"Pittance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... direct issue. Mr. Harkutt was conscious of having been unwillingly led step by step into a difficult, not to say dishonest, situation, and against his own seeking. He had never asked Elijah to sell him the property; he had distinctly declined it; it had even been forced upon him as security for the pittance he so freely gave him. This proved (to himself) that he himself was honest; it was only the circumstances that were queer. Of course if Elijah had lived, he, Harkutt, might have tried to drive some bargain with him before the news of the railroad survey came out—for THAT was only business. ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... to their labour and toil, cold, and half naked upon the roads, and divide their eight or ten pence worth of food at night among a sick family of five or eight persons. Some one is often kept at home, and prevented from earning this pittance, by the fear that some one of their family will die before their return. The first habitation we entered in the Castle-haven district was literally a hole in the wall, occupied by what might be called in America, a squatter, or a man who ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... hewer of wood, the drawer of water—slouching wearily to his toil; sleep clinging still about his leaden eyes, his pittance of food carried tied up in a dish-clout. The first stroke of the hour clangs from Big Ben. Haste thee, fellow-slave, lest the overseer's whip, "Out, we will have no lie-a-beds here," ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... logging camp, a turpentine camp? In this report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, you will find the statement proved that peonage existed in the state of Texas. Out of these conditions springs such a thing as the I. W. W.—when men receive a pittance for their pay, when they work like galley slaves for a wage that barely suffices to keep their protesting souls within their tattered bodies. When they can endure the condition no longer, and they make some sort of a demonstration, or perhaps commit acts of violence, how quickly are they condemned ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... presumptuous in a young man of twenty-five without a name, who might, if they were granted, become a colonel at thirty. Max accordingly sent in his resignation. The major—for among themselves Bonapartists recognized the grades obtained in 1815—thus lost the pittance called half-pay which was allowed to the officers of the army of the Loire. But all Issoudun was roused at the sight of the brave young fellow left with only twenty napoleons in his possession; and the mayor gave him a place in his office ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... it,"—after all! "We have at Pondicherry a Lally, a devil of an Irish spirit,—who will cost me, sooner or later, above 20,000 livres annually [have rents in our INDIA COMPANY, say 1,000 pounds a year, as my Angels know], which used to be the readiest item of my Pittance. But M. le Duc de Choiseul will triumph over Luc in one way or other; then what joy! I suppose he shows you my impertinent reveries. Do you know, Luc is so mad, that I don't despair of bringing him to reason [persuading him to give up Cleve, and knuckle as he should, in this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... country. The rest had fallen into the hands of the adventurers of 1641, who had advanced money for the purpose of raising a private army to conquer lands for themselves; while the body of Cromwell's troops looked on, awaiting the small pittance of a few hundred acres; which was to be their share of the spoil. Here is the strange and awe- inspiring picture of the conquered ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Parkman tells us that the physician Sarrazin, whose name still clings to the pitcher-plant (Sarracenia purpurea) was for years the only real medical man in Canada, and was chiefly dependent for his support on the miserable pittance of three hundred francs yearly, given him by the king. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose there was no cultivated society in Canada. The navigator Bougainville tells us, that, though education was so defective, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... century, those who made their living in England by writing were chiefly publishers' hacks, fellows of the Dunciad sucking their quills in garrets and selling their labor for a crust, for the reading public was too small to support them. Or they found a patron and gave him a sugared sonnet for a pittance, or strained themselves to the length of an Ode for a berth in his household. Or frequently they supported a political party and received a place in the Red Tape Office. But even in politics, on account of the smallness of the reading ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... principal occupation of the two others, one of whom had even been proposed as confessor to Madame la Dauphine. One was long ill of a malady he died of. He was not properly nourished, and I sent him his dinner every day, for more than five months, because I had seen his pittance. I sent him even remedies, for he could not refrain from admitting to me that he suffered from the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... giving himself up latterly to this fatal comparison. The hour when gold was entrusted to his charge found him feverish and irritable. He asked himself whether he was a mere machine to transfer money from spot to spot, and he spurned at the pittance bestowed upon honesty in this life. Where could Boyne's Bank discover again such an honest man as he? And because he was honest he was poor! The consideration that we alone are capable of doing the unparalleled ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... persons as are actuated by principles of honour and a spirit of enterprise, you have little to expect from them. They ought to have such allowances as will enable them to live like, and support the character of gentlemen; and not be driven by a scanty pittance to the low and dirty arts which many of them practise, to filch the public of more than the difference of pay would amount to, upon an ample allowance. Besides, something is due to the man who puts his life in your hands, hazards ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... destined to be fleeting. The fortune of its master was melted away by the mismanagement of others, leaving him but a slender pittance. He bore his loss like a man, sorrowing, but not repining. The estate was given up, and a new home found with his mother, in Edinburgh. This was in 1815. Four years later, fortune had smiled on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... planned the coup de theatre, were there to enjoy its result. This did not fail them. Miranda fainted away. As soon as consciousness returned, he made his act of atonement. He foreswore the illegal bond. He willed away his fortune to his kinsfolk; and would retain of it, from that moment, only a pittance for himself, and the means of honourable subsistence for Clara. They were to meet in the same house a week later, to arrange in what manner that sinful woman should be ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... "Yes. The trifling pittance upon which I lived, and barely lived, and yet from which I could still extract enough to do a little good—to feed, perhaps, one starving throat—is wrested, torn from me, and from those who shared in what it might obtain. I am ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... should not a more liberal portion of indulgence be dealt out to them? May not the want in most instances be inferred from the demand when the service can be proved, and may not the last days of human infirmity be spared the mortification of purchasing a pittance of relief only by the exposure of its own necessities? I submit to Congress the expediency of providing for individual cases of this description by special enactment, or of revising the act of May 1st, 1820, with a view to mitigate ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... slowly backward, travelling over the tragic yet uneventful history of his life. He remembered his childhood on a little Western farm, the commonplace poverty of his people, and his own burning, agonised ambition, which had sent him through college on a pittance, swept the highest honours from his graduation year, and wrecked at last what had been at his starting out a fairly promising physical constitution. He recalled, too, the sleepless enthusiasm of his last term at Harvard, the terrible exhaustion which had made his final ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... a question of an attic, sir. My father would not disinherit me because I preferred literature to business. I might have a pittance instead of a fortune, but I should not have to fear want. And why should I not live my own life? If I am bound to meet troubles, surely it is only right to provide what compensations I can, and my best compensation would be congenial work! I don't want to be rich. Let some other fellow take the ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... make provision for a precarious, uncertain futurity? Shall we suppose some revelation from above in favour of one of the faithful? Perhaps an angel from heaven appeared to this mirror of modern virtue, and informed her, that if she eat more than one piece of bread a day, her small pittance would not last her till the time she was to make her escape. Her mother, we know, is a very enthusiastical woman—a consulter of conjurors, a dreamer of dreams; perhaps the daughter dreamed also what was to happen, and so, in obedience ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... currency instead of a metallic one. Especially we landed proprietors would suffer terribly by the Italian land system being suddenly thrust upon us. To be obliged to sell one's acres to any peasant who can scrape together enough to capitalise the pittance he now pays as rent, at five per cent, would scarcely be agreeable. Such a fellow, from whom I have the greatest difficulty in extracting his yearly bushel of grain, could borrow twenty bushels from a neighbour, or the value of them, and buy me out without my consent—acquiring ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Paris for a thousand dollars, and he had brought back a few small cans of vegetables at fifty cents a can, a little flour at forty cents a pound, a bit of cheap cloth at the price of rare silk, some tobacco and a pittance of tea, and he was happy. A half season's work on the trap-line and his family could have eaten it all in a week—if they had dared to eat ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... in the world else? [Touches the piano.] You think you produce this wealth because you've got your money in it? You pass out a pittance to those who do produce it, and when they ask for more than a pittance you take their tools away from them! If they rebel you set the police on them. That's capital—and ...
— The Gibson Upright • Booth Tarkington
... satisfy the more importunate of his creditors, and to dole out an occasional pittance to his more immediate followers. From their private correspondence it appears that the most favoured among them were at a loss to procure ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... wood-pigeon, "What then shall I do that I may be freed from the bonds of the world and cut myself loose from all things save the service of my Lord?" Answered the hedgehog, "Betake thee to preparing for the next world and content thyself with a pittance of provision." Quoth the pigeon, "How can I do this, I that am a bird and unable to go beyond the date-tree whereon is my daily bread? And even could I do so, I know of no other place wherein I may wone." Quoth the hedgehog, "Thou canst shake down of the fruit of the date-tree ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Christian—one who took delight in the duties of his holy office, and who served God because he loved him. I am fully aware how laborious is the life of a country priest, and how contracted and mean is the pittance he in common receives, and how much more he merits than he gets, if his reward were to be graduated by things here. But this picture, like every other, has its different sides, and occasionally men do certainly enter the church from motives as little as possible connected with ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... hip and the other gracefully curved above the head, stared at the traveller, the post-chaise, and the horses; to these were added about fifty little vagabonds from the Papal States, who earned a pittance by diving into the Tiber at high water from the bridge of St. Angelo. Now, as these street Arabs of Rome, more fortunate than those of Paris, understand every language, more especially the French, they heard the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... England among whom manual labour is considered low and degrading. That is, unless it is undertaken solely for amusement. Out here we are navvies, day-labourers, mechanics, artisans, anything. At home, we should have to uphold the family position by grinding as clerks on a miserable pittance, or by toiling in some equally sedentary and dull routine of life. If we attempted to work there as we work here, we should be scouted and cut by ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... have heard me speak of Azuria. Well, many years ago a friend of mine, daughter of our King Christopher, fell to worrying about her cousin, a profligate who divided his time between the palace and Paris. As a punishment for various escapades the King had curtailed his allowance to a mere pittance, yet he seemed in spite of this to have as much money as before. It was this fact that worried my friend—the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... to talk to every day, and the loneliness which oppressed her like a physical pain would give place to gaiety and peace. Her father would be happy and stop working so hard, and her mother would not have to worry—all if she, Wilhelmina, could just sell her stock and salvage a pittance from ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... are now convinced, are written under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as "dependents;" they think five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and "baronial halls" are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear that they write in elegant ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... being to the north of the cape, the wind at S.W., and blowing strong, we bore away for some bay to complete our water and wood, being in great want of both, having been at the allowance of one quart of water for some days past; and even that pittance could not be come at above six or seven days longer. We anchored in Tolaga Bay on the 9th, in latitude 38 deg. 21' S., longitude 178 deg. 31' east. It affords good riding with the wind westerly, and regular soundings from eleven to five fathoms, stiff muddy ground ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... count on receiving from direct taxes, especially from the land-tax. The Eastern replies that he knows nothing of either financial equilibrium or of budgets, that it has, indeed, from time immemorial been the custom to leave him nought but a bare pittance when he had money, but to refrain from any endeavours to extort money from him when he ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... hard struggle for life far more quickly. The poorer classes can hardly be said to have any childhood; as soon as they can toddle they are sent to weed, cut grass, gather fuel, tend herds, or do anything that will bring them in a small pittance, and ease the burden of the struggling parents. I think the children of the higher and middle classes very pretty; they have beautiful, dark, thoughtful eyes, and a most intelligent expression. Very young babies however are miserably nursed; their hair is allowed to get all tangled and ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the hurricane was over. The sun shone out, the snow extended in the distance like a sheet of dazzling white damask. The horses were already at the door, harnessed. I paid our host, who asked so small a pittance that even Saveliitch did not, as usual, haggle over the price. His suspicions of the evening before had entirely disappeared. I called the guide to thank him for the service he had done us, and told Saveliitch to give him half ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... and thinks, and racks her brain, to find some means of increasing the small pittance upon which the household is starving. Can she give lessons in anything? paint card-racks? do fine work? She finds that women are working hard, and better than she can, for twopence a day. She buys a couple of begilt Bristol boards at the Fancy Stationer's and paints her very best upon them—a ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... men and women throwing down their work right and left in order to qualify for relief; while the conclusion of the whole matter is intensified congestion of the labour market—angry bitter feeling for the insufficiency of the pittance, or rejection of the claim." So writes Miss Potter of the famous Mansion House ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... to know that some of the investments poor father made would turn out badly, and that our income would be reduced to a mere pittance? For I tell you, Miss Belding," added the invalid less vehemently, "that we have almost nothing, divided by three, to live on. That is, an income for one must support us three. Aunt Jinny is one ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for him—fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in due course of time each took one as a wife. This was done in direct opposition to my grandfather's commands, and so incensed did he become over the affair, that when he died shortly afterward, it was found that he had cut them both off with a mere pittance, while the bulk of his estate which was valued at several million pounds, was to be held in trust until the eldest son of my uncle James had reached maturity, after which it was to be delivered to ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... teaching the art of running through an inheritance; but he had one last leg to stand on in his province, in the shape of a secure establishment. He was simply an heir who had passed without any transition from his pittance of a hundred francs a month to the entire paternal fortune, and who, if he had not wit enough to perceive that he was laughed at, was sufficiently cautious to stop short at two-thirds of his capital. He had learned at Paris, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... of their youth is exhausted by labour, and what are the hopes and consolations of their age? Sickness may deprive them of the opportunity of providing the least supply for the declining years of life, and the gloomy confinement of a work-house, or the scanty pittance of parochial help, are their only resources. By their condition may be estimated the real prosperity of a country; the real opulence, strength, and security of the public are proportionate to the comfort ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... O'Grady's was really small. The dullard does not want things which the man of lively imagination feels that he must have. The sour man of gloomy disposition is forever haunted by the possibility of misfortune. He hoards whatever pittance he may earn. Dr. O'Grady had good spirits and a delightful confidence in life. He spent all, and more than all he had, feeling sure that the near future held some great good fortune for him—a deadly epidemic perhaps, which would send all the people of Ballymoy flocking ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... state of things undoubtedly was, it was nevertheless one of the inevitables of pressing. You could not take forcibly one hundred husbands and fathers out of a community of five hundred souls, and pay that hundred husbands and fathers the barest pittance instead of a living wage, without condemning one hundred wives and mothers to hard labour on behalf of the three hundred children who hungered. Out of this hundred wives and mothers a certain percentage, again, lacked ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... trunk,—which inclined a good deal, to be sure,—exploring the crannies right and left, like any creeper. Half a dozen or more phoebes were in the edge of a wood; and they too seemed to have found out that, if worst came to worst, the tree-boles would yield a pittance for their relief. They often hovered against them, pecking hastily at the bark, and one at least was struggling for a foothold on the perpendicular surface. Most of the time, however, they went skimming over the snow and the brook, ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... sire," said she; "and nothing seek. 'Twere base in me to rob my lord unware; Our hands will earn a pittance week ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... attempt to break through that inflexible ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent them momentary victory, but their movement was ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... useless, burdensome This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not tie the world unto it Title of barbarism to everything that is not familiar To give a currency to his little pittance of learning To make their private advantage at the public expense Under fortune's favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace Vice of confining their belief to their own capacity We have lived enough for others ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... there this night Weele passe the businesse priuately and well: Send for your daughter by your seruant here, My Boy shall fetch the Scriuener presentlie, The worst is this that at so slender warning, You are like to haue a thin and slender pittance ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... savage who roams the wilds of an American forest, and the courtier who rolls in luxury and prescribes rules of refinement to the civilized world; by the miscreant who wrings from the cold hand of charity the pittance that sustains his life, and the monarch who sways his sceptre over half the globe; by him who is bent with woes and years, and him whose cheek is covered yet with boyhood's down. Hence we might conclude it capable of giving strength ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... may be to prevent such occurrences, certainly it is a cruel and undeserved hardship to a soldier who has served faithfully and fought for his country, and has perhaps been wounded and almost died at the post of honor and duty, that he should be unable to obtain his hard-earned pittance, when, too, he needs it for his own comfort, or when it may be that his family need it to keep them from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... amateurs, in which all sorts of heterogeneous objects are jumbled together. The museum of Lima bids fair to remain for some time to come on the footing on which it was when I saw it, for the establishment has no funds, save a monthly allowance of thirty-two dollars, and out of that scanty pittance the expense of fitting up the rooms, the glass cases, &c., has yet to be defrayed. The museum is open to the public ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... many beggars had flocked thither that it was impossible to be just to all, seeing that they themselves did not know how it might fare with them in these heavy troublous times. Meanwhile he would see whether he could raise any more. I therefore with many sighs had the small pittance carried to the manse, and though two loaves were, as Pastor Liepensis said in his letter, for me alone, I gave them up to be shared among all alike, whereat all were content save Seden his squint-eyed ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... more Reviserships! No paltry pittance For Themis' harvesters, too often sheafless! Is this the Constitution, once Great Britain's; This, your provision for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... of this "ridiculing the State," as the Times, in its leader, expressed it, for the penurious pittance it doles out of the revenues of the richest country in the world towards the maintenance of a National Portrait Gallery, was that I was the cause of arousing the Press of Great Britain to the miserable ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... great nation. Tradesmen!" exclaimed my grandfather. "Where would any of us be were it not for trade? We sell our tobacco and our wheat, and get money in return. And your father makes a deal here and a deal there, and so gets rich in spite of his pittance." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... where "Joseph is not, and Simeon is not," and where some sobbing heart, under the tattered garb of poverty, mourns, unsolaced and unpitied, its "loved and lost." Are there none such within your reach, to whom a trifling pittance would be as an angel of mercy? How it would hallow and enhance all you possess, were you to seek to live as almoner of Jehovah's bounties! If He has given you of this world's substance, remember it is bestowed, not ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... it was just a quarter to eight. Then I emptied my trousers pockets of whatever money they held, and when all was heaped up before me, I could count but twelve dollars, which, together with my studs and a seal ring which I wore, seemed a paltry pittance with which to barter for the liberty of which I had been robbed. But it was all I had with me, and I was willing to part with it at once if only some one would unlock the door and let me go. But how to make known ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... husband, and that her relations being determined that she should do something for her living, had advanced some money on condition that she set up an establishment. Having no experience in hotel-keeping, she soon dissipated the little capital and lived afterwards on a pittance in ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... a shilling. No fewer than forty-nine petitions, mostly from the widows of the greatest and most splendid houses of Bengal, came before the Council, praying in the most deplorable manner for some sort of relief out of the pittance assigned them. His colleagues, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, men who, when England is reproached for the government of India, will, I repeat it, as a shield be held up between this nation and infamy, did, in conformity to the strict orders of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to widen into a bottomless pit if it crosses the path of those who are living up to the utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory supplied—her cheerful industry, her brave struggle to live like a gentlewoman on a pittance, her tender thought for the welfare and happiness of her children—she felt she could walk through a burning fiery furnace if by so doing she could earn ease and repose for her ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... little charcoal brazier and warmed her transparent, needle-pricked fingers, thinking meanwhile of the strange events of the day. She had been up town to carry the great, black bundle of pants and vests to the factory and receive her small pittance, and on the way home stopped in at the Jesuit Church to say her little prayer at the altar of the calm, white Virgin. There had been a wondrous burst of music from the great organ as she knelt there, an over-powering perfume of many flowers, the glittering dazzle of many ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... the end of this peninsula had, not many years since, to be deserted for a new one, lest it should some day carry its congregation with it when it slides, as it soon will slide, into the sea. But as none had dared to pull down the old church, a custodian had to be found who for a pittance would take charge of it and of the important monuments it contains. Such a custodian was found in Wynne, who lived in the cottage already described on the Wilderness Road. Along this road (which passed both the new church ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... dregs of a defiled and perverted heart. This is not saying much, but it is saying all. What in him was parental attachment, would in another man, to such a son, be unfeeling and detestable indifference. His heart sank on contemplating the pittance he allowed for Connor's education; and no remonstrance could prevail on him to clothe the boy with common decency. Pocket-money was out of the question, as were all those considerate indulgences to youth, that blunt, when timely afforded, the edge of early anxiety ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... days he had accumulated a sum for which, back in Simsbury, he would have had to toil a week. Yet there was to be said in favour of the Simsbury position that it steadily endured. Each week brought its fifteen dollars, pittance though it might be, while the art of the silver screen was capricious in its rewards, not to say jumpy. Never, for weeks at a stretch, had Gashwiler said with a tired smile, "Nothing to-day—sorry!" He ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... was workin' as head salesman for the Gaflooey Auto Company at a pittance of ten thousand a year, he come up to the flat for dinner one night. I seen right away that somethin' was wrong, because he only eat about half of the roast duck and brung along his own cigars. After nature could stand no more, and we had dragged ourselves away ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... wish there were more of them. What troubles me is only a trifling matter of two linear inches on the back of my neck. Your general principle, Madam, is admirable. I merely plead for a slight relaxation of the rule. I ask only for a mere pittance ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... have felt. There is a magnanimity in authorship, as in everything else. His ambition seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever contemplated the possibility of being read by after-ages. What a slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of such plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and the Woman Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that a writer loses nothing ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... All gifts of mere generosity were beyond his power, and, consequently, in a short time beyond his wish; but to the cry of want and wretchedness his hand and heart were ever open. Often has he given away to a starving child in the street that pittance which was to purchase his own scant meal; and he never felt such neglect of himself a privation. To have turned his eyes and ears from the little mendicant would have been the hardest struggle; and the remembrance of such inhumanity would have haunted him on his pillow. This being ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... was yet a small boy, he had learned all that could be taught by the faded mulatto teacher in the long, shiny black frock coat, whom local public opinion permitted to teach a handful of free colored children for a pittance barely enough to keep soul and body together. When the boy had learned to read, he discovered the library, which for several years had been without a reader, and found in it the portal of a new world, peopled with strange and marvelous beings. Lying prone upon the ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... his fiddle earned him ten shillings, all in sixpences. But on unlucky days he had to take his fiddle under his arm, and carry his girl on his back: these unlucky days came so often that still as he travelled his small pittance dwindled. Yet half-way on this journey fortune smiled on him suddenly. It was in Derbyshire. He went a little out of his way to visit his native place—he had left it at ten years old. Here an old maid, his first cousin, received Grace with rapture, and Hope pottered about all day, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... the old man's masterful performance, found himself enthralled by it and made the marvelous flute-player a rich offer, the old man refused peremptorily even to talk the matter over with him—to the great delight of the small manager, who was paying but a pittance ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... day a timber-claim was not looked upon as valuable. The price of a quarter-section was a pittance in cash and a brief residence in a cabin constructed on the claim as evidence of good faith to a government none too exacting in the restrictions with which it hedged about its careless dissipation of the heritage of posterity. Hence, because redwood timber-claims were easy to acquire, ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... attainments that in the world of business would yield their possessors independent fortunes, or in the fields of authorship or politics result in honor and fame, are here freely offered. The material return rendered for such service is the merest pittance absolutely needed for family support, and the immaterial, but one's enshrinement in the heart of an occasional grateful student plus the consciousness of having done one's duty. Can such a generous outpouring of material and spiritual treasures be accounted ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... spake the Angel, "know that these, whose hands Round each white furnace ply the unceasing toil, Were Mammon's slaves on earth. They did not spare To wring from Poverty the hard-earn'd mite, They robb'd the orphan's pittance, they could see Want's asking eye unmoved; and therefore these, Ranged round the furnace, still must persevere In Mammon's service; scorched by these fierce fires, And frequent deluged by the o'erboiling ore: ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... has lost. He might have gone back to his forfeited career, with an ample income. He put the case to his wife and to his boys; with instant unanimity they said, "Never; this work is the best work in the world." And so the once brilliant lawyer is happy on a pittance, happier than he ever could be on a fortune, because he is doing Christ's work of love among his fellow men. And these instances are typical. In every corner of the world are those who belong to the true Society of Jesus—the ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... most unlikely thing in the world to have come to pass; and yet those were happy days when he could think of it as barely possible. Now all he could look forward to was disfigurement, feebleness, and the bare pittance that ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... himself. Having again got himself into the killing tights and buckled pumps, with a fine flower-fronted shirt, ere he embarked on the delicacies and difficulties of the starcher, he stirred the little pittance of a fire, and, folding himself in his dressing-gown, endeavoured to prepare his mind for the calm consideration of all the minute bearings of the question by a little more Mogg. In idea he transferred himself to London, now fancying himself standing at the end of Burlington ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... peculiarly desolate. Her own father had been an emigrant from another part of the country, and had died long since: they had no one relation to take them by the hand; they were outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings, to whom the most scanty pittance was a matter of favour, and who were treated merely as children of peasants, yet poorer than the poorest, who, dying, had left them, a thankless bequest, to the close-handed charity ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... it—and he's remarkably tight. I wrote to them after six years, when I was twenty. They wrote back; at least their lawyer did. They tried, not very sincerely, though, I think, to coax me East again... told me they'd double my allowance if I did—they've sent me a pittance—" He shuddered suddenly, a violent, primitive shiver. "I'm glad ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... furnishes her meager supply of dresses, shoes, coats and hats, says it would only make her father feel that he could give still less to the family's support and so she continues to attend. Every evening she helps her mother and on Saturday works hard for a neighbor with only a pittance for pay. ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... heart! They vilely barter Honor's wealth for party's place; Step by step on Freedom's charter Leaving footprints of disgrace; For to-day's poor pittance turning from the great hope of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... expression. The dedication of some of these books to the pope secured for him certain small preferments, which, in his most profitable condition, aggregated about thirty scudi a month (perhaps equal to $20 of our money). On this miserable pittance he supported his wife and four children. In 1556 he was discharged from his place as a pontifical singer, on account of his marriage, a fact which had been ignored by the pope who appointed him. He then held the post of chapel master at the Lateran. In 1561 he was transferred ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... when by chance he had come across his brother, bleeding and still half drunk, as he was about to enter his lodging, how completely under his thumb he had been! And now he was offering him of his bounty this wretched pittance! Then with half-muttered curses he execrated the names of his father, his brother, of Grey, and of Barry, and of his ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... tradesmen, and innumerable other reputable human beings who marry and bring up families on that or less. Which do you think I would prefer, to amass a fortune in business and have my town and country house and steam yacht, or to exist on a pittance and discover before I die something to benefit the race ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... this was the way of it: — Stung with the shame and the secret fury That comes to the man who has thrown his pittance Of self at a traitor's feet, I wandered Weeks and weeks in a baffled frenzy, Till at last the devil spoke. I heard him, And laughed at the love that strove to touch me, — The dead, lost love; and I gripped the demon Close to my breast, ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... said Gerald, "I call this jolly decent of her. You know, governesses never have more than the meanest pittance, just enough to sustain life, and here she is spending her little all on us. Supposing we just don't go out today, but play with her instead. I expect she's most awfully bored ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... hatred for her niece, Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint. Her money shall all go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband's, and Janet shall be saved the trouble of pretending to cry, by finding that she is left with a miserable pittance. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... there is the doctor, whom Mrs. P. does not condescend to visit: that man educates a mirific family, and is loved by the poor for miles round: and gives them port-wine for physic and medicine, gratis. And how those people can get on with their pittance, as Mrs. Ponto says, is a wonder ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doubtful. The ideal of women in Germany is the lowest in Europe. Infantile mortality is very high, immorality is widespread, and, in consequence, venereal disease is rampant. Notice, too, the miserable and niggardly pittance that is being paid to the wives and families of German soldiers, while nothing whatever is being paid to unmarried wives and their children. True security for women and children is for women to have control over their own destiny. And so it is a duty, a supreme duty, of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... opposite to one in the outer wall, through which the monk may have conveyed the sweepings of his cell and the refuse of his garden to the "eremus'' beyond. By the side of the door to the court is a little hatch through which the daily pittance of food was supplied, so contrived by turning at an angle in the wall that no one could either look in or look out. A very perfect example of this hatch—-an arrangement belonging to all Carthusian houses—exists at Miraflores, near Burgos, which remains nearly as it ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... not easy for Violet to stay in the house. She needed a thousand little things—or thought she did. And there was the old track and the easy money. But she knew what the pittance that came from Henry Fenn meant to him, so in pride and in shame one night she turned back home when she had slipped clear to the corner of the street with her paint on. When she got home she threw herself ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... one well qualified to speak upon this subject, 'I say not merely look at the pittance of men like John Dalton, or the voluntary starvation of the late Graff; but compare what is considered as competency or affluence by your Faradays, Liebigs, and Herschels, with the expected results ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... coarsest fare, holding life on a tenure as uncertain as does the leader of a forlorn hope; excluded from all the advantages of civilization; often at the mercy of a hard contractor, who wrings his profits from their blood; and all this for a pittance that merely enables them to exist, with little power to save, or a hope beyond the continuance of the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... not flourish among them, is true," answered Andrea, who loved so well to discourse on such subjects, that he would have stopped to reason on religion or manners with the beggar to whom he gave a pittance, did he only meet with encouragement; "but it is not as bad in France, on this important head, as it has been; and we may hope that there will be further improvement in ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the paper and read it carefully. The bulk of the $1,000,000 Cavendish estate was willed to charitable organisations, and a small allowance, a mere pittance, was provided for John Cavendish. After a few inquiries the attorney said sharply: "You want this ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... ever make him strong but our continued injustice and oppression. He appeals not to our fears, but to our compassion. He asks not to rule us: he only craves of us leave to toil; to hew our wood and draw our water, for such miserable pittance of compensation as the competition of free labor will award him—a grave. If we deny him this humble boon, we may expect no end to our national convulsions but in dissolution. If we promptly grant it, over all our national domain, we may expect the speedy return ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that reason, my lord, that one ought to be very cautious in the commands which they lay on her. Can I induce a foreign lady, who, for all her subsistence, has nothing but a small pittance she has reserved to herself, to give that up in favor of a house which is not yet established, and perhaps never will be? If the house should happen to fail, or be no longer of use, what shall that lady live on? Shall she go to the hospital? And indeed this house will not long be of ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... tramping the country from east to west, from north to south, in a vain search for work. For many years the home has been left to the care of the little ones, while the parents are exhausting their life and strength for a mere pittance. For thirty years the sturdy sons of America have been sacrificed on the battlefield of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt factory surroundings. For long and weary years this process of undermining the nation's health, vigor, and ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... thing,' he said, 'and it's this. I'm no' quite the slave-driver ye might take me for—workin' in the night to drag a pittance out o' me! For instance, I've a job in the store that yer man can have, if it'll suit him, and if you're willing yerself. It's no' a big thing, but it's white. And for the present while, I dare say I can advance ye enough to be going on with. And me and the lads 'll say ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... else I must speak as I found them. I hope they were not a just sample of their whole nation; for these gentry would exercise every imposition, and even insinuate the thing that was not, the more easily to plunder us of our hard earned pittance of small change. Had they shown any generosity, like the British tar, I should have passed over their conduct in silence; but after they had stripped our men of every farthing, they would say to them—"Monsieur, you have won all our money, now lend us a little change ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... under a tropical sky, when his mind was kept alive by a modicum of hard work and a very wide margin of sport—pig-sticking, peacock-shooting, paper-chases, all the delights of an Indian life. But now, vegetating on a slender pittance in the semi-slumberous idleness of Les Fontaines, he had nothing to do and nothing to think about; and he was glad to shorten his days by dozing away the fresher hours of the morning, while his wife toiled at the preparation of that elaborate ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... allowance for bread. They were amused with games and festivals. From the stately baths they might be seen to issue without shoes and without a mantle. They loitered in the public streets, and dissipated in gaming their miserable pittance. They spent the hours of the night in the lowest resorts of crime and misery. As many as four hundred thousand sometimes assembled to witness the chariot races. The vast theatres were crowded to see male and female dancers. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... considering, they ceased to be Got their laugh out of too many things in life Guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction Had learned not to censure the irretrievable Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance Handsome pittance Happiness is so unreasonable Happiness built upon and hedged about with misery He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices He buys my poverty and not my will Headache darkens the universe while it lasts Heart that forgives but does not forget Held ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and son, for twenty-two thousand francs, was now bringing in eighteen thousand francs per annum. Eve began to understand the motives lurking beneath the apparent generosity of the brothers Cointet; they were leaving the Sechard establishment just sufficient work to gain a pittance, but not enough to establish ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... up the hill, is a little well of pure water, fenced in and adorned with a tiny fernery, over which is an inscription, setting forth that "This is the well in which the head was washed; you must not wash your hands or your feet here." A little further on is a stall, at which a poor old man earns a pittance by selling books, pictures, and medals, commemorating the loyalty of the Forty-seven; and higher up yet, shaded by a grove of stately trees, is a neat inclosure, kept up, as a signboard announces, by voluntary contributions, round which are ranged forty-eight little tombstones, each decked with evergreens, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... a miserable creature she was, you would have pitied her, just as I did. She belonged to our village. Her mother was an old, old woman, and they used to sell string and thread, and soap and tobacco, out of the window of their little house, and lived on the pittance they gained by this trade. The old woman was ill and very old, and could hardly move. Marie was her daughter, a girl of twenty, weak and thin and consumptive; but still she did heavy work at the houses around, day by day. Well, one fine day a commercial traveller betrayed her and carried ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... not spare us according to his merciful capitulation at Sodom; if his goodness please not to pass over a great deal of bad for a small pittance of good, or to look upon us in the lump, there is slender hope for mercy, or sound presumption of fulfilling half his will, either in persons or nations: they who excel in some virtues being so often defective in others; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... clear-headed woman; my eyes are open, and I understand this man's hypocrisy. Did he not come here to-day and pretend he would take a situation—pretend he would share his hard-earned wages with us until you were well? Pretend! It makes me furious! His wages! a share of his wages! That would have been your pittance, that would have been your share of the Flying Scud—you who worked and toiled for him when he was a beggar in the streets of Paris. But we do not want your charity; thank God, I can work for my own husband! See what it is to have obliged a gentleman! He would let you pick him ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, would have been going too far; but he could, and did, cut down his salary to starvation point, in the hope that he would resign. But Duncan Rowallan had not come to Howpaslet for salary, and his expenses were so few that he lived as comfortably on his pittance as ever he had done. Porridge night and morning is not costly when ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... current against some standing trees and instantly filled with water and sunk. Potts who was with them is an indifferent swimer, it was with much difficulty he made the land. they lost three blankets a blanket coat and their pittance of merchandize. in our bear state of clootheing this was a serious loss. I sent Sergt. Pryor and a party over with the indian canoe in order to raise and secure ours but the debth of the water and the strength of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... but the solitude of a poor lodging was inconceivably dreary, after the society I had enjoyed. To be cut off from human converse, now I had been taught to relish it, was to wander a ghost among the living. Besides, I foresaw, to aggravate the severity of my fate, that my little pittance would soon melt away. I endeavoured to obtain needlework; but, not having been taught early, and my hands being rendered clumsy by hard work, I did not sufficiently excel to be employed by the ready-made linen shops, when so many women, better qualified, were ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... fortune for which his father had toiled and sacrificed, Donald preferred Nan's love; rather than a life of ease and freedom from worry, he looked forward with a fierce joy to laboring with his hands for a pittance, provided he might have the privilege of sharing it with her. And The Dreamerie, the house his father had built with such great, passionate human hopes and tender yearnings, the young laird of Port ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... were left unburied, a sight of horror and a source of infection to the survivors. To these frightful miseries were added a perpetual burning thirst, and the lingering torture of slow starvation, for each man received as his daily allowance a poor half pint of water, and a mere pittance of food, just enough to avoid breaking the letter of the conditions which Demosthenes had made for his troops. In this state they were left without relief for ten long weeks; then all except the Athenians themselves, and their allies from the Greek cities ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... themselves. To be paid at all, indeed, appears to have been a favor, for it has not been done in full now for several years in succession. Spain regularly remains indebted to the unlucky peasants in the amount of the miserable pittance allowed, from one year's end to another. The Government ordered the officials to exact a higher return from the impoverished population of the tobacco districts; and even rewarded informers who, after pointing out fields already ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... might help him to forget his darkened youth. Hilda and her mother would live as they could, and when the mother died Sigmundskron must go to the hammer. At all events it was not encumbered with debts, and its sale would leave the child a pittance to save her from starvation; possibly she would have more than before, but Frau von Sigmundskron could not judge of that. Possibly, too, Hilda's sixty-four quarterings would help her to gain admittance as a lady-canoness in one of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... balcony covered with vines. The general colour of a village is grey, cold, and forbidding, but this is relieved by the fig trees, and the bright green and blue paint many use on their doors and windows. Everything is primitive, and long may it remain so; all seem happy and contented on the small pittance any of them can earn. There is no attempt at farming on anything but ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... world. Business men were anxious, and retrenchment was the order of the day. Among others to draw in sail was the well-established firm whom Mr. Vincent had served for many years. The salaries of their employe's were cut down, in some instances to a mere pittance. Upon none did the blow fall more heavily than these two inexperienced ones who had made no provision for any such change in their affairs. They were dismayed; Mr. Vincent tried in vain to secure some more lucrative position, but he soon began to feel that he was most fortunate in such times to ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... by others. His personal history bears all the evidences of romance. He was the son of a poor widow, who, having spent all her property to give him an education, found her boy at the conclusion of his studies desirous of making the usual academic tour. She has but a pittance left, so she puts into his hand twelve kreutzer, and a rusty old coin, as a pocketpiece. Her eyes follow him until they are blinded in a flood of tears. Years pass on and Valentine comes home, having travelled, by dint of self-denial and perseverance, over the most interesting portions ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... higher and middling classes; but this most odious, this most galling tax, is felt even in the cottage of the labourer, who cannot return to refresh himself after his day of toil with his favourite beverage without paying twice its value out of his hard-earned pittance, to swell the dividend of the Company, and support these ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... straitness, and tries to eke out a support for himself and those dependent upon him by attention to business in a small and, I fear, far from lucrative way, but gives his heart to mission work. I feel guilty every time I make a remittance to Watsonville because the pittance we allow him is so small as compared with the work he does. But he and the zealous teacher have other ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 3, March, 1896 • Various
... sovereign? Does he complain of the reduction of his stipend or the infringement of treaties? No; he appears to consider himself to be, what in fact he really is, absolutely dependent on the Company, and to be willing to accept any pittance they would allow him for his maintenance: he claims no rights. Does he complain that the administration of justice is taken into the hands of the Company? No: by the treaty, the protection of his subjects is delivered up to the Company; and he well knew, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... although sore enough in its way, was not so heartrending as that of Kate. He was of a sex fitted to wrestle with the storms of life, but she, proud and brave as she was, occupied a different position. Fortunately for both, however, through the instrumentality of a small pittance set aside by the Courts in her case, and a kind relation in that of Barry, their education was far above their pecuniary pretensions, so that at the age of twenty Kate was really an accomplished and refined girl, while her lover, ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... The company, starting out from one or two, had been steadily reinforced by recruits from far and near, till it ran up to the neighborhood of a hundred men, who regularly presented themselves for their pittance. There is no more graphic description in his writings than his account of the scene which took place when a new-comer among the beggars had the indiscretion, on receiving his grano, to wish the giver only a hundred years of life; the indignation of the king of the gang ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... with the spear, from which came both blood and water to heal my dirty wounds. When thou hast so done if thou canst, take part of thy bread and of thy fish, and lay it by itself, and say thus quietly in thine heart, "Lord, what wilt Thou give me for this pittance I make to Thee? how many tears, how many love-yearnings and longings after Thee? how many comforts of the Holy Ghost, how many stirrings to good things, how many lookings towards me with Thy lovely eyes? Lord, wilt Thou for this meat that the poor hungry man shall have for ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... learning art under him, thinking that the friars were not giving them proper food, had counterfeited, without the knowledge of Mariotto, the keys of those windows opening into the friar's rooms, through which their pittance is passed; and sometimes, in secret, they stole some of it, now from one and now from another. There was a great uproar about this among the friars, since in the matter of eating they are as sensitive as any other person; but the lads did it with great dexterity, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... of a debtor by his creditor, with no motive on earth but the hope that some friend, or some relative, perhaps almost as poor as himself, his mother it may be, or his sisters, or his daughters, will give up all their own little pittance, and make beggars of themselves, to save him from the horrors of a loathsome jail. Human retribution cannot reach this guilt; human feeling may not penetrate the flinty heart that perpetrates it; but an hour is surely coming, with more than human retribution on its ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... infant death rate, the workers of the United States still have more children than they can care for. There are enough of them left over to provide 3,000,000 child laborers, who by working for a pittance crowd their parents out of employment and force the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... character of these brave heroes of evangelic poverty could not but please the Canadian people; ever gay and pleasant, and of even temper, they traversed the country to beg a meagre pittance. Everywhere received with joy, they were given a place at the common table; they were looked upon as friends, and the people related to them their joys and afflictions. Hardly was a robe of drugget descried upon the ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... death, which community is only valid through his consent. In the Jura and the Nivernais, he may pursue fugitive serfs, and demand, at their death, not only the property left by them on his domain, but, again, the pittance acquired by them elsewhere. At Saint-Claude he acquires this right over any person that passes a year and a day in a house belonging to the seigniory. As to ownership of the soil we see still more clearly that he once had entire possession of it. In the district subject to his jurisdiction ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of help to harvest them; cattle and horses well nigh worthless as there was no sale for them, neither was there male help sufficient to cultivate the farm, which went back to former wildness. The government was months behind in paying the soldiers, who at best received only a beggarly pittance. One night, alone with my children, I was awakened by a knock on the window and a call, "Hurry! Leave at once. The Indians are upon us, scalping as they come." With the little ones I fled across the fields to the nearest house, a half mile away, later, to ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... every evening we see a long procession of men and women going or coming from the work, at which they have given up their life force for the sake of a mere pittance. Look at these men and women! There they go, evidently free! No shackles are on their hands or feet, no overseer keeps them in check by club or gun. There they go voluntarily to their prison factories, offices, stores, in the morning; and in the evening, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... either of advantage or the reverse, which either compensates for the loss of a material benefit, or is requited by some addition of a tangible profit. The educated man who accepts three hundred a-year in the Church is not recompensed, or considered to be recompensed, by this miserable pittance. It is in the respect, the influence, the power, and the reverence that attach to his calling he is rewarded. Place a layman in the parish beside him with that income, and mark the difference of their stations! The same of the soldier. Why or how ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... and crown'd of fate As kings are crowned, as bards in their estate Are rapture-fraught, re-risen above the dust. Then were I torture-proof, and on the crust Of one kind word, though as a pittance thrown, I'd live for weeks! My tears I would disown And pray, contented with my discontent, As hermits ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings. Nor are there wanting many who push their imitation of the beggars whom they resemble a step further, and who find it easier to extort a pittance from the spectator, by simulating deformity and debility from which they are exempt, than by such honest labour as their health and strength enable them to perform. In the meantime the credulous public ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... places for the soldiers? Let me not underrate the number of garments that they made—surely a single machine might produce as many within a week. But there is danger that their work was only a sentimental expression of their world-grief. I'll sink to depths of practicality and claim that a pittance from their allowances would have bought more and better garments in ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... always ruthless, unbroken, unmanageable, a ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And yet, almost all these clerklings have an old mother lodging on some fifth floor with whom they share their pittance of thirty or forty ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... was left a widow with five young children, but with neither trade nor money, and how both she and he had to struggle for a mere subsistence, she at keeping boarders, and he as apprentice to a mean man, who gave him only the smallest weekly pittance. He says that we shall never go out into the world as destitute of resources as his mother was, and so we all have what may really be called trades. My brother is in the counting-house, keeping the books, and is provided ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... years he managed to dispose of all but a mere pittance of her fortune, and humiliated her in a thousand ways besides. His only decent act was to die and leave her undisturbed for the remainder of her life. Your uncle assisted in her support and saved the remnant of her property, so that she has, by careful and rigorous economy, been able to educate ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Dwyer, 'I meant no offence, and I will take none, at your hands at least. I will confess I care not, in love and soforth, a single bean for the girl; she was the mere channel through which her father's wealth, if such a pittance deserves the name, was to have flowed into my possession—'twas in respect of your family finances the most economical provision for myself which I could devise—a matter in which you, not I, are interested. ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... owes double what he has, and is about to blow out his somewhat unimportant brains. But Constance, in the truest spirit of melodrama, and having long sought him in vain under the guidance of a quarta persona, of whom more presently, realises almost the whole of her fortune, except a small pittance, dashes it down before him in the nick of time, and saves ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and nights of ceaseless rain they toiled, sometimes through fierce storms of thunder and lightning, and before terrific seas lashed into foam and fury by swift and sudden squalls, with only their miserable pittance of bread and water to keep body and soul together. Now and then a little rum was given after any extra fatigue of baling, but only at the times set ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... much in the papers here of the "Yellow Peril." If there is a Yellow Peril, it lies in the fact that our men are ready to labour unceasingly for a wage on which most Europeans would starve, and on that pittance they manage to save and become rich and prosperous. They have gone into other lands wherever they have found an opening, and some of the southern countries, like Singapore and the Philippines, owe much of ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... straw in the human 'stalls,' or clutching at their bowls of pauper-soup; a scene whose true character is enforced by accounts of poor women making shirts for a farthing apiece, a hard day's work; sleeping four in a bed; purchasing with the scanty pittance tea-leaves to boil over again! Hardly-entreated brothers and sisters of humanity! not always shall the glaring inequality that surrounds you, crush your spirits to the earth! . . . THERE is a pleasant pen in our metropolitan ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... so,' answered John with a sigh; 'and how we're to pay it, I don't know. If I could only get well, I shouldn't mind; for I'd rather break stones on the road, or sweep a crossing, than see my poor girl slaving from morning to night for such a pittance.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... answered the hermit, "your thoughts, like those of the ignorant laity, are according to the flesh. It has pleased Our Lady and my patron saint to bless the pittance to which I restrain myself, even as the pulse and water was blessed to the children Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, who drank the same rather than defile themselves with the wine and meats which were appointed them by the King of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott |
