"Penniless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... sublimely simple—as simple as his wardrobe had grown. All his clothes were on his back. In a week or two he would be on the streets; for a poor widow could not be expected to lodge, partially board (with use of the piano, gas), an absolutely penniless young gentleman, though he combined the blood of twenty county families with the genius of a pleiad ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... king to his shoulder And chuckled, "Look at that!" As the chubby fingers clutched his hair; Then, "Boys, hand round the hat!" There never was such a hatful Of silver and gold and notes; People are not always penniless Because they don't ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... a surprising fact, says a contemporary, that when LENIN was born his parents were practically penniless. The greater mystery is that his parents decided ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... weeks. Gaunt poverty was upon him soon, and he was glad to earn a meagre subsistence for a few weeks, by teaching. He used to speak of his short residence in Halifax as a time of severe privation and anxiety, for it was a place then of no great wealth, and had little to offer to a penniless adventurer, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... man had passed on, and there, as far as the present and the past were concerned, had been an end of it. The young man had been no favourite with her step-mother; and her father, who was almost on his death-bed, had heard what was going on almost without a remark. He had been told that the man was penniless, and as his daughter had been to him the dearest thing upon earth, he had been glad to save himself the pain of expressing disapproval. John Gordon had, however, been a gentleman, and was fit in all things ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... scholar, was intelligent, and, what was better, interesting, having visited many lands, and encountered many of the adventurous perils of war and travel. He was here a penniless soldier in "the land of the brave"—a friendless exile for liberty in the "home of the free." He talked well; and by his enthusiastic discourses in favour of equality and independence,—topics which possess a charm for most American ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... alone? Where were her natural protectors then? What would be her fate a-gypsying through a land blackened with war, or haunting camps and forts, penniless, in rags—and her beauty ever a flaming danger to herself, despite her ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... To be sister-in-law to George Osborne, Esquire, son of John Osborne, Esquire, son of—what was your grandpapa, Mr. Osborne? Well, don't be angry. You can't help your pedigree, and I quite agree with you that I would have married Mr. Joe Sedley; for could a poor penniless girl do better? Now you know the whole secret. I'm frank and open; considering all things, it was very kind of you to allude to the circumstance—very kind and polite. Amelia dear, Mr. Osborne and I were talking about your poor brother Joseph. How ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her father to let her return and share his risks. But the answer was "to wait" until this nine days' madness of an uprising was over. That madness lasted six years, outlived Maynard, whose gray, misdoubting head bit the dust at Ball's Bluff; outlived his colorless widow, and left Kelly a penniless orphan. ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... these occasions I had been in the company of people who spent at least as much in a week as I did in a year. Why was I, a penniless and unknown young man, admitted there? Simply because, though I was an execrable pianist, and never improved until the happy invention of the pianola made a Paderewski of me, I could play a simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most amateurs. It is true ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... go away," he murmured. "I want to leave the country. But at the present moment I am practically penniless. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... morning; and we heard, a month or two later, that the coach was stopped the same afternoon in the plains of Perote, and Antonio was robbed not only of his money but even of his jacket and serape, and reached Mexico penniless and half-naked. He was always a silly fellow, and his last exploit was ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... excellent novel. The Prelude, "the dark and vaulted gateway," is not unworthy of Hawthorne, who, I suspect, had studied Mrs. Radcliffe. The theme is more like a theme of this world than usual. The parents of a young noble might well try to prevent him from marrying an unknown and penniless girl. The Marchese Vivaldi only adopts the ordinary paternal measures; the Marchesa, and her confessor the dark-souled Schedoni, go farther—as far as assassination. The casuistry by which Schedoni brings the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the truth; how she whom he so worshipped, on her part, adored him? But this he himself did not know, or even suspect. Had he possessed much less of a fine, high-toned sense of honor, he might, by wooing the lady, have found this out for himself; but he, an almost penniless young man, was much too proud to ask the hand of the wealthy heiress. Or had he possessed a little more personal vanity, he might have suspected the truth; for certainly there was not a handsomer man in the ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... laid his career, plus fifty pounds per annum and some impalpable expectations, at the feet of Muriel, the clearance effected by Sir Thomas had been that of Lieutenant Aubrey Hamilton. "Is it marry one of my daughters to that penniless pup!" he had said to Lady Purcell, whose sympathies had, as usual, been on the side of the detrimental. "Upon my honour, Lucy, you're a bigger fool than I thought you—and that's saying a ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... really loved: a poor girl of a respectable family, she had taken up nursing; had married a wealthy doctor, and had been in the position of the penniless but beautiful ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... to Holland and thence to Belgium, settling afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of "companions," taking up different work with that facility of adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them and set them again ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of my doing any good?" the young Englishman asked himself, bitterly. "This place is again in the hands of the Dutch, and the English ships stand clear of it, or only receive supplies by stealth. I am friendless here, I am penniless; and worst of all, if I even get a passage home, there will be no home left. Too late! too late! What ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... execution appear quite Milesian viewed across the years, but to Rossetti it was no joke. To keep his head in its proper place and to preserve his soul alive, he departed one dark night for England. He arrived penniless, with no luggage save his lyre, but with muse intact. Yet it was an Italian lyre, and therefore of small avail for amusing Britons. Very naturally, Rossetti made the acquaintance of other refugees, and exile makes fast friends. It is only in prosperity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... of the dramatic and this tramp had been carefully thought out. The opportunity was made and it was for them to use it. He drew a long breath, conscious that here was the moment which comes but seldom in the lives of men. It was only five years ago that, practically penniless, he had overheard a conversation in ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... not a cheerful outlook with which to begin three years of penniless matrimony. Royal, suavely smiling, and smoking on the terrace, wondered suddenly if old Madame Carter, who had always been his ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... waiter-girls" were prepared to serve drinks at these latter—and to share in them, at a commission. The second floor was a theatre, and the third a dance-hall. Beneath the building were still viler depths. From this basement the riverman and the shanty boy generally graduated penniless, and perhaps unconscious, to the street. Now, your lumber-jack did not customarily arrive at this stage without more or less lively doings en route; therefore McNeill's maintained a force of fighters. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... any means penniless, king of Roman beggars, with a European reputation, unequalled, in his own profession—there sat the most scientific beggar that the world ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... a throne, I could not recall the promise that I had given in penury and banishment; I could not refuse to him who would have sacrificed worldly ambition in wedding a penniless bride, the reward of his own generosity. My daughter subscribes to ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before many years had passed. M. de Lomnie, in his interesting sketch of Beaumarchais, has tried hard to show the justice of his demands on the United States, but without much success. He does not attempt to explain how Beaumarchais, notoriously penniless in 1775, should have had in 1777 a good claim for three millions' worth of goods furnished. The American public looked upon Paine as a victim to state policy, and his position with his friends did not suffer at all in consequence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... as a captain was, he says, so poor that but for honour he 'would disdain it as much as to keep sheep.' This fact disposes of the notion that Raleigh arrived at the Court of Elizabeth in the guise of a handsome penniless adventurer. Perhaps he had by this time inherited his ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... a carriage which had been furnished her by him, to carry her home from some rendezvous—of course the driver took care of himself and his horses. The poor girl was picked up and carried to the hospital. She was without friends and almost penniless. She sent to him—for him; he returned no answer. She begged for help, for enough to enable her to obtain what was needed in her illness. Message after message was sent, and finally a reply came, brought by a messenger who had been bidden to insist upon receiving an ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... thought I would be afraid of a row, and that I would 'come down.' It is a system of blackmailing, like any other. An account is opened to some young rascal; and, when the amount is reasonably large, they take it to the family, saying, 'Money, or I make row.' Do you think it is to you, who are penniless, that they give credit? It's on my pocket that they were drawing,—on my pocket, because they believed me rich. They sold you at exorbitant prices every thing they wished; and they relied on me to pay for trousers at ninety francs, shirts at forty francs, ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... spite of their high birth, so poor that one by one the fields and woods of their little domain had been sold in order to buy the bare necessities of life. Knowing that his death would leave Isabella quite alone in the world and practically penniless, her father brought her up more like a boy than a girl; she could ride a horse as gracefully as an Amazon, she could swim like a born mermaid, and even outdo her father in his favorite sport of fencing. Yet so sweet was the gentle nature which ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... the safe material upon which to base the conclusion that the poet left Stratford penniless, or well-nigh penniless, in 1585; that after eleven years of hard work in London, in the course of which he probably paid brief visits to his home, travelling by way of Oxford and stopping at the Crown Inn, he returned to restore ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Vittore's accomplices were in waiting; and the unsuspecting stranger—pillaged and alarmed, would return to the vettura penniless. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... of an older civilization than that which had given Barney Ryan's daughter her frankness and her force, and it did not cross his mind that the heiress of millions might cast tender eyes upon the penniless sons of New England farmers. He said to himself with impatient recklessness that he ought not to and would not fall in love with her. There was too great a distance between them. It would be King Cophetua and the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... as he took an easy-chair in the back drawing-room, "My lady winces considerably. She didn't know what would be the charge for that superfine article, Henleigh Grandcourt." But it seemed to him that a penniless girl had done better than she had any right to expect, and that she had been uncommonly knowing for her years and opportunities: her words to Lydia meant nothing, and her running away had probably been part of her adroitness. It had turned out ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... system; and there is a class of men in the commercial world, banded together by peculiar ties and interests, who are said to accomplish it on a large and comprehensive scale. It is thus carried out: A penniless man starts in business, supplied with abundant capital by his friends: they may demand 6, 7, or 10 per cent. for the use of it; and if they manage, which they may, to avoid the residue of the law of usury, they are safe from the law of partnership. The new man, by his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... of these same wild geese found their way to the Transvaal, and there made for themselves a name, not as resistless fighters, but as irrestrainable looters. These men linked to the bywoners, or squatters, the penniless Dutch of South Africa, did little to help the cause they espoused, but many a time have caused every honest God-fearing burgher to blush by reason of ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... left penniless. In the year 1832 I myself saw Mlle. Cornelie de Lamarck earning a scanty pittance by fastening dried plants on to paper, in the museum of which her father had been a professor. Many a species named and ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... but even then things did not go well. So I had to take over the whole business myself, and when we made up our balance-sheet, it became evident that there was practically nothing left as my mother's share. And when mother died soon afterwards, of course Martha was left penniless. ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... all right," I observed to Noah; but I am, at this moment, as penniless as the good woman herself. I really do not see what we are to do, unless Bob sends her back his store ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... handed him a leather purse full of silver: You will not be altogether penniless, said he, even if you wreck your ship, so long as you can hold on to this. But yet it may be, said the King, that you will lose this money, and then it will be of little use to you that you have been to see King Sveinn and ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... don't know what to do with you. Since your poor mother died my life has been nothing but trouble and vexation. I can't manage you, you are too strong for me. So she hasn't left her room; crying her eyes out, because I won't consent to her marrying a penniless young officer! But I will not squander my money. I made it all myself, by my own industry, and I refuse to ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... course not. But it was your taking the boy in, a penniless, unknown fellow, that has cost you a cow," persisted the wife. "I told you at the time you ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Being penniless he looked for work, and his first job came from a small Jewish merchant, named Guth, who offered him a hundred dollars to do the assessment work on a tundra claim. For twenty days Folsom picked holes through frozen muck, wondering why a thrifty person like Guth would pay good money to hold ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... perfectly did it suit her rather stately beauty and dark, clear coloring. This turned out to be true, since Eugenia a short time before had discovered a little French dressmaker, whom the war had rendered penniless, and given her ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... American it was different, and he succeeded at last in tracing him to his home in this city. Unfortunately though, the long search had left the young mechanic without means, and he arrived in Boyd City in a penniless and starving condition, the night of the great storm winter before last. You are familiar with the finding of ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... dead-pit at Liscannor; it left Andy, but it left him blind. Then the neighbours began to have their doubts whether he was a Changeling after all; for the Fairies are faithful, and who ever heard of a Changeling being left blind and penniless? If he was only mortal he had been cruelly treated, so to make amends they gave him the fiddle that had belonged to the "Dark" Man—that is the blind man—of St. Bridget's Well, who had lately starved. There was still a feeling that he was unfit for a Holy ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... we know why we've come to encamp just across the street—it's to lay siege to a penniless cousin. (picks up "Quayle on Muscles" off couch, takes it ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... moment, however, he was almost penniless; and he had answered in vain some dozen advertisements of curacies, when a college friend came to the rescue and prevailed on a distant kinsman to offer him the living of Langona, with a net annual stipend of 51 ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I, a shabby, penniless little Peri, stood at the gilded gates disconsolate. I didn't like it. The mystery of the unknown beatitude within the Wonder Houses oppressed me to faintness. It was unimaginable. Through the leaves of a tree I could see the pale Queen Galeswinthe; but through ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... a long while recovering from the wound that had crippled him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had "drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... him by the arm, and the three hurried away from me in the direction from which I had come. The man looked back and made a face at me, shaking his fist. I was left penniless in the road. A milestone told me that I ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... wants us to buy information from him. He pretends to have broken with his employers on our account (though his explanation of getting here to Halfa on their dahabeah is ridiculous) and that, having come for our benefit against their wishes, he's without pay, penniless, and stranded." ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... parents and the beloved one were as hypothetical as the fortune); and how the Judge would make his first start as a capitalist by breaking a certain faro bank in Sacramento. He himself had been equally eloquent in extravagant fancy in those penniless days, he who now was quite cold and impassive beside the more ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... Louet is in great tribulation. In the course of his long ramble his money has worked a hole in his pocket, and he discovers that he is penniless just at the moment that he has established himself at the best hotel, and ordered supper for three by way of making up for past privations. He gets out of his difficulties, however, by giving a concert, which produces him a hundred crowns; and he then embarks for Toulon, on board the letter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Another emigrant arrived here penniless, but meeting a friend, obtained the loan of a few crowns, nearly his all. With these he went to the rooms, put down his stake, and won. He then successively doubled his stakes till he closed the evening with a hundred louis in his pocket. He went ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... ruined me. Before the sixty days expired I learned that he was bankrupt. My farm was sold at a sacrifice, under the hammer, and when I paid the thousand dollars which I had borrowed to build the barn with, I was left penniless. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... old was pulling a toy cart in which two younger children were packed. Behind followed the mother with a large bundle on her back. Then came the father with a still bigger one. There they were trudging along, leaving their home (p. 070) behind with its happy memories, to go forth as penniless refugees, compelled to live on the charity of others. It was through no fault of their own, but only through the monstrous greed and ambition of a despot crazed with feudal dreams of a by-gone age. As I looked ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... nothing but Tom. Sweetly, sighfully, she spoke, as more than once before, of those many things he had done for her, but spoke of them this evening more amply; his care of her, a penniless patient, in that hospital where she woke up after a space of unconsciousness; his unremitting kindness when she lived in his house and took care of his father, the dear old judge, who was sick three long years before he died; the proof of ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... With her nose in the air, Mary Morris was not a little jealous that her almost penniless sister-in-law should capture the prize ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... government to undertake as the postal or money-order business. As it is, the government coins money and transfers money, but will not take it on storage, which is absurd, and forces the people to deposit with loan and discount concerns, liable to explode at any time and leave them penniless." ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... neglected boy in Fazio's ill-ordered house, the student at Pavia, the youthful Rector of the Paduan Gymnasium, plunging when just across the threshold of life into criminal excess of Sardanapalean luxury, the country doctor at Sacco and afterwards at Gallarate, starving amongst his penniless patients, the University professor, the famous physician for whose services the most illustrious monarchs in Europe came as suppliants in vain, the father broken by family disgrace and calamity, and the old man, disgraced and suspected and harassed ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... kneeling there, motionless, for some quarter-hour more; in itself the act of suspense is an absorbing one. So much was I possessed by it that I forgot all beside it—that I was a lover, not of this shrouded unknown, that I was penniless and outcast, that I was hungry, ignorant, uncertain, unforgiven. I think that, in some indefinable way, the spirit of Aurelia may have been about me, pervading this cold church, linking me and that other; I think that Aurelia's soul may have whispered to mine, "Behold thy duty there." I ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is often haunted from pillar to post by her employer, and if he fails to get her to submit to his diabolical solicitations outside of the ball room, he will manage to get her to attend a dancing school, where he has the right to encircle her ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... rooms on Twenty-Eighth Street, there was an odor of stale tobacco, permeating the confusion created by a careless person. Dresser had been occupying them lately. He had found Sam Dresser, whom he had known as a student in Europe, wandering almost penniless down State Street, and had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ambition to become father-in-law to the old earl, forgot his religious prejudices and coaxed his daughter to sacrifice herself. And thus Berenice D'Israeli became Countess of Hurstmonceux. The old peer survived his foolish marriage but six months, and died leaving his widow penniless, his debts having swamped even her marriage portion. His entailed estates went to the heir-at-law, a ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... in the cause to which he had devoted his life—more than content. Valuing money for the sake of what it could do, he had yet envied no man who had more than fell to his lot. He must have known that his children must be left penniless! How could he ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... views include yourself. Are you thinking of reserving the prize for your own special benefit? A penniless guardian—a rich ward; as a situation, it is ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... perceptible to an indifferent observer in the accent, pronunciation, modulation of the voice of the biped animal, and in the braying of the quadruped. This Jack-Ass you might also behold perambulating the streets of ———, a second Judas Iscariot—a houseless, homeless, penniless, forlorn fugitive, like Old Nick or Beelzebub, seeking whom he might betray and injure in the public estimation, in rapacity, or in discharging a blunderbuss full of falsehood against the most pure and unimpeachable Member of society! ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... old man to his visitor, "I am proud of my girls and would like to see them comfortably married, and as I have made a little money they will not go penniless to their husbands. There is Mary, twenty-five years old, and a really good girl. I shall give her $1000 when she marries. Then comes Bet, who won't see thirty-five again. I shall give her $3000, and the man who ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... unwearying preparation of broths and jellies and sagos and gruels, what untiring and devoted slavery, had been necessary to save the faded rake who looked out upon the world once more, a ghastly shadow of his former self, a penniless helpless burden for any one who might ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... threw herself on her own bed, at one end of the dormitory, and all that night, whenever I woke, I heard her crying and moaning. I would have been sorry for her, except that she was only the teacher—a poor penniless Anglaise.' ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... and after this change came upon him he got all kinds of strange ideas in his head, among them a perfect mania for destroying papers. It is principally for that reason," with a slight shrug of her shoulders, "that we were left almost penniless. But he had a head clerk, a Mr. Carrothers, Ydo's father, by the way, who saw how things were going, and who, by various ruses, succeeded in saving some of the papers, among them those relating to the Mariposa ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... was well that he made me this present, for without it I should have been penniless, having contracted rather expensive habits during the time that I lived with the young baronet. I now determined to visit my parents, whom I had not seen for years. I found them in good health, and, after ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband nowadays if she is penniless," Crevel remarked, resuming his starchiest manner. "Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather alarm intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too expensive to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out walking with such a woman on your arm, every one will ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... brought against him, he was fined and sent to jail. There he was kept for several months, in company with counterfeiters, murderers, highwaymen, and gamblers, whose principal amusement was card-playing; when he was discharged penniless, in rags, and with a bad character. This was the commencement of his career of vice, his reformation from which is the next thing to a miracle. All this came upon him in consequence of keeping bad company. Learn from it to avoid evil company and betting. The boy that suffers ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... her, what was to prevent my crossing the frontier when so many of my friends and acquaintances did? But I am in love with her fortune. If I am to make myself felt in Paris, if I am to do what I have set my heart to accomplish, money I must have. True, I am not penniless like some of our ragged patriotic comrades, but, believe me, power will eventually rest with the man who can scatter the most gold to the people. That man I am ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... "Hideous, an outcast, penniless, she blessed my lonely years. Ah! I lost her, I lost her. Death wafted her soul to heaven!—But thou art left me," he said tenderly, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... circle of your friends,—F. Chopin.' Or, 'A welcome moment in which I can express to you my friendship.—F. Chopin, office clerk.' Or again, 'Ah, my most lordly sir, I do not myself yet understand the joy which I feel on entering the circle of your real friends.—F. Chopin, penniless'!" ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... lay in a nut-shell. I, Merle Fenton, sound, healthy, and aged two-and-twenty, being orphaned, penniless, and only possessing one near relative in the world—Aunt Agatha—declined utterly to be dependent for my daily bread and the clothes I wore on the goodwill of her husband and my ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... Barbary ducket. He came nere and with a low leg saluted his mistris, and told her that when she pleased to make choice of a husband he would make her the richest marriage in London, because she was so willing out of her own purse (when he was altogether penniless) to lay out for his adventure. To the pilot, and master, and every officer, and common saylor he gave liberal according to their degree, even to the ship boy, and then to every servant of the house, nay to the very kitchin wench who was so churlish ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... out of the house, into which she was brought back two days later a corpse, fished out from the East River? Didn't Edith's father act more nobly, more wisely even from a purely selfish point of view than the father of Bridget C, who kicked his daughter out penniless into the street, where he had to see her afterwards powdered and painted soliciting men and boys? The mother died of a broken heart, and the father, unable to bear the constant, daily repeated ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... following morning, as Adrien stood before a mirror, putting the finishing touches to his toilet, carefully supervised by Norgate, his thoughts went back to Jessica. The idea of the child wandering about the streets, homeless and penniless, filled him with a supreme pity. He had meant to have spoken to Jasper about it, but he felt half ashamed; besides, he rather dreaded to see Vermont's cynical smile at the idea of his ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... making. For Selwyn was well liked in the younger set, and that he was in process of becoming eligible interested everybody except Gladys and the Minster twins, who considered him sufficiently eligible without the material additions required by their cynical seniors, and would rather have had him penniless and present than absent ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... remuneration from the Greeks has "turned out perfectly chimerical," Lord Byron remarks, in a note, "and will do so, till they obtain a loan. They have not a rap, nor credit (in the islands) to raise one. A medical man may succeed better than others; but all these penniless officers had better have stayed at home. Much money may not be ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... awaiting his answer at Munich they were painfully surprised by the entrance of five old soldiers of noble birth, part of the body-guard they had left behind at Mittau, relying on the protection of Paul. The "mad Czar" had decreed their immediate expulsion, and, penniless and almost starving, they made their way to Louis XVIII. All the money the royal family possessed was bestowed on these faithful servants, who came to them in detachments for relief, and then the Duchess ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the arm-chair her brother had vacated and sat down, her thoughts drifting backward to the past. Backward four years, and she saw herself, a penniless orphan, dependent on the bounty of that miserly Uncle Roosevelt in Montreal. She saw again the stately gentleman who came to her, and told her he was her father's third cousin, Captain Danton, of Danton Hall. She had never seen him before; but she had heard ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... early penniless life he had migrated from his more northern native State, settled in the county, and, shortly after his arrival, had married the relict of the late lamented Major John Talbot of Pocomoke. This had been greatly to the ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... The return of the prospecting party to his humble hospitality that night had been an exceptional case; in his characteristic simplicity he did not dream that it was because they had nowhere else to go in their penniless condition. It was an incident to be pleasantly remembered, but whose nonrecurrence did not disturb his infinite patience. His pork barrel and flour sack had been replenished for other travelers; his own ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... penniless, Rupert De Willoughby lived in a corner of the house he had been brought up in. Such furniture as had survived the havoc of war and the entire dilapidation of old age, he had gathered together in three or four rooms, which he occupied with the one servant good fortune brought ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I answer? How could one give away the last kopeck and arrive penniless in a strange land? Every rouble taken from us was like a piece of our life. So my people and I began to weep and to beg for pity. 'Have compassion,' we cried. Answered they: 'In a frontier town compassion dwells not. Give money. That will bring compassion.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... her one brief visit to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not tried to see her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not roused his emulation, his understanding of her difficulties would have moved his pity. He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people's moods and whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of his ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... it was of her—this day. How beggared she felt! The fact that she was very nearly penniless troubled her very little; it was the homelessness—friendlessness—that frightened her. She had never had but two friends: the one who had gone so long ago was past ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... of dollars or of dollars' worth. Whatever they had acquired in slavery was the master's, unless he had expressly made himself a trustee for their benefit. Regarded from the legal standpoint it was, indeed, a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded, penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless, nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions. Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt and cousin, home, family—none of these ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... bar of New-York City to assist, in turns, in every trial, should remain evermore an indestructible monument to their unselfish devotion to their city, the existence of which was threatened by less than a score of ignorant, penniless ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fiancee! ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... considered the acme of bad form in Germany. Everybody professes the most profound interest in questions and enterprises relating to the church, and a large number of daughters of the most illustrious houses of the German nobility have conferred their hands and their hearts upon penniless Lutheran pastors, whose social status has thereby been entirely changed. Moreover, if during the past ten years more churches have been built, particularly in Berlin, than had been the case in the entire previous half-century, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... laws of this land and against the people, my subjects, on whom he hath heaped insult, I have taken counsel with my advisers, the ministers of state, and it is my royal will and pleasure to pronounce sentence. Wherefore, I declare that my son, the prince, shall be cast forth into the world, penniless, and shall not return until he shall have learned how to Count Five. And be it further known that none may minister unto his wants should he crave assistance by declaring he is my ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... Delf's sovereign contributed, the other half going for a bottle of Rhine wine, to return the compliment of my next neighbor at the table, who had invited me to take a glass of wine one day. Thus, as usual, I landed penniless from my venture, but fortunately found my brother on the wharf expecting the arrival of the steamer, her trips having been made with such precision that the hour of arrival was generally anticipated correctly. In those days the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... "'There they are, penniless,' says she, 'and in want for the barest necessities; and this man fiddling his time away! I had a struggle persuading him to give up his wretched toy; but I've handled harder cases. You should of seen the light in the mother's wan face when he consented! The twelve dollars won't be much, though ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... and labour. Even a leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the farm going to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case, though relatively his hardship was less, since his condition, being the lowest possible in all circumstances, could scarcely be worse. Obviously, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... were his feelings as he drew near to the great city this second time! It was just about a year since he had entered it for the first time, a stranger, homeless, well-nigh penniless, and very uncertain of the reception he should receive from his kinsfolk on the bridge. Now he stepped towards the region of shining lights with all confidence and joy. He was rich past his wildest hopes, for the treasure had proved to be far greater ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... are not worth a dollar. One man who was reported to be worth $100,000 before the flood now is penniless and has to take his place in the line along with others seeking ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... the bent of Mrs. Poyser's mind with regard to Adam; and though she and her husband might have viewed the subject differently if Hetty had been a daughter of their own, it was clear that they would have welcomed the match with Adam for a penniless niece. For what could Hetty have been but a servant elsewhere, if her uncle had not taken her in and brought her up as a domestic help to her aunt, whose health since the birth of Totty had not been equal to more positive labour than the superintendence of servants and ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... high-handed measures and appeared that evening at "Marse Perkins's" with a ring of portentous size squeezed on the little finger of his left hand. It had something of the color of gold, and that is the best that can be said of it; but it had left its purchaser penniless. This fact sat lightly on Jeff's mind, however, as he remembered the box at the foot of the persimmon-tree; and he stalked into the detached kitchen, where a dusky assemblage were to indulge in a shuffle, with the air of one who intends ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... to her, sobbing for very rapture that she, friendless, homeless, and penniless, should be thus elected for so fair a fate, and whispered through ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... pleaded and finally explained that I had lost my money and had sent to New York for a remittance, I was a remittance-man. Had this been true, it were sad, yet I had a hundred pounds sterling in my belt; but it just came to me to see how it would feel to be penniless and friendless and plead for charity. It is not hard to plead for charity when one has a pocket ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... purse was very low, and he had a good many more miles to go, and not feeling quite sure of his welcome he did not care to be penniless, so he went round the town with his advertising-board and very soon was painting doors in Bathurst. He found the natives stingier here than in Sydney, and they had a notion a traveler like him ought to work much cheaper than an established man; but still he put ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... her, so fair, so young, Whose head was happy on this breast; If you could have heard the songs I sung When the wine went round, you wouldn't have guess'd That ever I, Sir, should be straying From door to door, with fiddle and dog, Ragged and penniless, and playing To you to-night for ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... to deliver it for me ... told him how important it would be to our lives ... adjured him to consider our helpless and penniless state. He promised to deliver it ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... million, it makes him run about all over Europe; he worries himself, goes to the devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes a liquidation, such as I have seen myself, which very often leaves him penniless and without a reputation or a friend. The spendthrift, on the other hand, takes life as a serious game and sees his horses run. He loses his capital, perhaps, but he stands a chance of being nominated Receiver-General, of making a wealthy marriage, or of an appointment of attache to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... laughingly agreed with my mother, I knew that such a way of proceeding would not answer with Anna Holstein. Anna was rich. It would have shamed me to go to her, a penniless husband. Still, love is blind, and that Anna and I loved each other was not to be denied; so, one evening, by the Zuider Zee, we ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... members of her family was already recognised. Since the Irish Rebellion the fixed residence of herself and her husband had been in (Pall Mall?) London. Here her relatives from Ireland and elsewhere gathered round her; and here in 1644 her youngest brother, the future chemist, turning up brown and penniless, a foreign-looking lad of eighteen, after his six years of travel abroad, had been received with open arms. He had remained in her house about five months, and then had retired to his estate of Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, where he continued ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... inherited some independent property, Mr. Willcoxen would, however, have afforded a more liberal and gentlemanly education, could he have done so and at the same time decently withheld from going to some expense in giving his penniless grandson, Cloudy, the same privilege. As it was, he sought to veil ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... got to the station she found she was in time for the first train of the day. There was no third-class to it, but she found she had enough money for a second-class ticket, and without a moment's hesitation, though it left her almost penniless, she took one. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... worse to come. It nearly killed poor dear old aunt, and when she recovered a bit it was to hear the news from the lawyers. I don't quite understand how it was even now—something about a great commercial smash—but all uncle's money was gone, and aunt was left penniless." ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... and justly esteemed men, many of their colleagues have been rogues. Many a "table" has been closed very suddenly, when its owner absconded, or collapsed in bankruptcy, and the unlucky depositors and creditors have been left penniless, during the "rearrangement of the tables," ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... had that much money for months, and all our friends were in an equally bad plight. Like almost everybody else we had spent the few dollars we happened to have on entering prison, in a week or so, and since then we had been entirely penniless. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... since the bairns, as she called her sons, would be soon home. The poor farmer made a virtue of necessity, told his story, and surrendered his gold to Jean's custody. She made him put a few shillings in his pocket, observing it would excite— suspicion should he be found travelling altogether penniless. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... said Lasse, slowly nodding his head; "that's one for me and two for yourself! But what the parson preaches doesn't always come to pass. We might become penniless. Who knows what ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... own account, when he quitted England after his not altogether cheerful experiences there as an almost penniless emigre, he left behind him, in the charge of his landlady, exactly 2383 folio pages of MSS. enclosed in a trunk, and (by a combination of merit on the custodian's part and luck on his own) recovered them fifteen years afterwards, Atala, Rene, and a few ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... countrymen, senorita," Giusippe confessed. "Yes, sorry as I am to say so, it was our own fault. The French, you see, as well as the Venetians, had long been experimenting with glass-making and since it was considered there, as here, an art, many penniless Huguenot gentlemen who had lost their fortunes took it up; for one might be a glass-maker and still retain his noble ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... hazel eyes wearing an anxious expression. She was trying to discover where seams were to be placed and how gathers were to be hung; or if there were to be gathers at all; or if one had to be bereft of every seam in a style so unrelenting as to forbid the possibility of the honest and semi-penniless struggling with the problem of remodelling last season's skirt at all. "As it is only quite an ordinary brown," she had murmured to herself, "I might be able to buy a yard or so to match it, and I might be able to ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wouldn't—I guess he has no heart. But this is how it is: Blair has always been a loafer—that's why he behaved as he did to you. Satan finds some mischief still, you know! So I'm cutting off his allowance, now, and leaving him practically penniless in my will, to stop his loafing. To make him work! He'll have to work, to keep from starving; and work will make a man of him. As for you, you've done an abominable thing, Elizabeth; but it's done! Now, turn to, and pay for your whistle: do your duty! Use your influence ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... sort, where the man has absolutely nothing to offer beyond the charms of his more or less blandly persuasive person, excite no surprise abroad. That a penniless male fortune-hunter should marry a girl with wealth is considered in Europe at the present day not only just, proper and quite as it should be, but rather comme il faut than otherwise. Let the case be reversed, and a man of fortune permit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Duke of Buccleuch, but the marriage was unexpectedly broken off, and for very many years she persistently refused all the offers which were made for her hand. At length, in 1746, when she was forty-eight years old, she was secretly married to Mr. Stewart, of Grantully. This gentleman was a penniless scion of a good family, and the sole resources of the newly-wedded couple consisted of an allowance of L300 per annum, which had been granted by the duke to his sister, with whom he was on no friendly terms. Even this paltry means of support was precarious, and it was resolved to ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... "Penniless beggars like me don't marry beautiful wives like—like Miss Farrow," he said with a sort of savagery. "They want men with pots and pots of money, who can buy them motor-cars and diamonds, and all the rest of it." His voice was hurt and angry. Christine looked ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... with garrison balls and steeple-chases, picnics, regattas, and the thousand-and-one inventions to get rid of one's spare cash,—so called for being so sparingly dealt out by our governors? Now and then, too, when all else fails, we take a newly-joined ensign and make him marry some pretty but penniless lass in a country town, just to show the rest that we are not joking, but have serious ideas of matrimony in the midst of all our flirtations. If it were all like this, the Green Isle would be a paradise; but unluckily every ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... found himself quite penniless. He could sing but his voice was not large. It wasn't an instrument with which one could make money in any dignified way. Fortunately his wife had some money of her own. It was her money, invested in the piano manufacturing business, that had secured him the position as ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Eve. And Mrs. Ruthven she had been as wife and widow after the theatrical career had been abandoned in disaster. Something in her nature would have yearned toward Dauntrey if he had had nothing to recommend him to her ambition; but she would have resisted her own inclination for a penniless man without a title. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... aware, as I have not considered it necessary to inform you hitherto of my affairs, that all we are living on is an annuity your father bought for me, before the catastrophe to his fortunes. That, you will understand, ceases with my life. At my death you will be absolutely penniless, a beggar in the street. Even were you to sell these trifles"—and she pointed to the Sevres cups and the miniatures—"the few pounds they would bring might keep you from starving for perhaps a month or two—after that—well, enough—that ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... butt, and dear Caroline had never known it; she must never know it, never know it. She drew half her happiness from the past, as, so differently, Sophia did herself, and, drooping a little, her thoughts went farther back to the last year of her teens when a pale and penniless young man had been her secret suitor, had gone to America to make his fortune there—and died. She had told no one; Caroline would have scorned him because he was shy and timid, and he had not had time to earn enough to keep her; he had not had time. She had a faded ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... paralytic affection. The tutor awakened as from a dream. He saw his patron dead, and that his patron's only remaining child, an elderly woman, now neither graceful nor beautiful, if she had ever been either the one or the other, had by this calamity become a homeless and penniless orphan. He addressed her nearly in the words which Dominie Sampson uses to Miss Bertram, and professed his determination not to leave her. Accordingly, roused to the exercise of talents which had long slumbered, he opened ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... natural capacity for organisation, and the Association of Young Italy which he founded at Marseilles, the first nucleus being a group of young, penniless refugees, soon obtained an astonishing development. Up to the time of his 'Letter to Charles Albert,' his exile had been so far voluntary that he might have remained in Piedmont had he agreed to live in one of the smaller towns under the watchful ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... conscience drew him back. But the ties of his birth and ancestry were too strong; he had not the energy even of the poor tramp, who carries with him his whole fortune, and leaves in the lap of the gods the uncertain future. James envied with all his heart the beggar boy, wandering homeless and penniless, but free. He, at least, had not these inhuman fetters which it was death to suffer and death to cast off; he, indeed, could make the world his servant. Freedom, freedom! If one were only unconscious of captivity, what ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... ago, when my husband and I awoke from our honeymoon trance, we found ourselves in California, strangers in a lone land, penniless and jobless. My husband was blessed with neither college education nor profession, but we were both young and undaunted—therefore we pulled through. We rented an apartment, furnished, at $15 per month and buckled in. I might say that the rent ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... acres of ground, where strangers are buried. This is already occupied to a great extent. The graves are placed in rows close together, with numbers on a small iron plate to denote each. Here the shipwrecked, the pestilence-stricken, the penniless, and friendless are buried; and though such a spot cannot fail to provoke sad musings, the people of New York do not suffer any appearances of neglect to accumulate round the last resting-place of those who died unfriended and alone. Another ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... of one or two and twenty, thrown upon the world penniless, with nothing to depend on but his brains. The next ten years were hard years for him; they were years of unsettledness, sometimes of penury and despair, sometimes of extravagance and folly. This third period in Schiller's ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... one of the wealthiest merchants in the city; and one day when Lane was only nineteen he met Mary. Her beauty captivated him and inspired him to a nobler life. Mary loved the young sailor; but it was the old story of the penniless lover and cruel parent. The sailor was forcibly expelled from the house and sailed to America, with a heart full of ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... true regard for his own honour alike demanded. But he did not mean that, because he saw this and was resolved to act on it, the Count should escape castigation. Before he went, before he left behind him what was dearest in life, and again took his way alone, unfriended, solitary (penniless too, if he had happened to remember this), he would speak his mind to the Count, first in stinging reproaches, later in the appeal that friendship may make to honour; and at the last he would demand from ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... the matter," said Martin Lorimer. "Stubbornness is in the family, and you are your father's son. An archangel would hardly have moved poor Tom! Well, lad, you shall not go penniless, nor third-class, if it's only for the credit of the name; and you can't go until spring. I thank thee for telling me; but I'm busy, and we'll talk again. Hast told thy cousin Alice ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... proper development and field for the genius which he believed he possessed. His friends at Christiania idolized him, and were loath to let him go, but nothing could stay him, so with pilgrim's staff and violin-case he started on his journey. Scarcely twenty-one years of age, nearly penniless, with no letters of introduction to people who could help him, but with boundless hope and resolution, he first set foot in Paris in 1831. The town was agog over Paganini and Mme. Malibran, and of course the first impulse of the young artist ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... this: that she had no reverence for money. She was unable to hoard—an unpardonable sin. Envied in prosperity, she was smugly pitied in her distress. Such is the fate of those who stand apart from the crowd, among a nation of canting shopkeepers. To die penniless, after being the friend of duchesses, is distinctly bad form—a slur on society. True, she might have bettered her state by accepting a lucrative proposal to write her autobiography, but she considered such literature a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... desirable themselves or undesirable, men of her own world and bus-conductors, generals and Tommies—during the war she had had a perplexing time—bishops equally with vergers—round about her confirmation startling occurrences had taken place—wholesome and unwholesome, rich and penniless, brilliant or idiotic; and it made no difference at all what they were, or how long and securely married: into the eyes of every one of them, when they saw her, leapt this flame, and when they heard ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... well-rounded, stylish woman in Atlanta. It was my future sister-in-law, Irene Mitchell. She has had her little dream, too, and survived it. She thought she cared a lot for Andrew Buckton—or, rather, she liked to think that he was crazy about her, but he is penniless—has no more energy than a pet kitten, and, sensible girl that she is, she took her father's advice and sent him adrift. Everybody knows that affair is dead. He followed her away this summer, but came back with a long face, completely beaten. ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... Parton replied, "In point of family she was just as good as he, perhaps a little better. The colonel and I met a lady at Cape May who knew them well. This girl was left an orphan early, and through the rascality of her guardian found herself penniless at seventeen. She had inherited the artistic gift of her family, only in her it took the dramatic turn, and necessity and her surroundings all combined to lead her in that direction. Then just as she was making a success she gave it up to marry—" Another ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... and it was plain enough how it had been. Lord Martindale sighed. The rest being equal, it was not in human nature not to prefer an Earl to an almost penniless author. 'I would not urge you on any account,' he said; 'but I wish it could have ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... faded away, and he made a fearful resolve to leave Montreal, and never see his wife or children more. Accordingly one evening, instead of returning as usual from his store, he left for parts unknown, leaving his wife and children almost penniless behind. ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... her overpowered with trouble and shame—penniless in the great city, and disgraced by expulsion from her patron's roof. Seeing that her abject plight was the consequence of amiable readiness to serve him, Jeffreys pitied and consoled her. Most young men would have soothed their ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow, where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind and will than ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... care and foresight, even without thrift, I had enough to live as well as I ought; but a reckless dash of the old spendthrift blood I came of would master me now and then, and I'd launch out into some extravagance that would leave me penniless for ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Saracens, to the number of eight. The First (1096-1099), preached by Peter the Hermit, and sanctioned by the Council of Clermont (1095), consisted of two divisions: one, broken into two hordes, under Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless respectively, arrived decimated in Syria, and was cut to pieces at Nicaea by the sultan; while the other, better equipped and more efficiently organised, laid siege to and captured in succession Nicaea, Antioch, and Jerusalem, where Godfrey ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood |
