"Meagre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idleness. There were no longer battles with pirates. The Holy Order of Malta was now only an honorable distinction. A brother of his father, knight commander at Valetta when Bonaparte conquered the island, had come to spend his last days in Palma with only the meagre pension of a half-pay officer. It had been two centuries since the Febrers, forgotten on the sea where there was no longer any commerce, and where only poor padrones and fishermen's sons now made war, had given themselves up to investing their name with a splendrous luxury, which gradually ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... With its pale and meagre train? Do they gather closely round thee, Want, and suffering and pain? Mourn not, for the chilly dew-drops, Fell upon thy Master's bed; Mourn not, for the Prince of Glory Had not ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... college) was all to be stolen. There was an uncommon clearance of cakes and doughnuts, and pie and cheese, from each meal, at this time. Cup-custards, even, disappeared,—cups and all. A cold supper, laid at nine on Wednesday evening, for some expected travelers, turned out a more meagre provision on the arrival of the guests than the good host of the Giant's Cairn had ever been known to make. At bedtime Sin Saxon presented ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... by gestures that the former go above and the latter below after death. They bury their dead usually on top of the ground in a box made of small timbers or drift-wood, elevating the box four feet from the surface, and resting it on cross poles. Their meagre belongings are generally buried with them. The small bidarka (skin canoe) is not infrequently used for a casket when the head ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... last with a very meagre speech, on which no amendment could be hung. The Duke spoke extremely well in the House of Lords, and Peel the same in the House of Commons. Both approved (the Duke without any qualification, Peel more guardedly) of the foreign policy of the Government, and both said ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... being distasteful to the listener by the fact that it was given with a melancholy despairing gesture, which to a less serious person than Ringfield might have been amusing. But his sense of humour, originally meagre, was not developing at St. Ignace as fast as it might, and he saw nothing humorous in this view of madame's immunity from disease. Before he could frame ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... active, and ill-rewarded course of life which we have endeavoured to describe. He was a man between forty and fifty, devoted to his profession, and of such reputation in the medical world, that he had been more than once, as opportunities occurred, advised to exchange Middlemas and its meagre circle of practice, for some of the larger towns in Scotland, or for Edinburgh itself. This advice he had always declined. He was a plain blunt man, who did not love restraint, and was unwilling to subject himself to that which ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... but little to give to Christ; yet it is a comfort to know that our friendship really is precious to him, and adds to his joy, poor and meagre though its best may be—but he has infinite blessings to give to us. "I call you friends." No other gift he gives to us can equal in value the love and friendship of his heart. When Cyrus gave Artabazus, one of his courtiers, a gold ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... apart from human companionship, was supported on a small annuity, paid her quarterly by a very honest company, that would have been ruined with many such venerable clients. On pleasant days she crept about the town to do her meagre marketing, or crawled to the paupers' pew in the old brick meeting-house. During the warm summer weather her scant life was somewhat cheered, and a faint attempt at joyousness sometimes winked in her old eyes, but with the winter's cold came the cruel ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the lieges of the war-lord. They are all the more loyal to the throne as they are poor, and therefore dependent on the King for their very subsistence. There are few large estates in Prussia, and they yield but a meagre revenue. The relations of the Junkers to the Hohenzollerns are the relations of William the Conqueror to his companions-in-arms. The Junkers originally held their broad acres, their Rittergut, by military tenure. Some of their feudal ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... say that almost the same amount of spiritual power goes to waste in our average church life? One is startled at times as he notes the manifestations of fervor and warmth in the devotional meetings of the present day, and the meagre results that follow in the transformation of society into the likeness of the kingdom of heaven. Exactly what we have to do, however, is to help hasten the answer to the prayer our Lord taught us, "Thy ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... have a reputation to enhance or lose as the result might decide. Suddenly a name occurred to him. A short time ago his friend the President had been telling him the inner story of a very intricate case which had involved a scandal of two Courts. Only the most meagre details had obviously been permitted to appear in the papers, but His Lordship had told him that it had been solved and settled almost entirely by the skill and diplomacy of a M. Nicol Hendry, who held the little advertised but highly ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... tilled earth. Wild medicinal plants, so important in the rustic materia medica of New England—such as pennyroyal, for example—are generally much less aromatic and powerful when cultivated in gardens than when self-sown on meagre soils. On the other hand, the cinchona, lately introduced from South America into British India and carefully cultivated there, is found to be richer in quinine than the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... plastered, it was simply built of enormous bones skillfully arranged, which gave it its white color. Strange as the materials were, they were forced to admit that the idea of utilizing them was a natural one; besides there was nothing else available on the island where vegetation was most meagre; but the whole place, even the neighboring hills were covered with bones, which Dr. Schwaryencrona recognized as the remains of ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... they succeeded in catching him they carried him to the burning pile and made as if they would throw him on it. This ceremony over, they returned to the house of the Green Wolf, where a supper, still of the most meagre fare, was set before them. Up till midnight a sort of religious solemnity prevailed. No unbecoming word might fall from the lips of any of the company, and a censor, armed with a hand-bell, was appointed to mark and punish instantly any infraction of the rule. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... of writing stories and plays, but we were never able to get her to do anything of the kind for us. One of her constant pleas was that she might get the chance to become a well-trained teacher of English. Her letters never showed the same skill with English that her conversation denoted, but her meagre ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... loophole Father Robineau watched his chapel burning, with its meagre enrichments, added year by year. But this was nothing, when his eye dropped to the two or three figures lying face downward on the road. He turned himself toward the wailing of a ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... had represented only a meagre minority of the voters of the State since the Know-Nothing defection, now responded to the call with a full quota of delegates, and elected John A. King president. King was nearly double the age of Fenton. He had been a lieutenant of cavalry in the War ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... anticipated it. How terribly significant becomes the simple mechanism of loading a rifle when one knows that it is at once the earnest of deadly battle and the preparation for it! The few details which we could gather from the deck hands concerning the fight were meagre and unsatisfactory. They told us of disaster that befell our army in the morning, and which it seemed very doubtful if the afternoon had yet seen remedied; and their testimony was borne out by evidences to which our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the conventicles came to the knowledge of the magistrates, and on the eighth of September, 1546, a descent was made upon the worshipping Christians. Sixty-two persons composed the gathering. The lieutenant and provost of the city, with their meagre suite, could easily have been set at defiance. But the announcement of arrest in the king's name prevented any attempt either at resistance on their part, or at rescue on that of their friends. Respecting the authority ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... guest could eat or drink. Lord Byron did not touch meat, fish, or wine; and as to the biscuits and soda-water he asked for, there were, unfortunately, none in the house. He declared he was equally pleased with potatoes and vinegar, and on this meagre pittance he succeeded in making an ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... to follow her fancy, as the dame said who kissed her cow—only I do not much approve her choice, that is all. He cannot be six years short of fifty; and a verjuice countenance, under the penthouse of a slouched beaver, and bag of meagre dried bones, swaddled up in a black cloak, is ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... grow Those subtle weeds no man has need to tend, That flourish through neglect, and soon must send Perfume too sweet upon us and overthrow Our steady senses; how such matters go We are aware, and how such matters end. Yet shall be told no meagre passion here; With lovers such as we forevermore Isolde drinks the draught, and Guinevere Receives the Table's ruin through her door, Francesca, with the loud surf at her ear, Lets fall the colored ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... The result was meagre, and he was just losing himself again in contemplation of the upturned face, whose fixed mouth and haunting expression told such a story of suffering and determination, when there came from the dim recesses above his head a cry, which, forming itself into two words, rang down ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... kitchen. He looked around with keen, searching eyes, scanning every nook and corner in the bare little room. Truly, there was not much to see. The old fireplace had been blocked up, and in its place was the usual iron cooking-stove, with a meagre array of pots and pans hanging behind it. The floor was bare; the furniture, a table and chair, with a stool for John. There was no provision for guests; but that did not matter, as Mr. Scraper never had guests. Altogether, there was little attraction ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... packages and read and reread the labels, one was struck by the meagre English of merchandisers and the poor verbal resources of commerce generally. A while ago business dealt hardly with the word "proposition." It was the universal noun. Everything that business touched, however remotely, was ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... steaming poisons, and a length of flame. From every blast of her contagious breath Famine and drought proceed, and plagues and death. A robe obscene was o'er her shoulders thrown, A dress by Fates and Furies worn alone. She toss'd her meagre arms; her better hand In waving circles whirl'd a funeral brand: A serpent from her left was seen to rear His flaming crest, and lash the yielding air. But when the Fury took her stand on high, 160 Where vast Cithaeron's top salutes the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... where every smallest scene and almost personage is connected with the general theme; nor the lower unity of such a thing as Phedre, where everything is pared down, or, as Landor put it in his own case, "boiled off" to a meagre residuum of theme special. It has, at the very most, that species of unity which Aristotle did not like even in epic, that of a succession of events happening to an individual; and while most of these might be omitted, or others substituted for them, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... roused herself, and managed to furnish very scantily the little home where Katherine sat thinking. But the addition to their income was but meagre compared to the expenses which followed in the train of Mrs Frederic Liddell and her ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... These lovers fled away into the storm. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form Of witch and demon and large coffin-worm, Were long be-nightmared. Angela, the old, Died palsy-twitch'd with meagre face deform; The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, For aye unsought-for slept among ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... was dead and he was all friendless. Monsieur de Jouy procured him the place of private secretary to Count Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman established by the Czar in Paris as his political correspondent. The salary given was meagre enough, but in this world all things have a relative as well as an intrinsic value, and eight dollars a month seemed to the poor lad, who had never yet earned a cent, a fragment of El Dorado or of Peru. It gave him independence. His contemporaries have described ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... to-day, the horizon is thrown up so much that the altitude is about 12 too small. No land visible for twenty miles. No animal life observed. Lower Clark's tow-net with 566 fathoms of wire, and hoist it up at two and a half miles an hour by walking across the floe with the wire. Result rather meagre—jelly-fish and some fish larvae. Exercise dogs in sledge teams. The young dogs, under Crean's care, pull as well, though not so strongly, as the best team in the pack. Hercules for the last fortnight ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... cry all day for bread, And, 'neath the shelter of my meagre breast, Stirs one unborn, who must e'er long be fed— Another babe to hunger with the rest. Madonna Mary, hear a mother's moan! Pity the travail I must ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... a force that was passionate. There was violence in the grip of his hands. His light eyes were ablaze. His whole meagre body quivered as though galvanized by some vital, electric current more potent than it ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... diet passed provided that a tax payable in silver should be levied to defray the expenses of the war, though apparently nothing was fixed by the diet as to the amount to be raised or as to the mode of levy. With this meagre record our information regarding this celebrated diet ends; but the new Cabinet, before it parted, drew up a long-winded account of the cruelties of Christiern, which it sent abroad among the people for a lasting memorial ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... replete with the finest feelings of art, notwithstanding the Gothic dryness and fantastic forms of his figures. The folds of his draperies are more like creased pieces of paper than cloth, and his representation of the naked is either bloated and coarse, or dry and meagre. His backgrounds have all the extravagant characteristics of a German romance, and are totally destitute of aerial perspective; yet, with the exception of the character of the people and scenery ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... foyer, which troubled me very much. Mlle. Brohan was to play the part of the Marquise de Prie. At this time she was so fat as to be almost unsightly, while I was so thin that the composers of popular and comic verses took my meagre proportions as their theme and the cartoonists as a subject ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... commanded set them in a whirl. Baskets and boxes were dragged forth to receive the platters and remains of their meagre feast. In an instant the ground was cleared, and the three ladies had taken their departure to the chaise, which was set apart for their use. The men were already climbing into the house on wheels, when ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... many services to scientific truth, and one of these was an edition of Ptolemy's Geography, in which Judea was spoken of, not as "a land flowing with milk and honey," but, in strict accordance with the truth, as, in the main, meagre, barren, and inhospitable. In his trial this simple statement of geographical fact was used against him by his arch-enemy John Calvin with fearful power. In vain did Servetus plead that he had simply ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... endeavoured to explain the popular dislike to burial on the north side of the church, by reference to the place of the churchyard cross, the sunniness, and the greater resort of the people to the south. {254} These are not only meagre ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... burst forth in a kind of tender rapture, rolling pearly waves of harmony along the large spaces, and filling the dome with the foam and spray of interlacing measures, it seemed as if angels were welcoming the young child to heaven." The pettiness of a brief burial service in a private parlor or in a meagre meeting-house would not have touched her heart so profoundly, because it would not have recalled heaven so impressively in all its grandeur and tenderness. She evidently perceived here the sweet and even cheering veracity of a devotion that is glad to remember all the possibilities of reverent ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... power or instinct do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in life, that she becomes, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... involves these points:—The Aristophanic estimate of Euripides, with criticisms on its taste and justice (for which, however, a historical subject is given as an alternative); the Greek chorus, and choric metres. Now such an examination is, in the first place, a most meagre view of literature: it does not necessarily exercise the faculty of critical discernment. In the next place, it is chiefly a matter of compilation from English sources; the actual readings of the candidate in Greek and Latin would be of little ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... was productive of very meagre results. However, a singular combination of circumstances and of proper names will render the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... was bid. And the missionary's eyes were on the fair head of the man as he leant down over the smouldering embers stewing his own meagre midday meal. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... spoken in previous sketches of the faithfulness and devotion of many of the government nurses, appointed by Miss Dix. No salary, certainly not the meagre pittance doled out by the government could compensate for such services, and the only satisfactory reason which can be offered for their willingness to render them, is that their hearts were inspired by a patriotism equally ardent with that which actuated ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... announcement ope and hear: Pistoia first of Neri groweth meagre; Then Florence doth ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... than a pianist, a thinker than a musician. Commonplace is instinctively avoided in all the works of Chopin; a stale cadence or a trite progression, a humdrum subject or a hackneyed sequence, a vulgar twist of the melody or a worn- out passage, a meagre harmony or an unskillful counterpoint, may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions; the prevailing characteristics of which, are, a feeling as uncommon as beautiful, a treatment as original as felicitous, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... dispirits, the attentive renders more diligent: so slight, so small a matter it is, which overturns or raises a mind covetous of praise! Adieu the ludicrous business [of dramatic writing], if applause denied brings me back meagre, bestowed [makes me] full ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... like homesickness was in his heart. He had almost fancied for a minute that he was back once more in Athens. He raised his eyes and gave a quick, deep glance up and down the street—soot and dirt and grime, frowning buildings and ugly lines, and overhead a meagre strip of sky. Over Athens the sky hung glorious, a curve of light from side to side. His soul flew wide to meet it. Once more he was swinging along the "Street of the Winds," his face lifted to the Parthenon on its Acropolis, his nostrils breathing the clear air. Chicago ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... His complexion was of the muddy and unwholesome kind which tells a tale of bad health, late hours and penury, and almost always of a bad disposition. The best description of him may be given in two familiar expressions—he was sharp and snappish. His cracked voice suited his sour face, meagre look, and magpie eyes of no particular color. A magpie eye, according to Napoleon, is a sure sign of dishonesty. "Look at So-and-so," he said to Las Cases at Saint Helena, alluding to a confidential servant whom he had been obliged to dismiss for malversation. "I do not know how ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... of devotees, and very unlike the ghost in 'Don Juan,' who says, 'Che si pasce di cibo celeste non si pasce di cibo mortale,' for though rigorously obedient to the prescribed fasts of the Church, she devours flesh enough on other days to suffice for those on which it is forbidden; and on the meagre days she indemnifies herself by any quantity of fish, vegetables, and sucreries of all kinds. It is only like eating her first course on Thursday ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the omission of a play from a casual catalogue of this kind would hardly warrant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the time. The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same approximate fashion through the edition published by his fellow-actors. Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of the publication of a few of his dramas in his lifetime all is uncertain; and the conclusions which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas themselves, as well as from assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of the period, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... the dear New England woods and meadows, upon the tidy village where every man and woman was her friend; for his sake she had come to dwell among strangers in a strange and barren land. The old homestead had been sold, and with the meagre proceeds she had paid their way across the prairies, and had bought a little house and a lot of land on the outskirts of Springtown, while Willie looked about him for something to do. But the enemy before whom they had fled followed them to the high pure altitude ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... mumbled fiercely when he saw them, and Simmons cried out delightedly: "There now, he's better— he's swearin' at me!" The first intelligible words he spoke were those that had last passed his lips: "M-m-my f-f—," and from his melancholy eyes a meagre tear slid into a wrinkle and ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... and female, are meagre-bodied birds, with slender legs, and beaks twelve inches long. They are an inseparable couple, and wander about our patio and rooms in a restless nervous fashion, rattling their chop-stick noses ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... on her unmade cot, drawing a ragged sweater about her shoulders, and looked up at Kate with an almost furtive gaze. She always had been a small, meagre creature, but now she seemed positively shriveled. The pride and plenitude of womanhood were as far from her realization as they could be from a daughter of Eve. Sexless, stranded, broken before an undertaking too great for her, she sat there in the throes of a sudden, nervous chill. ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... I have the satisfaction—a meagre satisfaction you may call it, but a satisfaction all the same—of knowing that by the ploughing and harrowing of my heart a step is taken toward that future in which hearts shall be less harrowed and ploughed. "It must never ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... but he had saved space by making himself a bunk, in lieu of a bed, which, hung on hinges, could be hooked up out of the way when not in use. For the rest, a couple of chairs, a chest of drawers, and a table with a little oil stove for cooking purposes composed the meagre furnishings. But each bit of wall space was occupied in a manner that astonished one at first glance, for up to the height of four feet were shelves partly filled with books and magazines, while ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... shall have a future opportunity of giving a better account of the discovery and conquest of Chili than this extremely meagre notice by Zarate from Molina, Ovalle and other early authors. The nameless city mentioned by Zarate was probably St Jago de Chili, which was founded by Valdivia. The commencement of the Valdivian expedition was in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... some Europeans. The men are in general tall, that is, about five feet ten inches, or six feet; but I saw none that were fat and lusty like the Earees of Otaheite; nor did I see any that could be called meagre. Their teeth are not so good, nor are their eyes so full and lively as those of many other nations. Their hair, like ours, is of many colours, except red, of which I saw none. Some have it long, but the most general custom ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... little estimation), so biographers (if we except Melchior Adam, the great favourite of Bayle) have been equally silent respecting its author. Fabricius, and the Historical Dictionary published at Caen, do not mention him; and Moreri has but a meagre and superficial notice of him. Wolfius's Penus Artis Historicae, of which the best edition is that of 1579, is well described in the tenth volume of Fournier's Methode pour etudier l'histoire, p. 12, edit. 1772. My respect for so extraordinary a bibliomaniac ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... enforced; and free people of color were ordered point blank to leave the city.[54] Where they were to go, however, no one seemed to care, and as the free people of color had no intention of going, the question was not discussed. For some reason the enforcement of the law was not insisted upon. When a meagre attempt was made, it proved unsuccessful, and the complexion of Louisiana was definitely settled for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... hostility toward the press, but that which boasted Sawyer Lenthal for its speaker was its friend (at all events, at first, though afterward, as we shall notice by and by, it displayed some animosity against its early protege), and from this meagre beginning took its rise that which is beyond doubt one of the most important domestic functions of the press at ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... abject appearance and degraded condition of the teachers who plainly said to us by their looks every day of their lives, "Boys, never be learned; whatever you are, above all things be warned from that in time by our sunken cheeks, by our poor pimply noses, by our meagre diet, by our acid-beer, and by our extraordinary suits of clothes, of which no human being can say whether they are snuff-coloured turned black, or black turned snuff-coloured, a point upon which we ourselves are perfectly unable to offer ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... inclined to be cross; so when Boggley suggested we should dine in the waiting-room while Autolycus and the chuprassis went on with the luggage to acquaint the dak-bungalow people of our arrival, I upbraided him for not making proper arrangements, and reviled the meagre repast, and was altogether very unpleasant. When we reached our destination we found Autolycus prancing distractedly. "This," he said to Boggley, "is what comes of making no bundabust." Some other people were already occupying the bungalow, and we could only get the back rooms, small, mouldy, ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... incident, as in the case of Hawthorne's Tales, is so meagre and the language so exquisite, that the telling seems to be quite inadequate and inferior to the reading of the story. In such cases, variety may be afforded by reading, but generally speaking, it is more effective to tell ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... polished barrel, always replenished with beer, at the other a hearth with a wood fire constantly burning, and there was a table running the whole length of the room; at one end of this was laid a cloth, with a few trenchers on it, and horn cups, surrounding a barley loaf and a cheese, this meagre irregular supper being considered as a sufficient supplement to the funeral baked meats which had abounded at Beaulieu. John Birkenholt sat at the table with a trencher and horn before him, uneasily using his knife to crumble, rather than cut, his bread. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by such a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the data are too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of Sassacus the Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa, were substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts seems certain, and the early ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... greatly sought the honour of forming part of it, for the sake of wearing its rich uniform and caracoling in front of the ladies. But recruiting was now such a difficult matter that one had to content oneself with good-looking young men of doubtful or ruined nobility, whose only care was for the meagre "pay" which just enabled them ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... he wrote and destroyed. The floor became littered with torn papers. Then he enveloped a meagre result. Parker had ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... extraordinary cordial. He knew he could securely depend, not only on the good faith of an English ministry, but also on the good plight of the British nation, which, like an indulgent nurse, hath always presented the nipple to her meagre German allies. Those, however, who pretended to consider and canvas events, without prejudice and prepossession, could not help owning their surprise at hearing an alliance stigmatized as pernicious to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... moment they dashed into the midst of a snow village, and were immediately surrounded by the excited natives. For some time no information could be gleaned from their interpreter, who was too excited to make use of his meagre amount of English. They observed, however, that the natives, although much excited, did not seem to be so much surprised at the appearance of white men amongst them as those were whom they had first met with near the ship. In a short time Meetuck apparently had expended all he had to say to his ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... known in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... busy. He had formed several theories to account for the disappearance of the youth, of whom he had grown extremely fond, brief as was their acquaintance, but the data upon which he based these theories were so vague and meagre that he could do nothing until more ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... lady was for a time tearful in her forebodings that Harry would be starved, for in those days it was a matter of national opinion that our neighbours across the Channel fed on the most meagre of diet; but she was not in the habit of disputing her husband's will, and when the letter of acceptance had been sent off, she busied herself in preparing Harry's ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... of olive, fig, and pomegranate trees. The trees being small and low, the foliage of the olive thin and pale, the leaves of the fig broad and few, and the soil appearing everywhere at their roots, as well as between the rows of vines, the vegetation, when viewed from a little distance, has a meagre and ragged appearance. The whiteness of the hills, which the eye can hardly bear to rest upon at noon, the intense blue of the sea, the peculiar forms of the foliage, and the deficiency of shade and verdure, made me almost fancy myself in ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... from the school at Millersville, so Amanda spent most of her weekends at home. Each time she had wonderful tales to tell, at least they seemed wonderful to the little group at the Reist farmhouse. Mrs. Reist and Uncle Amos, denied in their youth of more than a very meagre education, took just pride in the girl who was pursuing the road to knowledge. Philip, boylike, expressed no pride in his sister, but he listened attentively to her stories of how the older students played pranks on the newcomers. Millie was proud ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... 'Hard-favour'd tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean, 931 Hateful divorce of love,'—thus chides she Death,— 'Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean To stifle beauty and to steal his breath, Who when he liv'd, his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... studies uninterrupted, was a friend of Authors, and composed a small work, "De Infelicitate Literatorum," which has been frequently reprinted.[1] It forms a catalogue of several Italian literati, his contemporaries; a meagre performance, in which the author shows sometimes a predilection for the marvellous, which happens so rarely in human affairs; and he is so unphilosophical, that he places among the misfortunes of literary men those fatal casualties to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... together—which was how I had to take them—they form as good an illustration as I can recall of the manner in which, for the good of his soul doubtless, fate sometimes deals with a man's avidity. These incidents certainly had larger bearings than the comparatively meagre consequence we are here concerned with—though I feel that consequence also a thing to speak of with some respect. It's mainly in such a light, I confess, at any rate, that the ugly fruit of my exile is at this ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... meagre news from Boston since she went away. Bertram had not written at all. William had written twice—hurt, grieved, puzzled, questioning letters that were very hard to answer. From Marie, too, had come letters of much the same sort. By far the cheeriest epistles had come ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... him: they had eaten up the last of his bacon: he stood up, and they were ready for the journey. The smoke from their meagre fire went thinly into the air, the small grey clouds of it went slowly up: nothing beside remained to bid them farewell, or for them to thank for their strange night's hospitality. They climbed till they reached ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... modern historians. Tillemont and Dupin are very full and very learned. But a truly immortal history of the church, exhaustive yet artistic, brilliant as well as learned, is yet to be written. The ancient historians, like Eusebius and Socrates and Zosimus, are very meagre. The genius and spirit of the early church can only be drawn from the lives and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... family, into two genera—the horse (equus) and the ass (asinus)—the principal points of distinction being, that animals of the horse kind have long flowing manes, full tails, and warty callosities on both hind and fore limbs; while asses, on the contrary, have short, meagre, and upright manes, tails slender and furnished only with long hairs at the extremity, and their hind limbs wanting the callosities. These, however, are found on the ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... match Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know! He holds on firmly to some thread of life— (It is the life to lead perforcedly) Which runs across some vast distracting orb 180 Of glory on either side that meagre thread, Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet— The spiritual life around the earthly life: The law of that is known to him as this, His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. So is the man perplext with impulses Sudden to start off crosswise, not ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... a length for which we must apologise to our readers; and yet this is but a meagre sketch of the contents of a book which deals with a very large proportion of the subjects that occupy the thoughts and move the feelings of religious men. We will attempt to sum up in a few words the leading ideas of the author. Addressing a mixed audience, he undertakes to controvert ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... evil thing that walks by night, In fog, or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... not amusing itself; it has a busy and serious air, like an Englishman or a Dutchman. Neither polyps nor jelly-fish, neither sea-weed nor crabs enliven the sands at low water; the sea life is poor and meagre. What is wonderful is the struggle of man against a miserly and formidable power. Nature has done little for him, but she allows herself to be managed. Stepmother though she be, she is accommodating, subject to the occasional destruction of a hundred thousand ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... victual for Walrave and others of that faith, on the meagre-days; but Walrave eat right before him,—evidently nothing but the name of Catholic. Indeed, he was a man hated by the Catholics, for his special rapacity on them. 'He is of no religion at all,' said the Catholic Prelate ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Hastings, ignorant of the conditions of English political life, could bring forward no better champion than Major Scott. Hastings opposed to the greatest orator and most widely informed man of his age, a man of meagre parts, who only succeeded in wearying profoundly the House of Commons and every other audience to which he appealed. Such a proconsul as Warren Hastings standing his trial upon such momentous charges needed all the ability, all the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... past forty minutes, bringing to the work of cross-questioning her all the intelligence, craftiness and logic at his command. The net result of his fusillade of interrogatories, however, was exceedingly meagre. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... mammary glands be developed in oviparous creatures? Mr. Darwin regards them as originating in cutaneous glands, developed in the pouch of the marsupials. But his grounds for this statement are very meagre. To a great extent they rest on what an American Naturalist "believes he has seen;" and besides, the ornithorhyncus, which has no pouch, and which is lower in the scale of life than the marsupials, by Mr. Darwin's ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... places land-slides had blocked the trail, and it involved a great amount of labor to clear them off. Everything around Ben West was of a most discouraging nature. What with being cold and wet all day; leg weary in the extreme when night came; bill of fare very meagre, consisting of bread, beans, bacon, and coffee, the men he hired sometimes felt like throwing up the sponge. For they met many returning who said the country was hell and no good; many were sick lying along the side of the ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... Meagre and cold was the sympathy which a transgressor might expect from the assembly at the pond. The women mingled freely with the crowd and appeared to take a peculiar interest in the punishment about to be inflicted. The age had not ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... are said to have been the produce of long and patient labor. The epithet of "slow" was early given to him by Rochester, and was frequently repeated. In truth his mind, unless we are greatly mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great labor and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest flavor. He has scarcely more claim to originality than Terence. It is not too much to say that there is hardly anything of the least value in his plays of which the hint is ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... close in upon the road, boldly took his beasts along the neglected parterres until at last he reached the stables. Here, near the open door he saw Malsain, tall and thin, but muscular and strong as whipcord, sitting down by the light of a guttering candle to a meagre repast of bread and cheese, washed down with ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... Christmas-day, passed very agreeably: we treated the men, on that day, with the best the establishment afforded. Although that was no great affair, they seemed well satisfied; for they had been restricted, during the last few months, to a very meagre diet, living, as one may say, on sun-dried fish. On the 27th, the schooner having returned from her second voyage up the river, we dismantled her, and laid her up for the winter at the entrance ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... convalescence, as Raymond would sit beside her bed and read aloud to her, their eyes were constantly meeting in unspoken apprehension. They saw the ground, so solid a month before, now crumbling beneath their feet; their struggles, their makeshifts, their starved and meagre life had all been in vain. Their little savings were gone; the breadwinner, tempting fate once too often, had received what was to her worse than a mortal wound, for the means of livelihood had been ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... he had done for Greece. To his persistent entreaties were due all the meagre displays of patriotism by which the Government of the country was maintained and Capodistrias accepted as President, and all the feeble efforts by which the war was carried on and the triumph of the Porte was averted until the direct interference of the Allied Powers. That interference had ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... may taste the meagre liquid, and pronounce it agreeable to their gustative inclinations; but something more than an agreeable titilation of the palate is required to keep up that manufactory of blood, bone, and muscle which constitutes the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... and Britain. As aide-de-camp, or orderly, for such a position he probably held, his place was by Caesar's side. They forded the rivers together, walked or rode through woodland or open side by side, shared the same meagre rations, and lay in the same tent at the end of the day's march, ready to spring from the ground at a moment's warning to defend each other against attack from the savage foe. Caesar's narrative of his campaigns in Gaul is a soldier's story of military movements, ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... proved meagre enough. Her mother died when Mary Ann was a child; her father when she was still a mere girl. His affairs were found in hopeless confusion, and Mary Ann was considered lucky to be taken into the house of the well-to-do Mrs. Leadbatter, of London, the eldest sister of a young woman who had ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... take shape in criminal action. The intellectual training given by town life does not, as we have seen, assist in stimulating higher intellectual and moral interests whose satisfaction lies above the plane of material desire. There is indeed some evidence that the meagre and wholly rudimentary education given to our town-dwellers is, by reason of its inadequacy, a direct feeder of town vices. The lower forms of music-hall entertainment, the dominant popular vice of gambling, the more degraded ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... specially on the subject of Irish writers. First is Bishop Nicholson's "Irish Historical Library." It gives accounts of numerous writers, but is wretchedly meagre. In Harris's "Hibernica" is a short tract on the same subject; and in Harris's edition of Ware's works an ample treatise on Irish Writers. This treatise is most valuable, but must be read with caution, as Ware was slightly, and Harris enormously, prejudiced ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... easily be captured, and that the intervening district promised an abundance of ripening corn and green apples. It was decided, however, that such fare, on which, it may be said, the Confederates learned afterwards to subsist for many days in succession, was too meagre for the work in hand. Jackson, runs the story, groaned so audibly when Lee pronounced in favour of postponement, that Longstreet called the attention of the Commander-in-Chief ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... displeasure against foolish men, That live an atheist life; involves the heaven In tempests; quits his grasp upon the winds, And gives them all their fury; bids a plague Kindle a fiery boil upon the shin, And putrefy the breath of blooming health. He calls for famine, and the meagre fiend Blows mildew from between his shrivelled lips, And taints the golden ear. He springs his mines, And desolates a nation at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... quarter-deck of the Ranger, deep in thought, paced the captain, John Paul Jones, a man of meagre build but of indomitable will, and as daring a fighter as roved the ocean {2} in this year 1778. He held a letter of marque from the Congress of the revolted colonies in America, and was just now engaged in harrying the British ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... his species, let him spend a week or two at Washington; let him go amongst the little leaders of party in that preposterous capital, watch their little tricks, the rapacity with which they clutch the meanest spoils and wonder how political profligacy grows fat upon diet so meagre and uninviting. He will come away with a conviction, already indorsed by the more respectable portion of the American community, that their government is the most corrupt under the sun; but he will not, with them, lay the flattering notion ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... that he did no other good than that of keeping away some person more objectionable than himself. He was however prepared to repeat this self-sacrifice in a spirit of patriotism for which he received a very meagre meed of eulogy from Miss Jack, and an amount of self-applause which ...
— Miss Sarah Jack, of Spanish Town, Jamaica • Anthony Trollope
... unparalleled in every individual, their rendering suffers, on the whole, from a great monotony. Love's gesture and symptoms are noted and unvarying; its vocabulary is poor and worn. Even a poet, therefore, can give of love but a meagre expression, while the philosopher, who renounces dramatic representation, is condemned to be avowedly inadequate. Love, to the lover, is a noble and immense inspiration; to the naturalist it is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... were being rubbed with ice to draw the frost out of them. The farmer-boys were allowed no share in all this excitement, for the fisher-boys, who went in and out and saw everything, drove them away if they approached—and sold meagre information at extortionate prices. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... lovely Rhine they grew more and more enthusiastic in their admiration and curiosity, and finding the meagre description of the guide-books very unsatisfactory, Amy begged her uncle to tell her all the legends of picturesque ruin, rock and river, as ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... insubstantial, he was slight and short and a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald. Delicacy was in the arch of his eyebrow, the finish of his facial line, the economy of "treatment" by which his negative nose had been enabled to look important and his meagre mouth to ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... Spurzheim are sustained by positive science. In the further development of the subject, hereafter, the true value and proper position of the discoveries of Ferrier, and the continental vivisectionists will be explained, though but meagre contributions to psychology, they furnish very valuable additional information as to the functions ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... the beach until he reached the open door of the cabin and looked in. He found it deserted as he had expected. He went in and hunted about among its meagre belongings and came back to the boys, triumphant, bringing with him a hatchet, an axe and a large, keen-bladed knife that was used by Mark in cleaning ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... of Spenser is wrapt in a similar obscurity to that which hides from us his great predecessor Chaucer, and his still greater contemporary Shakspere. As in the case of Chaucer, our principal external authorities are a few meagre entries in certain official documents, and such facts as may be gathered from his works. The birth-year of each poet is determined by inference. The circumstances in which each died are a matter of controversy. What sure information we have of the intervening events ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... Lenton, simpler in style but identical in arrangement and facts with the former work; a biography by Robert Redman; a metrical chronicle by Elmham (published in Rolls Series in "Memorials of Henry the Fifth"); and the meagre chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne. The King's Norman campaigns may be studied in M. Puiseux's "Siege de Rouen" (Caen, 1867). The "Wars of the English in France" and Blondel's work "De Reductione Normanniae" (both in Rolls Series) give ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... supplied at the lowest price; but it often was so intolerably bad, that I was obliged to send it back untasted, and endeavour, by a walk in the fresh air instead, to appease my hunger. I had lived thus for some time, and was, as may be imagined, become meagre enough, when Mrs. W., with whom I was not personally acquainted, proposed to me, through her housekeeper, that she should provide me with a dinner at the same low charge as the eating-house. I was astonished, but extremely delighted, and thankfully accepted the proposal. I soon discovered, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... he took his leave of us, with strong symptoms of gratitude and attachment, and set out for Sunderland, in order to embark in the first collier, bound for the river Thames. He had not been gone half an hour, when we were joined by another character, which promised something extraordinary — A tall, meagre figure, answering, with his horse, the description of Don Quixote mounted on Rozinante, appeared in the twilight at the inn door, while my aunt and Liddy stood at a window in the dining-room — He wore a coat, the cloth of which had once been scarlet, trimmed with Brandenburgs, now totally deprived ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... consider what way of attempting to impart that knowledge may be the best fitted, at once to obviate the natural indisposition to the subject, and to provide that when it does obtain a place in their understanding, it shall not be a meagre, diminutive, insulated occupant there, but in its proper dimensions and relations. And if, in attentively studying this, there be any who come to ascertain, that the right expedient is a bare inculcation of religious instruction, disconnected, on system, from the illustrative aid of other ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... was buried was made known by the researches of Signor Sacchi, a Cremonese conversant with the annals of his native city.[28] This was an interesting addition to the meagre information previously handed down to us touching Stradivari. It had long been known that a family grave was purchased by Stradivari in the church of San Domenico, in the year 1729: but in the certificates ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... he stopped, but said presently: Hard it is to tell thee of them, but needs must I. There be two of these things; and one is an image of a tall woman of middle-age, red-haired, white- skinned, and meagre, and whiles she has a twiggen rod in her hand, and whiles a naked short sword, and whiles nought at all. But the voice of her is ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... course, to be found a few pirates with household names such as Kidd, Teach, and Avery. A few, too, of the buccaneers, headed by the great Sir Henry Morgan, come in for their share. But I compare with indignation the meagre show of pirates in that monumental work with the rich profusion of divines! Even during the years when piracy was at its height—say from 1680 until 1730—the pirates are utterly swamped by the theologians. Can it be that these two professions flourished most vigorously side by side, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... circulate in the markets. Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette were in their own fashion keeping the oaths of silence they had taken. For her own part, Mademoiselle Saget warily held her tongue, leaving the two others to circulate the story of Florent's antecedents. At first only a few meagre details were hawked about in low tones; then various versions of the facts got into circulation, incidents were exaggerated, and gradually quite a legend was constructed, in which Florent played the part of a perfect bogey man. He had ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... selecting certain dresses, hats, stockings, etc., each of which she laid carelessly aside: an imposing pile of many hues, all bright and gay and glittering. In another heap she laid the sombre things of black: a meagre assortment as compared ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Just the same kind of pompous platitude conveyed in turgid phraseology, at which, in old times, Members used to laugh and run away. But CHAPLIN had them now. Like the wedding guest whom the Ancient Mariner button-holed—though as PLUNKET reminds me, the A.M. was meagre in frame, and CHAPLIN is not—the House could not help but hear. Once, when the orator dropped easily into autobiographical episode, described himself strolling about the fields of Lincolnshire, turning up a turnip here, drawing ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... his eyes sharply and beheld the meagre figure of Mrs. Silk. In one hand she held a medicine-bottle and a glass and in ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... meagre in nutriment; it contains but little phosphorous matter, with less carbon than other cereals, and is best and most generally employed as a diet ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... I was away there in Montreal waiting for the New Yorkers to take it—if they could. They were a sorry rabble, for they rushed on La Prairie, that meagre place,—massacred ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... harshness, and he had looked into her chamber in just the same way. The present room was much humbler, but what struck him about it was the abundance of books lying everywhere. Their number and quality made the meagre furniture that supported them seem absurdly disproportionate. Some, indeed many, must have been recently purchased; and though he encouraged her to buy in reason, he had no notion that she indulged her innate passion so extensively in proportion to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Betsy Thoughtless is evaporated; the fire of the author scarcely sparkles. Even two meagre volumes could not be filled, without a little History of Melinda Fairfax;—without the Tale of Cornaro and the Turk,—a tale told twice, in verse and prose,—a tale already often published, and as often read. Alas, poor author! we catch ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... be of the simplest description, without paintings, sculpture, or stained glass; and the ritual used at the services was in keeping with this bareness. The arrangements of the refectory and the dormitory were equally meagre. Hard manual work, strict silence, and one daily meal gave the inmates every opportunity of conquering their ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... opinion he could lay no claim. His library was sold at auction in New York on the evening of October 12, 1868. If the collection disposed of on that occasion was really his library in full, it must be confessed it was a sorry affair and meagre in the extreme. In surveying the collection a judge of the value of such property would perhaps pronounce it worth from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty dollars. The books brought fabulous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... uneasy about what that ancient lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato, and the whole ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... family dinner, you see," said Mr. Smith, as we took our places at the meagre board. "We are plain people. Shall I help you to some of the ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity. Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... them standing their little empty shoes in front of the meagre fire, he bowed his head on his hands, and the tears trickled through his fingers. But the mother smiled softly to herself, as she kissed each of the children and tucked them into their worn ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... time, the great mass of the people in Europe—men and women—were ignorant to the last degree, possessing little if any sense of delicacy or refinement, and were utterly uncouth. For the most part, they lived in miserable hovels, were clothed in a most meagre and scanty way, and were little better than those beasts of burden which are compelled to do their master's bidding. Among these people, rights depended quite largely upon physical strength, and women were generally misused. To the lord of ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... said, I am going to quote a few of my old gleanings from gravestones, not because they are good of their kind—my collection will look poor and meagre enough compared with those that others have made—but I have an object in doing it which will appear presently ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... a large annual sum out of moneys provided by Acts of Parliament for University purposes. The reason which the Commissioners gave fer not making this institution the basis of a new College was declared to be its meagre scale which makes ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... themselves idealists of a sort, entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to their real inspiration, to have laid all ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... of the birth, childhood, early associations, and very peculiar and abnormal psychological experiences of Professor Stowe. Aside from the fact of Dr. Stowe's being Mrs. Stowe's husband, and for this reason entitled to notice in any sketch of her life, however meagre, he is the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and "Oldtown Fireside Stories" embody the experiences of his childhood and youth among the grotesque and original ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... theme of conversation, and a topic for all sorts of discussions. National feeling was wrought up. Jokes were cracked upon the only Frenchman in the ship, and comparisons made between "old horse" and "soup meagre," etc., etc. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... shown off to advantage by an extensive smile, when she found that we had no murderous intentions. The other gin was the most repulsive object I have ever seen—like a hideous toad with wrinkled, baggy skin, with legs and arms so thin as to be no more than skin stretched tight over very meagre shinbones; and the face of this wretched being was a mass of festering wounds, on which no one could look without pity and horror. The man, too, was remarkable; an exceedingly smart young buck with an air of irresponsibility about him that suggested ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... with some meagre little purchases in hand, had been listening to the discussion, started for the door. When he had opened it, he turned and faced them. "I'll tell ye one thing, all of ye," he said, "an' that ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever is offended at this juxtaposition, and whoever can deem no revolution important which is not boisterous and material, has not yet risen to the broad and lofty viewpoint of the history of mankind. Even in our meagre histories of culture, which, for the most part, resemble a collection of variant readings accompanied by a running commentary the classical text of which has perished, many a little book of which the noisy rabble took scant notice in its day, plays a greater role than all that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... it upon the burning sands of Africa or in the frozen home of the Esquimaux, that he knows more than he puts in practice. We will concede to him that the quantum of his moral knowledge is very stinted and meagre; but in the same breath we will remind him that small as it is, he has not lived up to it; that he too has "come short"; that he too, knowing God in the dimmest, faintest degree, has yet not glorified him as God in the ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... returned, who had been seeing his horses provided for; that is to say, he had economically let them loose in the fields, where the poor beasts had to content themselves with the scanty moss they could pull off the rocks and a few meagre sea weeds, and the next day they would not fail to come of themselves and resume the labours ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... especially when hanging in clusters forty or fifty feet skyward. We had often read of the fan-palm, but they are much more curious to see than to read about, being here presented in their most thriving aspect. The California specimens are quite meagre and unsatisfactory in comparison with those grown so near the equator. Here the tree springs up in the exact shape of an outspread feather-fan, as though it were artificially trained, and reaches the height of thirty or forty feet, making a very distinctive ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... indeed, so exactly and so fully what they are that little remains for their bibliographer to add beyond the meagre historical detail here given. Their short and simple annals could be eked out by confidences which would not appreciably enrich the materials of the literary history of their time, and it seems better to leave them to the imagination of such posterity as they may reach. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... my pocket for the coin I glanced at the doorkeeper, the marked character and individuality of whose aspect encouraged me to expect something not quite in the ordinary way. He wore an old-fashioned great-coat, much faded, within which his meagre person was so completely enveloped that the rest of his attire was undistinguishable. But his visage was remarkably wind-flushed, sunburnt, and weather-worn, and had a most, unquiet, nervous, and apprehensive ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... house. It was rather a hovel than a house; but, poor as it was, it was as neat as misery could make it. The old woman was sitting up in her wretched bed, winding worsted; four meagre, ill-clothed, pale children were all busy, some of them sticking pins in paper for the pin-maker, and others sorting rags ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... then, the war was ended once more, after many men and much money had been consumed. The legions supported for it were very numerous, whereas the spoils taken were exceedingly meagre. [-17-] On this occasion also Germanicus announced the victory, in honor of which Augustus and Tiberius were allowed to bear the name imperator and to celebrate a triumph; and they received still other honors, as well as two arches bearing trophies, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from the whole heavy pile there fell but death-like silence, and a covert quiver of distress that had come from far away, perhaps from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola |
