"Motherless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her prayers to a white Virgin; Carmen's Senora de Guadalupe was only a negra! Then, for the first time, Carmen spoke so crossly to the child as to frighten her. But the pious woman's heart smote her the next moment for that first harsh word;—and she caressed the motherless one, consoled her, cheered her, and at last explained to her—I know not how—something very wonderful about the little figurine, something that made Chita's eyes big with awe. Thereafter she always regarded the Virgin of Wax as an object ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... ever he desired to see his motherless daughter well married before he should be called away from her. So, one evening, he sent for Sybil to come into his sitting-room, and when she obeyed his summons, and came and sat down on a low ottoman beside his arm-chair, he said, laying his hand ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... neighbor, except the farm-laborer who did an occasional day's labor for her father, was Mrs. Nixey, the tenant of a farmhouse, which lay at the head of a valley running up into the range of hills. Mrs. Nixey had given as much supervision to Phebe's motherless childhood as her father had permitted, in his jealous determination to be everything to his little daughter. Of late years, ever since old Marlowe in the triumph of making an investment had communicated ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... arsenal. That is love, and only with this weapon is feminine education successfully carried forward." Tolstoy, in fact, betrayed a touch of orientalism in his attitude towards women. In part no doubt as a result of his motherless youth, in part to the fact that his idealism was never stimulated by any one woman as it was by individual men, his views retained this colouring on sex questions while they became widened and modified in almost every other field of human philosophy. It was only that, with ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... beautiful white pig which Anderson gave them. A little movable pen was provided for this favorite, and the youngsters fed it several times a day with warm milk from a nursing-bottle, like any other motherless child. The pig loved its foster-mothers, and squealed for them most of the time when it was not eating or sleeping; fortunately, a pig can do much of both. It grew playful and intelligent, and took on strange little human ways which made one wonder if Darwin were right in his conclusion that we are ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making [25] Dionysus, as Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out among its enemies, motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest, the legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to definite sacred objects and places, the venerable relic of the wooden image which fell into the chamber of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Bridget Evanwy's private opinion, had been a hussy.... Was David his father's son? Hadn't she once caught Mrs. Howel Williams kissing a young stranger behind a holly bush and wasn't that why Bridget had really been sent away? She had returned to take charge of the pretty, motherless little boy when she herself was a widow disappointed of children, and the child was only three. Would she ever turn against her nursling now, above all, when he was showing himself such a son to his old father? Not she. He might be who and what he would. He was giving ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... see, Ed came into the country bringing you, a little motherless babe. He always said your mother was a fine woman, but I never so much as saw a picture of her. She was an educated woman, he said—a Southern woman—and her name was Virginia, but that's about all I can tell you of her. Now, I am going to let Ross know all of this as soon as I can. It will make ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... largely endowed William with the qualities of a great ruler; and education had developed those qualities in no common degree. With strong natural sense, and rare force of will, he found himself, when first his mind began to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the chief of a great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heir to vast and indefinite pretensions, which excited the dread and aversion of the oligarchy then supreme in the United Provinces. The common people, fondly attached during a century to his house, indicated, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... precious little book you had given me, and showed it to her, my eyes sparkling with pleasure. She opened it with care, and, looking through it attentively, told me how privileged I was. In fact, several times during the retreat, the truth came home to me that very few motherless children of my age are as lovingly cared for as I ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... dream,—one dreams such things, n'est-ce pas? But it is true! There is really a God, and prayers are answered—when one believes,—yes; when one believes very hard! Even the prayers of a poor little, miserable, wicked, motherless girl ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... ze story, only—to—to show thee how it would be! I say, 'It is me, Marie, Mere Jeanne! I come to show thee my little son, to take thy blessing. And my little friend, too!'" She turned to pat Petie's head; she would not let the motherless boy feel left out, even from a world in which he ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... died when he was quite young, and he, their only child, had been left to the care and protection of dame Brandon; and well had she cared for him, and been as a mother to the motherless. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... sense could not always understand a temperament like my laddie's. What was lacking in her you have supplied. Between you, I think Paul's training in these two past years has been as nearly ideal as a motherless ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... see; it is the man who sees. That compasses will not make a circle; it is the man. That a bay horse and a dun cow are three; because taken separately they are two, and taken together they are one: two and one make three. That a motherless colt never had a mother; when it had a mother, it was not motherless. That if you take a stick a foot long and every day cut it in half, you will never come to the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... at sea) to Tarsus, intending to leave her with Cleon, the governor of that city, and his wife Dionysia, thinking, for the good he had done to them at the time of their famine, they would be kind to his little motherless daughter. When Cleon saw Prince Pericles, and heard of the great loss which had befallen him, he said, "O your sweet queen, that it had pleased Heaven you could have brought her hither to have blessed my eyes with the sight of her!" Pericles replied, "We ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... Fatherless, motherless, and you might almost say friendless, Rose trod the broad way to destruction, with all its misery and shame, for twelve long years. Her wild, passionate nature, writhing under the wrong suffered, sought forgetfulness in the intoxicating cup, and she ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... God had prepared for her she did in some measure realise when, a few weeks later, outside the house a funeral procession passed from the rectory to the churchyard, and inside a little girl flung herself on her bed with the lonely cry of a motherless heart, "Oh, mamma, mamma, mamma!" Her bright and apparently thoughtless manner led to the idea that she was heartless, but all the while she was heavy and sad for her loss, and weary because she had not yet received ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... and I shall cherish with religious veneration the memories and virtues of the sainted mother of my children—so long as my heart shall be filled with paternal solicitude for the happiness of those motherless infants, I implore my enemies who so ruthlessly invade the domestic sanctuary to do me the favor to believe that I have no wish, no aspiration to be considered purer or better than she, who was, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... overhanging the darkness of the street, and the brilliantly lighted sala at their backs. This was a tete-a-tete of extreme impropriety; something of which in the whole extent of the Republic only the extraordinary Antonia could be capable—the poor, motherless girl, never accompanied, with a careless father, who had thought only of making her learned. Even Decoud himself seemed to feel that this was as much as he could expect of having her to himself till—till the revolution was over and he could carry her off to Europe, away from ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... am her mother, and have come to see you, who loved her so well, and your good mother, who cared for her when she was motherless"— ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... latch, he seemed to wrench it open the moment he touched it. In he strode, followed at the heels by the troop of boys, big and little, and lastly by the girls—last of all, at a short distance, by Annie, like a motherless lamb that followed the flock, because she did not know what else to do. She found she had to go down a step into a sunk passage or lobby, and then up another step, through a door on the left, into the school. There she saw a double row ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... for all those poor little motherless things, with a liar for a pa, an' all the time I lived there, I tried to make up to 'em what I could, but step-mas have their sorrers, my dear, that's what they do, an' I ain't never seen no piece about it in the paper ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... stood out in such bold colours as made the decorous pleasures of the visit to Miss Pierce turn pale. Julia was rushed into the centre of a group of eager, noisy, clever young people, six brothers and sisters who had been motherless from babyhood, and were in mourning now for their father. The Scotts were bold and outspoken in their grief as in everything else; they showed Julia their father's picture before she had been ten minutes in the house, and Kennedy—Julia's ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... but in tragedy something far higher ought to be aimed at. The end of this drama is reached when Hamlet, having attained the possibility of doing so, performs his work in righteousness. The common critical mind would have him left the fatherless, motherless, loverless, almost friendless king of a justifiably distrusting nation—with an eternal grief for his father weighing him down to the abyss; with his mother's sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... these five sisters had, a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age. Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others, starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... was watching her with a gaze half uneasy and wholly tender. She was the delight of his old age, the center of all his affections, this motherless child of his dead brother. His cheek twitched painfully as he thought of the huge amount of his losings to Lablache. He shivered perceptibly as he rose from his seat and went over to the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... journey from the prison was the saddest of my life. It was a bright May morning. Everything around seemed joyful and happy, but to me the world was gloomy. I imagined my wife lying at home a corpse, surrounded by my weeping, motherless little ones. She had passed away without my being at her bedside to go with her to the brink of the dark river. Mr. Morgan, my attendant, had lost his mother but a short time before this, and he could sympathize with me in a manner that aided ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... with a letter in his hand. He told me that he had been sent by Mr Hilton, a missionary stationed on an island about fifty miles off. Mr Hilton was very ill, and entreated my father to come and see him; for, believing that he should not recover, he was anxious to commit his motherless children to his charge. We accordingly conducted the ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... hour the animal was skinned and hung in front of a large fire. While I was superintending the cookery, the young one moaned incessantly, and my companion tried every persuasion to coax it down. Urged by Lucien, I ascended the tree, and tried to catch hold of the motherless little creature. No doubt it was paralyzed by fear, for it only showed its teeth, and allowed me to place it on my shoulder. It clung to my hair and wound its tail round my neck, as I descended, and I was in fear every moment of feeling ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... and right intent are shown when Agrippina recalled Seneca, and when she became the mother of the motherless children of Claudius. She publicly adopted these children, and for a time gave them every attention and advantage that was bestowed upon her own son. Gibbon says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic card often played, but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... and motherless girl had been purposely kept from all outside influences by Gregorio and Matilde, in order that they might control her disposition for their own interests. She had been taught to expect that in due time ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... answered, thoughtfully; "I think, on the whole, that I should prefer to do so, if I were sure of my competency for the position. It appears a great responsibility to have the care and training of a motherless girl like ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... motherless!" she cried. "Would to our dear Lady that thou wert no worse! The blessed saints help thee, for none other be like to do it ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... back on her chair, and buried her face in her hands. The quiet, reserved woman was weeping bitterly. "If we only had her, if we only had her!" she moaned. "Poor little motherless, fatherless one! Oh, it was my fault. I failed in my duty. I tried to do right by her. God knows ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... of grief and the small-pox, was just sunk at rest in the grave. It was suggested, I say, that if the colonel's little children, dressed in mourning, were to fall at the knees of lord Rawdon, he would pity their motherless condition, and give to their prayers their only surviving parent. They were accordingly dressed in black, and introduced into his presence: they fell down at his knees, and, with clasped hands and tear-streaming ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... that in Hamburg with his daughter Dora, whose mother died soon after the little girl came into the world, so that Dora had never known any parent but her father. Naturally, therefore, the child's whole affection was centred upon Major Falk, who had always devoted himself to his little motherless girl with such tenderness that she had scarcely felt the want of a mother, until the war with France broke out, and he was obliged to go with the Army. He was away for a long time, and when at last he returned, it was with a dangerous wound in his breast. The Major had no near ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... her take them along, poor motherless baby?" asked the doctor when he saw the dolls lying ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... some light in its severe desolation. Deeper and deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of its ill fate. The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe. Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance: a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more bizarre still—God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim the souls ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... which all could taste), but it brought in its train the assiduous attendance of Mrs. Simons. To see the kindly brown face bending over it with smiling eyes of jet, to feel the soft, cool hand pressed to its forehead, was worth a fever to a motherless infant. Mrs. Simons was a busy woman and a poor withal, and the Ansells were a reticent pack, not given to expressing either their love or their hunger to outsiders; so altogether the children did not see so much of Mrs. Simons or her bounties as they would have ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... have come in a dressing jacket. I shall advise her to discharge Benella after this episode, for no one can tell the effect it may have upon all our future lives, even those of the doctor's two poor motherless children." ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... come to thee, and mayest thou obtain fine, fat waterfowl. O thou who art the father of the orphan, the husband of the widow, the brother of the woman who hath been put away by her husband, and the clother of the motherless, grant that I may place thy name in this land in connection with all good law. Guide in whom there is no avarice, great man in whom there is no meanness, who destroyest falsehood and makest what is true to exist, who comest to the ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... with you. I was wretched, terrified, miserable, and my heart was breaking. I wept, and I have not done that before since my mother died," and now I saw that there was the moisture of tears about her eyes. It was near to making me cry myself when I thought of all that poor child had been through. Motherless and unprotected; hunted across a savage, primeval world by that hideous brute of a man; exposed to the attacks of the countless fearsome denizens of its mountains, its plains, and its jungles—it was a miracle that she ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Mrs. Parmigan! She was a dear old thing; had actually been nursery governess to Miss Grantley; and, having married and been left a widow, had heard of her former pupil and young mistress being left fatherless and motherless, and now brought her small annuity to Barton Vale, and helped to teach in the school and to be a sort of mother to Miss Grantley, without wanting any wages, and only just her board and lodging, beside which she could afford ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... as bad circumstances as ever any poor Christians were ever in; for the cries of the widowers, widows, fatherless and motherless children are enough to pierce the hardest of hearts. Likewise it is a very sorrowful spectacle to see those that escaped with their lives with not a mouthful to eat, or bed to lie on, or clothes to cover their nakedness or keep them warm, but all they had consumed to ashes. ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... dear I hold you. Do, Dane, do let us cease from this. Let us discuss no further. Let me care for Hester in my own way so long as I do no sin and harm no one; and be you father to us, and bless us who else must go unblessed. For Hester, also, is fatherless and motherless, and you must be to her as you ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... muleteer as his garb would indicate, but the only son and heir of a rich noble of Aragon. This gentleman's house in Madrid was situated directly opposite her father's, and having once seen Dona Clara the youth proceeded to declare his love for her. She, being motherless and having no one to whom she could confide her love secrets, had to leave Madrid with her father, when he was given his appointment to New Spain, without an opportunity to see her lover. But as soon as the youth, who was not much older than herself, learned of their departure, he dressed ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... vivacity of her gestures. Her manner was that of one accustomed to a large and varied world, who took all things without surprise, as they came. Dr. Hooper had felt some emotion, and betrayed some, in this meeting with his sister's motherless child; but the girl's only betrayal of feeling had lain in the sharpness with which she had turned away from her uncle's threatened effusion. "And how she looks at us!" thought Alice. "She looks at us through and through. Yet she ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Murdstone, who was weeping, took no notice of me. Miss Murdstone gave me her cold fingers, and asked if I had been measured for my mourning, and if I had brought home my shirts. There was no sign that they thought of my suffering, and—alone—except for dear faithful Peggotty, I remained there, motherless, and worse than fatherless, still stunned and giddy with the shock. As soon as the funeral was over, Peggotty obtained permission to take me home with her for a visit, and I was thankful for the change, even though I knew that Peggotty ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... contain passages of humour and pathos, and of humour and pathos mingled together and shot in warp and woof, like some daintiest silken fabric, that are scarcely to be matched in the language. As I go in my mind through the motherless child's short history—his birth, his christening, the engagement of the wet-nurse, the time when he is consigned to the loveless care of Mrs. Pipchin, his education in Dr. Blimber's Academy under the classic Cornelia, and his death—as ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... that we were childless, and I fervently thanked God on the day she told me our hopes were to be realized. Had I known the trouble that child was to cost me, I would have been less fervent. A little girl was born to us, and a week later she was motherless." ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... ago, when this old world was in its tender infancy, there was a child, named Epimetheus, who never had either father or mother; and, that he might not be lonely, another child, fatherless and motherless like himself, was sent from a far country, to live with him, and be his playfellow and helpmate. ...
— The Paradise of Children - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... two of his most needy and unprincipled dependants, Gilles de Sille and Roger de Bricqueville. The latter, the obsequious panderer to his most secret and abominable pleasures, he had entrusted with the education of his motherless daughter, a child but five years of age, with permission that he might marry her at the proper time to any person he chose, or to himself if he liked it better. This man entered into the new plans of his master with great zeal, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the tales had at last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going into the wilderness, and ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... 1794-1880), surnamed the "father of poetry", was born at Wilna. He spent a sad childhood. Left motherless early, he was deprived of the love and the care that are the only consolations known to a child of the ghetto. At the age of three, he was sent to the Heder, at seven he was a student of the Talmud, then casuistry occupied his mind, and, finally, the Kabbalah. The last had ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... assumed a somewhat different aspect. Gertrude van Floote proved to be not exactly a gentlewoman. It is true that her father had been a well-to-do man for his station in life, and had very much spoiled and indulged his one motherless child. Yet her education was so slight that she could do little more than read and write, besides speaking a little English, which she had picked up from the yachtsmen frequenting her native town. The professor found she had been but a distant relative ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... searching for the nest, but the foliage was dense, and though he groped the boughs aside he could discover no signs of it. Still, the thought of those motherless chicks had ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... of a dyer. Finding, however, but little employment in that business, he set up as a tallow chandler and soap boiler. Four years of life's usual joys and sorrows passed away when Mrs. Franklin died, leaving six children. The eldest was but eleven years of age. This motherless little family needed a maternal guardian. Within the year, Mr. Franklin married Abiah Folger, of Nantucket. She was the youngest daughter of Peter Folger, a man illustrious for many virtues, and of whom ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... and pushed away his half-eaten supper. He knew himself what it was to be friendless and lonely, and his heart softened toward this worse than motherless child. ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... relatives were gone Daniel Mueller was still in the ship with his little son and daughters. Certainly he was not a very salable redemptioner with his three little motherless children about his knees. But at length, some fifteen days after the arrival of the ships, Frank Schuber met him on the old customhouse wharf with his little ones and was told by him that he, Mueller, was going to Attakapas. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... "charge to keep" was the spiritual welfare of the elect, and especially of his own motherless children. To guide them in the narrow way, unspotted from the world, to train them up in the faith once delivered to the saints and in the customs which that faith had developed among the Scotch Covenanters, was the great desire of his heart. For that desire he would gladly have ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... like three months. Then it came and settled and bade fair to remain and thrive upon the fat of his land. Anna's mother came to live with them. He now realized that he had been extremely shortsighted. He should have stipulated in his advertisement that none except motherless young women need apply. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... of an old woman, at the head of her companions in the court-yard, is immured in one of these subterranean jails. Sava was always about the Count, who, it was said, had brought him from some distant land, with his little motherless child. Sava placed her under the care of an old man and woman, who had the charge of the bees in a forest near the palace, where he came occasionally to visit her. But once, six long months passed, and he did not come! In vain Anielka wept, in vain she cried, "Where is my father?" No ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... is closed between us, I can see these motherless children under this same blue mirror—the glass that had helped to pale the blood on their mother's face after she left the warm Cornish sea that was her home, and came to settle and die in this bleak exile. Some of her books are in the little bookcase here. They were ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her as though not fully aware whether she intended to be pert. In truth, the Lady Alexandrina was rather in the dark on the subject. It was almost impossible, it was incredible, that a fatherless, motherless, doctor's niece should be pert to an earl's daughter at Greshamsbury, seeing that that earl's daughter was the cousin of the Miss Greshams. And yet the Lady Alexandrina hardly knew what other construction to put on the words she ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... things," was the reply. "In the first place, the boys have found a lot of motherless calves galloping around and bleating for their mas. Of course, we always look for a few of those, but lately the number's been beyond all reason. Then, too, there's been quite a bunch of ornery fellers that the boys has caught sight of hangin' round where they didn't seem to have ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... come to thee without escape; Mayest thou reach unto plump water-fowl. For thou art the orphan's father, the widow's husband, The desolate woman's brother, the garment of the motherless. Let me celebrate thy name in this land for every virtue, A guide without greediness of heart; A great one without ...
— Egyptian Literature
... family of Anjou. In the month of April, 1371, he was one day reflecting beneath the shade of some trees on various passages in his life, and upon the memory of his wife, whose early death had caused him sorrow, when his three daughters walked into the garden. The sight of these motherless girls naturally turned his thoughts to the condition of woman in society, and he resolved to write a treatise, enforced by examples of both good and evil, for their instruction. The state of society ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... winds, stood like grim guardians; only at the grave-head a stunted wild-rose, wilted and scraggy, was struggling for existence. Thoughts came of the desolate childhood of many a little one in this hard world; and there was joy in the assurance, that Angelo was neither motherless nor fatherless, and that Margaret and her husband were not childless in that New World, which so suddenly they ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... enough; for Molly's father was a busy man, careless of everything but his mills, Miss Bat was old and lazy, and felt as if she might take life easy after serving the motherless children for many years as well as she knew how. Molly was beginning to see how much amiss things were at home, and old enough to feel mortified, though, as yet, she had done nothing to mend the matter except be ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... world, he was esteemed an honest man; and his word would have possessed the literal novelty of being as good as his note, had necessity ever required him to borrow money. But Uncle Ith was frugal, and made his small salary suffice for himself and a family of seven motherless children. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... more and more into one groove. I now am left fatherless and motherless as you were.' Other ties lay behind in her thoughts, but she ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Leaf—who was not Mrs. Leaf's own child. But the good step-mother, who had once taken the little motherless girl to her bosom, and never since made the slightest difference between her and her own children, knew ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... fate which a union with him would bring. Only passion stoops to subterfuge like this. And you," she continued, rising and turning toward me in a sort of forlorn hope very touching to see, "can you see this young motherless girl, driven by caprice, and acknowledging no moral restraint, enter upon the dark and crooked path she is planning for herself, without uttering one word of warning and appeal? Tell me, mother of children dead and buried, what excuse you will have for your own part ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... have provoked opposition, and even Mrs. Peyton felt herself impelled to come forward with an outstretched hand scarcely less frank than her husband's. Then Clarence lifted his eyes. He saw before him the woman to whom his childish heart had gone out with the inscrutable longing and adoration of a motherless, homeless, companionless boy; the woman who had absorbed the love of his playmate without sharing it with him; who had showered her protecting and maternal caresses on Susy, a waif like himself, yet had not only left his heart ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... than what Sandra said as she descended the Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of four; and the Park ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... of two motherless children. The sketches of character and touching love passages are exceedingly ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... done it, I shall never forgive myself. Never! For I can never say that I didn't suspect myself of being unfit. It will break my heart. I have been so proud to think that I had never failed any one who trusted me. And now a poor motherless girl, who was to be my especial care, who had no one but me to care for her—Oh, Judith, what has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... hearing these words, and she felt them to be a prophecy. And God did bless her. In bestowing love and care upon the motherless little ones, she received from above double for all she gave. In blessing, she was twice blessed. About them her heart entwined daily new tendrils, until her own life beat with theirs in even pulses, and to seek their good was the highest ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... deep grief which preyed upon the hearts of the unfortunate brothers, for weeks after they had been compelled to acknowledge the stern truth that they were indeed motherless. Those who have, at that tender age, known what it is to lose an affectionate mother, and under circumstances at all similar to those just described, will be at no loss to comprehend the utter desolation of their bruised spirits: to those who have not sustained this most grievous of human ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... notions had flitted across his mind too rapidly to stir such passion as moved him now; even the hint of her sin and danger had been heard heedlessly, if heard at all. It was the word itself which bore its own message, its own spell to the heart of the fatherless and motherless foundling, as he faced for the first time the deep, everlasting, divine reality of kindred.... A sister! of his own flesh and blood—born of the same father, the same mother—his, his, for ever! How hollow and fleeting seemed all 'spiritual ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... eye in imagination upon such men as Valentine M'Clutchy, cry out aloud, "where are the lightnings of the Almighty, and why are his thunderbolts asleep?" There was there the poor gray-haired old man—the grandfather—accompanied, perhaps, by his promising young grandsons, left fatherless and motherless to his care, and brought now in order that the agent might see with his eyes how soon he will have their aid to cultivate their little farm, and consequently, to make it pay better, he hopes. Then the ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... father: I am a poor foolish girl, that would fain do well, but have done ill, most ill, most unwisely; and now must bear the shame. But, father, I love you, with all my faults, and will not you forgive my folly, and still love your motherless girl?" ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... fun. When you watch them scattering like ants before the shell whose direction you have ordered, you somehow forget to think of them as individuals, any more than the bear-hunter thinks of the cubs that will be left motherless. You watch your victims through your glasses as God might watch his mad universe. Your skill in directing fire makes you what in peace times would be called a murderer. Curious! You're glad, and yet at close quarters only in hot blood would you hurt ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... father, and increasing years seemed only to confirm the custom. It was an unnatural life for the child, seeing no bright little faces peering into his own (for Augharad was, as I said before, five or six years older, and her face, poor motherless girl! was often anything but bright), hearing no din of clear ringing voices, but day after day sharing the otherwise solitary hours of his father, whether in the dim room, surrounded by wizard-like antiquities, or pattering ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... touched a tender chord in my heart, when I came to the account of his being the prisoner's friend. My soul responded to that; for I had realized it. About six years ago, I was one of those who got good advice from 'the old man.' I carried it out, and met with great success. I was fatherless, motherless, and friendless, with no home, nobody to take me by the hand. I felt, as the ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... whispered but one word, "Father." And that, when the sound of her low voice fell upon his straining ears, he had reached out the arm that still held life, and had drawn her head down upon his breast, and wept like a motherless babe. But what he had said, if aught, about the abandoned mother who, on the banks of the distant river, years gone, had yielded her life to him and his child, no one knew. Of but one thing was there any certainty: the name of Padre Jose de Rincon had ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Man's world runs on, Motherless, wild; Our servitude and long duress, Our shameless, harem idleness, Both fail ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... for the motherless child welled up in Dino's heart and he longed to be her protector. He could understand now why Cornelli looked so strange; he had even noticed it as soon as he had seen her. There was no mother to fix everything the way it ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... left me, my darling?" she wailed after the funeral. "How shall I live now without you, wretched creature that I am. Pity me, good people, pity me, fatherless and motherless, all alone in ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... in its anguish? Was there no other neck to clasp; no other face to turn to? no one else to say a soothing word to such deep sorrow? Was Florence so alone in the bleak world that nothing else remained to her? Nothing. Stricken motherless and brotherless at once—for in the loss of little Paul, that first and greatest loss fell heavily upon her—this was the only help she had. Oh, who can tell how much ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... prove the final wrench to a heart that had been on the verge of breaking for many a year, and it was not long before Olive and Cyril were motherless. ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... years of age, and had come into the world at Rio, where her father represented the Spanish government. The family were descended from Cervantes. As she had early been left motherless, her father had sent her over in her fifteenth year to her aunt in Paris. This latter was married to an old monstrosity of a Spaniard, religious to the verge of insanity, who would seem to have committed some crime in his youth and now spent his whole ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... to the poor little prince. I think people generally are kind to motherless children, whether princes or peasants. He had a magnificent nursery and a regular suite of attendants, and was treated with the greatest respect and state. Nobody was allowed to talk to him in silly baby language, or dandle him, or, above all to kiss him, ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... grave of his deceased companion, he directed all his thoughts to the preservation of the little one she had left him; and when he quitted the spot his anxiety might be directed to the child, in the idea that he might one day see his Ba-rang-aroo revive in his little motherless Dil-boong. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... "A ten-year-old boy, motherless, steals from harsh labor and yet harsher surroundings, runs to the home of sacred memories, clambers to the attic, and spends the night in anguished solitude. This was his first Gethsemane. For ten years buffeted and beaten, battling ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... left her with this pleasing intimation, "that if he found either of the boys dead on his return, he would shoot her through the head." Partly through fear, and partly from the goodness and rectitude of her mind, Lady Lovat devoted her attentions so entirely to the care of the delicate and motherless boy, that she saved his life, and won his filial reverence and affection by her attention. He loved her as a real parent. The skill in nursing and in the practical part of medicine thus acquired, was never lost; and Lady Lovat was noted ever after, among those who knew her, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... children orphaned while they were yet very young. Gustavo was but nine and a half years old at the time of his mother's death. Fortunately an old and childless uncle, D. Juan Vargas, took charge of the motherless boys until they ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... good dame! A poor girl, motherless, and I may say fatherless, too, for God alone knows what I have suffered since my own mother's hands were folded on her breast. I am seeking service, and as I know nobody and am wandering from place to place I have lost my way. But the Lord guided ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... always that old folks know the best turn to take. I'm going to see what the little one's course will be. It seems very much as if my own two children were in the way of getting some lessons in gentleness and self-forgetfulness from the poor little motherless child, which I don't know so well as she does how ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 'twas shame to see such bloody work; and there were motherless and fatherless children, stray lambs, to be met with, weeping their little hearts out, and starving all around unless some good Christian took pity ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... softly, looking away, "was a Russian noblewoman. Sophia is Farrell's daughter by adoption only. Farrell was once my closest friend. When my wife died...." He covered his eyes with his hand and remained silent for a few seconds. "When Sophia was left motherless, an infant in arms, Farrell offered to adopt her. Because I became, about that time, aware of this horror that has poisoned my life—this thing of which you have seen something to-night—I accepted on condition that the truth be never revealed to her. It cost me the friendship of Farrell; ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Mayor, taking off his coat. Alice danced with pleasure when she heard this "we'll see," for with Papa "we'll see" meant almost always the same thing as "yes." Alice was an only child, and a petted one, and Papa rarely refused any request on which his motherless little ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... that makes 'Aurora Leigh' deathless, nothing affected me half so deeply as the portrait of the motherless child; and often when I could not sleep, I have whispered ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... matter who owes me, or where I am in debt. There are none to care for a girl who is fatherless and motherless, and whose nearest kin are the offcasts of all honest people. No, no; go, lady, and Heaven for ever bless you! I am better here, in this desert, where there are none to know ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have sinned, but God has sent your punishment; that is sufficient. Live to devote your life to bringing up the little motherless children left to you. Restore Sampayo to his own again; then try, by true repentance, to atone for the wrong ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... grief within bounds. What seems to me so lamentable is that two honourable ladies should in the very spring-time of life have been carried off at the moment of becoming mothers. I am grieved for the infants who are left motherless at their birth; I am grieved for their excellent husbands, and grieved also on my own account. For even now I retain the warmest affection for their dead father, as I have shown in my pleading and my books. Now but one of his three children ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... never have let them do to me what they did. Every night I had prayed to God, and if there were a God anywhere, He would surely have heard my mother's prayer—when she was dying—she asked God to protect her poor little motherless girl. It is a sad world, Lady." The girl's eyes were dry and her voice unbroken. There is a limit even to tears and her ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... of the music; and even civilians' children, who see the service devoid of sweet sounds, and under its blackest and most revolting aspect, still are strangely fascinated thereby. Julie had heard about one of these, a lonely motherless boy, whose chief joy was to harness Granny to his "hearse" and play at funeral processions round the drawing-room, where his dead mother had once ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... said Mr. Peggotty, 'as you was early left fatherless and motherless, with no friend fur to take, in a rough seafaring-way, their place. Maybe you can guess that if you'd had such a friend, you'd have got into a way of being fond of him in course of time, and that my niece was ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Why not, Anselmo? A king is no less lonely than a collier When his wife dies, And his young daughter there, For all her being a princess, is no less A motherless child, and cries herself to sleep Night after night, as noisily as any, You ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... exactly what she would do. There was the child, motherless, and worse than fatherless. She would take him and bring him up unspotted from the world. It was clearly a leading for her. She had not been permitted to save the girl, but she might take and protect the boy. She ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... all his insolence, flying in terror in his chariot; and Alcmaeon, who made his mother pay with her life for the ornament she received to betray his father; and Sennacherib, left dead by his son in the temple; and the head of Cyrus, thrown by the motherless woman into the goblet of blood, that it might swill what it had thirsted for; and Holofernes, beheaded; and his Assyrians flying at his death; and Troy, all become cinders and hollow places. Oh! what a fall from pride was there! Now, maintain the loftiness of your looks, ye sons of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... trade of all kinds, that, if there is not some stop put to his exorbitant riches, he will monopolise everything; nobody will be able to sell a yard of drapery or mercery ware but himself. I then hold it advisable that you continue the lawsuit and burst him at once. My concern for the three poor motherless children obliges me to give you this advice; for their estates, poor girls, depend upon the success ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... somehow. Though motherless and fatherless they were not quite friendless, and in the struggle for existence they held their own and ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... of winter were sweeping those northern latitudes. The health of Hortense was extremely frail. She was fatherless and motherless, alienated from her husband, bereaved of one of her children, and all her family friends dispersed by the ban of exile. She had no kind friends to consult, and she knew not which way to turn. Thus distracted and crushed, she wrote an imploring letter to her cousins, ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... each of the above letters was Martha Custis Williams, a great-niece of my grandfather, Mr. Custis, who had for many years lived at Arlington with her uncle. The "little children" were her motherless nieces, whom she had brought that summer to the mountains for their health. General Lee had been engaged for some time in bringing out a third edition of his father's "Memoirs of the War of '76 in the Southern States." It was now in the ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... which Emily Bronte clung with the passionate love of the Swiss for his white mountains, with a homesickness in absence that strained the very cords of life. Yet her childhood in that motherless home had few of the elements of childish happiness, and its busy strictness of daily life was saddened by the loss of Maria and Elizabeth, dear, never-forgotten playfellows. Charlotte, now the eldest of the family, was only ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... young, sir; and oh! so sorrowfully! She was only nineteen, two years younger than I am now; and her son was motherless the hour he ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... a hard working man, and although the children were motherless, Alice, the oldest, kept the home neat and cheerful for her brothers and sisters. All the children were old enough to go to school save Tommy; and he had been to kindergarten occasionally this last term and would go to school regularly in ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... you sing, Vesty, you put your hands on Uncle Benny's poor, confused head and soothed and guided him. Who was there to help or guide you, motherless child, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... a lovely youth, called Adonis, whose exquisite beauty has become proverbial. He was a motherless babe, and Aphrodite, taking pity on him, placed him in a chest and intrusted him to the care of Persephone, who became so fond of the beautiful youth that she refused to part with him. Zeus, being appealed to by the rival foster-mothers, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... the lake. The "Mulberry Moon," Nanca called it, and loved its light. It shines in at her window now, but she can not see it. Ann, because the moon is so bright to-night—because the name of the moon goddess bears within it your name—let the name of my poor, motherless little girl be Diane. Nanca called her "Little Red-winged Blackbird!" I believe at the end she was thinking of the little girl we left in the Indian village. They are very much ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... to him in a flash of revelation that, did she have a mother, it was to her she would have gone at this moment, and not to him, and his eyes were a little misty as he looked down at her. That she and her sister should have grown, motherless, to such sweet, triumphant womanhood struck him in this instant as a kind of miracle—he had never thought of it before. He had taken their beauty, their wit, their sanity, as matters of course; he had never looked at them, clearly, from the outside; ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... woman of the "Leaf Dwellers" band. By reason of her great beauty, she was called "Demi-Goddess of the Sioux." Save for her luxuriant, black hair, and her deep black eyes, she had every characteristic of Caucasian descent. The motherless lad was reared by his grandmother and an uncle in the wilds of Manitoba, where he learned thoroughly, the best of the ancient folk lore, religion and woodcraft of his people. Thirty years of civilization have not ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... restlessly. He looked as if life was regaining its poise with him, and his voice seemed quite cheerful as he said, "Well, it's about my little girl! I'm bound for a mountain-camp, and it's no place for a motherless child. Lola's a kind of queer little soul, too! My wife made a great deal of her. She was from old Mexico, ma'am. She was a mestizo—not pure Indian, you know, but part Spanish. Her folks were rancheros, near Pachuca, where I worked in the mines. I'm from Texas, myself. They weren't ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... parts, in its very marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans. Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned; but who but he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans? And he couldn't groan, because they were, besides being motherless creatures, his own wife's flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he groan; but he could and did do it in bed. Why on earth that silly mother of theirs couldn't have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... rear seat with Tom; and she was shy in this close touch with the mysterious world from afar off; and her timidity made him timid, this youth whose earliest recollection was the booming of cannon, as he played upon a cavalryman's blanket, waiting for his father to return from the charge. Motherless, the pet of the battalion, his playthings the accoutrements of war, his "stick horse," a sabre, his confidential companion a brass field piece. Old soldiers, devoted to their colonel, carried him about on their shoulders, and handsome ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... and he did not suppose that such an occurrence was ever likely to happen to him. He forgot the old adage, that "the pitcher which goes often to the well is liable to be broken at last." He had lost his wife during his previous voyage, and had no one on whom he could rely to take care of his motherless children while he was absent from home. Walter had expressed a strong wish to go to sea, so he naturally took him; and with regard to Alice, of two evils he chose that which he considered the least. He had ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... was going to die. One day when her mind was clear, despite her deathly weakness, she made them leave the little boy alone with her while she told him of her consuming anxiety over his temper. And she talked to him too about a motherless young manhood and how he must try to keep clean and straight. She made him promise that if any of the facts of life puzzled him, he would go to his father and not let naughty minded little boys tell him bad stories. ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie |
