"Childless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have told you, and I tell you still: Lay steady siege to a rich dotard's will; Nor, should a fish or two gnaw round the bait, And 'scape the hook, lose heart and give up straight. A suit at law comes on: suppose you find One party's old and childless, never mind Though law with him's a weapon to oppress An upright neighbour, take his part no less: But spurn the juster cause and purer life, If burdened with a child or teeming wife. "Good Quintus," say, or "Publius" (nought endears A speaker more than this to slavish ears), "Your ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... so many have recourse to conceal their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves, than to impose on others. This aversion to growing old is specially natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless. The borrowed curls, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... cheering; toward the line Of the towering peaks he lifts his eyes. "I'd rather have a boy with shining hair, To bear my name, than all your share Of earth's red gold," he said; And died, a loveless, childless man, Before the morning ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the P[vr]emysl family I find only one bright spot of human interest, and that is the little affair of Ulrich and Bo[vz]ena. All three brothers, Boleslav III, Jaromir and Ulrich, the last surviving P[vr]emysls, were childless, and, failing heirs, their inheritance would pass to Poland, to the children of Dubravka. A P[vr]emysl successor was wanted; Ulrich and Bo[vz]ena provided one. It is undoubtedly true that Ulrich was already ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the Husband's Name? Shall the Wife Take the Husband's Nationality? Who Shall Choose the Domicile? Shall the Married Woman Earn Outside the Home? Economic Considerations Involved. Is It Bad Form to Earn After Marriage? Shall Parenthood be Chosen? Some People Have a Right to Marry and Remain Childless. What is the Just Financial Basis of the Household? What Shall be the Accepted Standard of Living? The Need for Full and Mutual Understanding Before Marriage. The Supreme Satisfactions of ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the flock of God, and of all their ordinances, and heavenly dainties. But when the days that I have spoken of, shall come, it will be to him a time of retaliation: for it shall then be done unto Antichrist, as he hath done to the church of God: As he hath made women childless, so shall he be made childless; as he has made Zion sit upon the ground, so now must this wicked one come down and sit in the dust; yea, as he has made many churches desolations, so now shall he be also made a desolation. Wherefore, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... blasted with the sight of her husband slain before her face, her only son groaning on the deck and weltering in his blood; and she left alone, bereft of all that was dear to her; stripped of the wealth she was that morning mistress of, now a widow, perhaps childless, a prisoner, a beggar, and in the hands of lawless ruffians, whose hands were reeking with her husband's and offspring's blood, at their mercy, and exposed to every evil which must befal a beautiful and unprotected female from those who were devoid of all principle, all pity, and all fear! Well might ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... yet," replied the discontented beauty, with a weary smile; "I may have it yet; my husband's brother is still childless. If I could be but certain that the grave would receive him a childless man, how proudly I would take precedence of such a woman as ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the family—consisting of Mrs. Sherwood and her brother's childless widow; Gussie and Dexie, twin girls of sixteen; Louie, aged thirteen, Georgie ten, Flossie three, and a year-old baby in the arms of black Dinah—arrived in Halifax, where ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... respect he has acted the part of a good citizen, in that he was willing to freely undertake the responsibilities entailed upon him by the fruitfulness of his wife, in an age when the advantages of being childless are such that many people consider even one son to be a burden. He has scorned all those advantages, and has also become a grandfather. For a grandfather he is, thanks to Saturius Firmus, whom you will love as I do when you know him ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... N. Jarvie retired from the firm in 1906; and John Arbuckle and his nephew W.A. Jamison continued it as sole owners and partners until Mr. Arbuckle's death in 1912. Mr. Arbuckle died childless and a widower, leaving as his only heirs his two sisters, Mrs. Catherine Arbuckle Jamison and Miss Christina Arbuckle. Mrs. Jamison is the widow of the late Robert Jamison, who had been a prominent drygoods merchant in Pittsburg. William ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... ill-disposed, all grant; but evidently of headlong turn, with a tendency to leap fences in this world. He has since been soldiering about, in a loose way, governing Innspruck, fighting the Turks. But, lately, his elder Brother died childless (year 1716); and left him Kurfurst of the Pfalz. His fair Radzivil is dead long ago; she, and a successor, or it may be two. Except one Daughter, whom the fair Radzivil left him, he has no children; and in these times, I think, lives with a third ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... is called the "Son of Heaven," and holds the supreme spiritual and temporal power in his hands. On his accession he gives an arbitrary name to his reign, which also becomes his own. He chooses his successor himself from among his sons. If he is childless he chooses one of his nearest relations, but then he adopts his future successor that the latter may make offerings to the souls of himself and his ancestors. The yellow robe and the five-clawed dragon are the emblems of the imperial house. The Emperor is immeasurably ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... foreseen it; and his taking the long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience. He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying: the question was ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... "Childless art thou? dead thy children? leaving thee to want and doole? Less thy misery than his is, who lives father to ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Yearsley, who had bidden fair to be the prop of her age; and whom she had apprenticed to an eminent engraver, with a premium of one hundred guineas, prematurely died; and his surviving brother soon followed him to the grave! Ann Yearsley, now a childless and desolate widow, retired, heart-broken from the world, on the produce of her library; and died many years after, in a state of almost total seclusion, at Melksham. An inhabitant of the town lately informed me that she was never seen, except ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... yielded the contest, and said discontentedly,— "Have your own way, Steenie, since you will make a solitary bachelor of yourself, but at least give up your useless toiling at the wine- office. To what end do you plod there every day,—you who are wifeless and childless, and have no need of money for yourself? Give me up this great house in which you live all alone, like an owl in an oak-tree, and let me find you a cottage somewhere in the neighborhood, where I can often come and see you, and where you may spend your days in ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... "Caesar is childless," said he, "and all see his successor in Piso. Doubtless, too, every man would help him with whole soul to gain power. Fenius Rufus loves him; the relatives of Annaeus are devoted to him altogether. Plautius Lateranus and Tullius Senecio would spring into ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... say so. You might add, the Deputy has many gray hairs among his black ones, and many furrows on his white brow, while Monte-Cristo had neither. Besides, M. Dantes has a handsome daughter and a son who resembles him greatly, both well grown, while the Count was childless." ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... late of Poland. Widowed. Likewise childless. Also brotherless. Also many other uncomfortable things. But the life of the crowd in the scrub-girls' quarters on the top floor. Aren't you, Anna? Mrs. Anna Czarnik, I'm sorry to say, is the source of the blood-curdling moan, and the ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... too—the house, the land, everything, except a share of the money which goes to the gal. It'll make her childbearing easier, I reckon, and for my part, that's the only thing a woman's fit for. Don't talk to me about a childless woman! Why, I'd as soon keep ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... proverbial. He vigorously opposed the admission of foreigners into the freedom of the City, and he fined the Brewers' Company L20 for selling bad ale and forestalling the market. His generosity was like a well-spring; and being childless, he spent his life in deeds of charity and generosity. He erected conduits at Cripplegate and Billingsgate; he founded a library at the Grey Friars' Monastery in Newgate Street (now Christ's Hospital); he procured the completion ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of sixteen he was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land. At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was childless. His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years. There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal river. The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... and robbed them of their cause of warfare. Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each was anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was likely to have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had, therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and united right to might in England. Thus after a moment of darkness and downfall the seed of the righteous took root again and prospered, and the children of St. Margaret occupied both thrones. Edgar, like so many of his race, died childless; but he was peacefully succeeded by his brother Alexander, who, though as much devoted to church-building and good works as the rest of his family, was apparently a more warlike personage, since he was called Alexander the Fierce, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... when galloping at a great pace his horse stumbled near a small stone, and young Espec was brought violently to the ground, breaking his neck and leaving his father childless. The grief-stricken parent is said to have found consolation in the founding of three abbeys, one of them being at Kirkham, where the fatal ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... about the streams of blood that might run through the scuppers—how their little ventures would be raised in value many hundredfold—would not young imaginations be excited and the greed for gain be potent in their young hearts? No matter what woman might be widowed—parent made childless, or child left without protector—if the gallant privateer was successful that was all they were taught to look for. And must not such teaching have had effect in after life? I have seen these things, and know them to be true; but I have seen them, I am glad to say, fade away, while other and better ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... not suffice a very motherly woman. Such a woman was Mrs. Batch. Had she been blest with a dozen children, she must yet have regarded herself as also a mother to whatever two young gentlemen were lodging under her roof. Childless but for Katie and Clarence, she had for her successive pairs of tenants a truly vast fund of maternal feeling to draw on. Nor were the drafts made in secret. To every gentleman, from the outset, she proclaimed the relation in which she would stand ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... happy, though childless married life, Mr. and Mrs. Botha's home was about to be blessed with an infant child, and it was the thought of the expectant mother's anguish and despair that took Hansie to ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... question of course that she should unveil her face to a person of my special business with it; so that the question of the portrait was by common consent left to depend on that of the installation of a successor to her late companion. Such a successor, I gathered from Mrs. Munden, widowed childless and lonely, as well as inapt for the minor offices, she had absolutely to have; a more or less humble alter ago to deal with the servants, keep the accounts, make the tea and watch the window-blinds. ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... to her house they talked of other things. Randolph learned something of her life in Callao: that she was an orphan like himself, and had been brought from the Eastern States when a child to live with a rich uncle in Callao who was childless; that her aunt had died and her uncle had married again; that the second wife had been at variance with his family, and that it was consequently some relief to Miss Avondale to be independent as the guardian ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... recollection of trifles which seems to return to old people when they speak of the incidents and scenes of their youth. And Lucia loved to listen, and to picture to herself Maurice making acquaintance with all these things which his father spoke of; and becoming necessary to the proud, childless possessor of such wealth and so fair a home, just as he had been necessary to them all, far away in the west. After all, these hours were the happiest of Lucia's life at that time. They brought her the consciousness of doing ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... childless, for all his children, his three sons and his daughter, died before him, as a punishment for his having set fire to a field of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... is childless is no reason in the present world why she should be cut off from the developing and ennobling association. Indeed, the childless woman of to-day, in addition to her obligation to herself, has a peculiar obligation to society in the matter of the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... also grows well in the cavities of the joints, causing rheumatism and crippling; it grows in the heart, causing valvular heart disease, which is incurable, and also in the generative organs of men and women, causing self-made eunuchs and childless wives. It is the cause of most of the severe abdominal diseases of women requiring the use of the knife to cut out ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... them in the cabin at the time—had been taken pity on by some neighbors almost as poor as himself; but the shock (or perhaps their own bad health) had caused the death of both boys, and the man was now homeless and childless. No wonder his brain gave way. He vowed vengeance. Vengeance was the one last thing left to him in life; he would revenge his wrongs or die. So, waiting his opportunity, he had crouched behind a hedge, and, with an old gun which he had stolen from a neighbor, had fired at the Squire. In the crucial ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... there is too much lavishment of human affection upon objects less than human! it hurts less than if there were none. I confess that it moves with strange discomfort one who has looked upon swarms of motherless children, to see in a childless house a ruined dog, overfed, and snarling with discomfort even on the blessed throne of childhood, the lap of a woman. But even that is better than that the woman should love no creature at all—infinitely better! It may be she loves as she can. Her heart may not ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... with a son of his own, he would make his son his most constant and his most confidential companion all his days. And so he did. The eleventh of Deuteronomy had become a greater and greater text to that childless man as he passed the mid-time of his days. 'Therefore,' he used to say to himself, as he walked abroad alone, and as other men passed him with their children at their side—'Therefore ye shall teach them to ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... which might give rise to this horrible doubt in other men's minds now struck him, one after another, as plain, obvious, and exasperating. That a childless old bachelor should leave his fortune to a friend's two sons was the most simple and natural thing in the world; but that he should leave the whole of it to one alone—of course people would wonder, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... announced that she'd like to have twelve. But talk is cheap. The modern woman who's had even half that number has pretty well given up her life to her family. It's remarkable, by the way, the silent and fathomless pity I've come to have for childless women. The thought of a fat spinster fussing over a French poodle or a faded blond forlornly mothering a Pekinese chow gives me a feeling that is at least first ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... English crown; he even assumed that all who refused to acknowledge him in England were traitors. We are, however, somewhat in the dark as to the basis of his claim. There is a story that he had visited the court of Edward the Confessor and had become his vassal on condition that, should Edward die childless, he was to designate William as his successor. But Harold, Earl of Wessex, who had consolidated his power before the death of Edward by securing the appointment of his brothers to three of the other great earldoms, assumed the crown and paid no attention to William's demand ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... as well content," she said, "as a poor, desolate, old childless widow could hope to be. There is no happiness left ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... heir to that property which, some years ago, passed from your hands into mine. My son, for whom alone wealth or I may say life was valuable to me, is no more. I only, an old, childless man, stand between you and the estates of Mordaunt. Do not wait for my death to enjoy them. I cannot live here, where everything reminds me of my great and irreparable loss. I shall remove next month into another home. Consider this, then, as once more ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... clergyman who officiated. But when I witnessed the lowering of the coffin to its future resting-place—heard the soft crumbling of the churchyard soil, as it dropped from the grasp of the sexton on the below-sounding coffin, down below—the anguished but stifled moan of the childless father, who had apparently expended his hard-got earnings for the interment of his child—I not only repassed the gates considerably affected, but overpowered with an indescribable dread of impending death. I was now possessed with a servile love of God, arising from fear; an anxiety ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... Philip was again childless at his fourth marriage, and it was not until long afterwards that a son was born who lived to succeed him; and there were no royal princesses in Madrid, so that Don John was his brother's only near blood relation at the court, and since he had been acknowledged he would ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... was not childless very long, for soon a baby son came to them. They brought up the boy in great luxury. One day when the child was at school he quarrelled with one of his playmates. This taunt was thrown in his face: ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... passed in prayer and study; by day he taught the Law to students, whom his fame had drawn to Bacharach; and by night he gazed on the stars in heaven, or into the eyes of Beautiful Sara. His married life was childless, yet there was no lack of life or gaiety in his home. The great hall in his house, which stood near the synagogue, was open to the whole community, so that people went in and out without ceremony, some to offer short prayers, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... happiness; sickly, ill-favored, childless, unloved, the poor woman spent herself for naught. Her first great mistake was that she resolutely turned her face toward the past; her second, that she loved Philip II of Spain (S369) with all her heart, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... big dog Waldmar to him, and with the dog beside him went once more out into the cold and the gloom, whilst his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, were sleeping, and poor childless Katte alone was awake. He looked up at the mountain, and then across the water-swept meadows to the river. He was in doubt which way to take. Then he thought that in all likelihood the lambs would have been seen if they had wandered the river-way, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Rome, had inspired her with feelings of devotion towards the last of her household which almost bordered on insanity. And, now that her beloved charge, her innocent victim, her future warrior, had, after all her struggles for his preservation, pined and died; now that she was childless indeed; now that Roman cruelty had won its end in spite of all her patience, all her courage, all her endurance; every noble feeling within her sunk, annihilated at the shock. Her sorrow took the fatal form which ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Mrs. Damer was childless, and very soon after her husband's death she travelled in Europe and renewed her study and practice of sculpture with enthusiasm. By some of her friends her work was greatly admired, but Walpole so exaggerated his praise of her that one can but think that he wrote out of his cousinly ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... married, when she was scarcely past childhood, to a young prince, who ruined himself by the contagious example of the Duc d'Orleans, she had had nothing to do from the time of her arrival in France but to weep. A widow at eighteen, and childless, she lived with the Duc de Penthievre as an adopted daughter. She had the tenderest respect and attachment for that venerable Prince; but the Queen, though doing justice to his virtues, saw that the Duc de Penthievre's way of life, whether at Paris or at his country-seat, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... him, and that ought to satisfy a reasonable man. It had to satisfy an unreasonable one. The Robertses had always lived just beyond the garden from the parsonage, and Grace, who from a little girl had been a great pet of the childless minister and his sister, was almost as much at home there as in her mother's house. When Philip fell in love with her, the Mortons were delighted. They could have wished nothing better for either. From the first Miss Morton had done all she could ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... and a childless old man," continued the colonel; "my only boy fell in the wah ah, and it broke his mother's heaht. Pahdon me," he said, as his voice shook a little, and the least glimmer of a tear stood in his eye, "I rahely talk of these mattahs of a puhely pehsonal kind, but, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... shortly after had got Catharine, her niece and Eric's sister, married to Prince John, a son of the German emperor Ruprecht; John being promised the Scandinavian crowns if Eric of Pomerania should die childless. Thus having strengthened and consolidated her power by influential connections and relationships, the Queen, upon whose head the three northern crowns were actually united, now proceeded to realize ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... he had buried a childless wife, who was said to have been a wonderful beauty, and to have been in many ways a trouble greater than Signor Fortini knew how to manage, and a trial that made his life a burthen to him. Those old troubles were now, however, long since past and gone; and ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... this function cannot be so delegated. At least we know of no human society in which the birth and rearing of children has not been the essential function of the family. From a sociological point of view the childless family is a failure. While the childless family may be of social utility to the individuals that form it, nevertheless from the point of view of society such a family has failed to perform its most important function and must be ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... which sometimes characterizes the relative of the wealthy, soon began to display a coolness and dislike toward the wife of the uncle, and as no children were born to them, they looked forward with certainty to inheriting the vast wealth of their childless relative, without seeming to regard the rights or interests of the wife, who, in Germany as well as in America, frequently exercises a potent influence in the disposition ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... Malakin came back to his own land, where he was welcomed right gladly of his friends, and served and honoured by all the folk of his realm. He lived long and tenderly with his wife, neither were they childless, as this story testifies. For of this lady, who was called the Fair Captive, was born the mother of that courteous Turk, the Sultan Saladin, an honourable, a wise, and ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... adoption among men owes its existence to the desire of offspring on the part of childless parents, the adoption of the soul by God springs from pure benevolence and unselfish love, and for this reason presupposes (in the case of adults) the free consent of the adopted. No one can become an adopted son of ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... ordinary Hindu has, they also have a firm belief in the value of offerings at certain holy places for obtaining temporal blessings. Thus the shrine of Saiyad Salar, at Bahraich, is resorted to, both by Hindus and Mussulmans, if a wife is childless, or if family quarrels cannot be composed. Diseases may be cured by a visit to the shrine of Shaik Saddo, at Amroha in Moradabad; while for help in legal difficulties Shah Mina's dargah at Lucknow ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... price had been heavy at that. She was childless and alone, lavishing her aborted maternity on a brother who was living his prosperous, cheerful and not too moral life at her expense. Fred was, she knew, slightly drunk with success; he attended to his minimum of labor with the least possible effort, had an expensive apartment on the Drive, and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with pang Fast sheathed in music, touched the heart of us So finely that the pity scarcely pained. I thought how Filicaja led on others, Bewailers for their Italy enchained, And how they called her childless among mothers, Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers Might a shamed sister's,—"Had she been less fair She were less wretched;"—how, evoking so From congregated wrong and heaped despair Of men and women writhing under blow, Harrowed and hideous ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of 'mammet' (as the English called the Richard II. who appeared up in Islay, having escaped from Pomfret Castle), had for his first wife a daughter of Henrietta, the favourite sister of our Charles II. This childless bride, after some ghostly years of matrimony, after being exorcised in disgusting circumstances, died in February 1689. In May 1690 a new bride, Marie de Neubourg, was brought to the grisly side ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... that enterprise would not be philosophers, but politicians, and so there would be some benefit to the race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss when a Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an ambassador or Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert Spencer goes to the grave without leaving sons behind him there is a detriment to all the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... mentions the proposed marriage, spoken of by Malcolm, between Dorothy and Lord Derby's son. They do, however, say that Dorothy had an elder sister who married a Stanley, but died childless, leaving Dorothy sole heiress to Sir George Vernon's ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... childless, so that he left no direct descendants. But the branches of the family descended from the original Jean Cartier appear on the registers of St Malo, Saint Briac, and other places in some profusion during the sixteenth ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... said: "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and means, have married and endowed ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... come Of slave-ships on Virginia's coast, Of mothers in their childless home, Like Rachel, sorrowing o'er the lost; The slave-gang scourged upon its way. The bloodhound and ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... had no more trouble about the master. The old man's severity became comprehensible and dear to him, and a loving liberty and confidence came into his bearing toward him, which went to the heart of the childless old man, so that dearer than the praise of the archduchess, or even the discomfiture of the Cistercians, became to him the success and welfare ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... especially well governed just then. A. Young, i. 480. Serfdom still existed in some remote French provinces, especially in the Jura mountains. Its principal characteristic was the escheating to the lord of the property of all serfs dying childless.] And in France prosperity was growing. The peasant's taxes were constantly getting heavier, but his means of bearing them increased faster yet. The rising tide of material prosperity, the great change of modern ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... separated from association with the person accomplishing the act of urination—has been recorded by Moraglia in a woman. It is the case of a beautiful and attractive young woman of 18, with thick black hair, and expressive vivacious eyes, but sallow complexion. Married a year previously, but childless, she experienced a certain amount of pleasure in coitus, but she preferred masturbation, and frankly acknowledged that she was highly excited by the odor of fermented urine. So strong was this fetichism that when, for instance, she passed a street urinal she was often obliged ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... angelic, tender bein's, half clothed, fill our streets on icy midnights, huntin' up drunken husbands and fathers and sons. They are driven to death and to moral ruin by the miserable want liquor- drinkin' entails. They are starved, they are frozen, they are beaten, they are made childless and hopeless, by drunken husbands killing their own flesh and blood. They go down into the cold waves, and are drowned by drunken captains; they are cast from railways into death, by drunken engineers; they go up on the scaffold, and die of crimes committed by the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... all events, the poor misguided youth, who had been stimulated with liquor, and goaded on to the commission of the crime, from fear of a violent death if he refused it, was tried, found guilty, and executed, leaving his childless father and mother, whose affections were centred in him, in a state of the most indescribable despair and misery. By the intercession and influence of friends, his body was restored to them, and interred in the churchyard, from which the procession just ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... no time a keen taste for the summer joys of Millbrook, and the family obligation which, for several months of the year, kept him at his aunt's side (Mrs. Vance was a childless widow and he filled the onerous post of favorite nephew) gave a sense of compulsion to the light occupations that chequered his leisure. Mrs. Vance, who fancied herself lonely when he was away, was too much engaged with notes, telegrams and arriving and departing guests, to do more ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... place? The "unimaginable touch of Time" gives Chella its peculiar charm: the aged fig-tree clamped in uptorn tiles and thrusting gouty arms between the arches; the garlanding of vines flung from column to column; the secret pool to which childless women are brought to bathe, and where the tree springing from a cleft of the steps is always hung with the bright bits of stuff which are the votive ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... the baby—Alice had chosen that name "in case it is a girl." Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother during the first three years of Eleanor's healthy and contented little life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions, she called him back from a desk ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... engineering expert of large machine works there. My father before me held an important position in the factory, and my family have always lived in Grunau. I have traveled a great deal myself. I am forty-five years old, a childless widower, and live with my old aunt, Miss Babette Graumann, and my ward, Miss Eleonora Roemer, a young lady of twenty-two." Muller looked up with a slight start of surprise, but did not say ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... occupy hours. The art of the canoe or sword maker would be graphically mimicked. The life of the woman found rehearsal from infancy until she passed from the protection of her father into the arms of her lover. If she had died childless, a protesting infant or an effigy in bark would be placed on her shrunken bosom, so that she might not suffer the reproach of matrons who had preceded her to ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the women speakers of the evening happened all to be childless women. One of them was not married, another was a widow, a third separated from her husband, and of the others at least ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... into the room And back again, pausing awhile to bask And wink its painted fans on the warm sill; A bird piped in the roses and there came Into the childless mother's ears a sound Of happy laughing ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... may stand betwixt us and the shadows of our deeds, Nor the light of dreams that lighten darkness, nor the prayer that pleads, But the wisdom equal-souled with heaven, the light alone that leads. Light whose law bids home those childless children of eternal night, Soothed and reconciled and mastered and transmuted in men's sight Who behold their own souls, clothed with darkness once, now clothed with light. King of kings and father crowned of all our fathers crowned of ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... youth for those who are childless. Nobody would come into the inheritance of delight in what was beautiful, of taste for what was beautiful, of enthusiasm for art and artists which they would leave behind them. Nobody would guard reverently all those hundreds of things and nicknacks she had gathered together ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... two women.) She was a gentle-spoken, thoughtful woman, with a deep, earnest spirit. But she had a disappointment which grew in intensity as it continued. The desire of her heart had been withheld. She was childless. ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... because it had always been their way of living, and besides it brought them a little money. So the years went by. When the children were grown and Sophie was out of the way, she might have married even then, for she still had half her money left, and being childless again, it was not too late. But no, Petra didn't want to, and it was too late, she said; it was the children's turn to marry ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... upon it. "And look how he's used the oar! The blood's burst out at his finger-tips!" Ole laughed through his tears. "He was a good lad. He was food to me, and light and heat too. There never came an unkind word out of his mouth to me that was a burden on him. And now I've got no son, Fris! I'm childless now! And I'm not able ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... in all its beauty. The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its familiar cold contour startled him. He remembered how, in their early married days, he had felt the sanctity of that Diana-like revelation, and the still nymph-like austerity which clung to this strange, childless woman. He even fancied that he breathed again the subtle characteristic perfume of the laces, embroideries, and delicate enwrappings in her chamber at Robles. Perhaps it was the intensity of his gaze—perhaps it was the magnetism of his presence—but her lips parted with a half sigh, half moan. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... eldest thereof, all his professional earnings, after buying commissions for the two younger in the army. The divine broke his neck, while yet a curate, in a fox-hunt; dying unmarried, and so far as is generally known, childless. This was Sir Wycherly's favourite brother; who, he was accustomed to say, "lost his life, in setting an example of field-sports to his parishioners." The soldier was fairly killed in battle, before he was twenty; and the name of the ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Mrs. Slogan was a childless married woman of past sixty. Her sister, Mrs. Dawson, had the softer face of the two, which, perhaps, was due to her having suffered much and to the companionship of a daughter whom she loved. She was shorter than her sister ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... parentage of a fated or gifted hero is familiar in Eastern tales, and he is often described as a divine reward to a long-childless king. This element of fate or destiny is, however, not seen before this age in Egyptian ideas; nor, indeed, would it seem at all in place with the simple, easygoing, joyous life of the early days. It belongs to an age when ideals possess the mind, when man ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... but with an Olympian irony, not bitterness. The central figure is an aged, childless widow, whose enormous wealth is eagerly awaited by a host of distant relatives. She changes her mind, and starts to give away her property to the Church, with natural disappointment to the heirs. Casandra, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... well enough. If, at times, David's longing for the sea troubled him, he stifled it, and listened not to its luring voice. He and Isabella were very happy; the only drawback to their happiness lay in the regretted fact that they were childless. ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Giles, as stiff as a poker,—and to-night, your onor, we are going to wake him, poor sowl! to smoke a pipe, and spake an horashon over his corpse before we put him dacently to bed with the shovel. Then, there's his poor widow left childless, and divil a rap to buy paraters wid—bad luck to the eye that wouldn't drap a tear to his mimory, and cowld be the heart that refuses to comfort his widow!" Here poor Barney could no longer restrain his feelings, and having concluded the family history, blubbered ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... wise man and anxious about the welfare of those under his care, fled precipitately. Later he learned that there had been no whooping cough in the house; in fact, the people who caused him to beat such a hasty retreat were childless. He felt annoyed and discomfited; but about a week following his first visit he called again at the house, this time ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... on the old Roman model, a sunset room where every thing was to be in accord, and a "sea" room fit for Naiads or Undines. Sylvie was intensely interested. This Mrs. Spottiswoode was young and handsome, the widow of a man nearly three times her age, and childless. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... the head of the large apartment, and received them as they advanced. He was a widower and childless, so that he had no wife nor daughter to present. Louis and Miss Blanche were the next, though the commander had proposed that Louis should come next to him and his mother; but Louis rebelled, and insisted that he should follow the pacha. The rajah came next, and had Mrs. Blossom on his arm, to ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... Francis I, ascended the throne in 1515, five years older then than the century. Henry of England had descended from a family of simple Welsh gentlemen, far indeed at one time from the crown; Francis I was also of a new line of kings, only a distant cousin of the childless Louis XII, whom he succeeded. "That great boy of Angouleme will ruin all," groaned Louis on his death-bed. Ruin the prosperity of France, he meant, for Louis had been a good and thoughtful king, cherishing his land and enabling it to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... one the incidents of the history linked themselves with the incidents of the day before, and the lonely old man of the Vatican—childless, kinless, homeless for all his state, and cut off from every human tie—began to think of things that were still farther back than the conclave and the proclamation—things of the dead past which nature had seemed to bury with so kind ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... who were childless and in easy circumstances, arranged to undertake the care of the children, and Mrs. Strickland had only herself to provide for. She let her flat and sold her furniture. She settled in two tiny rooms in Westminster, and faced the ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... cares, and one great grief: that they were childless. But she never troubled her husband with her sorrow, taking care to bear it alone. He had bothers enough in the service; how often did she not hear his voice storming outside! He should have peace at home. One thing only she could not bear without ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... enviously of her neighbor across the way, who had no son to give, the childless woman for whom in the old days she felt so sorry, but whom now she envies. She is the happiest woman of all—so thinks the knitting woman, as she sits alone in her quiet house; for thoughts can grow very bitter when the house is still and the boyish voice is heard no more shouting, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... terrific bombardment of a few hours it was laid in ashes. The Duchess of Orleans fled from her home at midnight, only a few hours before it was blown into the air by a shower of bombs. Escaping from these scenes of ruin and woe, the widowed, almost childless, and friendless duchess, but still maintaining wonderful fortitude of character, found refuge, after many painful adventures, in Port Mahon, on the island ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... conducted by the Sanitary and Social Board, the infant, if certified as Regular, is with solemn ceremonial admitted into the class of Equilaterals. He is then immediately taken from his proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some childless Equilateral, who is bound by oath never to permit the child henceforth to enter his former home or so much as to look upon his relations again, for fear lest the freshly developed organism may, by force of unconscious imitation, fall back again ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... no longer surprised, at the exaggerated way in which the childless Lady of the Bluffs,—her step-daughter having ten years back made a foolish foreign marriage,—gave me her views upon the drawbacks of the daughters of her world, when she made me, on her return from a European trip, a visit upon the twins' first birthday,—bearing, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... where sat Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Babbit, and so on, I looked sharply for Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. But neither was there the first day. All the people were childless and desolate-looking, though much bedecked with braids and curls, which ladies wore at that time without stint. Nobody looked as if she could be Mr. Lewis's wife. However, the ladies all treated me with so much cordiality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... rate Mr. and Mrs. Furnace took the risk with a cheerful mind. The woman came from Saltash, where she and her mother had driven a thriving trade in cockles and other shellfish, particularly with the Royal Marines; and being a busy spirit and childless, she hit on the notion of turning her old trade to account. Her husband, William John, had tilled Merry-Garden and stocked it with fruits and sallets with no eye but to the sale of them in Saltash market. But the house was handy for pleasure-takers by water, ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to his own limited Austrian territories. Bohemia added to the Austrian provinces, would constitute quite a noble kingdom. The crown was considered elective, though in fact the eldest son was almost always chosen during the lifetime of his father. The death of Wenceslaus, childless, opened the throne to other claimants. No one could more imperiously demand the scepter than Albert. He did demand it for his son Rhodolph in tones which were heard and obeyed. The States assembled at Prague on the 1st of April, 1306. ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... other lives, one of these her own, the second the guileless Henry's. The single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number, whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she and Henry and Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think of was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There were contingencies of course—and they exactly produced the pity and terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin, represented ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... of Fenn's books, which involve dire situations with pirates in the China Seas, and other such places, the entire action of this book takes place in a small English village. The local doctor, having retired childless, decides he would like to adopt a boy. Being a Governor of the local Institute for the Poor he goes there and selects a boy who at the age of two had been a foundling, and who is now ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... believed that, with proper management and the application of modern ranching principles, he would succeed, by the time he was fifty, in saving this principality intact for those who might come after him, for it was not a part of his life plan to die childless—now that the war was over and he out of it practically with a whole skin. This aspect of his future he considered as the train rolled into the Southland. He was twenty-eight years old, and he had never ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... rich man with a good and beautiful wife. They loved each other dearly, but sorrowed much that they had no children. So greatly did they desire to have one, that the wife prayed for it day and night, but still they remained childless. ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... Raja named Fuljhari and he was childless; he and his wife made pilgrimages to many shrines but all in vain, the wished-for son never arrived. One day a Jugi came to the palace begging and the Raja asked the holy man to tell him how he could have a son; then the Jugi examined the palms of their hands but having ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... mourning, yet dressed with elegant simplicity, befitting their rank and position in society. The Chevalier Le Gardeur de Tilly had fallen two years ago, fighting gallantly for his King and country, leaving a childless widow to manage his vast domain and succeed him as sole guardian of their orphan niece, Amelie de Repentigny, and her brother Le Gardeur, left in infancy to the care of their noble relatives, who in every respect treated them as their own, and who ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... evening we, childless parents, were sitting silently together in the cottage; neither of us had any desire to talk, even had our tears allowed us. We sat gazing into the fire on the hearth. Presently, we heard something rustling ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... of Satan, and after some years learned the secrets of witchcraft from an old woman. By means of this unholy knowledge, along with several other evil deeds, she so bewitched the whole princely race that the six young princes, who were each wedded to a young wife, remained childless; but no public notice was taken until Duke Francis succeeded to the duchy in 1618. He was a ruthless enemy to witches; all in the land were sought out with great diligence and burned, and as they unanimously named the Abbess of Marienfliess [Footnote: ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... apparently secure, for Gustavus IV, having nearly ruined his country by persisting in the English alliance, had made way for his uncle, who now ruled as Charles XIII under the protection of Napoleon. The new King, being childless, had selected as his successor Marshal Bernadotte, whose kindly dealings with the Pomeranians had endeared him to all Swedes. The estates of Sweden, remembering that he had married a sister of Joseph Bonaparte's wife, and recalling his long association ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... back," said Rachel, hoarsely, and she slipped down-stairs like a thief. She felt like a thief. For she was rich. The man who had led her father into the speculations which had ruined him had died childless, and had bequeathed ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... out to sea; Stephen Kennedy's boat came ashore bottom upward. His body was cast on the sands close to the spot where Donal dragged the net from the waves. There was sorrow afresh through the village: Kennedy was a favourite; and his mother was left childless. No son would any more come sauntering in with his long slouch in the gloamin'; and whether she would ever see him again—to know him—who could tell! For the common belief does not go much farther than paganism in yielding comfort to those whose living loves have disappeared—the ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... critics or the public that he wrote well about them. His crime lay in his subject. To Borrow, a man must be ready and able to knock another man down if necessity arise. When nearing sixty he lamented his childless state and said very mournfully: "I shall soon not be able to knock a man down, and I have no son to do it for me." {398a} He glorified the bruisers of England, in the face of horrified public opinion. England had become ashamed of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... no doubt that it is also followed for the purpose of keeping or killing the child, according to the wish of the mother. There is further, confirming the last statement, a well-known practice, when the mother goes down to the river with her baby, for some other woman, who is childless and desires a child, to accompany the mother, and take from her and adopt the baby; and as to this, there is no doubt that, before doing so, the woman ascertains from the mother whether or not she intends to keep her child, and only goes with her to ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson |
