"Ancestress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feebly. I entered it, seeking somewhere to hide myself, and saw a painted coffin lying on the floor near to the marble sarcophagus from which it had been dragged. It was that in which we had found the body of my ancestress; but since then thieves had been in this place. We had left the coffin in the sarcophagus and the mummy in the coffin, and replaced their lids. Now the mummy lay on the floor, half unwrapped and broken in two beneath the breast. Moreover, the face, which I remembered as being so like my own, was ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... Oroonoko can be traced directly and indirectly, perhaps unconsciously, in many a descendant. Without assigning her any direct influence on Wilberforce, much of the feeling of this novel is the same as inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe. She has been claimed to be the literary ancestress of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand; nor is it any exaggeration to find Byron and Rousseau in her train. Her lyrics, it has been well said, are often of 'quite bewildering beauty', but her comedies represent her best work and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... looked for; but the wildest of Scotchmen has the redeeming sense and canniness of his race—always excepting Mr. Cunninghame Graham, whose Scotch blood was infused with a large mixture of the wild tribe of an Arab ancestress; and Mr. Keir-Hardie—speaking a good deal like Mr. T.W. Russell—made a foolish proposal in a somewhat rational speech. But he was unlucky in his backers. The Liberal benches sate—dumb though attentive, and not unamiable. Mr. Gladstone gazed ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... claw-feet common in furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other portrait, which ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... turned out after, all that the dear old Creole lady who had sold us the ancient manuscript, finding old paper commanding so much more per ton than it ever had commanded before, raked together three or four more leaves—stray chips of her lovely little ancestress Francoise's workshop, or rather the shakings of her basket of cherished records,—to wit, three Creole African songs, which I have used elsewhere; one or two other scraps, of no value; and, finally, a long letter telling its writer's own ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... satisfactorily afforded the required information concerning Samuel Abbott, I shall still feel very greatly obliged if any other gentleman can throw any light upon the Archbishop's descendants, especially Sir Maurice's sons and their issue. I have in my possession an old will of an ancestress, sealed with the crest of Bartholomew Barnes, of London, merchant, whose daughter was second wife and mother to Sir Maurice's children, viz., Bartholomew, George, Edward, and Maurice. Did any of them leave a son called James, born ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... father. Mrs. Leete had never seen her grandmother, but had heard much of her, and, when her daughter was born, gave her the name of Edith. This fact might have tended to increase the interest which the girl took, as she grew up, in all that concerned her ancestress, and especially the tragic story of the supposed death of the lover, whose wife she expected to be, in the conflagration of his house. It was a tale well calculated to touch the sympathy of a romantic girl, and the ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... him? Slowly there dawned upon the King's vision—clear as though he had seen her but yesterday, the regal presence of a certain ancestress who more than any other had made the monarchy what it now was—an almost miraculous survival from the past. It was the old Queen Regent, the lady who for the last twenty years of her consort's reign, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Governor,' spoke the Maori chief, 'look round you and listen to me, far there is something worth seeing here.' Sir George was sitting on the very spot where sat Hine-Moa, the great ancestress of the tribe, when she swam the lake to join her sweetheart Tutanekai. She was a maiden of rare beauty and high rank, and many young men desired to wed her. She found escape from these perplexities in a long swim to her choice, Tutanekai. But the Maori chief goes forward with the idyll, and must ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... de Heton. He now for the first time heard of her unhallowed intercourse with the freebooter Blackburn, of her compact on Whalley Nab with the fiend, of her mysterious connection with Malkin Tower, and of her being the ancestress of Mother Demdike. The consideration of all these points, coupled with a vivid recollection of his own strange adventure with the impious votaress at the Abbey on the previous night, plunged him into a deep train of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... her first husband, Octavia was married to Mark Antony, by whom she had two daughters, through whom she was the ancestress of three ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... child's face that was also as if worn, aged, and wasted, through the wear of the race. Fronting each other, the imbecile child of a deathlike beauty seemed the last of the race of which she, forgotten by the world, was the ancestress. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... ancestress—but there is no need to publish her revered name—did indeed live at Bungay St. Mary's, where she lies buried. She used to walk with a tortoise-shell cane. She used to wear little black velvet shoes, with the prettiest high ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Western State as the wife of a white husband. A typical case was that of a family in which the tradition of Negro origin had persisted long after all trace of it had disappeared. The family took its origin from a white ancestress, and had consequently been free for several generations. The father of the first colored child, counting the family in the female line—the only way it could be counted—was a mulatto. A second infusion of white blood, this time on the paternal side, resulted in offspring not ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... clean and simple artificial feeding that is often advisable to-day. Yet the mortality of first-born children should indicate that a modern woman carries no instinctive system of baby management about with her in her brain, even if her savage ancestress had anything of the sort, and both the birth rate and the infantile death rate of such noble savages as our civilization has any chance of observing, suggest a certain generous carelessness, a certain spacious indifference to individual misery, rather ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells |
