"Famine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hatchway like a ghost; a thin, shambling personage, apparently about twenty years old; a pale, cadaverous face, high cheekbones, goggle eyes, with lank hair very thinly sown upon a head which, like bad soil, would return but a scanty harvest. He looked like Famine's eldest son just arriving to years of discretion. His long lanky legs were pulled so far through his trousers, that his bare feet, and half way up to his knees, were exposed to the chilling blast. The sleeves of his jacket were so short, that four inches ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... third. Regardless of the warnings of experience, they neglect to apportion provision for their wants, or can so little restrain their appetites, that, from imprudence or extravagance, they often are exposed to the miseries of famine like their ruder neighbors. Their sufferings are soon forgotten, and the horrors of one year seem to teach no lesson ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... time of Confucius the Chinese nation seemed to have fallen back into their original condition of lawlessness and oppression. The King's power and authority was laughed to scorn, the people were pillaged by the feudal nobility, and famine reigned in many districts. The foundations of truth and social order seemed to be overthrown. There were teachers of immorality abroad, who published the old Epicurean doctrine, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." This teaching was accompanied by a spirit of ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... predicted in terms of time, but only in those of conditions. When the strength of the nations is spent, when the slain totals appalling numbers, when few homes of high or low degree are without their terrible sacrifice, when the heart of the race is filled with anguish, when famine and disease have done their awful work, and humanity fully realizes what the reaction from greed, lust, cruelty and revenge actually means, the world will be ready to listen as it never listened before, and after that we may reasonably expect the Christ to again appear to re-proclaim the ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... green island of her nativity. Ireland, unhappy country! at this moment what are not the dire necessities of thy poor! Here, from the midst of abundance, in a land that God has blessed in its productions far beyond the limits of human wants, a land in which famine was never known, do we at this moment hear thy groans, and listen to tales of suffering that to us seem almost incredible. In the midst of these chilling narratives, our eyes fall on an appeal to the English nation, that appears in what it is the fashion of some to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... still considerable. It is a station on the Anglo-Indian telegraph route, and is served by a British-owned fleet of river steamers plying to Basra. Formerly a centre of Arabic culture, it has belonged to Turkey since 1638. An imposing city to look at, it suffers from visitations of cholera and famine. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through the trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... the deafening reports of ammunition exploding, and shells bursting when touched by the flames, dense columns of smoke ascending to heaven from the burning and exploding vehicles, exhausted men, worn-out mules and horses, lying down side by side—gaunt Famine glaring hopelessly from sunken, lack-lustre eyes—dead mules, dead horses, dead men everywhere—death many times welcomed as God's messenger in disguise—who can wonder if many hearts, tried in the fiery furnace of four unparalleled years, and never hitherto ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the thunderbolts of their Jupiter. They have removed war from the list of Heaven-sent visitations that could only be prayed against; they have erased its name from the supplication against the wrath of war, pestilence, and famine, as it is found in the litanies of the Roman Catholic Church; they have dragged the scourge down from the skies and have made it into a calm and regulated institution. At first sight the change does not seem for the better. Jove's thunderbolt looks a most dangerous plaything in the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging for a chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a worker ever since he was a child; he had run away from ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... us. One of these was loaded with oats for our horses, and carried the personal baggage of the cavalry troop. Another was loaded with ordinary army rations. A third was devoted to mess supplies of the officers of the party, and as we were going into a country wasted by war and almost famine-stricken, we each tried to carry with us a small stock of choice provisions which might eke out a little comfort to the mess. The fourth wagon carried our personal baggage. Captain Day had carefully selected strong and serviceable horses for the teams, and the wagons were ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... laborious and anxious season. He had often traveled in frost and snow through devastated districts far into the east and south. Every where he had seen mournful sights, burnt castles, disturbed trade, insecurity, famine, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... leering through the gas (Just such bosoms used to nurse you), Men, turned wolves by famine—pass! Those can ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Suliots, decimated by battle, worn by famine, discouraged by treachery, were obliged to capitulate. The treaty gave them leave to go where they would, their own mountains excepted. The unfortunate tribe divided into two parts, the one going towards Parga, the other towards Prevesa. Ali gave orders for the destruction ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... slaves. While the caste system did not prevail with as much rigidity here as in India, all groups of people were bound by the influence of class environment, from which they were unable to extricate themselves. Poorer classes became so degraded that in times of famine they were obliged to sell their liberty, their lives, or {159} their labor to kings for food. They became merely toiling animals, forced for the want of bread to build the monuments of kings. The records of Egyptian civilization through art, writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... General Butler wrote me a few days since that he was issuing more rations to the slaves who have rushed to him than to all the white troops under his command. They eat, and that is all; though it is true General Butler is feeding the whites also by the thousand; for it nearly amounts to a famine there. If, now, the pressure of the war should call off our forces from New Orleans to defend some other point, what is to prevent the masters from reducing the blacks to slavery again? for I am told that whenever ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... with their tears, and anointed his tresses With the delicious balm that they bore in their vases of crystal. "Farewell!" said the priest, as he stood at the shadowy threshold; "See that you bring us the Prodigal Son from his fasting and famine, And, too, the Foolish Virgin, who slept when the bridegroom was coming." "Farewell!" answered the maiden, and, smiling, with Basil descended Down to the rivers brink, where the boatmen already were waiting. Thus beginning ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... originally landed, forty-eight were gentlemen, and only twelve were tillers of the soil. Their leader, John Smith, however, not only explored the vast Bay of Chesapeake and discovered the Potomac and the Susquehannah, but held the little company together in the face of famine and desertion till the colonists had learned the lesson of toil. In his letters to the colonizers at home he set resolutely aside the dream of gold. "Nothing is to be expected thence," he wrote of the new ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... southwesterly direction along the main stream, they entered a valley which led into the mountains. Here they ate their last bit of fresh meat, the remainder of a deer they had killed a day or two before; they reserved for their final resort, in case of famine, a small piece of ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... dreams fulfilled were sure to be. Even so they were. His brethren did bow down Their faces to the earth 'fore him unknown, When they were sent by Jacob to obtain For him and his the necessary grain. It was a time of famine, and the dearth Had then extended over all the earth But Joseph was raised up by gracious heaven, And unto him for this was wisdom given. Now when his feelings he could not restrain, He formed a scheme by which he might detain The brethren, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... comet really does portend war, drought, plague, and famine," said Pulcheria, with full conviction; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... eastern United States. The bodies of no less than twenty-four of these birds were found in the cavity of one tree. It looked as if they had crowded together with the hope of keeping warm. It was not the cold alone which had destroyed the birds: a famine had preceded the cold snap, and the birds, weakened by hunger, were ill ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... the last moment, as we were moving on. We could not object to White Dog's tribe accompanying us, but as they came but scantily furnished with provisions, we were under some considerable apprehension that they would create a famine in our camp. ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing production. Some time when we have plenty of leisure ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... without a coat; his common calico shirt, yellow and in rags; his hair hanging over his face; his features changed with suffering, and pinched with famine—there sat Mr. Alfred Jingle; his head resting on his hands, his eyes fixed upon the fire, and his whole appearance denoting misery ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... that the city could be taken neither by regular approaches nor by sudden attack. It was therefore resolved that it should be reduced by famine. Still, as the winter wore on, the immense army without the walls were as great sufferers by that scourge as the population within. The soldiers fell in heaps before the diseases engendered by intense cold and insufficient food, for, as usual ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... weaker and weaker, being continually defeated in the House, and consequently discredited before the country. Its difficulties were increased by events outside of Canada over which the government could have no control. The hideous Irish famine of 1846-47 had its reaction upon Canada, for thousands of starving emigrants tried to escape to the new land, and, after enduring the long-drawn horrors of the middle passage, reached Canada only to die like plague-stricken sheep of fever and sheer misery. The monument at Grosse Isle ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... see it's a bit hard upon me for t' leave my sister—she as is t' widow-woman, wheere a put up when a'm at home. Things is main an' dear; four-pound loaves is at sixteenpence; an' there's a deal o' talk on a famine i' t' land; an' whaten a paid for my victual an' t' bed i' t' lean-to helped t' oud woman a bit,—an' she's sadly down i' t' mouth, for she cannot hear on a lodger for t' tak' my place, for a' she's moved o'er to t' other side ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... suffered severely, and the Protestant missionaries are not in a very safe condition. We are living on the slope of a volcano that may put forth its slumbering rage at any moment. For example, people ask why there is no rain, and blame the foreigners for it; and should a famine ensue, we may fare hard for it. Now is the time for trying what stuff a man's religion is made of. We may be all dead men directly; are we afraid to die? Our death might further the cause of Christ more than our life could do. We must die some time or other; now that we ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... yielding seed." How beautiful it is to see that at the very outset food was provided for man, even before God had made him; and that all through the long years which have passed from that time till now, it has never been wanting. It is true there have been terrible famine years, when the wheat-harvest has perished, or when the rice-crop, upon which the lives of thousands of people in India and China depend, has failed from want of water; and the hand of God in judgment may at times be seen in these years of drought; but ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... who suck the blood and gold of the country. Paris and the maritime towns taxed; the rural districts ruined and laid waste by the soldiers and other agents of the Cardinal; the peasants reduced to feed on animals killed by the plague or famine, or saving themselves by self-banishment—such is the work of this new justice. His worthy agents have even coined money with the effigy of the Cardinal-Duke. Here are ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... taking it for an especial gift, and proof of inspiration. And Winnie never came home at night without at least a score of ponies trotting shyly after her, tossing their heads and their tails in turn, and making believe to be very wild, although hard pinched by famine. Of course Tom would get them all into his pound in about five minutes, for he himself could neigh in a manner which went to the heart of the wildest horse. And then he fed them well, and turned them into his great cattle pen, to abide their time for breaking, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... behind With speedier motion, eyed us, as they pass'd, A crowd of spirits, silent and devout. The eyes of each were dark and hollow: pale Their visage, and so lean withal, the bones Stood staring thro' the skin. I do not think Thus dry and meagre Erisicthon show'd, When pinc'ed by sharp-set famine to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... we might be willing to engage? Some of these rivers, indeed, you could not cross at all, unless we secured you a passage. 19. But even supposing that we were baffled in all these points, yet fire at least would prove its power over the produce of the soil; by burning which, we could set famine in array against you, which, though you were the bravest of the brave, you would find it difficult to withstand. 20. How then, having so many means of waging war with you, and none of them attended ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... Red Sea and the Nile: But, being assured that the Red Sea was higher than the Nile, and that its salt water would overflow and ruin the whole land of Egypt, he abandoned his purpose, lest that fine province should be destroyed by famine and the want of fresh water[24]; for the fresh water of the Nile overflows the whole country, and the inhabitants have no other water ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... the particular rightness of his definite acts. In these later papers White found Benham abstracted, self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine, disease and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he found out, he meant quite simply and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... all the other boys began laughing, and made signs, as if they were eating their fingers off with hunger. Then Peter called Lady Harriet's house "Famine Castle," and pretended he would swallow the knives, like ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone; nor do I say with some that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife and probe in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies,' ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... who was very wise and thoughtful, caused great storehouses of brick to be set up in all the cities, and he told the people to place in these granaries one-tenth of the yield of each year's harvest. This he did to guard against any time of famine which ...
— Children of the Old Testament • Anonymous
... admirable quality, and much is imported to Silhet, the Jheels not producing grain enough for the consumption of the people. Though Silchar grows enough for ten times its population, there was actually a famine six weeks before our arrival, the demand from Silhet being ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... and encouraging justice; Raising up every good thing, and crushing every evil; As plenty comes removing famine, As clothing covers nakedness, As clear sky after storm warms the shivering; As fire cooks that which is raw, As water quenches the thirst; Look with thy face upon my lot; do not covet, but content me without fail; do the right and do ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... years are shrouded in darkness. We know that he was an unlettered shepherd in his youth and mistrustful of Rabbis and their learning. His master, Kalba Sabua—so the story goes—was one of the richest men in Jerusalem, one of the three wealthy philanthropists who offered to prevent the famine occasioned by the last great ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... grievously bruising the sheriff of Nottingham? You are a set of vagabond rascals in disguise; and I hear, by the bye, there is a gang of thieves that has just set up business in Sherwood Forest: a pretty presence, indeed, to get into my castle with force and arms, and make a famine in my buttery, and a drought in my cellar, and a void in my strong box, and a vacuum in ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... needle-women who had starved, gone mad, or committed suicide during the past year; the enormous profits wrung by capitalists from the blood and muscles of their employes; and the alarming increase in the cost of living, which was about to plunge the nation into debt and famine, if ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... whether he would accept that definition of himself. He presently rejected it by answering, "Rich is not quite the word for me, dame. I do work, and I must work. And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I must begin work there at eight to-morrow morning. Yes, hot or wet, blow or snow, famine or sword, my day's work to-morrow must ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... years since the heaven had been shut, and the earth dried up: so that they said commonly, the very elements mourned the death of Antony. But Hilarion's fame spread to them; and a great multitude, brown and shrunken with famine, cried to him for rain, as to the blessed Antony's successor. He saw them, and grieved over them; and lifting up his hand to heaven, obtained rain at once. But the thirsty and sandy land, as soon as it was watered by showers, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Misfortunes of the unhappy Ladies, I turn'd my Eyes upon them. They were each of them filling his Pockets with Gold and Jewels, and when there was no Room left for more, these Wretches looking round with Fear and Horror, pined away before my Face with Famine and Discontent. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... well known to him. He had seen them last hanging about the village street, pale with famine—the hatred in their ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for him. It can do much, but how do you suppose he finds it out; what instincts or accidents guide him? How does a cat know when to eat catnip? Why do western bred cattle avoid loco weed, and strangers eat it and go mad? One might suppose that in a time of famine the Paiutes digged wild parsnip in meadow corners and died from eating it, and so learned to produce death swiftly and at will. But how did they learn, repenting in the last agony, that animal fat is the best antidote for its virulence; ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... classes." This and similar experiences showed us that when the organisation of the trade unions was more complete, and the accumulated funds of several years were devoted to this purpose, the bulk of the inhabitants of London, and of other great cities, could be made to suffer a degree of famine comparable with that of Paris when besieged by the German ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Famine was staring RICHARD'S army in the face, so that nothing could be more natural and proper than that he should have issued orders to butcher ten thousand of his lower soldiers, and have their meat canned for the subsistence ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... possible for me to remain in the island. I had, in the second year of the war, determined to resign on account of the pecuniary difficulties of my position. We were living in a besieged town, with all necessaries of life at famine prices, and, since my brother's death, I had no fund to draw on for my excessive expenses. The Cretan committee in Boston, considering my resignation probably fatal to the insurrection, had promised that they would be responsible for any expenses above my salary, and on that understanding ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... from the position of the laet was that of the slave, though there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... it will be only for a time, for it is written, that He will not suffer the just to waver forever; the eyes of the Lord are on them that fear Him, and on them that hope in His mercy to deliver their souls from death and feed them in famine. Trust not to the princes of the earth, nor to the charitable offers made you by our benefactor, Count Orlando, for cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm. This lord has acted ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... recoiling on themselves! It looks as if civil war was bursting out in many provinces, and will precipitate approaching famine. When, till now, could one make such a reflection without horror to one's self? But, alas! have not the French brought it to the question, whether Europe or France should be laid desolate'! Religion, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... dreadful scene in my life—never!' said Mr. Swancourt, floundering into the boat. 'Worse than Famine and Sword upon one. I thought such customs were confined to continental ports. Aren't you ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... cradle to the grave, every strictly wild animal lives, day and night, in a state of fear of bodily harm, and dread of hunger and famine. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... twigs of circumstances, or the boughs of environment, or the grasses of accident that make the tiny waves of our individual experiences,—or even the great rocks and cliffs of national or racial import,—such as wars, and pestilence, and famine,—finally check or stay the river of life in its onward flow toward the sea of its final ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... 1843, was established on his hacienda, in partnership with an American who had been long resident in that part of the island. In this and the following year, however, the east of Cuba was visited by an unprecedented drought; causing famine which, though it destroyed many lives and ruined thousands of proprietors, attracted no more attention, he says, in England, than was implied by "a paragraph of three lines in an English newspaper." The west of Cuba was at the same ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of, and the cruelty of the English rendered this measure more necessary. Cooped up in a vessel at New York, and breathing a most noxious atmosphere, the American prisoners suffered all that gross insolence could add to famine, dirt, disease, and complete neglect. Their food was, to say the least, unwholesome. The officers, often confounded with their soldiers, appealed to former capitulations and to the right of nations; but they were only answered by fresh outrages. When one victim sunk beneath such treatment, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... banks of the Murray. Thus I could reach Sydney some weeks sooner, and also carry on my survey much more conveniently; the cattle, which had been sinking almost daily, would be thus refreshed sufficiently to be able to travel and the chance of the whole party suffering from famine would be much diminished. Such was the outline of the plan which our position and ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... born, had no ulterior idea. He always spent his monthly allowance by the second Tuesday after the first Monday, and sulked through a period of famine and debt until the next month. It was now the third Tuesday and he was disposed ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... against the monks we may know from the charges made even by those who favored the system. Jerome Ambrose, Augustine, and in fact almost every one of the Fathers tried to correct the growing disorders. We learn from them that many fled from society, not to become holy, but to escape slavery and famine; and that many were lazy and immoral. Their "shaven heads lied to God." Avarice, ambition, or cowardice ruled hearts that should have been actuated by a love of poverty, self-sacrifice or courage. "Quite recently," says Jerome, "we have seen to our sorrow ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... expressed his gratitude to both senate and people,—the consuls affording him an opportunity,—in their respective assemblies. He laid aside his hatred of Pompey for his banishment, became reconciled with him, and immediately repaid his kindness. A sore famine had arisen in the city and the entire populace rushed into the theatre (the kind of theatre that they were then still using for public gatherings) and from there to the Capitol where the senators were in session, threatening first to ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... in early August, some weeks after the incident described in the last chapter, Bobbie Forbes, in the worst inn's worst fly, such being the stress and famine of election time, drove up to the Tallyn front door. It was the day after the polling, and Tallyn, with its open windows and empty rooms, had the look of a hive from which the bees have swarmed. According to the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the Old! Here Noah lived when the Flood came, here Abraham and Isaac and Jacob pitched their tents and pastured their flocks. From here the sons of Jacob, who was also called Israel, went down to the land of Egypt to buy corn when there was a terrible famine lasting many years. We know that they settled there, having found their brother Joseph in great power; and long, long after they had all been dead their descendants multiplied into a great people and were treated as slaves by the Egyptians, so God brought them back again to ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... SOCIETY was organized March 1, 1882, with headquarters at Washington, D. C. Its object is the relief of suffering by war, pestilence, famine, flood, fires, and other calamities of sufficient magnitude to be deemed national in extent. It is governed by the provisions of the International Convention of Aug. 22, 1864, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... front rank and never retreat; they were the most faithful of auxiliaries, and yet required no pay. After the defeat of the Cimbri[90] their dogs defended their movable houses, which were carried upon wagons. Jason, the Lycian, having been slain, his dog refused to take food, and died of famine. A dog, to which Darius gives the name of Hyrcanus, upon the funeral pile of King Lysimachus being lighted, threw itself into the flames; and the dog of King Hiero[91] did the same. Philistus also gives a similar account of Pyrrhus, the dog of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... other. Within a month the whole Continent might be in arms. Pious men saw in this stroke, so sudden and so terrible, the plain signs of the divine displeasure. God had a controversy with the nations. Nine years of fire, of slaughter and of famine had not been sufficient to reclaim a guilty world; and a second and more severe chastisement was at hand. Others muttered that the event which all good men lamented was to be ascribed to unprincipled ambition. It would indeed have been strange if, in that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there came the Irish famine, and all the bindings of all the Tories were scattered to the winds like feathers. The Irishman's potato-pot ceased to be full, and at once the great territorial magnates of England were convinced that they had clung ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... possible to exaggerate the wretched state of the sister isle, where fires of recent hate were still smouldering, and where the poor inhabitants, guilty and guiltless, were daily living on the verge of famine, over which they were soon to be driven. Their ill condition much aggravated by the intemperate habits to which despairing men so easily fall a prey. The expenditure of Ireland on proof spirits alone had in the year 1829 attained the sum ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... greater peril than War reached Haifa. Famine stalked naked through the land of Lebanon; and it was urgently necessary to send help to the starving inhabitants of Beyrout and the surrounding country. Political reasons, too, demanded that we should occupy as much territory as possible. On October 3rd, therefore, we marched out ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... to the teachings of those "Black Robes," the few fearless priests who sought them out. The priests, bravest of the brave, journeyed unarmed and far, even among the scornful Iroquois, enduring torture by fire and knife, the torment of mosquitoes, cold and famine, and draughty, crowded bark houses smotheringly thick with damp ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... talked a little more about his travels, and a bridge over the Severn, that he thought the greatest wonder of the world, I asked him if he remembered the Famine. ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... speech on the sugar duties came off in due course. In this speech he took the sound point that the new arrangement must act as an encouragement to the slave trade, 'that monster which, while war, pestilence, and famine were slaying their thousands, slew from year to year with unceasing operation its tens of thousands.' As he went on, he fell upon Macaulay for being member of a cabinet that was thus deserting a cause in which Macaulay's father had been the unseen ally of Wilberforce, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... spare,—civilians as well as soldiers, blacks as well as whites; but no such distribution is possible, because there are but indifferent means for the conveyance of food from places where it is abundant to places where famine's ascendency is becoming established. The Southern railways have been terribly worked for three years, and are now worn out, with no hope of their rails and rolling-stock being renewed. Our troops have rendered hundreds of miles of those ways useless, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... a history, my dears, as I have said. And time is growing short. I shall pass over that dreary summer of '74. It required no very keen eye to see the breakers ahead, and Mr. Bordley's advice to provide against seven years of famine did not go unheeded. War was the last thing we desired. We should have been satisfied with so little, we colonies! And would have voted the duties ten times over had our rights been respected. Should any of you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reprimand. And all this time the true pastors of the people, meanly fed and meanly clothed, frowned upon by the law, exposed to the insults of every petty squire who gloried in the name of Protestant, were to be found in miserable cabins, amidst filth, and famine, and contagion, instructing the young, consoling the miserable, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying. Is it strange that, in such circumstances, the Roman Catholic religion should have been constantly becoming dearer and dearer to an ardent and sensitive people, and that your ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The cane growers of Louisiana have stopped the exodus from New Orleans, claiming shortage of labor which will result in a sugar famine. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... shortcomings, with its wars, controversies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,—it is her Practical Material Work alone that England has to show for herself! This, and hitherto almost nothing more; yet actually this. The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People, unable to speak its meaning in words, has ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... midst of this cruel partisan war that the duke heard of the fall of La Rochelle; he could not find fault "with folks so attenuated by famine that the majority of them could not support themselves without a stick, for having sought safety in capitulation;" but to the continual anxiety felt by him for the fate of his mother and sister was added disquietude as to the effect that this news might produce on his troops. "The people, weary ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the Arabs is in the exact style of the Old Testament. The name of God is coupled with every trifling incident in life, and they believe in the continual action of Divine special interference. Should a famine afflict the country, it is expressed in the stern language of the Bible—"The Lord has sent a grievous famine upon the land;" or, "The Lord called for a famine, and it came upon the land." Should their cattle ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... thereby beauty's rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory: But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel: Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament, And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content, And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding: ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... sight—and I pray thee, Almighty God! should I prove false to the vow or vows I now make, in becoming a member of this Holy Brotherhood, to shut from me the light of thy countenance—to visit the wrath of thy indignation upon me—to let my walks here on earth be paths of desolation, at the end of which be famine and death, and, in the world to come, torment and more tormenting pains racking my soul for ever! But, Almighty God! should I keep and carry out these, the only true principles, which thou in thy wisdom hast set aside for thy children to follow, then mayest ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... aquatic grasses, and so unfruitful that it would not give back the seed sown upon it. In 1848 a crop of corn was taken from it, which was measured and found to be eighty bushels per acre, and as, because of the Irish famine, corn was worth $1 per bushel that year, this crop paid not only all the expense of drainage, but the first cost of the land ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... seldom he has to have recourse to the forest for his maintenance. But the mountain Manbo is occasionally compelled to draw his sustenance from the various palm trees and vines that are found in such luxuriance throughout his forest domain. I have seen poisonous tubers gathered in time of famine by the Manbos of the upper W-wa region and eaten, after they had been scraped on a prickly rattan branch, and the poison had been removed by a series of washings ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... wife of King Ahab. It would seem to be the last place in which an enemy of Baal would seek refuge, but Elijah knew that God had a purpose in sending him there. Ethbaal, the father of Jezebel, was the King of Phoenicia, and the famine which followed the drought had reached that country, and was ...
— The Man Who Did Not Die - The Story of Elijah • J. H. Willard
... lived, and, although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family. Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a saint. His self-devotion ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... bride, dressed in her bridal drapery, her cheek wet and moistened with the tears of love. I can see her come and knock gently at the doors of the Union, asking for admittance. [Wild cheering.] Looking further back, I can see our forefathers of the revolution baring their bosoms to the famine of a seven years' war, making their own bosoms a breastwork against the whole hosts of King George III. But, gentlemen, as I before remarked, I desire to ask at your hands the high, distinguished and lucrative office, my fellow-citizens, and for which I will ever ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... assure him that if he let himself be caught napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot hell would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden death—the most enviable of all deaths—was regarded as the most frightful calamity. It was classed with plague, pestilence, and famine, battle and murder, in our prayers. But belief in that hell is fast vanishing. All the leaders of thought have lost it; and even for the rank and file it has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland which are still in the XVII century. Even there, it ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... prone to rage, and often found To perish for revenge, and die upon the wound Their venomed sting produces aching pains, And swells the flesh, and shoots among the veins. When first a cold hard winter's storms arrive, 310 And threaten death or famine to their hive, If now their sinking state and low affairs Can move your pity, and provoke your cares, Fresh burning thyme before their cells convey, And cut their dry and husky wax away; For often lizards seize the ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... uninhabited. But their enemies had the advantage of cannon against them, and of supplies of every kind; yet once the negroes beat off their assailants. But numbers overpowered them, and being weakened by famine, their city was forced, and the inmates seized as slaves. Zombi, however, and the most resolute of his followers, threw themselves from a high rock when they perceived their condition desperate. The Portuguese abused their victory, and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... had to pass through a cotton famine, and they had been taught the inconvenience of the prohibition of the export of cotton ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... instinctive, unreasoning. He realized vaguely that his whole existence depended on Edith's getting well, and yet we doubt whether he thought of himself any more than the Newfoundland, who watches beside the bed, and then beside the grave of a loved master, till famine, that form of pain which humanity cannot endure, robs ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... treasurer who had the charge there would by no means agree to any trade, or suffer us to take water. He had fortified his town with divers bulwarks in all places where it might be entered, and furnished himself with a hundred harquebusiers, so that he thought by famine to have enforced us to have put on land our negroes, of which purpose he had not greatly failed unless we had by force entered the town; which (after we could by no means obtain his favour) we were enforced to do, and so with two hundred men brake in upon their bulwarks, and entered the town ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... little coastal settlement famine was soon felt. The colonists did not understand how to get crops from the soil. They attempted to follow the times and the manners of England; but here they were in the Antipodes, where everything was exactly opposite to English conditions. There ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... misery, whichever be cause, whichever be effect, always go together. There has been, as is well known, a failure of the potato-crop, and consequently a famine, in the West Highlands and Hebrides. In the island of Mull, about L.3000 of money raised in charity was spent in the year ending October 10, 1848, for the eleemosynary support of the people. In the same space of time, the expenditure of the people on whisky was L.6009! We do not know how much ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... whom possibly the rise of humanitarian ideas not only tends to counteract the weeding out of the unfit, but even makes it relatively easy for them to propagate their species. What the result of the intermarriage of cousins is when war, famine, and infanticide are efficient weeders out of the unfit, we cannot say. Possibly or even probably the ill results would be inappreciable. It must not be forgotten that the marriage of near relatives is only harmful because or if it hands on to the children of the union an hereditary ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... predestined to death or slavery, [115] a surprising degree of population, which must at least include the inhabitants of the dependent districts. They were surrounded and taken by assault; but Tarsus was reduced by the slow progress of famine; and no sooner had the Saracens yielded on honorable terms than they were mortified by the distant and unprofitable view of the naval succors of Egypt. They were dismissed with a safe-conduct to the confines of Syria: a part of the old Christians had quietly lived under their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... Wave followed wave in the dreadful invasion; fleet after fleet and army after army was destroyed, and the Saxons were driven nearly to despair; for added to the evils of pillage and destruction were pestilence and famine, the usual attendants of desolating wars. In the year 878 the heroic leader of the disheartened people was compelled to hide himself, with a few faithful followers, in the forest of Selwood, amid ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... of pestilence and famine. The whole episode has a brilliant place among the sieges of history; it has been related a hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pass. I limit my ambition in these light pages to speaking of those things of which ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... and it prove the cause of thy losing her and the reason of thy ruin and increase of thine affliction. They have not sent us any supper to-night and we shall die an hungered; and were we in any land but this, we were already dead of famine or of shame for begging our bread." When Kanmakan heard these words from his mother, his regrets redoubled; his eyes ran over with tears and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Meantime a famine threatened France. The universal panic quickly aggravated the evil, by the precautions which it suggested. Avarice, always prompt in seizing the means of enriching itself, monopolized the corn while at ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... dread to see them, and their rags and their misery and the weals of their stripes. It irked me to see Dallach when he first fell to his meat last night, how he ate like a dog for fear and famine. How shall it be, moreover, when we have them in the Dale, and they fall to the deed of kind there, as they needs must. Will they not bear ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... down from Allentown," Miss Scarlett proceeded, "on purpose to be stayed with flagons and comforted with apples, as I have been here in the past. I wanted to have a good sort of lackadaisical time with the nice boys here, and I've had to stay—I don't know how long—on a famine diet of women and girls, with Ella Wheeler for sauce. It makes ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... deserters, for instance, were they necessarily without excuse? They might have been oppressively used; but in critical times of war, no matter for the individual palliations, the deserter from his colors must be shot: there is no help for it: as in extremities of general famine, we shoot the man (alas! we are obliged to shoot him) that is found robbing the common stores in order to feed his own perishing children, though the offence is hardly visible in the sight of God. Only blockheads adjust their scale of guilt to the scale ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the Kennebec. At first, his appearance excited the utmost indignation in the army; yet, on being arrested, he was acquitted by a court martial, on the principle that it was absolutely impracticable to obtain provisions on the route to preserve the troops from perishing with famine. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... ceaseless commerce brought here the food for its inhabitants. It is quite likely that, were Philadelphia shut off at once from all connection with the world, within ten days there would be an absolute famine here—so closely do we depend upon our commercial supplies for our subsistence. These supplies are not drawn from any one locality; were we to draw a radius of five hundred miles around our great city of a million inhabitants, we should still find that the greater part of our food supply ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... hire, Women of weak wills and strong desire. And, like the poison ivy in the woods That winds itself about tall virile trees Until it smothers them, so these Ruined the bodies and the souls of men. More evil were they than Red War itself, Or Pestilence, or Famine. Now in this war - This last most awful carnage of the world - All the old wickedness exists ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Irish political organisation having for its object the overthrow of English rule in Ireland and the establishment of a republic there. The movement was initiated in the United States soon after the great famine in Ireland of 1846-47, which, together with the harsh exactions of the landlords, compelled many Irishmen to emigrate from their island with a deeply-rooted sense of injustice and hatred of the English. The Fenians organised themselves ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... why men never suspect that any treason has been committed is because by his enchantments he has transformed his own appearance so as to become the exact counterpart of myself. The man who called down the rain and saved my country from drought and famine has simply disappeared, so men think, and I the King still rule as of old in my kingdom. Not the slightest suspicion as to the true state of things has ever entered the brain of anyone in the nation, and so the usurper is absolutely safe in the ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... superiority during the revolutionary war prevented a stoppage in the supply of wheat from abroad; but it became uncertain, prices fluctuated violently with good or bad harvests; war acted as a protection to the corn-grower and bad harvests were followed by famine prices; in 1795 wheat averaged 81s. 6d. in Windsor market, and in 1800 reached 127s. Wages rose with the expansion of manufactures, but not in anything like proportion to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... brother Imotu was made king in his place, and for a space reigned and had a son by his favourite wife. When the babe was three years old, just after the great war, during which no man could sow or reap, a famine came upon the land, and the people murmured because of the famine, and looked round like a starved lion for something to rend. Then it was that Gagool, the wise and terrible woman, who does not die, made a proclamation to the people, ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... permitted the place to be used for public promenades, lovers' meetings—and popular harangues. Friends of the People, Friends of Phillipe, and Friends of the King freely rubbed elbows. The popular tide set so strongly that none dared openly oppose the demagogic orators. A bread famine had descended upon Paris. The scarcity of wheat and flour was an ever-present theme; the oppression of autocracy and seigniorage, another. The cry for direct action always woke echo in the popular breast, sick over the delays of the Versailles lawgivers, and ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... that the church-mouse would be conceded a distinct advantage in many particulars. A very small nest will accommodate a very large family of growing mice; the tighter they are packed in the nest the better off they are in zero weather. Moreover, in a pinch, the parental church-mouse may stave off famine by resorting to a cannibalistic plan of economy, thereby saving its young the trouble of growing up to become proverbial church-mice. It may devour its young when it becomes painfully hungry, and not be held accountable to the law. With commendable frugality, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... the fur covering of their bodies. Their faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously distended and fat—fat as things bloated and swollen are fat. It was the abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterward destroys. The men moved about at times on their hands and knees; their tongues were distended, round, and slate-coloured, like the tongues of parrots, and when they spoke they bit ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... xxii. 28, 168. Chiefs as well as kings probably influenced fertility. A curious survival of this is found in the belief that herrings abounded in Dunvegan Loch when MacLeod arrived at his castle there, and in the desire of the people in Skye during the potato famine that his fairy banner ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... period of intense suffering. Sometimes the soldiers went for days without bread. "For some days past," wrote Washington, "there has been little less than famine in the camp." Most of the soldiers were in rags, only a few had bed clothing. Many had to sit by the fire all night to keep warm, and some of the sick soldiers were without beds or even loose straw to lie upon. Nearly three thousand of the men ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... real desire for food. Prisoners of war were killed and eaten, sometimes cooked, and among some tribes raw. In their religious frenzy the Aztecs ate the remains of the human beings who were sacrificed to their idols. At other times cannibalism has been a necessity. In a famine in Egypt, as pictured by the Arab Abdullatif, the putrefying debris of animals, as well as their excrement, was used as food, and finally the human dead were used; then infants were killed and devoured, so great was the distress. In many sieges, shipwrecks, etc., cannibalism ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... unserved. He has subdued this planet, his habitation and inheritance, yet reaps no profit from the victory. Sad to look upon: in the highest stage of civilization nine-tenths of mankind have to struggle in the lowest battle of savage or even animal man—the battle against famine. Countries are rich, prosperous in all manner of increase, beyond example; but the men of these countries are poor, needier than ever of all sustenance, outward and inward; of belief, of knowledge, of money, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... disputed between the two Sons of Isdigerd II., Perozes (or Firuz) and Hormisdas. Civil War for two years. Success of Perozes, through aid given him by the Ephthalites. Great Famine. Perozes declares War against the Ephthalites, and makes an Expedition into their Country. His ill success. Conditions of Peace granted him. Armenian Revolt and War. Perozes, after some years, resumes ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... a potato famine in the land. I let him have a ton for twelve pounds and he went away joyfully. That night I dreamt of a pile of gold in the form of a grave in which a girl was buried, and woke up callous with greed. On calling at my ship- broker's office, that man, after ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... doubt within my mind of yore; I sought to end that doubt and laboured sore; But now I search its mystery no more, But leave it safe within the Eternal's hand. The tiger hunts the lamb and yearns to kill, Himself by famine hunted, fiercer still; And much there is that seems unmingled ill; But God is ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the other hand, riches with a narrow niggardly spirit was abominable, but then—and the black sheep came, usually, to the strongest part of his argument when he said "but then"—it was an uncommonly difficult thing, when everything was up to famine prices, and gold was depreciated in value owing to the gold-fields, and silver was nowhere, and coppers were changed into bronze,—exceedingly difficult to practise liberality and at the same time to make the two ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... more, for there came a morning when the glorious winter sun of Russia greeted the Star-Spangled Banner, when American ships landed on Russian shores ready to protect us from a more cruel enemy—hunger. The cry of distress from our famine-stricken villages had found an echo in American hearts and the ships which came did not bear government orders, they bore the tokens of love from one brother to another; they brought us wheat and corn to feed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper |
