"Pitifully" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hip-gout, dislocated the joints of their knees, squattered into pieces the boughts or pestles of their thighs, and so thumped, mauled and belaboured them everywhere, that never was corn so thick and threefold threshed upon by ploughmen's flails as were the pitifully disjointed members of their mangled bodies under the merciless baton of the cross. If any offered to hide himself amongst the thickest of the vines, he laid him squat as a flounder, bruised the ridge of his back, and dashed his reins like a dog. If any thought by flight to escape, he ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... approach blue in our dressing-sack rainbow, speech becomes pitifully weak. Ancient maidens and matrons, with olive skins, proudly assume a turquoise negligee. Blue flannel, with cascades of white lace—could anything be more attractive? It has only one rival—the garment of lavender eiderdown flannel, the button-holes stitched with black yarn, which ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... quenched their thirst, and declined a more intimate acquaintance with the water. The next expedient employed was to carry all the lambs over, hoping the mothers would be drawn after them, moved by their cries. But the lambs might bleat as pitifully as they liked, the mothers never stirred. Sometimes this state of affairs would last a whole month, and the stock-keeper would be driven to his wits' end by his bleating, bellowing, neighing army. Then all of a sudden, one fine day, without rhyme or reason, a detachment would take ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... have whispered her about the treaty with her uncle, and about the contents of the Captain's letter; but, retreating, and with a rejecting hand, Keep thy distance, man, cried the dear insolent—to thine own heart I appeal, since thou evadest me thus pitifully!—I own no marriage with thee!—Bear witness, Ladies, I do not. And cease to torment me, cease to follow me.—Surely, surely, faulty as I have been, I have not deserved to be thus persecuted!—I resume, therefore, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... imperious thirst for glory instead of devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never the citizen, the believer, the man. Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of everything by mere force of genius. He is the type ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sisters had been startled by the appearance of the strange youth in their hidden valley. She turned away from him. But she looked again and she saw that he was beautiful and brave looking. He had spoken of his death. The nymph stood looking at him pitifully, and the youth, with the bronze shield laid beside his knees and the strange hooked sword lying across it, told her ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... were he to marry her, his advancement in the Church would be almost impossible; for, while the very minor clergy sometimes married in spite of the papal bulls, matrimony was becoming a fatal bar to ecclesiastical promotion. And so Heloise pleaded pitifully, both with her uncle and with Abelard, that there should be no marriage. She would rather bear all manner of disgrace than stand in the way ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... was bound to happen—the weakest snapped. A week went by, and Charlie did not come. Emily haunted the porch in an ironic appearance of freedom. Mrs. Drainger, in some subtle way, knew that she had won, that the girl was eternally hers. Emily's face was pitifully white: she was suffering. Was it love? Or was it her passionate hatred of the prison that held her, the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... gossip, thou'rt foolish, methinks; thou frettest 'gainst fate, thou kickest unwisely 'gainst the pricks, thou ragest pitifully 'gainst circumstance—in fine, thou'rt a very Pertinax, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... menu of the Chinese—with its ducks' eggs salted, sharks' fins and tails, stewed pups, fowls' and ducks' tongues, fricasseed cat, rat soup, silkworm grubs, and odds and ends generally despised and rejected—is pitifully unromantic when set against the generous omnivority ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... wrote and wrote, filling the New York and Philadelphia papers and magazines with a stream of translations, sketches, stories and critiques, for which he was sometimes paid and sometimes not, the aggregate sum he received was pitifully small and the Wolf scratched at the door and the gaunt features of Cold and Want became familiar to the dwellers in the Valley of the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... all very alert and soldierlike in the chill of the morning, but they were a pitifully small company as they passed up the road and were lost ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... Peace, a great pity surging through her breast as she saw the swollen, purple hands trying to hide under ragged sleeves of a pitifully thin coat. ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... condition for some years. No human foot-prints were to be seen, either on the track or among the bushes; but those of the cat were found everywhere. We now determined to follow up the track as far as it went, and Peterkin put the cat down; but it seemed to be so weak, and mewed so very pitifully, that he took it up again and carried it in his arms, where, in a few ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... white canvas boots; by its tight, short black skirt; by its slug pearl earrings; by its bewildering coiffure. By every line of its slim young body, by every curve of its cheek and throat you know it is adorably, pitifully young. By its carmined lip, its near-smart hat, its babbling of "him," and by the knowledge which looks boldly out of its eyes you know it ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... lot of things that I never talked about. I'm obstinate—I'm proud. I must believe for myself—and not because some one else does. I don't know where I shall come out. And that's the strange thing! Before we were engaged, I didn't know I had a mind!" She smiled at him pitifully through her tears. "And ever since we've been engaged—this few weeks—I've been doing nothing but think and think—and all the time it's been carrying me away from you. And now this trouble. I couldn't"—she clenched her hand with a passionate gesture—"I couldn't do what you're ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... price was less than that of many other schools, his profits were liberal, as he kept down expenses. His table was exceedingly frugal, as his boarding pupils could have testified, and the salaries he paid to under teachers were pitifully small. ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... worried me. Was it not a pitifully common impulse? 'Sisters under our skin,' you know—I and the maid who dresses me. She would have snooped; I didn't; that's the only generic difference. I wanted to know just the same. ... ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... to look at the distinguished perfumer, the decorated deputy-mayor, the partner of their own master. Birotteau, so pitifully small at the Kellers, felt a craving to imitate those magnates; he stroked his chin, rose on his heels with native self-complacency, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... pitifully over the heaving mass of anxious faces blue with cold, and growing more and more despondent as every minute they turned with a common impulse from the closed bank door to the Abbey clock, glittering far up in the sunshiny atmosphere ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... wreck—shells—old friends in the cabinets at home—as earnests to ourselves that all was not a dream: delicate prickly Pinnae; 'Noah's-arks' in abundance; great Strombi, their lips and outer shell broken away, disclosing the rosy cameo within, and looking on the rough beach pitifully tender and flesh-like; lumps and fragments of coral innumerable, reminding us by their worn and rounded shapes of those which abound in so many secondary strata; and then hastened on board the boat; for the sun had already fallen, the purple ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... fifty of them, went by as she waited and listened. But presently Maigan, that had laid his head in her lap and was looking at her pitifully, as if he had been begging her to help the man he loved, rose suddenly and dashed to the door, barking. It proved to be Papineau and his wife, who was ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... and observing his simple and plain way of living, his wife employed in kneading bread with her own hands, himself drawing water to wash his feet, they pressed him to accept it, with some indignation, being ashamed, as they said, that Alexander's friend should live so poorly and pitifully. So Phocion pointing out to them a poor old fellow, in a dirty worn-out coat, passing by, asked them if they thought him in worse condition than this man. They bade him not mention such a comparison. "Yet," said Phocion, "he with ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and Arcane's teamsters, and as we expected they were already out of grub and no way to get anymore. When the party killed an ox they had humbly begged for some of the poorest parts, and thus far were alive. They came to us and very pitifully told us they were entirely out, and although an ox had been killed that day they had not been able to get a mouthful. We divided up our meat and gave them some although we did not know how long it would be before we would ourselves be in the ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... up at him fearfully, fascinated, yet repelled. "I don't know," she repeated pitifully. "Is it—can't you help thinking of me in that way? Can't you be ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... three degrees more offensive and more suffocating than our own berth below. Another, in my condition, perhaps, would have submitted to his fate, and died in a pet; but I could not brook the thought of perishing so pitifully, after I had weathered so many gales of hard fortune: I therefore, without minding Oakum's injunction, prevailed upon the soldiers (whose good-will I had acquired) to admit my hammock among them; and actually congratulated myself upon my comfortable ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... the public, and was then majestically launched into space in his air-boat; and at once the old Marechal, beholding this, passed suddenly from unbelief to perfect faith in aerostatics and in the capacity of the human mind, fell on his knees, and, with his eyes bathed in tears, moaned out pitifully the words, "Yes, it is fixed! It is certain! They will find out the secret of avoiding death; but it will be after ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... Trieste, etc., and are addressed to as many places, often poste restante. Many are letters from women, some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps of paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully, imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins' he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with him, which may harm his reputation. Some are in French, more in Italian. Mon ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... found her—when morning lifted a dull and leaden eye over the stormy sea. It came gloomy and gray, rain falling still, wind whispering pitifully, and a sky of lead frowning down upon the drenched, dank ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... Goethe, published his Fragments on Modern German Literature; in the same year appeared Lessing's Laokoon, which, in Goethe's own words, transported himself and his contemporaries "out of the region of pitifully contracted views into the domain of emancipated thought"; and in 1767 Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm, Germany's "first national drama." Greatly as Goethe was impressed by both of these works of Lessing, however, he was not mature enough to ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... fluttered to his side. Her dress was torn and dragged on the ground. For all her disheveled appearance she was still beautiful to look upon. Forgetful of the danger on all sides of him, the animal in Carruthers saw in her pitifully half-clad body the same thing that the beast had desired. His ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... had worked about his neck, and a small bundle of his tools and most precious possessions on his shoulder. A couple of miles farther on came another harrowing parting with his betrothed, and from the top of the next rise beyond he could see Nicoletta still standing at the crossroads gazing pitifully after him. Thus many an Italian, for good or ill, has left the place of his birth for the mysterious land ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... believe that man has ever forsaken God. Because history shows that man has from the earliest times been eagerly and pitifully seeking God, and has served and raised and sacrificed to God with a zeal akin to madness. But ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... they are both self-engrossed, but women can dissemble and men cannot. It is another proof of their invincible boyishness, this total inability to pretend interest. Even the averagest man is no hypocrite. He tries it sometimes, and fails pitifully. The successful male dissembler is generally a crook. But the most honest woman in the world is often driven to pretense, although she may call it savoir faire. She pretends, because pretense is the oil that lubricates society. Have you ever seen a man when some neighbors ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... weather like this the owls fall out of their nests, the bats kill themselves because they feel the devil has created them, the mole burrows so deep into the earth that he cannot find his way out again and must pitifully suffocate unless he bores through to the other side and emerges again in America. Today every ear of corn shoots up twice as high, and every poppy grows twice as red as usual, even if only out of shame at not having been so at first. Shall man remain behind? Shall he defraud the dear Lord ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... warned of it, sprang like a Jack-in-the-box out of bed into the middle of the room, where he first stared vacantly around him like an unusually surprised owl, and then, guessing the cause of the noise, smiled pitifully, as though to say, "Poor fellow, you're easily frightened," and tumbled back into bed, where he fell ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... take command of us. But no one came; and I was griefed so much about poor Jeremy, besides being wholly unused to any violence of bloodshed, that I could only keep his head up, and try to stop him from bleeding. And he looked up at me pitifully, being perhaps in a haze of thought, as a calf looks ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... King; revoking his parole. The Monarchy has fallen; and not so much as honourably: no, ignominiously; with struggle, indeed, oft repeated; but then with unwise struggle; wasting its strength in fits and paroxysms; at every new paroxysm, foiled more pitifully than before. Thus Broglie's whiff of grapeshot, which might have been something, has dwindled to the pot-valour of an Opera Repast, and O Richard, O mon Roi. Which again we shall see dwindle to a Favras' Conspiracy, a thing to be settled by the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... lie embedded in the ice like corpses she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others—he had gone by now; no one would know until next day. She reached pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the girl, as her head sank back upon the pillows, pitifully weak and tired in her aching ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... of the panes were broken, the shutters hung upon broken hinges, the paint was peeling from the door. The house had the most melancholy aspect of long disuse. It seemed to belong to no one and to be crumbling pitifully to ruin like an aged man who has no friends. Yet this house had its uses, which Gaydon could not but perceive were of a secret kind. On the very first day that Gaydon sat at his window a man, who seemed from his dress ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... here, and Evadne looked up at the cathedral again, feeling for her pitifully. This new view of her mother was another terrible disillusion, and the more the poor lady exposed herself, the greater Evadne felt was the claim she had upon ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... eccentric figures in English literature. Popularly he is known as the English Opium-Eater and as the subject of numerous anecdotes which emphasize the oddities of his temperament and the unconventionality of his habits. That this man of distinguished genius was the victim—pitifully the victim—of opium is the lamentable fact; that he was morbidly shy and shunned intercourse with all except a few intimate, congenial friends; that he was comically indifferent to the fashion of his dress; ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... in many visible forms; it is prominent in painting and music, almost monopolizes fiction, and has pitifully degraded dancing. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... retold until they were magnified beyond all recognition. The old scandals about Jeff were revived again, and the general opinion seemed to be that the Gaylord boys were degenerates through and through. Rad's personal friends stood by him staunchly; but they formed a pitifully small minority compared ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions of his career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more than a work, it is an act—an act of high courage and nobility. With words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married woman who read Petrarch with Shelley ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... struggle were about her. Jake was sheltered behind the window table, and stood blinking in the sudden light, staring at her in blank astonishment. But the chief figure of interest was the blind man. He was groping about the opposite edge of the table, pitifully helpless, but snarling in impotent and thwarted fury. His right hand was still grasping the hilt of a vicious-looking, two-edged hunting-knife, whose point Tresler saw ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... gourd, which I believed to contain water; but though I tried to take it with my hands I could not move either, and I turned my eyes up pitifully ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... it lies fallow for want of training—and then my suffering is acute. When success—business or social or athletic or literary or artistic—comes to the untrained man under thirty-five, it comes pitifully near being his ruin. The adulation of the world is more intoxicating and more deadly than to drink absinthe out of a stein; more insidious than opium; more fatal than poison. It unsettles the steadiest brain and ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... the tree loosened the rope, Bowney was lifted off and placed on the ground again, and the woman threw herself on the ground beside him, caressed his ugly face, and wailed pitifully. The judge and jury fidgeted about restlessly. Still the horses stood on the alert, and soon three came through the oats—three children, ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... to him with a friendly mind, and asked him softly and pitifully what trouble had fallen upon him. At the sweet sound of her voice, and the bright encouragement of her eyes, he felt as if he was ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... to earth, madam," he said. "There is that that I wish to say to you. Listen to me kindly and pitifully, as ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... more, Susanna! This is the third time. You are a bad woman. I will never live with you again. I am going away forever, and I'll take little Willy with me. If you aren't fit to be a mother, you aren't fit to be a wife!" She cried out pitifully, but he lifted the child in his arms ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... face worked pitifully. The rectory and the wedding dress, which had lingered so regretfully in her thoughts since her last sight of Catherine, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... love him as I have it in me to love! Why did he look so exasperatingly humble? I was weak, oh, so pitifully weak! I wanted a man who would be masterful and strong, who would help me over the rough spots of life—one who had done hard grinding in the mill of fate—one who had suffered, who had understood. No; I ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... the deaf master could no longer hear his own playing which therefore came to have a pitifully painful effect. Concerning his manner of conducting, Seyfried says: "It would no wise do to make our master a model in conducting, and the orchestra had to take great care lest it be led astray by ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... simply excruciating. The boys were brave, and had resolved to stand their punishment without a groan, but this was too much for human endurance. Their will was strong, but Nature could not be denied, and they shrieked aloud so pitifully that a young Reserve standing near fainted. Each ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... face, still alight with content at having reached the mountain, upon his white, blue-veined body, so pitifully frail, and marveled that a frame so weak, so tender, so peaceful, had been ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... During the 1609-10 "starving time" a minimum force was retained at the settlement while everyone else was turned out to forage as best he could. Most sought the oyster grounds where they ate oysters nine weeks, a diet varied only by a pitifully negligible allowance of corn meal. In the words of one of the foragers, "this kind of feeding caused all our skin to peel off from head to foot as if we had been dead." The arrival of supplies ended the ordeal. But ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... went four or five yards in front of the poor bleeding brute, that seemed, though she could not rise, to know what he was about with the weapon of destruction; casting her black eye up at him, and looking pitifully in his face. ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... historic places of the Old World. At the tomb of Napoleon she remained cold, but at the "tree of the sad night," where Cortes is said to have wept bitter tears on that dark and rainy night away back in 1520, her imagination was deeply touched. At the church of Guadalupe she looked at the pitifully crude paintings and other thank-offerings of the simple devotees with deep and ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of men stricken by shell-shock, or paralyzed in the war—there are pitifully many of both sorts! I did not want them to stay in bare and cold and lonely institutions. I wanted to take them out of such places, and back to their homes; home to the village and the glen. I wanted to get them a wheel-chair, with an old, neighborly ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... the evening stillness with an ear-splitting din, no unholy piccolo sounded above the other tortured instruments, no violin wailed pitifully at its inhuman treatment, and the ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mass' Doctor," pitifully expostulated Jake, almost blubbering at the accusation of his possibly wanting to do me harm, "I'se only glad to hear him 'peak again, dat all;" and he went out of the ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... have made some incorrect statements. They took possession of both of his pack animals, threw their loads down on the ground, and one of the soldiers was ordered to lead them away. Poor Ali begged and entreated most pitifully. He pointed to me, and said that everything belonged to me, and requested that they should have some compassion with me as a helpless woman. The soldier turned to me and asked if it was true. I did not think it advisable to give myself out as their owner, and therefore appeared not to understand ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... was dug, and, sprinkling its depth with leaves and soft branches of spruce, the dwarf drew the body over, and lowered it slowly, awkwardly, into the grave. Then he covered all but the huge, unlovely face, and, kneeling, peered down at it pitifully. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... grandmother; and therefore I feel as if I should die of anxiety. It was I who proposed to Rico to go to find the lake, and now he has fallen into a ravine, and is dead; it has hurt him dreadfully, and it is all my fault." Then the poor child cried and sobbed pitifully. It seemed to the grandmother as if a heavy weight were lifted from her heart as she heard these words of Stineli's. She had given up Rico as lost; and had in secret believed that the child had fled from the unkind treatment he had received at home, and was lying somewhere ...
— Rico And Wiseli - Rico And Stineli, And How Wiseli Was Provided For • Johanna Spyri
... took him by the arms and led him towards the serfs' quarters, followed by Ivan. Having reached the door, however, Gregory stopped, turned his head, and seeing the aide-de-camp gazing pitifully at him, "Oh sir," he cried, "please thank his excellency the general for me. As for the lady Vaninka," he added in a low tone, "I will ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... up then so pitifully that he did not ask her anything more. But the news put him back a week. And she was in despair. The day he got up again ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... like a child, with her lips slightly parted and her eyelashes sweeping her thin, white cheeks. The alert look of the Londoner, which gave an expression of premature shrewdness to her waking face, had disappeared under the relaxing influence of slumber. She looked pitifully helpless, sad and weak, as her tired, worn-out little body leaned back in the corner of ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... ready, or that the anti-military party is strong,—and with that awful Caillaux affair; I swore to myself that nothing should tempt me to speak of it. It has been so disgraceful. Still, it is so in the air just now that it has to be recognized as pitifully significant and very ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... men with us give us their sympathy. They seem to look upon us tenderly and pitifully, and their expressions of kind wishes are warm. Although we are relieved from duty and from drill, and may lie in our tents during rain and at night, we have heard of no complaint. This is the more worthy of note as there are so few in our little (Vermont) camp. Each man comes ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... couple sat reluctantly down, and the husband whispered to the wife, "It is pitifully hard to have to wait; the shame will be greater than ever when they find we were only going to ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... if it were jealousy or something else. He walked about near the tables; listened to a comic singer in the hall. He had not a single phrase ready if he should meet his own party; and he felt sure beforehand that if he met his wife, he would only smile pitifully and not cleverly, and that every one would understand what feeling had induced him to come here. He was bewildered by the electric light, the loud music, the smell of powder, and the fact that the ladies he met looked at him. He stood at the doors trying to see and to hear ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though, no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... that became impossible. During the latter months of 1914 "there was practically no special training given to infantry subalterns, with temporary commissions." With 1915, the system of a month's training was revived—pitifully little, yet the best that could be done. But during the first five months of the war most of the infantry subalterns of the new armies "had to train themselves as best they could in the ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... main force, but even in his distress respecting Bartley's overcoat too much to touch it. He followed him out into the freezing air in his shirt-sleeves, and besought him not to be such a fool. "It makes me feel like the devil!" he exclaimed, pitifully. "You come back, now, half a minute, and I'll make it all right with you. I know I can; you're a gentleman, and you'll understand. Do come back! I shall never get over it ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... dear, I am going to ask you one of the big things. I don't want you to answer this letter; I don't want you to plead with me to change my mind. I daren't let you do it, my man, because, as I said, I'm so pitifully weak where you are concerned. And I don't know what would happen if you were to take me in your arms again. Why, the very thought of it drives me almost mad. . . . Don't make it harder for me, darling, than it is ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... spume of lace, towards the rise of her breasts. But her eyes bent down upon him with such gloom of tenderness that he dared not reveal the passion burning in him. He could not look at her. He strove almost pitifully to be with her sad, tender, but he could not put out his fire. She held both his hands firm, pressing them in appeal for her dream love. He glanced at her wistfully, then turned away. She waited for him. She wanted ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... girdling moat there shot vertically upward a coruscantly refulgent band of intense yellow luminescence. These were the hexan defences, heretofore invulnerable and invincible. Against them any ordinary warcraft, equipped with ordinary weapons of offense, would have been as pitifully impotent as a naked baby attacking a battleship. But now those defenses were being challenged by no ordinary craft; it had taken the mightiest intellects of Vorkulia two long lifetimes to evolve the awful engine of destruction which was hurling itself forward ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... on the children's heads. The startled urchins ran off as fast as they could go, and the abbe found himself left alone with the dog, which was painfully trying to rise. Before she could stand up, he knocked her back again, and began to hit her with all his strength. The animal moaned pitifully as she writhed under these blows from which there was no escape (for she was chained up) and at last the priest's umbrella broke. Then, unable to beat the dog any longer, he jumped on her, and stamped and crushed her under-foot in a perfect frenzy of anger. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... believe—that he was afraid to speak plainly because of the difference in our position. He said I should be a great lady, and he would be working for his bread far away, and thinking of me." Ruth's voice broke pitifully, but the red flamed in Margot's cheek, and she reared her proud head with a ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... on the table looked aggressively prosperous. His manner betokened a man suddenly inflated with a sense of his own importance. His hair was sandy, and the thin moustache and beard failed to cover the pitifully weak lines of his mouth ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... passed and I saw that she was abandoning hope; her lovely oval face seemed to fall in and grow visibly thinner beneath the pressure of a mental agony whose pencil drew black lines about the hollows of her eyes. The coral faded even from her lips, till they were as white as Leo's face, and quivered pitifully. It was shocking to see her: even in my own grief I felt ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... should his face change, and fill with such tenderness, that I could weep to see him? Why, when he walks in his sleep, as he does almost every night, his eyes open and beholding nothing, why should he cry so pitifully on my mother's name? Ah, if you could hear him then, you would say yourself: Here is a man that has loved; here is a man that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leave us now, will you?" said little Ivanka pitifully, getting on my knee and nestling on my breast; "you will stay with father, won't you, and help to take care of us? ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... realised from what he had told her that he recognised no law beyond his own wishes, and was prepared to go to any lengths to fulfil them. She knew that her life was in his hands, that he could break her with his lean brown fingers like a toy is broken, and all at once she felt pitifully weak and frightened. She was utterly in his power and at his mercy—the mercy of an Arab ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... provide meat, drink, and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty, that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other inconveniences, or pitifully die for hunger and cold; and it is thought by the king's humble and loving subjects, that one of the greatest occasions that moveth those greedy and covetous people so to accumulate and keep in their ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... is beginning in him,' said Dare, half pitifully; 'a purely chemical process; and when it is complete he will probably be clear, and fiery, and sparkling, and quite another man than the good, weak, easy fellow that ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... came vented from the window above my head the hot odour of a dead body; and, whenever that happened, the dog's grey nostrils and muzzle would quiver, and its eyes would blink pitifully as it gazed aloft. Glancing at the heavens, Ufim remarked ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... out of the room. As all true spacemen do at one time or another in their lives, he thought about the pitifully small part mankind had played so far in the conquest of the stars. Man had come a long way, Tom was ready to admit, but there was still a lot of work ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... it was right—she cried pitifully to herself. Meantime both suffered, she not knowing why, clinging to each other the while more ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fragile little gentleman this, with eyes and hair of an indeterminate color, while his clothes, scrupulously neat and brushed and precise to a button, showed pitifully shabby and threadbare in contrast with his elaborately frilled and starched cravat and gay, though faded, satin waistcoat; and, as he stood bowing nervously to them, there was an air about him that somehow gave the impression ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... the tenants. As far as she had been able to do, she had made friends with these poor folk, and had given what she could to relieve their necessities; but, in comparison with what was needed, the money at her command had seemed pitifully small. ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... pretty eloquence. Quadrilles are senseless things any how;" and our pretty Lillie actually yawned as she begged to know if it was not time to go. "You know, dear mamma," she said, "that I have to arise very early to-morrow morning, to help Tom in that hard lesson he groaned so pitifully over to-night." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... before set eyes upon him, this was surprising. The solution of the mystery came from the crowd, close-pressed about the Tyro. It took the form of an unmistakable sniffle, and it somehow contrived to be indubitably and rather pitifully feminine. The ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... woods was not as thick as I'd have liked. From a distance they'd seemed almost impenetrable, but when I was running through them towards the center, they looked pitifully thin. I could see light from any direction and the floor of the woods was trimmed, the underbrush cleaned out, and a lot of it ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... wisely and soberly before them, they fell to some blows among themselves, and did harm one to another. Then were these two poor men brought before their examiners again, and there charged as being guilty of the late hubbub that had been in the fair. So they beat them pitifully, and hanged irons upon them, and led them in chains up and down the fair, for an example and a terror to others, lest any should speak in their behalf, or join themselves unto them.[146] But Christian and Faithful behaved ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in that hour of stress, that she was right. Pitifully, damnably right. He had not wanted Graham to go, but he had wanted him to want to go. A thousand thoughts flashed through his mind, of Delight, sleeping somewhere quietly after her day's work at the camp; of Graham himself, of that morning after the explosion, and ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of which was marked by disillusions and failures. Since the war on the nobles had begun in 1789, all their efforts at resistance, disdainful at first, stubborn later on, blundering always, had been pitifully abortive. Their rebuffs could no longer be counted, and there was some justification in that for the scornful hatred on the part of the new order towards a caste which for so many centuries had believed themselves ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... standing behind her as he spoke, and she felt that he eyed her the while with disapproval of her appearance, and anger at her condition. She knew the look only too well, poor soul, and her attitude was deprecating as she sat there gazing up pitifully at the strip of level greyness above the houses opposite. She said nothing, however, only rocked herself on her chair, and looked forlornly miserable; seeing which brought his irritation to a climax. He flung the book across the room; but even in the act, his countenance ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... his men endured such dreadful punishment as not many ships have suffered. Again he attempted to work his way nearer the enemy, until he had not enough men left unhurt to serve the guns or to haul at the pitifully splintered spars. In the last extremity, Porter made an effort to destroy his vessel and to save her people from captivity by letting the Essex drive ashore. A kedge anchor was let go, and a dozen sailors tramped ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... Night. Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep, gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labour, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the gloaming of the real night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes, in the magic oil of the almond tree, and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap; ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... the United States where the average family income is pitifully low. It is in those communities that we find the poorest educational facilities and the worst conditions of health. Why? It is not because they are satisfied to live as they do. It is because those communities ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... up the struggle, "Paterno" withdrew from the crowd. In the melee he had lost his skirt. He looked long and pitifully at his fellow-mascots who had so suddenly turned against him. Great teardrops gathered in his eyes and trickled down his hairy cheeks. Raising his head, he spied a bamboo thicket in the distance. With a wild yell, he sprang through ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... such a position!" As I was beginning to laugh and ridicule him, the old mother of the young man came bursting into the jail, weeping and trembling, to see what fate had overtaken her son. Wringing her hands, the tears rolled down her face, and her voice was choked with sobs, as she asked pitifully whether he must die; she told me that he was her only support, and that, without him, she was absolutely alone. Taking the old woman outside, while the mask should be completed, I chatted with her, and as soon as the pieces of the mould were removed, delivered her precious ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... saved him in their ship. Soon after came a pair of mice, with their little ones, loudly squeaking in their fear. And these they also saved. The water was already rising to the roofs of the houses, and on one roof stood a cat, arching her back and mewing pitifully. They took the cat into the ship, too. Yet the flood increased and rose to the tops of the trees. And in one tree sat a raven, beating his wings and cawing loudly. And him, too, they took in. Finally a swarm of ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... weeping pitifully, 'I am not so good a girl as I ought to be! I know I have not the thankful heart, sometimes, I ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens |
