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More "Drudgery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the dear little cousins who preceded him thither during the previous month. Evidently they were beckoning him to leave this wicked South Africa and everything in it, and come to eternal glory. In this condition we left him early in the afternoon to answer the call of our daily and nightly drudgery — it would be gross extravagance to call it "duty" — an occupation which has no reverence for mournful occasions. At 9.15 p.m., just about the time of his birth sixteen months before, the little soul was relieved ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Court of the United States and in several of the appellate courts of the larger States each judge is provided with a clerk at public expense. While this is a means of relief from much which is in the nature of drudgery, it sometimes leads to a deterioration in the quality of the judicial opinions. A dictated opinion is apt to be unnecessarily long, and when a clerk is set to looking up authorities, although he can hardly be expected always ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... had placed himself at the table next to Vogt and Weise. He was overcome with heat, and said he would rather hang himself than endure this horrible drudgery for two whole years. But Weise chaffed him in his genial way: "How do you know you could find a tough enough rope, brewer? you're no light weight!" And presently the brewer grew less melancholy; now that he could sit down things did not look so formidable, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... their grain, besides doing so many other things. It will make a wonderful change in the lives of all. Young people will not want to leave the farms and go to the city. It will be a joy for them to remain, and so much of the drudgery will ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... think. We all know how it flows in to them, from lecture and book, from the Tribune and school—but few, especially in the Atlantic cities, know what becomes of culture among men and women who 'work and weave in endless motion' in the counting-house, or factory, or through daily drudgery and the reverses from wealth to poverty. Others have treated a single **o [transcriber's note: illegible word] of life, dramatically and by events, as well as Miss HARDING, but no one American has dared such intricacies of thought and character in individuals—has raised them to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... office, and giving up his time and thoughts to the work which it involved, the great Instauration had to wait his hours of leisure; and his exclamation, so often repeated, Multum incola fuit anima mea, bears witness to the longings that haunted him in his hours of legal drudgery, or in the service of his not very thankful employers. Not but that he found compensation in the interest of public questions, in the company of the great, in the excitement of state-craft and state employment, in the pomp and enjoyment of court life. He found too much compensation; ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... pitiful, mean, mutual scandal, never was more plentifully dispersed. Electioneering is a trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moral and mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mind capable of the dirty drudgery of such vice. I am at least certain no mind is great while thus employed. It is the periodical reign of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... principles of life; much less did they think of teaching them religion, or attempt civilising and reducing them by kind usage and affectionate arguments. As they gave them their food every day, so they gave them their work too, and kept them fully employed in drudgery enough; but they failed in this by it, that they never had them to assist them and fight for them as I had my man Friday, who was as true to me as the very flesh upon ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... of Napoleon—Once at St. Helena, when walking with a lady, some servants came along carrying a load. The lady, in an angry tone, ordered them out of the way, on which Napoleon interposed, saying, "Respect the burden, madam." Even the drudgery of the humblest laborer contributes towards the general well-being of society; and it was a wise saying of a Chinese Emperor that, "If there was a man who did not work, or a woman that was idle, somebody must suffer cold or hunger in ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... it must be difficult. And as to the drudgery of it—the dogs, and that kind of thing—nothing of that sort matters to me in the least. But I cannot be humiliated before those who have become my friends, entirely because Lady Henry wished ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... important places in all our countries will be few in proportion, but the struggle will be won in the Nation, as in the Army, by the army of the myriads of faithful workers faithfully performing tasks of drudgery and quiet service—and a realization of this is ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... the elder Hamilton Spence, now deceased, had been a far-sighted man. Benis had always cherished a warm admiration for the commercial astuteness which he conceived himself to have inherited. He would have been, he thought, exactly like his father—if he had cared for the drudgery of business. So it was a habit of his, when in a quandary, to consider what his parent would have done and then to do likewise—an excellent rule if he had ever succeeded in applying it properly. But there were always so ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... ways, backed by nimble sophistry, the whole ruling class, with its clouds of retainers, turned out either an increasing flood of praise of these conditions, or masses of misinforming matter which tended to reconcile or blind the victim to his pitiful drudgery. The masters of industry, who reaped fabulous riches from such a system, were covered with slavish adulation, and were represented in flowery, grandiloquent phrases as indispensable men, without whom the industrial system of the ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... impossible, except where, as in England, masterless men are forcibly prevented from producing the food they need. And you, as an artist, can tell me that at present great artists invariably do starve, except when they are kept alive by charity, private fortune, or some drudgery which hinders them in the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... times taken the standpoint that the masses of people are of crude susceptibility and clumsy intelligence, "sordid in their pursuits and sunk in drudgery; and religion provides the only means of proclaiming and making them feel the high import of life." (Schopenhauer.) Thus the theist is led to the conclusion that the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... barges plying up and down the canal and had occasionally been harnessed with other women to the towing rope of a pakschuyt plying between Broek and Amsterdam. But when Hans had grown strong and large, he had insisted on doing all such drudgery in her place. Besides, her husband had become so very helpless of late that he required her constant care. Although not having as much intelligence as a little child, he was yet strong of arm and very hearty, and Dame Brinker had sometimes great ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... she made choice of articles of dress too good for domestic drudgery, and not fine enough to suit the rank to which she belonged. In this case, extremes would have suited her better than a ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... in with a dull, heavy look of utter exhaustion, bodily and mental, and quietly sets the things for supper, and goes about her cottage work as one who bears a heavy chain, but has borne it too long to let it hinder the daily drudgery of life. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... originality and free healthy development may at last have a chance,—and an audience. What the people need in order to become an audience is the same thing that originality needs, emancipation from drudgery and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... father," he says in a letter, "would have put his hand to a spade or an axe with any man, and so could I pretty well, too, when I was in my prime; and my eldest son is now working with his own hands at farming, previous to emigrating to South America, where he will do the drudgery of his own cattle-pens and sheepfolds; and if I were twenty-four and unmarried I would go out there too, and work like an Englishman, and live by the ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... character," as the white men would limit the influence of the Negroes by retaining practically all of the wealth of the islands. The inducements, therefore, offered the free Negroes in the United States were merely intended to use them in supplying in the British dominions the need of men to do drudgery scarcely more elevating than the toil ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... properly directed, would introduce order and system into a family for a twelvemonth, by commanding the time and knowledge of those whose study they had been, and who would be willing to devote themselves to such objects, and then permit their wives and daughters to return to the drudgery to which the sex seems doomed in this country, he first bethought him of the wants of social life before he aspired to its parade. A man of the world, Mr. Effingham possessed the requisite knowledge, and a man of justice, the requisite fairness, to permit those who depended ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... his career a tragic weakness of will takes possession of Coleridge, making it impossible for him, with all his genius and learning, to hold himself steadily to any one work or purpose. He studied in Germany; worked as a private secretary, till the drudgery wore upon his free spirit; then he went to Rome and remained for two years, lost in study. Later he started The Friend, a paper devoted to truth and liberty; lectured on poetry and the fine arts to enraptured audiences in London, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... environment must find in the only school which ninety per cent will ever attend, a training which will give it an intelligent adjustment to its environment. With this adjustment, the future work of the child cannot reasonably expect to escape the state of drudgery. When a life's work degenerates into this condition, then contentment with it, or happiness as a result of it, becomes an idle dream. Can the accuracy of this statement be questioned? If so, it ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... son of Dr Lloyd, one of the masters of Westminster School, and who had been an early chum of Churchill's. This young man had discovered very promising abilities, alike at Westminster and at Cambridge, and had been appointed usher in his father's seminary; but, sick of the drudgery, and infected with a fierce thirst both for fame and pleasure, had flung himself upon the literary arena. Although far inferior to Churchill in genius, and indeed little better than a clever copyist of his manner, he exerted a very pernicious ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... are men in this valley who scout the idea that farming, carpentry, merchantry, are anything but drudgery, defend all the evils known to humankind with the argument that "a man must live," and laugh at any one who sees beauty or charm in being here, in working with the hands, or, indeed, in just living! ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes this ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... brethren, were vile and degraded: she saw lazy, drunken men, lounging about at the doors of smoky huts, or administering chastisement to yelping curs, or to women as noisy, reduced by ill-treatment and domestic drudgery to be the cunning, spiteful slaves they were. Every thing shocked the noble and pure spirit of Orikama: there were none here that she could make companions and friends, nor would Towandahoc and Ponawtan ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... house-visitation must do; and the mere business habits of accuracy and patience to which it compels them, are a valuable practical schooling for them themselves in after-life. It is tiresome and unsentimental drudgery, no doubt; but perhaps all the better training on that account. And, after all, the magic of sweetness, grace, and courtesy may shed a hallowing and humanising light over the meanest work, and the smile ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... expect to teach in the city schools; that has always seemed to me the hardest kind of work. I should think you would prefer a college position;—there would be less drudgery, and ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... of my readers to identify the lad whose story I am telling. His unit was located at a large Lancashire town some thirty miles from Brunford. Here he was initiated into the secrets of a soldier's life. At first everything was a drudgery to him; he could not see the meaning of what he was doing, could not understand how "forming fours" and other parts of his drill could help him to be a soldier. Still, being a fairly sharp, common-sense lad, he picked up his work quickly, and in the course of a few weeks was physically much ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... matter of fact, Mark Twain loathed the continuous travel and nightly drudgery of platform life. He was fond of entertaining, and there were moments of triumph that repaid him for a good deal, but the tyranny of a schedule and timetables was a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... himself with thoughts of the morrow, and visions of two people in a ferny hollow singing hymns out of one hymn-book. The glory seemed to have departed from Bridesdale, the romance to have gone out of its existence on that humdrum Saturday. The morning passed in drudgery, the dinner table in prosaic talk, and the hot afternoon was a weariness of the flesh and spirit. Just about tea time the mail waggon passed the gate; there was nobody in it for Bridesdale. When the quiet tea was over, the veteran lit his pipe, and he and Marjorie went to the post office to enquire ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... same deferential gallantry at the surgeon-general's office; the young doctors, indeed, became almost obtrusive in their eagerness to spare the young women the drudgery of scrutinizing the long lists of invalids. But, after two days' careful search, no names resembling Sprague or Perley ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... over the hard drudgery of practice. Those that witness only the final games of the year, little realize the gruesome task of preparedness. Every football player will acknowledge that some day he has ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... living and exposure to wind and weather, they also saved it from the wear and tear of steady industry and toil. Exercise of body and of mind, with a view to strength and endurance, was enjoined; but it was the drill of the soldier rather than the drudgery ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could. A farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming activities. It certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he is fond of them, or whether he regards them merely ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... of this class I easily obtained the reputation of a great genius, and was persuaded that, with such liveliness of imagination, and delicacy of sentiment, I should never be able to submit to the drudgery of the law. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... showed a great liking and aptitude for partisan warfare. At night he would go out for booty and always brought back French clothing and weapons, and when told to would bring in French captives also. Denisov then relieved him from drudgery and began taking him with him when he went out on expeditions and had him enrolled ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... loads of brick on their shoulders to the masons on the walls. Of course the sheep suffered for lack of care. The children also pined from neglect. Life for the Hebrews became a grinding treadmill of hardship and weariness and drudgery. ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... my blindness, that the great things were the easiest to do, but now I see that drudgery is an inseparable part of everything worth while, and the more worth while it is, the ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the Cree boys doing the drudgery, but Annette besought ham so sweetly with her eyes to let "the little scouts" do it, that he desisted. His glance, as he followed every movement of the maiden, had as much of mute adoration, reverent and ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... up his drudgery hose, And put on his holiday clothes; His coat was of scarlet so fine, Full trimmed with buttons behind; Two sleeves it had it is true, One yellow, the other was blue, And the cuffs and the capes were of green, And the longest that ever were seen; ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... is not possible to know if I am mistaken or not. And when shall I know? The day after the first performance, if I have it performed, which is not certain. There is no fun in anything except work that has not been read to any one. All the rest is drudgery and PROFESSIONAL BUSINESS, a horrible thing. So make fun of all this GOSSIP; the guiltiest ones are those who report it to you. I think it is very odd that they say so much against you to your friends. No one indeed ever says anything to me: they know that I would not allow it. Be valiant and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... calico, shrunken from many washings, and beneath the scant sleeves Carraway saw her thin red wrists, which looked as if they had been soaking in harsh soapsuds. Except for a certain ease of manner which she had not lost in the drudgery of her life, she might have been sister to the toilworn slattern he had noticed in one of the hovels ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty and the drudgery. And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo was even happy so. This was the truth ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... remarked, although in the middle ranks of life, was very much below the middle ranks in financial prosperity, and had therefore to perform much household drudgery. ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... credit, and what remains? I do not ask what remains to the few, but to the many? Take away this system of credit, and then tell me what is left for labor and industry, but mere manual toil and daily drudgery? If we adopt a system that withdraws capital from active employment, do we not diminish the rate of wages? If we curtail the general business of society, does not every laboring man find his condition grow daily worse? ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the same time avoid setting the game as a task? That such a result might follow is evident from our ordinary observation of young children. To the boy interested in a game of ball, the request to come and join his sister in playing housekeeping would, more than likely, be positive drudgery. May it not follow therefore, that a trade or guessing game given by the kindergarten director will fail to call forth the free activity of the child? One of the arguments of the advocates of the Montessori Method in favour of that system is, that the specially prepared apparatus ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Guy, eagerly, 'to be sure I delight in Homer and the Georgics, and plenty more. What splendid things there are in these old fellows! But, I never liked the drudgery part of the affair; and now if I am to be set to work to be accurate, and to get up all the grammar and the Greek roots, it will be horrid ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which I have spoken shows itself even here, where they are separated from old romantic associations, and begin the new life in the New World by doing all its drudgery. We know flights of poetry repeated to us by those present at their wakes,—passages of natural eloquence, from the lamentations for the dead, more beautiful than those recorded in the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... well as on shore, often stand more in need of notice and assistance than their gifted brethren, who are better able to make their own consequence felt and acknowledged; for it must not be forgotten that these honest, hard-working men actually perform the greater part of all the routine drudgery of the service, and perhaps execute it better than men of higher talents could ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... war lasted, he looked upon him as his fellow-helper in all emergencies, and fed him carefully with hay and corn. When the war was over, he only allowed him chaff to eat, and made him carry heavy loads of wood, and subjected him to much slavish drudgery and ill-treatment. War, however, being again proclaimed, the Soldier put on his charger its military trappings, and mounted, being clad in his heavy coat of mail. The Horse fell down straightway under the weight, no longer equal to the ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... left the vessel, and went up to a storehouse at Tuckhoe, and the first mate to Kent island, whilst the second mate and boatswain kept the ship; in the mean time our hero was employed in loading the vessel, and doing all manner of drudgery. Galled with a heavy yoke and narrowly watched, he began to lose all hopes of escape; his spirits now began to fail him, and he almost gave himself up to despair, little thinking his deliverance so near at hand, as he found it ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... to find him meat, drink, washing, and lodging during the said term. Steele was no great artist, though he had studied under Carlo Vanloo, of Paris. He troubled himself little enough as to his pupil's progress, employing him for the most part in grinding colours and in the drudgery of the studio. But George Romney made the best of his opportunities. And he was not unhappy. He had fallen in love with Mary Abbott, one of two sisters living with their widowed mother, in humble circumstances, at Kendal. But soon Steele was bent on quitting ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... pages I have tried to take from our practical and often laborious calling its dull, commonplace, and prosaic aspects. It should be our constant aim to lift life above mere plodding drudgery. It is our great good fortune to co-work with Nature, and usually among her loveliest scenes. Is it not well to "look up to the hills" occasionally, from whence may come "help" toward a truer, larger manhood, and then, instead of going home to the heavy, indigestible supper too often ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... has become an eminently scientific profession, it requires to make it interesting that it shall be thoroughly understood, and conducted upon a proper scale; but at that time it was commonly a mere routine of dull drudgery, and nowhere more so than in the west of Cornwall. To have an object in view, yet be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation. He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... tiring life, so long as I live, we shall earn enough, perhaps, between us to keep Lucien until success comes. My courage will never fail," said Eve, brightening. "There is no hardship in work when we work for one we love; it is not drudgery. It makes me happy to think that I toil so much, if indeed it is toil, for him. Oh, do not be in the least afraid, we will earn money enough to send Lucien into the great world. There lies his road ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... distinguish themselves by a voluntary privation of all that useful knowledge for which they are sent abroad; and yet, at that age, the most useful knowledge is the most easy to be acquired; conversation being the book, and the best book in which it is contained. The drudgery of dry grammatical learning is over, and the fruits of it are mixed with, and adorned by, the flowers of conversation. How many of our young men have been a year at Rome, and as long at Paris, without knowing the meaning and institution of the Conclave in the former, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... catechising were laid on them, a man who had held one of the law or medical fellowships sometimes took orders late in life and then claimed presentation to a College benefice in virtue of his seniority as a Fellow, having in the meantime escaped the drudgery to which the Fellow in orders ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... in her new position with undisguised satisfaction. But now that she had become a governess he was not at all inclined to relax his exertions in her behalf. She was of too much importance, he said, to waste her life and injure her health in constant drudgery, and so he determined that she should not suffer for want of recreation. In Naples there need never be any lack of that. The city itself, with its noisy, laughing, jovial population, seems to the English eye as though it was keeping one perpetual holiday. The Strada ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... and it is part of the enlightenment of our age that our understandings are being opened to the workingman's need of a little leisure wherein to look about him and clear his vision of the dust of the workshop. We know that there is a drudgery which is inhuman, let it but encompass the whole life, with only heavy sleep between task and task. We know that those who are so bound can have no freedom to be men, that their very spirits are in bondage. It is part of ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... position at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's exactly as she resigned in imagination a hundred times. No more drudgery over bills, no more mornings spent in icy, wet shoes, and afternoons heavy with headache. Susan was almost too excited to thank Mr. Brauer for his compliments ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regular wages, and are furnished with weapons, horses, traps, and other requisites. These are under command, and bound to do every duty required of them connected with the service; such as hunting, trapping, loading and unloading the horses, mounting guard; and, in short, all the drudgery of the camp. These are ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... in getting rich that we forget that by and by, when we have become rich, we shall have to learn how to live; for work can never be an end in itself; it is a "means of grace" when it is not drudgery; and it must, in the long run, be a preparation for play. For play is not organized idleness, frivolity set in a fanciful order; it is the normal, spontaneous exercise of physical activity, the wholesome gayety of the mind, the natural expression ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... Prior, Gay, Rowe, Congreve, Tickell, Parnell, and Pope all received direct or indirect aid from the government, in the reigns of George I and George II, Steele died in poverty, Savage walked the streets for want of a lodging, Johnson lived in penury and drudgery. Thomson was deprived of a small office which formed his sole dependence.[92] This neglect of authors and of literature was only partially due to an unappreciative government. It was supported by the indifference of a public in a high degree material and unintellectual. Conversation ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... una dies" (one day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of the cuckow; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar rules.' His general aversion to this painful drudgery was greatly enhanced by a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixey, the patron of the school, in whose house, I have been told, he officiated as a kind of domestick chaplain, so far, at least, as to say grace at table, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... honour, superior to his interest, superior to his inclination, and ruling his whole conduct with unremitting, unalienable constancy, impelled him to prefer the hard labour and obscure drudgery of working at a bureau of the minister ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My listening mind brightened.) 'But yet—there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are—And, of course—H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a salary is humiliating—unworthy ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... induced to continue the custom of maiming their female infants, in order that their children may be distinguished from those of the peasantry, who, in most of the provinces, are condemned to submit to the drudgery of the field. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... to the Aryan race, as fair and perhaps as handsome as their masters, and not subjected to especial ignominy or hardship. These slaves, of whom there were at least one hundred thousand adult males, relieved the twenty-five thousand freemen of nearly all the severe drudgery of life; and the result was an amount of leisure perhaps never since known on an equal scale ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... photographers who can snap pictures for twenty years without producing a single happy composition (except by accident), and reporters who never develop a "nose for news," there are story writers who can master all the mechanics of tale-telling, through sheer drudgery, and yet continually fail to catch fiction's spark of life. They fail, and shall always fail. Yet it is better to have strived and failed, than never to ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... which her mother had always tried to interest her without success. Rhoda thought it a great relief to have escaped from the tiresome boarders who chattered so about things they knew nothing about, and from her own daily drudgery, that had tired her back. (She had been a typist.) It was nice to be able to sit at peace with one's needlework and one's own reflections, and have Peter, who was always kind and friendly and cheerful, to brighten breakfast and leave her ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit in the closet; the shoes into which he intended ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... its sapless trunk. It is now at best but the reverse of what it was, a tree turned upside down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air. It is now handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and by a capricious kind of fate, destined to make her things clean, and be nasty itself. At length, worn out to the stumps in the service of the maids, it is either thrown out of doors, or condemned to the last use, of kindling a fire. When I beheld this, I sighed and said within ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... results lack of care of the body, improper use of the strength, and ignorant and improper use of the bodily functions. Then come weakness and disease and shortened life, not to speak of the misery included in these and the enjoyment missed. In the chain of results comes the toil that is drudgery. Not work, but excessive work, more than one should do, with less strength than one should have. Work itself under natural conditions is always a delight. But through sin has come strain, tugging, friction, unequal division. The changes wrought in nature by sin call for greater effort with ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... was work in it, but she soon found there was just as much drudgery as in the rag-pickin' or a beer-shop. But she had an ambition. She said she'd started here, an' she would stay an' learn everything there was, but she believed she should be an actress in the Old Bowery yet. That seemed a great thing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... against the evangelistic services of Sankey and Moody. At the age of twenty he turned his back upon Ireland, and started a literary career in London. In the first nine years of "consistent literary drudgery" he succeeded in ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... about that. You must not do drudgery for these savages much longer. Have you no relatives with whom it may be possible your sister ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... to accept. Then we'll be able to kill two birds with one stone. He'll tell us things about the heirlooms at Valley House we shouldn't be able to find out without his help—or a lot of dreary drudgery—and also he'll put a paragraph about us in his newspaper, which he'll send to your cousins. Now, isn't that a combination of ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... suffering the stroke of some affliction. In order to transfigure the everyday duties of life, there is need of imagination, of a vision such as the poets give. Without such a vision the tasks of life are drudgery. The dramas of the poets bring relief and incite ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... infinite joy in seeing him about him, healthy and vigorous, and without a care. Florent for his part remained very slim and lean in his threadbare coat, and his face began to turn yellow amidst all the drudgery and worry of teaching; but Quenu grew up plump and merry, a little dense, indeed, and scarce able to read or write, but endowed with high spirits which nothing could ruffle, and which filled the big gloomy room in the Rue ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... system. By the Anglicising process, we have spread all over India a vast layer of minor officials some six million persons deep! Consider, my dear young man, the significance of those figures. We reduce the European staff. We increase the drudgery of their office work—and we wonder why the Sahib and the peasant ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... provision which his father had in view for him in the church, he was bound to exert himself to obtain an independent maintenance in another line of life; that he had talents which would succeed at the bar, if he had application and perseverance sufficient to go through the necessary drudgery at the commencement of the study ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the poor roof over her head. She hoed and dug and drove hard bargains with the grocers to whom she sold her meagre products. She washed and ironed and mended and darned and cooked, coming at length perforce to the drudgery which throughout her brief life in the hole in the ground ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... and to him I went. I was surprised to find him at work, engraving! 'Does he,' said I, 'pretend to learning, taste, and genius, yet stoop to this drudgery?' ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... fields: which obligation was amply recompensed, by the gain he had made in showing me through half the kingdom, and the price he had now sold me for. That the life I had since led was laborious enough to kill an animal of ten times my strength. That my health was much impaired, by the continual drudgery of entertaining the rabble every hour of the day; and that, if my master had not thought my life in danger, her majesty would not have got so cheap a bargain. But as I was out of all fear of being ill-treated under the protection of so great ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... attending to the wounded and the many cases of scurvy, which was rampant among the garrison. One of her maids who shared these labours crept out of the castle one night with a view to reaching the town and escaping further drudgery and privations; but a Roundhead sentry discovered her and sent her back to the castle, thinking that she was a spy. When the great keep was partially destroyed, Lady Cholmley was forced 'to lie in a little ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... long time the young composer was unsuccessful in his attempts to break through the barren and irritating drudgery of a schoolmaster's life. At last a wealthy young dilettante, Franz von Schober, who had become an admirer of Schubert's songs, persuaded his mother to offer him a fixed home in her house. The latter gratefully accepted the overture of friendship, and thence became a daily ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... labor in a remarkable degree. The long winters were devoted to study, to sermons, or to meetings,—the summer to the plow and the harvest. One instance is on record in which the entire stock of a year's sermons were written between December and April. But, notwithstanding the inevitable drudgery of such a life, the ministry was, upon the whole, noted for study. The course held at Harvard required close application, and even at the chapel exercises the Scriptures were daily read in the original languages. These labors and studies are recorded in that quaintest of all American books, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... says some of us have golden gifts and some have copper gifts. But when we cast them all into the treasury of right service, there is an alchemy that transmutes every gift into gold. Every work is drudgery when done selfishly. Every work becomes golden when done in a ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... A.D.V.S. ordered him to be shot. He was one of the best friends I had in the war, and I am glad he entered the horses' heaven as a soldier, without the humiliation of a purgatory in some civilian drudgery. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... that emerge, ninety-and-five stay bound, less free and wealthy at the end of the chapter than they were at the beginning. And the quaint thing is—they know it; know that they will spend their lives in smoky, noisy, crowded drudgery, and in crowded drudgery die. Wealth goes to wealth, and all they can hope for is a few extra shillings a week, with a corresponding rise in prices. They know it, but it does not disturb them, for they were born of the towns, have never glimpsed at other possibilities. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... remuneration, would probably be very glad to do it after his ordinary working hours. Even an enthusiast cannot but consider digging as the most laborious of all gardening work, and will take especial care to shirk it whenever possible. In fact, real garden drudgery of all kinds is better done by a labourer, no matter how simple and easy such work may superficially appear to our young folk. Good work, as we all know, can only be done by ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... went abroad; to make clean his shoes; sweep the street; help to drive bucks when he washed; fetch water in a tub from the Thames—I have helped to carry eighteen tubs of water in one morning;—weed the garden. All manner of drudgery ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Not, however, by Johnson's testimony: Vide Adventurer, No. 39. "Such operations as required neither celerity nor strength,—the low drudgery of collating copies, comparing authorities, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... in attempting to procure subsistence by means which she deemed the best adapted to their present poverty. A churlish temper would have submitted with extreme reluctance, and many taunting reproaches to what might easily have been represented as the drudgery and degradation of the gleaner's field; but this excellent daughter-in-law displayed a spirit ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... mere preamble, and leads up to the fact that after ten years or so of drudgery I inherited a legacy which, though small, was sufficient to satisfy my simple wants. Finding myself independent, I rented a quiet house removed from the uproar and bustle of London, and there I settled down with the intention of producing some great work which should single me ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... work was unavoidable, as their husbands received so little pay. This in spite of all our vaunted "high wages." Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work without being obliged to do so. Two had no children, and their husbands' earnings were sufficient for their needs. One of these was saving for a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift because she found it less strenuous than the day. Only four of the hundred ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Minna's domestic qualities were given their most severe trial, for the composer found little or no chance to produce his own works, and was forced to gain a precarious living by the commonest musical drudgery. Probably her constant care and economy were all that turned the scale in favour of success. At length the Dresden authorities became interested in some of the earlier operas, and Wagner was ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... at him steadfastly. "No," he said. "But we are too poor to live in the city, and we can't bear the thought of wearing clothes of blue canvas and doing drudgery. We are going to live a simple life here, like ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... in the bosom of the excited family. The tattered paper still exists, folded away with other relics of those early days, so hard and yet so sweet, when the first small victories were won, and the enthusiasm of youth lent romance to life's drudgery." ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... silver ornaments, their nose-, finger-and ear-rings; their breast-, arm-and wrist-plates, and even all their wearing apparel, except that which barely covers their middle. All the American Indians are much addicted to this game, which to us appears to be a task of stupid drudgery; it seems, however, to be of early origin, when their forefathers used diversions as simple as their manners. The hurling stones they use at present were from time immemorial rubbed smooth on the rocks and with prodigious labor; and they are kept with ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... And yet the work is not half done, Which must supply from earnings scant A feeble bedrid parent's want. Her sleep-charged eyes exemption ask, And Holy hands take up the task; Unseen the rock and spindle ply, And do her earthly drudgery. Sleep, saintly poor one! sleep, sleep on; And, waking, find thy labors done. Perchance she knows it by her dreams; Her eye hath caught the golden gleams, Angelic presence testifying, That round her everywhere are flying; Ostents from which she may presume, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... question, "Thou art Saxon, father—Deny it not," she continued, observing that Cedric hastened not to reply; "the sounds of my native language are sweet to mine ears, though seldom heard save from the tongues of the wretched and degraded serfs on whom the proud Normans impose the meanest drudgery of this dwelling. Thou art a Saxon, father—a Saxon, and, save as thou art a servant of God, a freeman.—Thine accents ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Era, so it was the large majority of the people of Asia and Africa had always been wont to live. For a time it had seemed that, by virtue of machines, and scientific civilisation, Europe was to be lifted out of this perpetual round of animal drudgery, and that America was to evade it very largely from the outset. And with the smash of the high and dangerous and splendid edifice of mechanical civilisation that had arisen so marvellously, back to the land came the common man, back ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... implied them in advising you not to give up all idea of the theatre. You're too various, too gifted, too personal, to tie yourself down, at your age, to the dismal drudgery of teaching." ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... I will initiate you in the healing art, of which I have for so many years been at the head. Other physicians make the science to consist of various unintelligible branches; but I will shorten the road for you, and dispense with the drudgery of studying natural philosophy, pharmacy, botany, and anatomy. Remember, my friend, that bleeding and drinking warm water are the two grand principles—the true secret of curing all the distempers incident to humanity. Yes, this marvelous secret ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... a much better test of character than any one act of heroism, however noble. It was many years of drudgery, and reading a thousand volumes, that enabled George Eliot to get fifty ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... books—one trained to get at the best in all literary works and reveal it to the reader. This critical work—a combination of rapid reading and equally rapid written estimate of new publications—would have been deadly, save for a love of books, so deep and enduring that it has turned drudgery into pastime and an enthusiasm for discovering good things in every new book which no amount of literary trash was ever able ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... regarded at Bellomont as vaguely synchronous with sunrise—and she knew too well the nature of the tiresome things in question. Miss Pragg, the secretary, had been called away, and there would be notes and dinner-cards to write, lost addresses to hunt up, and other social drudgery to perform. It was understood that Miss Bart should fill the gap in such emergencies, and she usually recognized ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... quite content with his lot, toiling and slaving with never so much as a complaint. Folks used to say that now the Ingmarssons had got a son-in-law after their own hearts, for Elof Ersson did not know that there was anything else in life than just toil and drudgery. ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... which occupied—to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite so in the third—most of his life that was not given to literature. Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had his bread-and-butter secured for life ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... be despised because it is not altogether or even largely ethical. The heart depressed by drudgery, hardship, forlornness, craves not merely moral guidance but exhilaration and ecstacy. Small wonder if it seeks it in whisky; better surely if it finds it in hymns and prayers and transports partly of the flesh yet touched by the spirit. Further, by faithful masters and mistresses ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... son, advanced to manhood she relinquished the responsibility and devoted her time almost entirely to her household affairs. This change was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. Stephen disliked the drudgery of farm life and left the work to the hired men. So long as he could draw upon his father's careful savings to pay the wages and supply his own needs, he did not worry. The neighbours shook their heads and prophesied trouble ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... harnessed and brought into the foot-hills and down upon the margins of the valleys and plains in the form of electric current, let it, if possible, be in a large measure so distributed as to become available in the country village homes to lighten the burden and lessen the human drudgery and yet increase the efficiency of the human effort now so well bestowed upon subsidiary manufactures under the guidance and initiative of the home, where there may be room to breathe and for children to come up to manhood and womanhood in the best ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... of sail was in sight, and to a practised eye could be made out as the pirate sloop returning. Dolores glanced swiftly around, seeking some evidence that her commands to Sancho were being obeyed; but she saw no man—no figure save the ancient crone she had discarded and sent to the drudgery of the kitchen. With a keen sidelong glance she saw that the schooner was heavily grounded on the Point; a second glance told her that her guests were thinking little of the schooner, for their eyes never left her face. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... although the proceeds would have enabled him to pursue his studies with ease and comfort. He rather sought and obtained a tutorship, and for two years he devoted to law and letters only the time he could rescue from its drudgery. In a letter, written in April, 1839, replying to the request of a relative who offered to purchase his slave Sallie, subject to the provisions of his father's will, which manumitted her if she would ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... it's most kind of you. I'm sure Jean should be very grateful to you. You're a kind of fairy godmother to this little Cinderella. Only Jean must remember that it isn't very nice to come back to drudgery after an hour or two at the ball," and ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... adaptation for the direct and purposeful dealing with the problems of modern life. Especially for the early classes in the high school does the situation demand a relatively flexible curriculum, else the only choice will be to drop out to escape drudgery or failure. Inglis maintains that the selective function of the high school may operate by a process of differentiation rather than by a wholesale elimination.[59] The pupil surely cannot know in advance what he is best fitted for, ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... incidents, and grace my song, That to the humblest menial belong: To him whose drudgery unheeded goes, His joys unreckon'd as his cares or woes; Though joys and cares in every path are sown, And youthful minds have feelings of their own, Quick springing sorrows, transient as the dew, Delights from trifles, ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... more drudgery, no more humiliations," she said; "every trace of the old life melted away—every clew to identity buried and ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... &c. The duties of the women, are to skin the game when brought home and prepare the skins for market, to cook, to make the camp, cut and carry wood, make moccasins, plant and gather the corn, beans and pumpkins, and do all the drudgery connected with the domestic affairs. It is the commonly received opinion among the whites that the female Indians are the slaves of their husbands. This is not literally true. The men seldom make their wives feel their authority: as a general rule among the Sauks and Foxes, they live ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... to have me go fully into the affair. The sailors' spokesman told how he had been born on a farm, where he had shared the family drudgery and poverty till he grew old enough to run away. He meant to go to sea, but he went first to a factory town and worked three or four years in the mills. He never went back to the farm, but he sent a little money now and then to his mother; and he stayed ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... of an artist in proportion as they excel, or are defective in the mechanical parts, look on theory as something that may enable them to talk but not to paint better, and confining themselves entirely to mechanical practice, very assiduously toil on in the drudgery of copying, and think they make a rapid progress while they faithfully exhibit the minutest part of a favourite picture. This appears to me a very tedious, and I think a very erroneous, method of proceeding. Of every large composition, even of those which are most ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... a sense of disappointment, or from the silent dulness of this drudgery, his health appears to have been in a feeble state. In a letter to his father, he apologises for listlessness and stupidity by illness, and says, "that he does not come up to the definition of man as a risible animal." Yet the man who could live to eighty-seven, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... suffered to disturb the humility of patient exertion. Let our readers consider in what temper such a work must be undertaken and carried through—a work in which error was irremediable, change impossible—which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it involved the deliberation of a master—in which the patience of a mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician—in which no license could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of invention—in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... itself have wounded Richard to the quick had he not been devoured by far more biting cares, and even now it galled him. His twenty years might possibly, then, by extremity of good luck, be curtailed by five. By diligent execution of menial drudgery; by performing to some overlooker's satisfaction his daily toil; by careful obedience and subservience to these Jacks in office, themselves but servants, and yet whose malice or ill-humor might cause them to report him ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Before I let you in for that horrible drudgery? All that typing and indexing—If I'd only known you were doing anything like this.... Why couldn't you ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... wage and waif? It will be said, however, that, whatever the learning of Spenser may have gleaned, the law-books of that age were impervious to the illiterature of Shakespeare. No: such an intellect, when employed on the drudgery of a wool-stapler, who had been high-bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, might have derived all that was necessary from a very few books; from Totell's 'Presidents,' 1572; from Pulton's 'Statutes,' 1578; and from the 'Lawier's Logike,' 1588. It is one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... wore it out with sensual drudgery Before it came to me? What warped its valves? It has been used; my heart ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... useful and so honorable, it might be wished that he could have devoted himself entirely to scientific research. He had a strong taste for studies of that kind, and sometimes used to lament that his daily drudgery afforded him no leisure to compose a work on caloric, which subject he had ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for our girls, when we take such a much more practical standard for our boys, has always puzzled me. If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it, though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped attitude on a tall stool for hours and hours every day. Why should we accept life's necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls? No life worth living can be had without drudgery,—the ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... and sometimes darting off a little way and coming back to tug at the lower edge of my overcoat. But my mind was too much occupied for me to take any but a perfunctory interest in its manoeuvres. My eight years of thankless drudgery as a clerk, following on a brief adventurous period after I ran away to sea from my English home, had terminated three days before, upon receipt of a legacy, and I had at ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... work was more creative, more inspiring, more important than robot drudgery. Naturally it was the most important task in all the world ...
— The Real Hard Sell • William W Stuart
... of manufacture and trade, and in the professions formerly monopolized by men, they are actively and successfully engaged. Every law put upon the statute books affects their interests directly and indirectly—undreamed of in a social order where household drudgery and motherhood limited ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... respects, is himself no better or very little better off than his forefathers in slavery. In truth, he is still an economic slave. The conditions under which he lives and works are such as destroy whatever ambition he may possess, and reduce his life to a mere drudgery, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... Greek book and translates to me. Sometimes I listen to the sea, instead of to him, and go to sleep. But he doesn't mind. He is looking better, but work is loading up for him again as soon as we get back to Oxford about a week from now. If only he could get rid of drudgery, and write his best about the things he loves. Nobody knows what a mind he has. He is not only a scholar—he is a poet. He could write things as beautiful as Mr. Pater's, but his life is ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... day's work, is the sole reward and profit to be reaped from such arduous toil. The wealth of the soil, the harvests, the fruits, the splendid cattle that grow sleek and fat in the luxuriant grass, are the property of the few, and but instruments of the drudgery and slavery of the many. The man of leisure seldom loves, for their own sake, the fields and meadows, the landscape, or the noble animals which are to be converted into gold for his use. He comes to the country for his health or for change of air, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Hedderwick returned to his native city, and started the Glasgow Citizen—a weekly newspaper which continues to maintain an honourable position. Previous to leaving Edinburgh he was entertained at a public dinner, attended by men of letters and other leading individuals. The drudgery of newspaper life has left Mr Hedderwick little leisure for contributions to polite literature. While in Edinburgh, however, he wrote one number of "Wilson's Tales of the Border," and has since contributed occasionally to other works. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to work, and the wasteful classes would become economical. A limit would be fixed to the extravagances of fashion. Things comely and useful would satisfy the desires of both men and women. The powers of nature would be pressed more generally into our service, and compelled to do our drudgery both in the mine and on the farm. A sense of justice would dispose men to be content with their share of the blessings of Providence, and Christian generosity would prompt the rich to supply the wants of the helpless. The dangers ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... confidence for the same purpose. An element of moral courage and a keen sense of personal responsibility help to make the ideal patient in this disease. To meet a treatment appointment promptly at the same day and hour week after week, to go through the drudgery of rubbing mercurial ointment, for example, to say nothing of the unpleasantness of the method to a cleanly person, night after night for weeks, takes unmistakable grit and a well-developed sense of moral obligation. The man who has been cured of syphilis has passed through ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... resumed the cotton-raising subject by idly remarking, "I suppose since the invention of the cotton gin and the abolition of slavery most of the drudgery connected with the ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... the parental household. It is said that even at a very early age, his quick perception and his acute nervous organisation enabled him to produce much finer work than others of far greater experience in the same trade, whose obtuseness had kept them in a state of comparative drudgery all ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the pianoforte, and play every interval except the octave out of tune. When this modification had taken hold all music in the pure scale would be distorted and destroyed, unless string players were to face the practically impossible drudgery of studying both the equal temperament and the pure scale from the start, and were able to tackle either form at a moment's notice. A thorough knowledge of the natural genesis of the scale of western nations will be the best antidote to fads founded upon ignorance of it. ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... younger son Richard that he was far from pleased with his present situation. Instead of having to devote only a few hours a day to teaching English, as he had been promised, the whole of his time was taken up by the usual drudgery which is the lot of an under-master, so that he could not study for himself. The first thing his father did was to set him free from that bondage, and to devise the best means to enable him to pursue the study of painting which the boy wished to follow as a profession. They went together to ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... conversation will inform a man of sense that he is only a conceited fool. As to his political transactions, he has by his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business. During a European war, Turreaux's post is of little relative consequence; but should Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States will be exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same outrages their commercial navy now experiences ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our slaves—ministering to us and doing drudgery for us. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws Makes that and th' ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... thrusting upon him with every item of news from the city, is impelling him to disdain what the country can give him and to magnify the counter-attractions of the town. He has felt the monotony and the contracted opportunity of farm life as he knows it. He has experienced the drudgery of it ever since he began to do the chores. Familiar only with the methods of his ancestors, he knows that labor is hard and returns are few. He may look across broad acres that will some day be his, but he knows that his father is "land poor." As a farmer he sees no future for agriculture. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... wonder at the strange madness that possessed her, now pounding harder to still her tumultuous thoughts. She did not know what it was that she expected, only something great and new and wonderful, something to lift her at last from the drudgery of her work and make her feel young and gay. Something to rouse her up to the wild joy of living and make her forget her misfortunes. To be poor, and deaf, and alone—all these were new things to Mary Fortune; but she was none of them when ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... trade, and in the professions formerly monopolized by men, they are actively and successfully engaged. Every law put upon the statute books affects their interests directly and indirectly—undreamed of in a social order where household drudgery and motherhood limited a ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... civilization has created for mankind, they are perpetually brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended. They are filled with horror and compassion at the sight of poor men spending their blood in the quarrels of princes, and brutifying their sublime capabilities in the drudgery of unremitting labour. For all sorts of vice and profligacy in the lower orders of society, they have the same virtuous horror, and the same tender compassion. While the existence of these offences overpowers them with grief and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... left her free to follow her own inclinations. She had little taste for social distractions, and still she could not remain idle. For a time she thought of teaching to occupy her mind, but she knew she lacked the necessary patience, and she could not endure the drudgery of it, so, having won honors at college in English composition, she determined to try her hand at literature. She wrote a number of essays and articles on a hundred different subjects which she sent to the magazines, but they all came back with politely ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... before that time, and she now lies at our house in a very doubtful and dangerous state. Of course we are all exceedingly distressed at the circumstance, for she was like one of our own family. Since the event we have been almost without assistance—a person has dropped in now and then to do the drudgery, but we have as yet been able to procure no regular servant; and consequently, the whole work of the house, as well as the additional duty of nursing Tabby, falls on ourselves. Under these circumstances I dare not press your visit ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... me keen discontent with the life in the pits. At the same time, the spiritual ideal sustained me in the upward look. There was just ahead of me a to-morrow, and my to-morrow was bringing an escape from this drudgery. I exulted in the thought of the future. I could sing and laugh in anticipation of it, even though I lived and worked like a beast. I was conscious that in me resided a power that would ultimately take me to a life that I had had a little taste of—a life ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... the lead in all business matters in-doors and out-doors. She never asked my mother if she had better do this and that; she went right ahead, doing what she thought right and best, in every thing pertaining to the drudgery of life. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general health. They employ aesthetically the beautiful alleviations with which science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse; it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming, that you can ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... have other and more ostensible sources of satisfaction—greater splendour, wealth, or fame; but he will not be so wholly in his art, nor will his art have such a hold on him as when he was too poor to transfer its meanest drudgery to others—too humble to despise aught that had to do with the object of his glory and his pride, with that on which all his projects of ambition or pleasure were founded. "Entire affection scorneth nicer hands." When the professor is above this mechanical part of his business, it may have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... mistaken or not. And when shall I know? The day after the first performance, if I have it performed, which is not certain. There is no fun in anything except work that has not been read to any one. All the rest is drudgery and PROFESSIONAL BUSINESS, a horrible thing. So make fun of all this GOSSIP; the guiltiest ones are those who report it to you. I think it is very odd that they say so much against you to your friends. No one indeed ever says anything to me: they know that I would not allow it. Be valiant ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Irregular sleep on an uncomfortable hammock, wedged in with the other members of the crew, bad food, and over exertion told upon his frame. From the moment when all hands were piped to lash hammocks to the moment when the signal was given for turning in, it was one long round of thankless drudgery. But he proved himself to be very quick and nimble. Before long, no one could lash his hammock with the seven turns in a shorter time than he. After learning the work on the mainsails and trysails he was sent to practise the more acrobatic duties in the tops, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... discordance are apt to come to a signal defeat when Love takes the field. But now there seemed to be no question of wooing; Love was not on hand, where his power was wanted; the friends were all scattered one from another—Lois going to the drudgery of teaching rough boys and girls, she herself to the seclusion of some quiet seaside retreat, and ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... But now that she had become a governess he was not at all inclined to relax his exertions in her behalf. She was of too much importance, he said, to waste her life and injure her health in constant drudgery, and so he determined that she should not suffer for want of recreation. In Naples there need never be any lack of that. The city itself, with its noisy, laughing, jovial population, seems to the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... just in sight. Every man and woman must have something to live for, otherwise they become discontented or dull. People wonder at the present unrest among the working classes. But to me this unrest is inevitable to the conditions in which they live. They have no ideal to light up their drudgery with glory. They cannot express themselves in the dull labour which is their daily task. They just have to go on and on doing the same monotonous jobs, not in order to enjoy life, but just in order ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Evans contributed only one article, beyond her editorial work, to the pages of the Westminster Review. The work she did, almost wholly that of digesting and reviewing new books, could have been little to her taste. It must have been a drudgery, except in so far as it aided her in the pursuit of her studies. Occasionally, however, she must have found a task to her mind, as when, in the summary of current English literature for January, 1852. she had Carlyle's Life of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... as a schoolboy just escaped from drudgery, while Bertie's Nellie, as a matter of course, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... received from officiating curates of the little church such literary instruction as could be given by men who had left the farmer's flail, the tailor's thimble, and the service of strolling stage-players, to perform church drudgery under the parish incumbent, who was old and well-nigh blind. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a school at Wroxeter, where he spent three years, to little purpose, so far as a scientific education ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... powers: as calmly did he speak in this manner, as if it were a thing long settled in his own mind and in fate—and in the manner of an indulgent communication. He lamented the lack of taste and knowledge in the world; that so little was real art appreciated, that he was obliged to submit to the drudgery of portrait. Submit!—and such portraits. Poor fellow! how long will he get sitters to submit? I have recently heard the fate of one of his great compositions. He had persuaded the vicar and church-wardens of a parish to accept a picture. He attended ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... But this, at least, is true: in proportion as the worker knows the meaning of the work that he does,—in proportion as he sees it in its largest relations to society and to life,—his work is no longer the drudgery of routine toil. It becomes instead an intelligent process directed toward a definite goal. It has acquired that touch of artistry which, so far as human testimony goes, is the only pure and uncontaminated ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... so, I heard that Sprague, who is as well connected as Conway, and a great deal more industrious, would go into business with me on less exacting terms. He has been associated with me for some time. He does all the drudgery of the business, and is content with one-eighth of ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... invoice-books and similar literature with endless arithmetical calculations began to float before his mental vision. With intense regret he reflected that if he had only used reasonably well the brief period of life which as yet lay behind him, he might by that time have been done with initial drudgery and have been entering on a brilliant career in one of the learned professions. As to the army and navy, he was too old to get into either, even if he had possessed interest, which he did not. Sternly did he reproach his departed uncle when he brooded over his wrongs, and soliloquised thus:—"You ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... fate to be taken by a Spanish or Portugal man-of-war; and that then I should be set at liberty. But this hope of mine was soon taken away; for when he went to sea, he left me on shore to look after his little garden, and do the common drudgery of slaves about his house; and when he came home again from his cruise, he ordered me to lie in the cabin to look ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... herself from keeping a close watch that would degenerate into drudgery and to remain alive to events even when resting, with her back turned on the net, the ambushed Spider always has her foot upon the telegraph-wire. Of my observations on this subject, let me relate the following, which will ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... be a charge to some; education to most; art, in one form or another, to almost all. But the hard work of the world might well be left to men, upon whom it more naturally and fitly devolves. No hateful drudgery of "earning a livelihood." Women might rest content with being free and beautiful, cultivated and artistic, good citizens to the State, the mothers and guardians of the coming generations. If any woman asks more than this, she is really asking less—for she is asking that a heavier burden ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... learn their value soon enough. You ought to make a good match, a brilliant match—if there were any chance for a girl in such a hole as this. Marriage is your only hope, remember, Clarissa. Your future lies between that and the drudgery of a governess's life. You have received an expensive education—an education that will serve you in either case; and that is all the fortune I ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... doctrine had never been made a part of such education as she had the opportunity of acquiring. True, the girl learned right from wrong, also her religion was very clear on the point, but she could not then believe it was wrong to fly from the horrors of mill drudgery, made unbearable by the more intimate environment of ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... stimulated to those exertions which society and competition would arouse. Ennui often mars his enjoyment. We have seen men methodically pursuing, day after day, the same exercises, with all the listless drudgery of a hack-horse. Geniality and generous emulation are among the great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... would introduce order and system into a family for a twelvemonth, by commanding the time and knowledge of those whose study they had been, and who would be willing to devote themselves to such objects, and then permit their wives and daughters to return to the drudgery to which the sex seems doomed in this country, he first bethought him of the wants of social life before he aspired to its parade. A man of the world, Mr. Effingham possessed the requisite knowledge, and a man of justice, the requisite fairness, to permit those who depended on him so much for ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... contrariety of opinion prevails in the community in regard to the pleasantness of the business of teaching. Some teachers go to their daily task merely upon compulsion; they regard it as intolerable drudgery. Others love the work: they hover around the school-room as long as they can, and never cease to think, and seldom to ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... the House, but not at first with the success expected of him, his management of the abortive education proposals of '96 being thought, even by his own supporters, to show a disinclination for the continuous drudgery of parliamentary management under modern conditions. But after the opening session matters proceeded more smoothly, and Mr Balfour regained his old position in the estimation of the House and the country. He had the satisfaction ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... reader, you may understand that I continue to write, as Tony Lumpkin says—not to please my good-natured friends, "but because I can't bear to disappoint myself;" for that which I commenced as an amusement, and continued as a drudgery, has ended in ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... work in the kitchen and go to market from time to time, performing this menial drudgery under the personal inspection of the warrior who governed the garrison and fortress, but who in vain attempted to make Maria van Reigersbergen tremble ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this thing. She did. But doing it she had to abandon the easy life of a scholar and the aristocratic environment of a cultured, prosperous, Quaker family, of Moorestown, New Jersey, for the rigors of a ceaseless drudgery and frequent imprisonment. A flaming idealist, conducting the fight with the sternest kind of realism, a mind attracted by facts, not fancies, she has led fearlessly and with ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... nature rather for the inner circle, we must add that the arrangements of civilized life have not been, as yet, such as to secure it to her. Her circle, if the duller, is not the quieter. If kept from "excitement," she is not from drudgery. Not only the Indian squaw carries the burdens of the camp, but the favorites of Louis XIV. accompany him in his journeys, and the washerwoman stands at her tub, and carries home her work at all seasons, and ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of traps set, as the quantity of game in a given locality which regulates the amount of success for a trapper. Yet his efforts in this new business succeeded to a gratifying degree, and the fact of having exchanged the dull monotony of farm drudgery for the exhilarating excitement of a hunter's life, was in itself a sufficient reward for any amount of exertion. Indeed what mode of life could be happier or more free, for a healthy, strong-limbed youth of fifteen, than to live as he then did, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... for painting's sake; to such an one there is something almost sacramental in the very mixing of the colours. The true sculptor hears music in the tapping of the mallet upon the chisel as he shapes the marble into grace and beauty. There is no drudgery in the calling that is yours by ordination of nature, by right of true heartfelt affection. The kind of preacher we mean would rather talk about preaching than about any other subject, providing he meet with one like-minded with himself. He is ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... application of it. We love to add to our stock of ideas, facts, or even notions of things, provided moderate pains will suffice; but to put our knowledge in practice is too often esteemed servile, or eschewed as mere drudgery. Useful activities flatter pride, and gratify the imagination, too little. But of what avail, ordinarily, is the possession of truth, unless as light to direct us in the ways of beneficent labor, for ourselves and for our fellow men? There are, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... after left the vessel, and went up to a storehouse at Tuckhoe, and the first mate to Kent island, whilst the second mate and boatswain kept the ship; in the mean time our hero was employed in loading the vessel, and doing all manner of drudgery. Galled with a heavy yoke and narrowly watched, he began to lose all hopes of escape; his spirits now began to fail him, and he almost gave himself up to despair, little thinking his deliverance so near at hand, as he found ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... fixed time in a man's life at which he comes to himself, and some men never come to themselves at all. It is a change reserved for the thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can detach themselves from tasks and drudgery long and often enough to get, at any rate once and again, view of the proportions of life and of the stage and plot of its action. We speak often with amusement, sometimes with distaste and uneasiness, of men ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... tended him with the utmost care, for he wished him to be strong to endure the hardships of the field, and swift to bear his master, when need arose, out of the reach of danger. But when the war was over he employed him on all sorts of drudgery, bestowing but little attention upon him, and giving him, moreover, nothing but chaff to eat. The time came when war broke out again, and the Soldier saddled and bridled his Horse, and, having put on his heavy coat of mail, mounted him ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... middlemen. They were kidnapped or captured by the southern Indians from their own adjacent tribes and sold to the Tsimshian, who traded them to the northern Thlinkit and interior Tinne tribes for furs." "Slaves did all the drudgery, fished for their owner, strengthened his force in war, were not allowed to hold property or to marry, and when old and worthless were killed. The master's power was unlimited." The slave must commit any crime at the command of the master. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... were so tired of the system of vigilance, protection, amusement, and pampering at school and at home, that they were determined to bring up their own children in hunger, corporal discipline, and drudgery. ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... questions, laughing and jeering at his folly. No one laughed at him more than Max Inkster. Archy felt inclined to retort, but he remembered his promise to Max, and gave him no sign of recognition, he was treated as one of the ship's boys, and was put to do all sorts of drudgery and dirty work. Often and often he wished that he had remained at home, to look after his mother's farm, and help Maggie in ...
— Archibald Hughson - An Arctic Story • W.H.G. Kingston
... allows the pennies, which are the result of hard work, to slip out of his fingers—some going to the beershop, some this way, and some that,—he will find that his life of hard work is little raised above a life of animal drudgery. On the other hand, if he take care of the pennies—putting some weekly into a benefit society or an insurance fund, others into a savings bank, and confides the rest to his wife to be carefully laid out, with a view to the comfortable maintenance and culture ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... telling you the things that are happening. The people will not go back to their drudgery—they refuse to be disarmed. Ostrog has awakened something greater than he dreamt of—he has ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... of her desire to please her cousin, Allie had neither the patience nor steadiness needful to keep her at the piano; and she much preferred to settle herself comfortably in front of the fire, and listen to her cousin's performances, rather than go through the drudgery of scales and exercises, upon which Charlie insisted, as the orthodox preparation for later work. Accordingly, Allie's music usually ended in a playful skirmish which sent Charlie back to the piano, to beguile ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... years ago: but he had the sense to state that it should apply only to women of the upper classes, the mass of labouring women, who form the vast bulk of the English women of the present day, being left to their ill-paid drudgery and ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... the test of any piece of literature—its universal appeal to human nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh laws—only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and Virginia—the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the kingdom, and infallible signs of charity. And then they foolishly deplore their own state as far removed from that perfection, because forsooth their minds are uncultured, their faith simple, and their time taken up with the drudgery of life. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... scrambling for themselves, and trying to manage their own undertakings, instead of falling into harmony with God, and through Him, with all that is. What wears the soul out is not the work of life itself—it is its drudgery, its monotony, its blind vagueness, its apparent purposelessness. We do not wish to scatter our lives and spend ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... last there is some promise of success, some relief from drudgery, and with it a little leisure for companionship—then, too, there is opportunity for an estimate of intellectual quality. Then it is that the man of genius discovers that the woman who has stood by him through his ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... in a remarkable degree. The long winters were devoted to study, to sermons, or to meetings,—the summer to the plow and the harvest. One instance is on record in which the entire stock of a year's sermons were written between December and April. But, notwithstanding the inevitable drudgery of such a life, the ministry was, upon the whole, noted for study. The course held at Harvard required close application, and even at the chapel exercises the Scriptures were daily read in the original languages. These labors ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... all the myriads that do live, are of no more account than working animals; and there is, no such a theory, no reason, a priori; why they should not be controlled by superior men, and made to do that for which they seem the best fitted—Work and Drudgery! Only long experiment could teach a doctrine contrary to the logical presumption arising from weakness. There could be no doctrine of human rights. It would be simply a doctrine of human forces. Right would be a word as much out of place as among birds and beasts. ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... reserved for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit in the closet; the shoes into which he intended to change were ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with them, to enjoy and to help others to enjoy, seem to me often to do more for the world than the people who hurry from committee to committee, address meetings, and do what is called some of the drudgery of the world, which might in a hundred cases be just as well undone. It is most of it merely a childish game either way; and the child who looks on and applauds is often better employed than the child who ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one to three thousand words which are spelled in more or less irregular ways. The best that can be done with these words is to classify them as much as possible and suggest methods of association which will aid the memory. But after all, the drudgery of memorizing ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... more room in journalism for a gentleman; certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My listening mind brightened.) 'But yet—there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are—And, of course—H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... from the sale of their half-pay, almost expended in the transportation of their little families, before arriving on the lands assigned them by government—unfitted, from their former pursuits, to bear the drudgery their new course of life required, it was frequently the case, that before they could raise anything from their lands, they became perfectly destitute of the necessaries of subsistence. Too proud to seek assistance, they would starve rather than communicate their ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... was prickt well enough before, if you could haue let me alone: my old Dame will be vndone now, for one to doe her Husbandry, and her Drudgery; you need not to haue prickt me, there are other men fitter ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... but she knows but little of the rules and grammar. I think you will do very well together; for her fluency will tempt you on to talk, and your perseverance will keep her up to the exercises and conjugations, which are sad drudgery, but very needful if you are ever really to know anything of the language. You are persevering, are ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... told, inkyos; a social, or rather unsocial state, which in their case may be rendered unwidowed dowagers; since, in company with their husbands, they had renounced all their social titles and estates. Their daughters-in-law now did the domestic drudgery, while they devoted their days ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... tribes gradually dissolved under the continuance of peace; the subsequent occupation of the country dispersed those whom the camp had united. The enthusiastic elan with which the conquest had been achieved gave way to the petty drudgery by which the individual families, each in its own circle, had to accommodate themselves to their new surroundings. Yet under the ashes the embers were still aglow; and the course of history ever fanned them anew into flame, bringing home to Israel the truths ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... me," said Miss Stuart, "that you are an artist. That is not real sunshine. You have created it. You are born for an artist-life. Do not go back to your drudgery." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Puck and Yudge, people from over by Muchinippi, and out Noodletoozy way, big, red-necked men with the long loping step that comes from walking on the plowed ground. Following them are lanky women with their front teeth gone, and their figures bowed by drudgery, dragging wide-eyed children whose uncouth finery betrays the "country jake," even if the freckles and the sun-bleached hair could keep the secret. From the far-off fastnesses, where there are still log-cabins chinked with mud, they have ventured to see the show come into ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... the cattle merely to try their rifles. "Ours was the task of hewing and carting them firewood to the barracks," continued the petition, complaining of the way the Virginians had imposed on the submissiveness and docility of the inhabitants, "ours the drudgery of raising vegetables which we did not eat, poultry for their kitchen, cattle for the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... "What! with twelve thousand a year? What could Government give him would be half so dear To his heart as a walk with a dog and a gun Through his own pheasant woods, or a capital run? 'No; but vanity fills out the emptiest brain; The man would be more than his neighbor, 'tis plain; And the drudgery drearily gone through in town Is more than repaid by provincial renown. Enough if some Marchioness, lively and loose, Shall have eyed him with passing complaisance; the goose, If the Fashion to him ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... had no bright side. It was a youth of license, an age of drudgery. Despite an organization which, while it perhaps made them less sensible of pain, certainly made them less susceptible of passion, than the higher races of men, the Hurons were notoriously dissolute, far exceeding in this respect the wandering and starving Algonquins. [ 1 ] Marriage ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... "Let me make it up to you! We care so much! Suppose we aren't always happy. Oh, my love, a month of life with you would make me willing to bear all the spiritual drudgery of marriage!" ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... another field of labor. That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her. She had no inherent dislike for work. She was too vibrantly alive to be lazy. But she had had an overdose of unaccustomed drudgery, and she was growing desperate. If there had been anything to keep her mind from continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate, slept, worked,—ate, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... he was surely gone, it was also with a sense of pleasure that she collected together the articles belonging to him and packed them carefully. Hers was a nature peculiarly susceptible to the pure delight of serving, aiding, sparing trouble to those whom she loved. The meanest household drudgery, the severest labor, the most prosaic making and mending, would have gained a charm and been idealized into pleasures, if they contributed to the well-being of those dear to her; but, when performed for the one more precious than all others, they ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... into sludge by the feet and hoofs of the preceding divisions. Happily the march of Napoleon was not harassed, like that of Hannibal, by the assaults of living enemies. The mountaineers, on the contrary, flocked in to reap the liberal rewards which he offered to all who were willing to lighten the drudgery of ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... city, restless with the hurried toil of gnomes and goblins. So to myself Seville means ten times more than it can mean to others. I came to it after weary years in London, heartsick with much hoping, my mind dull with drudgery; and it seemed a land of freedom. There I became at last conscious of my youth, and it seemed a belvedere upon a new life. How can I forget the delight of wandering in the Sierpes, released at length from all imprisoning ties, watching the various movement as though it were a stage-play, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Petticoat, a White Shift and also a blue with her, and a mixt Blue and White Linsey Woolsey Apron." In 1728 the News Letter published an advertisement of a runaway Indian servant who, wearied by the round of domestic drudgery, adorned herself in borrowed finery and fled: "She wore off a Narrow Stript pinck cherredary Gown turned up with a little floured red and white Callico. A Stript Home-spun quilted petticoat, a plain muslin Apron, a ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... the "covenant of works," is much of a piece with superstition. It, again, is always a burden to be borne. Its mark is "drudgery and servility." It is a "lean and lifeless form of external performances." Its "law" is always something outside the soul itself. It is a way of acquiring "merit," of getting reckoned among "heaven's darlings," but it ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... of the United States and in several of the appellate courts of the larger States each judge is provided with a clerk at public expense. While this is a means of relief from much which is in the nature of drudgery, it sometimes leads to a deterioration in the quality of the judicial opinions. A dictated opinion is apt to be unnecessarily long, and when a clerk is set to looking up authorities, although he can hardly be expected always to select the ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... again to commonplace and drudgery, Beat the shares of vision into swords of dull routine, Take the trolley and the train To suburban hives again, For ye wake in little runnels where the floods of thought ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... with its own energy an extended sphere of action. Even now, when agriculture has become an eminently scientific profession, it requires to make it interesting that it shall be thoroughly understood, and conducted upon a proper scale; but at that time it was commonly a mere routine of dull drudgery, and nowhere more so than in the west of Cornwall. To have an object in view, yet be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation. He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... wherein there was any show of impiety nor witchcraft by her; and, were it otherwise, he would not, for the world and all the enjoyments thereof, nourish or support any creature that he knew engaged in the drudgery of Satan. It is well known to all the neighborhood, that the petitioner's mother has lived a sober and godly life, always ready to discharge the part of a good Christian, and never deserving of afflictions ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Anne gave herself up to a silent rapture over the shore road and Marilla guided the sorrel abstractedly while she pondered deeply. Pity was suddenly stirring in her heart for the child. What a starved, unloved life she had had—a life of drudgery and poverty and neglect; for Marilla was shrewd enough to read between the lines of Anne's history and divine the truth. No wonder she had been so delighted at the prospect of a real home. It was a pity she had to be sent back. What if she, Marilla, should indulge Matthew's unaccountable ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... what most would call our drudgery," she says, "there came a day devoted to amusement. Once we had a masquerade picnic in the woods, where we were thrown into convulsions of laughter at the sight of George W. Curtis dressed as Fanny Ellsler, in a low-necked, short-sleeved, book-muslin dress and a tiny ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... if once imbued with a love for geometry, and having once got over the drudgery of elementary acquisition, should be favourably situated for its cultivation, follows as a matter of course. The great difficulty lay in finding sufficient stimulus for their ambition, good models for their imitation, and adequate facilities for publishing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... Doomed to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position to which woman is always consigned where civilization and religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden, busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets, moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Jimmie forgot the drudgery to which he had been sentenced as a result of his fight with Otto for possession of the tiny packet concealed in the Cossack uniform. Forgotten were the multiplicity of duties incident to his service as a member of the "kitchen police"—the work to which all offenders ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... original, if not most finished, drama, Spring's Awakening. He studied law four terms at Munich, two at Zurich: but for this lawless soul jurisprudence was not to be; it was to fulfil a wish of his father's that he consented to the drudgery. A little poem which has been reproduced in leaflet form, Felix and Galathea, is practically his earliest offering to the muse. Like most beginnings of fanatics and realists, it fairly swims and shimmers with idealism. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the hundredth man, and to make a name for himself. He had found what might be called an easy place in contrast with the drudgery of the large classes he had previously taught. Here was the time, here the problem. The lamp was trimmed, the white sheets of paper were spread out invitingly on his desk. A few logs burned brightly in the fireplace, dispelling the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... enlightenment of our age that our understandings are being opened to the workingman's need of a little leisure wherein to look about him and clear his vision of the dust of the workshop. We know that there is a drudgery which is inhuman, let it but encompass the whole life, with only heavy sleep between task and task. We know that those who are so bound can have no freedom to be men, that their very spirits are in bondage. It is part of our philanthropy—it ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... amanuensis. "Salary," said "Anon," who seemed to be a humourist, "salary large but uncertain." He added with equal candour: "Drudgery great, but to an intelligent man the pickings may be considerable." Pickings! Is there a finer word in the language? T. Sandys had felt that he was particularly good at pickings. But amanuensis? The thing was unknown to him; no one on the farm ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... socialism—either God's or the devil's. Impotent those who, during the past week, have proposed to cure economic ills by spitting the heads of tyrants upon bayonets. But what force and law cannot do is slowly being done by sympathy and good-will. The heart is taking the rigor out of toil, the drudgery out of service, the cruelty out of laws, harshness out of theology, injustice out of politics. Love has done much. The social gains of the future are to be to the gradual progress ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... servants at Brook Farm. Every one served but no one was hired to serve. Household drudgery was reduced to the lowest practicable minimum. We did not live on the fat of the land, and that made a wonderful difference in the kitchen work,—that was at first. Later we had to employ farm-laborers and mechanics and as they needed meat for ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... spend fifteen or sixteen hours in study: for by some of whom this is reported it has never been done; others have done it for a short time only; and of the rest it appears, that they employed their minds in such operations as required neither celerity nor strength, in the low drudgery of collating copies, comparing authorities, digesting dictionaries, or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... Dunciad, published soon after the Odyssey, Pope laments ten years spent as a commentator and translator. He was not without compensation. The drudgery—for the latter part of his task must have been felt as drudgery—once over, he found himself in a thoroughly independent position, still on the right side of forty, and able to devote his talents to any task which might please ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... mark the Trees, and clear the way for the Surveyors every step they went. It was really a Pleasure to see with how much Cheerfulness they undertook, and with how much Spirit they went thro' all this Drudgery. . . . . . . . ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... like other girls, except that her lessons were read to her. She made great progress, and was a very apt pupil in French, German, and other subjects; but arithmetic she cordially disliked. Imagine for an instant the drudgery of working a long division sum with leaden type and raised, figures; think of all the difficulty of placing the figures, and the chances of doing the sum wrong; and then it will not cause surprise that ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... various parts of the kingdom. From his earliest youth he had a taste for roving and fraternising with gipsies and other vagrants. In 1819 he entered a solicitor's office at Norwich. After a long spell of drudgery and literary effort, he went to London in 1824, but left a year later, and for some time afterwards his movements were obscure. For a period of about five years, beginning 1835, he acted as the Bible Society's agent, selling and distributing Bibles in Spain, and in 1842 ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... any other course for the latter part of his life, which he made so useful and so honorable, it might be wished that he could have devoted himself entirely to scientific research. He had a strong taste for studies of that kind, and sometimes used to lament that his daily drudgery afforded him no leisure to compose a work on caloric, which subject ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... while the transgressor is doing well. On the one hand jewels and champagne, furs and motors, and on the other prayers that talk of death and judgment, plain garments made by the wearer's labour, and at the end the drudgery of earning an honest livelihood, perhaps as a servant. Human nature being what it is, it seems scarcely wonderful that these children of pleasure cling to the path of 'roses' and turn ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... it has never been positively known among the scouts of the Wolf Patrol whether Landy met with an unexpected accident, or allowed himself to be deliberately dragged out of the boat, seized with a sudden overwhelming desire to end his spell of drudgery. ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... Europeans who have been guilty of crimes that are not worthy of death: Some are sentenced to remain there ninety-nine years, some forty, some twenty, some less, down to five, in proportion to their offence; and during their banishment, they are employed as slaves in making ropes, and other drudgery.[141] In another island, called Purmerent, they have an hospital, where people are said to recover much faster than at Batavia.[142] In a third, called Kuyper, they have warehouses belonging to the Company, chiefly for rice, and other merchandise of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... little ventilation beneath the upper deck, with nigh two hundred panting, naked human beings wedged in together below so closely that there is scarce room for one more, the heat, the smells, the drudgery, are dreadful. No wonder the crew demanded that the trierarch and governor "make shore for the night," or that they weary of the incessant grating of the heavy oars ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... go to that little grave and lie down among the feathery flakes and forget it all, it would be so much easier than this eternal struggle to live. What had life in store for her? There was the daily drudgery, years and years of it, and always ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice. Mr. Coleridge is too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself to any drudgery: he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a thousand subjects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy, or losing themselves in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of children a family might own several of these strips of land, often miles from each other. This often brought complications and made it impossible to introduce modern farm implements and do away with much of the drudgery of ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... were so exhausted, that they were able to do nothing; the consequence was, that the whole drudgery fell on me; and I shared with them the little food which I procured, by labouring to make myself useful; for our master gave them nothing ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... these women whose name is associated with a famous business success, in writing of her own work recently said: "I believe that work which is most commonly thought drudgery can be made attractive and beautiful if it is approached in the right spirit, and I feel more than that—that until all women are awake to this, and really enjoy their work—whether it is running a home and bringing up their children, or being out in the world ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... importance and interest to the man who supplies it will it be supplied carefully, correctly, willingly, and above all, intelligently. We venture to hope that our tables may be one step towards the day when the supply of statistical information by the missionary will cease to be mere drudgery. ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... whole story. Wanaka watched her closely as Bessie told of her life with the Hoovers, of her hard work and drudgery, and of Jake's persecution. Her eyes narrowed slightly as Bessie described the scene at the woodshed, and told of how Jake had locked Zara in to wait for her mother's return, and of his cruel and dangerous trick with ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... are given a personal stake in deciding their own destiny, benefiting from their own risks, do they create societies that are prosperous, progressive, and free. Tonight, it is democracies that offer hope by feeding the hungry, prolonging life, and eliminating drudgery. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... awful drudgery for a while,' he continued, almost in the confidential tones of yore. 'To have so much money, your uncle had the poorest way of doing business. He had the customers all under his thumb, and made them fetch and carry what they wanted ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... surprisingly small amount of thinking is done; for the memorizing requires so much time and energy that, in spite of good intentions, the thinking is postponed for a more convenient season until it constitutes an insignificant part of study, while memorizing, the drudgery of study becomes ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... confessed to themselves that they would probably be obliged to keep on in the work of destruction. In the past their bitterest toil had been spiced with the hope of big achievement; the work they now set themselves to do was melancholy drudgery. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... in his farm work, transforming drudgery into contentment. And the farm began, in small ways, to show the effects of its ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... thus only remains for us to regard instinct as a mental faculty, sui generis, the gift of God to the lower animals, that man in his own person, and by them, might be relieved from the meanest drudgery of nature. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... and drudgery has given a fuller meaning to American life. Our people are better educated; we have more opportunities for travel and recreation and enjoyment of the arts. We enjoy more personal liberty in the United States today ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... board, which enabled Tom to be independent of the shop, as far as liquorice was concerned, and to cut a very smart figure among the young men about Greenwich; for on Tom's promotion another boy was appointed to the carrying out of the medicine as well as the drudgery, and Tom took good care that this lad should clean his boots as well as the doctor's, and not make quite so free with the liquorice as he had done himself. I found out also that he had cut ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... many respects, is himself no better or very little better off than his forefathers in slavery. In truth, he is still an economic slave. The conditions under which he lives and works are such as destroy whatever ambition he may possess, and reduce his life to a mere drudgery, to a mere ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
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