|
|
|
More "Pitiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do nothing more, sympathized with his feelings. The poor negro murmured and groaned in a manner that would have enlisted the feelings of a Patagonian; and in this way he continued until about three o'clock in the morning, when his moaning became so loud and pitiful, that the officer of the guard came to the door with an attendant, and unbolting it, entered with a lantern in his hand. He held the light toward his face, and inquired what he was making such a noise about? "Oh! good massa, good massa, do send for docta; ma head got a pile o' cuts on him," said ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... sacred group on earth to him, who, whatever his faults might be, loved them both dearly. He took a candle in his hand and, stepping lightly, went up the stairs to the nursery door. There was no sound of wailing within, no pitiful little cry to tell the tale; all was still and dark. He tried the door softly, but it would not open. Then another terror awoke, and for the moment took his breath from him. What had happened to the child? Sir Tom suffered enough at this moment to have expiated many ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the most valuable sort of aid, but the treaty declared that no assistance should be given him. It was a gross injustice on the part of our Government, which did no special credit to itself, when, after the deposed ruler had made a pitiful appeal to Congress, that body presented him with a beggarly ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... forms; vast piles of building mouldering to dust; hanging-gardens where the weeds had grown so strong that their stems, like wedges driven home, had split the arch and rent the wall; stone-terraced lanes, with the lizards running into and out of every chink; beggars of all sorts everywhere: pitiful, picturesque, hungry, merry; children beggars and aged beggars. Often at posting-houses and other halting places, these miserable creatures would appear to her the only realities of the day; and many a time, when the money ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... is a pitiful case; and easily mended, since Fay is so eager about it. Hope the lad is all she says, and nothing catching about his illness. ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... blown into flame and fury by theological and seignorial bellows! So that there shall be fighting from behind ditches, death-volleys bursting out of thickets and ravines of rivers; huts burning, feet of the pitiful women hurrying to refuge with their children on their back; seedfields fallow, whitened with human bones;—'eighty thousand, of all ages, ranks, sexes, flying at once across the Loire,' with wail borne far on the winds: and, in brief, for years coming, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... not stir. Whiter she could not grow, but a hopeless despair settled over her face, pitiful to witness. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... night through without a minute's unconsciousness. What wonder that his flesh had sunk away from his bones, and that his frame had lost its elasticity! For some hours every day he had lain prostrate on the bed in his cell, in a state of feebleness pitiful to behold, unable to speak or move, and hardly able to breathe. "One morning," he writes, "while gasping for breath, I besought the gaoler to let me have more air, by throwing up the window. 'You are ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... letters which come to me from St. Cloud say that you weep continually. This is not right. It is necessary to control one's self and to be contented. Hortense is entirely wrong. What you write me about her is pitiful. Adieu, my love. Believe in the affection with ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... touched by him, and there was deep joy in the thought. She would be always deprived of him, it was true, but the impossible must remain the impossible, and she would have drawn herself as near to him as could be. For a whole year she fed in fancy upon her pitiful little happiness. Alone, and with her eyes intent upon her work, she lived in another world, and believed herself to be his wife in a humble measure. The hours flowed on slowly like the motion of her needle; her hapless imagination was relieved. And then she at times indulged in a little hope. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... has the mark of use upon it, is a recommendation to the people of sense, and a hat with too much nap, and too high lustre, a derogatory circumstance. The best coats in our streets are worn on the backs of penniless fops, broken down merchants, clerks with pitiful salaries, and men that do not pay up. The heaviest gold chains dangle from the fobs of gamblers and gentlemen of very limited means; costly ornaments on ladies, indicate to the eyes that are well opened, the fact of a silly lover or husband cramped ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... she commanded. "He is reprieved until this hour to-morrow." The guards dragged off Calvaster, babbling his pitiful gratitude. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... shore, jaded from all these natural wonders," Conseil added, "think how we'll look down on those pitiful land masses, those puny works of man! No, the civilized world won't be good ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... the slough than go back one hairsbreadth. Till, one sunshiny morning,—no one knew how, and he never knew how himself—the steps were so high and dry, and the scum and slime were so low, that this hare-hearted man made a venture, and so got over. But, then, as an unkind friend of his said, this pitiful pilgrim had a slough of despond in his own mind which he carried always and everywhere about with him, and made him the proverb of despondency that he was and is. Only, that sunshiny morning he got over both the slough inside of him and outside of him, ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... just setting quiet." This was a thing Jane always added during all the years in which she told the story. "That was what made me notice. She kept by me and she kept looking at me different from any way I'd seen her look before—not pitiful exactly—but something like it. And once she came up and kissed me and once or twice she just kind of touched my dress or my hand—as I stood by her. SHE knew. No one ...
— In the Closed Room • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... roots he was so anxious to dispose of brought a pound on the market at that time, he would have been insane with anger. So the Harvester's eyes were dancing with fun and a wry grin twisted his lips as he clambered over the banks of the recently dredged river, and looked at its pitiful condition ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... counsels and pitiful irresolution. The commanders of the various contingents were brave men, veterans of the Mediterranean wars. But the coalition lacked one determined leader who could dominate the rest, decide upon a definite plan of action, and put it into energetic execution. Time was wasted ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... flesh-and-blood men and women, not the ghostly outline figures which pass for such, in what is called History. The horn lantern of the biographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled, from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to us his pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and of the conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light upon contemporaneous activities; what seemed before half fabulous, rises up in distinct and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... not pitiful. And I thinking the chimney sweeping would be forgot and not reproached to me, if you have handled the fooleries and watches of the world, that you don't know the end ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... stepped out of the throng, and took me under their protection, and wanted to lead me forth out of the press; but the crowd, which had at first been scattered over the sidewalk, now became disorderly, and hustled me. All stared at me and begged; and each face was more pitiful and suffering and humble than the last. I distributed all that I had with me. I had not much money, something like twenty rubles; and in company with the crowd, I entered the Lyapinsky lodging-house. This house is huge. It consists of four ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... however, that none of them slept. He pictured each one, his own father, Kootanie George, Ernestine, Lieutenant Max, lying wide awake, staring up into the stars, each one busy with his own destiny. What pitiful pictures are projected into the calm of the star-set skies from the wretched ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... terror, and she struggled frantically, but she felt its grip of steel about her wrist; and while she sat there with her face hidden, she was learning to gaze into its eyes, and front their fiery terror. When she looked up again her face was very white and pitiful to see, and she rose from her chair and went toward the door so unsteadily that the woman put ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride of stomach; and I scorn to fear the face of any man living: above everything, I abhor as hell, the idea of sneaking in a corner to avoid a dun—possibly some pitiful, sordid wretch, who in my heart I despise and detest. 'Tis this, and this alone, that endears economy to me. In the matter of books, indeed, I am very profuse. My favourite authors are of the sentimental ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... cannon began to boom from the Castle of St. Angelo. Gabriel Zimandy sprang out of bed and dressed himself quickly. His first care was to tap at Madam Dormandy's door and inquire for her health. The patient answered in a pitiful voice that the guns were fairly splitting her poor head, and that she did not expect to live the day through. This reply seemed to be quite to the advocate's liking: of the lady's succumbing to her ailment he had not the slightest ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Mis' Ricker, don't you go givin' in. Your kitchen's a sight with the good things o' your hand—think o' that,' I told her; 'think how you mortgaged your very funeral for to-night, an' brace yourself up,' An' she says, awful pitiful: 'I can't, Calliope,' she says. ''T seems like this slips the pins right out. They ain't nothin' to deboo with now, anyway,' she told me. ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... that repelled her, And the cold hand that turned her away, And take, from the lips that denied her, This answerless prayer of to-day! Take Lord, from my mem'ry forever That pitiful sob of despair, And the patter and trip of the little bare feet, And the one piercing ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... She's the most mercenary little jade in Europe. Yet she really affects my peace of mind; she is always running in my head. It's a striking contrast to your noble and virtuous attachment—a vile contrast! It is rather pitiful that it should be the best I am able to do for myself at my present respectable age. I am a nice young man, eh, en somme? You can't warrant my future, as you do ...
— The American • Henry James
... not work enough for me," replied Carrie firmly, and passing over my clever argument with a dignified silence; "it is the drudgery of mere ornamentation that I hate. I will do my best for those dreadful children, Esther. Are they not pitiful little overdressed creatures? And I will try and please their mother though I have not a thought in common with her. And when I have finished my ornamental brick-making—told my tales of the bricks——" here she paused, and looked at me ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... front and down the lawn, in sight of the veranda, where at this hour everybody was there to see them. Lucy meant everybody to see. He had chosen that place, and that hour, also, which wore, appropriately, the innocence of morning. He knew her pitiful belief that he was defying public opinion in being seen with her; but from her ultimate consent, from her continuous trust in him, and from the heartrending way she clung to him, he gathered that she knew him, she knew that defiance, from him, ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... face of her own loved father, the pressure upon her heart seemed almost more than she could bear. The tears stole down her cheeks, and her eyes sought those of her mother with a glance of almost pitiful appeal. ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hours a day in English factories, did it show practical good sense to delay a "short time" bill until hundreds of thousands of starving workmen agreed to starve yet more, if need be, to relieve the overwork of their families, and until the most pitiful procession the sun ever shone upon, that of the factory children, just as they left their work, marched through the streets of Manchester, that burst into sobs and tears at the sight? Yet if, in such instances, where there ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ear be deafened to the little wail that echoes pitiful within the chambers of her heart! When we remember the great passion of motherhood, the intensity of the drama, the prolongation into years of its deep interplots, we cannot marvel longer at the perennial, lasting character of the mother's love. Given, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... misguided soul, yielded again to her distraught imagination, amid the pitiful ejaculations of the entire company, with the exception of one mundane, young man who, suddenly assailed by the wild fancy that he wasn't drinking, crept furtively to the Moorish rook, and ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... me with a slowly kindling eye. I murmured some kind ineffective nothings about his being ill and needing advice and care, but he seemed absorbed in the effort to recall distinctly what had last passed between us. "You were right," he said, with a pitiful smile, "I am a dawdler! I am a failure! I shall do nothing more in this world. You opened my eyes; and, though the truth is bitter, I bear you no grudge. Amen! I have been sitting here for a week, face to face with the truth, with the past, with ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... William Colleton, on the other hand, with means hourly increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious entertainment—lodge ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... you not try to bring that time?" he said with pitiful simplicity. "When you speak I believe all you say; other people ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... from our borders? If it must be so, it will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have reason to tremble, when it remembers that the fate of nations is in the hands of One who is very pitiful, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... already says, "Dear Soul of ours," therein making itself familiar. Then, as is stated, it commands where it ought to rebuke that Soul, in order to induce it to come to her; and therefore it says to her: "See, she is lowly, Pitiful, courteous, though so wise ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... sonnets, in spite of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is to be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse days would have made Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to the tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters, to those who—as I do—believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which poets could invent. More than one touch, indeed, of utter self-abasement, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... this library here I have seen him open a letter with something that didn't just suit him in it, and he would rip around and carry on like an Indian, saying he wished he had the man that wrote it here, he wouldn't do a thing to him, and so on, till it was just pitiful. I never saw such a change. And here's another thing. For a week before he died Manderson neglected his work, for the first time in my experience. He wouldn't answer a letter or a cable, though things looked like going all to pieces over there. ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... renown which had long been their due. Then the Oak raised his head, rather hoary with age, And shook his broad arms in the air in a rage, And exhorted them all with a feeling of pride, To maintain their ground firmly, whate'er might betide. The Giant Elm follow'd and proudly look'd down On the pitiful plots of their foes with a frown. The Ash, pale with anger, derided "the crew," And the smooth-temper'd Purple Beech look'd rather blue. The Chesnut grew heated, and roasted them well; And bitter the taunts of the Almond-tree fell. The Apple and Pear both maintain'd, in their spleen, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... pirate! GIRLS: (recoiling, hopping) A pirate! Horror! FREDERIC: Ladies, do not shun me! This evening I renounce my vile profession; And, to that end, O pure and peerless maidens! Oh, blushing buds of ever-blooming beauty! I, sore at heart, implore your kind assistance. EDITH: How pitiful his tale! KATE: How rare his beauty GIRLS: How pitiful his tale! How ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Pitiful the cry, pitiful the cry the thrush is making in the Pleasant Ridge; sorrowful is the cry of the blackbird ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... agreed drily, breaking in on her quivering speech and steeling himself against its pitiful appeal. "All that. And then some. And it's generous of you not to blame me for being just the very tiniest least bit riled by it. That helps. I was afraid my peevishness might displease you. My temper isn't what it should be. If it were ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... maybe, throwing in a verse of the Psalms, if he wanted a bit of a change, would have done him far more good than his pretty stories, as he called them. And what's the next thing our young parson does? Why he tries to make us all feel pitiful for the black slaves, and leaves little pictures of negroes about, with the question printed below, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' just as if I was to be hail-fellow-well-met with every negro footman. They do say he takes no sugar in his tea, because he thinks ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... hand again. She found herself weeping, and yet the child did not complain. But it was plainly an effort for her to speak. Like most victims of complete deafness, it would not be long before she would be speechless, too. She "mouthed" her words in a pitiful way. ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... —the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget me, she thinks, as ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... far-reaching consequences. It is still he who disposes of the nations, since he disposes of their souls, and the Republic acts most inconsiderately, from the standpoint of its own interests, in showing that it no longer even suspects it. And tell the Cardinal too, that it is really pitiful to see in what a wretched way your Republic selects its bishops, as though it intentionally desired to weaken its episcopacy. Leaving out a few fortunate exceptions, your bishops are men of small brains, and as a result ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... now, let hearts united be To laud His praises joyfully, The God-Man born to-day. And let Thy mercy reach us now For pitiful and kind art Thou, ...
— Hymns from the Greek Office Books - Together with Centos and Suggestions • John Brownlie
... sweet wild-flowers; her little eyes had never seen the bright, blue sky, save between dark brick walls. Her little head often pained her. She was foot-weary and heart-sore; and what was worse than all, she had never heard of heaven, "where the weary rest." Wasn't it very pitiful? ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... of compassion soon becomes wearisome, and not the worthiest object in the world can keep one's charity interested through four hundred pages. Antonio, in "The Improvisatore," is a milksop whom the author, with a lavish expenditure of sympathy, parades as a hero. He is positively ludicrous in his pitiful softness, vanity, and humility. That the book nevertheless remains unfailingly popular, and is even yet found in the satchel of every Roman tourist, is chiefly due to the poetic intensity with which the author absorbed and portrayed every Roman sight and sound. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... compare favorably with the whites; they are easily handled, true and obedient; there is less viciousness among them; they are more patient; they have great constancy. The character of the white, as you know, runs to extremes; one has bull-dog courage, another is a pitiful cur; one is excessively vicious, another pure and noble. The phases of the character of the white touches the stars and descends to the lowest depths. The blacks character occupies the inner circle. Their status is mediocrity, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... that our Government, entrusted to the personnel of the Provisional Cabinet, is a pitiful and helpless Government, which only awaits the sweep of the broom of History to give way to a really popular Government. But we are trying to avoid a conflict, even now, to-day. We hope that the All-Russian Congress will take... into its hands that power ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... triumph through the night, and blended with the rustling of the leaves under a summer breeze, and she stretched her white arms to heaven, imploring the kind God with prayers that she dared not speak even to His pitiful ear. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... sell his soul to Templeton Thorpe in exchange for the fifty thousand dollars with which the old man had baited him on three separate occasions, and wishing that Lutie could know. It was something that she would have to approve of in him! It was rather pitiful that he should have found a grain of comfort in the fact that he had refused to kill ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... that she hoped they would starve to death, ignoring their pitiful glances. In the end it was our own tender-hearted Aggie who baked pancakes for them and, loosening their hands while I stood guard, saw that they had not only food but the gentle refreshment of fresh tea. Tish it was, however, who, not to be outdone in magnanimity, permitted them to go, one by one, ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Severn at the ferry of Ash, about ten miles above Bristol, and got to Monmouth to dinner through a rugged, indifferent country. It is a pitiful old town, and hath nothing remarkable in it; and from thence through a fat fertile country I got to the ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... Sheffield line was vehemently opposed by a Liverpool gentleman, on the ground that it would materially injure the prospect from a mansion, which had been the seat of his ancestors for centuries. The tale was well told, and seemed most pitiful; an impression was produced on the committee that the privacy of something like Hatfield, or Knebworth, was about to be infringed on by the "abominable railway." A stiff cross-examination brought out ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... I went through his papers, putting things in order, and from every leaf, every scrap, came corroboration of the new fact. He was one of those pitiful pedagogues of the rural South, shiftless, half-educated, inefficient. He had never been able to earn much, and his family had always gently starved. Then had come the chance—the golden chance—the Philippines and a thousand a year. He had taken the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... ah! yes, he suffered, not with locked teeth and stony stoicism, not with the masterful self-command, the reserve, the conquered bitterness of the still-water sort of nature, that is supposed to run to such depths. He tried to be bright, and his sweet old boyish self. He would laugh sometimes in a pitiful, pathetic fashion. He took to petting dogs, looking into their large, solemn eyes with his wistful, questioning blue ones; he would kiss them, as women sometimes do, and call them "dear old fellow," in tones that had tears; and once in the course of his travels ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... own hands again, to search among the leaves for the illustrations which were interspersed, so that Geordie might be introduced to all the beauties of this wonderful volume. Geordie kept looking at her as she turned the leaves with a somewhat pitiful gaze, and presently he said in a low tone, "Jean, come a little nearer. I want to speak to ye, Jeanie. Do ye ken I'm maybe goin' til the grand school the good Maister keeps waitin' for us in the heavenly land? And I'll be learnin' ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... pitiful Porter, Which often did resort there, Quoth he, I'll shew some Sport here, Amongst the Jovial Crew; The Porter he had very bad luck, Before that it was ten a Clock, The Fool got Drunk, and lost his Frock, For Joan's ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... men, as anger, love, hatred, grief, joy, &c., but it is so much the worse, since the judgment, which is the only directive and guide of them, is troubled. Now they are set on wrong objects, they run at random, and are under no kind of rule, and so they hurry the poor man and put him in a pitiful case. Now indeed so it is with us,—since sin entered, the soul is wholly turned off God, the only true object of delight, in which only there can be solid gloriation. The mind of man is blinded, and his passions are ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... to think for one instant that any trouble which may involve Scott is due to you or yours. And if it were, Duane, it could make no difference to him or to me. Money and what it buys is such a pitiful detail in what goes to make up happiness. Who but ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to meet no more for the next three or four months, when my leave and her love took us both to Simla. There we spent the season together; and there my fire of straw burned itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington had given up much for my sake, and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August, 1882, she learned that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... danger to the soldiers, too; and in turn, the soldiers were such a danger to the lambs of his flock. Domestic disasters in his parish came to his ears from time to time; cases of young girls whose heads were turned by soldiers, so that they were about to become mothers. They seemed to him pitiful indeed; but he could not forgive them for their giddiness, for putting temptation in the way of brave young men, fighting, or about to fight. The glamour which surrounded soldiers was not excuse enough. When the babies were born, and came to his notice, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... real. Read the names of those buried a couple of centuries ago—captains, elders, ministers, governors, wives well beloved, children a span long, maidens in the blush of womanhood—half the tender inscriptions are illegible; the stones are broken, sunk, slanting to fall. What a pitiful attempt to keep the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Northern Territory man who has all-comers on toast, because no one can contradict him or check his figures. When two of them meet, however, they are not fools enough to cut down quotations and spoil the market; they lie in support of each other, and make all other bushmen feel mean and pitiful and inexperienced. ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... stage. Oh, it's not at all the same as with Pushkin, Gogol, Moliere, Voltaire, all those great men who really had a new original word to say! It's true, too, that these talented gentlemen of the middling sort in the decline of their venerable years usually write themselves out in the most pitiful way, though they don't observe the fact themselves. It happens not infrequently that a writer who has been for a long time credited with extraordinary profundity and expected to exercise a great and serious influence on the progress of society, betrays in the end such poverty, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... what he—Big Bill Dunlavey—said about my brother?" she questioned, her eyes full and moist. Hollis nodded and she continued rapidly, her voice quavering: "Well, he told the truth." Her voice trailed away into a pitiful wail, and she stepped over and leaned against the boulder, sobbing quietly into her hands. "That's why it hurts ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... declared there was nothing left to eat, for the Boers had stripped the place. This sullen reception was not because we were going to plunder them, for the orders were that everything requisitioned was to be paid for; it was solely from a feeling of pitiful racial hatred. ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... her hands in his, and noticed that there were tears upon her cheeks. He was certainly sorry for her; it was pitiful to think that her new happiness had been wrecked in this way, but he could not overcome the coldness that was about him; and so they parted on the spot where a few months earlier Jim had said good-bye with a heart full ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... had seen the pitiful poltroon that he proved himself you would not say so,' said my uncle coolly. 'You are not yourself at present, but when you return to your right mind you will be ashamed of having made this public exposure of your weakness. And now, lieutenant, ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you pitiful 'natomy," cried Mrs Forster, in a rage, turning to the clerk, as she dared not revenge herself upon the curate. "Take that for your He, he, he!" and she swung round the empty pewter pot, which she snatched from the table, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... distress fell. For nearly half a year, their lawn, their verandah, sometimes their rooms, were cumbered with the sick and dying, their ears were filled with the complaints of suffering humanity, their time was too short for the multiplicity of pitiful duties. In Mrs. de Coetlogon, and her helper, Miss Taylor, the merit of this endurance was perhaps to be looked for; in a man of the colonel's temper, himself painfully suffering, it was viewed with more surprise, if with no more admiration. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... life on the selfsame stool, busied in colouring Freudenberger's sheets so long as he was alive, and, after his death, in drawing and painting, after his own fancy, bears, cats, and children at play, for the benefit of the widow, with the same pitiful day's wages which he had formerly received from his master. Many artists, after Freudenberger's death, would gladly have taken poor Mind into their service, but, like his beloved cats, he was so attached to the house, to his corner and its appurtenances, that he constantly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... Dr. Wream last night. A pitiful letter, for he's getting near the brink. Dennie—these funds I hold—I have never quite understood, but I had felt sure there was no other claimant. There was a clause in the strangely-worded bequest: 'for V. B. and his heirs. Failing in that, to the nearest related ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... after his wife, who still declined to see him; and came away at first relieved and hopeful because he was told that she seemed to be growing better, and then in despair because, the complication which the doctor had feared having ensued, recovery was impossible. The nurse was pitiful to his distress, but she had little to say that could console him. The poor woman lay quite still, refusing to speak, with her eyes intent, as though she watched for the coming of death. It could now be only the question of a day or two; and when, late one evening, Stroeve came to see ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... but in a crowd of queer people and bundles and voices I saw Sam standing and looking perfectly helpless, while that Commissioner of Agriculture stood over by the window, evidently perfectly furious and growling out expletives to the saddest crowd of pitiful people ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... family. How well that grand-looking open-minded Squire would become a great station, fitted as he was by nature, descent, and tradition, to play the solid part of an English country gentleman of the good old- fashioned kind. It was pitiful to think of a man of his stamp forced by the vile exigencies of a narrow purse to scheme and fight against the advancing tide of destitution. And Ida, too,—Ida, who was equipped with every attribute that can make wealth and power what they should be—a frame ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... scene from his mind. He continued to raise his head and body without a struggle. He looked the captain in the eye, and his mouth was in motion as though he were trying to speak,—to utter some dying accusation. Never did human eye behold a scene so pitiful as this dying man gazing on his destroyer, gasping to implore or to denounce him. In an instant a dimness came over his eyes, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... How prone are the wealthy, by warm, glowing grates, to forget their cheerless habitations, and turn inhumanly from their pitiful tales ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the hot sun and into a secluded archway, he talking straight on with a speed and pitiful grandiloquence totally unlike him. "I've finished all the easy parts—the first ecstasies of pure license— the long down-hill plunge, with all its mad exhilarations—the wild vanity of venturing and defying—that bigness of the soul's experiences which makes even its anguish seem finer than ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... fame from its own intrinsic merits. Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor, the easy husband for the most part rests content; his vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that quarter is averted. Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful and mean-spirited transaction. The danger is averted, but the glory of the achievement also is lost. Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and dashing fashion. Out of several dozen squaws whom he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... see how the fellow was coming on. The brute ought not to pull through. But it was too late: a new regime had begun; his little period of sway had passed, leaving as a last proof of his art this human jetsam saved for the nonce. And there rose in his heated mind the pitiful face of a resolute woman, questioning him: "You held the keys of life and death. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "Is it not pitiful? I pity only those who pity themselves. Yet he is mine more surely than ever. This is the end of human wisdom. How shall he now escape? What shall draw ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... themselves in the world than for women, and the army or the Church rarely failed to furnish some sort of career for all those who were denied the rights and privileges of the firstborn. The lot of the sister, however, was pitiful in the extreme (unless it happened that the older brother was kind and considerate), for if she were in the way she could be bundled off to a cloister, there to spend her days in solitude, or she could be married against her will, being ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... after coffee in the Oude Weg. I sit on the bench where you sat, and more often than not I see the sight that you saw. I am not a sentimental woman, but, after all, one has a heart, and this is a pitiful affair. Also, I have obtained from a reliable source the information that the new system of manufacture is more deadly than the old, which I have long suspected, and which, I believe, has passed through your mind as well. You and I went into this thing without le bon ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... that God, our heavenly Father, is omniscient. Our griefs are not hidden from him. He knows our hearts, and with all this knowledge he is good—so tender, so pitiful! Oh, to love him as he deserves! Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing his praises! Tell the sick, tell the sorrowing, tell the broken-hearted of this God; tell the wretched, the guilty, the wayward prodigal of this ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... bed, nor a blanket, nor a chair, nor any article or utensil of furniture whatsoever, had been left; all, all, was in the hands of the remorseless pawn-brokers, as the sufferers showed me by their certificates—pawned, too, for such pitiful sums as at once attested the oppressive and disgraceful system of avarice upon which those establishments are conducted. The storm yet howled fearfully without, and the hard particles of indurated snow were sifting through the ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... in his quivering voice. The manly repentance which burdened his soul reached her heart. After all, it was true: he had been only a reckless, thoughtless boy as he planned that raid on her uncle, and he had been so kind and helpful afterward—and so merry! It was pitiful to see how changed he was, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... tried teaching, without satisfaction to herself or perhaps to others. The kind of education she had herself received fitted her admirably to understand and influence children, but not to carry on the routine of a school. Sewing was her resource when nothing else offered, but it is almost pitiful to think of her as confined to such work when great powers were lying dormant in her mind. Still Margaret Fuller said that a year of enforced quiet in the country devoted mainly to sewing was very useful to her, since she reviewed and examined the treasures laid up in her memory; and doubtless ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... put aside the miniature, and is standing again before the toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more footsteps to and fro; and here, at last,—with another pitiful sigh, like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of which has accidentally been set, ajar—here comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... murdering of childhood; those heavy hands crushing this lovely girl; how abominable that such weakness should have such a weighty cross to bear! Again did Gervaise crouch down, no longer thinking of tucking in the sheet, but overwhelmed by the pitiful sight of this martyrdom; and her trembling lips seemed to be seeking for ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... calleth blessed and worthy of the kingdom of heaven. Again he chargeth us to mourn in the present life, that we may obtain comfort hereafter, and to be meek, and to be ever hungering and thirsting after righteousness: to be merciful, and ready to distribute, pitiful and compassionate, pure in heart, abstaining from all defilement of flesh and spirit, peacemakers with our neighbours and with our own souls, by bringing the worse into subjection to the better, and thus by a just decision making peace in that continual warfare betwixt ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... keep the whip from all of us," answered the Englishman. He bent his back to the shameful work, and felt, in the bitterness of his degradation, something less than human. The thoughts that surged through his brain are too pitiful to be set down here. Chained down in a filthy den, liable to be whipped like a beast of burden, fed upon stuff that was but one remove from offal—how horrible! And he could not forget that about a year before he had ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... color, but in manners and disposition! Some are timid and awkward, and the butt of the whole herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well- fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly fed one, a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others are extremely feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its unruly spirit,—one that plans all the mischief, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... gods, saw them and had pity upon them and spoke to himself saying, "Ah, immortal steeds, why did I give ye to king Peleus, whose generations die while ye remain young and undying? Was it that ye should know the sorrows that befall mortal men? Pitiful, indeed, is the lot of all men upon the earth. Even Hector now, who boasteth in the armour that the gods once gave, will shortly go down to his death and the City he defendeth will be ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... John were selfish, he was preferable to these drab women, these pitiful females herded together. Women in the mass were very displeasing to look at, and they frightened you. They turned down the corners of their mouths and looked coldly and condemningly at you. It was extraordinary how unanimous the girls ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... of the fleet, scattered in every direction by the storm, did not discover the absence of the Nautilus till mid-forenoon, when bits of wreckage, into which they sailed, soon told the pitiful story. Towards noon two bodies were found, that of the captain and steersman, afloat in the pilot-house, but no more; the fate of Reuben, the boy, and the three other ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... jealously guarded secrets of her existence, except her old love for Leslie Gray. Even in delirium something sealed her lips as to that. But all else came out—her anguish over her unfashionable attire, her pitiful makeshifts and contrivances, her humiliation over wearing unfashionable dresses and paying only five cents where every other Sewing Circle member paid ten. The kindly women who waited on her listened to her with tear-filled eyes, ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... entertain it when it is offered, but to seek it when it is away, and to pursue it when it runs away. (Psal. xxxiv. 14, which Peter urges upon Christians, 1 Pet. iii. 8, 9, 10, 11.) "Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous. Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing, but contrariwise, blessing, knowing that ye are thereunto called that ye should inherit a blessing. For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... torch threw its blue and hazy light into the cave. In spite of the gloomy poetic effects which Mademoiselle de Verneuil's imagination cast about this vaulted chamber, which was echoing to the sounds of a pitiful prayer, she was obliged to admit that the place was nothing more than an underground kitchen, evidently long abandoned. When the formless mass was distinguishable it proved to be a short and very fat man, whose limbs were ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... winsome lady'. But the look in her eyes—Eric, I felt as if I had murdered something. She bade me good-bye with a pitiful smile and went upstairs. I did not see her again, although I stayed to dinner as her uncle's request. Those old Gordons are a queer pair. I liked them, though. They are strong and staunch—good friends, bitter enemies. They were sorry that I could not ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... end of the weary day she came to your palace gate holding up her pitiful bowl, and you came and took her hand and seated her beside you ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore
... was formerly from Philadelphia, and an intimate friend of Charles Hunter's father, who was a sea captain, and being shipwrecked during one of his voyages, was conveyed in a pitiful condition to the house of Mr. Horton, and thus commenced an ardent friendship, to ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... one who beholds a vision from another world. And then a great sob burst from him—the pitiful sob of a strong man who is beaten, broken with emotion. The whole being of the man seemed to collapse. He staggered forward, and such a change came over the gaunt, hard face, that Bridget saw it through a rain of tears which ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... so before, but now that you mention it, I do think it emphatically." This is a pitiful effort at a jest, but it passes unpunished. "There comes Johnson to ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Devil owned he had never seen them equalled, except by the inhabitants of an English town called N—-, when dressed in their Sunday's best. "Envy, malice, curiosity, and avarice," said he, "are here and there the sole springs of action; and both places are governed by a pitiful mercantile spirit, which prevents them from being grandly wicked or nobly virtuous. In short, Faustus, there is little to be done in either place by a man of spirit, and we will hurry away from hence as soon as you have brought the mayoress to the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... in his illness, but she never cared for Charlie as he did for her. He worshipped the very ground she walked on. He thought her perfection. Uncle Max, it was pitiful to hear him sometimes. He would tell me how sweet and unselfish she was, and all the time I knew she was but an ordinary, commonplace girl. If he had lived to marry her he would have been disappointed in her. He was so large-hearted, and Lesbia has ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in the city, the Doctor went with me, and before I knew what he was at—he had marched me into a home for babies.... Katie was nearest the door—the first one. Pinned over her crib was her name: "Catherine Staats, aged three months." She held out her little arms ... so friendless—so pitiful—so alone—and I was done for. We brought her back home, the Doctor, a nurse and I. The first time I carried her up those stairs—all my fine bachelor's ideas went out of my head. I knew then that my theories were all humbug. I had missed the child in the house ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... charged them for 50 letters what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form themselves to get back that pitiful sum. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 12th it was -61.6deg. F., with a breeze dead against us. This was undeniably bitter. It was easy to see that the temperature was too much for the dogs; in the morning, especially, they were a pitiful sight. They lay rolled up as tightly as possible, with their noses under their tails, and from time to time one could see a shiver run through their bodies; indeed, some of them were constantly shivering. We had to lift them up and put them into ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... existence. Perhaps her fear was referable, in some sort, to the retrospect she had so lately heard. Be this as it might, she stood, submissively and deferentially, before her child, and inclined her head, as if in a pitiful entreaty to be spared ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Haldgren, he told himself; and there was something that came chokingly into his throat at the thought. That lonely figure—one tiny dot of life on a bleak and lifeless stage! It was pitiful, this undying effort to signal, to let his own world know ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... nicety, George," said the king; "ye are as preceese as a Puritan in form, and a mere Nullifidian in the marrow of the matter. May not a king's word serve ye for advancing your pitiful ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... with thy pitiful dirge, Thou need'st to be mournful and moan! The wrath of thy terrible surge Omnipotence ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... son, Franz, to help her to feed the unfortunate animals on board, who were in a pitiful plight, having been ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... It is pitiful to see in the many smoky cities the little done for this thirst for beauty, inherent in all. Even in the poorest sections where many foreigners dwell one sees a broken pitcher with its stunted geranium, a window box with ferns and vines or a canary in a rude cage. As soon ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... once cruel and merciful, thoughtlessly hard-hearted and tender-hearted, sympathetic, pitiful, and kind in ever changing contrasts. Love of neighbors, human or animal, grows up amid savage traits, coarse and fine. When father made out to get us securely locked up in the back yard to prevent our shore and field wanderings, we had to play away the comparatively ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... against superior numbers behind entrenchments; they endeavoured to turn the Germans out of insignificant villages after allowing them time to fortify the position. They fought in the open against an invisible enemy superior in numbers, superior in artillery, and here and there they gained a pitiful little hard-earned advantage. ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... delicate hands. At this sight Coroebus burst forth infuriate, and flung himself on death amid their columns. We all follow him up, and charge with massed arms. Here first from the high temple roof we are overwhelmed with our own people's weapons, and a most pitiful slaughter begins through the fashion of our armour and the mistaken Greek crests; then the Grecians, with angry cries at the maiden's rescue, gather from every side and fall on us; Ajax in all his valour, and the two sons of Atreus, and the whole Dolopian army: as oft when ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... condemned to die. Such was the crowd of besiegers for grace, offices, and simple greeting by the host of the White House that she was kept out in the hall. But one day, the master passing through the corridor "to hold the show," heard a baby's pitiful wail. He halted, listened again to make sure, and on entering his reception-parlor asked his favorite usher if he had not heard ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save that ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... preached none. He preached only revolt, and in that revolt defiance of all existing laws. He had no religion; Christ to him was a pitiful weakling, a historic victim of the same system that still crucified those who fought the established order. In his new world there would be no churches and no laws. He advocated bloodshed, arson, sabotage of all sorts, as a means ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... no longer dependent merely on the incitement of youth, grace, beauty, whether of body or character; it transcends all limitations of sex and age, and finds objects on which it can spend itself in all that God has made, even in that which has violated its own law of life and become mean and pitiful. It becomes a love of fallen humanity, and an ardour to save it by becoming the conscious and permanent motive of all men. The history of this evolution of love has been written by the poets. Every ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... work rush to the diggings. Indeed, many men are fools enough to leave their work to go there, but I confess that I don't like the notion. It has always appeared to me such a pitiful thing to see men, who are fit for better things, go grubbing in ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... instantly suppressed. The last speaker, Mr. Reuben Rice, was one of those wandering scribes who travel through the West and write up suffrage from a Pullman-car window, and as he exposed the weaknesses, the failures and the pitiful spectacle that voting women make of themselves, he galvanized the audience into a semblance of ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... Cossitollah, as a representative street, wherein the European and Asiatic elements of the Calcutta panorama are mingled in the most picturesque proportions; for Cossitollah is the link that most directly joins the pitiful benightedness of the Black Town to the imposing splendors of Kumpnee Bahadoor,—the short, but stubborn chain of responsibility, as it were, whereby the ball of helpless and infatuated stock-and-stone-worship is fastened to the leg of British ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... increased. And now a demure bride or two emerged in all the radiance of perfect love and raiment, squired by him, braving the searching sunshine with confidence in her beauty, her plumage, and a kindly planet; and, in pitiful contrast, here and there some waxen-faced invalid, wheeled by a trained nurse, in cap and cuffs, through sunless halls into the clear sea air, to lie motionless, with leaden lids scarcely parted, in the glory ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... read between the lines some, but I gathered that he now broke down completely at this betrayal of his trusting nature. Vida must of been suffering too keenly herself to write me all the pitiful details. And right on top of this blow comes the horrible discovery, when he takes his mandolin out of the case, that it has been fatally injured in the moving. One blow right on another. How little we realize the suffering that goes on all about us in this ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... mean to catechise—indeed, I don't. You must try to forgive me for the liberties I seem to be taking.... The thing's so serious, so pitiful. This story already flying around back in town—making him a base coward—he'll never live it down. And it's to-night or never, a—a misstatement travels so fast and far, and has ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may, yet will not I forget thee." The pity of neighbours and acquaintance helpeth in times of distress, but the pity of a father and a mother is pity with an over and above. "The Lord," says James, "is very pitiful, and of tender mercy." Pharaoh called Joseph his tender father,[21] because he provided for him against the famine, but how tender a father is God! how full of bowels! how full of pity! (James 5:11; Gen 41:43). ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... debts. Two years later he was deposed by the Assembly, when the King cast him off, and gave the temporalities of his see to one of the Court favourites. After that Adamson never lifted his head. When he had fallen into poverty and sickness he made a pitiful appeal to Melville, which was most generously met. His old opponent visited him, and for months provided for him out of his own purse; and it was through the good offices of both the Melvilles that he was able to make his peace with the Church ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... by a strange event which happened about this time. One day, without any warning, the thought of Cynthia darted urgently and irresistibly into my mind. Her image came between me and all my tasks; I saw her in innumerable positions and guises, but always with her eyes bent on me in a pitiful entreaty. After endeavouring to resist the thought for a little as some kind of fantasy, I became suddenly convinced that she was in need of me, and in urgent need. I asked for an interview with our Master, and told him the story; he heard me gravely, and then said ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and its failure to effect the crime proposed strengthened immensely the power, popularity, and influence of the Stadholder, made the orthodox church triumphant, and nearly ruined the sect of the Remonstrants, the Arminians—most unjustly in reality, although with a pitiful show of reason—being held guilty of the crime of Stoutenburg ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... place immediately; not that I have any objections either to my Lady or you, sir; but, to be sure, it was a sad day for me that I engaged myself to her Ladyship. Little did I think that a lady of distinction would coming to such a poor pitiful place as this. I am sure I thought I should ha' swooned when I was showed the hole ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... John Save the ground we stand on"— Cried the Miller,—"but ye come in a hurry;" While the lad, turning pale, 'Gan to weep and to wail, And to patter this pitiful story: ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... grotesque and pitiful. Is it strange that the feud should flourish in a land ruled by a "God of wrath?" Is anything but sickness and death to be expected where both are looked on as visitations of an ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... and failure of this day, And weariness of thought, O Mother Night, Come with soft kiss to soothe our care away And all our little tumults set to right; Most pitiful of all death's kindred fair, Riding above us through the curtained air On thy dusk car, thou scatterest to the earth Sweet dreams and drowsy charms of tender might And lovers' dear delight before to-morrow's birth. Thus art thou wont thy quiet lands to leave And ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... letter, covered with outlandish postmarks, was brought to the young priest—a letter from Anglice. She was dying;—would he forgive her? Emile, the year previous, had fallen a victim to the fever that raged on the island; and their child, Anglice, was likely to follow him. In pitiful terms she begged Antoine to take charge of the child until she was old enough to enter the convent of the Sacre-Coeur. The epistle was finished hastily by another hand, informing Antoine of Madame Jardin's death; it also told him ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... traffic in the street, the rattle of cars and tramp of hoofs. Jens Olaj's voice ascended towards me from the stables as he chid the horses. I was perfectly stunned. I sat and moistened my lips a little, but otherwise made no effort to do anything; my chest was in a pitiful state. The dusk closed in; I sank more and more together, grew weary, and lay down on the bed again. In order to warm my fingers a little I stroked them through my hair backwards and forwards and crosswise. Small loose ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... in a drooping attitude, with her eye intent upon her master; and when they would have taken her away, she hung back, and, stretching her neck till it reached his knees, licked his hands with a tenderness that was pitiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... You may call these observations coarse, if you please; but I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it? Everybody seems hitherto to have spared a man who never ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... broken leg, he tried to crawl along. The result was pitiful, for he merely floundered in the deep mass of soft whiteness. His share of the luggage was heavy packs, nothing of which he could make a flag of distress or even build a fire. He felt for his matches, and lighting a cigarette, waved it aloft, ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... of money for these Indulgences. But the system itself had meantime taken deep root. It continued, and continues to this day. It was, however, at its worst when the Twenty-second Article was drawn up. Can we be surprised that it sternly condemned it? It is all a pitiful history. But it was necessary to refer to it in order both to show how the growth of the Romish Doctrine of Purgatory gradually gathered round it mischievous accretions, and also to prove how little the belief, that in the Intermediate State ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... near and gazed inscrutably at this miracle of physical unfitness. Under his gaze the pitiful and insignificant figure bore itself as with a ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... devotedly attached to him, possessed the power of transforming herself into a variety of different animals. By this means she contrived to support her father, who sold her again and again each time she assumed a different form, and thus he dragged on a pitiful existence. {58} ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... mendicants whose faces were less familiar. One afternoon a most extraordinary Irishman, with a black eye, a bruised hat, and other traces of past enjoyment, waited upon me with a pitiful story of destitution and want, and concluded by requesting the usual trifle. I replied, with some severity, that if I gave him a dime he would probably spend it for drink. "Be Gorra! but you're roight—I wad that!" he answered promptly. I was ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... the surf boomed hollowly on the smooth, shady shore, littered now, I knew, by the pitiful spoils ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... world began to look through the new eyes of pity a great sorrow had given him. How worn the faces of these children. They must be horribly overworked. What a pitiful, starved life for a child. He thought of his own childhood, and saw himself with swift bare feet roaming the open fields ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... heir, unwilling that his estate should swell the fortunes of the family that in life had disowned him. Into his ear some kindly angel had whispered my name, and the memory that I shared with him the frowns of our house, and that my plight must be passing pitiful, had set up a bond of sympathy between us, which had led him to will his lands to me. Of Madame de Chevreuse—who clearly was the patron saint of those of her first husband's nephews who chanced to tread ungodly ways—my cousin Marion had besought that she should see ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... quietly proceeded to take out his pipe, fill, and light it, keeping an eye on Tom, who now sat disconsolately across the branch, looking at the keeper—a pitiful sight for men and fishes. The more he thought of it the less he ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... years about the pitiful condition of the 'drammer,' but did he ever write a play that saw the ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... talking of these matters," observed Mrs. Hastings, "we may as well face one or two things that have troubled us all a good deal. You know as well as we do that poor Tom has gradually been playing out; it's pitiful the way he has been letting his business go. Every one knows that he has ability, but he's been living more and more up in the air. He owns the block over there and the rent he gets from that is about all he has. And I shouldn't ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... the broken dishes and came towards him, with slack lips and great startled eyes. "John," she panted, like a pitiful frightened child, "what have I been doing?... Man, what did ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids: it was thought she was a woman, and was turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful, ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together. Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the poet, but they ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... debts, egad! why should not Victurnien have debts? At this time and at all times princes have debts, every gentleman has debts. Perhaps you would rather that Victurnien should bring you his savings?—Do you know that our great Richelieu (not the Cardinal, a pitiful fellow that put nobles to death, but the Marechal), do you know what he did once when his grandson the Prince de Chinon, the last of the line, let him see that he had not spent ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... her nephew. Selina felt sorry. Her passion ended in a gush of "nervous" tears under the influence of which she was led up stairs and put to bed, almost like a child—the usual termination of these pitiful outbreaks. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... this. He's goin' to be a rancher. Yes, don't y' see?" he asked, with a pitiful attempt at a ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... reason and another I shall not name. Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis. Into that space went wandering a road, over a hill and down out of sight, and up again smaller ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the wind go "Yooooo"? 'T is a pitiful sound to hear! It seems to chill you through and through With a strange and speechless fear. 'T is the voice of the night that broods outside When folk should be asleep, And many and many's the time I've ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... been so pitiful, it would have been ludicrous—what followed. Day after day, in one corner of the kitchen, an old man boiled his potatoes and fried his unappetizing eggs over a dusty, unblacked stove; in the other corner an old woman baked and brewed over ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... stands high, with a sharp eye on all the town. Every back window in the Tenements has a glint of it, and so the back of the Tenements is always better behaved than the front. It was in the front that Jamie Don, a pitiful bachelor all his life because he thought the women proposed, kept his ferrets, and here, too, Beattie hanged himself, going straight to the clothes-posts for another rope when the first one broke, such was his determination. In the front Sanders Gilruth ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... and up rose a piercing shriek and a terrible roar. It seemed that both children must have been mortally hurt, and I looked out hastily, only to see Budge and Toddie running after the carriage, and crying pitifully. It was too pitiful,—I could not have proceeded without them, even if they had been afflicted with small-pox. The driver stopped of his own accord,—he seemed to know the children's ways and their results,—and I helped Budge and Toddie in, meekly hoping ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground, and then she closed them altogether. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... sufferings during two winters was added the distress of losing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached; he perished in the spring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The Eloge in which Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of his friend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style of youth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste.[5] He complained that nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... northeast of the village, and before long Count Bismarck discovered in a remote place about twenty men dreadfully wounded. These poor fellows had had no attention whatever, having been overlooked by the hospital corps, and their condition was most pitiful. Yet there was one very handsome man in the group—a captain of artillery—who, though shot through the right breast, was talkative and cheerful, and felt sure of getting well. Pointing, however, to a comrade lying near, also shot in the breast, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... we were hungry the moment she saw us, that she had heard the soldiers were on short rations in consequence of the destruction of the railroad, and turning towards me she went on to say: 'There was such a pitiful, hungry look on this boy's face that it would have haunted me for a long time if I had let you go away without giving you a dinner. Many a hungry soldier,' she continued, 'both of the Northern and Southern army, has had something to eat at this table, and I ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... in Polotzk, to a single room hired by the week, and the humblest associations, and the averted heads of former friends! But oftenest it was my mother who turned away her head. She took to using the side streets to avoid the pitiful eyes of the kind, and the scornful eyes of the haughty. Both were turned on her as she trudged from store to store, and from house to house, peddling tea or other ware; and both were hard to bear. Many a winter morning she arose in the dark, to tramp three or four miles in the gripping cold, through ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... is perhaps the most lovable figure in Russian literature. I say lovable, because he was at bottom a hapless man,—a man who had fed on his own mighty heart. There is a Carlylesqueness about his woe that makes his life immeasurably pitiful. Pushkin's sorrow one finds it difficult to lament deeply, since it was mostly of his own making; but Gogol's was the sorrowful lot of all heaven-aspiring souls who have not yet attained the last, safest haven of rest in God,—that ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... deceived checked the words which were rising to his lips. Again he saw himself in a pitiful light, and this self-contempt reflected upon Sidwell. He could not doubt that she was yielding to him; her attitude and her voice declared it; but what was the value of love won by imposture? Why had she not intelligence enough to see through his hypocrisy, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of hope. She turned eagerly to examine them. Piles of sombre skirts, blue and black and tan. They were stout and coarse and scant, and not of the latest cut, but what mattered it? She decided on a seventy-five cent black one. It seemed pitiful to have to economize in a matter of twenty-five cents, when she had been used to counting her money by dollars, yet there was a feeling of exultation at having gotten for that price any skirt at all that would do. A dim memory of ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... Heidi began. But she did not get very far, for the story she was reading told of a grandmother's death. Suddenly she cried aloud: "Oh, now grandmother is dead!" and wept in the most pitiful fashion. Whatever Heidi read always seemed real to her, and now she thought it was her own grandmother at home. Louder and louder she sobbed: "Now poor grandmother is dead and I can never see her any more; and she ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... to you," said Naggeneen; "it was you that spoke to me. You called me, and here I am to the fore, though I don't belong to your pitiful little thribe, and I needn't come when you call, if ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll—that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to—all the banquets ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... rewards great. Then the law, which is no respecter of professions of that kind, had got him. "Crackerjack" had but recently returned from a protracted sojourn at an institution arranged by the State in its paternalism for the reception and harbouring of such as he. The pitiful dole with which the discharged prisoner had been unloaded upon a world which had no welcome for him had been soon spent; even the hideous prison-made clothes had been pawned, and some rags, which were yet the rags of a free man, which had been preserved through the long period of ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal theatre was a version of Balzac's Pere Goriot. "The domestic Lear I thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too pitiful—perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous play of Kean, in which most of the representatives of English actors ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... return. Joshua's prayer is answered. He knows now why little Ai has beaten them back. He asked, 'What shall I say?' He has got something of grave import to say. So far this passage carries us, leaving the pitiful last hour of the wretched troubler of Israel untouched. What lessons are ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... deem death to be preferable to life. O hero that never swervest from virtue, had I with my brothers met with destruction ere this at the hands of our enemies on the battle-field, I would not have found thee in this pitiful plight, thus pierced with arrows. Surely, O prince, the Maker had created is to become perpetrators of evil deeds. O king, if thou wishest to do me good, do thou then instruct me in such a way that I may be cleansed of this sin in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... out Dagon. "That pitiful creature has refused gold and a precious goblet, which I ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... figure. But now this was all changed; as though by some mysterious alchemy, war had succeeded peace, the very landscape appearing grimly desolate, yet alive with moving figures. And these told the story, the story of defeat. It was not a new scene to me, but nevertheless pitiful. They came trudging from out the smoke clouds, and across the untilled fields, alone, or in little groups, some armed, more weaponless, here and there a bloody bandage showing, or a limp bespeaking a wound; dirty, unshaven men, in uniforms begrimed and ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... Impertinent, the Agreeable, the Thoughtful, Busie, or Careless; the Serene or Cloudy, Jovial or Melancholy, Untowardly or Easie; the Cold, Temperate, or Sanguine; and of what Manners or Dispositions soever, whether the Ambitious or Humble-minded, the Proud or Pitiful, Ingenious or Base-minded, Good or Ill-natur'd, Publick-spirited or Selfish; and under what Fortune or Circumstance soever, whether the Contented or Miserable, Happy or Unfortunate, High or Low, Rich or Poor (whether so through Want of Money, or Desire of more) Healthy or Sickly, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... she had shown them that she could at any rate do one thing rather well; but she was equally glad that she had obtained Janet's promise to avoid any discussion of her qualities or her situation. After all, with her self-conscious restraint and her pitiful assured income of three pounds a week, she was a poor little creature compared with the easy, luxurious beings of this household, whose upkeep could not cost less than three pounds a day. Janet, in rich and complicated ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... suddenly realized that almost every man in the room bore the unmistakable mark of service in the trenches. It was the first time that he had been brought violently into contact with the far-reaching and horrible devastation of this cruel war. One pitiful figure, a young man of about twenty-two who sat apart from the rest, so affected him that he scarcely recovered himself in time to acknowledge the great kindness of the Duchess of Windthorst, who was receiving him in the most ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... lips, and changing colour, that she too was aware that her husband had returned. Presently he opened the room-door, and stood there uncertain whether to come in. His face was gray and pale; he had a timid, fearful look in his eyes; something almost pitiful to see in a man's face; but that look of despondent uncertainty, of mental and bodily languor, touched his wife's heart. She went to him, and threw herself on his ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... B * * and such like to hum and haw you, or, rather, Lady J * * out of her compliment, and me out of mine.[69] Sun-burn me, but this was pitiful-hearted. However, I will tell her all about it when ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... expression for being asked for one's passport at San Juliano, and required to fetch it from San Lorenzo, full a mile and a quarter distant. In like manner, travellers, after two or three days' residence in the city, used to return with pitiful lamentations over "the misery of the Italian people." Upon inquiring what instances they had met with of this misery, it invariably turned out that their gondoliers, after being paid three times their proper fare, had asked for ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... prayer would not come. I fell into heavy doubting and despair, and murmured against the Lord that He plagued me more sorely than Lazarus or Job. Wretch that I was, I cried, "Thou didst leave to Lazarus at least the crumbs and the pitiful dogs, but to me Thou hast left nothing, and I myself am less in Thy sight even than a dog; and Job Thou didst not afflict until Thou hadst mercifully taken away his children, but to me Thou hast left my poor ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... next morning the cannon began to boom from the Castle of St. Angelo. Gabriel Zimandy sprang out of bed and dressed himself quickly. His first care was to tap at Madam Dormandy's door and inquire for her health. The patient answered in a pitiful voice that the guns were fairly splitting her poor head, and that she did not expect to live the day through. This reply seemed to be quite to the advocate's liking: of the lady's succumbing to her ailment he ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Kurtz—Kurtz—that means short in German—don't it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life—and death. He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... friend. My head is still entirely filled with questions, and they are twining and twisting about like the fishing-worms in a bag, by the help of which men hope to secure fish. Be pitiful and allow me to fasten a few more of these questions to my fishing-rod, and thus try to secure ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... first awakening from his illusion. He had not gone far into the wilderness before it came to him, and it happened thus. As he was walking along in the forest he heard, but a short distance ahead of him, a pitiful cry of a creature in distress. Quickly he hurried on, and was just in time to see the convulsive gasp of a beautiful young fawn that had been seized and was being mangled by a great, fierce wolf, which had found it where ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... she ain't crazy. I 've seen that woman as sensible and as shrewd as any sane woman who ever drew breath. Then again, I 've seen her when I would n't get within fifty miles of her. Sometimes she 's pitiful to me; and then again I 've got to remember the fact that she 's a dangerous woman. Goodness only knows what would happen to a person who fell into her clutches when she 's got one of those immortality ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... to know—Nay, but I have asked you already. I desired to know did you deem me a very pitiful little fool?" ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... a pitiful game it all is! And alas! as George Sand says, "All this, you see, is a game that we are playing, but our heart and life are the stakes, and that has an aspect which is not ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... 'encouragement,' does not mean protection. A really wise policy should aim at making a country independent of foreign supply, but this should be effected without resorting to the pitiful shifts of customs duties and prohibitions. Industries must work out their own salvation, competition is the life of trade. A protected industry goes to sleep, and monopoly, like the protective tariff, kills it outright. ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... him, on the very day on which he and his men came in. They brought with them ten captives, boys and women. They were received with great joy. "He and those that were with him, arrived so DESTROYED BY THE MOUNTAIN, that it was pitiful to see them. When they were asked how they had lost themselves, they said that it was the thickness of the trees, so great that they could not see the sky, and that some of them, who were mariners, had climbed up the trees to look at the star (the Pole-star) and that they never ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in common, as a queer hooped and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... his cell, and the poor devil fainted three times at the heat caused by the throng of his admirers. So long as his fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not take up his pen without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have robbed him near Hyde Park. Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the white feather. Not once was he known to take a purse with his own hand, the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses' heads while his accomplice spoke with the passengers. A poltroon before his arrest, in Court he ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... own beseeching words, the jangle of the horses' bells, the mad movement of the poplars alongside, were all she had for answer, as they dashed on. No word came from the silent shape in front. There coursed through her mind a forecast of her pitiful progress through the city, driven onward by the lash, her swooning companion dragging on her arms, the crowd lining the pavements to stare at her, the officers pressing forward to greet her with mocking applause and ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... way to shore through that. She drove hard on the paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently, and gusty puffs of wind began ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... come to lead them. The preordained time has now arrived, and Emmanuel himself is to take the command. He, too, selects his captains—Credence and Good Hope, Charity, and Innocence, and Patience; and the captains have their squires, the counterparts of themselves—Promise and Expectation, Pitiful, Harmless, and Suffer Long. Emmanuel's armour shines like the sun. He has forty-four battering rams and twenty-two slings—the sixty-six books of the Bible—each made of pure gold. He throws up mounds and trenches, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... it dashed between the rocky banks, still calling to him. If he could only close his ears to it! But it still called—called still—the river! And still the child's voice pierced the rush of sound with its pitiful flute note, until the two resolved themselves into contesting strains, answering each other antiphonally. The river—the baby—the river—the baby; and in and through, and betwixt and between, there spun the whirling merry-go-round, with its ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... This pitiful recompense recalls one both glorious and well-earned which M. Larrey received from the Emperor during the campaign in Egypt. At the battle of Aboukir, General Fugieres was operated on by M. Larrey under the enemies' ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... man, but he would take on misery too in his own person, that he might be experimentally merciful to us. Certainly, the experience of misery and infirmity must superadd some tenderness to the heart of our High Priest. But though it did not help him to be more pitiful, yet it was done for us, to help us to have more confidence in him, and boldness to come unto him. What an encouragement is it for a poor man to come unto the once poor Jesus Christ, who "had not where to lay his head?" He knows the evil of poverty, and he chose to know it, that he might have ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... their fill, And then 'twould occasion to somebody ill. Said Bertrand to Ratto, "My brother, to-day Exhibit your powers in a masterly way, And take me these chestnuts, I pray. Which were I but otherwise fitted (As I am ingeniously witted) For pulling things out of the flame, Would stand but a pitiful game." "'Tis done," replied Ratto, all prompt to obey; And thrust out his paw in a delicate way. First giving the ashes a scratch, He open'd the coveted batch; Then lightly and quickly impinging, He drew out, in ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... age shall pass away, and silenced are the guns, When sweethearts join their loves again, and mothers kiss their sons, When brave unto the brave return, and all they did is told, How pitiful my gift shall seem, when all ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... thy pitiful dirge, Thou need'st to be mournful and moan! The wrath of thy terrible surge ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... Cross of the Legion of Honour to the lieutenant in command, M. de Langle, who had behaved like a hero. I went alongside his ship to see him in the lonely creek to which the infected vessel had been relegated. A crowd of spectral figures crept to the ports to look at me. It was a pitiful scene. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... this time his smile without words troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... faded in the sufferer's face, his cheeks had fallen in, but though the jolting must have caused him severe pain at times he rarely complained. Instead, he would smile at us encouragingly, or make some pitiful attempt at a jest, and I think it was chiefly to please us that he choked down a few spoonfuls of the very untempting stew we forced on him. Once, too, when I tried to feed him his eyes twinkled, though his lips were ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... he came by the mountain wall, The snow upon the heights looked down And said, "The sight is pitiful. The nostrils of his steed are brown With frozen blood; and he ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... "Shalt he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? Shall we 'the swarm that in the noontide beam were born,' feeling in ourselves the power to direct, this way or that, the forces of Nature—of Nature, of which we form so trivial a part—shall we, in our boundless arrogance, in our pitiful conceit, deny that power to the Ancient of Days? Saying, to our Creator, 'Thus far and no further. Thou madest, ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... word assured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While Cummings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... obey'd; and with mine eye return'd Through all the seven spheres, and saw this globe So pitiful of semblance, that perforce It moved my smiles: and him in truth I hold For wisest, who esteems it least: whose thoughts Elsewhere are fix'd, him worthiest call and best. I saw the daughter of Latona shine Without the shadow, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself; almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Holy Father: he has made his first appeal to the tendency that he knows to be the chief frailty in man, and especially in those who are very tender and pitiful in their natural affections, and tender to their own bodies—for such men as these hold life dearer than any others. So he fastened on this point from his first word. But I hope, by the goodness of God, that you will ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... inward eye the face of his long-dead father, white and set with some inward pain of which he did not speak. Dick remembered that as a boy that had seemed to him a pitiful thing. Now he saw it somewhat as the believers once saw the face of the martyr, the visible manifestation of triumph—the success of being true to yourself in spite ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... was a gaunt and haggard-looking man. The dirt seemed ingrained in him—in his hands, his eyebrows, his temples, under his hair, up to his very eyes. He told a pitiful story of long work and short pay—of hungry children and an over-tasked wife. He told, in fact, the story familiar to all of us—the 'chestnut' of the newspapers—the story which the busy man of ordinary society is not expected ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... straggling hand that wandered uncertainly over the lines. It was a pitiful letter telling of poverty bitter and grinding, but redeemed from utter misery by a love and faith ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... Lumley, with a pitiful smile, "that your intellects are sinking to a par with those of the geese which fly over the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied reassuringly: "I understand—I'll say nothing. Please show me those," and she pointed to a tray of unset rubies in ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... for months by bandages and by useless orthopedic apparatus! Now, however, thanks to care and good food and gymnastic exercises, many are improving. Their schoolmistress makes them practise gymnastics. It was a pitiful sight to see them, at a certain command, extend all those bandaged legs under the benches, squeezed as they were between splints, knotty and deformed; legs which should have been covered with kisses! Some could not rise from the bench, and remained there, with ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... age of nine, his father left Chatham, and Dickens was removed with the rest of the family to London, where his early pitiful struggles began, which ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... taken to dinner before joining the game at Nick's. It had gotten to be a sort of weekly date—although this night had given signs of being the last one. For a while that spring, desoxyribonucleic acid had begun to take second place in my heart. This is a pitiful admission for a biochemist to make—DNA should be the cornerstone of his life. But Shari was something rare—a gorgeous woman, if somewhat distant, who was thoroughly intelligent. She had already earned her doctorate, while I was still struggling ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... not wish to frighten them. At least, it knew now that life could come through the hole, and the small herbivore it had herded through confirmed that passage in the opposite direction was equally possible—plus a gratis demonstration of the other world's pitiful defenses. At swarming time, the whole new world would be open to embryo Harn, as well as this ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... had power been more centralized, and never in France had the reins been held by persons so pitiful, impelled by motives so contemptible. The levity, vanity, and spite of a concubine became a mighty engine to influence the destinies of nations. Louis XV., enervated by pleasures and devoured by ennui, still had his emotions; he shared Pompadour's ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... for his own hard-heartedness. He punished her as one would chastise a child. The tables were turned. The poor woman cowered under the stick which, figuratively, was constantly held over her. She was scarcely forty-two years old, and already had the stammerings of terror, and vague, pitiful looks of an old woman in her dotage. Her son continued to stab her with his piercing glances, hoping that she would run away when her courage was exhausted. The unfortunate woman suffered terribly from shame, restrained desire and ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... was at its height, you will know what happened when those white-clad figures went among the thousands of range-bred beasts, guarded by a pitiful handful of men. For range cattle are accustomed to a man only when he is mounted; then he is a part of his horse. It is dangerous for him to go among them on foot; then he is a strange animal. Many a cowboy has dismounted, ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... to work again to earn our daily bread—not with his old love or ability, but in an inert, feeble way that was pitiful to see. I think from the day my mother was buried he was dying. Some people, you know, die hard—some part with life lightly, as if it was a faded robe they shook off to don a brighter one. Others—my father was one, and I am like him—see one by one their trusts, their hopes, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... seem sort o' pitiful, don't it, to think how sort o' homeless the Americans are a gettin'? How the posys that blow under the winders of Home are left to waste their sweet breaths amongst the weeds, while them that used to love 'em are a climbin' ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... not all. On the day of her first visit to M. Arthur, when Mme. Derline came out of the great house, she was broken-hearted—positively broken-hearted—at the sight of her brougham; it really did make a pitiful appearance among all the stylish carriages which were waiting in three rows and taking up half the street. It was the brougham of her late mother-in-law, and it still rolled through the streets of Paris after fifteen years' service. Mme. Derline got into the woe-begone brougham to drive ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God's satire weighs heavily on me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the pretty, drooping head was lifted defiantly. No! she would not go down just yet, for one last motive remained. While she was at the store an hour before to buy a few necessary articles of food with the pitiful supply of money she had found in an old teapot on the kitchen shelf, a wonderful thing had occurred. Tod Greeley, weighing out some ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... Mark Twain to make me tired before. Positive fact." Ross slammed "Roughing It" on the floor. "When you're snowbound this-away you want tragedy, I guess. Humor just seems to bring out all your cussedness. You read a man's poor, pitiful attempts to be funny and it makes you so nervous you want to tear the book up, get out your bandana, and have ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Once again you feel the bigness of your world, the tremendous significance of everything in it—including yourself—and a far-seeing sadness grips you. Living in the flesh seems so transient, almost a pitiful thing in the last analysis. But somehow you feel that there is something bigger—not beyond it, but all about it continually. And you wonder that you ever hated anyone. You know, somehow, there in the smoky silence, why men are noble or ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Elsie darted after him. Nor did she stop to be directed. She went straight to her food cupboard, without paying the slightest heed to the outstretched body of the luckless Farley. Lennon threw a rug over the pitiful form and hastened to drag three saddles and as many ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well-fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly-fed one a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others are extremely feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its unruly spirit—one that plans all the mischief ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... alms; and when his father came and presented himself before him in turn, as he had done to the suitors one by one, he gave him of his own meat which he had in his dish, and of his own cup to drink. And the suitors were past measure offended to see a pitiful beggar, as they esteemed him, to be so choicely regarded ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... and your conscience is clear—what more can you want? You fall asleep—and suddenly... you hear a buzz!... Gnats! [Jumps up] Gnats! Be they triply accursed Gnats! [Shakes his fist] Gnats! It's one of the plagues of Egypt, one of the tortures of the Inquisition! Buzz! It sounds so pitiful, so pathetic, as if it's begging your pardon, but the villain stings so that you have to scratch yourself for an hour after. You smoke, and go for them, and cover yourself from head to foot, but it is no good! At last you have to sacrifice ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... of former days. Consequently the frequent calls which Dr. Surtaine deemed it expedient to make for the sake of appearances, at Hal's hotel, resulted in painful, rambling, topic-shifting talks, devoid of any human touch other than the pitiful and thwarted affection of two personalities at hopeless odds. "Least said soonest mended" was a favorite aphorism of the experienced quack. But in this tangle it failed him. It was he who first touched on the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... from Master Semmler? Away again? Where? The cows are at home already. You bad boy, I can't understand you. Wait, I'll have to see if you have no tongue in your mouth!" She made a few angry steps forward. The child looked up to her with the pitiful expression of a poor, half-grown dog that is learning to sit up on his hind legs. In his fear he began to stamp his feet and rub his back against ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... who first sweep, and then hold out a small palm for the penny, dodging the horses' hoofs, and just escaping by a hair's breadth the wheels of truck or omnibus in their attempts to secure the coin, if some pitiful passer-by stops ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... he desired him to make it a present to the Jesuit, telling him at the same time, that as these people had great power and authority, it might be of service to us hereafter. This Campbell very unwillingly did, and received from the father, not long after, a pitiful present, not a quarter part of the value of the rim of the watch. We understood afterwards that this had come to the governor's ears, who was highly offended at it, as thinking that if any thing of that sort had been to be had, it was his due, and did not spare the Jesuits ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... been taken with one of her fits of charity, which made her give all she owned that she might overwhelm those who had nothing. At the idea of suffering, her whole soul melted into a pitiful fraternity. She went often to the pere Mascart's, a blind paralytic on the Rue Basse, whom she was obliged to feed herself the broth she carried him; then to the Chouteaux, a man and his wife, each one over ninety years of age, who lived in a little hut ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... not in our generation at least, had Europe seen anything like that flight—nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation—at times one might almost have thought it some vast, eccentric ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the articles which had been founded on her answers, and the Bishop previously represented to her "that these doctors were all churchmen, clerks, and well read in law, divine and human; that they were all tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed mildly, seeking neither vengeance nor corporal punishment, but solely wishing to enlighten her, and put her in the way of truth and of salvation; and that, as she was not sufficiently informed in such high matters, the Bishop and the Inquisitor offered ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... believe it was she," he cried, in total disregard of the presence he was in, "I would not believe it; but now——" A certain pitiful gesture finished the sentence, and neither Coroner nor jury seemed to know just how to proceed, the conduct of the young man being so markedly different from what they had expected. After a short pause, painful enough to all concerned, the Coroner, perceiving that very little ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... veils to hide the truth. But, in that moment, the veils were lifted, and both saw Truth in all her naked terror and beauty. What he saw scorched and repelled but did not daunt him; instead, a nobler love, chivalrous and pitiful, was born of the sight. And she saw that love, and knew it great enough to clothe her even if she came to him stripped of fair repute and ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... she murmured while she listened,—"rest"; and with the repetition of the word the fever died out of her eyes, leaving them filled with such a look, more pitiful than any tears, as would have made a kind heart ache even to look at them; while her figure, alert and proud no longer, bent on the window ledge in such lonely and weary fashion that a strong arm would have involuntarily stretched out to shield it from any hardness or blow that might threaten, ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... cheeks that were obviously rouged; she wore a dress of curious shot silk decorated with much lace, and her fingers were thick with jewels; a large hat with great purple feathers waved above her head. It was a fantastic and gaudy impression that she made, and there was something rather pitiful in the contrast between her own obvious satisfaction with her personal appearance and the bizarre, almost vulgar, effect of such strangely contrasted colours. She came mincing into the room with her head a little on ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... subsisting between Harvey and Mary Abbott. These two children, known as Albert and Minnie Wager, were Harvey's offspring, the result of some liaison before his marriage; and Mrs. Abbott, taking charge of them for payment, had connived at the story of their origin, of their pitiful desertion. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... was strong again. With great shouts, he rallied his men. A pitiful handful; only fifteen of the fifty that had entered the valley. But Joan was alive, her face black with burned skin, otherwise unhurt. Wat's grin rose superior to a mask of raw flesh, and Grim, bleeding from a hundred wounds, was ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
