"Meager" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... early became the head of a North African empire, and her fleets plied in all navigable waters known to antiquity. Her navy was the largest in the world, and in the sea-fight with Regulus comprised three hundred and fifty vessels, carrying one hundred and fifty thousand men. Though we have but meager accounts of the internal affairs of Carthage, there can be no doubt that much attention was given, both at home and in the colonies, to the construction of highways, which were distinguished for their solidity. It is said that ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... allied with him, and his son, Victor Emmanuel, succeeded him. As to what took place ten years later, when the Austrians were finally expelled from Lombardy, and the transitory sovereigns of the duchies and of Naples flitted for good, and the Pope's dominion was reduced to the meager size it kept till 1871, and the Italian states were united under one constitutional king—I ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... more advanced governments of my day, by their poor laws and pauper systems, in a dim way admitted this responsibility, although the kind of provision they made for the economically unfortunate was so meager and accompanied with such conditions of ignominy that men would ordinarily rather die than accept it. But grant that the sort of recognition we gave of the right of the citizen to be guaranteed a subsistence was a mockery more brutal ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... of yellow soap, a bullet mold, and a nightcap; a tomahawk, a paper of nails, a scrubbing-brush, a hammer, and an old gridiron. Having emptied the sack, Mat took up the buffalo hide, and spread it out on his bed, with a very expressive sneer at the patchwork counterpane and meager curtains. He next threw down the bear skins, with the empty sack under them, in an unoccupied corner; propped up the leather bag between two angles of the wall; took his pipe from the floor; left everything else lying ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... he has a clue—a meager and unsatisfactory one, he admits—and to-day sent officers to Ganlook to investigate the actions of a strange man who was there last week, a man who styled himself the Count of Arabazon, and who claimed to be of Vienna. Some Austrians had been hunting stags ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... with the exertion, Bobby fell into deep and strength-restoring slumber, and Skipper Ed joined the others to cheer their hearts with the good news that Bobby's illness had passed its climax, and to rejoice with them over a meager breakfast. ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... Oberdieck. According to the company descriptive book, he was a native of the then kingdom of Hanover, now a province of Prussia. He was a typical German, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, quiet and taciturn, of limited and meager education, but a model soldier, who accepted without question and obeyed without a murmur the orders of his military superiors. Prior to the war he had made his living by chopping cord-wood in the high, timbered hills near ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and inbred, subject ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... attracted by the vivacious song of the little male, which I had not heard for several years—not since an excursion I had taken into Louisiana and Mississippi. His voice was clear and ringing, and the tune he executed was by no means a meager performance. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... almost constant toil, and very meager schooling,—only a few weeks each year,—James Garfield excelled all his companions in the log schoolhouse. Besides solving at home in the long winter evenings, by the light of the pine fire, all the knotty ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... and meager. It is not easy for us, in the midst of the luxuries, comforts, and necessities of a later civilization, to realize the conditions of western life previous to 1825. But the situation must be understood if one is to know the life ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... said of Robert that, though he had the hearty appetite of a growing boy, he never increased his aunt's sorrow by complaining of their meager fare, but always preserved a cheerful demeanor in the ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... is so meager, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material, that which describes character and fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... he overhauled his suit and patched it. He got fresh oxygen and bought a meager supply of food. He had one more good meal and started out south again with the single ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... really carrying on his farming in a businesslike way. Marty was getting to be a big boy now, and he could help more than he once had. Janice had suggested to Uncle Jason that, as he had such good pasture at the upper end of his farm, and as the milk supply of Poketown was but a meager one, it would pay somebody to ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... to those conducted by Mr. Stephen in the Tusayan group; but this phase of the subject was not included in our work. In the search for purely architectural evidence among these ruins it must be confessed that the data have proved disappointingly meager. No trace of the numerous constructive details that interest the student of pueblo architecture in the modern villages can be seen in the low mounds of broken down masonry that remain in most of the ancient villages of Tusayan. But little masonry remains standing ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... there are some things to which Conscience has no reply in words to offer; yet Conscience pointed to the portrait of the girl, and bade the most unworthy of all lovers look upon even his own poor and meager representation of her eyes and face, and ask whether such blasphemies could ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... I knew that Lys could not be particularly enthusiastic over game or guns; but she pretended she was, and always scornfully denied that it was for my sake and not for the pure love of sport. So she dragged me off to inspect the rather meager game bag, and she paid me pretty compliments, and gave a little cry of delight and pity as I lifted the enormous hare out of the sack ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... turned, and looked for a moment or two at the visiter. She was the child of poor parents; that was evident from her coarse and meager garments. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... comes next, meager of frame, round-shouldered, and wearing a coarse brown robe; over his eyes and face, and down his back, hangs a mat of long, uncombed hair. He is alone. Those who meet him laugh, if they do not worse; for he is a Nazarite, one ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Such meager fare his want supplies! A hand caress, and from his eyes There beams more love than mortals know; Meanwhile he wags his tail to show ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... and had included the adventures of many heroes: but in Gridley Quayle the proprietors held that the ideal had been reached, and Ashe received a commission to conduct the entire British Pluck Library—monthly—himself. On the meager salary paid him for these labors he had been supporting himself ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... living and in perfect health at the time of the report, his bizarre face, without expression, and his sobriquet, as mentioned, making him an object of great curiosity. He wore the Cross of Honor, and nothing delighted him more than to talk about the war. To augment his meager pension he sold a pamphlet containing in detail an account of his injuries and a description of the skilfully devised apparatus by which his declining life was made endurable. A somewhat similar case is ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Cain and Ham, and Pope and Turk, who are as father and son to each other, can afford to despise the judgment of the true Church on the strength of fleeting and meager successes in this life, why can not we afford in turn to despise their power and censure, on the strength of the everlasting blessings which we possess? Ham was not moved by his father's curse. Full of anger against him, and despising him as a crazy old man, he goes away and arms himself with ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... again been cleaned and "nursed" as the engineer described it for the day. The river had begun to widen and the bank to fall to almost a dead level just before reaching Circle the night before, and they now entered upon a dreary expanse of tundra or flat marsh land covered with a meager growth of willow and stunted birch. The river spread out to a width of nearly a dozen miles, dividing into many channels surrounding small bushy islands and rendering navigation very difficult. The wheelman, who was an ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... her manner of salutation is more quiet, though equally sincere. Ella drops on step, looks at figures, and grins. Florence indicates her depression, due to the figures that will not balance with her meager income. Ella makes ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... and rejected by the Anglo-Saxons. In this way at least the technical part of the task would have been tackled on right lines, the war would have been liquidated and normal relations quickly re-established among the belligerent states. It may be objected that this would have been a meager contribution to the new politico-social fabric. Undoubtedly it would, but, however meager, it would have been a positive gain. Possibly the first stone of a new world might have been laid once the ruins of the old were cleared away. But even this modest feat could not be achieved by amateurs ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... European Women. Their Remedies are a great Cause of this Easiness in that State; for the Indian Women will run up and down the Plantation, the same day, very briskly, and without any sign of Pain or Sickness; yet they look very meager and thin. Not but that we must allow a great deal owing to the Climate, and the natural Constitution of these Women, whose Course of Nature never visits them in such Quantities, as the European Women ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... printed on the same facts before another message brings later news and additional details. An example of this is the treatment of the first few stories of the wreck of the White Star liner Titanic. The story was a big one, but the first dispatches were very meager and many rehashings of these few facts had to be printed before later and more ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... mature students often reveal very meager knowledge of methods of study. I once had a class of some thirty persons, most of whom were men twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, who were college graduates and experienced teachers. One day I asked them, "When has a book been read ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... would they ever intend to do with so tiny a little baby monkey? What had they expected to put in all those boxes? Such questions came thicker than the stones they skipped over, but in reply the girls received nothing but skeleton answers from Mary, and these were built of simple, meager words. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... of the children, his mind being naturally active; but he had little disposition for study and very meager opportunities, for "school kept" only a few weeks in a year. At the time of this story he had just passed his majority, was somewhat above medium height, solidly built, with broad, square shoulders. His brown ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... profession on the porch and on the wharf. A number of them had simultaneously arrived at the conclusion that they would fare better perhaps camping on Professor Brierly's trail than they would in following the Higginbotham group and the meager information that the police were ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... Bangladesh has protested India's attempts to fence off high traffic sections of the porous boundary; Burmese attempts to construct a dam on the border stream in 2001 prompted an armed response halting construction; Burmese Muslim refugees migrate into Bangladesh straining meager resources ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... German, but he knew enough to be perplexed by the way in which Helen's driver expressed "beautiful thanks" for her gift. The man seemed to be at once grateful and downhearted. Of course, the impression was of the slightest, but Spencer had been trained in reaching vital conclusions on meager evidence. He could not wait to listen to Helen's words, so he passed into the hotel, having the American habit of leaving the care of his baggage to the hall porter. He wondered why Helen was so late in arriving that he had caught her up on the very threshold of the Kursaal, ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... fluid and there is none to waste. Our oceans evaporated ages ago, and outside of the precipitation of moisture at the poles in the form of snow, none is to be had anywhere else on the planet except in very meager quantities. ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... of water by the tent flap. Philip painfully made a meager toilet, glanced doubtfully at the coarse cotton garment which by one of the mystifying events of the previous night had replaced the silk shirt he had worn from Sherrill's, and emerged from ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... all this loud jangling and savage quarreling the Governor remained unperturbed and steady to his purpose. Notwithstanding frequent demands, he constantly refused to deal out any liquor except in the most meager quantities—he restrained the Potawatomi and made them smoke the pipe of peace with their offended allies—he met and answered all the arguments suggested by the British agents—and after fifteen days of constant and ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... purchased Brookside Farm from his father, the equipment of farm implements which his father turned over to him was meager; indeed, the few that answered the name of implements were so old and had been so badly neglected, by being exposed to all kinds of ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... so small in dimensions, so meager in population, so deficient, compared to the leading nations of Europe, in material and financial strength, had already her great future swelling in her heart. Intellectually and morally she was taking the lead among the nations. Even at that day she had produced much which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... busily for a time, without a word spoken by either of them. The only sound was the rustling of Jacqueline's stolen silks and the purling of a small stream of water near them, some meager spring. ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... guns and crew are contained in an armored body and the two tractor belts extend to full length on either side, being so arranged that the tank can climb a steep slope. From the meager data obtainable it would appear that the tanks carry from 4 to 6 machine guns in armored projections built out from the sides. These are provided with revolving shields permitting two guns to fire in any direction ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... shine as a man of learning was the natural outcome of his disproportionate vanity, his abnormal egotism, his craving for prominence and power. Sprudell was a man who had had meager youthful advantages, but through life he had observed the tremendous impression which scholarly attainments made upon the superficially educated—which ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... poor when I came to this country. I sought occupation in the pursuits for which I was best fitted by my education: for a time with little success; and at length I was offered for the translation of two wretched French novels, the meager sum of fifty dollars. I sold some of my wife's trinkets to purchase paper and ink, and worked diligently, you can guess how many weeks, until they were in English as readable as the French of their author. The task ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of ...
— Why We are at War • Woodrow Wilson
... large house, costing eight thousand dollars (in Salt Lake City it would have been worth fifty thousand dollars), I was offered eight hundred dollars. My fanaticism would not allow me to take so meager a sum for it. I locked it up, selling only one stove out of it, for which I received eight yards of cloth. The building, with its twenty-seven rooms, I turned over to the committee, to be sold to help the poor away. The committee afterwards parted with the house for twelve dollars ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... Academy. At the academy he was prepared for Yale College, which he entered when fifteen years of age. With the knowledge of science so small at the time, collegiate instruction in such subjects was naturally meager in the extreme. Jeremiah Day was then professor of natural philosophy at Yale, and was probably America's ablest teacher of the subject. His lectures upon electricity and the experiments with which he illustrated ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... acquainted. It was a mistake, argued Nat, to be over-sensitive about one's poverty. If Peter was saving his money surely that was excuse enough. He had a right to live as he pleased. Furthermore what possible difference could it make in their friendship? Nat himself lived simply but very nicely on the meager salary that he earned. He and his mother rented two tiny bedrooms, a sunny little living-room, and a microscopic kitchen in a part of the town which, to be sure, was cheap and ugly; but Mrs. Jackson, Peter soon found, was one of the rare women who could make a home—a real home—almost ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... brief pipe, and went out. Shearer was one of them. The woodsman nodded curtly to the young man, his cordiality quite gone. Thorpe vaguely wondered why. After a time he himself put on his overcoat and ventured out into the town. It seemed to Thorpe a meager affair, built of lumber, mostly unpainted, with always the dark, menacing fringe of the forest behind. The great saw mill, with its tall stacks and its row of water-barrels—protection against fire—on top, was the dominant note. Near the mill crouched a little red-painted ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Peter had had no doubt that the murdered man was Beth's father, but he had to admit under McGuire's questioning that there might still be a difficulty in tracing the vagrant from the meager history of his peregrinations that Mrs. Bergen had been able to provide. McGuire's attitude in regard to the absent little finger had been really admirable. Peter was thankful for that little finger, and for McGuire's honesty. There was no doubt in his mind now—if any had existed—who ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... almost wholly of fish. With the exception of soles, each man may select any fish he fancies from the glistening mass upon the deck; and the amount which each consumed at a meal at first astonished William Gale, accustomed as he was to meager workhouse rations. He soon, however, found himself able to keep up with the rest; but the operation of frying seemed sometimes interminable, so many times had the pan to ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... unreliable sources; we who delve in the lore of the great adventurer have to thank for our authorities Sewell, the great historian of that generation—who personally traveled several million miles to get what meager facts the Hawk would divulge concerning his life and career—equally with Friday, who shared this particular adventure with him. Friday's emotional eyes no doubt colored his memory of the scenes he passed through, and it is likely that the facts lost nothing ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... pension was denied January 9, 1884, because there was no record of the alleged diseases, and no satisfactory proof of their contraction in the Army was produced, and because of the meager and unconvincing evidence of disability found by the surgeon on an ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... journeyman had left, the meals had become more meager than ever. The masters had not had enough money in the spring to buy a pig. So there was no one to consume the scraps. Now they had to eat them all themselves. Master Andres was never at the table; he took scarcely any nourishment ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... with water and poured into the hot pan when the pork was done. He watched it until it hardened a little on one side, when he flung it up into the air and caught it in the pan again. There is an art in making palatable flapjacks out of nothing but flour and water. When the meager breakfast was ready, he awakened Grenfell, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... at least, an attempt is made at an accurate and intensive psychological analysis of the biological forces which were at the bottom of a career of habitual stealing. No attempt is made at hard and fast formulations. Our knowledge concerning the criminal is still too meager to justify one in drawing dependable conclusions. But it is felt that this clinical material emphasizes sufficiently the necessity of the psychopathological mode of approach to the problem of criminology. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... developments, government revision of the tariff, war between France and Turkey, famine in Russia or Ireland, and so on. The first Atlantic cable had not been laid as yet, and news of any kind from abroad was slow and meager. Still there were great financial figures in the held, men who, like Cyrus Field, or William H. Vanderbilt, or F. X. Drexel, were doing marvelous things, and their activities and the rumors concerning them counted ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... that chateau belong, friend?" cried my uncle to a meager, but fiery postillion, who, with tremendous jack boots and cocked hat, was floundering ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Purnell, promising to find his friend for her sake, he had assumed a confidence that he was far from feeling. No man knew the country thereabout any better than he did, and he realized that there was, at best, only a meager chance of trailing the miscreant who had succeeded in trapping his victim somewhere in the mountains. A weaker man would have paused in dismay at the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken, but Lem Trowbridge was neither ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... however postponed from time to time, till March, 1802, when a bill was passed establishing the Military Academy. It was at first on a small scale, and its course of instruction meager and deficient. It gradually became enlarged, but lingered along, with no great improvement, till 1817, when Capt. Patridge was dismissed from the superintendency, and Col. Thayer put in charge. From this period we date ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... cannot write a respectable letter. His thoughts outrun his hand, and by the time the first labored sentence is written his ideas have fled and he must begin again. Is it any wonder that his sentences are disconnected, his thought meager? ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... lines in the character of this great-natured and richly-cultured man. The outline is but poor and meager. Well do I remember the days following the Chicago Convention, when the biographers flocked to Mentor. How hard they found it to compress within the limits both of their time and their pages the life, services, and character of their great subject. One of these discouraged ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... parasite corporations are attached, industriously to suck away the surplus blood so that the owners of the beast may say, "It is eating almost nothing. See how lean it is, poor thing! Why, the bones fairly poke through its meager hide." ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... grieved to find the heads cooked off and the stalks harder than ever. The bread burned black; for the salad dressing so aggravated her that she could not make it fit to eat. The lobster was a scarlet mystery to her, but she hammered and poked till it was unshelled and its meager proportions concealed in a grove of lettuce leaves. The potatoes had to be hurried, not to keep the asparagus waiting, and were not done at the last. The blanc mange was lumpy, and the strawberries not as ripe as they looked, having been ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... so often admired, was well in keeping with the strength and grasp of his masterly mind. Without the privilege of a day's instruction in the schoolroom, he acquired a fund of useful knowledge that would put to shame the meager attainments of many a college graduate. His speeches and writing are models of a pure English style, and are characterized by simplicity, clearness, directness, ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... something very intensely. It was the hardest kind of a look to resist. She had often threshed this subject out with the House Surgeon before; for it was her theory that when a body's material condition was rather poor and meager there was all the more reason for scraping together what one could of a spiritual heritage ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... upon Fyles. He was studying this meager specimen of a prairie "crook." He had never before met one quite like him. He felt that here was a case of brain rather than physical outlawry. It might be harder to deal with than the savage, illiterate toughs he was ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... interested in, or a very enthusiastic listener to sermons about Lot's disobedient wife, who because she looked back was turned into a pillar of salt. He is far more concerned about his own overworked and perhaps underfed wife who, due to the strain of trying to raise his family on a meager income that permits of no rest or proper medical care, is slowly but surely turning into a corpse. To go to a church and listen to a sermon about the sublimeness of being humble and meek, that no matter how desperate the struggle ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... mesquites toward the town. At that distance, about a quarter of a mile, Mercer appeared to be a cluster of low adobe houses set in a grove of cottonwoods. Pastures of alfalfa were dotted by horses and cattle. Duane saw a sheep-herder driving in a meager flock. ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... a formidable piece of bread, the old man helped himself to a crust, and both father and son bravely attacked the meager meal, with robust appetites, sprinkling it plentifully with ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... may be advisable. The person whom I thus encountered hesitating before Mrs. Carew's house was a man of meager build, sloping shoulders and handsome but painfully pinched features. That he was a gentleman of culture and the nicest refinement was evident at first glance; that this culture and refinement were at this moment under the dominion of some fierce thought or resolve was equally ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... the holidays,—girls whose homes were in the West or South, or whose parents were traveling abroad or getting divorces—but this year the assortment was unusually meager. Patty was left alone in "Paradise Alley." Margarite McCoy, of Texas, was stranded at the end of the South Corridor, and Harriet Gladden of Nowhere, had a suite of eighteen rooms at her disposal in "Lark Lane." These and four ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... good—in other words, that the knowledge and love of God is the ultimate aim to which all our actions should be directed. The worldling cannot understand these things, they appear foolishness to him, because he has too meager a knowledge of God, and also because in this highest good he can discover nothing which he can handle or eat, or which affects the fleshly appetites wherein he chiefly delights, for it consists ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... meager and colorless realities and expand them into things of blossoming promise. She was almost creative in the artistry she brought to these transmutations. In the end she convinced herself of their existence and she was quite sure that ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Universel laid before the Chamber the draft of a new bill whereby the details of the proportional plan were brought back into closer accord with those of the Belgian system. During the period of the Caillaux ministry (June, 1911, to January, 1912) there was continued discussion, but meager progress. The Poincare ministry, established at the beginning of 1912, declared that the nation had expressed forcefully its desire for far-reaching reform and promised that, in pursuance of the work already accomplished by the parliamentary commission, it would take steps to carry ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... publishinghouses had approached me with the idea of putting out a book, any editorial revision and emendations to be taken care of by them without disturbing me at all. I could have allied myself with almost any paper in the country, undoubtedly at better than the meager stipend Le ffacase doled out ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... that which had the most valid claim to aboriginality, the so-called Negritos, were not involved. Their isolation, their lack of every sort of political, often indeed of village organization, also their meager numbers, render it conceivable that the greatest changes might go on among their neighbors without their taking such a practical view of them as to lead to their engaging in them. Thus it can be understood ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... twas; Diego had an enemie, (immortall vertue euer lincked is, With that pale leane-fac'd meager-hewed enuie) who secretly (so falsely) tells his Mis. How shee was mockt; Diego lou'd another, And storm'd & rag'd what madnes ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... of duty; therefore, my dear, consult your situation, consult your feelings, but above all, consult your God. Let His holy spirit be your counselor, and I will endeavor to submit." Then, alluding to the very meager support the circuit had given—less than ten dollars in all for the year—she adds: "If you should conclude to quit the connection this year, I should be well pleased if you would not receive anything from ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort necessary to understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the only morality ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... to say that Peter Cooper was exactly disgusted with the public-school system of New York, for he, more than any other one man, had evolved it and carried it forward from very meager beginnings. Democracy is a safeguard against tyranny, but it often cramps and hinders the man of genuine initiative. If the entire public-school system of the State had been delegated to Peter Cooper in Eighteen Hundred Fifty, he as sole commissioner could and would have set ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... deer is like the stock of specimens of it in museum collections,—meager and unsatisfactory. We need to know in detail how that species is faring to-day, and what its prospects are for the immediate future. In 1900, I saw great piles of skins from it in the fur houses of Seattle, and the sight ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... them. I had seen so much and been so constantly on the wing that I wondered that all things here should have stood still. I expected to hear of many births, marriages, deaths, and social upheavals, but the village news was remarkably meager. This hunger for home news on returning is common, I suppose, to ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... with the warm ardor of devotion. Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the king of Meath who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it with two hundred and forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill." From this meager outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the meadows of ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... by light new bread, excellent butter and cheese, Marilla's fruit cake and a dish of preserved plums, floating in their golden syrup as in congealed summer sunshine. There was a big bowlful of pink-and-white asters also, by way of decoration; yet the spread seemed very meager beside the elaborate one ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fickle. The thought of it aroused all her natural honesty and serious nobleness of character, which lay deep under the almost hoydenish levity usually observable in her manner. Crude as her sense of life's larger significance was, and meager as had been her experience in the things which count for most in the sum of a young girl's existence under fair circumstances, she grasped intuitively the gist of ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... his suitcase in old lady Winkler's most meager and coldest bedroom and after he had stoked the furnace and shoveled the walks he bolted ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... beavers, clearing and digging, scraping and building. All are pressed hard by a strong hope of establishing a permanent home and of earning future independence. But we still live in makeshift houses, and so far only a few families are able to make a living, bare and meager, out of their clearings, diggings, and cows. The vast majority—almost all of us—have, at times, to leave the farm in care of women and children and look for work elsewhere—in Duluth, Chicago, Detroit—for the purpose of earning bread for the family on the farm. ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... they sat enjoying this meager repast, "I've got something to tell you, something that I want someone else beside me to know. It's going to be an ugly storm and the Kittlewake is no trans-Atlantic liner. We may all get back to shore. We may not. If ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... while they probably held the power of life and death over their own people, but the capital cases were punished later by authority of Babylon (Jer. 29:22.) (4) Their religion. Here also the information is meager and must be gathered from statements and inferences found in several books. Several things are certain: (a) For the most part they preserved their genealogies, thus making possible the identity of the Messiah as well as their proper place in worship when they ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... corner in "a hack," was, despite ten years' residence, a complete stranger to her neighbors. She was quiet and well-behaved; she wore good clothes and shamefully neglected her child. These were the meager facts upon which gossip built a ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the contrary, might still be ignorant of the fact that he had come off his cruise. His letters to them were accordingly of great length; and he set forth therein with the nervous lucidity of a meager vocabulary the nature of his wrongs and the action which he had taken under Heaven's guidance to revenge them. He stated plainly in all four of his missives to Newlyn, Drift and Mousehole that the artist, John Barron, was shot dead by his hand and that he himself intended suffering ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... followed by three or four men, just as the shades of evening had fallen upon this sin-cursed world; there in darkness and silence we lowered his remains, and left the gloomy spot to return to his disconsolate wife, who had been too ill to join the meager procession. ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... a number of others and by Lawler, Blackburn; the "chuck-wagon" driven by the cook—a portly, solemn-visaged man of forty with a thin, complaining voice; the "hoodlum" wagon, equipped with bedding and a meager stock of medicines and supplies for emergencies—driven by a slender, fiercely mustached man jocosely referred to as "Doc;" and a dozen horses of the remuda, in charge of ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... your state is the more gracious, for certainly anything more flat, poor, and trashy I cannot well conceive. It had been, you know, a great part of my aunt Siddons's, and nothing better proves her great dramatic genius than her having clothed so meager a part in such magnificent proportions as she gave to it, and filled out by her own poetical conception the bare skeleton Mr. Murphy's Euphrasia presented to her. This frightened me a great deal; Juliet and Belvidera scarcely anybody ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... wretched prisons the diet was most meager. But "while the penance prescribed was a diet of bread and water, the Inquisition, with unwonted kindness, did not object to its prisoners receiving from their friends contributions of food, wine, money, and garments, and among its documents are such frequent allusions to this that it ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... sociability and fun of European outdoor life is here exchanged for the gloom of the church, the stuffy, germ-saturated country parlor, or the brutalizing atmosphere of the back-room saloon. In Prohibition States the people lack even the latter, unless they can invest their meager earnings in quantities of adulterated liquor. As to Prohibition, every one knows what a farce it really is. Like all other achievements of Puritanism it, too, has but driven the "devil" deeper into the human system. Nowhere else does one meet so many drunkards ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the morning after Kid Wolf's arrival in the town, the old padre was astonished to find a package of money inside his door. It was addressed simply: "For the poor." It was a windfall and a much-needed addition to the mission's meager finances. ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... but a minute or two to cut away a section of this protecting pipe. In doing so, he exposed to view the many wires making up an astonishingly substantial cable, for so meager an office building. He then turned back to his tool-case and lifted therefrom, first a Bunnell sounder, and then a Wheatstone bridge, of the post-office pattern, a coil of KK wire, a pair of lineman's pliers, and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... work. When he grew old enough, he watched the flocks of the people of Mecca, and gained a meager livelihood by doing this. He had no schooling, but once or twice had the opportunity to travel, when he went with his uncle to southern Arabia and to Syria, where he saw people different from those of Mecca and learned of many ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... its wounds, even at the risk of reopening them. We are not satisfied with poetry unless we find tears in it." We will not have the theology which ignores sin and suffering. The preacher who confines his discourses to pleasant themes has a meager following; the people swiftly and logically conclude that if life is as flowery as the discourse, the preacher is superfluous. Foolish we may often be, yet we cannot accept this Gethsemane for a garden of the gods; the most wilful ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... leaders were browsing greedily along the banks. They had emptied the few holes that had still held a meager store of brackish water and so the mutinous bulk of the herd snuffed at the trampled, muddy ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... have appeared in almost all standard dictionaries of painters and engravers and in numerous historical surveys, but these have been based upon meager evidence. A fraction of his work was usually known and details of his life were, and still are, sparse. Later writers interpreting the comments of their predecessors have repeated as fact much that was conjecture. The picture of Jackson that has come down to us, therefore, ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... that none was necessary. Two hundred miles of unbroken trail in prospect, with a scant six days' grub for themselves and none for the dogs, could admit no other alternative. The two men and the woman grouped about the fire and began their meager meal. The dogs lay in their harnesses for it was a midday halt, and ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... now, Chatelain and I, our guns resting on the already cooling earth, beside the pool that forms the center of the meager oasis, hidden behind a kind of hedge of alfa. The setting sun was reddening the stagnant ditches which irrigate the poor garden plots ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... When the meager little memories were all done he sat down on his bed again and felt that nothing mattered, since she was to marry Albert Wellesly and would surely believe him guilty of all that was charged against him. He felt no jealousy of her chosen husband, and no anger toward Wellesly because he ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... him the meager information that Pasco was a little railroad junction town in Franklin County, Washington, on the Columbia River. "The old man must have been delayed on his ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... overgrown, pretentious Norwood villa and one of those saturnine Institutes for cripples the train passes as it slinks ashamed through South London into Surrey. It was "wealthily" furnished and at first sight imposing, but on closer acquaintance revealed a meager personality, barren and austere. One looked for Rules and Regulations on the walls, all signed By Order. The place was a prison that shut out "the world." There was, of course, no billiard-room, no smoking-room, no room for ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... it made meager progress under Company control: few settlers were sent out; and they were not provided with proper means of defense against Indian depredations. Under the circumstances it did not take Colbert long ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... sailing orders under the new Constitution were unique. Precedents, those charts and lighthouses of the judicial mariner, were lacking. Progress was tentative and groping. Little wonder therefore that at first the business of the Court was meager and membership in its body seemed less attractive than membership in the judiciary of a state. Robert Hanson Harrison, one of President Washington's original appointees to the Supreme bench, declined to serve, preferring to accept a state judicial ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... the young lady a little to do that which some others might have done without pressing. Still all this is but hypothesis: our evidence as to the love affairs of the time of King Charles I. is but meager. But whatever the feelings of Miss Powell may have been, those of Mrs. Milton are exceedingly certain. She would not return to her husband; she did not answer his letters; and a messenger whom he sent to bring her back was handled rather roughly. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and he must love to teach his pupils not the meager elements of knowledge, but the secret and the use of their own intellectual strength, exciting and enabling them hereafter to raise for themselves the veil which covers the majestic form of Truth. He must feel deeply the reverence due to the youthful mind fraught ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... passed Fairmont, my attention was diverted from it for a short time, not over ten minutes, and when again looking for my cloud, it was gone. Every vestige of it had vanished completely, and in its place was the blue sky, its color intensified by reason of its recent meager obscuration. ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, a very short, flight to Italy—for my husband had only a meager holiday from the Times: "Go to Rome! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... My power, even like that of the Infinite, is limited by conditions. It is not my pleasure ever to have them go unrefreshed; but how much better for them, could they be content with whatever comes each day, though sometimes meager. How it cheers me to see those who have come in good courage and faith, not knowing that the feast was here. Eat and give thanks," he said; while a band ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... counties reported a shortage of labor, and in many parts of the State farmers adopted the plan of raising live-stock instead of agricultural crops. Much land lay idle, and where this was not the case there was a noted increase in the use of farm machinery to supplement the meager labor supply. Especially acute was the demand for cotton pickers. On the whole, the labor situation became so serious that average wages for Negro labor were rapidly advanced beyond those of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... the deep dusk of the morning, without knowing he was near. With swift, silent steps they had passed down the trail, taking as much of Larry Kildene's corn as they could carry, and leaving the bloody pelt of the sheep and a very meager share of the mutton in exchange. Hungry and footsore, yet eager and glad to have come home successfully, Harry King walked forward, leading his good yellow horse, his eyes fixed on the cabin, and wondering not a little; ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... second night after their arrival at Venture Island. Besides the clams referred to there was an abundance of fish, several varieties, besides game and meats, and the only thing which they seemed to lack, or which was rather meager in quantity, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... his contempt of small things. He thought of the poor that might deposit from time to time small coins that meant much from their slender incomes. Yes, "mites" were all right, if they were like the "widow's," and not the meager drippings from a selfish superfluity. But suppose he take a mite-box? How many of them would be required to hold the hoarded, unnecessary, unused wealth at his command? He could not insult the Lord and the "dearest ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... In concluding this meager record of the methods of earnest men and women of Illinois in their brave work for liberty, we are painfully conscious of a vast aggregate of personal toil and self sacrifice which can never be reported. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... her except Harding's; and this was a service she had never asked of old, and lately would rather have died than ask. So she took daily to the winding roads that led to a distant bridge and the hills with their forests. This day her need was at its sorest. When she had gathered a meager crop she sat down under a tree, and began to sort out the herbs upon her knees. One tender leaf she could not resist taking between her teeth, that had had so little else of late to bite on; and as she did so coarse laughter broke upon her. It was her rude suitor who had ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... as we could be with our meager equipment. The camp was in a state of siege. The cliff-lights were extinguished: the interior lights were dim, save in the workshops of the main building, where the final assembling of Snap's other flying platforms and their insulated ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable—Linda realized now that it had been the ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... much studied, it has nevertheless been subjected to only meager "development" over the centuries of its service to civilized men. Most past attempts to alter it significantly for man's use have either failed or have not led to lasting results, though their changing purposes over the ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... the meager facts, it became more evident that whoever had perpetrated the crime must have had the diabolical cunning to do it in some ordinary way that aroused no suspicion on the part of the victim, for there was no sign ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and suffering—he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted. Not that Ned (as I will call him, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... waiting. It had its irresistibly comic side. There were those among the Chautauqua girls who could see the comic side of things with very little trouble. The material out of which they made some of their fun might have appeared very meager to orderly, decorous people. ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... even in the few hours that he had been studying his meager evidence. Not only was he making a series of delicate chemical tests, but, in cases, he had several guinea-pigs which ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... the boy, for the first time in his short life, took stock of the condition of his own body. Slipping out of the big shirt once more, and borrowing Cis's mirror, he contrived, by skewing his head around, chinning first one shoulder, then the other, to get a meager look at his back. He appraised his spindling arms and legs. He thumped his ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... bed was breathing heavily, his lips moving at every breath in a way to form a grimace. He made in this condition the whole room as tawdry as a tavern tap. And at the feet of this thing he was tossing his meager store ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... off my hat to your 'society editress'," Dundee commented with false cheerfulness, when he had laid the paper back upon Penny's desk. "She makes half a column of this one item in what must be a meager Saturday bunch of 'Society Notes,' then writes it all over again, in the past tense, for an equally meager Monday ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... been prepared in part for the first meager showing of mission work. On shipboard he had encountered the usual assortment of missionary critics; the unobservant, the profane, the superior, the loose-living, and all that tribe. The first of them he had met on the second ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... obliged to turn his attention to the agriculture and industries practiced by primitive woman he brought all his technological skill and a part of his technological interest to bear on the new problems. Women had been able to thrust a stick into the earth and drop the seed and await a meager harvest. When man turned his attention to this matter, his ingenuity eventually worked out a remarkable combination of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms: with the iron plow, drawn by the ox, he upturned the face of the earth, and produced food stuffs ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... we again advanced, now traveling through a more open country, a prairie, interspersed with groves of trees. Daylight overtook us at the edge of a slough, which bordered a little lake, where in the gray dawn, Tim, by a lucky shot, managed to kill a crippled duck, which later furnished us with a meager breakfast. In the security of a near-by cluster of trees, we ventured to build a fire, and, sitting about it, discussed whether to remain there, or press on. It was an ideal spot for a camp, elevated enough to afford a wide view in every direction. No one could approach unseen, and ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... fast setting in. Poor oppressed Finland suffers under a hard climate with August frosts, an eight months' winter in the north, and five months of frost in the south. Idling in sleepy Abo, where the public buildings were so mean and meager and the houses for the most part built of wood, I saw on every hand the disastrous result of the attempted Russification of the country. The hand of the oppressor, that official sent from Petersburg to crush and to conquer, was upon the honest Finnish nation. The Russian bureaucracy ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... your lovely Brides, That have ingeminate in endlesse league Your troth-plight hearts, in your nuptial vowes Tyed true love knots that nothing can disolve Till death, that meager pursevant of Jove That Cancels all bonds: we are to [sic] clowdie, My spirit a typtoe, nothing I could chid so much As winged time, that gins to free a passage To his current glasse and crops our day-light, That mistie ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... would have to conclude that the whole business was a wretched mistake; that Lincoln found married life intolerable because of the fussily dictatorial self-importance of his wife. But the authority for all these tales is meager. Not one is traceable to the parties themselves. Probably it will never be known till the end of time what is false in them, what true. About all that can be disengaged from this cloud of illusive witnesses is that Springfield wondered why Mary Todd married ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... his most frequent visitor the Muse. Ill health forced him to resign in 1843, and Moerike once more became a wanderer. During these years love again crossed his path, and to be able to marry—his pension was too meager—he accepted (1851) a position at a girls' seminary in Stuttgart, where he taught German Literature for one or two hours a week, a none too heavy and an altogether congenial task. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Hebrews learned the art and secrets of Masonry, which they took with them to the promised land. Long years are rapidly sketched, and we come to the days of David, who is said to have loved Masons well, and to have given them "wages nearly as they are now." There is but a meager reference to the building of the Temple of Solomon, to which is added: "In other chronicles and old books of Masonry, it is said that Solomon confirmed the charges that David had given to Masons; and that Solomon taught them their usages differing but slightly from the customs ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... long moment, Alice decided, presently. Mrs. Dresser had grown restive; and her nods and vague responses to her young dependent's gaieties were as meager as they could well be. Evidently the matron had no intention of appearing to her world in the light of a chaperone for Alice Adams; and she finally made this clear. With a word or two of excuse, breaking into something Alice ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... buildings themselves. The word architect was little used until after the Renaissance. The owner and the "surveyor" were the people responsible, and the plans, directions and details given to the workmen were astonishingly meager. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... perceived the superior aptitudes and abilities of Abraham. She became very fond of him, and in every way encouraged his marked inclination to study and improve himself. The opportunities for this were meager enough. Mr. Lincoln himself has drawn a ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... looking from the highest points of the North or South Sides across the depression where the stockade crossed the swamp. In this way we could see about forty acres at a time of the adjoining woodland, or say one hundred and sixty acres altogether, and this meager landscape had to content us for ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... little boy of four or five looked miserably unhappy, and the worn and meager-looking mother was plainly frightened out of her wits. She let the baby scream on the seat beside her while she held the little girl in ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... prisoner. Herman moved his bed down-stairs and slept in the sitting-room, the five or six hours of day-light sleep which were all he required. And at night, while he was at the mill, Rudolph sat and dozed and kept watch below. Twice a day some meager provisions were left at the top of the stairs and her door was unlocked. She would creep out and get them, not because she was hungry, but because she meant to keep up her strength. Let their vigilance slip but once, and ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Fenneben sat alone in his university barracks and saw the prairie dogs making the dust fly as they digged about what had been intended for a flower bed on the campus. Then he packed up his meager library and other college equipments and walked ten miles across the plains to hire a man with a team to haul them away. The teamster had much ado to drive his half-bridle-wise Indian ponies near enough to the university doorway to load his wagon. Before the threshold a huge rattlesnake ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Professor Gehren by sight, knew of him further by repute as an impulsive, violent, warm-hearted and learned pundit who, for a typically meager recompense, furnished sundry classes of young gentlemen with amusement, alarm and instruction, in about equal parts, through the medium of lectures at the Metropolitan University. During vacations the professor pursued, with some degree ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... gazed straight into Satish's eyes. He flushed with emotion, lowering his gaze in silent repentance. When we were served a lavish meal, including out-of-season mangoes, I noticed that my brother-in-law's appetite was meager. He was bewildered, diving deep into the ocean of thought. On the return journey to Calcutta, Satish, with softened expression, occasionally glanced at me pleadingly. But he did not speak a single word after the moment the priest had appeared to invite us to ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... and must have shown it, when, with the first rays of a very meager sun, Miss Grey softly unclosed her eyes and found me looking at her, for her smile had a sweet compassion in it, and she said as she pressed ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... had made their meager breakfast of salt pork, coffee and biscuit, Clayton commenced work upon their house, for he realized that they could hope for no safety and no peace of mind at night until four strong walls effectually barred the jungle life ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... again, but walked restlessly about the room, intently examining its meager details. The circuit of inspection bringing her again to the table, she picked up Morico's turkey fan, looking at it long and critically. When she laid it down, it was to seize the glass of "toddy" which she unhesitatingly put ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... and the sun had disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to be finished "to-day," at one blow, immediately, or he would never return home, because he had no desire to live thus. How to finish? ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... rage, was past hearing. He turned his attention to Meta, tearing her from him. She was a woman and her supple strength was meager compared to his great muscles. But she was a Pyrran woman and she did what no off-worlder could. She slowed him for a moment, stopped the fury of his attack until he could rip her hands loose and throw her aside. It didn't take him long ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... about them. They hated the "Nawth" and cursed the Yankees, and honestly believed that the leanest of them was a match for any half a dozen of the bulkiest of Northerners. I must also do them the justice to say that they were quite as ready to fight as to brag, which, by the way, is no meager statement. With these gentry—for whom I retain a respect which filled me with regret at the recent course of events—I spent a good deal of my large leisure. The more studious of both sections called us a hard crowd. ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... the day before, and carried them into the kitchen, where a pine ironing board was supported by two empty barrels. Lila was busily preparing a bowl of gruel for one of the sick old Negroes who still lived upon the meager charity of ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... write their descriptions of accidents hastily and often from meager data, and in the attempt to make them vivid they sometimes make them ridiculous; for example, a New York City paper a few days ago, in describing a collision between a train and a motor bus, said: "The train, too, was filled with passengers. Their shrieks mingled with the cries of the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... of 1611 Dale was in Virginian waters. By this day, beside the main settlement of Jamestown, there were at Cape Henry and Point Comfort small forts garrisoned with meager companies of men. Dale made pause at these, setting matters in order, and then, proceeding up the river, he came to Jamestown and found the people gathered to receive him. Presently he writes home to the Company a letter that gives a view of the place ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... down at the roof of our shack it looked small and pitiful, tragically meager to house the tangled human destinies it was housing. And the fields where we'd labored and sweated took on a foreign and ghostly coloring, as though they were oblongs on the face of an alien world, a world with mystery and beauty and unfathomable ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... light burned beyond the dirty glass partition, but the tall meager form of the old merchant was nowhere visible. Mr. Shrimplin advanced yet farther into the room and urged by his sense of duty and his public spirit, he directed his steps toward the office, treading softly as one who fears to come upon the unexpected. Once he paused, and addressing the ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... . And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again—a meal was bought With blood, and each sat sullenly apart, Gorging himself in gloom, . . . and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails;—men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh The meager by the meager were devoured, Even dogs ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... this. But remember, for the future, that yo ur business does not lie on the bedroom story. Mr. Mazey sleeps on that bed you noticed. It is his habit at night to sleep outside his master's door." With that meager explanation Mrs. Drake's lips closed, and opened ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the money which Jennie sent, for what purpose they could hardly guess. As a matter of fact, Gerhardt was saving as much as possible in order to repay Jennie eventually. He thought it was sinful to go on in this way, and this was his one method, out side of his meager earnings, to redeem himself. If his other children had acted rightly by him he felt that he would not now be left in his old age the recipient of charity from one, who, despite her other good qualities, was certainly not leading a righteous ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser |
