"Meagre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... read upon the face of the land the story of this hill farmer and his meagre existence—his ill-directed effort to wring a poor living for his family from these upland fields, his poverty, and, above all, his evident lack of knowledge of his own calling. Added to these things, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... School life are meagre, but we can readily understand that to a lad of Borrow's temperament the routine of a well-ordered school was naturally distasteful, though he loved to gain knowledge from any unconventional source open to him. So we find him studying French and Italian with "one banished priest," ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy? Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one condition—that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood forth ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... she was sad and sorry and ashamed, because of the futile bustle and bluster and cheerful courageous activity about her. Not a cheek had blenched; not a hand had trembled; not a voice had been lifted to protest or counsel surrender, despite their meagre capacities for defense and their number, but a handful. What would these men say to her if they knew that their patriotism and their valor were expended in vain,—above all, their mutual cause of quarrel wasted!—as pretty a bit of neighborhood spite as ever stopped ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... during and especially since the war, in the cost both of the cotton stuffs which the working man needs even for his scanty apparel and of the foodstuffs which constitute his meagre fare, discontent grew steadily more acute, and wages, though more than once enhanced, did not always keep pace with that appreciation. If in circumstances, often of undoubted hardship, labour had been sufficiently equipped to state its own case, or had found disinterested friends ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... we ever find much beyond such matters in Egyptian hieroglyphics, or in Cuneiform inscriptions? In fact, what does the ancient history of the world before Cyrus, before 500 B.C., consist of, but meagre lists of Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian dynasties? What do the tablets of Karnak, the palaces of Nineveh, and the cylinders of Babylon tell us about the thoughts of men? All is dead and barren, nowhere ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... in Cleveland a few weeks ago, a young man who has won distinction on the bench told me this incident from his early life. He was born in a little village of Western Russia where the opportunities for schooling were meagre. When he was thirteen his parents sent him to the nearest city in search of an education. There—in Bialystok—were good secondary schools and good high schools; but the Russian law, which limits the percentage of Jewish pupils in any school, barred his admission. The boy's parents lacked the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... wonder, then, that we have known practically nothing of the Apache and their customs beyond the meagre record of what has been given us by a few army officers; consequently their study was entered into with especial interest. Although much time was expended and much patience consumed before the confidence of their elders was gained, the work was finally successful, as will be seen particularly ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... A pretty daughter! Would you fall back on a stranger? Or perhaps you are thinking of the Board of Guardians!' And a shudder of humiliation traversed her meagre frame. For at sixty she was already meagre, had already the appearance of the venerable grandmother she was now to become, save that her hair, being only a pious wig, remained rigidly young and black. Life had always gone hard with ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... few of those commodities, which are the objects of commerce, are adulterated to a greater extent than wine. All persons moderately conversant with the subject, are aware, that a portion of alum is added to young and meagre red wines, for the purpose of brightening their colour; that Brazil wood, or the husks of elderberries and bilberries,[27] are employed to impart a deep rich purple tint to red Port of a pale, faint ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... handkerchiefs to mark for Christmas customers, besides towels and table-linen, sheets and pillow-cases. People had found her out, and she had to refuse more than one good order for lack of time. But needlework alone, quick as she was in doing it, would have given her but a meagre income, had she not been able to ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... The meagre information we have as to the life and habits of Shakespeare would seem to make it an almost hopeless task now to discover the causes of his insomnia. He wrote a marvellous body of literature, and it might be thought this labor itself would suffice as an explanation: that ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... past life, sitting by a blazing fire in his comfortable apartment in the Rue Miromeuil previous to dressing for the Duc de Frontignan's dinner-party. Born of poor parents in the south of France, entering the priesthood at an early age, having received but a meagre education, and that chiefly confined to a superficial knowledge of the most elementary treatises on theology, he had, in twenty-five years, and solely by his own exertions, unaided by patronage, obtained a most desirable berth in one of the leading Paris churches, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... what Private Ortheris called "eeklar." It fell in the heart of the hot weather, and, after the wedding, Slane was going up to the Hills with the bride. None the less, Slane's grievance was that the affair would be only a hired-carriage wedding, and he felt that the "eeklar" of that was meagre. Miss M'Kenna did not care so much. The Sergeant's wife was helping her to make her wedding-dress, and she was very busy. Slane was, just then, the only moderately contented man in barracks. All the rest were more or ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... female, on seeing the house in such a crowded state, started, paused, and glanced with some terror at the persons assembled. Her dress was not altered since her last visit; but her countenance, though more meagre and emaciated, expressed but little of the unsettled energy which then flashed from her eyes, and distorted her features by the depth of that mysterious excitement by which she had been agitated. Her countenance ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... later invaders, already abashed if not terrified by the unexpected spectacle of suspended animation which confronted them from the judge's chair, shrank tumultuously back as little Miss Weeks advanced upon them, holding out her meagre arms in late defence of the secret to save which she had ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... forced to compress what I had to say in these articles, I have only been able to suggest rather than put forward ideas, for my own knowledge of these correspondences is very incomplete. As far as I know the subject has been untouched hitherto, and this must be my excuse for the meagre nature of the information given. I hope later on to treat of the relation of sound and colour to form and to show how these correspondences will enable us to understand the language which the gods speak to us through flowers, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... feared word would be passed and the Bolos would try to prevent us from accomplishing our purpose. The inhabitants were given three hours to vacate. It was a pitiful sight to see them turned out of the dwellings where most of them had spent their whole simple, not unhappy lives, their meagre possessions scattered awry upon ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... above drama was suggested by two or three rather meagre pages of the 'Islendingasaga' of Sturla Thordsson (ed. Vigfusson, ch. 146). To my notion, the poet has succeeded admirably in reproducing the cool coloring, the ironic-pessimistic attitude, that uncompromisingly masculine sentiment ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... from the pilgrim's brow, as a small and meagre book, Unchased with gold or gem of cost, from his folding robe he took! "Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price, may it prove as such to thee Nay, keep thy gold—I ask it not, for the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... blue eyes and gold lashes— Made in the mold of the Saviour, they say! Drink deep of my bosom, my starved, meagre bosom, That—keeps you ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "Meeting," and shows seven gamins talking together before a wooden fence at the corner of a street. Francois Coppee wrote of it: "It is a chef d'oeuvre, I maintain. The faces and the attitudes of the children are strikingly real. The glimpse of meagre landscape expresses the sadness of ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... his head beneath his skull cap. He would see what he could screw out of the funds of the Obreria; if just at first nothing could be managed, as the revenues of the Primacy were meagre and at their lowest ebb, no doubt something ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Arianism. Servetus had rendered many services to scientific truth, and one of these was an edition of Ptolemy's Geography, in which Judea was spoken of, not as "a land flowing with milk and honey," but, in strict accordance with the truth, as, in the main, meagre, barren, and inhospitable. In his trial this simple statement of geographical fact was used against him by his arch-enemy John Calvin with fearful power. In vain did Servetus plead that he had simply drawn the words from a previous edition of Ptolemy; ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the fifth floor of a building in New York City he toiled at his experiments day and night, with little food, and that of the simplest kind. Indeed so meagre was his fare, mainly crackers and tea, that he bought provisions at night in order to keep his friends from finding out ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... the movements of the Prince in 1749? Curiously enough, Mr. Ewald does not seem to have consulted the 'Stuart Papers' at Windsor, while the extracts in Browne's 'History of the Highland Clans' are meagre. To these papers then we turn for information. The most useful portions are NOT Charles's letters to James. These are brief and scanty. Thus he writes from Avignon (January 15, 1749), 'We are enjoying here the finest ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... are not thy kindred as hardened as thou wast? Send Lazarus from the dead! That, as Bunyan justly says, would be to make a new Bible, to improve the finished salvation. No, if they will not hear Moses and the prophets, our Lord and his apostles, they must all likewise perish. This is a very meagre outline of this solemn treatise; it is full of striking illustrations, eminently calculated to arouse the thoughtless, and to convey solid ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... type of manhood. Morality is always affected by one's religious views. The moral binds us to our fellowmen, and the religious to our God; and a man may in many respects be better than his fellowman but he can never be better than his God. If a man has low and meagre ideas of God his ideas of man will be low and meagre whatever may be his conceptions of the law, government, and the character of his Creator will be his ideas of duty to wife, children, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... a sum of money scraped together by his sister and brother-in-law, and goes to the capital, accompanied by Madame de Bargeton. His liaison there with the lady is but of short duration. In compensation, however, he becomes acquainted with a new literary world, into which he enters with his meagre stock of poems, plus a novel; and, after a number of adventures, turns journalist, a metamorphosis that supplies the author with an opportunity to rage furiously against all those of that ilk. The rest of the first part of the Lost Illusions ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... quantities of each! Each monk had a yard-long loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and an absolute stable-bucket of salad, liberally dressed with oil and vinegar. The oil supplied the fat necessary for nutrition, still it was a meagre enough dinner for men who had been up since 3 a.m. and had done two hours' hard work in the vegetable gardens. The "Pere Hospitalier" told me that not one scrap of bread or lettuce would be left at the conclusion of the repast. The immense austerity of ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... the world. Having come from an old society, which has a long historical experience, the most vivid impression made upon me in the two Americas has been just that of entering into a society provided with but meagre historical experience, which therefore easily deludes itself, mistaking for signs of heroic energy and proofs of a finished superiority, the passing advantages of an order chiefly economic, which come from the singular economic condition of the world. In a word, I do not believe ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... by thee bare-footed, Cold is the baby that hangs at thy bending back Meagre and livid and screaming ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... simple gravestone in Milby Churchyard, telling that in this spot lie the remains of Edgar Tryan, for two years officiating curate at the Paddiford Chapel-of-Ease, in this parish. It is a meagre memorial, and tells you simply that the man who lies there took upon him, faithfully or unfaithfully, the office of guide ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... these circumstances, a careful writer hesitates to form any positive opinion based upon these reports of the discussions, but no one can doubt that the directing spirit of the conference was Sir John Macdonald. Meagre as is the record of what he said, we can yet see that his words were those of a man who rose above the level of the mere politician, and grasped the magnitude of the questions involved. What he aimed at especially was to follow as closely ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... world, which was always promising so much and giving so little. Then he urged to a wise and patient consent to this discipline, which, if rightly used, would help to temper and strengthen the soul against the day of sorrow and bereavement. But I am not doing him justice in this meagre report; there was something almost heavenly in his expression ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... clear that the major cause in his delinquency was his aberrational mentality. What there was by way of causation back of this, our history, although obtained from an apparently conscientious parent, is too meagre for explanation. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... to steep the church in the glowing atmosphere of Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete," said Durtal, "but alas, here below, nothing ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... INTELLIGENCE of the month is unusually meagre. The only work of great interest that has been published is WORDSWORTH'S posthumous Poem, The Prelude, of which a somewhat extended notice will be found on a preceding page. It has already been republished in this country, where ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... peeling away in places and soiled with stains in others. You realised that rapid wear and tear went on here amidst the continual scramble of the big eaters who sat down at table. The only ornaments were a gilt zinc clock and a couple of meagre candelabra on the mantelpiece. Guipure curtains, moreover, hung at the five large windows looking on to the street, which was flooded with sunshine; some of the fierce arrow-like rays penetrating into the room although the blinds ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... friends pitched their tent in the Piazza del Grano, and made a meagre beginning out of which great things were to grow. They began a series of pictures which was to lead at least one of them to fame. It was in the little Piazza, del Grano studio that the "Baptism of Christ" was painted, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... the setting sun over the dark line which meant home. Then he shook out several strings of vermin, and holding them at arm's length, stopped at the cabin window. His cheap trousers failed to reach the tops of his coarse shoes, and the gap showed the skin on meagre ankles. I was interested to know ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in itself is meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meagre thing. It is the essential meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... was my intention," he writes, "to have prefixed a life of Wallenstein to this translation; but I found that it must either have occupied a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of the publication, or have been merely a meagre catalogue of events narrated, not more fully than they already are in the play itself. The recent translation, likewise, of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War, diminished the motives thereto. In the translation, I have endeavoured to render my author literally, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... to give to Christ; yet it is a comfort to know that our friendship really is precious to him, and adds to his joy, poor and meagre though its best may be—but he has infinite blessings to give to us. "I call you friends." No other gift he gives to us can equal in value the love and friendship of his heart. When Cyrus gave Artabazus, one of his courtiers, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... did his first ovariotomy. He believed the operation to be without precedent in the annals of surgery, yet he kept no note of it or of his subsequent work. He prepared no account of it until 1817. This appeared in the Eclectic Repertory. It was so meagre and so startling that surgeons hesitated to credit its truth. He had not mastered his mother tongue. The paper was thought to bear internal evidence of its author's having "relied upon his ledger for ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell
... works, was found by Luther in his own persevering study of Holy Writ. In this also he was encouraged by Staupitz, who must, however, have been amazed at his indefatigable industry and zeal. For the interpretation of the Bible the means at his command were meagre in the extreme. He himself explored in all cases to their very centre the truths of Christian salvation and the highest questions of moral and religious life. A single passage of importance would occupy his thoughts for days. Significant ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... stole its way into my ears. There was no resisting the charm with which this extraordinary mortal could fascinate even the hard and the cold; nor them, perhaps, the least. For as you see in extreme old age, when the heart seems to have shrunk into itself, and to leave but meagre and nipped affections for the nearest relations if grown up, the indurated egotism softens at once towards a playful child; or as you see in middle life, some misanthrope, whose nature has been soured by wrong and sorrow, shrink from his ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... caught the flicker of the fire and winked at him as though it were aware of the absurdity of anything so trivial being held in such high esteem. More of the "calico," which really was an inexpensive but tasteful chintz, hung against the wall and served to hide from prying eyes the child's meagre wardrobe, and a bow of it was perkily tied to the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... considering the period at which M. BOSC wrote, that he obtained his information from travellers to the further east, and has connected with the habitat universally ascribed to them from old KNOX'S work (Part 1. chap. vi.) a meagre description, more properly belonging to the land leech of Batavia or Japan. In all likelihood, therefore, there may be a H. Boscii, distinct from the H. Ceylanica. That which is found in Ceylon is round, a little flattened on the inferior surface, largest at the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... kept apart By Shyness's soon shatter'd Chinese Wall. But in her dim fantastic temple bower The little Chinese puppet sits and sighs, A dream of far-off wonders in her eyes— And in her hand a golden tulip flower. For her the tender firstling tendrils grew;— Rich crop or meagre, what is that to you? Instead of it we get an after crop They kick the tree for, dust and stalk and stem,— As hemp to silk beside what ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... inland commerce was still being drawn by horses along the country roads. Yet Gourlay was the only carrier in the town. The wonder is diminished when we remember that it had been a decaying burgh for thirty years, and that its trade, at the best of times, was of meagre volume. Even so, it was astonishing that he should be the only carrier. If you asked the natives how he did it, "Ou," they said, "he makes the one hand wash the other, doan't ye know?"—meaning thereby that he had so many ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... noblewoman, by whom he had two children, both of whom were living. Such was his dislike of their mother, on account of a slight deformity, that for four or five years he shamefully maltreated her, and at last shut her up in this dungeon-keep, allowing her daily the most meagre ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... said the low, sweet voice that had thrilled and comforted so many human souls; and entering as he was bidden, he saw Lotys seated in a low chair near the window, rocking a tiny infant, so waxen-like and meagre, that it looked more like a corpse than ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... a poet than a pianist, a thinker than a musician. Commonplace is instinctively avoided in all the works of Chopin; a stale cadence or a trite progression, a humdrum subject or a hackneyed sequence, a vulgar twist of the melody or a worn- out passage, a meagre harmony or an unskillful counterpoint, may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions; the prevailing characteristics of which, are, a feeling as uncommon as beautiful, a treatment ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... though while the Ferrier influence had ignored him, the Darcy influence had not troubled itself to do much for him. That he had claims could not be denied. So this very meagre bone had been flung him. But if he had refused it, he would ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ancient tribes formed from the nobility. He formed ten new tribes of religious and political unions, thus intending to break down the influence of the nobility. Although the popular assembly was composed of all citizens of the four classes, the functions of this body in the early period were very meagre. It gave them the privilege of voting on the principal affairs of the nation when the council desired them to assume the responsibility. The {238} time for holding it was in the beginning indefinite, it being only occasionally convened, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... he had been known only to a small religious community, the coterie that ran the Bible Society. Even the large mass of people who subscribed to that Society knew its agent in Spain only by meagre allusions in the Annual Reports. Now the world was to talk about him, and he enjoyed being talked about. Borrow declared—in 1842—that the five years he passed in Spain were the most happy years of his existence. But then he had not had a happy life during the previous years, as ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... false, yet none can deny that these cheerful scenes with their bright colours and their agreeable if trivial subjects were singularly well adapted to improve the appearance of the bare narrow rooms, the meagre proportions of which seem to us absolutely incompatible with plain comfort, to say nothing of luxury. Space may be increased, so far as the eye is concerned, by an architectural or landscape painting ingeniously conceived, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... up the beach until he reached the open door of the cabin and looked in. He found it deserted as he had expected. He went in and hunted about among its meagre belongings and came back to the boys, triumphant, bringing with him a hatchet, an axe and a large, keen-bladed knife that was used by Mark in cleaning ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... mass of the people in Europe—men and women—were ignorant to the last degree, possessing little if any sense of delicacy or refinement, and were utterly uncouth. For the most part, they lived in miserable hovels, were clothed in a most meagre and scanty way, and were little better than those beasts of burden which are compelled to do their master's bidding. Among these people, rights depended quite largely upon physical strength, and women were generally misused. To the lord ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his manhood. Never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and Ellen had obliged him to present to destiny. She had beggared him of all those aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept himself inwardly alive. The capacity for ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... selection for semi-arid agriculture. The Professor believes that the great areas of high plain country to be found from Canada to Mexico can be made more productive through planting crop varieties that have been bred to withstand the existing conditions which produce meagre returns from the vast expanse of territory ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... embarrassment for some years after the close of the war. But when things were adjusted to the changed conditions, and the stream of life began to flow more vigorously in the new channels, they saw themselves in danger of dropping behind, unless in some way they could add to their meagre income. Miss Myrover looked over the field of employment, never very wide for women in the South, and found it occupied. The only available position she could be supposed prepared to fill, and which she could take without distinct loss of caste, was that of a teacher, and there was no vacancy ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... general outline,—the great frame-work of the history. There will be the beginning, the middle, and the end, containing perhaps few of the minor details, but what is retained is all in regular order, bound together as a continuous narrative, and, however meagre, the whole forms in the imagination of the reader, a distinct and connected whole. There is perhaps no more of the intended fabric of the history erected in the mind than the mere skeleton of the ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... Thatcher is a brave, ambitious, unselfish boy. He supports his mother and sister on meagre wages earned as a shoe-pegger in John Simpson's factory. Tom is discharged from the factory and starts overland for California. He meets with many adventures. The story is told in a way which has made Mr. Alger's name a household word in so ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... exception, however, in a testy old huntsman, as hot as a pepper-corn; a meagre, wiry old fellow, in a threadbare velvet jockey-cap, and a pair of leather breeches, that, from much wear, shone as though they had been japanned. He was very contradictory and pragmatical, and apt, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the world ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... addressed himself, was less broadly positive. "That is a matter of opinion," she answered; and added: "To go no further than the very beginning, Monsieur should perceive that her choice has exactly fifty chances in the hundred of going wrong: lying, as it does, between a meagre, sallow-faced creature of a death-white baldness, and a fine big pattern of a man, strong and ruddy, with a close-clipped but abundant thatch on his head, and a moustache that admittedly ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... appreciatively of Little Alfred, who was afterward the Great, and from mighty meagre materials creates a story that hangs together well. The illustrations for this volume are especially ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... Brownie formed a class of being distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus Cleland, in his satire against the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... choose to take pains, they can do things almost as well as other people. But what do you say to the story you have been reading, Tommy? Would you rather have owned the genteel dog that left his master to be devoured, or the poor, rough, ragged, meagre, neglected cur that exposed his own life in his defence?" "Indeed, sir," said Tommy, "I would have rather had Keeper; but then I would have fed him, and washed him, and combed him, till he had looked as well ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... Burlingame: "Burlingame is a man who could be esteemed, respected, and popular anywhere, no matter whether he was among Christians or cannibals." Then, in the same letter, comes the great incident. "A letter arrived here yesterday, giving a meagre account of the arrival, on the Island of Hawaii, of nineteen poor, starving wretches, who had been buffeting a stormy sea, in an open boat, for forty-three days. Their ship, the Hornet, from New York, with a quantity of kerosene on board had taken fire and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Burke's small store, the customer scanned the place anxiously, and it seemed to him that its supplies had never been so meagre. He succeeded in buying his lettuce, however, and a bottle of salad oil, and, remembering a can of asparagus tips on his own shelves, congratulated himself upon the attainment of his salad. Some eggs which the grocer swore were above reproach, and some ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... go above and the latter below after death. They bury their dead usually on top of the ground in a box made of small timbers or drift-wood, elevating the box four feet from the surface, and resting it on cross poles. Their meagre belongings are generally buried with them. The small bidarka (skin canoe) is not infrequently used for a casket when the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... man of five-and-twenty, well built, though a trifle meagre, and of pale complexion. He had hair that was very nearly black, and a clean-shaven face, best described, perhaps, as of bureaucratic type. The clothes he wore were of expensive material, but had seen a good deal of service. His ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... and wearing his most ingratiating smile, silently beckoned Scott to enter. With a quick glance the latter took in every detail of the second apartment. It was somewhat larger than the first, but the furnishing was meagre and shabby in the extreme, and, with the exception of a small set of shelves containing a few dilapidated volumes, there were no visible signs ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... brother read aloud, and the reading chanced to be to-night from the book of Job. The words of the splendid poem mingled in the mind of Maurice with the most incongruous and unpriestly thoughts. He chafed at the routine into which he had fallen as into a pit from which he had once escaped; the meagre repast seemed to him pitifully poor; and most of all he was angry with himself that he could not feel joy at his return to the house which was the symbol of the consecrated work to which he had given his life. After dinner came an hour and a half of recreation, and in this ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... who find fault with everything and everybody, who even scold publishers because their own books bring but meagre royalties, who fuss and fume over the harmless foibles of the very ones upon whom they depend for their audience, and like an ungrateful dog fasten their teeth in the charitable hand that offers them food, there can be but small sympathy. One is tempted to enlarge upon this ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... watches of the night I thought over my resources, which, indeed, were meagre enough; for I am a very poor man. It was necessary to take a great deal of money, for once away from Rome no one could tell when I might return. My salary as professor is paid to me quarterly, and it was yet some ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... Tillemont and Dupin are very full and very learned. But a truly immortal history of the church, exhaustive yet artistic, brilliant as well as learned, is yet to be written. The ancient historians, like Eusebius and Socrates and Zosimus, are very meagre. The genius and spirit of the early church can only be drawn from the lives and writings ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Meagre living, starvation even, he would suffer rather than live more amply at risk of Nance's life, but if the hope of ultimate escape was taken from him then he might as well give in at once ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... was toying with her fan beside me, and talking in an undertone behind it. "What prince of all that you have seen or read of," said she, "if born on a meagre mountain farm, would have made his fortune and have educated himself, as this man has done? I think the kings who founded races of kings were like him. And what prince of them all alive looks so much the prince as he? ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... presence of this opportunity she faced her companion once more; she traced in her the effect of everything she had already communicated; she signified, with the same success, that the terrace and the sullen night would bear too meagre witness to the completion of her idea. Soon enough then, within the room, under the old lustres of Venice and the eyes of the several great portraits, more or less contemporary with these, that awaited on the walls of Fawns their final far migration—soon ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... By reason of the normal Republican majority of the state the nomination by the Legislature in those days of a Democratic candidate for the United States senatorship was a mere compliment, a courtesy, a very meagre one indeed, and was generally paid to the old war horses of democracy like James E. Martine, of Plainfield, New Jersey; but the appearance of the doughty Colonel Harvey on the scene, at the 1907 session of the New Jersey Legislature, gave a new turn to ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... rule of life" to Christians, I saw to be a glaring mistake, intensely opposed to the Pauline doctrine. This discovery, moreover, soon became important to me, as furnishing a ready evasion of objections against the meagre or puerile views of the Pentateuch; for without very minute inquiry how far I must go to make the defence adequate, I gave a general reply, that the New Testament confessed the imperfections of the older dispensation. I still presumed the Old to have been perfect for its own ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... fought. Bones, broken weapons and shattered breastplates, and all the debris of the fight, were long ago buried fathoms deep beneath mounds of drifting sand. Old Nieuport—Nieuport Ville, as they call it now—for which so much blood was shed, is desolate and dreary with its small industries and meagre commerce; but a short walk to the north brings us to Nieuport-Bains, and to the gay summer life which pulsates all along the Flemish coast, from La Panne on the west ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... few problems of more or less difficulty, and which none of them appear inclined to solve; and I do not wonder at this, as the attempt, in my own case, in one or two instances, has involved days of study and references to dozens of medical and other works with but a meagre result. However, to take them seriatim, we can assume, I think, with some show of evidence, that the Ethiopian stone, mentioned as being used to make the first incision in the corpse, might have been a piece of obsidian or basalt, but most probably was merely an ordinary sharp ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... to have taken place in the character and habits of the people.[123] Recent inquiry has discovered that even there, in districts once famous for fine men and gallant soldiers, the inhabitants have degenerated into a meagre and stunted race. In the healthiest situations, on hillsides fronting the sea, the faces of their famished children are as thin and pale as they could be in the foul atmosphere of a London alley.[124] Still ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... for a distance of nearly four hundred miles, to the Rocky Mountains. This desert, broken by precipitous ravines, canons, and gorges, at the bottom of which gurgles some insignificant stream, its banks clothed with stunted and meagre vegetation, produces nothing but cacti with sharp ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... on Lake Champlain and of Niagara on Lake Ontario were both in the hands of the English. A portion of the Canadians had left the camp to try and gather in the meagre crops which had been cultivated by the women and children. In the night between the 12th and 13th of September, General Wolfe made a sudden dash upon the banks of the St. Lawrence; he landed at the creek of Foulon. The officers had replied in French to the Qui vive ( Who goes there?) of the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and some of it overflows into the Bowery. From this street also the Baxter Street variety of Jews find their way into the Bowery. These are the Jew toughs, and there is no other type of Jew at all like them in all New York's assortment of Hebrew types, which cannot be called meagre. Of the Jewish types New York has, as the ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... duller,— The fire she carries hath changed its colour. Those creatures that draw me you never would mind, If you'd but look on your own Pharaoh's lean kine; They're taken for spectres, they're so meagre and spare, Drawn damnably low by your sorrel mare. We know how your lady was on you befriended; You're not to be paid for 'till the lawsuit is ended: But her bond it is good, he need not to doubt; She is two or three ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... other plan—even more difficult—was to continue down the river as far as its junction with the Tres Barras, from which place I would strike across the virgin forest as far as the Madeira River. I had not the faintest idea how I could realize either plan with the ridiculously meagre resources at my disposal. I had money enough, but unfortunately that was one of the few spots on earth where money was of little use. Again I trusted in Providence to come to our help. Both plans involved thousands of kilometres of navigation of a diabolical river, in an almost ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... question, from the comparison of pottery and pipes. On the whole the Hochelagan facts throw much light both forward on the history of the Iroquois and backwards on that of the Huron stock. Interpreted as above, they afford a meagre but connected story through a period hitherto lost in darkness, and perhaps a ray by which further links may still be discovered through continued ...
— Hochelagans and Mohawks • W. D. Lighthall
... Amidst our meagre relations, I must regret that D'Herbelot has not found and used a Persian translation of Tabari, enriched, as he says, with many extracts from the native historians of the Ghebers or Magi, (Bibliotheque ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... who read. I think it the better way-certainly it is the easier one for me. I shall therefore permit the Old Cattleman to tell his stories in his own fashion. The style will be crude, abrupt, and meagre, but I trust it will prove as satisfactory to the reader as it has ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... partition of the soil of the forest into small plots of ground for the poor. Paper is very forbearing, and it looks very idyllic and comfortable to see, carefully calculated before our eyes, how many hundreds of dear little estates could be made out of the meagre soil of the forest, on which the proletarian could settle down to the contented patriarchal existence of a farmer. Practical attempts along this line have not been wanting, but, instead of diminishing the proletariat, such an increase of small farms only served to augment it all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... slowly. In the course of time the crowd thinned out to a meagre handful. Fifth Avenue, save for an occasional cab or foot passenger, was bare. Broadway was thinly peopled with pedestrians. Only now and then a stranger passing noticed the small group, handed out a coin, and went ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... to transliterate the parallel Icelandic. We suspect that Gray's knowledge was fuller than Professor Kittredge will allow, although we must admit that superficial knowledge may coexist with a fine interpretative spirit. Matthew Arnold's knowledge of Celtic literature was meagre, yet he wrote memorably and beautifully on that subject, ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... following Class-list, I hope the solitary occupant of III. will sheathe her claws when she hears how narrow an escape she has had of not being named at all. Her account of the process by which she got the answer is so meagre that, like the nursery tale of "Jack-a-Minory" (I trust I. E. A. will be merciful to the spelling), it is scarcely to be ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... only a meagre minority of the voters of the State since the Know-Nothing defection, now responded to the call with a full quota of delegates, and elected John A. King president. King was nearly double the age of Fenton. He had been a lieutenant of cavalry in the War of 1812 and an opponent ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... half-starved militia suffered intensely. Six field-pieces, with their ammunition, had been sent ashore; but they were nearly useless, as there were no means of moving them. Half a barrel of musket powder, and one biscuit for each man, were also landed; and with this meagre aid Walley was left to capture Quebec. He might, had he dared, have made a dash across the ford on the morning of Thursday, and assaulted the town in the rear while Phips was cannonading it in front; but his courage was not equal to so desperate a venture. The firing ceased, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... his heart out, for death alone could set him free. One morning the turnkey, whose duty it was to bring him his food, instead of leaving him when he had given him his meagre pittance, stood with his arms folded, looking at him with strange meaning. Conversation between them was brief, and the warder never began it. The Chevalier was therefore greatly surprised when the man said to him: 'Of course, monsieur, you know your own ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac |
