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More "Pitiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and that he may as well pay the stake calmly? There was a true British composure about the unutterable atrocity of this villain—murderer he was, and a most detestable murderer too—but his character belongs to our country as fully as that of our heroes. Hunt and Probert were pitiful wretches, fit for the Bicetre. Doubtless the agony of Hunt's feelings until his reprieve came, would, if properly divided into chapters, make a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... judges. They read to her the articles which had been founded on her answers, and the Bishop previously represented to her "that these doctors were all churchmen, clerks, and well read in law, divine and human; that they were all tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed mildly, seeking neither vengeance nor corporal punishment, but solely wishing to enlighten her, and put her in the way of truth and of salvation; and that, as she was not sufficiently informed in such high matters, the Bishop and the Inquisitor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... do not share it. He is the least respectful of the sentiments entertained by me. Pray, spare me the mention of him, as you say of your husband. He has that pitiful conceit in men, which sets them thinking that a woman must needs be susceptible to the declaration of the mere existence of their passion. He is past argument. Impossible for him to conceive a woman's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... yes, and the mass of inhabitants of English cities, have so unblushingly, for the mere sake of money, turned their backs on those principles of freedom of which they boasted for so many years, flouting us the while for being behind them in the race of philanthropy! It is pitiful and painful to see pride brought so low. We of the Federal Union are striving, heart and soul, to uphold our government—a government which has been a great blessing to England and to the world. Who shall say what revolutions, what tremendous disasters, would ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not a mere impersonation of the powers of nature, but a personal Being, righteous and merciful, with whom man stands in the closest relations. Holy and awful, indeed, hating iniquity and exacting punishment upon the wicked, He is also tender and pitiful—a Father of the oppressed, who bears their burdens, forgives their iniquities, and crowns them with tender mercy.[18] All nature speaks to the Hebrew of God. He is no far-off creator, but immanent in all His works.[19] He presides over mankind, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... was near, and it seemed as if the pair of strugglers were doomed to perish when a pitiful eddy swept them both out of the deep pool into the foaming rapid below. Shank followed them in howling despair, for here things looked ten times worse: his comrade being tossed from billow to breaker, was turned heels over head, bumped against boulders, stranded on shallows, overturned ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... start forward again—was conscious of a confusion of lamentable sounds that rose into the night from out the engine's wake. Prolonged cries of agony, sobbing wails of infinite pain, heart-rending, pitiful. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... William Colleton, on the other hand, with means hourly increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious entertainment—lodge ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... you will, their theory is pitiful, and their tight little method squeezes all the life out of them. Filth and the flesh are their all in all. They deny wonder and reject the extra-sensual. I don't believe they would know what you meant if you told them that ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... undignified frivolity the Princess of Wales strove to support an anomalous position and find balm to her wounded pride and weak brain; while the passionate, all-human child-princess, Charlotte, awakening with pitiful precocity to the realities of an existence which was to deal with her but harshly, pitted her stormy soul against a destiny which decreed that before her the sweets of life were eternally to be ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... the innumerable multitude of people who can do nothing of the kind, and who take no real interest in anything except spending money and gossiping, are to be really pitied, is true. Some of them once had minds—and these are the most pitiful or pitiable of all. It is to be regretted that novels are, with rare exceptions, written to amuse this class, and limit themselves strictly to "life," never describing with real skill, so as to ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... rods and the stones of the Jews. It was the cruel custom in Asia Minor, a custom not yet extinct, for masters to wound their slaves with marks which made it impossible for them to escape recognition. And so St. Paul glories in the pitiful scars on his body, because they prove Whose he is ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... cried for vexation—when a curt and sour note from Southend told her the issue. The blow struck down her excitement and her exultation. Away went all joy in her encounter with Mr Disney, all pride in the skill with which she had negotiated with the Prime Minister. The ending was pitiful—disgusting and pitiful. She poured out her heart's bitterness to Major Duplay, who had ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... evident to everybody that Coulter was in a pitiful state, for he could not find the plate at all, and the next man went down on four balls, filling ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... and triumphs, and she blesses Thee, who art "able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think" [Eph. 3:20]; for she perceived Thee to have given her more for me than she used to ask by her pitiful and most doleful groanings. For Thou didst so convert me unto Thyself, that I sought neither a wife, nor any other hope of this world—standing in that rule of faith in which Thou, so many years before, had showed me unto her. And thou didst turn her grief unto gladness [Psalm 30:11], ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... forward was pitiful in the extreme. Weeping women carrying heavy burdens and with their children clinging to their dress came along. Some searched up and down frantically for members of the family who had been lost in the ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... a little girl; she had large gray eyes, and brown hair smoothly parted over her forehead, while there was a pitiful expression round her mouth, that pleaded with you so earnestly, you could scarce help stopping, as you met her, to give her ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... but the treaty declared that no assistance should be given him. It was a gross injustice on the part of our Government, which did no special credit to itself, when, after the deposed ruler had made a pitiful appeal to Congress, that body presented him with a ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... of June 28 in this year 1863, Leila riding from the mills paused a minute to take note of the hillside burial-ground, dotted here and there with pitiful little linen flags, sole memorials of son or father—the victims of war. "One never can get away from it," she murmured, and rode on into Westways. Sitting in the saddle she waited patiently at the door of the post-office. Mrs. Crocker was distributing letters and newspapers. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... book it only penetrated the breast to the ribs, but it knocked him down and disabled him for the rest of the campaign. He was a most competent and worthy officer, and now lives in poverty in Chicago, sustained in part by his own labor, and in part by a pitiful pension recently granted. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... Philip as much concealed by the scanty, blue-check curtain as he could manage to be. They heard a confusion of voices below, a hasty moving of chairs, a banging of doors, a further parley, and then a woman's scream, shrill and pitiful; ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... watched the flickering embers. Here he lived in his loneliness and cursed curses that were prayers, and here for near five decades he read and thought and dreamed and wrote. Here the spirits of Cromwell and Frederick hovered; here that pitiful and pitiable long line of ghostly partakers in the Revolution answered to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... sordid tale? Mate, I know a certain spot in this Land of Blossoms, where only foreigners are laid to rest, which bears testimony to a hundred of its kind—strange and pitiful destinies begun with high and brilliant hopes in their native land; and when illusions have faded, the end has borne the stamp of tragedy, because suicide proved the open door out of a life ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... more important than his subject. Look what an enchanting book Carlyle made out of the Life of Sterling. Sterling was a man of real charm who could only talk. He couldn't write a line. His writings are pitiful. Carlyle put them all aside with a delicious irony; and yet he managed to depict a swift, restless, delicate, radiant creature, whom one loves and admires. It is one of the loveliest books ever written. But, on the other hand, there are hundreds of fine creatures who have ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Prudence had moved her small bed out of the twins' room, and had placed it in the front room occupied by herself and Fairy. They asked if they might speak to Constance, but Prudence went in with them to say good night to her. The twins broke down and cried as they saw the pitiful little figure with the wan and tear-stained face. They threw their arms around her passionately and kissed her many times. But they went to bed without ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... are in a pitiful state, said Gudrun, what with the hay shortage, almost everyone is badly off, and not a single farmer with a scrap of hay to spare, except ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... the benches and fanned themselves while the perspiration ran down their flushed faces. They looked so utterly miserable that we told the cook to give them a piece of cake which Mrs. Caldwell had sent us the day before. Their gratitude was pitiful, but, of course, they gave the larger share to ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... some little comfort, however, in the fact that beneath the pitiful cot that he called his bed he had a small tin trunk. Even that was destroyed, however, by the entrance of a thin young man called Smithers, who reached under the cot and dragging out the trunk proceeded to take out one of the pairs of ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for six half rations until she received help from her husband. This closed my day's work. On my return to the Garno House, Mrs. Halford informed me that the lady who went with me in the morning was sick, for she had hardly ceased weeping over those pitiful families we visited in ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... touch was a galvanic battery of human kindness. It thrilled and electrified me. No; he had not even seen my pitiful presence. I do not know where the people of the world get their manners; but these Artichokes got theirs, rough-coated though they were, straight ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... retain her self-control was pitiful. Then she broke down and cried, her head on the ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... inflame them; they lap it up and long for more! I can't bear it if nothing is going to happen! Now you've pulled yourself out of the mire—and it's the same with everybody who has accomplished anything—one after another—either because they are contented or because they are absorbed in their own pitiful affairs. Those who are of any use slink away, and only the needy ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... came. "Twenty years and more—ay!—twenty years, and five over—and most of the time in Hell! Ah—run away, if you like—run away from your own son!" He released her arm; but though the terror had come back twofold, she would not run; for the most terrible maniac is pitiful as well as terrible, and her pity for him put her thoughts on calming and conciliating him. He went on, his speech breaking through something that choked it back and made it half a cry in the end. "Fourteen years of quod—fourteen ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... than I had hoped. Promises are cheaper than gold, and even here in Holland, where all is at stake, the burghers are loath to put their hands in their pockets, and haggle over their contributions as if they were to be spent for my pleasure instead of their own safety. It is pitiful to see men so fond of their moneybags. The numbers of men who can be relied upon to rise are satisfactory, and more even than I had hoped for; for in matters like this a man must proceed cautiously, and only sound those upon whom he feels sure beforehand he can rely. ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... on at something that I was ashamed to see. There was a kind of deliberate determination about their happiness and Clare's little body with her hair on the verge, as it seemed, of a positive downfall, had something quite pitiful in its deliberate rejoicing; such a child, my dear—I never realised how young until last night. Such a child and needing some one so much older and wiser than ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... they so conducted themselves their life was pitiful, and their death desired; but these lived and died praised, being brought up in the virtues of their ancestors, and on becoming men they kept their fame untarnished and exhibited their own valor. 70. For they brought many benefits to their country, and made good the ill-successes of others, and ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... excused; for the woman from nowhere, in the dusty shoes and gray traveling dress, was very lovely, with black hair and great eyes full of tears. She was tall, with a fine figure, and her voice had a running sob in it pitiful to hear. As soon as the Senior Subaltern stood up, she threw her arms round his neck, and called him "my darling" and said she could not bear waiting alone in England, and his letters were so short and cold, and she was his to the end of the world, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that we could, although of these I did not see much, since all that day my time was occupied in attending to the wounded with the help of my son and a few rough orderlies, whose experience in doctoring had for the most part been confined to cattle. A pitiful business it proved without the aid of anaesthetics or a proper supply of bandages and other appliances. Although my medicine chest had been furnished upon a liberal scale, it proved totally inadequate to the casualties ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... a hand in the game and built others. In the contest, alas, America has been far behind until gradually she has let other countries slip in and usurp the major proportion of ocean commerce. It is a pitiful thing that we should not have applied our skill and wealth of material to building fine American steamship lines of our own instead of letting so many of our tourists turn their patronage to ships of foreign nations. Perhaps if the public ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... really pitiful," said Lucile, "and it made me so desperate to see all those thoughtless cruel boys following him, hooting at him, and laughing at him and calling poor old battered Bull all sorts of names. So I turned around and looked at them. I saw that little Bob Fletcher ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... burst of flame in the fireplace, and the little, pitiful letter, with its selfishness and pain and sacrifice, vanished—as Lily's handkerchief had vanished, and the braided ring of blossoming grass—all gone, as the sparks that fly upward. Nobody could ever know the scented humiliation of the handkerchief, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... His excitement was pitiful to behold; and I felt myself grow indignant with Northmour, whose infidel opinions I well knew, and heartily derided, as he continued to taunt the poor sinner out of his humour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... betting ring with a persistence almost pitiful, but he had neither the appearance nor the manner which begets confidence in unlikely tales, and in his mouth the truth itself sounded like a fabrication. He was a willing but an unconvincing liar, and the few who lingered long enough to listen to his clumsy ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... nights, evenings and mornings, before there was any sun; when it is the presence or absence of the sun that is the cause of day and night—and what is called his rising and setting that of morning and evening. Besides, it is a puerile and pitiful idea, to suppose the Almighty to say, "Let there be light." It is the imperative manner of speaking that a conjuror uses when he says to his cups and balls, Presto, be gone—and most probably has been taken ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... face of Age, with a pitiful smudge of Youth, Carmine and heavy and lined, like a jester's mask on Truth; And she laughed from the red lips outward, the laugh of the brave who die, But a ghost in her ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... in men, as anger, love, hatred, grief, joy, &c., but it is so much the worse, since the judgment, which is the only directive and guide of them, is troubled. Now they are set on wrong objects, they run at random, and are under no kind of rule, and so they hurry the poor man and put him in a pitiful case. Now indeed so it is with us,—since sin entered, the soul is wholly turned off God, the only true object of delight, in which only there can be solid gloriation. The mind of man is blinded, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... pitiful experience for you—one which has caused me many qualms of conscience," he muttered, "but I have tried to atone and would beg you to believe that all my happiness for the ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... feeling one had, on the top of the great building in that town older than Rome itself, of the continuity of human life and the futility of human conceit. The provincial vanity of modern States looked pitiful in the clear air above that vast ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... should be shotted, but not fired so as to injure the crews of our ally's ships; and, finally, that they should be used as hostilely and destructively as was necessary to accomplish the purpose of forcing Naples to let the Sicilian rebels alone. But then it is said, and it is the pitiful pretext of equal treatment to both parties, that the orders were alike to prevent action of the King's troops and the revolters. Was ever there a more wretched shift, a more hollow pretence, than this? Keep the Sicilians ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... their bodies. We've done our best by the boy, sir, but I don't guess he'll ever be any better. Once for a spell we tried keepin' him to home, but he got right sick and would o' died sure, if we hadn't let him go; it was pitiful to see him. Everybody 'lows there won't nothin' in the woods hurt him nohow; so we let him come and go, as he likes; and he just stops with the neighbors wherever he happens in. Folks are all as good to him ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... and to her lasting shame, Olive Keltridge's glance sought that of Brenton. Before the hurt and abased look in his deep gray eyes, her own eyes dropped, ashamed and pitiful. What right had she, in a moment so tragic, albeit so very, very petty, to spy upon him in his disappointment? What right to obtrude her honest ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Verily, for this reason, I would deem death to be preferable to life. O hero that never swervest from virtue, had I with my brothers met with destruction ere this at the hands of our enemies on the battle-field, I would not have found thee in this pitiful plight, thus pierced with arrows. Surely, O prince, the Maker had created is to become perpetrators of evil deeds. O king, if thou wishest to do me good, do thou then instruct me in such a way that I may be cleansed of this sin ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... their position; and Mr. Boffin, who heard it, rejoiced within himself, comforting himself with the reflection that his withers were unwrung, and thinking with what pleasure he might carry the anecdote into the farthest corners of the clubs. Poor Duchess! 'Tis pitiful to think that after such Herculean labours she should injure the cause by one slight unconsidered word, more, perhaps, than she had advanced it by ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... long way off. I am a poor creetur not to feel that the Lord knows best what I can bear. It don't seem as though I could suffer much more than I used to, seeing my mother's suffering. And I know the Lord is kind and pitiful, ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the evil: A most miraculous work in this good king; Which often, since my here-remain in England, I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven, Himself best knows: but strangely visited people, All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures, Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers: and 'tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction. With this strange virtue, He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... with a sort of pitiful gayety, her song ran in the wise of saying how we should gather our rose-buds while we may. The warning could not have been addressed to me; I shall gather mine while I may—the unrifled rose of Georgiana's life, ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... inhabitants of an English town called N—-, when dressed in their Sunday's best. "Envy, malice, curiosity, and avarice," said he, "are here and there the sole springs of action; and both places are governed by a pitiful mercantile spirit, which prevents them from being grandly wicked or nobly virtuous. In short, Faustus, there is little to be done in either place by a man of spirit, and we will hurry away from hence as soon as you have brought the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... was with us on the raft, and whom the infuriated beings had thrown into the sea, as well as her husband, who had defended her with courage. M. Correard, in despair at seeing two unfortunates perish; whose pitiful cries, especially the woman's, pierced his heart, seized a large rope which he found on the front of the raft, which he fastened round his middle, and throwing himself a second time into the sea, was ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradually affected Amiel's life supplies abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production; and this mental habit of his—this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... on the ground, and the news soon spread that the Japanese surgeon had pronounced the little captain's case hopeless. I went to see him as soon as I could, and seldom have I seen a more pitiful sight. Lying on a coat thrown one the ground, with his side torn open by an iron bullet, the stricken man looked like a child who had met with a terrible accident. He could not have been more than five feet high, and his ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... emaciated animal, lashing his sunken sides with his restless tail, sniffing with terror and contempt at the fodder that is put before him, his eyes always turned toward the door, pawing the empty place beside him, smelling the yoke and chains his companion wore, and calling him incessantly with a pitiful bellow. The driver will say: "There's a yoke of oxen lost; his brother's dead, and he won't work. We ought to fatten him for killing; but he won't eat, and he'll soon starve ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... he said eloquently, "went together down the terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of the night, under one umbrella. And I said to myself as they went, dejected and pitiful, 'Well, that's the final exit of Foster from ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... the imagination on other people's needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... had taken only such articles as pertained to his maturer years. The pictures on the walls—the few shabby books that had drifted into his lonely and misunderstood childhood—remained. There was the locked box containing, Conning knew full well, the pitiful but sacred attempts at self-expression. The key was gone, but he recollected every scrap of paper which lay hidden in the old, dented tin box. Presently he went to the dormer window and opened it wide. ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... second fiddle even to the dying. So in all his praises of her and his laments for her he never failed to endeavor to impress on his hearers the idea of his own immense superiority to her and to everybody else. There is hardly anything in fiction so touching, so pitiful, so painful, as this exposition of a naked, brutal, yet not quite selfish, not wholly unloving, egotism. The Queen did not die on the Wednesday. Thursday and Friday passed over in just the same way, with just the same incidents—with the King alternately blubbering and ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... died. After a year the body was claimed by his grandmother, who lived at this time in the Pensa district, and his remains were removed to be fitly honored in the family village of Tarchany. In connection with the tragedy, it is pitiful to remember that his grandmother wept herself blind over the ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... born of an earthy race, blood ran thick in our veins, we were sensuous and passionate, the breath and steam of pleasure stifled our brains, and our filmy eyes could not see heaven. Yes, yes, I needed it all; but, friend, it is pitiful. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of hopelessness and doubt. I often listen to the people speaking of blindness and the blind. They only see that the eyes are gone, that the glory which is spring is for ever dead; they perceive the hesitating walk, the outstretched groping hand which, to my mind, is more pitiful than the story of the Cross, and inwardly they murmur, "How awful!" and sometimes they turn away. But they have never seen the real tragedy which lies behind the visible handicap. Only their imagination is stirred by the outward ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... place immediately; not that I have any objections either to my Lady or you, sir; but, to be sure, it was a sad day for me that I engaged myself to her Ladyship. Little did I think that a lady of distinction would coming to such a poor pitiful place as this. I am sure I thought I should ha' swooned when I was showed the hole where I was ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... as Californians, whether this is a record in which we can take any pride. With the exception of the pitiful attempts of its loyal friends from time to time to revive the California Historical Society, absolutely no organization work whatever, except what has lately been initiated at Berkeley, has been done by any public institution to promote the ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... his orders, the troops, supplies, and arms requested by the governor of these islands. Will your Majesty also command that food and sustenance be provided for the soldiers, for their sufferings are most pitiful. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... of Anatole Dufour, he rented a small room on the heights of Montmartre, and lived by doing odd jobs wherever he could find them. He led a pitiful existence. Three times, he obtained regular employment, only to be recognized and then discharged. Sometimes, he had an idea that men were following him—detectives, no doubt, who were seeking to trap and denounce him. He could almost feel the strong hand of ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... when he used to laugh, and say that it was a pleasure to give up anything to be with my mother. Now he began to pace up and down the room while she looked after him with pitiful eyes. Suddenly she rose, and, going up to him, laid her hand on his arm. She gazed earnestly ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... that that ends all!" said the queen, with a burst of anger. "You think that, with a pitiful paying for the brilliants, you can atone for the disgrace which you have brought upon your queen? No, no, sir; I desire a rigid investigation. I insist upon it that all who have taken part in this ignominious deception be ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... inducement. He started forward with alacrity. In the wink of an eye he threw the cord around Beauvais's arms and pinned them to his sides. Beauvais swore, but the valet was strong in his fright. He struggled and wound and knotted and tied, murmuring his pitiful "Mon Dieu!" the while, till the Colonel was the central figure ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... The pitiful procession reached the sitting-room. "Sit down there," George commanded. "If you make a sound I shall probably cut your head clean off. What do you mean by ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... made a pitiful attempt to laugh, to speak lightly—"Teacher said ridin' horseback would keep you from gettin' fat. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably from its uncomfortably meteoric position, and some other things help: but the total of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... powerfully scented mixture of grease and ashes, with which their bodies were smeared. The buck—poor fellow!—was suffering from some horrible skin disease, which spread over his chest and back. He seemed to have but little power in his arms, and a pitiful object he was, as we uncovered him from his screen of branches. Having apparently satisfied them that it was not our intention to eat them, by signs we showed them our pressing need for water—these they ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Dame Weston make of it, softening her voice for the nonce into a shrill tremulous whine, and exciting the mingled pity and anger—pity towards herself, anger towards her husband—of the whole female world, pitiful and indignant as the female world is wont to be on such occasions. Every woman in the parish railed at Master Weston; and poor Master Weston was summoned to attend the bench on the ensuing Saturday, and answer the charge; and such was the clamour abroad and at home, that the unlucky culprit, terrified ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... 'twas pitiful—far worse beyond the hills, Where flashing gun and culverin were heard; There the unhappy bore their heavy cross, And suffered, more than elsewhere, agonising pain, Were killed and strangled, tumbled into wells; 'Tween Penne and Fumel the saddened ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... Jennie must return to her school, and the poor old man be left to his weariness and vacancy. On the day of the child's departure, he looked vainly for her appearance until the time of her usual coming was passed, and then, with a low moan and a pitiful face, he sank back upon the bench. Old Simon tried to arouse and interest him, but he only shook his head, and looked about him with the old air of melancholy, and murmured, ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... brother-in-law," returned Lumley, with a pitiful smile, "that your intellects are sinking to a par with those of the geese which fly over the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... night when she kep' a sinking and sinking, and turned away her head and didn't know him no mo', it was fitten to make a body's heart break to see him climb onto the bed and lay his cheek agin hern and call her so pitiful and she not answer. But bymeby she roused up, like, and looked around wild, and then she see him, and she made a great cry and snatched him to her breast and hilt him close and kissed him over and over agin; but it took the last po' strength she had, and so her eyelids begin to close down, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... should be Employed here for further decency; I dare not say they are in office, though A service here they are appointed to: They must be very aged, trusty, meek, Such who have done much good, that do not seek Themselves; they must be humble, pitiful, Or they will make their service void and null. These are to teach the younger women what Is proper to their sex and state, what not: To be discreet, keepers at home, and chaste; To love their husbands, to be good; shamefac'd: ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... occupation; she was dipping fresh-cut salad leaves into great bowls of water as quietly as if only her own little family were assembled before her. Once only she lifted her heavily-moulded, sagacious eyebrow at the irate dog-cart driver, as if to measure his pitiful strength. She allowed the fellow, however, to touch the point of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... and the Church has drawn his breath for the conflict. His teeth are set—his weapon is in his hand—you will see the result within a year. We shall have a government in power, a government whose power will not be dependent on the faddists and the self-seekers—the ignorant, the blatant bellowers of pitiful platitudes, the platform loafers who call themselves labor-leaders, but whom the real laborers repudiate. Mark my words, their doom is sealed; back to the desert and the ditch! My dear Holland, pardon this digression. I feel that I need say nothing more to you than I have already said. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... his hand, and he stood looking at his daughter. His look was pitiful, and she could not bear to see him shake his head slowly from side ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... chair came to a halt, and the man, bending down, lifted the boy from the chair. With pitiful eyes, Theodora noted the limp helplessness of all the lower part of his body; but she also saw that the boyish face was bright and manly, and that his blue eyes flashed with a spirit equal to Hubert's own. She watched approvingly the handy way in which the man settled the cushions. Then he ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... stages of that great defence. We had no ammunition, and we were terribly short of gun stores, though the bare guns had all been saved. And our men were very short of steel helmets and box respirators, and the boots and clothing of many were in a pitiful condition. But a small supply of ammunition came through from France, and it was decided to send one Section of the Battery into action on the Piave and the remainder back to Ferrara to refit. All gun stores and men's equipment were to be pooled, and those going back ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... him: "It seems thy God Is a very pitiful kind of God: He could not shield thine aching eyes From the blowing desert sands that rise, Nor turn aside from thy old gray head The glittering blade that is brandished By the sun He set in the heavens high; He could not moisten thy lips when dry; The desert fire is in thy brain; Thy limbs are ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... turnpike-man relaxes, in favour of your 'pink,' his usual grimness. A tramping woman, with one child at her back and two running beside her, asks charity; you suspect she is an impostor, but she looks cold and pitiful; you give her a shilling, and the next day you don't regret your foolish benevolence. To your mind the well-cultivated land looks beautiful. In the monotony of ten acres of turnips, you see a hundred pictures of English farming ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... the bad, Poisoned with conflicting emotions, Proclaims at times, Through no fault of his, That for a surety the sins of fathers Become the heritage of sons Even to the fourth generation? Or that murdered chastity, That ravished motherhood— So pitiful, so helpless, Before the white hot, Lust-fever of the "master"— Has borne ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... Vansittart in French), "I take a daily promenade after coffee in the Oude Weg. I sit on the bench where you sat, and more often than not I see the sight that you saw. I am not a sentimental woman, but, after all, one has a heart, and this is a pitiful affair. Also, I have obtained from a reliable source the information that the new system of manufacture is more deadly than the old, which I have long suspected, and which, I believe, has passed through your mind as well. You and I went into this thing ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... echoed and re-echoed, was followed by a continuous shower of litter tearing or trickling down through the trees. Unnerving cries rose from a score or more stampeding horses in the adjacent camp; but the subtler human ear caught on the damp night breezes a sound that froze the blood ... pitiful low sobs of men dying from ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... general muster was made, and all appeared who had survived the perils of the wilderness, a more pitiful and humorous spectacle was exhibited than I had ever ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... made on the cutter, the captain intending to run for the Falkland Islands. The sufferings of the passengers increased from day to day; they soon ran short of water, until the day's allowance was reduced to about two tablespoonfuls for each person. It was pitiful to hear the little children calling for more, but it could not be given them: men, women, and children had to share alike. Provisions failed. The biscuit had been spoiled by the salt water; all that ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... she began to feel almost absurdly disappointed about the tea. She was hungry, too; she had had no lunch just because of the tea. It was to be a sort of family revel, and she had wished to enjoy it in every way, to make of it a real meal. Her abstention from lunch now seemed to her almost pitiful. Disappointment became acute in her. Yet even now her uneasiness, though definite, was not strong. If it had been she would not have been able to feel so disappointed, even so sorry for herself. She had given up the day to Dion. The nursery ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... found a pitiful little heap of wet and sodden rags, lying at the foot of a mound of earth and stones thrown upon the side of the track. It was little Titee with a broken leg, all ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... each other they would have no fear; they would laugh, and would openly march to the church door, in the face of every smile and every word. I have read about it in books, and I have seen it for myself. That is a pitiful love which chooses a secret course. Love naturally begins in secresy because it begins in shyness; but it must live openly because it lives in joy. It is as when the leaves are changing; that which is to ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... weather, although most favourable for to-day's excursion, betokened change. The light fleecy clouds playing about the summits of the Causses, on either side grew heavier in appearance. We must hasten on. We heard, too, a pitiful story of two American ladies who had lately made this journey in a perpetual downpour, arriving at Le Rozier drenched to the skin, and having seen nothing. We had not crossed the Atlantic certainly to shoot the rapids of the Tarn, but it would be deplorable even to have ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Mountains. While the summer lasted all went well with them; they, and the little son who was born to them, were content with the sustenance the forest afforded. But in the winter all was changed. Starvation stared them in the face. More and more pitiful became their condition, till at length Rudolph resolved to seek the baron, and give his life, if need be, to save ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... them and spoke to himself saying, "Ah, immortal steeds, why did I give ye to king Peleus, whose generations die while ye remain young and undying? Was it that ye should know the sorrows that befall mortal men? Pitiful, indeed, is the lot of all men upon the earth. Even Hector now, who boasteth in the armour that the gods once gave, will shortly go down to his death and the City he defendeth will be burned ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... merely accidentally, for he commanded only an "Army of Reserve," which nevertheless he had greeted with the title of Grand Army before he entered upon the campaign. It is scarcely conceivable that Bonaparte, possessing as he did an extraordinary mind, should have descended to such pitiful artifices. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... been built at the edge of the marsh, and three figures ran out from it as they came up: two boys and a heavy middle-aged man. It was for Mary Bell to tell Henderson that it would be hours before he could look for other help than this oddly assorted wagonful. The man's disappointment was pitiful. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... Jewish writer, was born in London in 1864. He first won fame by interpreting the Jewish temperament as he saw it manifested in London's dingy, pitiful Ghetto quarter. "This Ghetto London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... herself all the while stiff and erect. There was a certain sustaining pride in her close, firm-set mouth. There was never any sign of tears, though more than once her lips parted for a moment in a pitiful quiver. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... more of him, than of a shepherd, goatherd, or neatherd: a lazy Coridon, occupied in milking and shearing his herds and flocks, but more rudely and harshly than the herd or shepherd himself. Do you repute any man the greater for being lord of two thousand acres of land? they laugh at such a pitiful pittance, as laying claim themselves to the whole world for their possession. Do you boast of your nobility, as being descended from seven rich successive ancestors? they look upon you with an eye of contempt, as men who have not ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the theme of many a magazine article, and years have come and gone; yet hundreds of people cross the pastures to the lonely spot each year, and wander through the house, and listen to the story of the joy of the first glad, hopeful days and the pitiful ending of this philosopher's plan for ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... never thought to fall so low as this, or that the time would come when we would feel moved—all but compelled, in fact—to betray to a cold and discriminating world our poor, pitiful, one-adjective state. ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... worried, Half maddened by his sting, Exclaimed, "Be off, vile fly— Mean, pitiful, base thing!" After the fly had ended his repast, Fully exhausted feels the beast at last, And roared so that he shook the earth, While the victorious fly Met in the spider's web ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... little ground parlour, or at least to hear the sound of merry voices and laughter in the rooms above; but no sounds of any sort awaited me; indeed the house seemed strangely silent for one so fully lighted, and, astonished at this, I pushed the door ajar at my left and looked in. An unexpected and pitiful sight awaited me. Seated at a table set with abundance of untasted food, I saw the master of the house with his head sunk forward on his arms, asleep. The expected guests had failed to arrive, and he, tired out with waiting, had fallen into a ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... very pathetic, this pair of eager eyes suddenly turned inward; this discovery of an empty soul; this comparison with his grandfather's golden hoard; and this pitiful confession of abject poverty. I felt sorry for him, just as I felt sorry for the lady in the tramcar. The lady in the tramcar looked into a purse that she thought to be empty, and suffered all the agony of a great loss. ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... gloom, made him stumble. Now and then a large bird of the night flew by with a rushing sound: the air grew so cold that all Martinswand might have been turning to one huge glacier. All at once he heard through the stillness—for there is nothing so still as a mountain-side in snow—a little pitiful bleat. All his terrors vanished, all his memories of ghost-tales passed away; his heart gave a leap of joy; he was sure it was the cry of the lambs. He stopped to listen more surely. He was now many score ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... help believing The lady had not forgotten it either, And knew the poor devil so much beneath her Would have been only too glad, for her service, {750} To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise, But, unable to pay proper duty where owing it, Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it. For though, the moment I began setting His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting (Not that I meant to be obtrusive), She stopped me, while his rug was shifting, By a single rapid finger's lifting, And, with a gesture kind but conclusive, And ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... women the strongest and holiest sentiment of life is affection for a personal embodiment of goodness and love, who once walked in Galilee and Jerusalem, existing now in the invisible realm, sympathizing with all human aspiration, pitiful to all human weakness and sorrow, inspiring to all effort and hope and trust. That sentiment is surely a blessed revelation to those in whom it exists,—the warm and living symbol of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... again, and this time his smile without words troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... blood-stained hole through his tunic. Bert Powel was so badly hurt that we exhausted our supply of field dressings in bandaging him. We found little Charlie Harrison lying close to the side of the wall, gazing at his crushed foot with a look of incredulity and horror pitiful to see. One of the men gave him first aid with all the deftness ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... That is the pitiful part of it, pitiful and yet exasperating. He admits his own weakness, and is sorry and ashamed, as soon as he comes to himself. For a time, he is a model of caution and sobriety. Then he blunders into the way of temptation and makes a mess ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... like having to give pain to the young girl, but he frankly told her of the wound of the young man, who could be no other than Bernard Brandon, and the pitiful result. ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... the bed; and then they held quite still, Philip as much concealed by the scanty, blue-check curtain as he could manage to be. They heard a confusion of voices below, a hasty moving of chairs, a banging of doors, a further parley, and then a woman's scream, shrill and pitiful; then ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... some of them don't work. The hall is half-filled with dust and sand, and they move so clumsily! They're trying to hurry, because they saw you too, but it's like ... like they've forgotten how. They think they can get rid of us all, but they.... It's pitiful—they're so slow." ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... I 've seen that woman as sensible and as shrewd as any sane woman who ever drew breath. Then again, I 've seen her when I would n't get within fifty miles of her. Sometimes she 's pitiful to me; and then again I 've got to remember the fact that she 's a dangerous woman. Goodness only knows what would happen to a person who fell into her clutches when she 's got one of those ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of all his sufferings he murmurs not nor for a moment gives way to revenge; he leaves the persecutor in the hands of God. Stand off, Christian; pity the poor wretch that brings down upon himself the vengeance of God. Your pitiful arm must no strike him—no, stand by, 'that God may have his full blow at him in his time. Wherefore he saith avenge not yourself—"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Give place, leave such an one to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "if I was a young man, as I was wanst—but the young men now are poor, pitiful, cowardly—I would—I would;" he paused suddenly, however, looked up, and clasping his hands, exclaimed—"forgive me, O God! forgive the thought that was in my unhappy heart! Oh, no, no, never, never allow yourself, Con, dear, to be carried away by ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... the justification of her existence and a first-rate weapon of apologetic argument in her behalf. When wars come, the Church is blamed because she did not prevent them; when wars are over, she takes counsel how she may prove the validity of her message by making their recurrence impossible; and the pitiful dismemberment of the Church by sects and schisms is hated and deplored, not so much because of economic waste or theological folly, as because these insane divisions prevent social effectiveness in bringing the message ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... fearless for a personal encounter. The two horses were abreast, or Ingoldsby's a little ahead, the rider turning round in his seat, with his pistol presented at Lambert, whom he swore he would shoot if he did not yield. Lambert pleaded yet a pitiful word or two, and then reined in and was taken.—On Tuesday, the 24th of April, Lambert was again in the Tower, with Cobbet, Creed, and other prisoners, though Okey and Axtell were not yet among them. There had been a great review of the City Militia that day in Hyde Park, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... to you," said Naggeneen; "it was you that spoke to me. You called me, and here I am to the fore, though I don't belong to your pitiful little thribe, and I needn't come when you call, ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... cried out loudly at sight of the meagre tray, and as the egg and tea passed her lips a strange, eager sensation was hers, a delicious, gratified climax of emotion: Miss Mary was glad she was alive! She savoured each morsel of the pitiful meal; she could have wished it doubled; the cheap tea filled her nostrils with a balmy ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me, was that this unmoved, unseen stranger who existed in me without my cognizance, even as I am probably about to live in him without his concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the pitiful recollection of a thing that is no more? Now that he has taken my place, while destroying, in order to acquire a greater consciousness, all that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another life commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... artist and father of Sheila, bore witness to his faith in God and man. He had been lying apparently unconscious, his slow, difficult breath drawn at longer and longer intervals. Sheila was huddled on the floor beside his bed, her hand pressing his urgently in the pitiful attempt, common to human love, to hold back the resolute soul from the next step in its adventure. The nurse, who came in by the day, had left a paper of instructions on the table. Here a candle burned under a yellow shade, ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... C. D. Bunker a rescuer named Baker was killed while trying to get a dead body from the ruins. Other rescuers heard the pitiful wail of a little child, but were unable to get near the point from which the cry issued. Soon the onrushing fire ended the cry and the men ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... of the sick man lying on his poor narrow bed in the corner of the great studio. It was shameful that he should die; tears rose to her eyes, and she had to walk across the room to hide them. It was a pitiful story. He was dying for her, and she wasn't worth it. She hadn't much heart; she knew it, perhaps one of these days she would meet some one who would make her feel. She hoped so, she wanted to feel. She wanted to love; if ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the workshops of the primeval world. So the whole machinery of being seemed to be toiling in the light of an awakened conscience, to the making of a man. It seemed to him that all his life was being crowded into these hours. His past was here—its posing, its folly, its pitiful uselessness, and its shame. Kathleen and Billy were here, with all the problems that involved them. Rosalie was here, with the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Touaricks are, indeed, giants compared to some of our pigmy European nations. Oudney made an excursion to Janoun, the Kesar Jenoun. He says, "Our servant Abdullah accompanied me. He kept at a respectable distance behind. When near the hill, he said, in a pitiful tone, 'There is no road up.' I told him we would endeavour to find one. The ascent was exceedingly difficult, and so strewed with stones, that we were only able to ascend one of the eminences; there we halted, and found it would be impossible to go higher, as beyond where we were was a precipice." ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... its climax in Thomas a Kempis. Not only does he distrust and disparage all philosophy, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas, but he shuns society and conversation as occasions of sin, and quotes with approval the pitiful epigram of Seneca, "Whenever I have gone among men, I have returned home less of a man." It is, after all, the life of the "shell-fish," as Plato calls it, which he considers the best. The book cannot safely be taken as a guide to the Christian life as a whole. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... see it on yon sands. Let them find the courage to float it, and it is even possible that Dolly Venn and I can do the rest. We should be thirteen men then, and glad of the number. I won't hide it from you that we are a pitiful handful to face such a horde as lingers yonder. Why, think of it. Your husband keeps them off the yacht, that's clear to a child's eye. What harbour, then, is open to them? The island—yes, there's that! They can go and sleep the death-sleep on the island, as many an honest man before ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... a pitiful nonsense-monger!" she cried; and for some reason this speech made him turn his glasses upon her gravely. Her lashes fell before his gaze, and at that he took her ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... for coffins stopped, and now there is the pitiful cry of those who seek wood to make coffins for ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... smile. It is for the first time in his life Mr. Clive listens to the little voice; indeed, it is only since about six weeks that that small organ has been heard in the world at all. Laura Pendennis believes its tunes to be the sweetest, the most interesting, the most mirth-inspiring, the most pitiful and pathetic, that ever baby uttered; which opinions, of course, are backed by Mrs. Hokey, the confidential nurse. Laura's husband is not so rapturous; but, let us trust, behaves in a way becoming a man and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Camer's mother. On the sand, lying in a limp, unnatural position, was Camer. No longer the bright, little baby-camel that Cara had known, but a quiet, inanimate thing, which neither answered nor moved in response to its mother's pitiful entreaties. ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... Indians overran the country like a frightful scourge, murdering and burning, until a vast region was emptied of its people. First to respond to the pitiful calls for help was Tennessee, and within a few weeks twenty-five hundred infantry and a thousand cavalry were marching into Alabama, led by Andrew Jackson, who had not yet recovered from a wound received in a brawl with Thomas H. Benton. Among ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... writes about an election in which Mr. Lowell was a candidate. 'A pitiful protest was entered by an' (epithets followed by a proper name) 'against Lowell, on the score of his being an alien. Mallock, as you learn, was withdrawn, for which I am truly thankful.' Unlucky Mr. Mallock! 'Lowell polled 100 and Gibson 92 . . . The intrigues and corruption appear to be almost worthy ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... It is thus that in a great number of civilized nations, the life of the citizen is placed in the same scales with money; that the unhappy wretch who is perishing from hunger, who is writhing under the most abject misery, is put to death for having taken a pitiful portion of the superfluity of another whom he beholds rolling in abundance! It is this that, in many otherwise very enlightened societies, is called justice, or making the punishment commensurate with ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... named for the first Inca, Manco Ccapac, the founder of the dynasty, was selected as the most acceptable figurehead. He was a young man of ability and spirit. His induction into office in 1534 with appropriate ceremonies, the barbaric splendor of which only made the farce the more pitiful, did little to gratify his natural ambition. As might have been foreseen, he chafed under restraint, escaped as soon as possible from his attentive guardians, and raised an army of faithful Quichuas. There ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... in his illness, but she never cared for Charlie as he did for her. He worshipped the very ground she walked on. He thought her perfection. Uncle Max, it was pitiful to hear him sometimes. He would tell me how sweet and unselfish she was, and all the time I knew she was but an ordinary, commonplace girl. If he had lived to marry her he would have been disappointed in her. He was so large-hearted, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that creature, over whom his heart yearned, the hardest and painfulest business she had yet been involved in. We cannot take credit for the doctor which he did not deserve. He forgave Fred when he saw his motionless figure, never more to do evil or offend in this world, laid in pitiful solitude in that room, which still was Nettie's room, and which even in death he grudged to his brother. But Edward's distinct apprehension of right and wrong, and Fred's deserts in this world, were not altered by that diviner compunction which had moved Nettie. He forgave, but did not ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... than himself, and Hilda was equally concerned in it. It had been sacredly kept by those older than he was, and it was not for him to betray it. "My poor mother!" he called her. Never, before he learned the secret burden she had borne, had he called her by that tender and pitiful epithet; but as often as he thought of her now his heart said, ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... where Sonya was talking to Mademoiselle Bourienne. The countess caressed the boy, and the old count came in and welcomed the princess. He had changed very much since Princess Mary had last seen him. Then he had been a brisk, cheerful, self-assured old man; now he seemed a pitiful, bewildered person. While talking to Princess Mary he continually looked round as if asking everyone whether he was doing the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and of his property, thrown out of his accustomed groove he seemed to have lost the sense of his own significance ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... it was on her lips to say, "Oh, I am so sorry for you; oh, don't do wrong any more," would the unhappy creature perhaps have listened to her, and repented, though Lizzie said she did not want to repent? Chatty could not forget that pitiful face. Would she ever, she ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... am very unwell in consequence of the awful events at Paris. How will this end? Poor Louise is in a state of despair which is pitiful to behold. What will soon become of us God alone knows; great efforts will be made to revolutionise this country; as there are poor and wicked people in all ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... to burst into new life. As one walked down the roads in the bright sunshine, and smelt the fresh winds bearing the scent of springtime, an exquisite feeling of delight filled the soul. Birds were singing in the sky, and it was pitiful to think that any other thoughts but those of rapture at the joy of living should ever ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... one more pitiful straw that the lonely bundle should be left in such a vault of doom, with no last touches of care from its fellow-beings, and no heap of kind earth to hide it. But whether the place is deadly or not, man dares not venture into it. So they took Hank from the tree that ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... present charming pictures of the warm zone below, mingled with others near and far. Then the bitter wind and the drift would break the blissful vision and dreary pains cover us like clouds. "Are you suffering much?" Jerome would inquire with pitiful faintness. "Yes," I would say, striving to keep my voice brave, "frozen and burned; but never mind, Jerome, the night will wear away at last, and tomorrow we go a-Maying, and what campfires we will make, and ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... the horrors and waste of the war for which Germany was chiefly responsible, the diplomatic disorganization of Europe, which permitted this world disaster, desired by merely a handful of firebrands—all these tragic and pitiful facts had been burned into the mind of the age. There was a definite determination that a recurrence of such catastrophes should not be permitted. The period of the war will be regarded by future historians as one of transition from the international chaos of the nineteenth century ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... of having heard, but got up and left the lunchroom. Had the girl been kidnapped while he overslept? He burned with shame to think what a pitiful failure his knight-errantry had been. His first idea was to beard Weintraub and compel him to explain his connection with the bookshop. His next thought was to call up Mr. Chapman and warn him of what had been ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... hands again, to search among the leaves for the illustrations which were interspersed, so that Geordie might be introduced to all the beauties of this wonderful volume. Geordie kept looking at her as she turned the leaves with a somewhat pitiful gaze, and presently he said in a low tone, "Jean, come a little nearer. I want to speak to ye, Jeanie. Do ye ken I'm maybe goin' til the grand school the good Maister keeps waitin' for us in the heavenly land? And I'll be learnin' a ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... of readers have imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often greets the eye in the squalid sections of our large cities. General Garfield's infancy and youth had none of this destitution, none of these pitiful features appealing to the tender heart, and to the open hand of charity. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... Godard Pitiful? (Aside) What shall I say? (Aloud) We differ in our views on this subject, but do you know why I prefer your ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... was purged to-day of men elected by fraud and bloodshed in the south, the Democrats would be in a pitiful minority in the capital. At the last session the Democrats tried to repeal the election laws, and were met by veto after veto from the stanch Republican President. Then they tried to nullify existing laws. We must as firmly ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... would. They would do anything to repair the injury done to God; and if, by any slight neglects, which appear crimes to them, they have offended their neighbour, what return are they not willing to make? But it is pitiful to see the state of that one who has driven away her Beloved. She does not cease to run after Him, but the faster she goes, the further He seems to leave her behind; and if He stops, it is only for a moment, that she may recover ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... answered the nun. "That is the saddest part of it to me. Nearly all these poor creatures you see here once had happy homes of their own. That pitiful old body over by the stove, shaking with palsy, was once a gay, rich countess; the invalid whom madame visits was a marquise. It would break your heart, mademoiselle, to hear the stories of some of these ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and from M. VISCONTI, and other members of the Council, who happened to be present, I experienced the most polite and obliging attention. As an Englishman, I confess that I felt a degree of shame on reflecting to what pitiful exaction a foreigner would be subject, who might casually visit any public object ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Bucephalus stood the mere skeleton of a horse, with the white bones peeping through his ill-conditioned hide; but, if my heart had not warmed towards that pitiful anatomy, I might as well have quitted the museum at once. Its rarities had not been collected with pain and toil from the four quarters of the earth, and from the depths of the sea, and from the palaces and sepulchres of ages, for those ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not the stomach, it's the heart as wants nourishment with yon poor lad. He looketh that pitiful at you sometimes, my faith, I can hardly tell whether to laugh at his newings or cry at the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. "Personally, I must confess, although with the greatest reluctance, that considering the enormous advantage possessed by the enemy in this combination of submarine and flying machine, we have no other alternative but to surrender at discretion. It is a pitiful thing to say, I am well aware, but we are fighting forces which would never have been called into being in any other war. I agree with Lord Kitchener that you cannot fight an enemy if you cannot hit him back. I am afraid there is no ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... all her trust in Him who had said, "When thy father and thy mother forsake thee, then the Lord shall take thee up." With all the energy which the love of a dying woman could give, she besought her child to cleave with perfect love to Him who was so kind and pitiful. She then placed around her neck a medallion, inclosing a portrait of herself and her husband, with their initials, the date of their marriage, and locks of their hair, and told her never to part with it, but to wear it next her heart. She directed her to be in all respects obedient to her ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... next few days I would have been staying there with Edith, and planning evenings at the theater before going to Newquay!" she murmured; there was a pitiful catch in her voice that told better than words how the remainder of her existence would be darkened by ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... characters, and she could melt to tears over their trials and wrongs. And yet she passed by in haughty silence the sublime life that of all others is the only perfect one on record, and she had no tears to shed over the shameful and pitiful story of the cross. What a strange girl she was! I wonder if it be possible that there are ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... was sombre as well as pitiful, "It's very rough on a girl of that kind, and she's true grit right through," he said. "I'm thankful you don't know what some women who have to earn their living doing what used to be men's work in the cities ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... He has known it since the hour of my father's death. He knows that I know it. Yet he has kept the lands to this day." Another uneasy perambulation. "Do you think of that when you talk of revenge? Manliness? He has none. He is a pitiful, truculent, groveling coward, ready to buy profit at any price. He has robbed me of my inheritance. He stands in my place. He is a living lie. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... a moment or two, and Benson, whose face was marked with baffled desire and scarcely controlled fury, glared at the others. Blake's expression was pitiful, but his lips were resolutely set; Harding's eyes were very keen and determined. Then Benson made a sign ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... it was on the de Coetlogons that the distress fell. For nearly half a year, their lawn, their verandah, sometimes their rooms, were cumbered with the sick and dying, their ears were filled with the complaints of suffering humanity, their time was too short for the multiplicity of pitiful duties. In Mrs. de Coetlogon, and her helper, Miss Taylor, the merit of this endurance was perhaps to be looked for; in a man of the colonel's temper, himself painfully suffering, it was viewed with more surprise, if with no more admiration. Doubtless all had their reward in a sense ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a moment with a pitiful attempt at a smile. Then her head disappeared suddenly in her hands, and ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and honor and pitiful tears To all who fail in their deeds sublime; Their ghosts are many in the van of years, They were born with Time, in advance ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... are the eyes of these cavalry horses at times! There it seemed sheer horror; but often when wounded they look towards one with a world of pitiful appeal for relief; in their dumbness loud-voicedly reproachful against the ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... will. But Geraint has overtaken him, and avenged the insult to the maiden to the uttermost." And thereupon, behold, a porter came to the spot where Guenever was. "Lady," said he, "at the gate there is a knight, and I saw never a man of so pitiful an aspect to look upon as he. Miserable and broken is the armor that he wears, and the hue of blood is more conspicuous upon it than its own color." "Knowest thou his name?" said she. "I do," said he; "he tells me that ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... were all intrigue. They made themselves the agitators in an assembly of which they might have been the statesmen. They had not confidence in the republic, but feigned it. In revolutions sincere characters are the only skilful characters. It is glorious to die the victim of a faith; it is pitiful to die the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in their supreme expression. And yet—why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his old General Kervick—the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three hundred a year. Yes—she was his daughter, and she also was poor. Plowden ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... leaves into great bowls of water as quietly as if only her own little family were assembled before her. Once only she lifted her heavily-moulded, sagacious eyebrow at the irate dog-cart driver, as if to measure his pitiful strength. She allowed the fellow, however, to touch the point of abuse before she ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... bill to pass. In it are involved the liberties of England, the liberty of the press, and. of every other institution dear to Englishmen. Against the bill I protest, in the name of the Irish people, and in the face of Heaven. I treat with scorn the puny and pitiful assertions, that grievances are not to be complained of,—that our redress is not to be agitated; for, in such cases, remonstrances cannot be too strong, agitation cannot be too violent, to show to the world with what injustice ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the jealously guarded secrets of her existence, except her old love for Leslie Gray. Even in delirium something sealed her lips as to that. But all else came out—her anguish over her unfashionable attire, her pitiful makeshifts and contrivances, her humiliation over wearing unfashionable dresses and paying only five cents where every other Sewing Circle member paid ten. The kindly women who waited on her listened ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... arguments, going over all the ground again. She listened to him as she had once listened to his plea in his defence—her pose pensive, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes pitiful. As far as she was aware of her own feelings it was merely to take note that a kind of yearning over him, an immense sorrow for him and with him, had extinguished the fires that a few days ago were burning for herself. It was hard to sit there heedless of his exposition and deaf to ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... out softly as though from a hallowed place, and closed the door noiselessly behind him. His small anticipations of what that scene would be like, full of many words and attempts at tactful speech, seemed infinitely pitiful and contemptible now, beside the dignity, the kindness, the noble pride and the grand simplicity of the woman who had given him her name. He walked slowly, and his head was bent in thought as he threaded the well-known passages and stairways ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... mistress was, the maid was even worse, and it was pitiful to see the poor creature's efforts to obey the exigent demands of her employer. In the end faintness overcame her, and if Claire had not rushed to the rescue, she would have fallen ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... M. de Tourville said upon the subject, and the more gesture and emphasis he used to impress the belief in his truth, the less Caroline believed him, and the more dislike and contempt she felt for the duplicity and pitiful meanness of a character, which was always endeavouring to seem, instead of to be.—He understood and felt the expression of her countenance, and mortified by that dignified silence, which said more than words could express, he turned ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... that he may as well pay the stake calmly? There was a true British composure about the unutterable atrocity of this villain—murderer he was, and a most detestable murderer too—but his character belongs to our country as fully as that of our heroes. Hunt and Probert were pitiful wretches, fit for the Bicetre. Doubtless the agony of Hunt's feelings until his reprieve came, would, if properly divided into chapters, make a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... had exhausted his pretty madrigals, M. Schmoll became sombre and pitiful. He complained piteously. He was not decorated enough, not provided with sinecures enough, nor well fed enough by the State—he, Madame Schmoll, and their five daughters. His lamentations had some grandeur. Something of the soul of Ezekiel and of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... very pitiful. "Dear Chrissy," she said gently, "there is no need to fret over that now. Hatty was always fond of you, and you of her; she told me that night, when I came home, how kind you had been to her. There was no one but you to do things, and ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Madame Shtchukin in a pitiful voice, "I have the doctor's certificate that my husband was ill! Here it is, if you will ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... obstinacy. We could never let him trudge through Albania, and so the Scotchman procured him a free passage to Corfu by steamer. He left us one morning, leading his son by the hand, and over his shoulder a sack containing his worldly possessions, a sorrowful, ludicrous, and pitiful picture. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... to remember him every hour of the day and night. How could I pray for him, if I forgot him? Little you know how a mother loves, Charlotte. His father forgave him: shall I be less pitiful?—I, who nursed him at my breast, and carried him ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... her the issue. The blow struck down her excitement and her exultation. Away went all joy in her encounter with Mr Disney, all pride in the skill with which she had negotiated with the Prime Minister. The ending was pitiful—disgusting and pitiful. She poured out her heart's bitterness to Major Duplay, who had ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... "Mother got him." "Oh, well, then, you needn't fret about him; she'll take care of him." "No, she won't; he won't be having nothing to eat, I know he won't." And the boy covered his face again in a sullen despair that was pitiful to see. Now, you know, Hal, this boy was not begging; he did not come to us with a pathetic appeal about his starving little brother: he was lying starving himself, and stupefied, with his head covered over, buried in his rags when I spoke to him; and this touching ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... at him with cruel scorn, "have the courage of your pitiful baseness. Come, speak out! You think that this gentleman's boots are very like mine, do you not?—I forbid you to take off your boots," she added, turning to Lucien.—"Yes, M. Camusot. Yes, you saw some boots lying ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... hand again, and I felt my questions to be crude and my distinctions pitiful. "Good-night, my dear boy—don't bother about it. After all, you do ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... but she stirred not nor spoke. "Yolande!" he murmured, drawing nearer; but still she moved not, though his quick ear caught a sound faint though very pitiful. "Ah, dost thou weep?" he cried. Yolande sobbed again, whereupon down fell he beside her on his knees, "Dear lady, why ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... poetic scholar could scarce refrain from uttering to himself,—"There goes Diogenes or Chrysippus! There goes one, by the side of whom many a bustler in letters is only a worthless drone, many an idolized celebrity a weak and pitiful sham!" Such a character as Percival's, in the presence of a scholastic community, was a perpetual incentive to industry and manliness; and although he rarely spoke in its hearing, and has left us fewer published works than many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... to cry; and she sometimes thought that her suffering was about to find an outlet in sobbing; but the relief of tears did not come to moisten her eyes. And, stubbornly, viciously, she went over the whole pitiful story, recalling Suzanne's stay in Paris, the excursions on which Philippe used to take the young girl and from which they both returned looking so happy and glad, their meeting at the Old Mill, Philippe's departure for Saint-Elophe and, the next day, Suzanne's strange attitude, ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... Niedermayer, showed himself at least pitiful. He tried a system more ingenious and more honest. He reversed the terms of torture. Instead of wishing to make plain chant supple and to thrust it into the mould of modern harmony, he constrained that harmony to bend itself to the austere tonality of plain chant. He thus ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... presence, opposed their influence over the prisoners, or proved themselves superior to their temptations, were torn from their homes without warning, and incarcerated in their floating dungeons. Nothing was forborne, in the shape of pitiless and pitiful persecution, to break the spirits, subdue the strength, and mock and mortify the hopes, ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... she said "Let me go home now," it was the broken word of hapless defeat. They struggled together out into the boisterous street, and once or twice she failed and had to stop and turn. Then she would cling to a wall or a tree, putting his help aside with a gesture in which there was again some pitiful trace of renunciation. They went almost without a word, each treading upon the heart of the other toward the gulf that was to come. They reached it at the Murchisons' gate, and there they paused, as briefly as possible, since ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... was from them that we first learned the real horrors of war. Some had only one arm; others had lost a leg; still others were suffering from shell shock. Those who were suffering from shell shock were the most pitiful, as the ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... that perhaps in the intimacy of their engagement she might show his letter to Wainwright, and they would laugh together over him, a poor soldier, presuming to write as he had done to a girl in her station. They would laugh together, half pitifully—at least the woman would be pitiful, the man was likely to sneer. He could see his hateful mustache curl now with scorn and his little eyes twinkle. And he would tell her all the lies he had tried to put upon him in the past. He would give her a wrong idea of his character. He would rejoice and triumph to do ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... new role of military arbitrator, left Shanghai on January 19th by boat, creeping slowly through the canals. The desolation along both banks was pitiful; every village had been burned, every field trampled; not a living thing was in sight—not even a dog—but the creeks were choked with corpses. No man could pass through such a dreary waste unmoved, least ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... the position that the day of hate was passed. With the end of mutual slaughter and destruction came immediately the time for help. It was like that pitiful period after the battle when the bloody field is taken over by the stretcher-bearers, the Red Cross nurses, and the tireless surgeons. So Hoover had already clearly in mind that the hand of charity was going to be extended ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... horse-whipped, and degraded scoundrel, whose malignity is only surpassed by my cowardice—whose principal delight is to stab in the dark—a lurking assassin, but not an open murderer—a sneaking, skulking thief, without the manliness of the highwayman—a pitiful, servile—but, I believe, I have said enough. Well, gentlemen, I trust I am none of these; nor am I saying who is. Perhaps it would be impossible to find them all centred in the same man; but if it were, it would certainly be quite as extraordinary ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... intrusion. Aware, however, that she had nothing to lose and everything to gain by the adventure, her natural fearlessness and quickness of tongue carried her through. She had already guessed that an appeal for employment, even the most pitiful, would meet with a flat, prompt refusal, therefore she had resolved on ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... with my brain-elements unto Naani, that was Mirdath; and spoke to give her assurance, and to haste to tell unto me that which was so wrong and pitiful with her. And who shall be amazed that I was shaken with the eagerness of my spirit, in that it was so long since Naani had spoken clear within my soul; ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food." ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... alike. He had not developed as she had expected. In Burke, she seemed to see the promise of Guy's youth. But Guy himself had not fulfilled that promise. He had degenerated. He had proved himself a failure. And yet he did not look coarsened or hardened by vice. He only looked, to her pitiful, inexperienced eyes, as if he had been ravaged by some sickness, as if he had suffered intensely and were doomed to suffer as ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... been graciously opened with prophetic inspiration, and the promise of the heathen as an inheritance hath marvelously recurred to me. For there can be none lack such diligence in the true faith but may see that even the conversion of these pitiful salvages hath a meaning. As the blessed St. Ignatius discreetly observes," continued Father Jose, clearing his throat and slightly elevating his voice, "'the heathen is given to the warriors of Christ, even as the pearls ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... good new times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote to a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful little literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these thick-skulled and no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the epithets are singularly ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... dismay was so genuine, his distress so pitiful, that the heart of Harry Squires was touched. His face sobered at once. Stepping forward, he held out his hand ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... y of a primitive word, when preceded by a consonant, is generally changed into i before an additional termination: as, merry, merrier, merriest, merrily, merriment; pity, pitied, pities, pitiest, pitiless, pitiful, pitiable; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... been so pitiful, it would have been ludicrous—what followed. Day after day, in one corner of the kitchen, an old man boiled his potatoes and fried his unappetizing eggs over a dusty, unblacked stove; in the other corner an old woman baked ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... correspondence, that they looked upon the President as the dupe of his secretary of the treasury. Not that they were ever wanting in terms of respect and even of veneration for the President, but the tone was often one of pitiful regret almost akin ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... begun the pitiful procession which was to empty the Big House of its company. The tracks were nearly cleared by the wrecking crew, and long rows of fires were consuming the broken evidences of the ruin that had been wrought. The injured had been cared for as best might be by the physicians of the relief ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... straight through the night, before it was extinguished, and consumed, there is in fact no saying how many dwelling houses. Anyhow, pitiful to relate, the Chen house, situated as it was next door to the temple, was, at an early part of the evening, reduced to a heap of tiles and bricks; and nothing but the lives of that couple and several inmates of the family did not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... another city whose bright lights glow all night Tony Holiday was still playing Madge to packed houses, happy in her triumph but with heart very pitiful for her beloved Miss Clay whose sorrow and continued illness had made possible the fruition of her own eager hopes. Tony was sadly lonely without Alan, thought of him far more often and with deeper affection even than she had while she had him at her beck and call ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... garbellisiftationibus horarum canonicarum, libri quadriginta. Arsiversitatorium confratriarum, incerto authore. The Gulsgoatony or Rasher of Cormorants and Ravenous Feeders. The Rammishness of the Spaniards supergivuregondigaded by Friar Inigo. The Muttering of Pitiful Wretches. Dastardismus rerum Italicarum, authore Magistro Burnegad. R. Lullius de Batisfolagiis Principum. Calibistratorium caffardiae, authore M. Jacobo Hocstraten hereticometra. Codtickler de Magistro nostrandorum Magistro nostratorumque ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... was in the treasury. The university and other state institutions were hampered and embarrassed, and the whole machinery of government was in large measure paralyzed. In other words, under the Oregon law a pitiful minority of the people was able to obstruct and embarrass the usual and orderly processes of government, and for a time at least to absolutely thwart the will of an overwhelming ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... see Miss Moore's contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis's grave glance. One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that they don't know how amusing—or else boring—or else irritating—they are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world! Eleanor had no idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found her ridiculous. She only knew that Maurice ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... HOMO. Merciful father, thy pitiful grace extend To me careful wretch, which have me sore abused, Thy precept breaking. O Lord, I mind to amend, If thy great goodness would now have me excused; Most heavenly Maker, let me not be refused, Nor cast from ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... and vented her spleen in a solemn exhortation to Andrew to get ready for the coming of the Master, not three weeks off at the farthest, and she warned him that the archangel might blow his trumpet at any moment. Then where would he be? she asked in exultation. Human meanness is never so pitiful as when it tries to seize on God's judgments as weapons with which to gratify its own spites. I trust this remark will not be considered as ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... Hardy, for example, submitted a humorous poem on how the grapes disappeared from his stone wall,—a poem so amusing and so good-natured yet withal containing such a pitiful little refrain of disappointment that the seniors at once took it upon themselves to see that no more of Lemuel's ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... cheek. He had not seen anything like it in his youth, but—it was Youth itself, and so was that which the ringers were so soon to toll for; and for some remote and unformed reason, to his scores of years they were pitiful and should be cheered. He bent forward himself and put out his ancient, veined and knotted, gnarled and trembling hand, to timorously touch the arm of her he ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... then, presently, only the window of one room, Hermione's. His eyes were fixed on that as the boat drew nearer and nearer—were almost hypnotized by that. Where was Hermione? What was she doing? How was she? How could she be, now that—she knew? A terrible but immensely tender, immensely pitiful curiosity took possession of him, held him fast, body and soul. She knew, and she was in ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... suffering poor! How prone are the wealthy, by warm, glowing grates, to forget their cheerless habitations, and turn inhumanly from their pitiful tales of ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... induced him to pocket up his wrongs and his "merced" together. The states-general also sent the correspondence to the Walloon provincial authorities, with an eloquent address, begging them to study well the pitiful part which La Motte had enacted in the private comedy then performing, and to behold as in a mirror their own position, if they did not recede ere ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,—a priest, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... or locked up in a desk. By-and-by the hidden poem will be taken out and read with a blush. For how could he, a practical-minded man, with a wholesome contempt for the small scribblers and people weak in their intellectuals generally, have imagined himself a poet and produced this pitiful stuff! ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... said to the wounded man, "that I am not to be disposed of so easily as he imagined. I should be only giving you what you deserve if I were to pass my sword through your body; but I disdain to kill such pitiful assassins except in ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... came to an end. Dreadful things may and do happen in this world, but, as a general rule, they do not last a great while. The fire did its work, and then stopped. It was fearful while it raged, and it left a pitiful wreck; still, as Mrs. Parlin said, it was "not so bad but it might have been worse." "Nothing," she always declared, "ought to make us really ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... greatest of the gods, saw them and had pity upon them and spoke to himself saying, "Ah, immortal steeds, why did I give ye to king Peleus, whose generations die while ye remain young and undying? Was it that ye should know the sorrows that befall mortal men? Pitiful, indeed, is the lot of all men upon the earth. Even Hector now, who boasteth in the armour that the gods once gave, will shortly go down to his death and the City he defendeth will be burned ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... hasty. How do you know Lady Kingsland detests you? That is impossible, I think. She will be a kind mother to my little motherless girl. Ah, pitiful Heaven! that agony ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... population, however, General Gatacre had decided that some sort of advance must be made. He reconnoitred in and around Molteno, and visited the outposts of regulars, irregulars, and police, and ascertained to an almost pitiful degree the slenderness of his resources ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... your Grace that he did try to do his friend a service in spite of the laws, for that he held love to be the highest law. Ah! how many happy souls you can make with a word; because you are a Queen.—What is it to be a Queen!—to be able to do all that!—Oh! madam, be pitiful then, and show mercy as one day you ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... had been written, offered, accepted, and rehearsed, in the compass of three months. You may easily guess how much I was confounded at this event! I own to you that, in the first transports of my anger, I suspected Mr. Brayer of having acted towards me in the most pitiful perfidious manner; and was actually glad at his disappointment in the success of his favourite piece, which, by the strength of art, lingered till the third night, and then died in a deplorable manner. But now that passion ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... had fled so mysteriously a few days before, taking with him the son over whom so dread a charge was hanging, bowed deferentially to the detective, with the pitiful mien of one who is crushed beneath the burden of misfortune. His features were drawn, his face bore the stamp of deepest grief, and in his hand he held an evening paper, which in his agitation he had crumpled almost into ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... grass beneath the window we found her wing tips and many other fragments of her plumage. All that day the distressed mate flew about the lawn and called continually. He seemed to gather but little food and {50} the evidence of his suffering was pitiful. In fact, he stirred our feelings to such a pitch we at length closed the windows to shut out the sounds of his ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... I can only see part of it surely. When his wife left the office, she met Cory on the street. You saw what a pitiful kind of fool she was, irresponsible and helpless and feather-brained. There are thousands of women like that everywhere—some of them are 'Court Beauties,' I dare say—and they always mix things up; but they are most dangerous when they're like Claudine, because then ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... officers and crews who had served him and Chili during the previous fighting time. His earnest arguments on their behalf were not heeded. The poor fellows were left to starve and be perished by the cold of a South American winter, against which the pitiful rags in which they were clothed afforded no protection. And before long fresh incidents arose which made it impossible for him to persevere in ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... ancient burlesque on 'Faust' at the —— Theatre last night was without any noteworthy feature save the pitiful performance of the part of Mephisto by a doleful gentleman named Thomas Mogley, who showed not the faintest of humour and who was tremendously guyed by a turbulent audience. Mr. Mogley was temporarily taking the place of William Renshaw, a funmaker of more advanced methods, ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... woman or the helpless-bred man who marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination these scorners have! To marry for a mere living, hardly better than one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for men or women all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning money—for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from the misery and shame that poverty ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... gone, the two men made their beds by the fire in the big room. Follett was awakened twice by the other putting wood on the fire; and twice more by his pitiful pleading with something at his back not to come in ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... earth!—this is the sore pestilence with which we are afflicted and almost destroyed. O valiant and all-powerful Lord, the common people are almost made an end of and destroyed; a great destruction the ruin and pestilence already make in this nation; and, what is most pitiful of all, the little children, that are innocent and understand nothing, only to play with pebbles and to heap up little mounds of earth, they too die, broken and dashed to pieces as against stones and a wall—a thing very pitiful ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... and agitation). King Mark, oh good King Mark, Behold, he is my brother in my kind, A much abused and crazy fool who means No evil with his foolish jests! See now How pitiful his mien! He strove to make Thee laugh in his poor way as I in mine. Forgive the knave, and drive him not away Into the darkness like a snarling cur That whines about the house! He hungers, too, For thou hast given him naught to eat or drink Since he has been beneath ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... I think it lost time to attend lectures on this branch. He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the manager and part owner, was a man of enterprise. He believed it would pay to handle a better class of cattle and horses on the range, and one of his ventures was ten half-blooded mares, tall, clean-limbed, deer-eyed creatures that made the scrub cow-ponies look like pitiful starvelings of some degenerate ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Darbois in the cloak-room. The little flirt was in a pitiful state: I helped her on with her cloak and her ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... "Everything you say, everything you do, convinces me—of some great issue in which I am concerned. I do not want to pass the time, as you call it. Yes, I know. Desire and indulgence are life in a sense—and Death! Extinction! In my life before I slept I had worked out that pitiful question. I will not begin again. There is a city, a multitude—. And meanwhile I am here like a rabbit ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the book. It is not often that a reviewer has the chance of checking local colour with so little pains. And in the third place Mr. JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY informs me, on page 101, that his hero will "gaze one day upon rivers to which the Thames should seem little better than a pitiful rivulet." As Henry never gets further from his native Devon than London in the course of this novel I take it that this is a delicate allusion to the possibility of a sequel. I hope it is so, and that I shall hear of Henry in days to come, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... luxury, he broke down completely. And while he did everything possible to alleviate her suffering, in the few last days that remained to her on earth, and gave her an imposing burial, what torture he must have suffered, at this pitiful picture of his mother who had ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... bleak and lonely cabin, lost in the desolate wastes of snow, he was simply the clansman—the feudist—the primitive avenger. Virginia too should know the crime, and the haunting sight of those pitiful bones in the dark cavern would rise before her eyes whenever she sought Harold's arms. He would show her the picture; she could see the murderer's face in her own lover's. She could ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... an' the orf'cer bhoy begins pleadin' pitiful to Crook to be let go, but divil a bit wud ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... question?[58] No, indeed. I would rather we had lost ten battles than stultified ourselves in the House of Commons with Brummagem brag and Derby intrigues before the eyes of Europe and America. It seems to me utterly pitiful. I hold that the most susceptible of nations should not reasonably have been irritated by the Walewski despatch, which was absolutely true in its statement of facts. Ah, dearest friend, how true I know better than you do; for I know of knowledge how this doctrine of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... terrible period of indecision was past. He knew now where he stood. Nor was his immediate departure from England altogether unpleasant to him. His political career was shattered—friends and enemies were alike cold to him. Such an act of cowardice as his, such pitiful shrinking back at the last fateful moment, was inexplicable and revolting. Even Letheringham was barely civil. It was certain that his place in the Cabinet would be intolerable. He yearned for escape from it all, and the means of escape ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies. Moreover, the work made me pitiful and kindly. I learned much of the untold grievances of the natives, and saw something of their strange, twisted reasoning. Before we had got Laputa's army back to their kraals, with food enough to tide them over the spring sowing, Aitken ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... squareness the triangular gable of the building. Upon this screen, in the brightest of colours, magenta and sky-blue predominating, was represented the day of judgment—the mother seated on the right hand of the judge, and casting a pitiful look upon the miserable assembly on her left. The square was a good deal on the slope, and as they went slowly up to the church, they kept looking at the picture. The last tatters of the skirt of the ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... arm vessels at their own expence; with these ships they were directed to land on the coast of Africa, for the purpose of pillage, the fruit of which was to be their own private gain. The senate even went further to evade, by a pitiful subterfuge their own decree, for they lent the few ships which still remained to the republic, to private citizens, on condition that they should keep them in repair, and make them good if they were lost. By these measures a very considerable fleet was equipped, which committed great ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
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