"Poverty-stricken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moment, of the face, and of the dreadful change in it—struck him speechless and helpless. The steady presence of mind in all emergencies which had become a habit of his life, failed him for the first time. The poverty-stricken street, the squalid mob round the door, swam before his eyes. He staggered back and caught at the iron railings of the house ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... to eight feet. The banks of the river are flat, and fringed with underwood and young trees; the background is formed by ranges of hills. The little houses, which are visible now and then, are built of stone, and covered with tiles, yet, nevertheless, they present a tolerably poverty-stricken appearance. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... is not necessarily wantonness: a Gothic moulding may be buried half a foot deep in thorns and leaves, and yet will be chaste in every line; and a late Renaissance moulding may be utterly barren and poverty-stricken, and yet will show the disposition to luxury in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Palmer was of opinion that the working-classes could pay well enough; it was the middle-class that would suffer most; and Mr. R. McNeill, following up this assertion, suggested (without success) that for the sake of poverty-stricken M.P.'s the House should adjourn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... politics, he is a gigantic landowner, and the work of his life is concentrated on the development of his own estate. He knows the circumstances of every village, almost of every farm. It is his pride that no labourer on his estate is badly housed, that no part of it is slovenly or mismanaged or poverty-stricken. He endows churches and hospitals, he erects public buildings, encourages every local industry, makes in times of distress much larger remissions of rent than would be possible for a poorer man, superintends personally the many interests on his property, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... billionaires or "Napoleons of Finance" who enrich themselves in a few years by seizing upon—in ways more or less clearly described in the penal code—the public funds, and which, at the other pole, accumulates vast multitudes of poverty-stricken wretches in the slums of the cities or in the houses of straw and mud which reproduce in the South of Italy, the quarters of the Helots of antiquity, or in the valley of the Po, the huts ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... mines of Almaden are one of the sure cards of the Spanish finance minister, and during the late war, especially, were often a great resource to the poverty-stricken government. When other sources of revenue failed, there were always to be found speculators willing to treat for the quicksilver contract; and these mines, like the tobacco and other monopolies, and the Havanna revenue, have helped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... any great moment, that Ruth had to tell my Grandmother. She could but hold her in discourse of how the Invalid Matrosses had the rheumatism and the ague; how the Life-guard men in their room diced and drank and quarrelled, both over their dice and their drink; how the rumour ran that the poverty-stricken habitants of the adjoining village had, from long dwelling among the fens, become as web-footed as the wild-fowl they hunted; and how her Father, who had been for many years a widower, was harsh and stern with her, and would not suffer her to read the romances ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... fault of his if they have not become equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... some debt, or under the pressure of necessity? Perhaps she had not paid her rent. The old man seemed shrewd enough not to allow his money to be taken with impunity. What interest attracted him to this poverty-stricken house, he who was rich? Why, when he had formerly been so familiar with Adelaide, had he given up the rights he had acquired, and which were ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... was born in Donegal in 1890. He was the son of poverty-stricken peasants and, between the ages of 12 and 19, he worked as farm-servant, drainer, potato-digger, and navvy, becoming one of the thousands of stray "tramp-laborers" who cross each summer from Ireland to Scotland to ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... upon the young girl's active brain, quickened by seclusion and fed by solitary books. She read with keen eyes the miserable secret of her father's strange guest in the poverty-stricken walls, in the mute evidences of menial handicraft performed in loneliness and privation, in this piteous adaptation of an accident to save the conscious shame of premeditated toil. She knew now why he had stammeringly ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... by reason of our Jewish descent, find life, particularly in the higher sense of the word, to be a keener struggle for existence than our neighbors do. Yet it would not be half so wearing if our difficulties were consecrated by an inspiring cause or by a thrilling loyalty. Why need we be poverty-stricken in spirit, bereft of everything that makes struggle sweet and suffering endurable? We must put the very question, What is Judaism? in a new way and in a different spirit. We must have the definite purpose in mind, of so understanding it as to know what ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... good deal of luggage with us, also some casks, cases, and barrels of provisions, and a piano-forte, as our place of sojourn is somewhat out of the way and far removed from civilised markets. A few poverty-stricken natives stood on the rude stone pier as we landed, and slowly assisted us to unload. At the time I conceived that the idiotical expression of their countenances was the result of being roused at untimely hours; but our subsequent experience led ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... anywhere. As a matter of fact he did not possess one, thus fulfilling literally our Lord's words: "He that hath two coats, let him give to him that hath none!" [*] His colleagues were often displeased at his poverty-stricken appearance and regarded his shabby clothes as a reflection upon their dignity. These faultfinders could easily have learned that the patched garments of the hero of brotherly love commanded the respect of all who knew Vianney's real character. Wherever he appeared he was received with the utmost ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... are never absent; and in it men and women grown old in sin and crime spend their last evil days. The whining voice of the professional mendicant is ever heard in its streets, for its poverty-stricken inhabitants readily respond to ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... was in the hamlet, he found it not quite what he had imagined it to be; he could easily think of many a better place to settle down in. The whole place was poverty-stricken, and no-one seemed to have any ambition. The fishermen went to sea because they were obliged to. They seized on any excuse to stay at home. "We're just as poor whether we work hard ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... system arose, that is, the houses of the poor, whose internal arrangements deter the poverty-stricken from seeking a refuge from starvation. In the workhouse benevolence is ingeniously combined with the revenge of the bourgeoisie upon the poor who ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... France blamed this expense as quite unnecessary. But the Queen said she had done it to show other nations that France was not so totally ruined and poverty-stricken by reason of her recent wars as was supposed; and that, since she was able to spend so much for frivolity, she would be able to do far more for affairs of consequence and importance; and that France was all the more to be esteemed and ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... poor white "cracker" population that we saw, seemed indigenous products of the starved soil. They suited their poverty-stricken surroundings as well as the gnarled and scrubby vegetation suited the sterile sand. Thin-chested, round-shouldered, scraggy-bearded, dull-eyed and open-mouthed, they all looked alike—all looked as ignorant, as stupid, and as lazy as they ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... all the clothing she had. The burden of her support evidently fell heavily upon him and upon the poverty-stricken family of her hostess. And Sonia was in deep discouragement. She was about to go away from New York in hopes of finding work ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... towards the chateau it became apparent that this side of it was even more neglected and ruinous than the one we have already described; the recent poverty-stricken owners having tried to keep up appearances as far as possible, and concentrated their efforts upon the front of their dilapidated abode. In the stable, where were stalls for twenty horses, a miserable, old, white pony stood ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... himself, since 'out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.' But our young gentleman remains elegantly monosyllabic, and it would seem that he is not at all overjoyed upon his return to the poverty-stricken, quiet house of his father. It is true, he has lived in much handsomer style at the Orange court, lived there, indeed, amid plenty and pleasure—by the way, we can sing a little song on that subject, for our son has seen well to the outlay, but ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... they helped to win the war. What was their reward? The opulent portion of them were saddled with an enormous income tax and high prices of living through bad legislation, which made life a burden. The more poverty-stricken suffered sympathetically in exactly the same way. We won the war and we lost the peace. We fastened upon the shoulders of the deserving, the wage-earning portion of the community, a burden which their shoulders could never carry a burden which, had we ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... believe that any state should make a law that permits an ignorant and poverty-stricken white man to vote, and prevents a black man in the same condition from voting. Such a law is not only unjust, but it will react, as all unjust laws do, in time; for the effect of such a law is to encourage the Negro to secure education and property, and at the same time it encourages the ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... not so poverty-stricken as you think," laughed Toinette. "She won't suffer. And then I wanted to ask you if there wasn't some way of helping Helen in her art work. She wants so much to go abroad with Miss Preston, but has no more idea of ever being able to do so than she has ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... words, and thought to himself: "Can this be He? No, a wise man does not surround himself with such a shabby, poverty-stricken crowd. And yet they say it is He." Simeon got out of his litter and drew his scimitar. Then he pressed forward amid the disagreeable smell of old clothes and of the perspiring crowd. Oh, how repulsive is the odour of the poor! The multitude shyly gave way to the brilliant figure, for never ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... our country, however, are the customs and peculiarities, imported from the old world by the earlier settlers, kept up with more fidelity than in the little, poverty-stricken villages of Spanish and French origin, which border the rivers of ancient Louisiana. Their population is generally made up of the descendants of those nations, married and interwoven together, and occasionally crossed with a slight dash of the Indian. The French character, however, floats ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... cruelty and oppression. Yet Ireland, like the American Colonies until the verge of the revolutionary struggle, was consistently loyal to the Crown both in peace and war. The loyalty of Catholic Ireland, poverty-stricken, inarticulate, almost leaderless, and shamefully misgoverned, does not, from the human standpoint, appear worthy of admiration, but it was a fact. The few Catholic noblemen outdid the Protestants in ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... their doors to Mrs. Latham and several more aspiring Whirlpoolers, Mrs. Jenks-Smith having penetrated the sacred precincts, only by right of having been presented at the English Court in the last reign through the influence of her stepdaughter, who married a poverty-stricken title. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Galbraith," he said, "that I can see. She must either be poverty-stricken or have an income provided ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... imposing roofs of slate removed to make way for two or three wretched storeys of lath and plaster or had even been demolished altogether and replaced by shabby whitewashed houses, and now displayed only a series of irregular, poverty-stricken, squalid fronts, pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows enlivened with flowers in pots, birdcages, and rags hanging out to dry. These were occupied by a swarm of artisans, jewellers, metal-workers, clockmakers, opticians, printers, laundresses, sempstresses, milliners, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... persecution—eyes piercing and crafty—sickly, wrinkled features, are the characteristics of the men. Although, as I have remarked, the gates and the pales of the Ghetto are now removed, a stranger can easily tell when he enters what Catholic Rome considers its tainted circle, by the miserable, poverty-stricken appearance of the whole district. The people crowd around him, losing all sense of manly dignity or mental degradation in the anxiety for gain. Skinny shrivelled hands touch his clothes in the hope of arresting his progress; worn-out tawdry finery is thrust before ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... were poverty-stricken, her purse could not be replenished by any such means as these other girls found to help them over the hard places. In this matter of the tam-o'-shanter, for instance, it would be very difficult to help the ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... by culture and satiated with prosperity is a dead nation, for whom nothing remains but, like Sardanapalus, to burn itself up together with all its magnificence. The blase city man, the fat farmer of the rich corn-land, may be the men of the present; but the poverty-stricken peasant of the moors, the rough, hardy peasant of the forests, the lonely, self-reliant Alpine shepherd, full of legends and songs—these are the men of the future. Civil society is founded on the doctrine of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... in a measure deserted for many years, and the successful termination of the strife rendering it probable that the Vanhome estate would be confiscated to the new government, an aged, poverty-stricken couple had been encouraged by the neighbors to take possession as tenants of the place. Their name was Gills; and these people the traveler found upon his entrance were likely to be his host and hostess. Holding their right as they did by so slight a tenure, they ventur'd to offer ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... another document of Krishna, the first illustrated version of Keshav Das's Rasika Priya.[78] As we have seen, this poem was composed at Orchha in Bundelkhand in 1591, at a time when both poet and court were in close association with Akbar. Yet the version in question shows the same poverty-stricken manner with its crude aping of imperial idioms and utter lack of sensitive expression. There is no evidence that at this time Bundelkhand possessed its own school of painting and in consequence the most likely explanation is that yet another inferior artist trained in the early Mughal manner, migrated ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... what I had seen and known of free, white, non-slaveholding people in the slave states. Regarding slavery as the basis of wealth, I fancied that no people could become very wealthy without slavery. A free white man, holding no slaves, in the country, I had known to be the most ignorant and poverty-stricken of men, and the laugh{268} ing stock even of slaves themselves—called generally by them, in derision, "poor white trash." Like the non-slaveholders at the south, in holding no slaves, I suppose the northern people like them, also, in poverty ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... incrustation which began to settle over and bedim all earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple; ever since which hapless epoch, her daughters have chiefly been engaged in a desperate and unavailing struggle to get rid of it. But the dirt of a poverty-stricken English street is a monstrosity unknown on our side of the Atlantic. It reigns supreme within its own limits, and is inconceivable everywhere beyond them. We enjoy the great advantage, that the brightness and dryness of our atmosphere keep everything clean that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... cuffed out of the way by a court chamberlain. Surely that were felicity enough for fools! Our boasted Republican government, whose shibboleth has ever been the equality of all men— that the harvester of the lowly hoop-pole stands on a parity with a prince swinging a gilded scepter and robbing a poverty-stricken people—considered that its paid representatives in Russia would be unequal to the task of spilling sufficient slobber over the chief representative of "divine right," the great arch-enemy of human liberty, and sent special envoys ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... say, let's have a law to turn those d——d Germans out of the country. They come over here—the hungry, poverty-stricken brutes—and they take the bread out of Englishmen's mouths, and they talk about education. Education! who cares for education? I never could read a book in my life without falling asleep, and I can give some of the ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... substance had been expended in the royal service. In the third petition, Melchor de Legazpi requests that the office of accountant of the City of Mexico rendered vacant by the death of its incumbent, be bestowed upon him, in remembrance of his father's services. He says the family is "poverty-stricken and in debt," because of his father having spent all his possessions in the king's service. The fourth petition presents information concerning Legazpi's services. The fifth petition requests that certain persons be received by the court as witnesses, and give information regarding ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... forest in all its bewildering luxuriance, the live-oak, the hackberry, the myrtle, the Spanish bayonet in bristling groups, and the shaded places gave out a scented moisture like an orangery; anon we passed fields of corn and cotton, swamps of rice, stretches of poverty-stricken indigo plants, gnawed to the stem by the pest. Our ponies ambled on, unmindful; but Nick vowed that no woman under heaven would induce him to undertake such a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the tea-things created a diversion, but the discontented girl sat apart, while the hideousness of her surroundings came upon her as a new revelation. Certainly, in Canada, in a poverty-stricken abode, taste seems more completely starved than in ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... Ban-de-la-Roche, a wild mountainous district between Alsace and Lorraine, where, single-handed, and in the midst of extraordinary difficulties and privations, he was privileged to work wonders amongst a most ignorant and poverty-stricken people. The knowledge of several pious and excellent institutions had reached the secluded valley where Oberlin was stationed before it was received by the rest of France. No sooner had he learned that there were Christians ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... in sight successively two elderly ladies, lean and rather poverty-stricken in appearance, very much alike, evidently sisters; a footman in livery; an infantry corporal; a fat gentleman in a soiled and patched jacket-suit; and, lastly, a workman's family, father, mother, and four ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... and when Christine had placed it carefully on a wretched little couch, she seemed, for the first time, free to think of Noel. She turned and asked him to sit down—at the same time glancing about her with a sudden rush of consciousness, which until now a nearer interest had crowded out. The poverty-stricken look of her surroundings was made the more evident by the few objects belonging to other days that lay about—a charming sacque, smartly braided and lined with rich silk, hung on the back of a chair, and a handsome travelling rug was folded under the ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... northern creatures are remote products of the Great Ice Age, and by this time, like Polar bears, we have grown adapted to our glacial environment. All the more, therefore, is it a useful shaking-up for us to get transported bodily from our cramped and poverty-stricken northern slums, just once in our life, to the palms and temples of the South, the lands where the human body is a hardy plant, not a frail exotic. We come back to our chilly home among the fogs and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... that fume and fuss and try, and their things won't do anything at all. There's Aunt Easygo has plant after plant brought from the greenhouse, and hanging-baskets, and all sorts of things; but her plants grow yellow and drop their leaves, and her hanging-baskets get dusty and poverty-stricken, while mamma's go on flourishing as ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... by three or four of these chaps, to each of whom we had given a trifle, moved by their poverty-stricken appearance and Maltese whine; when, on reaching the top of the steps, an old fellow, who from his venerable look seemed above that sort of thing, repeated a like request to his compeers lower down the stairs, holding out the palm of a lean clawlike hand resembling ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... step toward solving this problem is to lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves, in marriage or out, for bread and shelter. To do that, girls, like boys, must be educated to some lucrative employment; women, like men, must have equal chances to earn ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... changed as we woke up an hour before reaching Tiflis. The country became green, lovely, and populous in comparison. The people seemed less 'ragged, poverty-stricken, and wretched; the native women wore garments of brightest red and blue; the men put on more style, with their long Circassian coats and ornamental daggers, than I had yet observed. East of Tiflis, the Caucasus Hallway may, roughly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the trick been discovered, he would undoubtedly have been roughly treated, if not killed, for the Shirazis have an unmitigated contempt for Europeans. There are few places, too, in Asia where Jews are more persecuted than in Shiraz, although they have their own quarter, in the lowest, most poverty-stricken part of the town, and other privileges are granted them by the Government. Shortly before my visit, a whole family was tortured and put to death by a mob of infuriated Mohammedans. The latter accused them of ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... all farmers, and, according to their own statements, a poverty-stricken people. They plead poverty before an English merchant because they fancy it will have the effect of reducing prices. Fortunately, the merchants possess rather an accurate knowledge of such customers, and in consequence they lose nothing. One would ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... better for Robert than the prospect of a college education. But his first thought at the news was not of the delights of learning nor of the honourable course that would ensue, but of Eric Ericson, the poverty-stricken, friendless descendant of yarls and sea-rovers. He would see him—the only man that understood him! Not until the passion of this thought had abated, did he begin to perceive the other advantages before him. But so practical and thorough ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... wretched ever since he had entertained the idea. Love and a cottage were, he knew, things incompatible; but the love and the cottage implied in those words were synonymous with absolute poverty. Love with thirty thousand pounds, even though it should have a cottage joined with it, need not be a poverty-stricken love. He was sick of the world,—of the world such as he had made it for himself, and he would see if he could not do something better. He would first get Mary Bonner, and then he would get the ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... It's a ruin to-day. The trees have been cut and sold for firewood. There's only a little bit of the vineyard that isn't abandoned—just enough to make wine for the present Italian lessees, who are running a poverty-stricken milk ranch on the leavings of the soil. I rode over it last year, and cried. The beautiful orchard is a horror. The grounds have gone back to the wild. Just because they didn't keep the gutters cleaned ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... best of his knowledge, led in the required direction, and hurried forward with awakened senses. The landscape was only half revealed by the summer night, but it was all as familiar as the mends in the back of Father Lasse's waistcoat, although he had never been here before. The poverty-stricken landscape spoke to him as with a mother's voice. Among these clay-daubed huts, the homes of poor cultivators who waged war upon the rocky ground surrounding their handful of soil, he felt safe as he ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... would say, then, to the peddlers of stars, crosses, garters, and A. S. S.'s. There are poverty-stricken principalities and hard-up beys and khedives enough to find ribbons for a thousand American buttonholes, and to turn ten thousand of our exemplary fellow citizens to chevaliers. An envious public sentiment might ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... open air filled me with joy, so that I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover. Another occasion when ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... successfully developed by industrial workers in towns and cities and is commonly known as "consumers' cooperation." Starting with a few poverty-stricken workers who pooled their meager savings so that they could buy at wholesale and share in the profits of the retailer, the Rochdale system has grown until the wholesale cooperative societies of England and Scotland ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... and in straitened circumstances, and sometimes Jess was cramped for clothing as well as spending money. She lived at the "poverty-stricken" end of Whiffle Street, just as the Beldings lived ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... after her husband's death, with the money made from her turkeys, represented the single extravagance as well as the solitary ambition of her life. Even as a child she had longed ardently to wear crape, and this secret aspiration, which had smouldered in the early poverty-stricken years of her marriage, had burst suddenly into flame when she found herself a widow. During the burial service over her husband, while she had sat bowed in musty black cotton, which had been loaned her by a neighbour, she had vowed earnestly that she would ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the other hand, there is a natural jealousy on the part of the natives of the region suddenly become fashionable. They have seen the land they sold at farm prices by the acre coming to be valued by the foot, like the corner lots in a city. Their simple and humble modes of life look almost poverty-stricken in the glare of wealth and luxury which so outshines their plain way of living. It is true that many of them have found them selves richer than in former days, when the neighborhood lived on its own resources. They know how to avail ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not feel in her toes, for she walked along carelessly beside him to the door of her hotel, a hostelry possibly a shade more poverty-stricken in a flag paved by-street, a trifle staler-smelling than his own, and there put out ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... place one night out of every six in the rank and file. The gondoliers have two proverbs, which show how desirable it is, while taking a fixed engagement, to keep their hold on the traghetto. One is to this effect: il traghetto e un buon padrone. The other satirises the meanness of the poverty-stricken Venetian nobility: pompa di servitu, misera insegna. When they combine the traghetto with private service, the municipality insists on their retaining the number painted on their gondola; and against this their employers frequently ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the boys in a friendly way; a men's lodging-house, where a comfortable bed and shelter can be had for eight cents a night. The latter is an enterprise which could be imitated with profit in all our large American cities, where it is very difficult for the homeless and poverty-stricken to obtain a decent lodging, or to find any place, in fact, where liquor is not sold. There are also evangelistic services in the mission here, Sunday-schools, Bible-classes, temperance meetings, a soup kitchen, and a coffee ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... were built by these Moslem despots and their viceroys. Most of them are now in ruins, but from the top of the Kutab Minar one may count a score of tombs with their domes and cupolas still intact. Into these tombs was poured much of the treasure wrung from the poverty-stricken ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... six inches long, interspersed with which were curious aloes, whose weird leafy tops gave them the aspect of shrubs growing upside down with their roots scrambling aimlessly in the air. In front stood the native hut, the wretchedness of whose outside was only equalled by the filth and poverty-stricken aspect within. Near to this were several native children, as black as coal, as impudent-looking as tom-tits, and as lively as crickets. Beyond all lay the undulating plains studded with flowering shrubs of varied form and hue, ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... and Kathlyn took the rifle, vaguely wondering how it came into the possession of this poverty-stricken hillman. Of one thing she was certain; it had become his either through violence of his own or of others. She examined the breech and found a dead shell, which she cast out. The rifle carried six cartridges, and she loaded skillfully, much to the astonishment of the hillman. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... travellers, and in control of the Cuadrilleros, was styled the Alguacil. Hence the Tribunal served the double purpose of Town Hall and casual ward for wayfarers. There were all sorts of Tribunales, from the well-built stone and wood house to the poverty-stricken bamboo shanty where one had to pass the night on the floor or ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... surrounded with the best efforts of the old and modern masters, denotes that you will have insatiable longings and desires for higher attainments, compared to which present success will seem poverty-stricken ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... and furious, and the poverty-stricken courtiers brightened up as the sum began to mount into ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... poverty, won a prize of one hundred dollars from the Baltimore Saturday Visitor for his story, "The Manuscript Found in a Bottle." Through John P. Kennedy[1], one of the judges whose friendship the poverty-stricken author gained, he procured a good deal of hack work, and finally an editorial position on the Southern Literary Messenger, of Richmond. The salary was fair, and better was in sight; yet Poe was melancholy, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... contradicted me flatly, and said that whatever else I might know I was quite wrong there; for that neither she nor any one of her people would condescend to speak anything so low as Gaelic, or indeed, if they possibly could avoid it, to have anything to do with the poverty-stricken creatures who used it. It is a singular fact that, though principally owing to the magic writings of Walter Scott, the Highland Gael and Gaelic have obtained the highest reputation in every other part of the world, they are held in the Lowlands in very considerable ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... knowledge of Nature has penetrated into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced. The causal elements and not the totals are what we are now most passionately concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be. But the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day, from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Dorothy, flushing. "I'll have to watch my step to merit that compliment. Now that you've heard the sad story of the poverty-stricken senior, I call for a change of subject. Did you know that Edith Hammond ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... for Sicily in a Genoese packet. Off the island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little picaroon, with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos and pistols stuck in their waistbands. The pirates thoroughly ransacked the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found little ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... by those who were willing to sacrifice quality to cheapness. It was said that the most inferior English was sold under the name of American, the best of the American doing duty for medium quality English. I remember seeing a very ancient and poverty-stricken cow knocked down to a Birmingham dealer, who exclaimed exultingly as the hammer fell, "I'll make 'em some 'Merican biff ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... had been,—not, as is generally the case, when a new land is brought into occupation, by the poverty-stricken dregs of a redundant population, nor by a gang of outcasts and ruffians, expelled from the bosom of a society which they contaminated,—but by men who in their own land had been both rich and noble,—with possessions to be taxed, and a spirit ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... lady, and haven't enough money to purchase a salt herring! Shall I show up my satin waistcoat? No, d——n it, that won't do, for I must keep up appearances. Can't I borrow a trifle from some of my friends? No, curse them, they are all as poverty-stricken as I am! I have it!—I'll test the benevolence of some gospel-wrestler, and borrow the devil's impudence for ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... uneasy under the responsibility of this magnanimous but costly appellation; and began to fear he might be involved in a second interchange of pledges of friendship. He hastened, therefore, to let the old chief know his poverty-stricken state, and how little there was to be ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... isolated, occupying commanding situations, showing themselves freely in the full pride of their beauty, and he compared them with this Cathedral of Toledo, the mother-church of Spain, smothered by the swarm of poverty-stricken buildings that surrounded it, clinging closely to its walls, permitting it to display none of its exterior beauties, beyond what could be seen from the narrow streets that closed it in on every side. Gabriel, who was acquainted with its interior magnificence, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... England?" exclaimed the count. "Ah, no, Olympia; trust me, le Dieu-donne looks higher than the poverty-stricken daughter of a headless king and a crownless queen. There is nought to fear from her. But, come, there is our cue," and, with a gay song upon their gossipy lips, Mars and Venus danced in upon the stage, while a terrible Fury circled around them in a mad whirl. And amid the applause of the spectators ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... price I paid for it. On that occasion I attempted the voyage in an opposite direction—viz., from America to France, but only half the distance was covered. Alaska was then almost unexplored and the now populous Klondike region only sparsely peopled by poverty-stricken and unfriendly Indians. After many dangers and difficulties, Alaska was crossed in safety, and we managed to reach the Siberian shores of Bering Straits only to meet with dire disaster at the hands of the natives of that coast. For no sooner had the American ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... mercy reaches our nature, and supplies our wants. Through the ministry of the Spirit, in the earliest promise and in subsequent prophecy the refreshing water was brought into contact with parched lips. A heavenly treasure lies on this poverty-stricken, bankrupt, accursed world, sufficient to enrich every one of its poor and miserable and wretched ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... general laboratory they met Professor Hastings, and she could see at once what Karl meant. He was apparently a man of about sixty, and kindness was written large upon him. Ernestine could fancy his looking after students who were ill, and trying to devise some way of helping the poverty-stricken boy through another year ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... farmers who to-day clear their three thousand dollars and four thousand dollars a year could not clear one hundred dollars a year. Commerce was absolutely stagnant. Canada was a federation, but a federation of what? Poverty-stricken, isolated provinces. Not in bravado, not in flamboyant self-confidence, rebuffed of all chance to trade with the United States, the new Dominion humbly set herself to build the foundations of a nation. She did not know ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... our hotel in Cienfuegos, there sat upon the sidewalk of the street a blind beggar, a Chinese coolie, whose miserable, poverty-stricken appearance elicited a daily trifle from the habitues of the house. Early one morning we discovered this representative of want and misery purchasing a lottery ticket. They are so divided and subdivided, it ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... disagreeable contact with suffering and appeals from the poverty-stricken. The utmost care should be taken of the health ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... poverty-stricken appearance, Mrs. Sowler was not absolutely destitute. In various underhand and wicked ways, she contrived to put a few shillings in her pocket from week to week. If she was half starved, it was for the very ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... brown-stone; above, along the country road which was then Fifth Avenue, a waste, squalid yet in its way picturesque, that extended almost to Mount Morris Park. "Here lived," "Fifth Avenue" tells us, "over five thousand as poverty-stricken and disreputable people as could be seen anywhere. The squatters' settlements in the Park were surrounded by swamps, and overgrown with briers, vines, and thickets. The soil that covered the rocky surface was unfit for cultivation. Here and ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... his poverty-stricken home, and Oliver solaced himself with a novel and a cigar, and Miss Ethel Kenyon sank to sleep in spite of a tumult of innocent delight which would have kept a person of less healthy mind and body ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to him like a fairy scene, in which his every wish was gratified. And now, he had returned, dishonored, worn out, disgusted with the realities of life, still tasting the bitter dregs of the cup of shame, stigmatized, poverty-stricken, and friendless, with nothing to lose, and nothing ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... charm, ought never, in a man's opinion, to LOOK sad, whatever she may FEEL. It is her business to smile, and shine like a sunbeam on a spring morning for his delectation always. And Aubrey Leigh, though he could thoroughly appreciate and enter into the sordid woes of hard-worked and poverty-stricken womankind, was not without the same delusion that seems to possess all his sex,—namely, that if a woman is brilliantly endowed, and has sufficient of this world's goods to ensure her plenty of friends and pretty ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the motives which were sending Miss Amy Vost into Szechwan, most deplorable, most poverty-stricken of provinces, was satisfied before the Hankow had put astern the great turbulent city after which it ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... summer evening, a young man and a girl sat down together in the open air. They were distant relatives, sprung from a stock once wealthy, but of late years so poverty-stricken, that David had not a penny to pay the marriage fee, if Esther should consent to wed. The seat they had chosen was in an open grove of elm and walnut trees, at a right angle of the road; a spring of diamond water just bubbled into the moonlight beside them, and ...
— An Old Woman's Tale - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... according to his lights for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly large bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... town like Ronda, so entirely apart from the world, poverty-stricken, this desire for realism makes a curiously strong impression. The churches, coated with whitewash, are squalid, cold and depressing; and at first sight the row of images looks nothing more than a somewhat vulgar exhibition of wax-work. But presently, as ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... good time, and then, in spite of the brave defense, Gibraltar also fell. Then followed a repetition of the scenes that had been enacted in Maracaibo for the past fifteen days, only here they remained for four horrible weeks, extorting money—money! ever money!—from the poor poverty-stricken, pest-ridden souls crowded into that fever ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe: at last to ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... to himself, took a glance round the poverty-stricken room, and stretched out his long legs to the blaze. The evening air without had been chilly. The sea-coal in the grate, stirred by the Commandant's poker, woke to a warm glow with a small dancing flame on top. Sir Ommaney stared ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Iceland immigrants, to whom reference is made, I recently met in London a famed traveler, who was in Iceland when the people were setting out for Canada, Mrs. Alec. Tweedie. She explains in her book how these people were absolutely poverty-stricken when they left Iceland. In fact, the sufferings endured the first year in Winnipeg were mild compared to their privations in ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the new white stucco wall of some costly hygienic institution, or art gallery, or Governor's palace, glaring in the bright sun, stands the incongruous figure of the half-naked and sandalled Indian, ignorant and poverty-stricken! These, indeed, are elements of Spanish-American civilisation which the philosopher sees and ponders upon. In fact, the character of the Latin races seems sometimes to tend to run off into ultra-scientific methods and institutions before the every-day welfare of its citizens is secured. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... the lower orders were encouraged to come thither for oblivion. It had about it nothing inviting to the general eye. No gas illuminations proclaimed its midnight grandeur. No huge folding doors, one set here and another there, gave ingress and egress to a wretched crowd of poverty-stricken midnight revellers. No reiterated assertions in gaudy letters, each a foot long, as to the peculiar merits of the old tom or Hodge's cream of the valley, seduced the thirsty traveller. The panelling over the window bore the simple announcement, in modest letters, of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... which it was proposed to affect by the Bill was a mere matter of some 80,000 acres, a bagatelle to the landed interest of Ireland, but involving vital consequences to the poverty-stricken peasants of the West. It was a Bill, as the Lord Chancellor declared, to deal with the tail of an agrarian revolution, and to effect this with the minimum of suffering, compulsory powers and a simple and expeditious procedure were demanded, but in ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... the men and women of Philistia were dining. Everywhere maids were passing hot dishes, and forks were being thrust into these dishes, and each was eating according to his ability and condition. No matter how poverty-stricken the household, the housewife was serving her poor best to the goodman. For with luncheon so long past, all the really virile men of Philistia were famished, and stood ready to eat the moment, they had ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... of faith, and manifests itself in ways astonishing to visitors from Christian lands. Thus, the impunity—nay, the protection and sympathy—afforded to the street-beggar, and the way in which the very poor divide their crust with those still more poverty-stricken than themselves, surprise the stranger who observes the scene in the open streets. Then, too, the public fountains, which are charitable offerings from pious persons, are more numerous in Constantinople than in any other city in the world. Nor does the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... however poverty-stricken, could be made to believe this. Every time after so saying he looked into their eyes, but in spite of the warning, expectation flamed ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... the town, howling and dancing, carrying flaring torches, burning the blue and red fire, and some of them singing silly or obscene songs; whilst the collectors ran about with the boxes begging for money from people who were in most cases nearly as poverty-stricken as the unemployed they were asked to assist. The money thus obtained was afterwards handed over to the Secretary of the Organized ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... forgotten me, they repeated the same trick on me; and others, on catching sight of me, beat a retreat. Thus I perceived, that in the ranks of this class also deceivers existed. But these cheats were very pitiable creatures: all of them were but half-clad, poverty-stricken, gaunt, sickly men; they were the very people who really freeze to death, or hang themselves, as ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... as they turned, but now their way lay towards home, via sundry other places. The long sunbeams were passing lovely as they lay upon the snow, and the fantastic shadows of Jerry and the sleigh and all it held, were in odd harmony and contrast. The poverty-stricken house to which the two had walked that memorable night, had been already visited and passed, and several others with sick or poor inhabitants. Then Mr. Linden turned off down one of the scarce broken by-roads, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Brussels. Poor wights! It is they who are paying for the war. Sightless soldiers led by little children come selling you sticking-plaster in the restaurants. Germany is too poor to care for them. It is they who are paying for the war. The drab, many-headed middle class of Berlin with its poverty-stricken breakfast-table, the old black bread of the war and no sugar and paper table-cloths; the women going about the streets with great bundles on their backs; the people making their 1918 clothes still do—they are paying ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... in a League newspaper, loudly boasting of the great victory won by Mr. Dillon, M.P., for the starving and poverty-stricken tenants. Two of these tenants (brothers) were under a yearly rent of L7, 10s. They declared they could only pay L3, 15s., or a half-year's rent, and this only if they got an abatement of 15s. Yet these same tenants were then paying Mr. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... with terror. They fear infection from every newcomer. There was a panic throughout this vicinity a few days ago, over the landing of a flatboat, and the coming ashore of the unfortunates who were on it. They were in a most pitiful plight. I hope never to see a sadder sight than that poverty-stricken little family. But they were not suffering from any disease more contagious than want; they were only cold, wet, tired, hungry, and disheartened. The poor mother was sitting on the damp sand near the water's edge, with her little ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... another rising genius in art, literature, or science, his zeal for knowledge and investigation in those days of grinding poverty fed the fires of his genius, and this was the light which throughout his long poverty-stricken life shed a golden lustre on his toilsome existence. He did not then know that the great Linne, the father of the science he was to illuminate and so greatly to expand, also began life in extreme poverty, and eked out his scanty livelihood ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Hathornes, is transferred in the book from the family of the accursed to that of Maule, the utterer of the evil prophecy. "As for Matthew Maule's posterity," says the romancer, "to all appearance they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race of people"; but "they were generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea as sailors before the mast"; and "so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... would soon learn, to her cost, how a very poverty-stricken ranchman lived. His examination of the larder had ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... secluded from the outer world, the annual influx of visitors from July to September is a positive boon, moral as well as material. The women are especially confidential, inviting us into their homely yet not poverty-stricken kitchens, keeping us as long as they can whilst they chat about their own lives or ask us questions. The beauty, politeness, and clear direct speech of the children, are remarkable. Life here is laborious, but downright want I should ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... it all there was one longing, one yearning for all that she had lost, all she had wantonly thrown away. Suffering Creek, with its poverty-stricken home on the dumps, suggested paradise to her now. She yearned as only a mother can yearn for the warm caresses of her children. She longed for the honest love of the little man whom, in the days of her arrogant ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... there are oyster-beds containing large and toothsome bivalves. With 'possums and 'coons, fish and oysters, is it strange that Cuffie clung to his old home long after his master had left it? is it a matter of wonder that there yet remains a remnant of the old slave population, houseless and poverty-stricken, clinging to the island that once gave them so delightful a home? At the close of the war, it is related, Mr. Stafford, proprietor of the central portion of the island, burned his negro houses to the ground, telling his people to go, as he had no more use for them nor they for him. Cumberland to-day ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... O, never, should he see her in her degraded state. Never should he behold her fallen, as she deemed, from her pride of beauty, the poverty-stricken inhabitant of a garret, with a name which had become a reproach, and a weight of guilt on her soul. But though impenetrably veiled from him, his public office permitted her to become acquainted with all his actions, his daily course of life, even his ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... temper his duty with a little substantial justice of his own. Thus he was once called upon to execute a judgment for $30 against a poor family. Gates went down to the premises, looked over the situation, talked to the man—a poverty-stricken, discouraged, ague-shaken creature—and marched back to the offices of the ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... a lady, and looked it, in spite of the piles of coarse mending, and the pair of trousers, almost bullet-proof with patches, out of which she drew her hand, roughened and reddened with hard labour, in spite of her patched and faded cotton gown, and the commonest and most poverty-stricken of peasant surroundings, which failed to hide that she had ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... the change from the old to the new regime in Utah. Leadership was no longer a dangerous honor. Proscription no longer made the authorities of the Church strong by persecution—hardy chiefs of a poverty-stricken people—leaders as sensible of the obligations of power as their followers were faithful in their allegiance of duty. Political freedom and worldly prosperity made the office of President a luxurious sovereignty, easily tyrannical, fortified in its religious absolutism by ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... one of those poverty-stricken natures which are never glad excepting for some special reason drawing them above themselves. She was naturally joyous and happy, unless under the pressure of an active sorrow that shaded her sky and ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... the greatest exploits were achieved for the pleasure of one's Lady-Love, and there were even such valiant knights, as Don Quixote, who went about the world proving by force of arms that their ladies had no peer. The poverty-stricken troubadours singing harmoniously about their beautiful women found them flying away in the arms of knights who had broken lances at tournaments, or had performed the greatest feats of arms. In fine, all the peoples of the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... these turns "dives" ... and he dived frequently.) He had gone off to the Caucasus to serve the Tzar and fatherland "with his breast," in the capacity of a yunker. And although a certain benevolent aunt had commiserated his poverty-stricken condition and had sent him an insignificant sum, nevertheless he asked me to help him to equip himself. I complied with his request, and for a period of two years thereafter I heard nothing about him. I must confess that I entertained strong doubts as to his having gone to the Caucasus. ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the sense of his disgrace in having his poverty-stricken boots come to the knowledge of the banker. Really, his mortification was so great that the accident seemed to him to put an end to all his hopes of further relations with Blanche and ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... "Don't say 'poverty-stricken', Wayland! A'm . . . rich. A've never known want! God has taken care of me since A put it squarely up to Him! A've my wife! A've my children! A've my ranch; an' my ranch pays for the school! A've never known want! Why, man, thirty dollars a year is more than A need for ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... on, and at the turning of the path, just where Middleton had met Eldredge, the new-comer appeared in sight. It was Hoper, in his usual dress of velveteen, looking now seedy, poverty-stricken, and altogether in ill-case, trudging moodily along, with his hat pulled over his brows, so that he did not see the ghastly object before him till his foot absolutely trod upon the dead man's hand. Being thus made aware of the proximity of ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the poverty-stricken shelves with a calculating eye, all his energy fired by enthusiasm at the prospect of doing something. Graham watched him with kindling liking and admiration. His old lips quivered a little before he ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... handmaid of the barracks, was a common person. She certainly belonged to the same mammiferous division of vertebrata as Mrs. Beaudesart, but there the affinity ended with a jerk. In a word, she was the low-born daughter of a late poverty-stricken Victorian selector. Her father, after twelve years' manful struggle with a bad selection, had hanged himself in the stable; whereupon the storekeeper had sold the movables, and the mortgagee the farm. Runnymede was Ida's first situation. Her wages, month by month, went to the support ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... this offer the woman, who seemed to be living so luxuriously, but was in reality poverty-stricken, embraced me with the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... at the entrance to the outer court of the temple. They did not stand there, as do the ushers in the West, in order to keep the riff-raff, those humble, poverty-stricken children of God, from occupying the plush-covered seats in His House; but knowing the intimate connection between religion and the senses, and the limited space of the court of sacrifice and the temple itself, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... furniture and the elegance that prevailed throughout this house mocked the threadbare raiment and poverty-stricken aspect of the man who threatened to drag her down to his own lower plane of life and association? Her innate pride, and her cultivated fondness for all beautiful objects, rebelled at the picture which her imagination painted in such sombre hues, and with a bitter cry of shame ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and drank them—did not merely glance at them and shake their heads. The ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom they were descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help respecting such prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the poverty-stricken class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a very different thing when I lived there twenty years later, and though port and Madeira were generally on the table, the only man whom I saw habitually drink them was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... towards the bed with a start He could not make out what the grandmother was saying. It was four years since he had heard Yiddish spoken, and he had almost forgotten the existence of the dialect The room, too, seemed chill and alien.—so unspeakably poverty-stricken. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill |
