"Scanty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hastings, that none of the pensions or allowances, assigned by the said Nabob in lieu of the estates confiscated, were paid, or were likely to be discharged, with that punctuality which was necessary even to the scanty subsistence of the persons to which they were in name ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of the most notable of the Irish writers, J.M. Synge, was born near Dublin in 1871 and died in that city in 1909. His brief span of life has yielded only scanty biographical data. He came of an old Wicklow family; he was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin; afterwards he wandered through much of Europe, finally settling ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... sheep mountain that sole eminence which offered a pasture ground to their sheep all the year round. In summer and autumn all the neighbouring fells, that were not mere rocks, yielded pasture more or less scanty. But Fairfield showed herself the alma mater of their flocks even in winter and early spring. So, at least, my local informants asserted. Mr. Ferguson, however, objects, as an unaccountable singularity, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... arranged, and producing a perfect harmony of colour and shade. I could now more easily believe the rest of her story; especially as I saw, every now and then, a certain heaving motion in the wings, as if they longed to be uplifted and outspread. But beneath her scanty garments complete wings could not be concealed, and indeed, from her own story, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... own resources, my mother strove to support herself and me by peddling pea mush or doing odds and ends of jobs. She had to struggle hard for our scanty livelihood and her trials and loneliness came home to me ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... all the comforts of home; but she would sometimes speak quick, and she was always sure to "speak her mind," be the rate of speech slow or quick. Simes Badger was a retired old salt and kept the light-house; not that scanty funds compelled him, but mostly because he must do something about the sea to keep him at all contented. Simes once remarked, "I'll allow that Stanshy is a leetle tart at times, and I've knowed her since she was a gal. But then if you take a good sour apple and stew it and sugar ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... less extended position, where he believed he could be more secure. He sought the Governor's authority for the step, which fact well indicates the critical nature of the whole situation. Sir George scribbled an emphatic 'No,' and resumed the scanty sleep from ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... steps to his dwelling-house. It was only a short distance from the factory, but the hedge and high bank on each side of the lane which conducted to it seemed to give it something of the appearance and feeling of seclusion. It was a small, whitewashed place, with a green porch over the door; scanty brown stalks showed in the garden soil near this porch, and likewise beneath the windows—stalks budless and flowerless now, but giving dim prediction of trained and blooming creepers for summer days. A grass plat and borders fronted the cottage. The borders ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... great mass of the people in Europe—men and women—were ignorant to the last degree, possessing little if any sense of delicacy or refinement, and were utterly uncouth. For the most part, they lived in miserable hovels, were clothed in a most meagre and scanty way, and were little better than those beasts of burden which are compelled to do their master's bidding. Among these people, rights depended quite largely upon physical strength, and women were generally misused. To the lord of the manor it was a matter of little importance ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... that season of the year the river was nearly dry, still there was a scanty herbage on and near its bank, intermixed with beds of rushes and high reeds; this was sufficient for the pasture of the cattle, but it was infested with lions and other animals, which at the dry season of the year kept near the river-bank ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... somehow," said Francis. "My coats were very threadbare and my meals scanty, but I weathered these three years, and then I got a good step, and crept up gradually. I have been now in this same bank for seventeen years, and am at present in the receipt of 250 pounds a year, thinking myself rich and fortunate;—now I am rich and unfortunate. Why did not my father ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... sides of the house were rustling boughs and cool grass and flower-beds. It suited my humor to sit in the scanty strip of shadow cast by the eaves, my feet upon the step that had soaked in the noonday heat, and to be as wretched as a five-year-old could make herself, with a sharp sense of injury boring like a bit of steel into her small soul. The room behind me was my mother's—the "chamber" ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... by which the passage of time could be measured. When all were sleepy they laid down to rest, and on awakening a small quantity of food was dealt out. After the scanty meal had been eaten they continued what every one now believed was useless labor, ceasing only when the desire for ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... an object which everybody stops to look at. Her aesthetic soul was at first greatly tried with the water-barrel which stood under the eaves spout,—a most necessary evil, since only thus could her scanty supply of soft water for domestic purposes be secured. One of the Graces, however, suggested to her a happy thought. She planted a row of morning-glories round the bottom of her barrel, and drove a row of tacks around the top, and strung her water-butt with ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... achieved by the Portuguese missions remains to be considered. In our present comparative ignorance of Japanese social history, it is not easy to understand the whole of the Christian episode. There are plenty of Jesuit-missionary [331] records; but the Japanese contemporary chronicles yield us scanty information about the missions—probably for the reason that an edict was issued in the seventeenth century interdicting, not only all books on the subject of Christianity, but any book containing the words Christian or Foreign. ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Deane! How utterly wretched and desolate she was, as she crouched before the scanty fire, and tried to warm the little bit of worn-out flannel, with which to wrap her mother's feet; and how hard she tried to force back the tears which would burst forth afresh whenever she looked upon that pale, sick mother, and thought how soon she ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... In the scanty journals kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... black stinking mud, heaped up and pressed against his bosom; or to labor in drawing huge blocks of stone to build the mole; or in building and repairing the fortifications, with numerous other painful and disgusting tasks. The only food was a scanty supply of black bread, and occasionally a few decayed olives, or sheep which had died from some disorder. At night they were crowded into that most horrid of prisons the Bagnio, to sleep on a little filthy straw, amidst the most noisome stenches. Their limbs in chains, and often receiving ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... on service activities connected with the country's strategic location and status as a free trade zone in northeast Africa. Two-thirds of the inhabitants live in the capital city, the remainder being mostly nomadic herders. Scanty rainfall limits crop production to fruits and vegetables, and most food must be imported. Djibouti provides services as both a transit port for the region and an international transshipment and refueling center. It has few natural resources ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and bony Blaessel was also spared him. With sticks and steed, therefore, he quitted his native place, and began to take his rounds abroad, scarcely hoping to gather what was denied him amongst his own people—a scanty pittance. It was little that poor Nicholas got to break and bite upon his road; he made amends for the deficiency by consulting the brandy flask, from which the deserted one sucked his temporary solace. With the hot liquor in his head, he could whistle and sing, forget his misery, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Exchange does the price of wheat. But there is one thing he can do to raise himself in civil stature, moral growth, and domestic comfort. He may empty the Jug into the Basket. He and his family may consume in solids what they now do in frothy fluids. They may exchange their scanty dinner of cold bacon and bread for one of roast beef and plum pudding, by substituting cold coffee, cocoa or pure water for strong beer. Or, if they are content to go on with their old fare of food, they may save the money they expended in ale for the rent of one or two acres of ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... himself, at the time of an earlier edition, edited once more the poems, employing an original MS. presented to him by Mr. Murray. In a note in Woodstock, Sir Walter sums up the information he had procured concerning the author, which, scanty as it is, is not without interest. "Of Carey," he says, "the second editor, like the first, only knew the name and the spirit of the verses. He has since been enabled to ascertain that the poetic cavalier was a ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... cloisters, but which has almost perished, he introduced Brancacci, his employer, Brunelleschi, Donatello, some of whose innovating work in stone he was doing in paint, Giovanni de' Medici and Masolino. The scanty remains of this fresco tell us that it must have ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... in the western part of the United States whence most of these metals are obtained has been the scene of many tragedies. It is an inhospitable region, scanty in both animal and vegetable life, where climatic conditions call for heroic daring on the part of those who would search out its hidden mysteries; it is a land of death-dealing mirages, yet containing untold wealth for the miner, and likewise ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... ride, or, as was more frequently the case, when compelled to bivouac in the forest before the fire kindled by the industry of the hardy Aid-de-Camp, served them as their only couch of rest, while the small leather valise tied to the pummel of the saddle, and containing their scanty wardrobe, was made to do the duty of the absent pillow. The blanket Gerald found to be the greatest advantage of his grotesque equipment—so much so indeed, that when compelled, by the heavy rains which took place shortly after their departure, to make it ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... but scanty appetite. He drank a cup of coffee and ate part of a roll. Scarcely had he finished, and directed the removal of the dishes, than the servant ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... troubled him. He turned with a quick, disturbed movement and put the candle down. The light streaming upward into his face showed the countenance of a man so degraded by intemperance that everything attractive had died out of it. His clothes were scanty, worn almost to tatters, and soiled with the slime and dirt of many an ash-heap or gutter where he had slept off his almost daily fits of drunkenness. There was an air of irresolution about him, and a strong play of ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... in an untidy knot, slipped from the hairpins, and fell, grey and scanty, over her neck; her bony shoulders, barely covered by the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... approaching dawn were lighting up the eastern horizon; but he saw them not; they were effectually hidden from his sight by the dazzling brightness of the flames and the dense clouds of smoke which went rolling heavily to leeward before the now scanty wind. The fire had made steady progress during the night, the hull forward being burned down nearly to the waters' edge; while aft, the flames had extended to the after hatchway, and the main-mast, burnt through at its heel, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... low-cut waistcoats, clubmen, shining bald heads, wide partings in scanty hair, light-coloured gloves, big opera-glasses raised and directed towards various points. In the galleries a mixture of different social sets and all kinds of dress, all the people well known as figuring at this kind of solemnity, and the embarrassing promiscuity which places the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... It will be no scanty, obscure, uncertain deliverance. There shall be light in it, glory in it. The world battles with its troubles and seems sometimes to be successful, until we see how those troubles have shaken its spirit and twisted its temper; ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... Wilkins as if he possessed the strength of Samson and the wisdom of Solomon. He received her respect as if it was his due, and now and then graciously accorded her a few words beyond the usual scanty allowance of morning and evening greetings. At his shop all day, she only saw him at meals and sometimes of an evening, for Mrs. Wilkins tried to keep him at home safe from temptation, and Christie helped her by reading, talking, and frolicking with the children, so ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... featherless and crest-fallen. For, Mr. Clay's resolution sweeps by the board all those stereotyped common-places, as "Congress a local Legislature," "consent of the District," "bound to consult the wishes of the District," &c. &c., which for the last two sessions of Congress have served to eke out scanty supplies. It declares, that as slavery existed in Maryland and Virginia at the time of the cession, and as it still continues in both those states, it could not be abolished in the District without a violation ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... given them, drove harder than ever against the Northern line. They crashed through it in many places, seizing prisoners and cannon. Almost the whole Northern camp was now in their possession, and many of the Southern lads, hungry from scanty rations, stopped to seize the plenty that they found there, but enough persisted to give the Northern army no rest, and press it back nearer ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... above any, I went to pay my court to Joanna Baillie. I found on her brow, not indeed a coronal of gold, but a serenity and strength undimmed and unbroken by the weight of more than fourscore years, or by the scanty appreciation which her thoughts ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... yellow, and pitiably thin, were used with a grace which checked to some extent their cruel betrayal of her age. Her dress had seen better days, but it was worn with an air which forbade it to look actually shabby. The faded lace that encircled her neck fell in scanty folds over her bosom. She sank into a chair by Hugh's side. "It was a great pleasure to me, Mr. Mountjoy, to offer my poor services to Miss Henley; I can't tell you how happy her presence makes me in our little house." The compliment was addressed to Iris with every advantage ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... second place, this rebellion does not teach the danger of educating the negro; for the negro of Jamaica never has been educated. While the government has wrung from his scanty wages a million dollars, it pays the Governor alone more than three times the sum it appropriates to education. It doles out for the education of seventy-five thousand children the pittance of twelve thousand ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the sight of her. Madame Desvignes had died six months previously, passing away, even as she had lived, gently and discreetly, at the termination of her task, which had chiefly consisted in rearing her two daughters on the scanty means at her disposal. Still it was she, who, before quitting the scene, had found a husband for her granddaughter, Berthe, in the person of Philippe Havard, a young engineer who had recently been appointed assistant-manager at a State factory near Mareuil. It was at ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... of the farming-class a body of energetic, thrifty, intelligent, and aspiring people. Scotland and New England alike owe some of their best as well as their least attractive traits to bitter climate and a parsimonious soil; and the rural population of either is pushed into emigration by the scanty harvests at home. It is not a little singular that the Yankee and the canny Scot should each stand as a butt for the wit of his neighbors, while each has a shrewdness all his own. The Scotch, it is true, are said to be unusually impervious to a joke, while our Down-Easters are perhaps the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... own, and that was none other but such an one as was false. So then, the Pharisee is by this time quite out of doors; his righteousness is worth nothing, his prayer is worth nothing, his thanks to God are worth nothing; for that what he had was scanty, and imperfect, and it was his pride that made him offer it to God for acceptance; nor could his fawning thanksgiving better his case, or make his matter at all good ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and three quarters. Their fur was extremely thick, soft, and of the most beautiful whiteness imaginable. We saw no deer near Port Bowen at any season, neither were we visited by their enemies the wolves. A single ermine and a few mice (Mus Hudsonius) complete, I believe, our scanty list of quadrupeds at this desolate and ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... high narrow ridge level along the top and sloping abruptly on each side extends northward from the hills on the right side of Roubidoux Creek and terminates in a vertical cliff. Bedrock projects on the top and on both sides, and vegetation is so scanty that the crest ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... constitutes, in fact, the very essence of Freemasonry? "The names of God," said a learned theologian at the beginning of this century, "were intended to communicate the knowledge of God himself. By these, men were enabled to receive some scanty ideas of his essential majesty, goodness, and power, and to know both whom we are to believe, and what we are ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for four ancient maidens,—with whom it is best the family should die out, unless it can begin again as its great-grandfather did. Now a million is a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious form the summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... announce the cause of his being brought thither. But such was the activity of the soldiers employed, that they followed him close at the heels, and, entering with their ghastly burden, laid MacEagh on the floor of the apartment. His features, naturally wild, were now distorted by pain; his hands and scanty garments stained with his own blood, and those of others, which no kind hand had wiped away, although the wound in his side had ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... erected over the grave where they had been lying for two decades, and for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of his murdered relatives. Paris was full of returning royalists. Banished exiles with grand old names, who had been earning a scanty living by teaching French and dancing in Vienna, London, and even in New York, were hastening to Paris for a joyful Restoration; and Louis XVIII., while Russian and Austrian troops guarded him on the streets of his own capital, was freely talking ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... diamond mines assisted the government, both in Brazil and in the mother country, to make a stand in the midst of the eminent peril which threatened, in consequence of the losses sustained in the east, while at home there was a scanty and impoverished population, ruined manufactures, and, above all, a neglect of agriculture, that rendered Portugal dependent on foreigners for corn. Every thing was wanted; there was nothing to return; and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Brazil may be truly said ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... when the whole world speaks against thee, yea, opposes thee with all its powers?" When some, who, on account of his extraordinary acquirements, had ranged themselves among his most prominent supporters, began to draw back, Vadianus became cooler and Erasmus put into his scanty and formal letters expressions of ill-humor. How worthy of all honor did the man stand here, who did not suffer himself to be ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... in her arms, and there was no getting her away. I felt sad enough myself, but there was scanty time for grieving; for a party of Spaniards, headed by one of the Acadians, was close up to the mound on the side which I was defending. I shot the Acadian; but another, the sixth, and last but one, took his place. "Rachel!" cried I, "the rifle, for God's sake, the rifle! a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... of potatoes rest side by side, sits down (close cuddled up to the old dame) to fill his little empty stomach with as many of those esculent roots as he can manage, which, in truth, is the poor child's only dinner from year's end to year's end. And yet it is a remarkable fact that, in spite of this scanty fare, the Irish peasant, when come to man's estate, is ever strong and vigorous and well grown. And who shall say he hasn't done his queen good service, too, on many a battle-field? and even in these latter days, when sad rebellion racks our land, has not his name been worthy of ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... us in that place, *summoner That had a fire-red cherubinnes face, For sausefleme* he was, with eyen narrow. *red or pimply As hot he was and lecherous as a sparrow, With scalled browes black, and pilled* beard: *scanty Of his visage children were sore afeard. There n'as quicksilver, litharge, nor brimstone, Boras, ceruse, nor oil of tartar none, Nor ointement that woulde cleanse or bite, That him might helpen of his whelkes* ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... an appeal to his reason, but finding that impregnable, he pulled out his scanty purse to guarantee his sincerity with an offer of pledgemoney. The waggoner waved it aside. He wanted no money, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Perces, so that, although the hunters of the garrison were continually on the alert, ranging the country round, they brought in scarce game sufficient to keep famine from the door. Now and then there was a scanty meal of fish or wild-fowl, occasionally an antelope; but frequently the cravings of hunger had to be appeased with roots, or the flesh of wolves and muskrats. Rarely could the inmates of the cantonment boast of having made a full meal, and ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... mathematics: witness that miracle of the loaves and fishes. Our Lord said to His disciples: "Give ye them to eat," and as they divided, He multiplied the scanty provision; as they subtracted from it He added to it; as they decreased it by distributing, He increased it for distributing. And it has been beautifully said of all holy partnerships, that griefs shared are divided, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... leave only four or five eyes; and though the subject of poverty is too serious to joke on, the withered and stunted appearance of the country people exactly corresponded to that of these dry pollards. I trust that we were in some degree deceived by their natural ugliness, and that hard labour and scanty profits are not the only reasons which render their tout ensemble such a contrast to the healthy robust looks of the Normans and Picards, whose very horses show the effects of their ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... of the little Red House. Saddest of all her sad days I think my mother felt it to be, seeing the bounties and friends at the tables of others and unable to make her own worthy of the occasion. She sometimes spared an aged and unprofitable hen from her scanty flock and made us each a custard in an earthen cup. For that day she brought out her only silver, six tea spoons, and spread on her round table her only table cloth, hand-woven and white as snow. In the evening we parched corn over the hearth fire. My mother sat at one corner of the fireplace ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... the dust that runs out of the notch is coarse and brown, it means that the wood is too soft; when it is very fine and scanty it means that the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... thy scanty mantle clad, Thy snowy bosom sunward spread, Thou lift'st thy unassuming head In humble guise; But now the share uptears thy bed, And low ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... pressing wants and daring spirit of the British emigrant. One important hindrance is noticed by Flinders,—the scarcity of water,—but the presence of so many animals shows that there is an abundance somewhere, though he could find but a scanty supply in one single spot. In Kangaroo Island only one accident occurred which showed any disposition or power on the part of its old inhabitants to wage war with the intruders. One of the sailors having attacked a large seal without proper caution, was so severely bitten in the leg, that ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... length perceiving a servant throwing the fragments from an eating cloth, he advanced, and gathering them up, sat down in a corner, and gnawed the bones and half-eaten morsels with eagerness; after which, lifting up his eyes towards heaven, he thanked God for his scanty meal. The servant, who had observed his motions, was surprised and affected at his wretched condition and devotion, of which he informed his master; who, being a charitable man, took from his purse ten sherifs, which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... Bratton and Shields and all the other artisans fell to fashioning dugouts from the tall pines and cedars, hewing and burning and shaping, until at length they had transports for their scanty store of goods. By the first week of October they were at the junction of their river with the Snake. An old medicine man of the Nez Perces, Twisted Hair, a man who also could make maps, had drawn ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... and rewarded the wit of the saying with a heavy bracelet. Then Wigg, thrusting out his right arm decked with the bracelet, put his left behind his back in affected shame, and walked with a ludicrous gait, declaring that he, whose lot had so long been poverty-stricken, was glad of a scanty gift. When he was asked why he was behaving so, he said that the arm which lacked ornament and had no splendour to boast of was mantling with the modest blush of poverty to behold the other. The ingenuity of this saying won him ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... road to Croghan's house, where was a negro wench to aid them and a soldier-servant to serve them. And the odd bits of furniture that had been used at our General's headquarters had been taken there to eke out with rough make-shifts, fashioned by Alden's men, a very scanty establishment for these ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... a royal hospital here, which is one of the most necessary and useful things in this land for the health and treatment of the poor soldiers and of the other people who serve your Majesty. Although its income is but scanty, if it had some one to distribute it efficiently, and to care for it properly, there would be sufficient aid from the many alms given by the inhabitants who can do something. It is most necessary for its good government and maintenance for your Majesty to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... brothers constructed a "prairie schooner" from our scanty belongings, and one forlorn morning in early autumn, with the skeleton horse and cow harnessed tandem for motive power, we all set ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... in a stick to feed the chimney rent, Where scanty pith ill fills the narrow sheath, The vapour, in its little channel pent, Struggles, tormented by the fire beneath; And, till its prisoned fury find a vent, Is heard to hiss and bubble, sing and seethe: So the offended myrtle inly ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... electricity at Chatham, his chair at the London University, his partnership with Sir William Thomson and Mr. Varley in many ingenious patents, his growing credit with engineers and men of science; and he is to bear in mind that of all this activity and acquist of reputation, the immediate profit was scanty. Soon after his marriage, Fleeming had left the service of Messrs. Liddell & Gordon, and entered into a general engineering partnership with Mr. Forde, a gentleman in a good way of business. It was a fortunate partnership in this, that the parties retained their mutual respect unlessened ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... back from the chase ten days after, when he rode out to meet him and they saluted each other; and when King Shahryar looked at King Shah Zaman he saw how the hue of health had returned to him, how his face had waxed ruddy and how he ate with an appetite after his late scanty diet. He wondered much and said, "O my brother, I was so anxious that thou wouldst join me in hunting and chasing, and wouldst take thy pleasure and pastime in my dominion!" He thanked him and excused himself; then the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... need even for the scanty inquiry that in those days preceded sentence. In every line of his beautiful face, marred as it was by sickness and suffering—in the unconquerable dignity, which dirt and raggedness were powerless ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... with a couple of brown oarsmen in scanty kilts of blue. The speaker, who was steering, wore white clothes, the full dress of the tropics; a wide hat shaded his face; but it could be seen that he was of stalwart size, and his voice sounded like a gentleman's. So much could be made out. It was plain, besides, that the Farallone ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... well-bred, fine-tempered, and high-spirited little Egyptians were replaced by a mongrel lot, hastily congregated from every breeding ground in Europe. The Fellahs, who had expected great things from the mission of MM. Goschen and Joubert, asked wonderingly if those financiers had died; while a scanty Nile, ten to twelve feet lower, they say, than any known during the last thousand years, added to the troubles of the poor, by throwing some 600,000 feddans (acres) out of gear, and by compelling an exodus from the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... wore on a few stars came out in a discouraged kind of way. Heretofore he had been steering by the wind; now, that scanty peripatetic band, adrift on celestial highways, assisted him in keeping his course. When one sleepy-eyed planet went in, another, not far away (from the human scope of survey) came out, and Francois, with the perspicacity of a follower of the sea, seemed to have learned how ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... consisted of native-made cloth or matting, and was very scanty, but in many cases was tastefully put on and intermingled with flowers. Some of the men wore a feather in their hair; others wore a wig made of the hair of men and dogs. Both sexes wore ear-rings made of pieces of stones, shells, or berries, which ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the lower against the oppression of the upper class. The crown became, sooner or later, despotic; the peasantry, by a long series of enactments, extending to the end of the seventeenth century, was reduced to servitude; the population grew scanty, and much of the land went out of cultivation. All this is related by the Protestant historians and divines, not in the tone of reluctant admission, but with patriotic indignation, commensurate with the horrors of the truth. In all these countries Lutheran unity subsisted. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... bring together vast masses of ancient theology and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The Theogony attempts to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the Gods; The Catalogue of Women and the Eoiai, preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix in canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and hypotheses by which most royal families in central Greece recorded their descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God. The Works ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... black. Their noses, it is said, incline to be flat, their foreheads recede, and their lips are thick. They live in rude and easily removable huts made of leaves and branches, subsist on jungle birds, beasts, roots, and fruits, and wear a scanty covering made from the inner bark of a species of Artocarpus. They are expert hunters, and have most ingenious methods of capturing both the elephant and the "recluse rhinoceros." They are divided into tribes, which are ruled by chiefs on the patriarchal ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Roumania. Starting from the arbitrary and controvertible premises that the native Jews of Roumania domiciled there for centuries are "aliens not subject to foreign protection," the ability of the Jew to earn even the scanty means of existence that suffice for a frugal race has been constricted by degrees, until nearly every opportunity to win a livelihood is denied; and until the helpless poverty of the Jew has constrained an exodus of such proportions as to cause ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... numerous troop; but, to so many famished men it presented only very feeble resource. Morgan, who did not suffer less from hunger than the rest, generously appropriated none of it to his own use, but caused this scanty supply to be distributed among those who were just ready to faint. Many, indeed, were almost dying. These were conveyed on board the boats, the charge of which was committed to them; while those who had hitherto had the care of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... flew back over the years, and took up again the thread of her relations with Evan, and traced them to their beginning; and went over all the ground, going back and forward, recalling every meeting, and reviewing every one of those too scanty hours. For a long while she had not been able to do this, because Evan, she thought, had been faithless, and in that case she really never had had what she thought she had in him. Now she knew he was not faithless, and she had got the ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... A scanty few are they, who when they hear Such tidings, hasten. O ye race of men Though born to soar, why suffer ye a wind So slight to baffle ye? He led us on Where the rock parted; here against my front Did beat his wings, then promis'd I should fare In safety on my way. As to ascend That steep, upon whose ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... to a dreary plain again. Plenty of vines there are in the open fields, but of a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about straight sticks. Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere; but an extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children than I ever encountered. I don't believe we saw a hundred children between Paris and Chalons. Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled: with odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... stories of the brutality shown to the Allied prisoners by the Hun, the English and French have too much humanity to retaliate. Time and again I have seen British soldiers who were bringing in Germans stop and spend their own scanty pocket money for their captives' comfort. ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... daily life I could never hope to be an unfailing fountain of energy and bounteous love. My health is frail; my earthly life is shrunk to a scanty rill; I am little better than an aspiration, which the ages will reward, by empowering me to incessant acts of vigorous beauty. But now it is well with me to be with those who do not suffer overmuch to have me suffer. It is best for me to serve where I ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... powers, though none attained the excellence of their great precursors. Although a number of works representing this school still exist in the various countries of Europe, yet compared with the actual abundance of them at one time they constitute but a scanty remnant. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... stumbling over it as he walked. His head was bare, and his coarse, blue-striped shirt, open at the throat, displayed an embrowned and muscular neck. Emerging from out a sort of cell, or den, contrived by nature or art in the side of the cliff, he threw on a scanty fire, which burned between two hollowed rocks, a small log of pine wood, and then returning to his cave, and bringing from it an iron pot, which contained water, he scooped with his toil-hardened hands a resting-place for it in the ashes, and placed it on the embers. It was ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... already occupied the foresight of the last Congress, and which will deserve your serious deliberations. Our Navy, commenced at an early period of our present political organization upon a scale commensurate with the incipient energies, the scanty resources, and the comparative indigence of our infancy, was even then found adequate to cope with all the powers of Barbary, save the first, and with one of the principle ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... She had curled her red hair on a pair of old-fashioned tongs. The curling irons were but a quarter of an inch in diameter and they were heated by thrusting them into the living embers of the kitchen fire. When Sary drew the comb through her scanty tresses they took on the appearance of carrot- colored cotton threads which had just been ripped out of an old garment—so crinkly and frizzed were the strands of hair. The flowered organdy dress that Eleanor had given Sary to wear for the great occasion of receiving a ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... reclined musingly in a two-horse wagon, the canvas covering of which served in some measure to protect him from the wind and rain. His servant, Joe Beck, was perched upon one of the horses, his shoulders screwed under the scanty folds of an oil-cloth cape, and his knees drawn nearly up to the pommel of the saddle, to avoid the thumping bushes and briers that occasionally assailed him, as the team plunged along in a stumbling pace. Their pathway, or rather their direction, for there was no beaten road, lay along the ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... paradoxical enough to believe that poor Winstanley never wrote these sentences which have destroyed his fame. To support my theory, it is needful to recount the very scanty knowledge we possess of his life. He is said to have been a barber, and to have risen by his exertions with the razor; but, against that legend, is to be posed the fact that on the titles of his earliest ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... in the case of the pure types. Individuals were noted with other negroid features but with curly hair, showing a probable mixture of blood. The hair grows low on the forehead and is very thick. Eyebrows are not heavy, save in particular instances, and beard is very scanty, though all adult males have some beard. There is very little body hair on adults of either Sex, except in the axillary and pubic regions, and it is scant even in these places. The northern Negritos have practically none in the armpits. ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the bridge; and Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of their scanty leisure in playing billiards and shooting Black-buck with the young man. He had been bear-led by an English tutor of sporting tastes for some five or six years, and was now royally wasting the revenues accumulated during his minority by the Indian Government. ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... closed his eyes during two nights and three days, for the rest obtained while he and Abdur Kad'r awaited the outcome of Hussain's embassy was calculated rather to add to his physical exhaustion than relieve it. He had covered eighty miles of desert on scanty fare, and had fought a short but terrific fight against a dozen adversaries. Yet, his cool demeanor and unwearied carriage conveyer! no hint of fatigue— to all outward seeming he might have been entering the encampment after an ordinary march, when ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... rivers and streams. The Great Shamokin Path followed the Susquehanna from Shamokin (now Sunbury) to the West Branch, then out along the West Branch to the Allegheny Mountains.[4] Loading his wife and smaller children on a pack horse, his scanty possessions on another horse, the prospective settler drove a cow or two into the wild frontier at the rate of about twenty miles a day.[5] This meant that a trip of approximately two days brought him from Fort Augusta to the Fair ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... loyalty was little warmer than the atmosphere; and when the five were further forced to make the best they could of two narrow trundle-beds, but a brief time before deemed none too good for the coloured servitors, with a scanty supply of bedclothes to eke the discomfort, he became quite of the same mind with Tabitha. Even the most flaming love of royalty and realm serves not to keep warm toes extended beyond short blankets at Christmas-tide. It is not strange that late in December, 1776, all ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... after a few days had oats and barley in a profusion which, although far from careless, might well have seemed to her unlimited. Twice every day, sometimes oftener, Richard went to see her, and envied the rapidity of her recovery from the weakness which scanty rations, loss of blood, and the inflammation of her wounds had caused. Had there been any immediate call for his services, however, that would have brought his strength with it. Had the struggle been still going on upon the fields of battle instead ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... they were bound was on the further side of the chain of rocks, nearly two miles from Rockquay, and one of the roads ran along the top of the red cliffs that shut it in, with no opening except where the stream emerged, and even that a very scanty bank ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a happy one; salmon (leaxus) had been already mentioned; and sprods will be found to be a very confined local name for what, in other places, are called scurfes or scurves, and which we, in our ignorance, designate as salmon trout. In the very scanty A.-S. ichthyologic nomenclature we possess, there is nothing to lead us to imagine that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had any corresponding word for a salmon trout. I must be excused, therefore, for still clinging ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... referred to was John Smeaton, whose history, so far as the scanty materials will allow, shall here be given to ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... to 1823, the crops in Ireland had been scanty, particularly those of potatoes. In 1821 the potato crop was a complete failure; and in 1822 it is impossible to tell, and dreadful to think, of what might have been the consequence, had not the English people come forward, and by the most stupendous act of national generosity which the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... had begun, the deed was as clear as day; but the evidence concerning the perpetrator was so scanty that, although all circumstances pointed strongly towards the "Blue Smocks," nothing but conjectures could be risked. One clue seemed to throw some light upon the matter; there were reasons, however, why but little dependence ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... public are informed that the scenery is by Pitt, (where is Tomkins?) and others: the machinery by Mr. Hayley, and the lightning by the direction of Mr. Outhwaite! Bat will the public be satisfied with such scanty information? Who, they will ask the manager, rolls the thunder? who supplies the coloured fires? who flashes the lightning? who beats the gong? who grinds up the curtain? Let Mr. Yates be speedy in relieving the breathless curiosity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... necessarily implied in the form of discourse called a Proposition, why do I object to it as the scientific definition of what a proposition means? Because, though the mere collocation which makes the proposition a proposition, conveys no more than this scanty amount of meaning, that same collocation combined with other circumstances, that form combined with other matter, does convey more, and the proposition in those other circumstances does assert more, than merely that ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... a few years' work, the skin becomes calloused and tough. The hands become claws or talons—broken and disfigured. The muckers laughed at us. They saw we were concerned about trifles. Bloody sweat and hot oil held the red dust around us like a tight-fitting garment. Our scanty clothing was glued to our bodies. Our shoes were filled with water, but that ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... no longer indicated the boy, and as he was tall and large for his years, the fashionable suit he wore, his gay scarf with its sparkling pin, and his brightly polished boots, did not appear out of place upon him. But Edna often declared that she had thought him a great deal better-looking in the scanty, well-worn, but more graceful garments in which he had disported himself on the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... lodges at night and placed near them. These animals are very severely treated; for whole days they are pursuing the buffaloe, or burdened with the fruits of the chase, during which they scarcely ever taste food, and at night return to a scanty allowance of wood; yet the spirit of this valuable animal sustains him through all these difficulties, and he is rarely deficient either in flesh ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... come to Dartford on Saturday for lessons. Will you all come and have tea with me? You shall meet my husband, who is a very jolly sort of man, and we can show you some of our curiosities, which we have collected from time to time in our scanty travels. We are precious poor, so you mustn't expect anything but a very plain tea—bread and butter and jam; but you will have enough, and that is something, and you will see the inside of a ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... was a simple one; and with strips of linen for which Marion sacrificed some of her scanty supply of clothing, and the thin sticks of tough aspen wood, the leg ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... is no captive from the wilderness," he replied. "The heathen savage would have given him to eat of his scanty morsel, and to drink of his birchen cup; but Christian men, alas! had cast him ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... began the surgeon; "I am painfully conscious that the facts which I am in a position to lay before you are very scanty and unsatisfactory." ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... afternoon the spacious floor, well known to many who attend the workers' meetings, is filled by adult classes of women. At the close an address is given, often by a returned missionary, and many among these very poor of the flock bring their offerings, scanty in themselves, but surely much prized in the sight of Him whose love has constrained them; twice over has a precious offering been given to me for the Punrooty Mission—once from the adult classes, and again from the younger Sunday scholars. The adult Sunday-school ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... 1522, the Trinity, commanded by Gonzala Gomez de Espinosa, another of the ships of Magellan, sailed from Tidore for New Spain. And, as the wind was scanty, they steered towards the N. E. in lat. 16 deg. N. where they found two islands, which they named the Islands of St John. In lat. 20 deg. N. they came to another island, which they called la Griega, where some of the simple natives ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... vegetable in these well-watered portions of the continent are varied and plentiful. In striking contrast with the fertility and abundance of these favoured regions are the stony plains and bare rocky ranges of the interior, where water is scarce, vegetation scanty, and animal life at certain seasons of the year can only with difficulty be maintained. It would be no wonder if the natives of these arid sun-scorched wildernesses should have lagged behind even their savage brethren of the coasts in respect of material and social progress; and in fact there ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... sires had dared to leave Less scanty measure of those graceful rites And usages, whose due return invites A stir of mind too natural to deceive; Giving the memory help when she could weave A crown for Hope!—I dread the boasted lights That all too often are but fiery blights, ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... intention to wander over all the debatable ground of the Cabot voyages, where every circumstance bristles with conflicting theories. The original authorities are few and scanty, but mountains of hypotheses have been built upon them, and too often the suppositions of one writer have been the facts of a succeeding one. Step by step the learned students before alluded to have established certain propositions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... but a scanty one, for the Lycosa has not the wealth of silk possessed by the Weaving Spiders, lines the walls of the tube and keeps the loose earth from falling. This plaster, which cements the incohesive and smooths the rugged parts, is reserved more particularly for the top of the gallery, near the mouth. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... she had to act the part of a Roman daughter, and give strength out of her own scanty stock to her father. Mr. hale would hope, would not despair, between the attacks of his wife's malady; he buoyed himself up in every respite from her pain, and believed that it was the beginning of ultimate recovery. And so, when ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... however, only those which are perpetually fed by those tributary streams that flow down from mountains which are covered with snow all the year, and these are not many. The majority of Spanish rivers are very scanty of water during the summer time, and very rapid in their flow when filled by rains or melting snow: during these periods they are impracticable for boats. They are, moreover, much exhausted by being drained off, bled, ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... both my mother and grandmother would have set down as in extremely bad taste. My companion soon cleared up this little matter, by informing me that the toilet of these artless damsels, so bright in color and scanty in places, was in strict keeping with the standard of fashion adopted by the very best society, which was to be more undressed than dressed, that the devil-who always wanted to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... many were seized and put to death with cruel torture, and often those who returned in safety were robbed of what they had gleaned at so great peril. The most inhuman tortures were inflicted by those in power, to force from the want-stricken people the last scanty supplies which they might have concealed. And these cruelties were not infrequently practised by men who were themselves well fed, and who were merely desirous of laying up a store of provision for ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... of 1813, the Guards were stationed with head-quarters at St Jean de Luz, and most comfortable we managed to make them. For some short time previously we had been on scanty commons, and had undergone considerable privation: indeed we might have said, like the Colonel to Johnny Newcome on his arrival to join his regiment, "We sons of Mars have long been fed on brandy and cigars." I had no cause to ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... Hence that beam of light was most welcome to us which that most excellent thinker brought down to us through dark clouds. One must be a young man to render present to one's self the effect which Lessing's "Laocooen" produced upon us, by transporting us out of the region of scanty perceptions into the open fields of thought. The /ut pictura poesis/, so long misunderstood, was at once laid aside: the difference between plastic and speaking art [Footnote: Bildende und Redende Kunst." The expression "speaking art" is used ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... door a bag o' meal, And in the kist was plenty O' guid hard cakes his mither bakes, And bannocks werena scanty. A guid fat sow, a sleeky cow Was standing in the byre, Whilst lazy puss with mealy mouse Was playing at ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... sufferings; I will not pause to tell you how, when I beheld young men still free and happy, married, fathers of children, cheerfully toiling at their work, my heart reproached me with the greatness and vanity of my unhappy sacrifice. I will not describe to you how, worn by poverty, poor lodging, scanty food, and an unquiet conscience, my health began to fail, and in the long nights, as I wandered bedless in the rainy streets, the most cruel sufferings of the body were added to the tortures of my mind. These things are not personal to me; they are ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... rate, he was given some hours to marshal his forces for the discussion with the representatives of Scotland Yard. He knew well that he must then face the dilemma boldly. Two courses were open. He could either share Bates's scanty knowledge, no more and no less, or avow his ampler observations. And why should he adopt the first of these alternatives? Was he not bringing himself practically ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... the lovely view; Unseen is Yanina, though not remote, Veiled by the screen of hills: here men are few, Scanty the hamlet, rare the lonely cot: But, peering down each precipice, the goat[fc] Browseth; and, pensive o'er his scattered flock, The little shepherd in his white capote[24.B.] Doth lean his boyish form along the rock, Or in his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... undergrowth of shrubs give it an air of desolation, not to say danger. It is certainly not the place that a professional man would choose to be abroad in after dark. The inhabitants, living, so it is said, on their scanty dividends and on such parts of their income as our taxation is still unable to reach, are not people that one would care to ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... disadvantage, that Hanson has not yet made anything but the most scanty of statements. Fearing for his life, since this gang will stick at nothing, he has been closely guarded by the police from the moment he made his preliminary statement. Every effort which has been made to ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... themselves, and right noisily, too. They were all dressed alike, and in the fashion which in that day prevailed among serving-men and 'prentices{1}—that is to say, each had on the crown of his head a flat black cap about the size of a saucer, which was not useful as a covering, it being of such scanty dimensions, neither was it ornamental; from beneath it the hair fell, unparted, to the middle of the forehead, and was cropped straight around; a clerical band at the neck; a blue gown that fitted closely and hung as low as the knees or lower; full sleeves; a broad red belt; bright yellow ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Pathetic proof of this meets the traveller at every turn on the west coast of Ireland. As he tramps the byways and unfrequented paths of County Clare, his eye is caught from time to time by an artless array of shelves on the sloping banks of some meadow spring. On the shelves are scanty votive offerings, piteous to see. Piteous, not on the score of the superstition which prompts them—that is a matter to be dealt with in a spirit of broad sympathy, on its historic and social merits—but because of the dire poverty they reveal. Even its of broken crockery are ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... black. Not only the public buildings, the shops, and the better residences were draped in funeral decorations, but still more touching proof of affection was seen in the poorest class of houses, where laboring men of both colors found means in their penury to afford some scanty show of mourning. The interest and veneration of the people still centered in the White House, where, under a tall catafalque in the East Room, the late chief lay in the majesty of death, and not at the modest tavern on Pennsylvania Avenue, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... that a severe financial pressure was upon us. I had spent what I could immediately command of my own funds, and the good brethren had contributed so generously out of their scanty means, to place the Church in condition for use, that they could not meet the Pastor's salary. I saw clearly that some other provision ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... subsistence. Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during the earlier and less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its character in all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict as to afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting the means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an advance is presently made beyond this early stage of technological development. Industrial efficiency is presently carried ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... "Yavash-yavash" ("Slowly, slowly"). On the whole we found them good-natured and companionable fellows, notwithstanding their interest in baksheesh which we were compelled at last, in self-defense, to fix at one piaster an hour. We frequently shared with them our frugal, and even scanty meals; and in turn they assisted us in our purchases and arrangements for lodgings, for their word, we found, was with the common people an almost unwritten law. Then, too, they were of great assistance in crossing ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... exception to the general rule. A judge, he says, ought to be allowed to sit in the legislature as a representative of the people; for the best school for a legislator is the judicial bench; and the supply of legislative skill is in all societies so scanty that none ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were ready to take up arms in his defense; but he declined their assistance, and withdrew privately from the city. Saturninus brought forward other popular measures, of which our information is very scanty. He proposed a Lex Frumentaria, by which the state was to sell corn to the people at a very low price; and also a law for founding new colonies in Sicily, Achaia, and Macedonia. In the election of the magistrates for the following year Saturninus was again chosen Tribune. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... of safety lay in getting into the open and across the water before the fire reached us, and we were nearly, very nearly caught. The bush grew denser as we went on, and was filled with "lawyers," which impeded our progress, so that in our extremity to tear ourselves away we left most of our scanty clothing and somewhat of our skins in their clutches, while a fresh breeze springing up, increased the pace of the terrible fire which came roaring towards us in a wall of flame, sparks and smoke, which had already nearly blinded us, the trees snapping, creaking, ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... being in his quiver, while his other garments, of yellow and blue, floated everywhere save over his body. The floor of the room was of red bricks, which had once been waxed, and the furniture was scanty, massive and very old. Anastase Gouache lay in one corner in a queer-looking bed covered with a yellow damask quilt the worse for a century or two of wear, upon which faded embroideries showed the Montevarchi arms surmounted ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... of rooms was scanty, and embroidered hangings, cushion and stool covers provided the necessary notes of colour and comfort; the wall hangings of the 13th century were of coarse canvas decorated with a ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... the city scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would recognise ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 1 Scanty remains of the ancient town walls, of a gymnasium near the harbour and of the amphitheatre are still ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no that scanty in ilk siller pock, When ilka bit laddie maun hae his bit staigie; But I kent the day when there was nae a Jock, But trotted about upon honest ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... could not obtain a lodging in one of the cottages, so the Manse opened its hospitable doors to them. The minister, Mr. Duncan, was old, and so was his wife, and they had no children; so, as there was room and to spare, and their income was somewhat scanty, the good old people were quite willing to take in Colonel Mordaunt and his little daughter. Fay had forgotten their existence until now; but she remembered how kind Mrs. Duncan had been to her; and she thought she would go to her, and tell her that she was married, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... should not mention this abortive project, only that it has been utterly thrown aside and will never now be accomplished. The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the birds do, And shall get your scanty food By boring, and boring, and boring, All day in the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... of the world, amount, in goods, produce, specie and bills, and freights, &c. to upwards of 80,000,000l. a year. The letters to which this vast trade, especially as the whole of it is carried on by means of correspondence, must give rise, will be immense: and yet, with the exception of the scanty mail communication afforded by Britain to a few places, there is none to be found. The amount of the trade here stated, includes of course the trade with all places in Europe. The portion which is exclusively Colonial and American, ...
— A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World • James MacQueen |
