"Pittance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belief. More than once Trina had decided that she could no longer put up with Augustine but each time she had retained her as she reflected upon her admirably cooked cabbage soups and tapioca puddings, and—which in Trina's eyes was her chiefest recommendation—the pittance for which she was ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... and crown'd of fate As kings are crowned, as bards in their estate Are rapture-fraught, re-risen above the dust. Then were I torture-proof, and on the crust Of one kind word, though as a pittance thrown, I'd live for weeks! My tears I would disown And pray, contented with my discontent, As hermits pray ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... curious language which might have been mistaken for French. To B. and me he spoke an equally curious language, but a perfectly recognizable one, i.e., Cockney Whitechapel English. He showed us a perfectly authentic mission-card which certified that his family had received a pittance from some charitable organisation situated in the Whitechapel neighbourhood, and that, moreover, they were in the habit of receiving this pittance; and that, finally, their claim to such pittance was ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... to eight. Then I emptied my trousers pockets of whatever money they held, and when all was heaped up before me, I could count but twelve dollars, which, together with my studs and a seal ring which I wore, seemed a paltry pittance with which to barter for the liberty of which I had been robbed. But it was all I had with me, and I was willing to part with it at once if only some one would unlock the door and let me go. But how to make known my wishes ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... are principally felt by the higher and middling classes; but this most odious, this most galling tax, is felt even in the cottage of the labourer, who cannot return to refresh himself after his day of toil with his favourite beverage without paying twice its value out of his hard-earned pittance, to swell the dividend of the Company, and support these pruriencies of ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the key in her own door, And, at the watchman's lantern borrowing light, Finds a cold bed her only comfort left. Wives beggar husbands, husbands starve their wives, On Fortune's velvet altar offering up Their last poor pittance—Fortune, most severe Of goddesses yet known, and costlier far Than all that held their routs in Juno's heaven.— So fare we in this prison-house the world. And 'tis a fearful spectacle to see So many maniacs ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... No paltry pittance For Themis' harvesters, too often sheafless! Is this the Constitution, once Great Britain's; This, your provision for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... Frankland allows her a pittance, but it cannot be more, for his own affairs are considerably involved. Whatever she may have deserved one could not allow her to go hopelessly to the bad. Her story got about, and several of the people here did something to enable her to earn ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... yourselves and your posterity for hire—for a paltry price, to be refunded with interest by some minister, who will indemnify himself out of your own pockets; for, after all, you are bought and sold with your own money—the miserable pittance you may now receive is no more than a pitcher full of water thrown in to moisten the sucker of that pump which will drain you to the bottom. Let me therefore advise and exhort you, my countrymen, to avoid the opposite extremes of the ignorant clown and the designing courtier, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... the paper and read it carefully. The bulk of the $1,000,000 Cavendish estate was willed to charitable organisations, and a small allowance, a mere pittance, was provided for John Cavendish. After a few inquiries the attorney said sharply: "You want ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... "Yes. The trifling pittance upon which I lived, and barely lived, and yet from which I could still extract enough to do a little good—to feed, perhaps, one starving throat—is wrested, torn from me, and from those who shared in what it might obtain. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... royal conscience had been the principal occupation of the two others, one of whom had even been proposed as confessor to Madame la Dauphine. One was long ill of a malady he died of. He was not properly nourished, and I sent him his dinner every day, for more than five months, because I had seen his pittance. I sent him even remedies, for he could not refrain from admitting to me that he suffered from the treatment he ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... thy thoughts high cheer, Say grace for others dining, And keep thy pittance clear From poison ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... performance of all its services, it became my duty to urge attention to the subject, and this was apparently complied with, the 27th of November being appointed for the payment of the men. On that day three months' pay only was offered to them, notwithstanding all they had achieved. This paltry pittance was refused. ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... the people, as was said, being few and poor, he was at this time exposed to great hardships. I have been assured that he and his family have lived for a great while together without tasting animal food, and with but a scanty pittance of ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... mother, if he had the power. But Madam Esmond would not hear any of these reasons. Feelings were her reasons. Here was a chance of making Harry's fortune—dear Harry, who was left with such a slender younger brother's; pittance—and the wretches in London would not help him; his own brother, who inherited all her papa's estate, would not help him. To think of a child of hers being so mean at fourteen year of age! etc. etc. Add tears, scorn, frequent ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Anthony Hackbut, of Boyne's Bank, had been giving himself up latterly to this fatal comparison. The hour when gold was entrusted to his charge found him feverish and irritable. He asked himself whether he was a mere machine to transfer money from spot to spot, and he spurned at the pittance bestowed upon honesty in this life. Where could Boyne's Bank discover again such an honest man as he? And because he was honest he was poor! The consideration that we alone are capable of doing the unparalleled thing may sometimes inspire us with fortitude; but this will depend largely upon the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... make his task a difficult one, he will find to his cost that the soldiers of Spain on whom he must rely are ill, poorly fed, and angry with the Government because it does not even pay them the pittance due in return for their ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 51, October 28, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... grown stiff and I am obliged to stay at home." Then the boy went to a High School and learned diligently so that his masters praised him, and he remained there a long time. When he had worked through two classes, but was still not yet perfect in everything, the little pittance which the father had earned was all spent, and the boy was obliged to return home to him. "Ah," said the father, sorrowfully, "I can give you no more, and in these hard times I cannot earn a farthing more than will suffice for our daily bread." "Dear father," answered the son, "don't trouble ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... gone, except a small pittance in the form of an annuity. I will not state the ridiculously trifling amount. I have seen more than our whole annual income lost by a single turn of a card at the establishment of the late Mr. P. Hearn, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... seldom failed to make his appearance every forenoon: the poor fellow came for sympathy and conversation. It is difficult to imagine a situation more forlorn and isolated than that of this man,—a Greek at Seville, with scarcely a single acquaintance, and depending for subsistence on the miserable pittance to be derived from selling a few books, for the most part hawked about from door to door. "What could have first induced you to commence bookselling in Seville?" said I to him, as he arrived one sultry day, heated and fatigued, with a small ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Given health and strength, he might perhaps continue to hold his own in this merciless conflict; perhaps, only; but what if some accident, such as befalls this man or that in every moment of time, threw him among the weaklings? He saw his mother, in her age and ill-health, reduced to the pittance of the poorest; his sister going forth to earn her living; himself, a helpless burden upon both.—Nay, was there not rat-poison to ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... 'It is well known, that the religious, who broke their vows of chastity, were subjected to the same penalty as the Roman vestals in a similar case. A small niche, sufficient to enclose their bodies, was made in the massive wall of the convent; a slender pittance of food and water was deposited in it, and the awful words, VADE IN PACE, were the signal for immuring the criminal. It is not likely that, in latter times, this punishment was often resorted to; but among the ruins of the ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Dutch mastiff, a mackaw, Two parrots, with a Persian cat and kittens, He chose from several animals he saw— A terrier, too, which once had been a Briton's, Who dying on the coast of Ithaca, The peasants gave the poor dumb thing a pittance; These to secure in this strong blowing weather, He caged ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... some of us destroy other of us." The Wolf accepted the governance of their affairs and allotted to each of them what sufficed him that day; but on the morrow he said in his mind, "An I divide this camel amongst these weaklings, no part thereof will come to me, save the pittance they will assign to me, and if I eat it alone, they can do me no harm, seeing that they are a prey to me and to the people of my house. Who, then, is the one to hinder me from taking it all for myself? Surely, 'tis Allah who hath bestowed it on me by way of provision ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... after another was proposed and rejected; we knew, if the home were sold, after the demands were met, there would be but a mere pittance left for four females to live ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the children dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they had come out without a crust to ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... be great scholars, it must, I think, be either by means supernatural, or by a method altogether out of any road yet known to the learned. But I conceive the fact directly otherwise, and that many of them lose the greatest part of the small pittance ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... was workin' as head salesman for the Gaflooey Auto Company at a pittance of ten thousand a year, he come up to the flat for dinner one night. I seen right away that somethin' was wrong, because he only eat about half of the roast duck and brung along his own cigars. After nature could stand no more, and we had dragged ourselves away from ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... with dormer windows in the roof, and some frame cottages with struggling grass-plots. No one dreamed of the tall tenements that were to take their places, the sewing-machines that were to hum while the workers earned their scanty pittance, and swarms of children ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... indulgence be dealt out to them? May not the want in most instances be inferred from the demand when the service can be proved, and may not the last days of human infirmity be spared the mortification of purchasing a pittance of relief only by the exposure of its own necessities? I submit to Congress the expediency of providing for individual cases of this description by special enactment, or of revising the act of May 1st, 1820, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... on the streets, a kind of inspiring music in the whir and clatter, that spoke of food and warmth and raiment. Good feeling and sympathy had been touched; and though some of the workmen, who were harassed by back debts, looked rather ruefully at their small weekly pittance, still it was so much better than no ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Monte Carlo, just as famous, indeed, as old Mr. Drewett, the Englishman who lost his big fortune at the tables, and who was pensioned off by the Administration on condition that he never gamble at the Casino again. For fifteen years he lived in Nice upon the meagre pittance until suddenly another fortune was left him, whereupon he promptly paid up the whole of his pension and started at the tables again. In a month, however, he had lost his second fortune. Such is gambling in the little country ruled over ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... Young brothers and sisters, probably, all crying aloud for the pittance she was able to earn by giving lessons at so ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... as a penalty upon the people of the county, he could not be quartered upon them as long as he lived. For they were the more culpable criminals. Belonging to one of the richest divisions of the State, with vast interests at stake, they had not been ashamed to pay a judge this contemptible pittance, and they deserved to have their law badly administered. This feeling was undoubtedly wide-spread in the Senate; but, on the other hand, there was the duty we were sworn to perform, and the result was that the judge ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... and prove a healing cordial to the sufferings of perishing humanity. A slight taxation upon even acknowledged superfluity, would in some cases produce an ample revenue for many indigent families, although religion claims on their behalf more than a scanty and unwilling pittance; for "he which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully, shall reap also bountifully. Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly or of necessity, for ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... perturbed life fell to the lot of Kepler. The most crushing poverty all his life oppressed him. For, though his nominal salary as Astronomer Royal was large enough, yet the treasury was so exhausted that it was impossible for him ever to obtain more than a pittance. What a sad tragedy do these words, in a letter to Mstlin, reveal:—"I stand whole days in the antechamber, and am nought for study." And then he adds the sublime compensation: "I keep up my spirits, however, with the thought that I serve, not the Emperor alone, but the whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... life was a cheat upon the world, and that, so far as he was concerned with the public, his little cunning had the upper hand of its united wisdom. Every day would furnish him with a succession of minute and pungent triumphs—as when, for instance, his importunity wrung a pittance out of the heart of a miser, or when my silly good-nature transferred a part of my slender purse to his plump leather bag, or when some ostentatious gentleman should throw a coin to the ragged beggar who was richer ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... apprehension That the dawn would not approach her; And the morning was attended With but little hope or succour. Charity, in cold attendance, Came with many words and wishes; And, in fair and full pretending, Stood, and pitied, and regretted; But it gave a meagre pittance Or of comfort or appeasing, To withdraw the pangs of hunger, Or relieve her sunken spirit. But good Sero saw in pity. He beheld her calm endurance Of the anguish bearing on her; And he sent and took her spirit— ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... rude and plaintive strain some ballad, the purport of which I could not understand. On making inquiry, I discovered it was part of a body of miners, who, about eighteen weeks before, in consequence of not being able to support their families with the small pittance allowed them, had "struck" for higher wages. This their employers refused to give them, and sent to Wales, where they obtained workmen at the former price. The houses these laborers had occupied were all taken from them, and for eighteen weeks ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... brothers or nephews, if they were not in community with the defunct at the moment of his death, which community is only valid through his consent. In the Jura and the Nivernais, he may pursue fugitive serfs, and demand, at their death, not only the property left by them on his domain, but, again, the pittance acquired by them elsewhere. At Saint-Claude he acquires this right over any person that passes a year and a day in a house belonging to the seigniory. As to ownership of the soil we see still more clearly that he once ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the little charcoal brazier and warmed her transparent, needle-pricked fingers, thinking meanwhile of the strange events of the day. She had been up town to carry the great, black bundle of pants and vests to the factory and receive her small pittance, and on the way home stopped in at the Jesuit Church to say her little prayer at the altar of the calm, white Virgin. There had been a wondrous burst of music from the great organ as she knelt there, an over-powering perfume of many ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... done women by the law. She felt acutely the wrong done her and her sisters by being denied an education equal to their brothers, and denied also an equal share of their inheritance. While the father possessed a large estate, and provided liberally for his sons, he left his daughters a mere pittance. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... escaped, were they paid by his administratrix and deputy, Munny Begum? Not a shilling. No fewer than forty-nine petitions, mostly from the widows of the greatest and most splendid houses of Bengal, came before the Council, praying in the most deplorable manner for some sort of relief out of the pittance assigned them. His colleagues, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, men who, when England is reproached for the government of India, will, I repeat it, as a shield be held up between this nation and infamy, did, in conformity to the strict orders of the Directors, appoint ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... solemn compact that they would thenceforward devote themselves body and soul to the attainment of an academical degree. Yet they were both poor. One was but a shoemaker's apprentice, while the other was a pupil teacher earning but a miserable weekly pittance. One could do the parts of speech; the other could not. One had struggled with the pans asinorum; the other had never seen it. I may mention that the young pupil teacher is now a curate in the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... sighed the girl, "how I pity him! Life has been very hard to him. Why are some men born to be gentlemen, with untold wealth at their command, while others are born to toil all their weary lives through for the meager pittance that suffices to keep body ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... in securing sufficient funds for the building of a new church, but such was not the experience of Rev. Mary Baker Eddy. Money came freely from all parts of the United States. Men, women, and children contributed, some giving a pittance, others donating large sums. When the necessary amount was raised the custodian of the funds was compelled to refuse further contributions in order to stop the continued inflow of money from ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... earning money, and so must take whatever work you can get? Alas! I know you do, many of you, dear girls. But do not think this so very unfortunate. Unless your very life is being worn out; unless your wages are ground down to a pittance, and your work is wholly disagreeable, be thankful. You are as well off as the girls who are languishing with dissipation and ennui. The average girl has the average amount of hardship and blessing in her life. ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... The old order. "They talk about 'back to the land,'" snorted Sir James suddenly, "as the sovereign cure for all evils. You can take it from me, Vane, that except in a few isolated localities the system of small holdings is utterly uneconomical and unsuccessful. It means ceaseless work, and a mere pittance in return. You know Northern France—well, you've got the small holdings scheme in full blast there. What time do they get up in the morning; what time do they go to bed at night? What do they live on? And from what ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... revelation from above in favour of one of the faithful? Perhaps an angel from heaven appeared to this mirror of modern virtue, and informed her, that if she eat more than one piece of bread a day, her small pittance would not last her till the time she was to make her escape. Her mother, we know, is a very enthusiastical woman—a consulter of conjurors, a dreamer of dreams; perhaps the daughter dreamed also what was to happen, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... to know that some of the investments poor father made would turn out badly, and that our income would be reduced to a mere pittance? For I tell you, Miss Belding," added the invalid less vehemently, "that we have almost nothing, divided by three, to live on. That is, an income for one must support us three. Aunt Jinny is one of ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... that some who possess a mere pittance not only find this sufficient, but actually succeed in getting a surplus out of it; while others do not find ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... financial world. Business men were anxious, and retrenchment was the order of the day. Among others to draw in sail was the well-established firm whom Mr. Vincent had served for many years. The salaries of their employe's were cut down, in some instances to a mere pittance. Upon none did the blow fall more heavily than these two inexperienced ones who had made no provision for any such change in their affairs. They were dismayed; Mr. Vincent tried in vain to secure some more lucrative position, but he soon began to feel that he was most fortunate ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... contributed a dish of fat pickles, luscious to the eye and cooling to the palate. Mrs. Murdison brought a jar of marmalade of her own making—a rare delicacy; though the oranges were purchased of an Italian vender who had sold out an over-ripe stock at a pittance. Mrs. Lukens supplied a plate of fat doughnuts, and Mrs. Burke sent over a big platter of molasses candy. Thus the people of the neighbourhood had come to feel the affair one to which not only had they been bidden, but in which they were ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... will it be believed that the only establishment in Ireland for the propagation and diffusion of scientific and antiquarian knowledge—the Royal Irish Academy—receives annually the munificent sum of L300 from the Government! And yet, notwithstanding this pittance, the members of that society have made a step in the right direction by the purchase of the late Dean of St. Patrick's Irish Archaeological Collection, of which a fine series of drawings is now being made at the expense of the Academy, and of which they would, doubtless, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... 'I meant no offence, and I will take none, at your hands at least. I will confess I care not, in love and soforth, a single bean for the girl; she was the mere channel through which her father's wealth, if such a pittance deserves the name, was to have flowed into my possession—'twas in respect of your family finances the most economical provision for myself which I could devise—a matter in which you, not I, are interested. As for women, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... course I shall get over it. You don't suppose I'm going to sit down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid living on a pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Association. But my heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by that is that I know that what has happened to me with Marcus will not happen to me ever again. In the world for me there is Marcus and a lot ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... employed, but along with them were other passages of true expression. The dedication of some of these books to the pope secured for him certain small preferments, which, in his most profitable condition, aggregated about thirty scudi a month (perhaps equal to $20 of our money). On this miserable pittance he supported his wife and four children. In 1556 he was discharged from his place as a pontifical singer, on account of his marriage, a fact which had been ignored by the pope who appointed him. He then held the post of chapel master at the Lateran. In 1561 he was transferred to Santa Maria Maggiore, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... tempest-worn and desolate, A pilot journeying through the wild Stopped to solicit at the gate A pittance for his child. ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... we know as Balkanic, with perpetual Balkanic eruptions, so to speak. Their conception of life did not admit of the absence of at least one good summer campaign. Mr. Stobart neatly puts it to this effect: no man is content to live ambitionless on a bare pittance and the necessaries; he must see some prospect, some margin, as well; and for these folk, now that they had freed themselves from the Etruscans, the necessaries were from their petty agriculture, the margin was to be looked ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... giving up the enterprise and making all sail at once for home, since France now had no port of refuge on the western continent nearer than Quebec. Rations were reduced to three ounces of biscuit and three of salt meat a day; and after a time half of this pittance was cut off. There was diligent hunting for rats in the hold; and when this game failed, the crew, crazed with famine, demanded of their captain that five English prisoners who were on board should be butchered to appease the frenzy of their hunger. ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... on one side, by the stigma of our late slavery, and, on the other, by the influx into our kitchens of the uncleanly and ignorant—is shunned by the self-respecting and well educated, many of whom prefer either a miserable pittance or the career of vice to this fancied degradation. Thus comes the overcrowding in all avenues for woman's work, and the consequent lowering of wages to starvation prices ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ministered unto, but to minister; to pour out of His life into the lives of others; to see what He could do to make others blest; and "to give his life a ransom for many." Not merely to give the little pittance that He could spare and not know it any more than one would miss the farthing with which he would buy his ride on the street car, but to give His life a ransom for many. And if any man have not that spirit, he is ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint. Her money shall all go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband's, and Janet shall be saved the trouble of pretending to cry, by finding that she is left with a miserable pittance. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... always get their work done for as little as possible, and if the Chinamen had been allowed to swarm into this country, and work for the pittance they ask, the result would have been that our own workmen would have been obliged to take the same ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 27, May 13, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... not turned me off with such a pittance it wouldn't have happened," he said, sullenly. "Out of your abundance you only gave me ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... entailed my going. After an interval I obtained a temporary engagement; the occasion which required my services passed, and I with it. After another, and a longer interval, I again found temporary employment, the pay for which was but a pittance. When that was over I could find nothing. That was nine months ago, and since then I had not earned a penny. It is so easy to grow shabby, when you are on the everlasting tramp, and are living on your stock of clothes. I had trudged all over London in search of work,—work of any kind ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... tithe is required, these insurrections are unknown. The double Church which Ireland supports, and that painful visible contribution towards it which the poor Irishman is compelled to make from his miserable pittance, is one great cause of those never-ending insurrections, burnings, murders, and robberies, which have laid waste that ill-fated country for so many years. The unfortunate consequence of the civil disabilities, and the Church payments under which the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... question. To take half of her little pittance! I wonder you can even suggest the thing. It—it is almost an insult," says he, reddening ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... place,' said she, 'which a good Christian ought never to have entered; I leave a house of which the master is a sorcerer, the mistress a demon who dares not cross her brow with holy water, and their trencher companion one who for a wretched pittance is willing to act as match-maker between a wizard and an incarnate fiend!' She then departed, with rage in her countenance, and spite in her heart. The Baron of Arnheim then stepped forward, and demanded of the knights and gentlemen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... largesses. Monthly distributions of corn were converted into daily allowance for bread. They were amused with games and festivals. From the stately baths they might be seen to issue without shoes and without a mantle. They loitered in the public streets, and dissipated in gaming their miserable pittance. They spent the hours of the night in the lowest resorts of crime and misery. As many as four hundred thousand sometimes assembled to witness the chariot races. The vast theatres were crowded to see male and female dancers. The amphitheatres were still more largely attended ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Christian—one who took delight in the duties of his holy office, and who served God because he loved him. I am fully aware how laborious is the life of a country priest, and how contracted and mean is the pittance he in common receives, and how much more he merits than he gets, if his reward were to be graduated by things here. But this picture, like every other, has its different sides, and occasionally men do certainly enter the church from motives ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... in and adorned with a tiny fernery, over which is an inscription, setting forth that "This is the well in which the head was washed; you must not wash your hands or your feet here." A little further on is a stall, at which a poor old man earns a pittance by selling books, pictures, and medals, commemorating the loyalty of the Forty-seven; and higher up yet, shaded by a grove of stately trees, is a neat inclosure, kept up, as a signboard announces, by voluntary ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... thing could be made in America, and he was content. It was usually in some one of these disused buildings that he set up his hermitage in these absences from home. He would sally out once a day and buy bread, just a pittance, hardly enough to keep him alive, and then bury himself again in darkness and solitude. If the absence did not last more than three or four days, his wife and sons gave themselves no concern about him. He usually returned a saner and healthier man than he went away. When the absences ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... a month the poor desolate girl contrived to provide for her grandmother's necessities, by disposing of the different articles of the trousseau. This store was now nearly exhausted, and she had found a milliner who gave her a miserable pittance for toiling with her needle eight or ten hours each day. Adrienne had not lost a moment, but had begun this system of ill-requited industry long before her money was exhausted. She foresaw that her grandmother must die, and the great object of her present existence ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... this "ridiculing the State," as the Times, in its leader, expressed it, for the penurious pittance it doles out of the revenues of the richest country in the world towards the maintenance of a National Portrait Gallery, was that I was the cause of arousing the Press of Great Britain to the miserable condition of the National Portrait ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... cottager, who weaves at her own door, Pillow and bobbins all her little store; Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay, Shuffling her threads about the live-long day, Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night, Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light; She, for her humble sphere by nature fit, Has little understanding, and no wit, Receives no praise; but, though her lot be such, (Toilsome and indigent) she renders much; Just knows, and ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... desire to travel in foreign parts. He left his paternal home in Padua, and journeying from town to town, from land to land, he at last reached Brzesc in Lithuania. There he married the daughter of David Drucker, and his pittance being small, he led but a ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... had subsisted, on terms varying little or nothing from the original ones, from that day to this; and, at this very time, twelve old men were not wanting, of various countries, of various fortunes, but all ending finally in ruin, who had centred here, to live on the poor pittance that had been assigned to them, three hundred years ago. What a series of chronicles it would have been if each of the beneficiaries of this charity, since its foundation, had left a record of the events which finally led him hither. Middleton often, as he talked ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a very serious matter to Miss Joliffe from the material point of view; he was her sheet-anchor, the last anchor that kept Bellevue Lodge from drifting into bankruptcy. Mr Sharnall was dead, and with him had died the tiny pittance which he contributed to the upkeep of the place, and lodgers were few and far between in Cullerne. Miss Joliffe might well have remembered these things, but she did not. The only thought that crossed her mind was that if Mr Westray went away she would lose yet ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... "Where would any of us be were it not for trade? We sell our tobacco and our wheat, and get money in return. And your father makes a deal here and a deal there, and so gets rich in spite of his pittance." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, you will find the statement proved that peonage existed in the state of Texas. Out of these conditions springs such a thing as the I. W. W.—when men receive a pittance for their pay, when they work like galley slaves for a wage that barely suffices to keep their protesting souls within their tattered bodies. When they can endure the condition no longer, and they make some sort of a demonstration, or perhaps commit acts of violence, how quickly are ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... enjoying the present as Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be. Once, no doubt, Nature’s sweetest gift to all living things—the power of enjoying the present—was man’s inheritance too. Some of the human family have not lost it even yet; but poets are rarely of these. Give Wordsworth any pittance, enough to satisfy the simplest physical wants—enough to procure him plain living and leisure for “high thinking”—and he would be happier than Tennyson would have been, cracking the finest “walnuts” and sipping ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... knew what a miserable creature she was, you would have pitied her, just as I did. She belonged to our village. Her mother was an old, old woman, and they used to sell string and thread, and soap and tobacco, out of the window of their little house, and lived on the pittance they gained by this trade. The old woman was ill and very old, and could hardly move. Marie was her daughter, a girl of twenty, weak and thin and consumptive; but still she did heavy work at the houses around, day by day. Well, one fine day a commercial ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... rare profit of it, for without these poor fellows how could they hold their possessions in spite of native and foreign enemies? For what a paltry and cheap annuity do these men sell their lives? For what a miserable pittance do they dare all the horrors of a most deadly climate, without a chance, a hope of return to their native land, where they might haply repair their exhausted energies, and take a new lease of life! Good God! if these men may be thus heartlessly sacrificed ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... six months after that. Jim has some rather well-to-do people over there. They were all very nice to me. I imagine they thought he was marrying money. Perhaps he thought so himself. He had nothing except a quarterly pittance. He has no sense of values, and I was not much better. There is always this estate which he will come into, to discount the present. He had seen service the first year of the war. He was wounded and invalided home. Then he served as ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... neither's height was raised by th'ill Of others; since no stud, no stone, no piece Was rear'd up by the poor-man's fleece; No widow's tenement was rack'd to gild Or fret thy cieling, or to build A sweating-closet, to anoint the silk- Soft skin, or bath[e] in asses' milk; No orphan's pittance, left him, served to set The pillars up of lasting jet, For which their cries might beat against thine ears, Or in the damp jet read their tears. No plank from hallow'd altar does appeal To yond' Star-chamber, or does seal A curse to thee, or thine; but all things even Make ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... a moment. The dolphin, after having received his pittance, presented his back to the boy, after having tacked in all his spines and prickles as well as he could, and carried him right across the lake, thus saving the little fellow a long roundabout walk; and not only that, but after school hours it was waiting to carry him back again. ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... Englishmen in Berlin employed by the German Government, notably Aubrey Stanhope, who for well-known reasons was unable to enter England at the outbreak of war, and so remains and must remain in Germany, where, for a very humble pittance, he conducts this campaign against ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... in the pound amounts to 5000 pounds a year. This brings the allowance down to 45,000 pounds. Then comes the sixpenny duty to the Civil List lottery, which has also to be deducted from the poor prince's dwindling pittance, and likewise the fees payable at the Exchequer; and the sixpenny duty amounts to 1250 pounds, and the fees to about 750 pounds, so that altogether 7000 pounds would have to be taken off, leaving the prince only 43,000 pounds allowance. Then, to be sure, there was the duchy of Cornwall, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... for here he hears no other language than that which came from the shores of the Mediterranean. Here are Italians of all ages, sexes and conditions of servitude, from the padrone to the bootblack who works for a pittance until he obtains enough to start himself in business. If one investigate closely it will be found that many of the people of this part of San Francisco have been here for years and still understand no other language than that ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... help from any who are associated with me, whose interests, one would think, would impell them to at least inquire if they could render me some assistance. For nearly two years past I have devoted all my time and scanty means, living on a mere pittance, denying myself all pleasures and even necessary food, that I might have a sum, to put my telegraph into such a position before Congress as to insure success to the common enterprise. I am crushed ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... had been an emigrant from another part of the country, and had died long since: they had no one relation to take them by the hand; they were outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings, to whom the most scanty pittance was a matter of favour, and who were treated merely as children of peasants, yet poorer than the poorest, who, dying, had left them, a thankless bequest, to the close-handed ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... [59] From these stately palaces issued a swarm of dirty and ragged plebeians, without shoes and without a mantle; who loitered away whole days in the street of Forum, to hear news and to hold disputes; who dissipated in extravagant gaming, the miserable pittance of their wives and children; and spent the hours of the night in the obscure taverns, and brothels, in the indulgence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Victor alone. She has spoiled him into the worthless creature he is. She worships him and the ground he walks on. Robert is very well in a way, to give up all the money he can earn to the family, and keep the barest pittance for himself. Favorite son, indeed! I miss the poor fellow myself, my dear. I liked to see him and to hear him about the place the only Lebrun who is worth a pinch of salt. He comes to see me often in the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... we have lived differently, we certainly feel it more acutely than when we at once change the scene, and see around us nothing we can well compare with what is past. It is unnecessary to say by what means our easy fortune was reduced to a mere pittance; but, alas! it was so, and we found ourselves forced to seek another dwelling-place. Following the example of most of our country-people in a similar situation, therefore, we resolved to go abroad; not, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... destinies and acquire the supreme direction of affairs, either as the High Priest or the Grand Lama of Europe, was not beyond the compass of his thoughts or the scope of his ambition. Now, he was petitioning the Queen for a small increase to his worldly pittance, and an opportunity of clearing himself before her Majesty's council from the foul and slanderous accusations by which he was continually assailed. Yet he had not abandoned his former projects. Though failing in his mission aforetime to the Emperor of Germany, the King of Poland, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... was not born to the fortune that passed to me by the death of a distant relation, who had, in my earlier youth, children of his own. I was an only son, left an orphan at the age of sixteen with a very slender pittance. My guardians designed me for the medical profession. I began my studies at Edinburgh, and was sent to Paris to complete them, It so chanced that there I lodged in the same house with an artist named Auguste Duval, who, failing ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to rights, and bade her father's old friends to the funeral, and buried him with all the money that was in the house, neither asking nor accepting aid from any; and with the poor pittance that her severe conscience could afford her sorrow she procured some cheap material of the doleful sort and went into the most unbecoming of "full mourning." When she made her appearance in church,—which she did, as usual, the very first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... roof, but the tree which gave him shelter. He went every day to Lesneven to seek his daily bread, but he never begged; he uttered the simple words "Ave Maria! Solomon could eat bread," and returned with whatever pittance was given him to his tree near the fountain, into which he dipped his crusts, and plunged even in the depth of winter, for his bath, always repeating the words, "Hail, Maria!" One day a party of marauding soldiers accosted him. In answer to their questions, he replied, "I am neither for Blois nor ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... times of straitness, and tries to eke out a support for himself and those dependent upon him by attention to business in a small and, I fear, far from lucrative way, but gives his heart to mission work. I feel guilty every time I make a remittance to Watsonville because the pittance we allow him is so small as compared with the work he does. But he and the zealous teacher have other ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 3, March, 1896 • Various
... the end! The little warmth and love of his cherishing arms about her cold body completed the pittance ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... prohibited the wives of Jewish artisans who were legally entitled to residence in that city to sell eatables in the market, on the technical ground that under the law artisans could only trade in the articles of their own manufacture, thus robbing the poor Jewish workman of the miserable pittance which his wife was anxious to contribute by her honest labor towards the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... not turn out well. This Mr. Delaney is a young man, only twenty-five, and what can he see in mother to induce him to marry her? It can only be for the little pittance of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... married the elderly Dominie Mauverensen. When he was so untowardly killed, fifteen years later, she was left with eight children, of whom I, a toddling urchin, was among the youngest. She had no money save the pittance from Stone Arabia, no means of livelihood, nor even a roof of her own over her head, since the new dominie made harsh remarks about her keeping him out of his own every time he visited our village. To add to the wretchedness of her plight, at this very time her sister Margaret came back in ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... little charcoal brazier and warmed her transparent, needle-pricked fingers, thinking meanwhile of the strange events of the day. She had been up town to carry the great, black bundle of coarse pants and vests to the factory and to receive her small pittance, and on the way home stopped in at the Jesuit Church to say her little prayer at the altar of the calm white Virgin. There had been a wondrous burst of music from the great organ as she knelt there, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... inequity is involved by this business of borrowing for war, and laid upon just the people whom we ought, above all, to treat most fairly, namely, those who fight for us. The soldiers and sailors risk their lives for a pittance during the war, while their brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts, left at home in security and comfort, earn bloated profits and wages, and put them, or part of them, into War Loans; then when the fighters come ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder, with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid opportunities open to him—refusing even to think them splendid in presence of higher aims—cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House a pittance of two hundred pounds ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... I, immediately. "Dimitri has received a mere pittance from that which they had stolen from him. It is a thing which is done everywhere. On the banks of the Rhine, when a traveler is ruined at roulette, the conductor of the game gives him something wherewith ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... who receive 1 franc 50 centimes a day, complain that they are unable to support themselves on this pittance. The conduct of these peasants is above all praise. Physically and morally they are greatly the superiors of the ordinary run of Parisians. They are quiet, orderly, and, as a rule, even devout. Yesterday I went into the Madeleine, where some service was ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it," replied Dr. Leete, "nor even if it took it all save a bare pittance. But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten nor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle which makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... is for that reason, my lord, that one ought to be very cautious in the commands which they lay on her. Can I induce a foreign lady, who, for all her subsistence, has nothing but a small pittance she has reserved to herself, to give that up in favor of a house which is not yet established, and perhaps never will be? If the house should happen to fail, or be no longer of use, what shall that lady live on? Shall she go to the hospital? ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... their present debts by paying the same in depreciated dollars. Nor should it be forgotten that it is not the rich nor the money lender alone that must submit to such a readjustment, enforced by the Government and their debtors. The pittance of the widow and the orphan and the incomes of helpless beneficiaries of all kinds would be disastrously reduced. The depositors in savings banks and in other institutions which hold in trust the savings of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... a scoundrel, a disgrace to society—to—to—" Then in sudden fury he went on: "When a man gets down to playing for a mere pittance, as he does, in a disreputable theatre, and dwelling in a squalid neighbourhood, with ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... that she had never felt her poverty till now. Bitterly did she regret her inability to help them. From the abundance that had blessed her youth and middle age a mere pittance had been saved, scarcely enough to maintain herself, and altogether insufficient to enable her to gratify her benevolent feelings by doing for them as she wished. She had removed from her early home to a little ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... and received him into his own family. Canova wished to earn something for himself, and engaged to work half of the day for Giuseppe Ferrari, who was a nephew of his former master, Toretto. Of this time Canova afterward wrote: "I labored for a mere pittance, but it was sufficient. It was the fruit of my own resolution, and, as I then flattered myself, the foretaste of more honorable rewards." This circumstance proves how remarkable he must have been; it is unusual ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... question of an attic, sir. My father would not disinherit me because I preferred literature to business. I might have a pittance instead of a fortune, but I should not have to fear want. And why should I not live my own life? If I am bound to meet troubles, surely it is only right to provide what compensations I can, and my best compensation would be congenial work! I don't want to be rich. Let some other fellow ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the price what it would. Rather than the fortune for which his father had toiled and sacrificed, Donald preferred Nan's love; rather than a life of ease and freedom from worry, he looked forward with a fierce joy to laboring with his hands for a pittance, provided he might have the privilege of sharing it with her. And The Dreamerie, the house his father had built with such great, passionate human hopes and tender yearnings, the young laird of Port Agnew could abandon without a pang for that little white house on the Sawdust ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... yearly sum granted by Louis XIV. to the best opera singer. The first female dancer received thirty-six pounds! We are quite sure, that the waiting maid of an Elssler or a Taglioni, would turn up her nose at such a pittance. Louis XIV. was gathered to his fathers, and soon after his death matters improved a little. Still the pay was poor enough. But what of that? Those were the palmy days of the heroes and heroines of the foot lamps. For the disciples ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... come at last; and on this dreary December day she was face to face with absolute want. The wolf, with his gaunt eyes, was crouched beside her cold hearth. A pittance owed to her for work had not been paid. The little food left in the house had furnished the children an unsatisfying breakfast; she had eaten nothing. On the table beside her lay a note from the agent of the estate of which ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... much more free to attain those desirable ends than most of the ministers who were preaching for humanity's sake and the gospel's, at salaries ranging from five hundred to two thousand dollars a year, and who had families to support out of their slender pittance. If any woman was in a position to "overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit," surely she was. Stately and beautiful of mien, fervent in spirit, eloquent in language, one who had learned the Hebrew and Greek that she might read the Scriptures ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... female was finally well established, and many women became the successful heads of prosperous industries. The wage was, as it is to-day, the merest pittance; but any wage whatever was an advance upon the conditions ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... the path of those who are living up to the utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory supplied—her cheerful industry, her brave struggle to live like a gentlewoman on a pittance, her tender thought for the welfare and happiness of her children—she felt she could walk through a burning fiery furnace if by so doing she could earn ease and repose for her mother's ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... sales of feathers we read of many thousands of the wonderful ocellated wing feathers of the argus pheasant, but no less horrible is the sight of a canoe crammed with the bedraggled bodies of these magnificent birds on their way to some Chinese hamlet where they will be sold for a pittance, the flesh eaten to the last tendon and the feathers given to the children and puppies to play with. The newly-aroused appetite of the Mongolian will soon be an important factor in the extermination ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... that inflexible ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent them momentary victory, but their movement was only intended as a blind to the main attack arranged from ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... been opportunely replenished. In two days he had accumulated a sum for which, back in Simsbury, he would have had to toil a week. Yet there was to be said in favour of the Simsbury position that it steadily endured. Each week brought its fifteen dollars, pittance though it might be, while the art of the silver screen was capricious in its rewards, not to say jumpy. Never, for weeks at a stretch, had Gashwiler said with a tired smile, "Nothing to-day—sorry!" He might have ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... (impotence) 158; deficiency &c. (incompleteness) 53; imperfection &c. 651; shortcoming &c. 304; paucity; stint; scantiness &c. (smallness) 32; none to spare, bare subsistence. scarcity, dearth; want, need, lack, poverty, exigency; inanition, starvation, famine, drought. dole, mite, pittance; short allowance, short commons; half rations; banyan day. emptiness, poorness &c. Adj.; depletion, vacancy, flaccidity; ebb tide; low water; "a beggarly account of empty boxes" [Romeo and Jul.]; indigence &c. 804; insolvency &c. (nonpayment) 808. V. be ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... you prevent it? These Visitors, and those who commission them, are hungry folk. I hear they take the lands and goods of poor religious such as we are, and if these are fortunate, give one or two of them a little pittance to get bread. Once I had moneys of my own, but I spent them to buy back the Valley Farm which the Abbot had seized, and of late to satisfy his extortions," and ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... effort, but a petition signed by even 30,000 men would have been considered worthy of attention. The vast majority of women have no money of their own and those who work for wages, as a rule, receive but a pittance, and yet there were raised in California for this amendment campaign almost $19,000, and the amount contributed by men was so small as not to be worth mentioning. The financial success was due very largely ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... things which had kept their stimulating power—distant journeys, the enjoyment of art, the contact with new scenes and strange societies—were becoming less and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a pittance; he had spent rather too much of it in his first plunge into life, and the best he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work, mitigated by brief and frugal holidays. He knew that he was more intelligent than the average, but he had long since concluded that ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... privations—but of pleasures next to none; whose life at its most prosperous estate is labour, and in death we count him happy who did not die a pauper. Through them, serfs of the soil, the earth yields indeed her increase, but it is for others; from the fields of plenty they glean a scanty pittance, and fill the barns to bursting, while their children cry for bread. Not that Roger for his part often wanted work; he was the best hand in the parish, and had earned of his employers long ago the name of Steady Acton; but the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... more of them. What troubles me is only a trifling matter of two linear inches on the back of my neck. Your general principle, Madam, is admirable. I merely plead for a slight relaxation of the rule. I ask only for a mere pittance of warmed-over air." ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... all forget. He has a holier and a nobler fame By poor men's hearths, who love and bless the name Of a kind friend; and in low tones to-day, Speak tenderly of him who passed away. Too poor to help the daughter of their friend, They grieved to see the little pittance end; To see her toil and strive with cheerful heart, To bear the lonely orphan's struggling part; They grieved to see her go at last alone To English kinsmen she had never known: And here she came; the foreign girl soon found Welcome, and love, and plenty all around, And here she pays it back ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... would have come to some decision. If you can save the property of course you ought to do so. If you can live on what pittance ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... without meeting dozens of single women, or widows, of all ranks, who do that, and do it better and more easily than men, because they do not, like men, require wine, beer, tobacco, and sundry other luxuries? So wise and thrifty are such women, that very many of them are able, out of their own pittance, to support beside themselves others who have no legal claim upon them. Who does not know, if he knows anything of society, the truth of Mr. Butler's words?—'It is a very generally accepted axiom, and one which it seems has been endorsed by thoughtful men, without a sufficiently ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... Promises, threats, nothing has any effect. One day I thought I would try an experiment; and, instead of letting him have his breakfast, I said to him, 'You shall have nothing to eat till you say, "I am hungry."' At the end of twenty-four hours I had to let him have his pittance; for he would have starved himself ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... is both collective and individual. At one end of the scale you find a scheme for raising a hundred million dollars to maintain and educate Belgian and French orphans. At the other, I could show you a poor woman in Boston who is living on a mere pittance, because she gives every cent that she can possibly spare to Allied Relief. I know many American business men who cross the Atlantic several times a year: on these occasions they seldom fail to take with them, as part of their personal ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... stalworth figure of Simon Patterson, the plantation parson. Our plantation parsons, be it known, are a singular species of depraved humanity, a sort of itinerant sermon-makers, holding forth here and there to the negroes of the rich planters, receiving a paltry pittance in return, and having in lieu of morals an excellent taste for whiskey, an article they invariably call to their aid when discoursing to the ignorant slave-telling him how content with his lot he ought to be, seeing that God intended him only for ignorance and servitude. The parson did, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... soldier in one of the Highland regiments, died early in life, leaving his mother in circumstances of poverty. From his mother's private tuition, he received the whole amount of his juvenile education. When a child he was sent to serve as a tobacco-boy for a small pittance of wages, and as a youth was received into the copper-printing branch of the establishment of Messrs James Lumsden and Son, booksellers, Queen Street. He very early began to write verses, and some of his compositions having attracted the notice of Mr Lumsden, senior, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... after many rebuffs succeeded in getting employment as errand-boy in a large importing house. The salary was a mere pittance, but it kept him in clothes and coarse food, until one day, about a year after his apprenticeship there, he chanced to save the life of Mr. Belgrade, the senior partner. A gas-pipe in the private office of the firm exploded, and the place took fire, and Mr. Belgrade, smothered and ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... going to make him some promise; to tell him something of her intention towards his son, and to make some tender of assistance to himself; being now in that mind to live on the smallest possible pittance, of which I have before spoken, when he ceased speaking or listening, and hurried her on to ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... too weak and spent to inhale the steam of vinegar, and the attempts to make her swallow produced fruitless anguish. They could not discover how long it was since she had taken any nourishment, and they already knew what a miserable pittance hers had been at the best. Mrs. Kelland gave her up at once, and protested that she was following her mother, and that there was death in her face. Rachel made an imperious gesture of silence, and was ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... got mad and threatened to give up school and go to work so as to take some of the load from the old pater's shoulders. So they were glad, actually glad, when the war came along and gave them a chance not only to serve their country and earn some money—even if it was only a miserable pittance—so that they could send some home to their dad and feel that they had stopped being a drag upon him. He used to tell me," Frank went on, for the spell of those old thrilling times was strong upon him again, "with tears in his eyes—and ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... actually receive his pittance, his lot might be more tolerable. But it is the almost universal complaint, that, either from inability or disinclination, the planter does not keep his agreements. Sometimes the overseer, when the work has been done, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... also, brother." Thereupon he thrust his hand into the pouch of the fat Friar and drew thence a bag like the other and counted out from it threescore and ten pounds. "Look ye now," quoth he, "I knew the good Saint had sent thee some pittance that ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... these shares were not of a sort to open the doors of a financial paradise to the men. The fisheries have always afforded impressive illustrations of the iron rule of the business world that the more arduous and more dangerous an occupation is, the less it pays. It was for the merest pittance that the fishermen risked their lives, and those who had families at home drawing their weekly provender from the outfitter were lucky if, at the end of the cruise they found themselves with the bill ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot |
