"Drudgery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rectory that though Harry had worked very hard at college—as is the case with many highly born young gentlemen—and though he would, undoubtedly, continue to work hard if he were thrown among congenial occupations—such as politics and the like—nevertheless, he would never excel greatly in any drudgery that would be necessary for the making of money. There had been something to be proud of in this, but there had, of course, been more to regret. But now if Harry were to marry Lady Ongar, all trouble ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... The drudgery of the Cuckoo's Nest was far behind her now, and the bare little room under the eaves. Henceforth this was to be her home. She remembered the day in the church when her godmother's invitation to the house party reached ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... made an end of his story he charmed her into sleep, for Ariel was at hand, and he had work for him to do. Ariel, who longed for his complete freedom, grumbled to be kept in drudgery, but on being threateningly reminded of all the sufferings he had undergone when Sycorax ruled in the land, and of the debt of gratitude he owed to the master who had made those sufferings to end, he ceased to complain, ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... condition that is highly favorable to the healthy development of young plants. I have never yet seen a person who liked to pull weeds by hand. Gardens are often neglected because of the dislike of their owners for this disagreeable task. The use of the weeding-hook does away with the drudgery, and makes really pleasant work of the fight ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... with this clause Makes drudgery divine. Who sweeps a room as for thy laws Makes that ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... own table-lands, though they are high and vast as they. Buoyancy, freedom, flexibility, variety, possibility, which also are qualities of the Unnamed, they deal not with. The undeserved reward is to be earned by an everlasting moral drudgery; the incalculable promise of the morrow is, as it were, weighed. And who will say that their conservatism has not been effectual? "Assuredly," says a French translator, speaking of the antiquity and durability of the Chinese and Indian nations, and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... use of the bodily functions. Then come weakness and disease and shortened life, not to speak of the misery included in these and the enjoyment missed. In the chain of results comes the toil that is drudgery. Not work, but excessive work, more than one should do, with less strength than one should have. Work itself under natural conditions is always a delight. But through sin has come strain, tugging, friction, unequal division. The changes wrought in nature ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... before this last letter, her brother, Prof. Francis, had written her apparently wishing her more congenial circumstances; we have only her reply, from which it appears her father is under her care. She declines her brother's sympathy, and wonders that he can suppose "the deadening drudgery of the world" can imprison a soul in its caverns. "It is not merely an eloquent phrase," she says, "but a distinct truth that the outward has no power over us but that which we voluntarily give it. It is not I who drudge; it is merely the case that contains me. I defy all the powers of earth ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... continued, observing that Cedric hastened not to reply; "the sounds of my native language are sweet to mine ears, though seldom heard save from the tongues of the wretched and degraded serfs on whom the proud Normans impose the meanest drudgery of this dwelling. Thou art a Saxon, father—a Saxon, and, save as thou art a servant of God, a freeman.—Thine accents ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... could do to avert this audible upbraiding was to point to the notebook and mutely beg that she would do her scolding by that silent channel. Not she, however. Never in all the years of her drudgery of teaching had she felt her responsibility so great as now. To be entrusted with the charge of Miss Rhinelander's most indulged pupils—all the school knew that—had, at first seemed a burden, and next a most delightful honor. But, after all, they were just like other girls. ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... English literature is to bring deliverance to souls weary with routine, despondent, or suffering the stroke of some affliction. In order to transfigure the everyday duties of life, there is need of imagination, of a vision such as the poets give. Without such a vision the tasks of life are drudgery. The dramas of the poets bring relief and incite ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... odd to you to hear me say so, but I can't help feeling the difference. I used to think it so poor and weak to be in love, or to want any one to take care of one. I thought marriage such ordinary drudgery, and ordinary opinions so contemptible, and had such schemes for myself. And this—and this is such a break down, my blunders and their consequences have been so unspeakably dreadful, and now instead of suffering, dying—as I felt I ought—it has only ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sculptors and caricaturists centred for the most part in Munich,[71] we might be content to regard Germany not as a fount of culture but rather as one of the world's workshops, a well-organised ergastulum for dealing with the drudgery of modern civilisation, for manipulating secondary products and extracting derivatives, a large factory for the production of dictionaries, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... opportunities - above all, to the incessant desire to work and fill every hour of his days with something done. He is sent as a youngster to Palestine, through peril to life, through great privation, through heart-breaking drudgery, he pursues his work until he has completed a map of all western Palestine to the amazement and delight of his employers. And he values this experience so largely because he learns Arabic, and, above all, he learns the Arabic character. One of the chroniclers of his career makes the ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... command of a corps, with a prospect of stirring events as soon as the snow melted, he would have spurred his horse with high satisfaction, even though he left a bride behind him; but to return to a drudgery which he hated the more for having escaped it for three enchanted weeks, made his spirit turn its back to the horse's head. He resolved anew to resign if an opportunity offered. Four years of that particular sort of devotion to the patriot cause were enough. He wished to demonstrate ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... if only to get at the facts; whilst on the path where the greatest and most widespread fame is to be won, the facts may be grasped without any labor at all. But just in proportion as less labor is necessary, more talent or genius is required; and between such qualities and the drudgery of research no comparison is possible, in respect either of their intrinsic value, or of the estimation in which ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the water more than six miles. No part, that I have seen, is plain; you are always climbing or descending, and every step is upon rock or mire. A walk upon ploughed ground in England is a dance upon carpets, compared to the toilsome drudgery of wandering in Skie. There is neither town nor village in the island, nor have I seen any house but Macleod's, that is not much below your habitation at Brighthelmstone. In the mountains there are stags and roe ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... only a conceited fool. As to his political transactions, he has by his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business. During a European war, Turreaux's post is of little relative consequence; but should Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States will be exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same outrages their commercial ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in getting rich that we forget that by and by, when we have become rich, we shall have to learn how to live; for work can never be an end in itself; it is a "means of grace" when it is not drudgery; and it must, in the long run, be a preparation for play. For play is not organized idleness, frivolity set in a fanciful order; it is the normal, spontaneous exercise of physical activity, the wholesome gayety of the mind, the natural expression of the spirit, without self-consciousness, constraint, ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... properly directed, would introduce order and system into a family for a twelvemonth, by commanding the time and knowledge of those whose study they had been, and who would be willing to devote themselves to such objects, and then permit their wives and daughters to return to the drudgery to which the sex seems doomed in this country, he first bethought him of the wants of social life before he aspired to its parade. A man of the world, Mr. Effingham possessed the requisite knowledge, and a man of justice, the requisite fairness, to permit those who depended on him ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... lies at our house in a very doubtful and dangerous state. Of course we are all exceedingly distressed at the circumstance, for she was like one of our own family. Since the event we have been almost without assistance—a person has dropped in now and then to do the drudgery, but we have as yet been able to procure no regular servant; and consequently, the whole work of the house, as well as the additional duty of nursing Tabby, falls on ourselves. Under these circumstances I dare not press your visit here, at least until she is pronounced out of danger; it would ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... upon himself the burden of labor, examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of essential fact—quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,— but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... two ladies continued on their way to the abbey. "I don't see why I mayn't sketch things I see about me," said the young lady impatiently. "Of course, I understand that I must go through the rudimentary drudgery of my art and study from casts, and learn perspective, and all that; but I can't see what's the difference between working in a stuffy studio over a hand or arm that I know is only a STUDY, and sketching a full or half length in the open air with the ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... comfort and contentment. The girl was the embodiment of everything sweet and womanly to him, and the joy of the moment, bringing added colour to her cheeks, made the utmost contrast imaginable to the dust and drudgery of the afternoon in ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... exciting happened while you were away!" groused Bertha. "We got all the drudgery, and you ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... brought the breath of spring, I guide to shores of regions blest Where white, uncaught Ideas nest And Thought is strong o' wing! Within the Hours that I unlock All customed fetters fall; The chains of drudgery release; Set limits fade; horizons cease For you who hear the call No trumpet note—no roll of drums, But quiet, sure and sweet— The self-same voice that summoned Drake, The whisper for whose siren sake They manned the Devon fleet, More lawless than the gray gull's wait, More ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the two or three under-foremen whom he liked best were on the day shift. The night's work with none of those pleasant little momentary interruptions that used to occur in the daytime was mere unrelieved drudgery, but the afternoons, when he had given up trying to sleep any longer, were tedious enough to make him long for ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... after he had made the end sharp, he put a slice of bread upon it, and placed it before the fire, and thus toasted the bread. It is remarkable that the business of cooking the food, which, in houses and cities, is considered a disagreeable drudgery, which is to be kept as much as possible out of sight, is always in the woods a very important part of the entertainment, in which all the guests are pleased ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... in all our countries will be few in proportion, but the struggle will be won in the Nation, as in the Army, by the army of the myriads of faithful workers faithfully performing tasks of drudgery and quiet service—and a realization of this ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... Liverpool and Leeds thirty priests and more, young men in the flower of their days, old men who seemed entitled to some quiet time after their long toil. There was a bishop cut off in the North; but what had a man of his ecclesiastical rank to do with the drudgery and danger of sick calls, except that Christian faith and charity constrained him? Priests volunteered for the dangerous service. It was the same on the first coming of the cholera, that mysterious awe-inspiring infliction. If priests did not ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... business; but his speculations failed: he returned to Rome, and his necessities obliged him to enter the service of a baker, who employed him in turning a hand-mill. While in this degrading occupation he wrote three plays, the sale of which to the managers of the public games enabled him to quit his drudgery, and begin his literary career. He was then about 30 years of age (B.C. 224), and continued to write for the stage for about 40 years. He died in B.C. 184, when he was 70 years of age. The comedies of Plautus enjoyed ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... became his chief desire. He quite worshipped the boy, was charmed with his merry laughter, and felt infinite joy in seeing him about him, healthy and vigorous, and without a care. Florent for his part remained very slim and lean in his threadbare coat, and his face began to turn yellow amidst all the drudgery and worry of teaching; but Quenu grew up plump and merry, a little dense, indeed, and scarce able to read or write, but endowed with high spirits which nothing could ruffle, and which filled the big gloomy room in the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... parts of the kingdom. From his earliest youth he had a taste for roving and fraternising with gipsies and other vagrants. In 1819 he entered a solicitor's office at Norwich. After a long spell of drudgery and literary effort, he went to London in 1824, but left a year later, and for some time afterwards his movements were obscure. For a period of about five years, beginning 1835, he acted as the Bible Society's ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... it may be remarked, although in the middle ranks of life, was very much below the middle ranks in financial prosperity, and had therefore to perform much household drudgery. ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... entirely exhausted, and some means of support had to be sought without delay. After many attempts, he got a place as clerk in a business house at a salary of twenty-six pounds a year, but the work proved so distasteful that after two months of drudgery he threw it up. Then followed a period of deep misery, but a period which must have greatly influenced the work of the future novelist. Wandering the streets by day and, when he could find money to buy a candle, writing poems and short stories by night, he was gaining that experience ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... occupations of women in their homes are generally disconnected and of little educational value, at least as those homes are at present conducted. Given the best will in the world, the daily doing of household details becomes a wearisome monotony if the mere performance of them is all. To make drudgery divine a woman must have a brain to plan and eyes to see how to "sweep a room as to God's laws." Imagination and knowledge should be the hourly companions of her who would make a fine art of each detail in kitchen and nursery. Too long has the pin ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... that a merely evil root? No, surely! it is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of "the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;" angel-wings with which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life. It is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... assigned to a particular man the girls indulge in promiscuous intercourse, whereas after marriage they are fiercely guarded. They may indeed attempt to elope with another man more suited to their age, but they do so at the risk of cruel injury and probable death. The wives have to do all the drudgery; they get only such food as the husbands do not want, and on the slightest suspicion of intrigue they are maltreated horribly. Causes enough surely for their resistance to obligatory marriage. This resistance ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... so largely of death and honor" were to be found on the field of battle; when a febrile enthusiasm for liberty and the just rights of humanity seemed strangely transformed into the sordid spirit of the money-changer; those years of the drawn-out war when drudgery in obscure committee rooms was valued above declamation and the practical sense of Robert Morris counted for more than the finished oratory of Richard Henry Lee; the times that tried men's souls, when "the summer soldier and the sunshine ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... would observe that slavery exists among several of the tribes beyond the Rocky Mountains. The slaves are well treated while in good health, but occupied in all kinds of drudgery. Should they become useless, however, by sickness or old age, they are totally neglected, and left to perish; nor is any respect paid to their bodies ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... H(ertfor)d['s] civilities in inviting so many of the Opposition to her Ball, afford a great deal of mirth. Charles did not go; he has not leisure for those trifles. Hare and Lord Robert have the drudgery of dealing between them. Your kinsman Walker is a cul de plomb at the table, and has lost, I believe, both his eyes and fortune at it. He seems so blind as not to see the card which is before him. Keene seems ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... at home in the wigwam, and picked up the language of the Indians in a very short time. The squaws made him do their drudgery; but the warriors liked him, and the Indian dogs wagged their tails when he looked at them out ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of the Earth's Freedom as well as theirs. And is not this a slavery, say the people, that though there be land enough in England to maintain ten times as many people as are in it, yet some must beg of their bretheren, or work in hard drudgery for day wages for them, or starve, or steal, and so be hanged out of the way, as men not fit to live on the Earth? Before they are suffered to plant the waste land for a livelihood, they must pay rent to their ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... aware that he could not live long. At any time a cold or a chill might hasten the end, yet the knowledge caused him no real regret. During his years of loneliness and privation he had learned to regard death as an open door through which he should escape from drudgery, ill-treatment, desolation, into the rest, the love, the happiness that remain to the children of God in that home where there is no death, "neither sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain: for the former things are passed away." Now, the wretchedness was all behind. His daily path ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... what was then called gout, struck in and he died, and was buried beside his father in the Church of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. He remained laborious to the last, and imposed upon himself all kinds of drudgery, compiling dictionaries, histories of Britain and Russia. He must have worked not so much from love of his subjects as from dread of idleness. But he had hours of relaxation, of social intercourse, and of music; and it is pleasant to remember that one pipe of tobacco. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... to put considerations of personal comfort aside. It is only too melancholy to observe at the University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil Service or the Bar in preference to educational work. I cannot wonder at it. The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special mental ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Grub-Street Journal, and, in a satirical article upon the title of that newspaper, likens the writers to caterpillars and grubs, etc., 'deriving their origin from Egyptian locusts;' and, in another article, accuses them of 'having undertaken the drudgery of invective under pretence of being champions of politeness.' The other papers summarized are the Free Briton, a violent opponent of the Craftsman, the British Journal, and the Universal Spectator, the forte of the last two lying in essays ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... which they have never really mastered, and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I say, is it for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, to eschew the College and the University altogether, than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they meet him, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, if you do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as digging ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Labor, office drudgery, are things which sap the color from a woman's cheeks, and strength from her body. She grows into a machine, and you are a bird, to fly and light on the nearest branch ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... you to do anything," Laura answered. "It is for you to ask yourself what you are going to do. I believe it is in your power to make over that poor girl mind and body—I might almost say, soul too. She thinks she can do nothing but household drudgery. She is afraid of everything. When I think of what you could do for her in the next month—Olga, I wonder that you can let such a ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... of the earth. Then consider the work she does! She moves hundreds of ships and barges, filled with valuable cargoes, up our tidal rivers, to the commercial cities on their banks. She thus performs a vast amount of daily and nightly mechanical drudgery. She is the most effective of all Tugs; and now that we understand the convertibility and conservation of force, we may be able to use her Tide-producing powers through the agency of electricity for ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... said a fat lady from Louisville, distinguished for her appetite, an' often surreptitiously referred to as 'The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.' 'The idea of trying to make it fashionable to endure drudgery! I think we women have all we ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... or earl performed not, at all times, in person, the obligations of his office. The enjoyment of ease and of pleasure, to which in Germany he had delivered himself over, when disengaged from war, and the mean idea he conceived of the drudgery of civil affairs, made him often delegate to an inferior person the distribution of justice in his district. The same sentiments were experienced by the Saxon nobility; and the service which they owed by their tenures, and the high employments they sustained, called them often from the management ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... a barrister, almost a briefless one at present, for his habits were desultory, not to say idle, and he had not taken very kindly to the slow drudgery of the Bar. He had some money of his own, and added to his income by writing for the press in a powerful trenchant manner, with a style that was like the stroke of a sledge-hammer. In spite of this literary work, for which he got very well paid, Mr. Saltram ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... capable of better work. His duty was drudgery, but drudgery well encountered will reveal itself as of potent and precious reaction, both intellectual and moral. One incapable of drudgery can not be capable of the finest work. Many a man may do many things well, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... gate to the kingdom of heaven, the publicans and harlots should press into it before us; and lest, while we are boasting that we are the children of Abraham, God should, without our help, raise up children to Abraham of those stones outside; those hard hearts, dull brains, natures ground down by the drudgery of daily life till they are as the pavement of the streets; those so-called 'heathen masses' of whom we are ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... would take to prove the unsettling effects of music; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who lived ninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater part of his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle against poverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate his family? Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... in procuring a temporary post in a lawyer's office as a clerk. The drudgery was terrible. Daily, from nine in the morning to six in the evening, he found himself chained to the desk, and obliged to go through the dullest and most mechanical routine, the only respite being half an hour in the middle of the day, which he spent in dining at an eating-house. Nursed on ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... how can young ladies paint, play the piano, and study, when their hands and dresses must be unfitted by such drudgery? The woman who asks this question, has yet to learn that a pure and delicate skin is better secured by healthful exercise, than by any other method; and that a young lady, who will spend two hours a day at the wash-tub, or with a broom, is far more likely to have rosy cheeks, a finely-moulded ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the education of their children. Some three thousand of these now go to school, not always irregularly. Very quaint scholars are the dark-eyed, quick-glancing, brown-skinned little people sitting tied "to that dry drudgery at the desk's dull wood," which, if heredity counts for anything, must be so much harder to them than to the children of the Pakeha.[1] Three years ago the Government re-organized the native schools, had the children taught sanitary lessons with the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... effects of the introduction of machinery into industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of workers from mechanical drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position to which woman is always consigned where civilization and religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden, busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets, moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... our younger son Richard that he was far from pleased with his present situation. Instead of having to devote only a few hours a day to teaching English, as he had been promised, the whole of his time was taken up by the usual drudgery which is the lot of an under-master, so that he could not study for himself. The first thing his father did was to set him free from that bondage, and to devise the best means to enable him to pursue the study of painting which ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... education, sir, has been so different from what would be required in that station," resumed her husband, choking with vexation, at the idea of his beauteous high-born bride being doomed to the drudgery of household cares. ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... fact it is a very easy thing to pick up a needle, but if one cannot stoop to pick it up another ought to be paid for it. One servant who is paid for his work will pick up more needles than twenty fat, lounging slaves that think it a drudgery ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... only with the hope of profiting by his social connections; and in this respect the alliance had been a failure. It was in such directions that he most lacked facility, and so far he had been of use to his partners only as an office-drudge. He was resigned to the continuance of such drudgery, though all his powers cried out against it; but even for the routine of business his aptitude was small, and he began to feel that he was not considered an addition to the firm. The difficulty of finding another ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... gladly have lived and died doing nothing but fixing his soul's eye steadily on the glory of God's goodness, had to come down from the mount likewise, and work, and preach, and teach, and wear himself out in daily drudgery for that God whom he learnt to serve, even when he could not adore Him in the press of business, and the bustle of ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... connections, would have carried the elections generally; but it turned out, that in most cases, the lower clergy had obtained the popular majorities. These consisted of the Curees sons of the peasantry, who had been employed to do all the drudgery of parochial services for ten, twenty, or thirty louis a year; while their superiors were consuming their princely revenues in palaces of luxury and indolence. The objects for which this body was convened, being ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Brass, thrusting his hands in his pockets, and rocking himself to and fro on his stool, 'the fact is, that a man of your abilities is lost, Sir, quite lost, in our dry and mouldy line. It's terrible drudgery—shocking. I should say, now, that the stage, or the—or the army, Mr Richard—or something very superior in the licensed victualling way—was the kind of thing that would call out the genius of such a man as you. I hope you'll ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... said to be worth from two millions to three millions of dollars, and speculate in mines, oil-wells, saw-mills, etc., doing very little hard work, and hiring laborers from without to take their places in all drudgery. They are engaged principally in farming and the common trades, and supply nearly everything for themselves. They are nearly all aged, none of them being under forty except some adopted children. All are Germans and use the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Indians of other tribes, their enemies, whom they have made captive in battle. But to the Tovas master it signifies little what be the colour of his bondman's skin, whether white or red; and many of the former, women as well as men, may be seen doing drudgery in this same Sacred town—its hewers of wood and drawers of water. These are also captives, the spoil of predatory incursions across the Salado into the settlements of ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Jacques" of boys' stories, the butt of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make a man diabolique! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this depressing drudgery to our "vagabond's" credit. Think of it! The first poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions conjugating the verb aimer in its ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... work here was not the stiff, hopeless drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a knack of facetious mimicry, and a man's career might be made in a trice. So it had been with Bryantsev, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... table; occasionally a misdemeanor is reported to her, when the offender is cited to the august presence, and duly reprimanded, not according to the quality of the offense, but, in an inverse proportion, to the quality of the offender. Her teachers do the mental drudgery of the institution. Their life is about as varied and pleasant as that of a churn-dog; that is, if the dog were kept churning all day. The balancing of accounts with them, and the making out of the bills for the patrons, are certainly 'under the immediate supervision of the principal.' These bills, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery, necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just indignation against those who inflicted ...
— Burke • John Morley
... thousand had been employed on the Confederate side in the construction of earthworks, in driving teams, in cooking, in the general work of the Quartermaster and Commissary Departments, and in all forms of camp drudgery. To permit this was simply adding four millions to the population from which the Confederates could draw their quotas of men for military service. It was no answer to say that they never intended to put arms in the hands of negroes. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... needs type-making and type-setting machines of great complexity, printing-presses of great size and cost, and much curious machinery in the departments of electrotyping and bookbinding; but these machines, intended to relieve the drudgery of monotonous manual labor, do not supplant the necessity for a higher skill in craftsmanship. They really ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... lived to be his own master. The occasion of his death was as follows:—One morning, instead of making the best of his way to school, (which he was constantly ordered to do) happening very luckily to be overtaken by Tom Sharper, and Dick Lackwit, they prudently agreed to avoid the intolerable drudgery of the hornbook, by playing truant and indulging themselves in the profitable diversions of sitting all day on the bank of a lonesome brook to fish for minows; they had pretty good sport, as they called it, for the first hour; but then Mr. Sharper's ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... of you. I'm sure Jean should be very grateful to you. You're a kind of fairy godmother to this little Cinderella. Only Jean must remember that it isn't very nice to come back to drudgery after an hour or two at the ball," and she gave an ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... all the heavy work and drudgery about camp, and it troubled Bob not a little to see them working while the men were idle. Several times he attempted to help them, but his efforts were met with such a storm of protestations and disapproval, ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... sufficient income to support himself as a gentleman; and to send him up to London to study law, or medicine for two or three years would but expose him to the temptations and dissipations of that great city, and it would take years of drudgery before he would be able to obtain a competency. In my opinion the safest and most expeditious way of proceeding is to put him into the army; his commission and outfit is the only outlay, and can be done at once; his position is established, and it only remains ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sold with other horses to the Belgians, our kind A.D.V.S. ordered him to be shot. He was one of the best friends I had in the war, and I am glad he entered the horses' heaven as a soldier, without the humiliation of a purgatory in some civilian drudgery. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... not like the separation from his Company in the least, but notwithstanding, quietly reported for duty. Several days of desk drudgery, most laborious to one fresh from out-door exercise, had passed, when one morning about eight o'clock, a conceited coxcomb of an aid, in slippers, entered the office-tent, and holding a pair of muddy boots up, with an air of matter-of-course authority—ordered Harry ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... determined to use the initiative and collect the requisite number of names on a petition that would compel the Legislature to submit the question. Women in every county volunteered to get these signatures, fifty or sixty altogether, and did the drudgery of canvassing until the required ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... apprenticeship in literary form. The secret lay, no doubt, in his secure sense of a vocation, and his belief that good work could not fail in the end to justify itself. But, not the less, these four years of obscure drudgery wore upon his spirit, and hence some of the references in these letters to his days of self-despising. The period of waiting came to an end at last with the publication in 1913 of his Garden Without Walls, which attained immediate success. When he speaks in these letters of his brief burst of fame, ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... retreated to Yellow Medicine, taking with him a large baggage train of plunder, and about one hundred white prisoners, chiefly women and children, whom he had captured at different places, and whom, with a few exceptions, they did not specially maltreat, but compelled to labor at camp drudgery. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... were so exhausted, that they were able to do nothing; the consequence was, that the whole drudgery fell on me; and I shared with them the little food which I procured, by labouring to make myself useful; for our master gave ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... preferred it; it was a tradition that Hope had expressed the wish, when a child, that her father might lose his property, so that she could become a teacher. As for Harry, he infinitely preferred the drudgery of a law office to that of a gentleman of leisure; and as for their step-mother, it turned out, when she was left a widow, that she had secured for herself and Emilia whatever property remained, so that ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Indian dramatic dances shows that by means of them the vocations of men and women were lifted out of drudgery, made types of activity and allied to the forces recognized in the religious beliefs of the people. The dances here given, those relative to the Corn and also the Hede-wache, not only illustrate what has been said above but they reflect back a light upon the religious dances that ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... home, and the shop folks peeping abroad, and the white 'buses full of late clerks and city folk rumbling home to their dinners, we part from him. He is back. To-morrow, the early rising, the dusting, and drudgery, begin again—but with a difference, with wonderful memories and still more wonderful desires and ambitions replacing those ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... the Sixth, but he hated school now with all his heart, and, having lost his ambition, cared nothing whether he did ill or well. He awoke in the morning with a sinking heart because he must go through another day of drudgery. He was tired of having to do things because he was told; and the restrictions irked him, not because they were unreasonable, but because they were restrictions. He yearned for freedom. He was weary ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the Tiers Etat shall have double representation? The notables are again summoned to decide, but vanish without decision. With those questions still unsettled, the election begins. And presently the national deputies are in Paris. Also there is a sputter; drudgery and rascality rising in Saint-Antoine, finally repressed by Gardes ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... see how happiness could be where the drudgery of dairy-work had to be done for a living—the hands red and chapped, and the shoes clogged....Stephen, I do own that it seems odd to regard you in the light of—of—having been so rough in your ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... abolished, and leisure and grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then will be those in which none of the persons represented are troubled with want of money or wretched drudgery. Our plays of poverty and squalor, now the only ones that are true to the life of the majority of living men, will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read only by ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... animated, joyous; had plenty of funds for present pleasures, and my uncle's estate in the perspective. Let those mope at college and pore over books, thought I, who have their way to make in the world; it would be ridiculous drudgery in a ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... short doing something, which by a little management might probably have been anticipated, or which, without any material inconvenience, might be postponed! Even business itself is recreation, compared with Religion, and from the drudgery of this day of Sacred Rest they fly for ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... Trials had created. Sir Richard became more exacting and more than ever critical. {49b} The end could not be far off. Borrow had come to London determined to be an author, and by no juggling with facts could his present drudgery be considered as authorship. Occasionally his mind reverted to the manuscripts in the green box, his faith in which continued undiminished. He made further efforts to get his translations published, but everywhere the answer was the same, in effect, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... in attempting to procure subsistence by means which she deemed the best adapted to their present poverty. A churlish temper would have submitted with extreme reluctance, and many taunting reproaches to what might easily have been represented as the drudgery and degradation of the gleaner's field; but this excellent daughter-in-law displayed a spirit ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... position upon a metropolitan newspaper; not that he knew anything about news paper work, or had the least idea of journalism; he knew he was not fitted for the technicalities of the subordinate departments, but he could write leaders with perfect ease, he was sure. The drudgery of the newspaper office was too distaste ful, and besides it would be beneath the dignity of a graduate and a successful magazine writer. He wanted to begin at the top of ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... your hearts as well as your brains—tired it may be, too often, with the drudgery of some mechanical, or merely calculating, occupation—refresh your hearts, I say, by lifting them up unto the Lord, in truly spiritual, truly heavenly thoughts; which bring nobleness, and trust, and peace, to the humblest and the most ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... property, and exacted all his hire and labor. For twelve years he had been hired out for $100 per annum. Harriet, the wife of Edward, belonged to David Baines, of Norfolk. Her general appearance indicated, that nature had favored her physically and mentally, although being subjected to the drudgery of Slave life, with no advantages for development, she was simply a living testimony to the crushing influence of Slavery—with a heart never free from the saddened recollection of the auction block, on which ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... make the most of his prize. Having some skill on the violin himself, he resolved to teach him that instrument; and as soon as he could hold it, put one into his hands, and made him sit beside him from, morning to night, and practise it. The incessant drudgery which he compelled him to undergo, and the occasional starvation to which he subjected him, seriously impaired his health, and, as Paganini himself asserts, laid the foundation of that valetudinarian state which has ever since been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... light-hearted as a schoolboy just escaped from drudgery, while Bertie's Nellie, as a matter of course, was overcome ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... presently dart spitefully at her. She would then take up her position in his rear and wait till he had finished his meal. The position of the female among the birds is very much the same as that of woman among savage tribes. Most of the drudgery of life falls upon her, and the leavings of the males are often ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... man of abilities if you can help it; he will scarce ever submit to the drudgery of your business, or pay that deference to your authority, which you may ...
— The Academy Keeper • Anonymous
... free from sin and to find peace with God, led him at last to enter a cloister, and devote himself to a monastic life. Here he was required to perform the lowest drudgery, and to beg from house to house. He was at an age when respect and appreciation are most eagerly craved, and these menial offices were deeply mortifying to his natural feelings; but he patiently endured ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... were possessed of an uninterpreted longing to join their brothers of the wilderness in their care-free wanderings, and be forever free themselves from the yoke of sledge and whip and the toil and drudgery of the trail. But so like men were the beasts that they never had the courage to cast themselves free from the shackles of their man-master, though it required but a resolution and ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... annoyance against the correctors for the blunders they let pass. The idea that so magnificent a person as an editor or author should correct proofs had not arisen. It was the business of the young men who had been hired to do this drudgery; and all blame rested with them. So far as the evidence goes, it was the same all through Erasmus' life. In the case of one of his most virulent apologies (1520) he says that he corrected all the proofs himself; but from the stress ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... people, in every savage and barbarous state, the father, the chief of the family, is a despot, and a cruel and insolent despot. The wife is his slave, the children his servants. This king sleeps or smokes his pipe, while his wife and daughters perform all the drudgery of the house, and even that of tillage and cultivation, as far as occupations of this nature are practised in such societies; and no sooner have the boys acquired strength then they are allowed to beat the females and make them serve and wait ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... marriage she has retired into the kitchen, and made haste to clear her brain of everything else, in order to leave room for bad cooking. But suppose it begins to dawn upon her that a woman need not sacrifice her whole existence to household drudgery any more than a man need make himself nothing else than a business machine. Suppose she develop an ambition to take part in the social and national life. Then the influence of such a partner, healthy in body and therefore vigorous ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... confides an unfledged scion to some head-clerk, or gives him in charge of a directory who initiates him into what Bilboquet, that profound philosopher, called the high comedy of government; he is spared all the horrors of drudgery and is finally appointed to some important office. The rich supernumerary never alarms the other clerks; they know he does not endanger their interests, for he seeks only the highest posts in the administration. About the period of which we write many families ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the respect of her aunt, who no longer dared to offer her work as a washerwoman, considering her present position far above it. The question of working in the laundry did not even occur to Maslova now. She looked with compassion on the life of drudgery led by these pale, emaciated washerwomen, some of whom showed symptoms of consumption, washing and ironing in a stifling, steam-laden atmosphere with the windows open summer and winter, and she was horrified at the thought that she, too, might be ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... the garden, and picking stone was drudgery, and haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way off; picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited my hands and my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in the spring meadows ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... gain one point at a time," I said, beginning with the lightest end of my argument. "A little while since you feared you were fated for the life of those around—household drudgery, with an occasional sulky drive in the afternoon; now that you have escaped that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... luxury of fashionable life, united to a very aristocratic set of boarders; and Mrs. Stone, herself, is an extremely fascinating lady. Indeed, I have been spoilt; I don't think I could endure the drudgery of housekeeping, now; though I once told Alonzo, if he would give me a four-story house, up town, with a marble front, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always destroys home. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this very reason he was never elevated, as a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound dog, and never had a home superior to Doolittle's birth-place, which, he said, was "at Cape Cod, Nantucket, and all along ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... formed himself according to such maxims. And what more could we desire? Philosophy, with its abstruse questions, was set aside; the classic languages, the acquisition of which is accompanied by so much drudgery, one saw thrust into the background; the compendiums, about the sufficiency of which Hamlet had already whispered a word of caution into our ears, came more and more into suspicion. We were directed to the contemplation of an active life, which we were so fond of leading; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is spirit-stirring!—that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood! Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor daily necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not be in it also a great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble, though even its only end may appear ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... in the youth of the author. In requital mine host was always furnished with the news of the country, and was probably a little of a humorist to boot. The devolution of the whole actual business and drudgery of the inn upon the poor gudewife was very common among the Scottish Bonifaces. There was in ancient times, in the city of Edinburgh, a gentleman of good family who condescended, in order to gain a livelihood, to become the nominal keeper of a coffee-house, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... taking her hand in his. Hers was cold, his as hot as fire. "You know what you said away off yonder somewhere, that she'd let me live here if I deserved it. I am a pauper, Peggy, and I'm afraid I'll—I may have to get down to drudgery again. Will she turn me out? You know I must have somewhere to live. Shall it be the poorhouse? Do you remember saying one day that ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... memorizing requires so much time and energy that, in spite of good intentions, the thinking is postponed for a more convenient season until it constitutes an insignificant part of study, while memorizing, the drudgery of ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... days were perhaps the most unhappy that I have known. My life, indeed, since I had left the hospital had been one of many disappointments and much privation. Unfulfilled desires and ambitions unrealised had combined with distaste for the daily drudgery that had fallen to my lot to embitter my poverty and cause me to look with gloomy distrust upon the unpromising future. But no sorrow that I had hitherto experienced could compare with the grief that I now felt in contemplating the irretrievable ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... was taken to Madame Anna Casaloni at Turino. She was quite elderly at that time, but she had been a great singer. When she tried my voice, she told me it was quite properly placed—so I had none of that drudgery to go through. ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... well enough before, an you could have let me alone: my old dame will be undone now for one to do her husbandry and her drudgery: you need not to have pricked me; there are other men fitter to go ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... the sole reward and profit to be reaped from such arduous toil. The wealth of the soil, the harvests, the fruits, the splendid cattle that grow sleek and fat in the luxuriant grass, are the property of the few, and but instruments of the drudgery and slavery of the many. The man of leisure seldom loves, for their own sake, the fields and meadows, the landscape, or the noble animals which are to be converted into gold for his use. He comes to the country for his health or for change of air, but goes back to town to spend ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... France did not form a privileged order, living on the fruits of other men's labour. On the contrary, they gave the colony far more than they took from it. Although paid a mere pittance, they never complained of the great physical drudgery that their work too often required. Indeed, if labourers were ever worthy of their hire, such toilers were the spiritual pioneers of France beyond the seas. No one who does not approach their aims and achievements ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... had been at a probe. The 'Tower of Babel' and the 'Lenore' Symphony were among the things we had practiced. Both of them, the 'Lenore' particularly, had got into my head. I broke lose for one day from routine, from drudgery and harness. It was a mistake. Friedhelm went off, shrugging his dear old shoulders, and I at last turned up, mooning at the Koelner Bahnof. Well—you know the rest. Nay, do not turn so angrily away. Try to ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... question. I mentioned several particulars, wherein I showed that I had no authority in the station I was in, and that others acted as General who had not any call, but used his Royal Highness's name. That in the drudgery, I was employed, but anything of moment was done without my participation. That, in short, I had ventured my all—life, fortune, family—every thing, my honour; which last I had some to lose, but none to gain, in the way things were managed, and therefore ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... of such a life;—a continued miracle from the age of thirty or thirty-five, after which he built himself up anew, by living as well in cold water as in hot, and luxuriating in cold baths, and working hard,—harder, perhaps, on the whole, at downright drudgery, than any other man of his age, like Rousseau in copying music, as a relief from writing poetry,—yet when death happens we are all taken by surprise, just as if we thought God had overlooked his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... gentleman; certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My listening mind brightened.) 'But yet—there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are—And, of course—H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a salary is humiliating—unworthy of one's ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... impressions, she made choice of articles of dress too good for domestic drudgery, and not fine enough to suit the rank to which she belonged. In this case, extremes would have suited her better ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... quick survey of his early years—the years of drudgery and privation. His father, a charming man who could never say "no," had so signally failed to say it on certain essential occasions that when he died he left an illegitimate family and a mortgaged estate. His lawful ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... a wizard, and so I am a rich woman. I shall have an income of something like three thousand pounds, mon cher! Oh, we will roll in it. I have had ten bad years—ten hateful years. You don't know how I have hated it all, this business, this drudgery, this cut-and-dried, methodical existence—moi, enfant de Boheme! But, enfin, it was obligatory. Now we will change all that. Nous reviendrons a nos premieres amours. I shall have ten good years—ten years of barefaced pleasure. Then—I will range myself—perhaps. There ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... day on which you were to leave London and I have been amusing myself in the intervals of my law-drudgery, with figuring you in the Oxford post-coach. I doubt, however, if you have had so merry a journey as you and I had in that vehicle last year, when you made so much sport with Gwyn[386], the architect. Incidents upon a journey are recollected with peculiar ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight. Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Durtal, stretching. "As a matter of fact I wish it might never be finished. What will become of me when it is? I'll have to look around for another subject, and, when I find one, do all the drudgery of planning and then getting the introductory chapter written—the mean part of any literary work is getting started. I shall pass mortal hours doing nothing. Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... professed student of life, he maintained, must keep in touch with life at every feasible angle. No experience should come amiss to a detective; he should be a pundit of all knowledge. A detective he now frankly considered himself; and the real drudgery of his unique profession of Ad-Visor was supportable only because of the compensating thrill of the occasional chase, the radiance of the Adventure of Life glinting from time to time ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... high wages; but if he allows the pennies, which are the result of hard work, to slip out of his fingers—some going to the beershop, some this way, and some that,—he will find that his life of hard work is little raised above a life of animal drudgery. On the other hand, if he take care of the pennies—putting some weekly into a benefit society or an insurance fund, others into a savings bank, and confides the rest to his wife to be carefully laid out, with a view to the comfortable ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... lies in the superficial character of the American mind. We have scarcely one in the country capable of being a hard student. The whole nation repels the idea of drudgery of any sort, and the most conscientious teacher has to contend against a home influence, which, working at right angles with her own, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... would listen to was Newman, then Vicar of St. Mary's; of Pusey's interminable and prosy harangues he could not bear even to think. Although unable to bend himself to the drudgery of Oxford, Burton was already forming vast ambitions. He longed to excel as a linguist, and particularly in Oriental languages. Hence he began to teach himself Arabic; and got a little assistance from the Spanish scholar Don ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... saving of effort to use wooden plates and paper napkins ... so much less mere household drudgery ... so much more time ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... United States is not tending here, as it has tended in all other nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may be argued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children are luxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children are drudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that in our case there is really decay at both ends of our social system—with the pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with the hard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very young is certainly a serious ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... uncongenial to him; he would rather have calculated the tables themselves. The true science of mathematics is the most imaginative and creative of all sciences, but the mere application of mathematics to figures for the construction of engines, ships, or buildings is the dullest sort of drudgery. ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... could not wait to put my dress in order before running out into the street to see how my windows shone. Every workman who carries a dinner pail has these moments of keen delight in the product of his drudgery. Men of genius, likewise, in their hours of relaxation from their loftier tasks, prove this universal rule. I know a man who fills a chair at a great university. I have seen him hold a roomful of otherwise restless youths ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... from credulity had already set in, a reaction that carried them into the blankest atheism and boldest immorality. People who had spent the summer in looking for a change that would relieve them from all responsibility, now turned reluctantly toward the commonplace drudgery of life. It is the evil of all day-dreaming—day-dreaming about the other world included—that it unfits us for duty in this world of ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... England, masterless men are forcibly prevented from producing the food they need. And you, as an artist, can tell me that at present great artists invariably do starve, except when they are kept alive by charity, private fortune, or some drudgery which hinders them in the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... a distaste for manual labor, and sometimes he chafed against it. Again and again he felt his spirit faint within him when he recalled the scenes of excitement through which he had passed, and looked forward to years of this unvaried drudgery; but he never permitted his soul to question his duty! He had decided in the most solemn reflections of his life that he would conquer himself in the place where he had been defeated, perform the tasks which he had so ignominiously abandoned, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... his charger. As long as the war lasted, he looked upon him as his fellow-helper in all emergencies and fed him carefully with hay and corn. But when the war was over, he only allowed him chaff to eat and made him carry heavy loads of wood, subjecting him to much slavish drudgery and ill-treatment. War was again proclaimed, however, and when the trumpet summoned him to his standard, the Soldier put on his charger its military trappings, and mounted, being clad in his heavy coat of mail. The Horse fell down straightway ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... her spelling was. Nevertheless, in the goodness of her heart she laboriously spelled out her instructions to me in special lessons twice a week, to give Miss Sullivan a little rest. But, though everybody was kind and ready to help us, there was only one hand that could turn drudgery ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... were usually circulated by women going from house to house. They did the drudgery, endured the hardships and suffered the humiliations attendant upon the early history of our cause; but their names are forgotten, and others reap the benefit of their labors. These women were so modest and so anxious for the success of their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... it's not fair to shut me out from all the excitement and fun after I did all the drudgery. Think how I used to struggle here to keep up ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... are her old scholars. Those black eyes are Hoglah's; that neat woman is Judy! Yes, she has lived among them, and worked among them all her life, never forgetting that "no good work can be done without drudgery." She has her Girls' Friendly Society class still in her own little house, though she has dropped most of her regular out-of-door work of late years. For the vicar—there is a vicar now—and his daughters teach ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very true. Dick would never have succeeded as a business man; he was too full of crotchets and speculations to be content to run in narrow grooves. The notion of money-making was abhorrent to him; the idea of a city life, with its hard rubs and drudgery, was utterly distasteful to him. "One would have to mix with such a lot of cads," he would say. "English, pure and undefiled, is not always spoken. If I must work, I would rather have a turn ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... believed neither of the Hosmers was looking at him. "You see, this happens to be Tilly's birthday. She hasn't had a real one for ever so long, and Andrew and me, why, we've fixed it that she should take a holiday from her drudgery and we'd all go off for a little lark. Now, perhaps you two would like to keep us company. How about that, boys? You've been pretty kind to my sister, and we all feel that you're our good friends. What do you say about tagging along? In my walks ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... deceased, had been a far-sighted man. Benis had always cherished a warm admiration for the commercial astuteness which he conceived himself to have inherited. He would have been, he thought, exactly like his father—if he had cared for the drudgery of business. So it was a habit of his, when in a quandary, to consider what his parent would have done and then to do likewise—an excellent rule if he had ever succeeded in applying it properly. But there were always ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... delightful things that Sterne has written of them. But this was not after the pattern of the ass at Lyons. He was of a white colour, that seemed to fit him rather for rare festal occasions than for constant drudgery. Besides, he was very small, and of the daintiest proportions you can imagine in a donkey. And so, sure enough, you had only to look at him to see he had never worked. There was something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... marry at all in the army—and how could she marry anywhere else?—she must soon make up her mind. Her experience now stood her in good stead. Had she not seen these very first-class cadet officers only three years before as mere despised "beasts," doing all kinds of drudgery for their oppressors? Had she not seen her fiance, Saunders, himself, a short twelvemonth ago, with nose intact, slinking like a pariah about the post? She had learned the lesson which the younger girls had yet to learn, that from these unpromising chrysalises ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... blackguard sprite, Condemn'd to drudgery in the night; Thou hast no work to do in the house, Nor halfpenny to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... in her work, and when she came out her brain was a sluggish and unresponsive as one might expect. Well aware of her shortcomings, she made light of them, insisting laughingly that she was the dunce of the family and Virginia its genius. She would do the drudgery of housekeeping while her sister ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... pleasure of an article of his on "The Woman of the Slums," packed with allusions to Marcella Maxwell, which was to appear in the next number of the "Haymarket Reporter," the paper that he and Fontenoy were now running. Harding was not the editor. He disliked drudgery and office-hours; and his father was good for enough to live upon. But he was a powerful adviser in the conduct of the new journal, and wrote, perhaps, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Locke is the inverse of that from Hobbes to Milton. Locke was also a man of few books. If he had been sent to school under Milton, as he might have been,[16] he would have very soon thrown up the learned drudgery prescribed for him, and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... am not indolent. I always have my music, embroidery, or reading to attend to. As to being chained down to household drudgery, I cannot think of it, and I am certain that it would be as much against George's ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... a good deal harder than the boys thought it was going to be; but it was over at last; the carriages rolled out of the gate, the sentry presenting arms as they passed, and the boys who remained turned sorrowfully away to take up the drudgery of school routine. After that there were no more loud, angry discussions, no shaking of fists in one another's faces, and the orderlies who raised the flag at morning and hauled it down at night, handled it tenderly out of respect to the feelings of their ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon |
