"Ancestress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself by the little lady of honor. "Thusnelda, you are an incomparable creature, and quite calculated to be the ancestress of all the Germans. I declare myself your cavalier for the evening, and will devote myself to you as your most humble servant, and will not quit your ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... commonplace, little second-heroine in "Adam Bede," Hester, a pathetic and sentimental expression, to which nothing in her mind or character corresponds, and which must have been an inheritance from some ancestress in whom such an expression had originated with ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... and his restoration, as complete as it is possible for it to be, and which no historian had attempted, stands out before us as sharply as a plan in relief, and with all the perspective of a panorama. Thebes of the Hundred Gates, as Homer called it,—antiquity has told us nothing more about this ancestress of capitals; but M. Ernest Feydeau takes us walking with him through the city of Rameses; he shows us all its monuments, its temples, its palaces, the dwellings of the inhabitants, the gardens, the harbour, the fleet of vessels; he draws and colours the costumes of the people; he enters ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... hated Eskimo dogs; choosing either to ignore his own huskie blood, or feeling that it was superior to the native strain in the malamutes of the coast—just as some people boast of being descended from Pocahontas, but would shudder at the mere idea of a Siwash Squaw ancestress. ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... was herself that was changed. She pushed the cheap hat off her hot forehead and tried to win to some coherence of thought and—so far had she already come on a new, strange path—looked back with wondering uncomprehension, as upon the beliefs and preferences of a crude primitive ancestress, to the girl who had cared that this hat cost a dollar and a half instead of a dollar and a quarter—only a few hours since when she bought it at the store. She went over the bits of talk that had been between her and Creed Bonbright. What had he said his favourite colour ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... his court. It was later noted as the meeting-place of many imperial diets. It remained a free city till 1801. In the "Thidreksaga" the name is corrupted into "Wernize". (9) "Uta" (M.H.G. "Uote"). The name means ancestress, and is frequently used for the mother of heroes. The modern German form is "Ute", but in order to insure its being pronounced with two syllables, the form "Uta" was chosen. (10) "Dankrat" (M.H.G. "Dancrat") appears as the father only in the "Nibelungenlied" ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... seen her, and am quite content without it. It is said to be an ancestress of mine, a Lady Cordelia Carne, who was murdered, when her husband was away, and buried down there, after being thrown into the moat. The old people say that whenever her ghost is walking, the water of the moat bursts in and covers the floor of the vaults, that she may flit along it, as ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... "No, Madam Ancestress, born of her whom not an Indian or a fierce bear could frighten away from her duty of protection to those of her affections, I will not flee. I will stay here by the side of my Uncle, the General Robert, and my great chief, that Gouverneur ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a very worn and threadbare gown,—that I still think, even after all my experience of life, they were a blessing to the family. You will think that I am wandering away from my Lady Ludlow. Not at all. The Lady who had owned the lace, Ursula Hanbury, was a common ancestress of both my mother and my Lady Ludlow. And so it fell out, that when my poor father died, and my mother was sorely pressed to know what to do with her nine children, and looked far and wide for signs of willingness to help, Lady Ludlow sent her a letter, proffering aid and assistance. I ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of Cleopatra. A banquet was given at his cost to the whole Roman people, and the shows of gladiators and beasts surpassed all that had ever been seen. The Julii were said to be descended from AEneas and to Venus, as his ancestress, Caesar dedicated a breastplate of pearls from the river mussels of Britain. Still, however, he had to go to Spain to reduce the sons of Pompeius. They were defeated in battle, the elder was killed, ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Rahab, and how she became The ancestress of the great Psalmist David; And wherefore should not I, Helen of Tyre, Attain ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to think—Pike of Pike's Peak. Never heard of the battle you mention; but as an explorer—So one of his companions married your ancestress?" ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... her chickens under her wings becomes the type of the brooding love and more than maternal solicitude of God in Christ. Nor can we forget that the only other instance of the figure before David's psalms is in the exquisite idyl which tells of the sweet heroism of David's ancestress, Ruth, on whose gentle and homeless head was pronounced the benediction, "A full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust" (Ruth ii. 12). We may perhaps also ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... name as well as that of her ancestress, and she blushed as her eyes met those of a strange young gentleman, with a sketch-book in his hand, and a ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... athletic lad, with a nature far removed from that of the other Devitts; he had seemed to be in the nature of a reversion to the type of gentleman, who, it was said, had imprudently married an ancestress of Montague's first wife. Whether or not this were so, in manner, mind, and appearance Harold was generations removed from his parents and brother. He had been the delight of his father's eye, until an accident had put an end ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... satisfactorily afforded the required information concerning Samuel Abbott, I shall still feel very greatly obliged if any other gentleman can throw any light upon the Archbishop's descendants, especially Sir Maurice's sons and their issue. I have in my possession an old will of an ancestress, sealed with the crest of Bartholomew Barnes, of London, merchant, whose daughter was second wife and mother to Sir Maurice's children, viz., Bartholomew, George, Edward, and Maurice. Did any of them leave a son called James, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... the girl indignantly, "that my ancestress was in the right, refusing further communication with this ignoble Churchman who dared ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... half pleasing and half repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other portrait, which was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... traced directly and indirectly, perhaps unconsciously, in many a descendant. Without assigning her any direct influence on Wilberforce, much of the feeling of this novel is the same as inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe. She has been claimed to be the literary ancestress of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand; nor is it any exaggeration to find Byron and Rousseau in her train. Her lyrics, it has been well said, are often of 'quite bewildering beauty', but her comedies represent ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... marriage; this could not lead to marriage, except through—the Divorce Court. And suddenly the Colonel had a vision of his dead brother Lindsay, Olive's father, standing there in the dark, with his grave, clear-cut, ivory-pale face, under the black hair supposed to be derived from a French ancestress who had escaped from the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Upright fellow always, Lindsay—even before he was made bishop! Queer somehow that Olive should be his daughter. Not that she was not upright; not at all! But she was soft! Lindsay was not! Imagine him seeing that young fellow putting her handkerchief ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her a story of her grandmother, with a verve and graphic spirit that enchanted Margaret, for she liked clever old men. Besides he is not old. It is not so long since—well, it is a long story. However, in less than one minute the assembled guests were listening to the old-time tale of Margaret's ancestress, and the waiter paused breathless on the threshold to hear the end, before he ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... the missionary of the Algonquins at the Lake of Two Mountains, above Montreal, wrote down a tradition of the death of Marquette, from the lips of an old Indian woman, born in 1777, at Michillimackinac. Her ancestress had been baptized by the subject of the story. The tradition has a resemblance to that related as fact by Charlevoix. The old squaw said that the Jesuit was returning, very ill, to Michillimackinac, when a storm forced him and his two men ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... city of the Silver Mountain, who wear enchanted girdles that enable them to fly as swiftly as a bird. The youngest of these princesses is caught while bathing, by means of a magical slip-knot. A divine ancestress of the Bantiks, a tribe inhabiting the Celebes Islands, came down from the sky with seven companions to bathe. A man who saw them took them for doves, but was surprised to find that they were women. He possessed ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... curious by certain wrinkles which ran from the corners of the eyes towards the ears. I think that these came from the bending of the brow in thought, but others say that they were inherited from an ancestress on the female side. Bakenkhonsu my friend, the old prophet who served under the first Seti and died but the other day, having lived a hundred and twenty years, told me that he knew her before she was married, and ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... beauty or finish that charmed me; it was something strange in the figures, the immense contrast between the child and what was supposed to be her gouvernante in the garb of some severe order; the child, a girl, was said to be the ancestress of the family, a princess of some foreign land. No sooner had I read 'The Scarlet Letter' than it burst clearly upon me that the picture could represent no one else than Hester Prynne and little Pearl. I hurried to see it again, and found my suppositions ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Maori chief, 'look round you and listen to me, far there is something worth seeing here.' Sir George was sitting on the very spot where sat Hine-Moa, the great ancestress of the tribe, when she swam the lake to join her sweetheart Tutanekai. She was a maiden of rare beauty and high rank, and many young men desired to wed her. She found escape from these perplexities in a long swim to her choice, ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... first man and woman. Oxen stepped forth from it too, but baboons, as Caliban says of the stars, "came otherwise," and sheep and goats sprang from a flat rock. Black people are so coloured, according to the Ovaherero, because when the first parents emerged from the tree and slew an ox, the ancestress of the blacks appropriated the black liver of the victim. The Ovakuru Meyuru or "OLD ONES in heaven," once let the skies down with a run, but drew them up again (as the gods of the Satapatha Brahmana drew the sun) when most of mankind had been drowned.(1) The remnant pacified ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... tracking her dissatisfaction to its real beginning. Everything, it reminded her, had been perfect until she and Benis had sat upon the hill in the sunset and talked about Mary. Something had happened then. Like a certain ancestress she had coveted the fruit of knowledge and knowledge had been given her. Not at once—Benis had at first been distinctly reluctant—but by gentle persistence she had won through his cool reserve. Abruptly and without visible reason, his ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... teacher's part, and mild began: "The wound, that Mary clos'd, she open'd first, Who sits so beautiful at Mary's feet. The third in order, underneath her, lo! Rachel with Beatrice. Sarah next, Judith, Rebecca, and the gleaner maid, Meek ancestress of him, who sang the songs Of sore repentance in his sorrowful mood. All, as I name them, down from deaf to leaf, Are in gradation throned on the rose. And from the seventh step, successively, Adown the breathing tresses of the flow'r Still doth the file of Hebrew dames proceed. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Mrs. Pritchard were playing before them! And I, for my children's sake, thank that good Actor in his retirement who was the first to banish that shame from the theatre. No, madam, you are mistaken; I do not plume myself on my superior virtue. I do not say you are naturally better than your ancestress in her wild, rouged, gambling, flaring tearing days; or even than poor Polly Fogle, who is just taken up for shoplifting, and would have been hung for it a hundred years ago. Only, I am heartily thankful that my temptations are less, having quite enough to do with those ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... passion, resumed its sway as soon as the storm was over; but the awful wrath which would suddenly break forth, when the king's face changed, and he rolled on the ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have something of diabolic origin. A story was told of a demon ancestress of the Angevin princes: "From the devil they came, and to the devil they will go," said the grim fatalism ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... how. You only felt it. And besides being like me, she was like a lynx. There was one in the Zoo in London, with just her expression. Jack and I saw it together, and he laughed, and said now he knew who my first ancestress was. He didn't say anything about my looking like 'Bella Donna,' but I knew he must have thought it. He got me away from the picture as soon as he could, but I couldn't forget. The lynx-face, with the ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... those tortures and burnings. I said that Bridget was rather a wild and savage woman than a malignant witch; and, above all, that Lucy was of her kith and kin; and that, in putting her to the trial, by water or by fire, we should be torturing—it might be to the death—the ancestress of her we ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... his sword and become, like Lytton's hero, "now heard of, the first on the wall:" the pretty belle of the afternoon fete, may she not have the same heart of steel and a spirit as true as that of some eighteenth-century ancestress? There is room, then, even in this historic spot, for the gay modern cortege, for the life, the light, the prosperity and pleasure which embalm old memories and keep a centennial on the shrines where the youth and chivalry of a century ago lived, loved and have left the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Another version of the "Wilkina-Saga" gives a different account of the death of Theodoric. According to this, Witig, after he sank in the lake, was received by his mermaid ancestress and borne away to Zealand. Here he abode a long time, till he heard of the return and recovered might of Theodoric. Then, fearing his resentment, he betook himself to a certain island, and having made an image of Theodoric, laid a strict charge upon the boatman who ferried passengers across ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... be very pleasant, when one was in the mood. But it would not satisfy her. There was something strong and fierce and primitive in her nature—something that had come down to her through the generations from some harness-girded ancestress—something impelling her instinctively to choose the fighter; to share with him the joy of battle, healing his wounds, giving him of her courage, exulting ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... room but for the first: which is a striking exemplification (in subject at least) of Wordsworth's aphorism, that "the child is father to the man." It is a sonnet addressed to "Zelia," "On her charging the author with writing too much on Love!" Who Zelia was—whether a lineal ancestress of Dickens's "Mrs. Harris," or some actual grown up young lady, who was teased by, and tried to check the chirpings of the little {566} precocious singing bird—does not appear: but we suspect the former, for this sonnet is immediately followed by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... expedition reached Biloxi, there were two suitors for the hand of Agricola's great ancestress. Neither of them was Zephyr Grandissime. (Ah! the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... the fact that not only did her Majesty represent one of her predecessors, an ancestress however remote, but that many of the guests were enabled to follow her example. They appeared—some in the very armour of their forefathers, others in costumes copied from family pictures, or in the dress of hereditary offices still held by the representatives ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the two words in some annoyance. They were very ugly. Addressed to a person who wore pink shoes, they seemed singularly abrupt. And if Miss Vancourt should chance to resemble in the least her ancestress, Mary Elia Adelgisa de Vaignecourt, they were wholly unsuitable. A creditor might write 'Dear Madam' to a customer in application for an outstanding bill,— but to Mary Elia Adelgisa one would ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... had been all eagerness to seek for some explanation of the resemblance to which I have just alluded, and the fitting moment had, I conceived, arrived. I called attention to a peculiar expression in the features of Miss Mowbray, and then instanced the likeness that subsisted between her and my ancestress. 'It is the more singular,' I said, turning to her mother, 'because there could have been no affinity, that I am aware of, between them, and yet the likeness is really surprising.'—'It is not so singular as you imagine,' answered ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... plank shattered by the waves; and I still remember, after the lapse of twenty-five years, all the light and strength she afforded to me when I was young and unknown." He dedicated to her his "Life of Saint Dominic," saying, "I wish that some one of your descendants may one day know that his ancestress was a woman whom Saint Jerome would have loved as he loved Paula and Marcella, one who needed only a pen illustrious and saintly enough to do her justice." Hearing of her last illness, he made a ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... and endowed the village school and almshouses at Hemingby. Another granddaughter, Abigail, married Edward Dymoke, younger son of Sir Edward Dymoke, of Scrivelsby, as shewn by the register there, on 18 July, 1654, and she thus became ancestress of the Tetford branch of the Dymokes, now also ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... owner's friends. Knowsley lies near Prescott, about seven miles from Liverpool. The family are descended from the Lord Stanley who was created Earl of Derby by the Earl of Lancaster and Derby, afterwards Henry IV., for services rendered at the battle of Bosworth Field. An ancestress, Charlotte de la Tremouille, Countess of Derby, is celebrated for her defence of Latham House against the Parliamentary forces in the Great Civil War, and is one of the heroines of Sir Walter Scott's novel of "Peveril of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... of the underworld. Thither the dead returned to him who was ancestor of the living as well as lord of the dead.[771] On the other hand, if the earth had originally been thought of as a female, she as Earth-mother would be ancestress of men. But her place in the myth would easily be taken by the Earth or Under-earth god, perhaps regarded as her son or her consort. In other cases, clans, families, or individuals often traced their descent to gods or divine animals or plants. Classical writers occasionally ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Guerras, and many marvel at the modesty of the Author, in deriving his own origin from him and from his wife, when he might have derived it from a more noble source. But I find in such modesty the greater merit, in that he did not wish to fail in affectionate gratitude toward her,—Gualdrada,—his ancestress,—giving her name and handing her down as it were to eternity, while she by herself would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... to grow up, because he feared for his life, seeing that Tamar had brought death to two husbands before him. So she remained a widow in her father's house for two years. Endowed with the gift of prophecy, Tamar knew that she was appointed to be the ancestress of David and of the Messiah, and she determined to venture upon an extreme measure in order to make sure of fulfilling her destiny.[82] Accordingly, when the holy spirit revealed to her that Judah was going ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... not on this ground alone or chiefly that it has a place in the sacred canon. It records also the sublime faith of Ruth the Moabitess, which led her to forsake her own country and kindred to trust under the wings of the Lord God of Israel (ch. 2:12), and which was rewarded by her being made the ancestress of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the book connects itself immediately with "the house and lineage of David," and may be regarded as supplementary to the history of his family. It was evidently written after David was established on the throne. Further than ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... Maine (Early Law and Custom), in speaking of tribes who still trace their descent from a single ancestress, says, "The outlines" (i. e. of the maternal family) "may still be marked out, if it be worth any one's while to ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... you must know that it had been in Leonora's family ever since her ancestress, Theodolite, Pharaoh's daughter, left Egypt, not knowing when she was well off, and settled in Ireland, of all places, where she founded ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... the far-famed Pocahontas, daughter of the Virginian king; who, after having been received at Court by the old pedant James the First, with the honors of a sister sovereign, and having become the reputed ancestress of more than one ancient Virginian family, ended her days in ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... was quickly filled with water and formed a lake, at first called Logrum (the sea), but now known as Maelar, whose every indentation corresponds with the headlands of Seeland. Gefjon then married Skiold, one of Odin's sons, and became the ancestress of the royal Danish race of Skioldungs, dwelling in the city of Hleidra or Lethra, which she founded, and which became the principal place of sacrifice ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... indeed, no inner bar," answered Catherine, firmly, "but there are the staples where that bar should be; and into those staples have I thrust mine arm, like an ancestress of your own, when, better employed than the Douglasses of our days, she thus defended the bedchamber of her sovereign against murderers. Try your force, then, and see whether a Seyton cannot rival in courage a maiden of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... de), related to the Herouvilles; lived in the first part of the seventeenth century; probably ancestress of the Grandlieus, well known in France two centuries ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... get its name in Greece? According to Hesiod, the oldest Greek poet after Homer, the Bear was once a lady, daughter of Lycaon, King of Arcadia. She was a nymph of the train of chaste Artemis, but yielded to the love of Zeus, and became the ancestress of all the Arcadians (that is, Bear-folk). In her bestial form she was just about to be slain by her own son when Zeus rescued her by raising her to the stars. Here we must notice first, that the Arcadians, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... happy; she died 1765. Left no son (Brother-in-law succeeded, last of the Schwedt MARGRAVES): her Daughter, wedded to Prince Friedrich Eugen, a Prussian Officer, Cadet of Wurtemberg and ultimately Heir there, is Ancestress of the Wurtemberg Sovereignties that now are, and also (by one of HER daughters married to Paul of Russia) of all the Czar kindred of our time. [Preuss, iv. 278; Erman, Vie de Sophie ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... country. The chief of the latter is ancestor-worship. The ancestors of a family form its household gods; but only the male ancestors are worshipped: no offerings are ever laid on the shelf of the household gods before an ancestress. Property, too, passes chiefly in the male line, and every Japanese father is eager to have a son who shall continue the worship of his ancestors, and to whom his ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... shall go away into eternal expatriation, while among the queens of heavenly society will be found Vashti, who wore the modest veil before the palatial bacchanalians; and Hannah, who annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple; and Grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imitated her virtue; and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to the world; and many of you, the wives, and mothers, and sisters, and daughters of the present Christian church who, through great tribulation, are entering into the kingdom of ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... attention. She started nervously, and, as usual, the thought of the White Lady worked in her mind. They said the poor ghost moaned when death drew near to any of her descendants, and she was Eberhard Ludwig's ancestress. The Landhofmeisterin dared not turn her head for fear she should see a tall, white, shrouded figure with bloodstained hands. Again ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Cooke's daughters was Lady Burleigh, who had been governess to Edward VI., second wife of the famous lord-treasurer, and direct ancestress of the present talented marquis of Salisbury, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, whose sister, Lady Mildred Beresford-Hope, wife of the well-known son of the author of Anastasius, bears the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... from MAJOR became MINOR in Saxon Genealogy. "Magnanimous Johann Friedrich," said they, "had to wife an Aunt of the now deceased Duke of Cleve; Wife Sibylla (sister of the Flanders Mare), of famous memory, our lineal Ancestress. In favor of whom HER Father, the then reigning Duke of Cleve, made a marriage-contract of precisely similar import to this your Prussian one: he, and barred all his descendants, if contracts are to be valid." This is the claim of the Ernestine Line of Saxon Princes; not like to go ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... Courtenay. "Isn't it a dear, interesting old place? I expect Monica will have told you most of the legends. No! Why, Monica, what have you been thinking of? Do you mean to say they haven't heard yet about your ancestress and Sir Humphrey Warden ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... inflexible in such matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs. Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's to receive that venerable ancestress's blessing. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... name applied after her death and apotheosis to Papa, the wife of Wakea, and the ancestress of the Hawaiian race. (The Polynesian Race, A. Fornander, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... road dropped down and down to the shores of lonely St. Mary's Loch (Scott wrote of it in "Marmion"), and at the end of the still lake to Dryhope Tower, where brave Mary Scott, his ancestress, "The Flower of Yarrow," had ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... parties of Rajput gentlemen, beggars, hangers-on, retainers armed with ancient swords, mountebanks, several carriage-loads of women, who could sing and dance and were as particular about their veiling as if Lalun were not their ancestress, the inevitable faquirs, camel-loads of entertainers, water-carriers, sheep, asses, and bullock-drawn, squeaking two-wheeled carts aburst with all that men and animals could eat. Three days and nights of circus life, as Tess described ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... your private affairs overseen and interfered with by such beings as they are, though sometimes it may be most useful and agreeable. Besides which, there was a Fairy-secret connected with the family that lived at the Sea Castle. An Ancestress of the present Mistress had been a Fairy herself, and though she had accommodated herself to mortal manners, and lived with her husband quite quietly as well as happily, and so her origin had been in a great measure forgotten, it was not unknown ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... visited Queen Mary's rooms, being shown, like other strangers, the closet where her ancestress had sat at supper on a memorable night, and the stair from the chapel up which Ruthven, risen from a sick-bed, led the conspirators who seized Davie Rizzio, dragged him from his mistress's knees, to which he clung, and slew him pitilessly on the boards which, according ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... spear in her hand. She got a glimpse of King George, with ringlets, velvet suit and Vandyke lace collar gravely smiling as he received the papers from her hands. She was still in the romantic stage of kingship! And then the stolidly common-sense Puritan ancestress in her made her laugh. It was hard for her to disbelieve a romantic and perilous tale. But these letters! They were simply the pathetic love-letters of a mother to her boy, bringing an atmosphere of a commonplace, peaceful English home into all this madness. With ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... her native land of Moab in darkness, and traveled through an undying affection for her mother-in-law, is in the harvest-field of Boaz, is affianced to one of the best families in Judah, and becomes in after-time the ancestress of Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory! Out of so dark a night did there ever dawn so ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... of high (book-collecting) reputation, the Comtesse de Verrue, was represented in the Beckford sale by one of three copies of 'L'Histoire de Melusine,' of Melusine, the twy-formed fairy, and ancestress of the house of Lusignan. The Comtesse de Verrue, one of the few women who have really understood book-collecting, {16} was born January 18, 1670, and died November 18, 1736. She was the daughter of Charles ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... 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 and Days form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabus relating to agriculture. The work of Hesiod as a whole is one of the most valiant failures in literature. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Her scarlet lips and sweet, grave eyes might have been the inheritance gift of some remote ancestress whose feet, instead of being bare and brown, had trod in high-heeled, satin slippers. When Lord Fairfax governed the Province of Virginia, that first Sally, in the stateliness of panniered brocades and powdered hair, may ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... relations was one Nesta, princess of South Wales, daughter of a Welsh king, Rice ap Tudor, a heroine whose adventures are of a sufficiently striking, not to say startling, character. By dint of a succession of alliances, some regular, others highly irregular, she became the ancestress of nearly all the great Anglo-Norman families in Ireland. Of these the Fitzgeralds, Carews, Barrys, and Cogans, are descended from her first husband, Gerald of Windsor. Robert FitzStephen, who plays, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... shelves in the corner some articles connected with family history were intermingled with curiosities brought from the East. A pair of brass-bound pattens hinged in the middle, once worn instead of overshoes by some colonial ancestress, sat alongside a pair of oriental sandals. Millard thought nothing could be more in keeping with the ancient desk and table than the unaffected and straightforward manner in which Miss Callender greeted him, holding out her hand with modest friendliness and just a touch of diffidence. This last ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... that Mullner's Guilt and The Ancestress of Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy. His translation of the first of these two masterpieces does not make us long for any further acquaintance with the school. Here is a specimen from the fourth ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... others before him? Slowly there dawned upon the King's vision—clear as though he had seen her but yesterday, the regal presence of a certain ancestress who more than any other had made the monarchy what it now was—an almost miraculous survival from the past. It was the old Queen Regent, the lady who for the last twenty years of her consort's reign, when his wavering mind ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... very nice,' said Lady Davenant gently. 'It would take that to account for you: such women as Selina are always easily enough accounted for. I didn't mean it was inherited—for that sort of thing skips about. I daresay there was some improper ancestress—except that you Americans don't seem to ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... they must have new plate. Their father's plate may be very handsome, but the fashion is changed. They will have a new service from the leading manufacturer, and the old plate, except a few apostle spoons, and a cup which Charles the Second drank a health in to their pretty ancestress, is sent to be melted down, and made up with new flourishes and fresh lustre. Now, so long as this is the case—so long, observe, as fashion has influence on the manufacture of plate—so long you cannot have a goldsmith's art in this country. Do you ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... rash to say that Cressid is the first representative of this dread and delightful entity, and the ancestress of all its embodiments since in fiction, as Cleopatra seems to have been in history. No doubt "it" was of the beginning, but it lacked its vates. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... knows all that was, is, and shall be, she tells him; the ancestress of the everlasting world, older than time; the mother of the Norns who speak with Wotan nightly. Gravest danger has brought her to seek him in person. Let him hear and heed! The present order is passing away. There is dawning ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... lady never really looks like straying far into disconcerting opinions of her own, even the rival himself obliges us by throwing up the sponge just when the game should really begin. All this is soothing enough, but it is also very thin stuff; and the addition of a ghostly ancestress, who lures her descendants to midnight assignations by smiling at them out of a LELY painting, does not stiffen things much. The fact is that away from such a purely Irish subject as, say, "Countrymen All," Mrs. HINKSON really has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... Marquis, for the first time, addressed his conversation to me. He prefers to speak in English—to show what a linguist he is, I suppose. He made me many compliments, and said how very like I was growing to my ancestress, Ambrosine Eustasie de Calincourt, and he told me again the old story of the ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... had a kind of right to Austria, withal. He descended by the female line from Kaiser Ferdinand I. (as did Kur-Sachsen, though by a younger Daughter than Karl Albert's Ancestress); and he appealed to Kaiser Ferdinand's Settlement of the Succession, as a higher than any subsequent Pragmatic could be. Upon which there hangs an incident; still famous to German readers. Karl ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the law of the State, and on giving a large sum of money to maintain 200 knights for three years in the Holy Land. He also largely endowed Mary and Agnes Becket, the Archbishop's sisters, with possessions in his newly-conquered domain in Ireland; and one of them became the ancestress of the noble family ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Israel. Boaz rejoices over her, and especially over her conversion, and prays, 'A full reward be given thee of Jehovah, the God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.' She is married to him, and becomes the ancestress of David, and, through him, of the Messiah. All this is a beautiful completion to the other side of the picture which the fierce fighting in Judges makes prominent, and teaches that Israel's relation to the nations around was ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... artificial feeding that is often advisable to-day. Yet the mortality of first-born children should indicate that a modern woman carries no instinctive system of baby management about with her in her brain, even if her savage ancestress had anything of the sort, and both the birth rate and the infantile death rate of such noble savages as our civilization has any chance of observing, suggest a certain generous carelessness, a certain spacious indifference to individual ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... particularly interested in that part of the legend which referred to Isole de Heton. He now for the first time heard of her unhallowed intercourse with the freebooter Blackburn, of her compact on Whalley Nab with the fiend, of her mysterious connection with Malkin Tower, and of her being the ancestress of Mother Demdike. The consideration of all these points, coupled with a vivid recollection of his own strange adventure with the impious votaress at the Abbey on the previous night, plunged him into a deep train of thought, and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... showing her dimpled shoulders and the turn of the breast. She had dressed her hair in a bunch of curls, high on the head, and over her forehead she wore the circlet of diamonds which my great-grandfather had given to that French ancestress of ours with the uncommendable but frank conduct. Around her neck was the famous necklace of diamonds and emeralds, and at the bosom a cluster of diamonds winked and twinkled at every breath. She stood for one minute near me, her eyes like misty ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... see in the ceremony an acknowledgment of the kinship of the snakes with the Hopi, both having descended from a common ancestress. And since the snakes are to take part in a religious ceremony, of course they must have their heads washed or baptized in preparation, exactly as must every Hopi who takes part in any ceremony. The meal sprinkled on the snakes during ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... might not, but I must not be considered in that light," answered the captain. "Strange as it may appear to you, I am connected with that very family of which you are speaking. An ancestress of mine was a Brindister. I must claim relationship with the occupants of Lunnasting. It will, in truth, be pleasant in this remote region to find friends so nearly related ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... Anne of Denmark. Such of her many jewels as were to be found when she died are said to have been left to her son, later Charles I, and none to her daughter Elizabeth, later Queen of Bohemia and ancestress of many of the sovereigns of Europe, as well as of the present reigning house in England. Unfortunately for her heir, a great part of the jewels had been embezzled, and could not be recovered, although models of many had been carefully preserved by William Herrick, who swore that the originals ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... incarnation of his own soul? The soul of some ancestor or ancestress—of his mother, perhaps? or, perhaps, some occult portion of himself—of his own brain ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after sixteen years' imprisonment; this man has passed through the jaws of death, has left his country a fugitive and a pauper, has returned as if by a miracle, carried back to a throne upon the hearts of his people; and behold ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... "By the women—that is by some obliging woman, of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to refer to as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great—great enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator, crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My point is, at any ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing her letters. Still, there is something to be said in defence of that venerable ancestress. The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred and thirty-six of whose learned letters were preserved by De Thou, composed a dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had committed the greater sin? But Ludovico Domenichi, in his "Dialogue on the Nobleness of Women," maintains that Eve ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... mountain crest above him. There was a midnight train, he knew, from Pampeluna to Saragossa. The railway station was only twenty miles away, which is to this day considered quite a convenient distance in Navarre. There would be a moon soon after nightfall. There was plenty of time. That far-off ancestress of the middle-ages had, it would appear, handed down to her sons forever, with the clear cut profile, the philosophy which allows itself time to get through ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... has left in her pupils a faint trace of the soft red-brown—just enough to remind us of what we have lost, and keep fresh in our minds the memory of these sorrows. If I wish to see what her eyes might have been, I look above my head to the portrait of Sylvia's noble ancestress, a copy made by a "tramp artist" in Castleman County, and left ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the newly christened Ann Hicks, "you have already arranged a very fanciful family tree for me. Can I ever live up to such an ancestress as that?" ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... Adams," she answered calmly. "After we parted at dawn I slept heavily, and in my sleep a dark and royal woman stood before me whom I knew to be my great ancestress, the beloved of Solomon. She looked on me sadly, yet as I thought with love. Then she drew back, as it were, a curtain of thick cloud that hid the future and revealed to me the young moon riding the sky and beneath ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... became conscious of the mysterious links which, bound me to my Gypsy ancestress by reading one of her letters to my great-grandfather, who had taught her to write: nothing apparently could have taught her to spell. It was written during a short stay she was making away from him in North Wales. It described in the simplest (and often the most uncouth) words that Nature-ecstasy ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... iris was a uniform shade: strange, slumberous, resentful eyes, under straight, thick, black brows, the expression full of all sorts of meanings, though none of them peaceful or calm. And from some far back Spanish-Jewess ancestress she probably got that glorious head of red hair, the color of a ripe chestnut when it falls from its shell, or a beautifully groomed bright bay horse. The heavy plaits which were wound tightly round her head must have fallen below her knees when they were undone. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... trampled sides; and the Roman, sore beset, may have gazed down this very road for relief, praying for night or the succouring legion. This child that swings on a gate and peeps at you from under her sun-bonnet — so may some girl-ancestress of hers have watched with beating heart the Wessex levies hurry along to clash with the heathen and break them on the down where the ash trees grew. And yonder, where the road swings round under gloomy overgrowth of drooping ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... us, no more interesting work exists than his earliest masterpiece, Cliges. The delicate and reticent Soredamors; the courteous and lovable, Guinevere; the proud and passionate Fenice, who will not sacrifice her fair fame and chastity; the sorceress Thessala, ancestress of Juliet's nurse—these form a gallery of portraits ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... hand, and marks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days when the suttee flourished. Mr. Parker said that widows would burn themselves now if the government would allow it. The family that can point to one of these little memorials and say: "She who burned herself there was an ancestress ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
