"Meagre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... statesmen than Lord Palmerston. There are, of course, many most serious accusations to be made against him. The sort of homage with which he was regarded in the last years of his life has passed away; the spell is broken, and the magic cannot be again revived. We may think that his information was meagre, that his imagination was narrow, that his aims were short—sighted and faulty. But though we may often object to his objects, we rarely find much to criticise in his means. 'He went,' it has been said, 'with a great swing;' but he never tumbled over; he always managed to ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... failure. In training he had been, once upon a time, an engineer and built dams that broke and bridges that fell down and wharves that floated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer and failed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meagre life as a sort of surveyor or land expert on goodness ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... an habitue of Wall street, Front street, and Coenties Slip, that even now, when wandering along those thoroughfares, we almost momently expect to meet him. We can not but think that at the next turn we shall see that shrunken and diminutive form, that meagre, hungry-looking countenance, and that timid, nervous eye, which indicated the fear of loss or the dread approach of charity. His office was held for years in the second story of a warehouse in Front street, a spot in whose vicinity he had passed nearly three-score years. Thither ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... latter port; nor was there then known reason to censure the decision of the officer on the spot, whose information, dependent upon despatch vessels, or upon local scouting, was necessarily, in some respects, more meagre than that of the Department, in cable communication with many quarters. Nevertheless, he was mistaken, and each succeeding hour made the mistake more palpable and more serious to those in Washington; not, indeed, that demonstrative proof had been received ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... works of Asia, China and Japan are taken almost entirely from the Hindu, while in Southern Russia the meagre literature of the Kalmucks is borrowed entirely from the same source. The Ramayana, or great Hindu poem, must have had its origin in the history-to-be of Christ. It has been translated into Italian and published ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... in which primitive manners and customs and old-world tradition linger on into an age that has elsewhere forgotten them. In the summer, it is true, a small contingent of visitors, adventurous in spirit, though mostly of sedate and solitary habits, make their appearance to swell its meagre population, and impart to the wide stretches of smooth sand that fringe its shores a fleeting air of life and sober gaiety; but in late September—the season of the year in which I made its acquaintance—its pasture-lands ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... be able to supplement with some further interesting details the meagre accounts of Mr. Roosevelt's explorations in Brazil which have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... beside him, like the faithful, ruffed, and farthingaled wife on a fifteenth-century tomb. Behind them, again, at some little distance, we and our visitor. With the best will in the world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter. The room is altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it. I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither bulky nor ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... approach her; And the morning was attended With but little hope or succour. Charity, in cold attendance, Came with many words and wishes; And, in fair and full pretending, Stood, and pitied, and regretted; But it gave a meagre pittance Or of comfort or appeasing, To withdraw the pangs of hunger, Or relieve her sunken spirit. But good Sero saw in pity. He beheld her calm endurance Of the anguish bearing on her; And he sent and took her spirit— Took it gently from ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... opinion went, and would have no fear as to expressing his opinion to his brother clergyman. So she sent for Mr. Crawley. In appearance he was the very opposite to Mark Robarts. He was a lean, slim, meagre man, with shoulders slightly curved, and pale, lank, long locks of ragged hair; his forehead was high, but his face was narrow; his small grey eyes were deeply sunken in his head, his nose was well-formed, his lips thin, and his mouth expressive. Nobody could ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... advantage. We beheld the same contrast recently in the Crimea; while exposure and impatience thinned the ranks of the brave islanders, their Gallic allies constructed roads, dug where they could not build a shelter, and ingeniously prepared various dishes from a meagre larder, fighting off, meantime, chagrin and ennui with as much ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... made their scanty suppers; after it both were hungry. They had been hungry thus for four days. There remained coffee and sugar enough for another half-dozen meagre meals; here the affluence ended. The bacon was down to a piece of fat two inches thick and seven inches long; there was bacon grease a couple of inches deep in a tomato-can; there was a teacup of flour; there was one small tin of sardines and a smaller one of devilled ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... higher unity, say, of Hamlet, where every smallest scene and almost personage is connected with the general theme; nor the lower unity of such a thing as Phedre, where everything is pared down, or, as Landor put it in his own case, "boiled off" to a meagre residuum of theme special. It has, at the very most, that species of unity which Aristotle did not like even in epic, that of a succession of events happening to an individual; and while most of these might be omitted, or others substituted ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... After a few strides he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a light in the window of a ground-floor room; he approached. Through a cracked window he beheld a mean chamber which recalled some confused memory to his mind. In that room, badly lighted by a meagre lamp, there was a fresh, light-haired young man, with a merry face, who amid loud bursts of laughter was embracing a very audaciously attired young girl; and near the lamp sat an old crone spinning and singing in a quavering voice. As the young man ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... their destruction was completed and their shattered planks and timbers torn out of the "gripes." The crew of the ship had, for safety's sake, assembled aft on the full poop; and among them could be seen a female figure crouching down under the meagre shelter of the cabin skylight evidently in a ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the nest. The Chatterer came directly to the tree—I remember it was an oak tree—and began to climb up. And he never ceased for a moment from his infernal row. As I have said, our language was extremely meagre, and he must have strained it by the variety of ways in which he informed me of his undying hatred of me and of his intention there and then to have it ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... his once peculiarly fine and noble form; his great length of limb, which had gained him, and handed down to posterity, the inelegant surname of Longshanks, rendered his appearance yet more gaunt and meagre; while his features, which once, from the benignity and nobleness of his character, had been eminently handsome, now pale, thin, and pointed, seemed to express but the one passion of his soul—its gratification of revenge. His expansive brow was now contracted and stern, rendered more so perhaps ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... dark alleys, in the very vilest of the black and white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart, there was an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch whose portion of life was more meagre and low than theirs. Something in them struggled up to meet the trust in the pitiful eyes,—something which scorned to betray the trust,—some Christ-like power, smothered, dying, under the filth of their life and the terror of hell. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... underfoot from what has gone before: scraps of Roman tile and stone chippings protrude through the grass in meagre quantity, but sufficient to suggest that masonry stood on the spot. Before the eye stretches under the moonlight the interior of the fort. So open and so large is it as to be practically an upland plateau, and yet its area lies wholly within the walls of what may be ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Anselm offered as his contribution five hundred marks, what would now be equal to L10,000,—a large sum in those days, but not as much as the Norman sovereign expected. In indignation he refused the present, which seemed to him meagre, especially since it was accompanied with words of seeming reproof; for Anselm had said that "a free gift, which he meant this to be, was better than a forced and servile contribution." The King then angrily bade him ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... really acquainted with ancestors of the people of to-day, even though we may have read in the pages of earlier writers of alien descent much that is of great concurrent interest. Through the medium of the native saga, epic, and meagre chronicle, we see for the first time their real though dim outlines, moving in and out of the mists that obscure the dawn of history; and these outlines become more and more distinct as the literary remains of succeeding ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... depend on the volume and the significance of the group of associated facts of which the doctrine offers a solution. The facts that it has been in my power to discuss within the compass of discourses like the present, only give a very meagre and inadequate notion of the entire phenomena connected with the moon which the tides will explain. We have not unfrequently, for the sake of simplicity, spoken of the moon's orbit as circular, and we have not even alluded to the fact ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... one great source from which has sprung the vitalities of the country's faith. And who does not know that to be a poor, unsolid fiction,—a weak and hollow sham? And, on the other hand, some of our Free Churchmen are asserting that they are not morally bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and altogether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, when they were set down in their humble schools, divorced from all other means of support, to regulate their very limited expenditure by the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... so brave about it that my heart went out to them. Children and no Christmas gifts! Only the chill, bare room, the wretched, meagre meal. I ransacked my brain. Finally something occurred to me. After dinner I excused myself and hurried back to the church. There were two small wicker baskets there which were used for the collection—old but rather pretty. I selected the best one. Fortunately I had ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... and theological materials of many religious books are as faulty as their style, and the injury they do the Gospel is incalculable. Here is a systematic writer in whose hands all the riches and magnificence of revelation shrink into a meagre list of doctrinal points, and not a single verse in the Bible is allowed to tell its meaning, or even allowed to have one, till it has been forced under torture to maintain one of his points. You are next confronted with a prater about the invisible world, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... heart. Consider that this law was aimed at the life, liberty, and happiness of the poor and least-privileged portion of our people—a class whom the laws should befriend, protect, and raise up. What is the true character of a law, whose working, whose fruits are such as this meagre outline of its history shows? Is it fit that such deeds and such a law should have your sanction and support? Will you remain in a moment's doubt whether to be a friend or a foe to such a law? Will you countenance or support the man, in the church ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the scope of this work, I might furnish a catalogue, by no means meagre, of inhabitants formerly distinguished in their day and generation. For example, I have heard it stated as a curious fact, that, not far from the beginning of the present century, each of the three Professors of Harvard College, namely, Professors Webber, afterwards ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... drank in the yells and hootings of the multitude, he added his shrill cracked voice to the uproar. When the shots were fired from the town-hall, he bounded and capered upon the platform, clapping his meagre fingers together in ecstasy; but as the Empecinado got further from the house, and the firing was discontinued, an expression of anxiety replaced the look of triumph that had lighted up the old maniac's face. Diez still moved on unhurt, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... never use a word you can't define," observed Nick, from the depths of the hammock in which his meagre person ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... persons—men, women, and children—survived altogether.[45] Within a very short time the cabins which he erected were ready to fall and the palisades could not keep out hogs. A tract of land called the "company's garden" yielded the company L300 annually, but this was a meagre return for the enormous suffering and sacrifice of life.[46] Dale took Pocahontas with him to England, and Lady Delaware presented her at court, and her portrait engraved by the distinguished artist Simon de Passe was a popular curiosity.[47] While in England she met Captain John Smith, and when ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... the end of the honeymoon, whatever hopes or illusions George Tressady had allowed himself in marrying, were already much bedimmed. His love-dream had been meagre and ordinary enough. But even so, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of a foul and fearful conspiracy of the French against this state; whereof no less than thirty have already suffered very condign punishment, between men strangled in prison, drowned in the silence of the night, and hanged in public view; and yet the bottom is invisible." Beyond this quaint, meagre, chronological notice, little is actually established of the details, although the event is perhaps as familiarly known by name to English readers as any other in the History of Venice. We are, therefore, happy to see the affair treated with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... the way along a plain trail that seemed to be the easiest route up to the enclosure. Three times out of four a stranger, prowling around with meagre light to guide him, would be apt to follow that beaten track; and this was evidently what the ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... luxuries of a tropical country. They might plant orchards of the choicest fruit trees around their houses, grow Indian corn, and rear cattle and hogs, as intelligent settlers from Europe would certainly do, instead of indolently relying solely on the produce of their small plantations, and living on a meagre diet of fish and farinha. In preparing the cacao they have not devised any means of separating the seeds well from the pulp, or drying it in a systematic way; the consequence is that, although naturally of good ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... taken Sylvia's advice. The tramp known to her by the name of Freeman—that in which he received his pension—lodged with her still, and paid his meagre shilling in advance, weekly. A shilling was meagre in those hard days of scarcity. A hungry man might easily eat the produce of a ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... The early Christians were imbued with the sentiment of moral grandeur and loveliness; they represented Christ our Lord as the fair ideal of humanity; but a darker age decreed that his form should be meagre and homely—misled by those pagan Syrian pictures, which still disfigure the churches in Russia, and whose original may be found in the avatars of violence, modified by old Persian influence. From the seventh to the twelfth century, the tendency to asceticism was rampant. Beauty ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... metropolis of our politics, and which has sprinkled with its cordial drops kindred spirits scattered far and wide over the land, welled up from no wholesome sources such as these. It was no deliverance from barbarous enemies, from pestilential disease, from meagre famine, that moved those raptures,—no joy at ignorance dissipated, barbarism dispelled, or tyranny put down. The "peace" and the "prosperity," the prophecy of which was so sweet to the souls that took sweet counsel together on that night, were of a kind which only souls tuned to such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... appreciate the value of this privilege to Benjamin, unless he understands that books were far from being abundant then. The bookstores, instead of being furnished with thousands of volumes to suit every taste in the reading world, offered only a meagre collection of volumes, such as would hardly be noticed at the present time. There were no large publishing houses, manufacturing many books in a year, and scattering them over the land, as is the case to-day. Neither were there any libraries at that time. The idea of a collection of books to lend ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... them welcome to the new asylum of the faithful; then launched into a long harangue full of zeal and unction. His discourse finished, he led the way to the dining-hall. If the redundancy of spiritual aliment had surpassed their expectations, the ministers were little prepared for the meagre provision which awaited their temporal cravings; for, with appetites whetted by the sea, they found themselves seated at a board whereof, as one of them complains the choicest dish was a dried fish, and the only beverage rain-water. They found ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... injury, and set to work at the preparation of supper—a task not strange to her, as her mother considered it correct that her daughter should have a working knowledge of kitchen affairs. Her equipment was meagre, and she spent more time scouring than cooking, but her heart beat high with the spirit ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... bridges have been much carped at, and modern accounts of Hang-chau (desperately meagre as they are) do not speak of its bridges as notable. "There is, indeed," says Mr. Kingsmill, speaking of changes in the hydrography about Hang-chau, "no trace in the city of the magnificent canals and bridges described by Marco Polo." The number was no doubt in this case also a mere ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... assigned peculiar employments. The chief of these were the Fairies, concerning whom the reader will find a long dissertation, in Volume Second. The Brownie formed a class of beings, 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 ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... then, taking him, led him to the presence. But when Sankharib considered him, he found him as one clean wasted by want; his hair had grown long like the pelts of wild beasts and his nails were as vulture's claws and his members were meagre for the length of time spent by him in duresse and darkness, and the dust had settled upon him and changed his colour which had faded and waxed of ashen hue. So his lord mourned for his plight and, rising up in honour, kissed him and embraced him ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... convert for baptism was often very slight. A dying Algonquin, who, though meagre as a skeleton, had thrown himself, with a last effort of expiring ferocity, on an Iroquois prisoner, and torn off his ear with his teeth, was baptized almost immediately. [ 1 ] In the case of converts in health there was far more preparation; yet these often apostatized. The various ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... a physician of some local repute, who seems to have been impelled to emigrate in consequence of the impossibility of making any suitable provision in England for so numerous a progeny. The ascertained facts with reference to John Rolph's early life in England are singularly meagre. He accompanied his parents to Canada some time prior to the War of 1812, for he served as a volunteer during the early part of that conflict, and was for some months a paymaster of militia. During the progress of the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the trip as a partner, Bates made some sarcastic remarks about horses not fetching $12 a dozen, which had been literally true within the year, and he preferred to go on a very meagre salary. But no one who once saw the Pacer going had failed to catch the craze. Turkeytrack experienced the usual change of heart. He now wanted to own that mustang. How this was to be brought about he did not clearly see till one ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... much that the altitude is about 12 too small. No land visible for twenty miles. No animal life observed. Lower Clark's tow-net with 566 fathoms of wire, and hoist it up at two and a half miles an hour by walking across the floe with the wire. Result rather meagre—jelly-fish and some fish larvae. Exercise dogs in sledge teams. The young dogs, under Crean's care, pull as well, though not so strongly, as the best team in the pack. Hercules for the last fortnight or more has constituted himself leader of the orchestra. Two ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... pronounce them as fascinating as any romance. Stranger still, these modern historians excel their predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and picturesqueness of style. Compare the meagre array of references in the foot-notes of Watson's "History of Philip the Second" with the multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott. It may be doubted, whether any printed book, however rare or little known, which could throw the least glimmer of light ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... to the meagre story which is supplied to us by the early years of Japanese history, it will be well to glean from the myths and legends which tradition has preserved the lessons which they contain. Although we may be unable to concede the truth of these ...
— Japan • David Murray
... said in faultless English as he entered. He had a beaming face, and a sort of pinkish blond hair. "Fancy you being Butteridge." He slapped Bert's meagre luggage down. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... clerks, of course, were second-class citizens. And without employment, they'd soon lose their luxury privileges. Unless they were fortunate enough to find other employment very soon, they'd have to move to subsistence quarters, and learn to do without all but the most meagre of food, clothing, and shelter. When they did get employment again, they'd appreciate it. He looked majestically around the office once more, then turned and ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... general he was known in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... our unspeakable joy that it was our own cutter. While she was still at a distance, we imagined that she had been discharged out of the port of Acapulco by the governor; but when she drew nearer, the wan and meagre countenances of the crew, the length of their beards, and the feeble and hollow tone of their voices, convinced us that they had suffered much greater hardships than could be expected from even the severities of a Spanish prison. They were obliged to be helped into ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... streams are treacherous; one step too far plunged her into twenty feet of water, and the next moment she was spinning round and round in the current. She had learned to swim a few strokes in the creek on her father's farm, and her meagre skill now stood her in good stead, for she was able to keep afloat until the current threw her against a gravel bar that jutted into the river. She dragged herself ashore, very wet, and of a sudden, very frightened, and sat down ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... not get up from—well, what was the end on't? Why, as sure as we are among these monkeys, the fellow BOOKED me. Had I BOOKED but the half of what he guzzled, the amount, I do believe, would have taken the transaction out of any justice's court in the state. He said my molasses was meagre, the pork lean, and the liquor infernal. There were truth and gratitude for you! He gave the whul account, too, as a specimen of what ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... year, when the Abbey Theatre Company was touring in England, he came with it if his health allowed, to watch the performances in London, Manchester or Edinburgh, wherever they might be. His life was always mainly within himself; the record of these years is very meagre, all that can be said of them is that he passed them mostly in Ireland, writing and re-writing, in failing health and with increasing purpose. His general health was never robust, and for at least the last six years of ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... the result. Those that were the ruling classes in the backward countries are now atoning for the excessive exercise of their rights of mastership; they are now paying the difference between the wages they formerly gave and the—meagre enough—general average of wages under ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... inheritance east of the Jordan, and the rest of the land was allotted on the west to the remaining tribes. Judah's boundaries and cities are first and most exhaustively given; then come Manasseh and Ephraim, with meagre records, followed by Benjamin, which again is exhaustive, then by Simeon, Zebulon, Issachar, Asher, Naphtali and Dan (xiii.-xix.). Three cities on either side of Jordan were then set apart as cities of refuge for innocent homicides, and for the Levites forty-eight ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... threshold. But Mr. Adams's career in public life stretched over so long a period that to write a full historical memoir of him within the limited space of this volume is impossible. All that can be attempted is to present a sketch of the man with a few of his more prominent surroundings against a very meagre and insufficient background of the history of the times. So it may be permissible to begin with a general outline of his figure, to be filled in, shaded, and colored as we proceed. At best our task is much more difficult of satisfactory ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... they cry all day for bread, And, 'neath the shelter of my meagre breast, Stirs one unborn, who must e'er long be fed— Another babe to hunger with the rest. Madonna Mary, hear a mother's moan! Pity the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... only give you the most meagre information," said Mr. Farrington. He was white and shaky, a natural state for a law-abiding man who had witnessed wilful murder. "I heard voices and went down to the door, thinking I would find a policeman—then I ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... down at one of the small tables, and Scanlon looked about. Some patrons of both sexes were already there; the women were dejected, or hard; here and there were seen a few who were merely vacant. The men were of the meagre, pallid type, nervous of action and furtive of eye. Stoical Chinamen, with ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its conquests, teach us more than this? Let us approach ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... been written in vain if it serves the purpose of provoking to the good work of discovery some of those who on the score both of quality and of quantity account what has been thus far done in the line of revision inadequate and meagre. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... it should be by mere book study. The result will be meagre in comparison with the capabilities of the subject. The study of the text should always be supplemented by a series of practical experiments. Actual observations and actual experiments are as necessary to illuminate the text and to illustrate important ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... dinner-plates; that they glared with a most unholy malevolence; and that they were spaced about thirty inches apart. These details, such as they were, corresponded with the impression produced upon Earle, who forthwith proceeded to jot down the meagre facts in his notebook by ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... grim protection of Osterno, was deserted and forlorn. All the doors were closed, the meagre curtains drawn. It was very cold. There was a sense of relief in this great frost; for when Nature puts forth her strength men ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... head of a buffalo, and beneath that a picture of old general Wrangel, under whom he had once served as an adjutant, he was very proud of what he had done. But when I see these things here, all our Hohen-Cremmen elegance seems by the side of them merely commonplace and meagre. I don't know what to compare them with. Even last night, when I took but a cursory look at them, a world of ideas ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Ill., but our happiness was of short duration, as my husband was killed in the explosion of the steamboat Edward Bates, on which he was employed. To my mind it seemed a singular coincidence that the boat which bore the name of the great and good man, who had given me the first joy of my meagre life—the precious boon of freedom—and that his namesake should be the means of weighting me with my first great sorrow; this thought seemed to reconcile me to my grief, for that name was ever sacred, and I could not speak it ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... you want with arms?" cried suddenly a shrill, piercing voice. All eyes were turned toward the spot whence the voice proceeded, and there was seen the meagre figure of the linen-weaver, who had leaped upon a bench, and from his elevated position was looking down upon the people with the confident air of a conqueror. But Pfannenstiel observed, to his dismay, that ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... conquer is to make dissension cease, That man may serve the King of kings in peace. Religion now shall all her rays dispense, And shine abroad in perfect excellence; Else we may dread some greater curse at hand, To scourge a thoughtless and ungrateful land: Now war is weary, and retir'd to rest; The meagre famine, and the spotted pest, Deputed in her stead, may blast the day, And sweep the relics of the sword away. When peaceful Numa fill'd the Roman throne, Jove in the fulness of his glory shone; Wise Solomon, a stranger to the sword, Was born to raise a temple to the Lord. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... of this meeting is in curious contrast to that of Audubon. It is meagre and unsatisfactory. Under date of March 19, he writes in his diary at Louisville: "Rambled around the town with my gun. Examined Mr. ——'s [Audubon's] drawings in crayons—very good. Saw two new birds he ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... together, and for half-an-hour we threw our flies with all our accustomed skill, and more than our usual patience; but we gathered little by the exercise of these qualities. A few grayling, with a trout or two of meagre dimensions, alone rewarded our care; and these, we judiciously concluded, were not of sufficient value to compensate for the loss of time that would be sustained in adding to their numbers. Besides we found ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... She did not care what part her guardian played in the morrow's ceremonies. Like all the other figures peopling her meagre world he had grown non-existent to her. She had ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... it possible 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 whole, nothing ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... things may be excusable from a humane point of view; it arose from the older methods of instrumentation, where the role of the viola consisted for the most part in filling up the accompaniments; and it has since found some sort of justification in the meagre method of instrumentation adopted by the composers of Italian operas, whose works constitute an important element in the repertoire of the German ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... in which he lived, had but one school, a miserable hovel, which was falling to ruin: he constructed two, one for girls, the other for boys. He allotted a salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as large as their meagre official salary, and one day he said to some one who expressed surprise, "The two prime functionaries of the state are the nurse and the schoolmaster." He created at his own expense an infant school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... "Peacock" would overtake her and her convoy, directed the latter to separate while she stood down to engage the hostile cruiser. The two vessels soon came to blows. The accounts of the action on both sides are extremely meagre, and preclude any certain statement as to manoeuvres; which indeed cannot have been material to the issue reached. The "Epervier," for reasons that will appear later, fought first one broadside and then the other; but substantially the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... a reality; they were getting beyond the summer range of deer and buffalo, which had been their chief reliance. Through their long season of toil they had been plentifully fed; but they were now to know the pains of hunger, and the ills which follow upon a meagre diet. The hunters were daily reporting increasingly bad luck in the chase; some days would yield nothing; upon other days the camp would heartily welcome an owl, an eagle, or a bag of insignificant small birds ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... of the solar ray, the identity of magnetism and electricity, the polar nature of chemical affinity, the optical polarities of crystals, and the interaction of magnetism and light. Since then the once meagre and fragmentary science of physics has become one of the grandest and richest departments of human thought; and the illustrious names of Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer, of Grove, Faraday, and Tyndall, may be fitly named beside those of the leading thinkers of past ages. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... theory, is absolutely nothing new—only the assertion that new species originate always in sports, for which the evidence adduced is the most meagre and inconclusive of any ever set forth with such pretentious claims! I hope you will thoroughly expose this ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... deep," replied Mercedes impressively, glad of a chance to air her meagre knowledge of ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... named John, was destined for the ministry, and had been three years at Oxford before coming to this country. On arriving here, thinking his preparatory work too meagre for his profession, he devoted himself to husbandry. He settled in Hull, in 1633. His son Samuel, the father of Thomas, was born in 1649, and his son chronicles of him, "That he was healthy and strong ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... 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 words, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... their self-sacrificing labours. By the beginning of 1621 they had a comfortable residence on the bank of the St Charles, on the spot where now stands the General Hospital. Here they had been granted two hundred acres of land, and they cultivated the soil, raising meagre crops of rye, barley, maize, and wheat, and tending a few pigs, cows, asses, and fowls. There were from time to time accessions to their ranks. Between the years 1616 and 1623 the fathers Guillaume Poullain, Georges le Baillif, ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... of Colenso Sir Redvers Buller's telegraphic despatch, though it probably does the commander less justice than he would have received at the hands of any other narrator, gives an authoritative if meagre account. The attack seems to have been planned rather as a reconnaissance in force, to be followed up in case it should reveal possibilities of victory, than as a determined effort on which everything was to be staked. In all probability this form of action ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... pretended literature and meagre civilisation of China—what they are, and with what real effects such masquerading phantoms operate upon the generation with which accidents of commerce have brought ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the principalship of the school, finding its meagre return insufficient to meet the needs of an increasing family. Yielding to the persuasion of Henderson, he became contractor for taking out timber at Trout Creek Mill. He counted on his two oldest sons to do men's work during the summer when school was not in session. Fellows moved his family into ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... For the correspondents in the greatest of all wars the pickings had been meagre. "You are to be congratulated," I said. He brushed aside my congratulations. "For what?" he demanded. "I didn't go after the stories; they came to me. The things I saw I had to see. Couldn't get away from them. I've been with the British, serving in the R.A.M.C. Been hospital ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... and then it was that he sighed. Nevertheless he did roam about for three years longer; and then his health giving way, he was obliged to return to England, and arrived at his sister's house, a bronzed, meagre, bearded traveller, with his youth gone for ever, and years of life, and adventure, and toil separating him from the lad who had first seen little ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... be absolutely no intellectual life. There is undoubtedly work, but not one single problem concerning it. The Indian hunters do fairly well in a financial way, though their lives are beset with weakening hardships and constant danger. Their meagre diet wears out their constitutions, and they are subject to disease. The simplicity of their minds makes it very difficult to see into their life as they try to narrate it to one who ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... I come to you, of course," I interrupted. "I've the right to know the meaning of this infernal nonsense." In the half light of the room, which was greenish, because of the tree-tops screening the window, I saw him writhe his meagre shoulders. It came into my head, as disconnected ideas will come at all sorts of times into one's head, that this, most likely, was the very room where, if the tale were true, Falk had been lectured by Mr. Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers' (the son's) overwhelming voice, in ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... cottager for the cultivation of a dozen or more tea shrubs, from which they procure tea for their own use, or realize a small sum by sales of the green leaves to tea traders. Many a rocky hillside or mountain slope, otherwise waste ground, is terraced so as to detain the rains and meagre soil within its inwardly inclined banks and trenches, and made to yield a valuable crop of tea. Indeed, some of the finest flavored Chinese tea, of fabulous value where they are produced, are grown in seemingly inaccessible retreats ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... Wyckliffe, accompanied by Dr. Moloney, called at the police-station and reported himself as being the victim of a terrible assault by which he will be marked for life. It appears from particulars to hand, which are very meagre, that two men named Morris and Winter have followed him for some months in order to be revenged for some fancied wrong. They decoyed him into a house and committed the assault complained of. We learn that information has been sworn, and the matter is in the ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... one miserable December evening, standing on the arrival platform of Euston Station (the academy was near Manchester), an unwonted statue of dubiety. At his feet lay his meagre valise; in his hand was an enormous bouquet, a useful tribute of esteem from his disconsolate pupils; around him luggage-laden porters and passengers hurried; in front were drawn up the long line of cabs, their drivers' waterproofs glistening with wet; and ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... themselves idealists of a sort, entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... — the young noblemen! Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear the stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together. There was every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... children in their mother's lap. No falsehood could withstand its rough sincerity; for the waves washed paint and powder from worn faces, and left a fresh bloom there. No ailment could entirely resist its vigorous cure; for every wind brought healing on its wings, endowing many a meagre life with another year of health. No gloomy spirit could refuse to listen to its lullaby, and the spray baptized it with the subtile benediction of a cheerier mood. No rank held place there; for the democratic sea toppled down the greatest statesman in the land, and dashed over the bald pate of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... first case, let us summon from the shades my venerable friend Archdeacon Meadow, as he was in the body. You see him now—tall, straight, and meagre, but with a grim dignity in his air which warms into benignity as he inspects a pretty little clean Elzevir, or a tall portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a peculiar grunting ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to kill the man at my stirrup, who looked beseechingly up to me for protection. Why he selected me I have no idea, and I did not relish the compliment at all. Our escort formed a meagre ring around us, and ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... quarrymen was lying by the wayside, with a rag of coarse cloth for all covering; and his body was disfigured by bitter marks of the biting cold and scorching heat. The bones of his shoulders and chest showed all but bare beneath the meagre flesh; and Despair looked out grim and gaunt from the black ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... "A meagre purse for so famous a judge," the man said, weighing it in his hand; "but your money is a small matter. I have a bigger score to settle than that. Out with you!" and the man flung open the ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... warrant me in making some communication of same to your valuable sheet, and although in these days of electricity one might reasonably imagine the cable would have outstripped me, still by careful examination of American newspapers I find only meagre mention of the remarkable musical occurrence that shook all Laputa to its centre last month. As you know, we pride ourselves on being a thoroughly musical nation; our symphony concert programs and our operatic repertory contain all the novelties ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... cheerful common sense. While he could not convince them that they had been needlessly alarmed, he drew their attention to other things, by stories of college life and experiences at the North, while Sheba bustled about, bringing out the best of her meagre store to ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... to our own day. We can only speak of this work from memory, having been unable, in London, to procure the sight of a copy; but our impression, at the time we saw the collection, was as unfavorable as could possibly be: nothing could be more meagre than the wit, or poorer than the execution, of the whole set of drawings. Under the Empire, art, as may be imagined, was at a very low ebb; and, aping the Government of the day, and catering to the national taste and vanity, it was a kind of tawdry caricature ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... scatters into flight The flagging Rearguard of a ruined Night, And hark! the meagre Champion of the Roost Has flung a matins to the Throne ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... able to read and write a letter. The proportion of literacy among Hindus and Sikhs is three times as great as among Muhammadans. In 1911-12 one boy in six of school-going age was at school or college and one girl in 37. This may seem a meagre result of sixty years of work, for the Government and Christian missionaries, who have had an honourable connection with the educational history of the province, began their efforts soon after annexation, and a Director of Public Instruction ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... every book, every photograph, every pen and pencil, was a part of him, he found himself once more straining for a hope, catching at straws. He took a sheet of paper, and sitting down at his desk began again, for the ten thousandth time, to balance feverishly his meagre assets against his overwhelming liabilities. He added and subtracted and multiplied and divided with a sort of frenzy, as though by dint of sheer forcing the figures he could make ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... history, which had even impelled him to pledge Doctor and Mrs. Joyce never to mention in public any particulars of the narrative related at the Rectory. Still, he had not got over his first dread that she might one day be traced, claimed, and taken away from him, if that narrative, meagre as it was, should ever be trusted to other ears than those which had originally listened to it. Still, he kept the hair bracelet and the handkerchief that had belonged to her mother carefully locked up out of sight ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... anew some phantom's wound.[ld] Herself would question, and for him reply; Then rising, start, and beckon him to fly From some imagined Spectre in pursuit; Then seat her down upon some linden's root, And hide her visage with her meagre hand, Or trace strange characters along the sand— 1270 This could not last—she lies by him she loved; Her tale ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... relieving their distresses arising from poverty, my finances were much too limited to be of any avail. With regard to those who were suffering on a sick bed, with but slender hopes of recovery, my powers of consolation were even more meagre. ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... later, Humphrey and Julian, fully equipped with instructions, introductions, money and other necessaries, left the city, ready for their homeward voyage; and in another week the small but hardy band of Rangers, with their plain and meagre outfit, but with stout hearts and brave resolves, said adieu to those they left behind, and started westward for that debatable ground upon which a bloody warfare had to be fought to ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Stradivari was buried was made known by the researches of Signor Sacchi, a Cremonese conversant with the annals of his native city.[28] This was an interesting addition to the meagre information previously handed down to us touching Stradivari. It had long been known that a family grave was purchased by Stradivari in the church of San Domenico, in the year 1729: but in the certificates from the Cathedral of Cremona ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... knew, and wandering about the city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of the dim inscriptions ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 was still muffled as before, the awful protuberance ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... that his allowance be no more than one small ounce of mouldy bread and half a pint of standing water, for each day's support, till his now blooming skin be withered, his flesh be wasted from his bones, and he dwindle to a meagre skeleton.' So saying he left them, as he hoped, to bewail each other's sad condition. But the unhappy Fidus, bereft of his Amata, was not to be appalled by any of the most horrid threats; for now his only comfort was the hopes of a speedy ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... that brought his team to an instantaneous dead stop. His first care was then the woman, next the man clinging to the front seat, then the oxen. Before starting he clambered to the top of the wagon and cast a long, calculating look across the desolation ahead. Twice he even further reduced the meagre contents of the wagon, appraising each article long and doubtfully before discarding it. About mid-afternoon ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White |
