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More "Miserable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out of fashion. The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury. Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it. "That woman is cheating you," he would say, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... at Lord Dreever enlightened her. That miserable creature was wearing the air of a timid child about to pull a large cracker. He seemed to be bracing himself up for ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... himself. It is as if a man should use a ladder to reach a lofty crag, and then kick it over contemptuously, and aver that he could just as well have flown up, and ask the crowd below to break up that miserable ladder and try their wings. Doubtless they have wings, if they only knew it. But seriously, I am not inclined to join in the hue-and-cry against even the ultra-transcendentalist. He has truth mixed up with what I esteem objectionable, and some truth ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Till Nature's pale-faced sergeant them surprise, And as the tree then falls, just so it lies. Now look at home, thou who these lines dost read, See which of all these paths thyself dost tread, And ere it be too late that path forsake, Which, followed, will thee miserable make. ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... think about and be miserable about all the time he was in prison. For anything he knew they might have been sent to prison, too. They did those things in Russia. But while he was in the mines some friends managed to get a message to him that his wife and children had escaped and come to England. ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... that shall be consulted," cried the Contessa. "Lucy, my little angel! if it is really so that you will give my Bice the advantage of your protection for her debut—— But that is to be an angel indeed, superior to all our little, petty, miserable—— Is it possible, then," cried the Contessa, "that there is some one so good, so noble in ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... a heartless, as she was a vicious and a miserable woman. Instead of the yearnings of maternal love, she regarded her innocent child merely as the offspring of that monster, whom she execrated and feared with a preternatural hate. If she looked upon him with any feeling more lively than that of indifference, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... mind, I repeat, was at this point still a blank as to what explanation he would give to the Comte de Cambray of his own miserable failure. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... story told of Voltaire," says Dr. Arthur Leared, "well illustrates both the evil effects of constipation and the advantage of using the enema. The great philosopher was one day so miserable and dejected that he told a friend he had resolved to hang himself. His friend called the next morning to ascertain whether the resolve had been or was intended to be carried out. But Voltaire only replied, with a smile, 'I have ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... never-to-be-forgotten nine days' journey. Generally we slept in cities or towns, where we were made more or less comfortable; but on one occasion, owing to an accident, we were belated and had to stop overnight at a miserable hamlet, where no accommodation could be procured save such as a native adobe house could afford. This consisted of one large room approached by a shed. In this room the man, his wife, his children, his ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... presented altogether a dismal picture of neglected dilapidation. Nothing daunted, Viushin tore down another section of the ruined side to make a fire, hung over teakettles, and brought our provision boxes under such shelter as the miserable hut afforded. I never could ascertain where Viushin obtained the water that night for our tea, as there was no available stream within ten miles, and the drippings of the roof were thick and discoloured ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... exist in those wretched chilly damp cloisters I can't imagine," she said, as she squatted by the stove warming her hands. "Were they allowed to take hot bricks to bed with them in their cells? Think of turning out for midnight services into an unwarmed church! It sounds absolutely miserable!" ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... am the last person to call any restoration whatever, judicious. Of all destructive manias, that of restoration is the frightfullest and foolishest. Nevertheless, what good, in its miserable way, it can bring, the poor art scholar must now apply his common sense to take; there is no use, because a great work has been restored, in now passing it by altogether, not even looking for what instruction we still may find in its design, which will be more intelligible, if ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... offender, this happened in Lent, the season in which the rules of the rigid Chartreuse oblige the prior and procurator to flagellate all the frati, or lay brothers of the convent. They were, therefore, armed for their wonted pious discipline, when the miserable Salvatoriello fell in their way; whether he was honored by the consecrated hand of the prior, or writhed under the scourge of the procurator, does not appear; but that he was chastised with great severity more than proportioned to his crime, is attested ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... that bundle of tatters, was like nothing else in the world! She was not on speaking terms with more than three of the ladies. Some of them had, what she called, "taken precedence" of her—in getting into, or out of, that miserable little shelter!—and others had not called to pay their respects, or something of that kind. So, there she sat, in her own state and ceremony, while her husband sat on the same log of wood, ordering us one and all to let the raft go to the bottom, ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... the coach he had hoped to go by, but there was another that left at night, and which reached Newcastle in the forenoon, so that, by the loss of a night's sleep, he might overtake his lost time. But, restless and miserable, he could not stop in Hartlepool longer than to get some hasty food at the inn from which the coach started. He acquainted himself with the names of the towns through which it would pass, and the inns at which it would stop, and left word that the coachman was to be on ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... conditions is shown in a private letter to his chief, Lord John Russell. The picture he draws is lively, unflattering, but instructive. 'I am satisfied that the mass of the people are sound—moderate in their demands and attached to British institutions; but they have been oppressed by a miserable little oligarchy on the one hand and excited by a few factious demagogues on the other. I can make a middle reforming party, I am sure, that will put down both.' The record of seventy-five years and of two wars shows the attachment of the Canadians to British institutions, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... the affirmation of its existence; but then the conception in your minds is identical with the thing itself, or you have supposed the existence of a thing to be possible, and then inferred its existence from its internal possibility—which is but a miserable tautology. The word reality in the conception of the thing, and the word existence in the conception of the predicate, will not help you out of the difficulty. For, supposing you were to term all positing ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... return my thankful acknowledgments, for your free communication of a medicine, by which means, through the blessing of providence, I have been enabled to restore health and happiness to many miserable objects. ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... the very best means of supply. So Mr. Grabguy makes a purchase of three prime men, whom he intends to transform into first-rate mechanics. He declares he will not be troubled hereafter with those very miserable white workmen he is constrained to import from the north. They are foolish enough to think they are just as good as any body, and can be gentlemen in their profession. They, poor fools! mistake the south in their love of happy New England ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... spiritual need. The Roman Catholic Church has been a miserable failure. "Nearly 7,000,000 of people in South America still adhere, more or less openly, to the fetishisms of their ancestors, while perhaps double that number live altogether beyond the reach of Christian influence, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... but continued to climb the stairs, thinking to myself: "Well, if you understand the whole thing, it is strange that you should put the widow of ex-President Abraham Lincoln in a three-cornered room in the attic of this miserable hotel." ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... "You can't imagine (gravely I write and speak) how exhausted I am to-day with yesterday's labors. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable. I do not know ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... Blasius date from 1560). Well, he was put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he found himself set next to his own imitation born and baked yesterday at Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature said to him, with a grin? 'Old Pipeclay,'—that is what he called my friend,—'the fellow that bought ME got just as much commission on me as the fellow that bought YOU, and that was all that HE thought ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... you some more." Her other wants were regularly seen to on a certain day every week. Ours was an accidental visit. We now turned up to another nook of the court, where my companion told me there was a very bad case. He found the door fast. We looked through the window into that miserable man- nest. It was cold, gloomy, and bare. As Corrigan says, in the "Colleen Bawn," "There was nobody in—but the fire—and that was gone out." As we came away, a stalwart Irishman met us at a turn of the court, and said to my companion, "Sure, ye didn't visit this house." " Not to-day;" ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... details of the matter; the text is what interests us here. I shall only remind the reader that Swift was fifty-seven when the 'Drapier' wrote, that Gulliver appeared about three years later, and that Swift himself expired—lunatic and miserable beyond utterance—on the 19th October 1745, twenty-one years after all Dublin and half England had rung with the boldness and the triumph of ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... people elect the legislators and the people are responsible for the character of men they elect and send to Nashville to make and unmake laws. We know the Legislature was bad, even miserable, but the members got their commissions ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... damp and mildew—all was rotting in ruin and decay. Tim led the way up-stairs. The same appearances were still manifest. The dark shadow of death seemed to brood there—an interminable silence. They entered a small closet, nearly dark; and here, on a miserable pallet, lay the form of Grace Ashton, now, alas! pale and haggard. She seemed altogether unconscious of their presence. The horrible events of the preceding night had brought on mental as well as bodily disease. It was the practice of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... shall get no credit that you rush it into print and make a fizzle of it. I know who the traitors to the party are—you are one. Doc Weaver with his elegant style and his Shakespeare is another. And that miserable intermeddling little book agent is ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... raged on, and many more were killed, vengeance threatened the miserable Trader. Miaki attacked him thus, "You led us into this war. You deceived us, and we began it. Rarip is dead, and many others. Your life ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... she gritted, in a swift surge of anger. "I am afraid to face this country alone. I admit my helplessness. But so help me Heaven, I'll make you pay for this dirty trick! You're not a man! You're a cur—a miserable, contemptible scoundrel!" ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... each other,' said Cadurcis; 'for, after all, it is a miserable craft. What is poetry but a lie, and what are poets ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... would have much preferred making them drunk with his vile whisky to preparing them any pretence for a dinner. But they firmly declined his liquor, so muttering unintelligibly to himself he shambled off to obey their behests. After some delay they succeeded in getting a miserable meal of some kind; and then, the horses being sufficiently rested, they set off once more at a good pace, not halting again until, just before sundown, they arrived at the depot, where the first stage ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... the whole wretched business began. At a cost which the conquest of a whole continent would hardly justify, these terrible armaments and the heroic hosts which wield them push one another a few miles back and forward in a month, and take and retake some miserable village three times over in less than a week. Can you doubt that though we have lost all fear of being beaten, (our darkened towns, and the panics of our papers, with their endless scares and silly inventions, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... No more miserable place could be found outside the jail, and it could only be surpassed in horror by one within. It might have been, and probably was, an anteroom to hell, but of that I say nothing. I leave my description, for I can do no more justice to it. The only cheerful thing about ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... he saw the mean, ferrety face of a well-known low-class dealer thrust forward from among the crowd. This dealer was notorious for keeping a large number of big Danes and Newfoundlands in the miserable backyard of a cobbler's shop in the East End of London. He had been ordered out of show rings before that day for malpractices. He had never owned a Wolfhound, but he was a shrewd business judge of the values of dogs. He nodded to the auctioneer, and that gentleman nodded responsively ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... bay, opening into it, is a lagoon of considerable extent. On one side is the town, a great part of which is built on piles at the water's edge. The place has but little to recommend it; indeed, there are scarcely a dozen houses of any size, while the rest of the buildings have a miserable appearance both without and within. Above the town stands the church,—a building of no architectural pretensions, and greatly resembling a barn. Buenaventura is the port of a considerable district, embracing the valley of the Cauca. The climate, however, owing ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... Maybe other folks can't get it right. I once had to do with a case in which a feller shot up his mother, and was made out 'bug,' and was put away. It worried me some. Later I found his ma made his life miserable. He lived in terror of her. She'd broken bottles over his head. She'd soused him with boiling water. She'd raised the devil generally, till—well, till he reached the limit. Then I found she acted that way because her dandy boy ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... The miserable condition of our troops, the season of the year, the almost total lack of means of transportation for supplies and of a pontoon bridge to cross the river, rendered any considerable movement on our part impossible. But to relieve the existing apprehension, I determined to assume the offensive ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... darkened, to multitudes of tender and highsouled persons, by the loathsome insincerity and treachery, the frivolous fickleness, the petty suspicions and envies, and the incompetent judgments, which they are constantly meeting. These superficial and miserable vices of common society disenchant the soul, and dry up the springs of love and hope. They are fatal to that magnanimous wisdom and that trustful sympathy which compose at once the brightest ornaments of our nature, and the costliest treasures of experience. Ah, if, in place of them, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... by the least inviting road. On one side were rows of miserable houses with broken windows and grimy walls and doors, that looked as if all their brightness had gone into the smart public-houses ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... within one or two, both in "Waverley" and "Guy Mannering") that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least in the world's estimate, respectable persons; and that they are all grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison. Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the silken blades bend in gentle undulations, and they are dappled into lighter and darker shades, like the shadows of summer clouds flitting across the sun. It was a scene of pure enjoyment, and I only realized, on being awakened from my day dreams how miserable ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... have now said, and farther to show the miserable effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage which will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into his majesty's favor, I told him of an invention discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder into a heap, on which the ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... overcoat. "But upon my word!" he added, surveying me from head to foot, "I didn't expect to find such a big, strapping fellow as you are. Your surroundings are quite as I had supposed they would be. Cramped quarters in a miserable tumble-down back street! I suppose your guardian provided this place ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... hills, the flowing river, and the tangled wildwood, could still soothe a soul that, but for its susceptibility to these beneficent charms, might have said in its sadness of everything earthly, "miserable comforters are ye all." Continuing to reside at Forge while her children were young, she devoted herself to the direction of their education, the cultivation of her own pure tastes, and the peaceful enjoyments of a country life; and when ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... some one had set loose a dog that Cox owned. It was a miserable cur, but was long-winded, like its master, and possessed of good barking qualities. Rivers got well concealed, but the dog was after him—bark, bark, bark; he tried all he could to quiet him, but could not. Soon a neighboring dog commenced ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... comfort-seeking caresses. She leaned her elbows on the corral gate and watched him awhile. She asked a bashful, gum-chewing youth if he could tell her where to find Lite Avery. But the youth seemed never to have heard of Lite Avery, and Jean was too miserable to explain and describe Lite, and insist upon seeing him. She walked over to the nearest car-line and caught the next street car for the city. Part of her chief's orders at least she would obey. She would go down to the Victoria and see "Jean, of the Lazy A," but she was not ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the real reason that Miss Henderson hated her was that she was a decent married girl; and she knew that the talebearers and the toadies hated her for the same reason, and were doing their best to make her life miserable. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... to judge the Hawtry scenes at all until the opening night," Mr. Vandeford answered, positively quaking in his boots for fear that Miss Adair would force him to an elucidation of the scene, which was mostly of the cleverest innuendo. "She is a miserable study, and she and Height rehearse the big scenes alone. She just walks through with the company. Truly, you can hardly judge anything of what a play will be from just a reading or from any rehearsal. Please trust me and help me as you ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Vous etes mon parent, malheureusement; mais je ne m'en vanterai point. N'avez-vous pas de honte? Vous parlez de votre fortune. je la connois; elle vous met fort en etat de supporter le retranchement d'une aussi miserable somme que celle dont il s'agit, et qui ne peut jamais etre que mal acquise. Ah! Ciel! Moi qui vous estimois! Quelle avarice sordide! quel coeur sans sentiment! Et de pareils gens disent qu'ils aiment! Ah! le ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... was satisfied with everything she saw there, except her complexion, and that she resolved should improve. She was almost painfully happy. Out there was the Widdiehill, dark and dismal and cold, through which she had come, sad and shivering and haunted with miserable thoughts, into warmth and splendour and luxury and bliss! Wee Sir Gibbie had made a lady of her! If only poor Sir George were alive to see and share!—There was but one thing wanted to make it Paradise indeed—a good tumbler of toddy by the fire ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... truth. I saw enough the last day I lunched here to show me Kilgobbin was not what it used to be. You were all of you what my poor father—who was always thinking of the dogs—used to call "on your hind-legs," walking about very stately and very miserable. There were three or four covered dishes on the table that nobody tasted; and an old man in red breeches ran about in half-distraction, and said, "Sherry, my lord, or Madeira?" Many's the time I laughed ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... case, even if I saw any advantage for Riette in the plan, which I do not, I am too selfish to consent to it. Well, well, I have other reasons; I will tell them to your mother one of these days. I am sorry Madame de Sainfoy should have thought of it, as it seems ungracious to refuse. But I was miserable enough without Riette last year, when she spent those weeks at the Convent at Sonnay. By the by, the good nuns did not find her so ignorant. She knows her religion, she can dance and sing, she can ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... free from pain. No, the serfs of the Middle Ages were in no sense happy. Stifled moans of misery, a sense of their unutterable agonies, steal up from proverb and by-corners of history—we feel that they were more miserable than jail prisoners at the present day—for then, as now, man groaned at being an inferior, and he had much more than that to groan over in those days of strifes and dirt. And yet every one of those serfs was God's child, as well as the baron ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... exclaimed Constance, coming forward with tears in her eyes. "Do you think that the mere fact of suspicion being cast upon him, publicly though it was made, could have rendered us as cowardly miserable as it did? Hamish, how shall we atone ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... that some pleasures are "false." Protarchus hits the nail on the head by replying, "No one would call pleasures bad because they are 'false,' but BY RASON OF SOME OTHER GREAT EVIL TO WHICH THEY ARE LIABLE," i.e, because of their after-effects.] Who would wish, however miserable, to exchange places with it! Are there not other things to be considered besides happiness? "It is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." And why? In the first place, we suspect that the oyster's, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... him for several minutes, at the imminent risk of his own life, vainly entreating aid from the passers-by. He was at length joined by Sergeant Deane of the sappers, with whose assistance he dragged his friend on a quilt through the remainder of the pass, when he succeeded in mounting him on a miserable pony, and conducted him in safety to the camp, where the unfortunate officer lingered till the next morning, and was the only man of the whole force who received Christian burial. Lieutenant Mein was ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... he bade Miss Higham good evening in a curt way, and Madame accompanied him to the front door. There they had a spirited discussion. Madame considered an allowance of half a crown would be ample; he said, in going, that his wife was a mean, miserable cat. ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... smith, a plowman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed on labors so necessary that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood, and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... continue that the old seals have no time to eat, and during the three or four months they stay with their families on the beaches they never take a mouthful of food. At the end of the time, when they leave the rookeries, they are thin and miserable, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 26, May 6, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the child as the property of its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for his own credit let his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population, parents ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... they been allowed, they would have torn him in pieces. Many of these were women, who mocked at and reviled the unfortunate Englishman, screaming like so many furies, spitting at him, and gloating over his miserable plight, as is the custom of a certain grade of womankind all over the world. Inspired by the example of their elders, a swarm of impish children added their shrill cries to the tumult, let fly an occasional ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... were dug by the order of Moses to quiet the clamours of the thirsty Israelites. Suez lies in the bottom of the Gulf, three leagues from Toro, once a place of note, now reduced, under the Turks, to an inconsiderable village, where the miserable inhabitants are forced to fetch water at three leagues' distance. The ancient Kings of Egypt conveyed the waters of the Nile to this place by an artificial canal, now so choked with sand, that there are scarce any marks remaining of so noble and beneficial ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... of his contemporaries and the passage in which this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general expression of this sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in the People—the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers—else of all men the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in the end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate between it and the false." And then he resorts ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... her is the only thing to explain the harshness of his behaviour to her. Had he not loved her and not been miserable about her, he would have been as polite to her as well bred people would ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... Oh bridal chamber! Oh deep-delved And strongly-guarded mansion! I descend To meet in your dread chambers all my kindred, Who in dark multitudes have crowded down Where Proserpine received the dead. But I, The last, and oh how few more miserable, Go down, or ere my sands ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... happened. Miss Quincey was neither brilliant nor efficient, but she had made the most of herself; at least she had lived a life of grinding intellectual toil; the whole woman had seemed absorbed in her miserable arithmetical function. And yet at fifty (she looked fifty) she had contrived to develop that particular form of foolishness which it was Miss Cursiter's business to exterminate. There were some of them who talked as if the thing was done; as if competitive examinations had ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... to Bassompierre, who vainly attempted to console him, "I am lost; Signore, I am ruined; Signore, I am miserable. I regret my daughter, and shall do so while I live; but I could support this affliction did I not see before me the utter ruin of myself, my wife, my son, and my whole house, in the obstinacy of Leonora. Were you not aware of my whole history I should perhaps be less frank, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... so confined to business that it had been impossible for him to slip away and visit Blanche as he had done formerly. Occasionally, he had written her a note and sent it by his friend the dwarf, making such errands the occasion of a round remuneration to the miserable cripple. ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... of our tenderest love of flowers comes from association, and many are lovingly recalled solely by their odors. Balmier breath than was ever borne by blossom is to me the pure pungent perfume of ambrosia, rightly named, as fit for the gods. Not the miserable weed ambrosia of the botany, but a lowly herb that grew throughout the entire summer everywhere in "our garden"; sowing its seeds broadcast from year to year; springing up unchecked in every unoccupied corner, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... which I fear is incurable. If I yield to my penchant for her, and become her husband, instead of being a tender lover, of which she is so worthy, I should be a tyrant, whose frenzy would render her more miserable than myself. They press me to bring our union to a conclusion, they threaten me also with a rival, who without doubt deserves her more than I. How can I, miserable wretch that I am, how can I ward off the blow which threatens me? I flatter myself, at least, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... Herbipolis one day, While kneeling at the altar's foot to pray, Alone with God, as was his pious choice, Heard from beneath a miserable voice,— A sound that seemed of all sad things to tell, As of a lost soul crying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... suggestion. It is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed men who have walked the earth. I only give it you at second-hand. Try it. Get your mind in hand. And see how the process cures half the evils of life—especially worry, that miserable, avoidable, ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... Then [the Seven Scorpions] took counsel concerning her, and they all at one time shot out their venom on the tail of the scorpion Tefen; as for me, the woman Taha[FN212] opened her door, and I entered into the house of the miserable lady. ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... miserable little cry, and an Italian woman who reminded Rose-Ellen of Mrs. Albi peered out of a patched tent and said, "Iss a bambina! Oooh, the little so-white bambina! Look you here, quick! The people next door have leave these tent. You move in before ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means
... beach off the town, where all my watchmates were sitting in a row, like lost sheep, waiting to be taken on board again. They had had enough of liberty; indeed, such liberty as that was hardly worth having. It seems hardly credible, but we were actually glad to get on board again, it was so miserable ashore, The natives were most unsociable at the port, and we could not make ourselves understood, so there was not much fun to be had. Even those who were inclined to drink had too little for a spree, which I ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... and the danger of suffocation precluded the building of an adequate fire, and the miserable night wore interminably upon the nerves of the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... grow bright at his approach, and the scowl of discontent and envious repining dissolve into equanimity, or mould itself in smiles. I had yet to see him the kind and patient companion of the friendless and the slighted—slighted, because poor; the untired listener to long tales of misery—so miserable, that they who told them could not track their dim beginnings, or fix the time in distant childhood when wretchedness was not. I had yet to find him standing at the beggar's pallet, giving encouragement, inciting hope, and adding to the counsel of a guide the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... caliph, does not seem to be rich; let us go to him, and inquire into his circumstances. Honest man, said the vizier, who art thou? The old man replied, Sir, I am a fisher, but one of the poorest and most miserable of the trade; I went from my house about noon to go a-fishing, and from that time to this I have not been able to catch one fish; at the same time I have a wife and small children, and nothing to maintain them. The ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... "The miserable ninny never even observed that the foils were buttoned, but, throwing down his, rushed out of the room ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... his white linen suit, bowed acknowledgement. "My compliments, Mr. Haljan. I hope you have no strong religious convictions, else we will make your table here very miserable!" ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... read, how hard to do! Mrs. Gary's image was very ugly yet to Daisy. Could she speak pleasantly to her aunt? could she even look pleasantly at her? could she "forbear" all unkindness, even in thought? Not yet! Daisy felt very miserable and very much ashamed of herself, even while her anger was in abiding ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... it is possible to confuse and torment children by stories of the exquisite delicacy of the consciences of the saints, as St. Aloysius, setting before them a standard that is beyond their comprehension or their degree of grace, and making them miserable because they cannot ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... said Clarendon; "and I had almost as lief, as to be cooped up in a dirty fishing-smack with vulgar sailors, half-starved with their miserable fare." ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... troops for self-defense. Yet throughout Europe Spanish victories have been obtained by Italian generals; the bravest soldiers in foreign armies are Italian exiles. Perhaps it may be argued that the empty titles which abound in every petty city, the fulsome promises on which those miserable vassals found their hopes, are makeweights for such miseries. Call them rather chains to bind the nation, lures and birdlime such as snarers use. There is but one quarter to which the widowed and discrowned Queen of Nations can appeal for succor. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... state of affairs indeed. David Dubbs, aroused from the joyful celebration of his Christmas dinner and from the midst of this cosey party and sent off across the river to his master's house with a miserable letter and by a miserable young man (and if delivering letters when every other well-intentioned man is eating his turkey isn't miserable, why what is it?). Sent off on a graceless errand for nothing, perhaps. But his kind employer, ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... water-noises waked me early; but then, I hadn't slept very soundly, because I couldn't help thinking a good deal about Mr. van Buren, who found a telegram waiting for him at Sneek, and went away from us by the first train he could catch. I don't know what was in the telegram, but he looked rather miserable as he read it, and I wondered a good deal in the night if his mother had called him back because Freule Menela van der Windt was not pleased at having him stay so ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... side streets, squalid alleys, and tumble-down tenements. He saw forlorn little children scud away like rats into their holes as he drew near, and wretched, vicious-looking men and women fighting with each other for places in the crowd. Sharp, miserable faces peered round corners at him, and nobody smiled because every one hated or distrusted his neighbor, and they dreaded and disliked the young King because all the King Mordreths had been evil and selfish, and he ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of this miserable creature, once a gentleman, to all advocates of imprisonment for debt. First rendered reckless by imprisonment—then hopeless—then sottish—and, last of all, from utter despair of freedom, insane! Round his withered temples is a blue ribbon, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... different tale—governesses and nurses, sister and brothers, it was the same story with all—Hoodie's temper was the strangest and the worst that ever a child had made herself and other people miserable by. ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... his hands and let them drop to his sides. Then he muttered something—a long sentence—in dialect. His voice sounded like a miserable old man's. ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes—rather unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had painted those miserable sepoys being eternally ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... but a miserable wretch! and I wish to Heaven I was in yonder dead-cart, with the rest of them—and she, too, if she ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... had received Holy Orders has ever swerved from the faith, though the "Hau- Haus" have led away many hundreds of Christians. Still, a good number remain loyal and faithful, and hold to the English in the miserable war which is still raging, provoked by disputes over ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... secret was still locked within her own heart, weighing heavily upon her conscience, but still unconfessed, still unsuspected by others. Ever since that miserable afternoon she had shrunk from meeting her classmates, and although she had been obliged to do so at school, she had avoided all other opportunities of seeing them, and on one excuse and another had refused to attend the meetings of the club which came together every Friday afternoon, ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... Macbeth was subject. His queen and he had their sleeps afflicted with terrible dreams, and the blood of Banquo troubled them not more than the escape of Fleance, whom now they looked upon as father to a line of kings who should keep their posterity out of the throne. With these miserable thoughts they found no peace, and Macbeth determined once more to seek out the weird sisters, and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Newark, now Niagara. The seat of Government, according to the Duke de la Rochefoucault Liancourt, who visited it in 1795, consisted of about a hundred houses, "mostly very fine structures." Governor Simcoe apparently did not occupy one of them, but a "miserable wooden house,"—formerly occupied by the Commissaries, who resided there on account of the navigation of the lake,—his guard consisting of four soldiers, who every morning came from the fort, to which they returned in the ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... turn to stone," said Robert, breaking a long miserable silence, "because the Sand-fairy said he'd give us another wish to-morrow, and he couldn't if ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... memories, I will repeat it. Ladies and gentlemen, in this Station we have the honor of being protected from the malice of the aborigine by two noble regiments. We count, moreover, at least thirty of the fair sex and forty miscellaneous persons, such as miserable civilians like myself, and children. Hitherto, we have been content to meet at odd times and odd places. When hospitality has run dry, we have resorted to a shed-like structure dignified with the name ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... suddenly, "they have turned sharp to the right. Oh, I hope they won't kill! I feel miserable when they kill, especially when the fox has shown us such ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... gray—her handbag, her whole demeanor—all bespoke affluence. She had probably been visiting at some little town, and had come down on the accommodation; but no one had been there to meet her. Anyway, Spike found himself too miserable and too cold to ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... Ulysses is religious in the truest sense—'Father Zeus, thou who rulest over gods and men, surely thou hast just thundered in the starry sky, and there is no cloud anywhere. Thou showest this as a sign to some one. Fulfill now, even to me, miserable wretch, the prayer which I now offer'" ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... amazing love! Christ visited this poor beggar, yea, was formed in him the hope of glory; his body, so miserable in the sight of man, was a temple of the Holy Ghost, and the angels carry his soul to heaven. O the riches ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... farm instructor, and those who had left comfortable homes in the east in order to carry civilization into the remote places of the west. The work that they were performing was calculated to elevate the Indian and make him a better man; taking him from his miserable mode of living and leading him into a more happy and prosperous life for this and the next. It is unaccountable, and there is yet a something that will come to the surface that was the real cause for this dreadful act. At this point a ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... of being with you I am miserable, upon seeing you take so little care of a health which is so precious to every honest man, but more so to me in particular, because I know you, and therefore can't help loving, honouring, and esteeming you; but alass! what service can my zeal and attachment be to my dear master, unless ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... detectives, swilling beer in public-houses, gave their opinions about the crime, and the more beer they drank, the wilder and more impossible became their theories. Some suggested that the gipsies camped on Southberry Heath, who were continually fighting amongst themselves, had killed the miserable creature; others, asserting that the scamp was desperately poor, hinted at suicide induced by sheer despair; but the most generally accepted opinion was that Jentham had been killed in some drunken frolic ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Chimes, one note bespeaking disregard, or stern regard, of any hope, or joy, or pain, or sorrow, of the many-sorrowed throng; who hears us make response to any creed that gauges human passions and affections, as it gauges the amount of miserable food on which humanity may pine and wither; does us wrong. That wrong you have done ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... "Oh, how miserable I was during all this time! I was suspicious of everybody and trembled at common noises. Any unexpected look of stranger caused a start. It was in vain that I reasoned against this foolish fear. My misery was so great that I contemplated suicide. It ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... overthrow of which they are all the time more ardently longing. If, on the other hand, we go into the electoral struggle arm in arm with the Freethinkers (Radicals) or even with the National Liberals, if we make ourselves their accomplices, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... Hamburg congratulates itself that "the British campaign of pin-pricks is fast coming to a miserable end." If the reference is to bayonets, our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... that, having now punished the wicked, he would of his goodness spare the remainder, and such as he had hitherto judged fit to be delivered from so severe a calamity; for that otherwise these last must be more miserable than the first, and that they must be condemned to a worse condition than the others, unless they be suffered to escape entirely; that is, if they be reserved for another deluge; while they must be afflicted with the terror and sight of the first ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... reflect that even what we find good ought to be still better, and how distant we are still from perfection, we are discouraged and dissatisfied. Besides all this, although the approbation I have received has been very flattering, the least adverse criticism, even miserable as it might be, has always occasioned me more vexation than all the praise I received could give me pleasure." And, again, he endeavours to impress on him that the favour he received from the world he owed not to his verses. "Do not imagine that they are my verses ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in climbing into the boat to "study her lessons," she had sprained her ankle, and she had been very miserable all by herself, and cried and called for him until ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... hour later Anthony Cardew entered his house. He had spent a miserable evening. Some young whipper snapper who employed a handful of men had undertaken to show him where he, Anthony Cardew, was a clog in the wheel of progress. Not in so many words, but he had said: "Tempora mutantur, Mr. Cardew. And the wise employer ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... handsome figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the work of local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to review and criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were saleable. I said so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a miserable renegade, bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at pictures thenceforward, not with the eye of the artist, but the dealer; and I saw the stream widen that divided ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... signs to the old woman, but she took up a stick and struck him, and beat his horse and drove him away; but as he was leaving he caught a glimpse of Finola at the door of the hut, and saw that she was crying. This sight made him so very miserable that he could think of nothing else but her sad face that he had always seen so bright, and he allowed the old horse to go on without minding where he was going. Suddenly he heard a voice saying: "It is time for you ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... system excuse, if not justify, infidelity on the part of the wife? An old, drivelling dotard takes to his home and bed a virgin in her teens, whom he has purchased, but as he has gone through a formal ceremony, law and the world pronounce her wife. His miserable physical incapacity provokes without satisfying the passions of his victim; and in the arms of a lover she secretly enjoys the solace which she cannot derive from her legal owner. Then, if she is detected, ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... rained so heavily that Mr. Evringham was obliged to forego his ride. Wet weather was an unmixed ill to him. It not only made riding and golf miserable, but it reminded him that rheumatism was getting a grip on one ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... "What's this? A drunkard?" He shook his head and opened the dead man's shirt to feel for any possible flutter of life in the heart. There was none. And he thought: "If this were only Grimshaw! If the whole miserable business ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration quite contrary to Christian simplicity. Let us rather read the Epistles and Gospels. Let us not seek to penetrate what mysteries they contain; for how can we, miserable sinners that we are, know the terrible and holy secrets of Providence while we remain in this flesh which forms an impenetrable veil between us and the Eternal? Let us rather confine ourselves to studying ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... thwarts, I passed miserable hours, unable to move more than a few inches in the narrow space. At noon, with the vertical eye of the evil sun staring down upon us, my clothes were so hot that I had to hold them off my body. I meditated leaping into the ocean and swimming awhile. Ghost Girl saw my intention ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest of some beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left it to fill with snow. I have been absolutely miserable when I have looked in a face for her I used to see there, and could see her ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... you have no right, as an honorable attorney, to make him do. A just judge ought to stop you if you try it. To confuse a witness whom you know to be telling the truth is not skill; it is a trick, and a very miserable trick, whose performance requires ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... unlimited time, can give rise. If we knew these, and found none competent to originate species, we should have good ground for denying their origin by natural causation. Till we know them, any hypothesis is better than one which involves us in such miserable presumption. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... up—not her own only, but all the blood of all the De Beaurepaires—pale as ashes with great wrath, her purple eyes on fire, and her whole panther-like body full of spring. "Wretch! you dare to insult her, and before me! Arriere miserable! or I soil my hand with your face." And her hand was up with the word, up, up, higher it seemed than ever a hand was raised before. And if he had hesitated one moment, I really believe it would have come down; not heavily, perhaps—the ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... very indigent, but I am not at all miserable. If we are to be made miserable by that, what is the use of all ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... enjoyed nearly half a century of entire independence and self-rule. And with what issues? As respects moral and intellectual culture, stagnation: in all that concerns material development, a fatal retrogression. He beholds there, at this day, a miserable parody of European and American institutions, without the spirit that animates either: the tinsel of French sentiment on the ground of negro ignorance: even the 'sacred right of 'insurrection' burlesqued: a people which has for its only living belief an ill-defined apprehension of the superiority ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... Providence which has uniformly protected them, will advance with alacrity to the attack of works incapable of being defended by the wretched Garrison posted behind them, consisting of Sailors unacquainted with the use of arms, of Citizens incapable of Soldiers' duty, & of a few miserable Emigrants. The General is confident that a vigorous & spirited attack must be attended with success. The Troops shall have the effects of the Governor, Garrison, & of such as have been active in misleading the ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... preservation of mankind. Now, does it not follow, from what has been said, that for a man to receive the news of his son's death with dry eyes, and to weep at the same time for the calamities of his country, is a wretched affectation and a miserable inconsistency? Is not that, in plain English, to receive with dry eyes the news of the deaths of those for whose sake our country is a name so dear to us, and at the same time to shed tears for those for whose sakes our country is not a name so dear ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... is truly miserable, his misery reaching its keenest whenever he either looks into his mirror or stands before a portrait that hangs against the wall of the sala. It is a likeness of Adela Miranda; for he has taken possession of the house of his predecessor, with all its furniture and pictures, left ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... plan; but her mind, quieted down somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward composure for his sake, perceived that her behaviour had secured, at any rate, a short period of safety. Perhaps because of the similarity of their miserable origin in the dregs of mankind, she had understood Ricardo perfectly. He would keep quiet for a time now. In this momentarily soothing certitude her bodily fatigue asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause was not so much the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... of things. They have no meaning apart from the soul. The world says that health and wealth are good, and that sickness and poverty are evil. If that were true the line that separates the healthy from the sick, the rich from the poor, would also separate the happy from the miserable. But we find joy and sorrow on both sides of that line. We are drawn to look deeper than this for our definition of good and evil. We have to make the soul the final arbiter amid these conflicting voices. Here ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... the window. He nodded and his nod was returned. Hannah's experience was as gloomy as his own. She did not look happy and somehow the idea that she was not happy pleased him; Abbie Larkin had been altogether too happy; it grated on him. He was miserable and he wanted company of his own kind. He stopped, hesitated, and then turned in at the ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... own order; to have figured through the struggle as nominally the superior House, but really the mere ciphers of the Commons; to have had to throw all their aristocratic dignity and all their permissible conservatism at last into the miserable form of partisanship with a despotic Presbyterianism and zeal for the suppression of Sects, Heresies, and Independency:—here was a retrospect for men of rank, men of ambition, men of pride in their pedigrees! And now to have an Army of these Independents, Sectaries, and Heretics, holding ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... smoke, mingled with the suggestion of some masculine soap or essence, were so poignant in their effect that she trembled and water rose in her eyes. In fact—and despite her terrified effort to control it, a miserable tear fell on her cheek and stood there because she ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with cushions, trumpets of carved ivory, a sunshade of crimson satin, a sword in a silver scabbard, and no end of such gear.[599] An old civilization had been found and a route of commerce discovered, and a factory was to be set up at once on that Indian coast. What a contrast to the miserable performance of Columbus, who had started with the flower of Spain's chivalry for rich Cipango, and had only led them to a land where they must either starve or do work fit for peasants, while he spent his time in cruising among wild islands! The king ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... a dismal character; for, hearing the noise of a horse's hoofs in the silent streets at that hour of the night, the people opened their doors as he passed by, thinking it the pest-cart, and brought forth many a miserable victim of the pestilence. Averting his head from the revolting spectacles, Sir Norman held the bottle of vinegar to his nostrils, and rode rapidly till he reached Newgate. There he was stopped until his bill of health was examined, and that small manuscript being found ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... bowed and retired; and his trusty band was diminished to two thousand, and at last to five hundred, volunteers. The cral, [28] or despot of the Servians received him with general hospitality; but the ally was insensibly degraded to a suppliant, a hostage, a captive; and in this miserable dependence, he waited at the door of the Barbarian, who could dispose of the life and liberty of a Roman emperor. The most tempting offers could not persuade the cral to violate his trust; but he soon inclined to the stronger side; and his friend was dismissed without injury to a new vicissitude ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... are—are no longer safe from violence in the streets of Rome. Although, Fausta, you believe not with us, you must, scarcely the less for that, pity us in our present straits. Can the mind picture to itself, in some aspects of the case, a more miserable lot! Were the times, even at the worst, so full of horror in Palmyra as now here in Rome? There, if the city were given up to pillage, the citizen had at least the satisfaction of dying in the excitement of a contest, and in the defence of himself and ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... do it,' she sobbed, 'I can't, it's no use; I'm not the right person to be—to be a hero's aunt. I don't want him to go, I shall die if he gets killed; I sha'n't be proud, I shall only be miserable; what am ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... I was a miserable letter-writer, and didn't expect anything of me. I don't think I have written twenty letters of pure friendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondence altogether by telegrams. This is a letter of pure friendship; you have got hold of a curiosity, and ...
— The American • Henry James
... sounding, they found only twelve fathoms three leagues off the shore. Huge fires were observed, kindled by the inhabitants. The Portuguese had before this landed on the coast, and reduced the natives to a miserable stage of bondage, compelling them by their cruelty to fly from the fertile parts of the country into ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... discouragement and brave effort his power of painting grew with a slow but normal splendor of achievement. His fame began to spread. The "New Kano" and "The Dragon Painter of Kiu Shiu" the people of the city called him. Not only his work but his romantic, miserable story drew sympathy to him, and bade fair to make of him a popular idol. Older artists wished to paint his portrait. Print-makers hung about his house striving to catch at least a glimpse of him, which being elaborated, ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... of my own, dear! I don't know what she would not give to be staying here at Lord Cumnor's with me; but, instead of that, she has to spend her holidays at school; and yet you are looking as miserable as can be at the thought of stopping for just one night. I really have been as busy as can be with those tiresome—those good ladies, I mean, from Hollingford—and one can't think of everything at ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... aimlessly, feeling miserable enough. But, all at once, it occurred to him, "Would it not be cheaper for him to take board by the week in some boarding-house?" Reckoning up, he found that his hotel bill would be three dollars and a half a week, while his meals, even if he were quite abstemious, ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... you wish to be consistent, all that are already born, or ever shall be, are not only miserable, but always will be so; for should you maintain those only to be miserable, you would not except any one living, for all must die; but there should be an end of misery in death. But seeing that the dead are miserable, we are born to eternal misery, for they must of consequence be miserable ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Gabriel's service passed off much the same as the first, and so it went for almost a week; but the boy saw day by day that Brother Stephen's chain became more and more unbearable to him, and that he had long fits of brooding, when he looked so miserable and unhappy that Gabriel's ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... want to be rude to you. I have lived in total ignorance of you and your affairs for twenty-five years, and since by chance we meet on a steamer, you cannot make me feel that what I do or say is of the slightest importance to you. You made the young Tom Kinsella about as miserable as a man could be, but the old Tom is immune from misery, thank God, and there is no use in trying to get a flame from the dead ashes of the past. I am very glad to see you again and especially glad to make the acquaintance of the daughter of my old friend, ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... comes hard to you, my dear Enrico, as your mother says: I do not yet see you set out for school with that resolute mind and that smiling face which I should like. You are still intractable. But listen; reflect a little! What a miserable, despicable thing your day would be if you did not go to school! At the end of a week you would beg with clasped hands that you might return there, for you would be eaten up with weariness and shame; disgusted with your sports and with your existence. Everybody, everybody studies now, my child. Think ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales of degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the right kind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a guide, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the count is guilty, very guilty. He is the author of the infamous conspiracy, and yet I feel no hatred against him. He has committed a crime, but he has an excuse, his passion. Moreover, my father has not deceived me, like this miserable woman, every hour of my life, during thirty years. Besides, M. de Commarin has been so cruelly punished, that, at this present moment, I can only ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... soft arched neck, "eat away, old chap. You needn't be miserable if I am. I can't go and leave poor Leather ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... it despite all the official trammels that the post commander could devise. She was sick at heart, but next door lay a woman whose unrest was greater still, whose trouble seemed more than she could bear. Mrs. Truscott had arrived at the conclusion before ten o'clock that night that she was the most miserable woman on ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... came to Ruth's home, asking the little girl to visit Aunt Selina, the Blue Birds felt sorry for her, knowing what a miserable time Ruth would have. Then, too, Ruth's father was expected home that Saturday, and Ruth had not seen him ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... plain as Peter Pasley's pike-staff. I will allow that ilk parochine, on an average, employs fifty pleughs, whilk is a great proportion in sic miserable soil as thae creatures hae to labour, and that there may be pasture enough for pleugh-horses, and owsen, and forty or fifty cows; now, to take care o' the pleughs and cattle, we'se allow seventy-five families of six lives in ilk family, and we'se add ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... or has seen the migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother was miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking of one and the same thing—how to get into the country. And this yearning by degrees passed into a definite desire, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 'He is a very miserable man,' said Miss Anne, sighing; 'I often hear him walking up and down his room, and crying aloud in the night-time for God to have mercy upon him; but he is a slave to the love of riches. Years ago he might have broken ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... evidently apologized with his forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the future. Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted his wheel and attempted to ride off, when he was stopped and brought back to the miserable error of his confession. The whole ground was then gone over again, and again pardon with warning was given. Even a glad good-night was exchanged, the wheelman's voice rising in a quaver of grateful ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... for one poor graven steeple Whereon you shattered what you shall not know, How should I pay you, miserable people? How should I ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... speech amused the boy, but he did not in the least comprehend it. It was the description of an unimaginable experience in a region which was as yet known to him only as the seat of pleasure. He did not understand how any one could be miserable when he could catch trout from his ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... left, Mr. Hanbury-Green among them, the invalid was experiencing a sense of exasperating neglect. He felt extremely miserable. Life, and all he held good in it, seemed to be over for him, and his financial position was absolutely desperate—quite beyond any question of marriage it threatened to swamp his actual career. He felt impotent and beaten, lying there like a ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... low, in her sleep, "Ah me! my body and my miserable flesh, you may take them to save my husband; but my heart, never. No one has ever had it, and I cannot ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... to full consciousness, staggered out of the house to the woodshed, and shivered down into a miserable heap. There in the darkness he seemed to see things, for the first time in his life, quite as they were. His gaze, accustomed to the glittering promise of the future, peered fearfully into the past, and reviewed the long line of groundless hopes, of empty projects, of self-deceptions. ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... sea—in both senses of that term—with no knowledge of where he is going or of his chances of pulling through, and having been told of what will be expected of him personally at the target, still has no picture of the support which will be grouped around him, he is apt to be as thoroughly miserable and demoralized as were the sailors under Columbus, when sailing on and on, they came to fear that they would override the horizon ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... did well on sugar, but nobody dissected the whiskey section which bored gimlet holes into the bottom of every barrel of high wine to let it out without paying a cent of tax. The Democrats are therefore the real free whiskeyites. This ought to be shown up thoroughly in the Senate. Our miserable platform places us on the defensive. The Mills bill places the Democrats on the defensive if it is rightly handled. I do not mean attacking the free wool part of it, for that portion if enacted would do your constituents certainly ten or twenty times more good than harm, nor ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... not soon forget the long, dreary, dangerous hours they spent along this line. Here we find ourselves shivering around a miserable fire among the sighing pines (though in times of special danger we are not permitted to have even this slight comfort, for fear of detection), often compelled to sit or lie down in snow or mud, or ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... which your Majesty commands to be made. As this is discussed, however, in another letter, I will go to no greater length than to say that, if your Majesty were present here, no orders would be given to increase the tributes of these miserable people, but rather they would pay less. But he who informed your Majesty that more tribute can be paid has already accounted or will account to God also. I am affected in part by these hardships and dangers, as it is now two years since your ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... written in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she discusses with her bosom friend. "While I have 'Udolpho' to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... She had told the queen that she was expecting her father, the Emperor of Austria, and that she feared the queen's presence might make him feel ill at ease. Moreover, the young empress, although dejected and grave, was by no means so sorrowful and miserable as Hortense expected. The fate of her husband had not wounded the heart of Marie Louise as deeply as ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... sword, make a furious charge upon the intruding canaille, and disperse them "vi et armis"—but a second thought stayed his hand, as he realized that the killing or wounding of two or three of these miserable actors would not further his suit; and besides, he could not stain his noble hands with such vile blood as theirs. So he put force upon himself and restrained his rage, and, bowing with icy politeness to ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the spot where his plot is laid; but because the eye of the critic has become familiar with such unworthy productions as these, it must scan with more eager justice any pages which are a happy exception to this miserable reality; it must not hesitate to discern whether the motive has been merely to arouse emotional tendencies, by clothing life's dangerous forms in unreal fascinations, or (where the author's hand, guided by his unsullied heart, has taken up the quill as a mighty ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he said. I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... governesses in a "finishing" school where three years of my girlhood were passed. Julia ——— was a great favourite among us; no one could have done otherwise than admire the ability and good-humour with which she fulfilled her many arduous duties. Perhaps, of all miserable positions for a well-educated and refined young person to be placed in, that of "little girls' teacher" in a lady's school ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... not been for his fearful struggle for me, he would not have been so ill," said Agatha miserably. Aleck, with one foot on the low step of the piazza, stopped and turned squarely toward her. His face was no less miserable than Agatha's, but behind his wretchedness and anxiety was some masculine reserve of power, and a longer view down the corridors of time. He held her eye with a look of ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... Vivian really wished to keep her miserable secret, she had done wisely in removing the little packet from its shelter in the trunk of the old oak-tree; for of course Sibyl remembered it in the night, although Betty's wonderful story had carried her thoughts far away from such trivial ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... generous patriotism. We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in. In such a case we are sure that we are right; and we leave to you the despairing reflection of being the tool of a miserable tyrant. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... once raised a much larger army, as in the course of the war we ultimately had to do. The answer is that in a time of peace we could not possibly have raised a large army on the Continental scale. If we had tried to we should have made a miserable and possibly disastrous failure. The utmost we could do toward it was to provide the organization in which the comparatively small force which was all we could create might be expanded ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... mid-air. Then with a wild plunge I found myself feet downward, and as I sunk my heart and all that appertained to it seemed to remain where they had been. Now I was rolling obliquely down the cabin on to the top of wretches as miserable as myself. Now I was rolling back, and they pouring on to the top of me. The one thought in my mind was—which way are we going next? and mixed up with it occasionally came the aspiration—would it were to the bottom! Above it all ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... man I am, I usurp the right. What damnable infatuation can bind you to that miserable poltroon, who skulks in safety, knowing that the penalty of his evil deeds falls on you? One explanation has suggested itself: it haunts me like a fiend, and only you can exorcise it. Are you married to that brute, and is ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... you beheld it with dreaming eyes," replied Miriam. "It was unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this face of mine no more. Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it has lost its charm. Yet it would still retain a miserable potency' to bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish that would darken all your life. Leave me, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dear young ladies, let us think no more about it. It was my fault; I should not have brought him with me; but he was always so miserable, whenever I left him. You will make allowance for my weakness. A good heart feels for animals as well as people; so I must trust to your sensibility ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... little ashamed of our position in the business, and explained to the Frenchman that our worthy countryman had but little experience in the usages of war, while we proceeded to unbind him and liberate him from his miserable bondage. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... admitted. "I enjoy myself as I go, but I have my eyes always fixed upon the future. I make many friends, and I do not lose them. I set my face towards the pleasant places, and I keep it in that direction. It is the cult of some to be miserable; it is mine to be happy. The person who does most good in the world is the person who reflects the greatest amount of happiness. Therefore, I am a philanthropist. You shall learn from me, my young friend, how to banish some of that gloom from your face. You shall ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... became sublime. Great furnaces gleamed red in the twilight, and their fires were reflected in horrible black canals; processions of heavy vapour drifted in all directions across the sky, over what acres of mean and miserable brown architecture! The air was alive with the most extraordinary, weird, gigantic sounds. I do not think the Five Towns will ever be described: Dante lived too soon. As for the erratic and exquisite genius, ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... so heartless to his parents, so neglectful of his affianced, is not to be redeemed. I brought about this betrothal: tell Isaura that I release her from it. I have watched her closely since she was entrapped into it. I know how miserable the thought of it has made her, though, in her sublime devotion to her plighted word, she sought to conceal from me the real state of her heart. If the betrothal bring such sorrow, what would the union do! Tell her this from me. Come, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some Divisional baths at Bazentin-le-Petit, and I remember having a most cold and miserable bath there one night; but it was better than none at all. It was surprising how quickly the heavy railway had been brought along. It now reached High Wood, but of course did not cross the ridge, which would have been in view of the enemy. About January 15 we went back to the line in very ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... deep and the storms too fierce for the vacillating Erasmus. He did some excellent service in his way, but all his counsels and ideas failed, as they deserved. Once the idol of Europe, he died a defeated, crushed, and miserable man. "Hercules could not fight two monsters at once," said he, "while I, poor wretch! have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions, every day at my sword's point.... There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and that I cannot, for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... long-handled cricket-bat. Their spears and throwing sticks were of the same kind as those in use at Cape York, to be afterwards described. These people were wretched specimens of their race, lean and lanky, and one was suffering from ophthalmia, looking quite a miserable object; they had come here in search of turtle—as I understood. Each of the men had lost a front tooth, and one had the oval cicatrix on the right shoulder, characteristic of the northern natives, an imitation of that of the islanders. ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... how the cold creeps will chase up and down the spinal column of that miserable sneak of a hobo when he glimpses this article," chuckled Thad. "I can imagine him starting, and his eyes nearly popping out of his head as he gets busy devouring the whole thing. And, then, Hugh, what d'ye reckon his next move will ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... upon him so fiercely that he started back. "How dare you!" she said, her voice choking with anger. "You miserable fraud! You bellwether for the plutocracy, to lead reform movements off on a false scent, off into the marshes where they'll be suffocated." She looked at him from head to foot with a withering glance. "No doubt, you'll ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... be of any use to her"—the argument of Raskolnikoff—"I resisted, but next day she began again, pointing out that one killed people in war, which was not considered a crime, and therefore one should not be afraid to kill a miserable old woman. I urged that the old woman had done us no harm, and that I did not see why one should kill her; she reproached me for my weakness and said that, had she been strong enough, she would soon have done this abominable deed herself. 'God,' she added, 'will forgive us because ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... can fabricate a falsehood so unblushingly as John did the foregoing is already on the road to ruin. The reader will not be surprised to learn, before the whole story is told, that he became a miserable, reckless sort of a man. This lie proved that he was destitute of moral principle and would do almost any thing ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... seven to fifteen miles a day being the progress lately made; but now the current seemed to favour her, for a change of forty miles a day was observed in the latitude, and the hearts of officer and men grew lighter, notwithstanding their miserable plight, always wet to the skin, and unable to change their clothes for days together. Two terrific storms were still to be encountered; and, at the commencement of the second, Mr Murray sent the men below, and remained alone on the deck, which he never expected to leave alive. The heat of ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... trade, we may then indulge a reasonable hope for the gradual improvement of Africa. The chief motive of war among the tribes will cease whenever there is no longer any demand for slaves. The resources of that fertile but miserable country might then be developed by the hand of industry and afford subjects for legitimate foreign and domestic commerce. In this manner Christianity and civilization may ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... work in the production of enuresis, or bed wetting, although the matter is here often complicated by the development later on of a sense of shame and unhappiness in the child. There comes a time when the child passionately desires to regain control and is miserable about her failure, until the concentration of her thoughts on the subject becomes a veritable obsession. Every night she goes to bed with this only in her mind. Every night she falls asleep, miserably aware ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... leapin' up and dancin' around. "Why, it took me two weeks to make that one miserable model I gave you!" he yells at Alex. "I couldn't make fifty thousand of them things ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... that all was lost unless he could obtain external aid. The smala was now reduced to his own deira, a bare thousand souls, wandering about in miserable fashion. After another desperate engagement with Lamoriciere during which the Arab women cheered on the warriors, and Abd-el-Kader and his men fighting in the presence of their wives and children performed new prodigies of valor, he succeeded in safely establishing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... lady, is detailed by all our historians: it seems almost incredible that the surrounding crowd were not urged by an unanimous impulse of horror and compassion to rush in and rescue from the murderous hands of the executioner the last miserable representative of such a line of princes. But the eyes of Henry's subjects were habituated to these scenes of blood; and they were viewed by some with indifference, and by the rest with emotions of terror which effectually repressed the generous ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... we must not hasten to conclude, with Professor Flournoy, that if there is a future life it is one of wretched degeneration, one more misery added to all the others which overwhelm us in this miserable universe. ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... Feng in a low tone of voice. "I'll take you, you mean covetous creature, and ... ! All these mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law have come forward and raised money to celebrate your birthday, and are you yet not satisfied that you must also drag in those two miserable beings! But what do you ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... not, as I believe, less certain. I have heard educated men speak with an ill-disguised contempt of the studies of the naturalist, and ask, not without a shrug, "What is the use of knowing all about these miserable animals—what bearing has ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... had shown her. Gravener declared this to be false; Lady Coxon, who didn't care for her, hadn't seen her three times. The only foundation for it was that Miss Anvoy, who used, poor girl, to chuck money about in a manner she must now regret, had for an hour seen in the miserable woman—you could never know what she'd see in people—an interesting pretext for the liberality with which her nature overflowed. But even Miss Anvoy was now quite tired of her. Gravener told me more ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... tell me, and I don't wonder," Doctor Hugh said crisply. "You'd let a miserable little thing like an apology you were forced to make her, interfere with your loyalty to service. I thought you were bigger than ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... with his books and the usual medley of playthings with which a boy's room is piled, he contrived to make the time pass without being very wretched. It was the disgrace of being punished, the lost position in school, and above all, the triumph which it would be to Sam, which made him the most miserable. The very injustice of the thing was its balm in this case. May it be so, my young readers, with any punishment which ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... "None. You are only that poor creature, a bashful youth." And he bravely calls on all his nerves, muscles, and brains to help him through this ordeal. He sees the pitying eyes of the woman to whom he is talking turn away from his countenance (on which he knows that all his miserable shyness has written itself in legible characters). "And this humiliation, too?" he asks of himself, as she brings him the usual refuge of the awkward—a portfolio of photographs to look at. Women are seldom ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... and pain, could not have told herself with what intention it was uttered. "But I've not been sitting long," Madame Merle continued; "that is I've not been long with Pansy. I came to see her because it occurred to me this afternoon that she must be rather lonely and perhaps even a little miserable. It may be good for a small girl; I know so little about small girls; I can't tell. At any rate it's a little dismal. Therefore I came—on the chance. I knew of course that you'd come, and her father as well; still, I had not been told other visitors were forbidden. The good woman—what's her name? ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... Danforth to the door. The poor boy looked quite embarrassed to behold pretty, neat Ellen Williams standing there on the miserable, dirty threshold. "Good day, Willie," said she, pleasantly; "is ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... reasons already given they despised, because they could not yet comprehend, the life of the civilian. They contented themselves with pulling down the walls, razing the fortifications, and destroying every mark which would make of the city anything but an aggregate of miserable dwellings. The inhabitants were for the most part spared, and left to enjoy, if the term can be used for such an existence, what the conquerors did not think worth the having. These felt the fruits of their victory to lie in the rich arable lands of the surrounding ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... lamb, you know nothing of the world; and I should be most wicked to disturb your lovely peace of soul with any sinful doubts. Oh, Agnes, Agnes, I am most miserable, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the gods were of a public character, affecting the whole community, especially fruitful seasons, increase of flocks and herds, and success in war. So long as the community flourished, the fact that an individual was miserable reflected no discredit on divine providence, but was rather taken to prove that the sufferer was an evil-doer, justly hateful to the gods."[9] Jehu and his house were blamed for the blood spilt at Israel, although ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... but gave them full leave to pass. Who were these? One was a man who, by disease, had become all over of a light flesh-colour, his black skin peeling off. It was a perfect phenomenon—a man with strong negro features, entirely white, or of a light dull-red colour. The other man was a miserable, filthy, blind fellow, whom the first invalid was leading. They were, in fact, a couple of mendicants going to Zinder on speculation, having come from Kuka, begging through all the towns and villages. The trade of begging is coextensive with man, civilised ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... feelings of this miserable wretch? Why say more of his terror, his misery, his remorse? He held himself in the seat until the middle of the last act of the play. At last, unable to restrain himself longer, he arose and almost ran from the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... theyr lyfe, whych haue gotten them by experience of thinges a sely small prudence & thinke whether y^u woldest wyshe so greate myschiues to thy sonne. Moreouer philosophye teacheth more in one yere, then dothe anye experience in thyrty, and it teacheth safely, wh[en] by experience mo men waxe miserable then prudent, in so much that the old fathers not without a cause sayde: aman to make a perill or be in ieopardy, whych assayed a thyng by experience. Go to, if a man wold haue hys sonne well seene in physycke, whether wolde he rather he shulde reade the ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... got through that miserable evening he never could recall. He realized by her coldness on the return journey, and by the demonstrative encouragement shown to Aston, that he had ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... my chair and stood erect before him. This groveling wretch, forcing the words through his dry lips, was the thief who had made another of my father and had brought to miserable ends the lives of both my parents! Everything was clear. The creature went in fear of me, never imagining that I did not know him, and sought to buy me off—to buy me from the remembrance of my dead mother's ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... November evening, that the two women appointed for this melancholy purpose arrived at the miserable cottage which we have already described. Its wretched inmate lay stretched upon the bed, and seemed almost already a lifeless corpse, save for the wandering of the fierce dark eyes, which rolled in their sockets ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... the window he was sober. And so it was that he now stared up at the girl. At her breast she held a cloak together with one hand and the other hand touched the railing of the stairs. He saw one foot suspended for the next step, as though the sight of him kept her back in fear. To the miserable soul of Donnegan she seemed all that was lovely, young, and pure; and her hair, old gold in the shadow and pale gold where the lamp struck it, was to Donnegan like a miraculous ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... Bettina's second season in London was unlike the first in both its object and its results. From some unknown and unquestioned source she was becoming penetrated with the "scorn for miserable aims that end with self," and by the time that she was ready to return to Kingdon Hall her life had become so informed with its new purpose that she looked forward to the leisure which her removal there would ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... spake he seized on the miserable wretch in their presence, swinging him round by the waist like an infant, and bore him off, up the turret stairs, to the summit. Ere he disappeared he ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the mother of El Mahdi. I remember how Ump cried when the colt was born, and how he sat out in the rain, a miserable drenched rat, because his dear Bay Eagle was in the mysterious troubles of maternity, and because she must be very unhappy at being on the north side of the hill among the black hawthorn bushes, for that was a bad sign—the ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... eye. It hurt very much indeed, and it felt something like a red-hot spark—only it seemed to have legs as well, and wings like a fly. Effie rubbed and cried—not real crying, but the kind your eye does all by itself without your being miserable inside your mind—and then she went to her father to have the thing in her eye taken out. Effie's father was a doctor, so of course he knew how to take things out of eyes—he did it very cleverly with a soft paintbrush ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... will make it worth your while to risk them. For the half-talent write a talent charged upon my estate, whether I live or die. And be swift, I pray you, for I have matters to speak of, of more importance than this miserable money. Whilst I was commissioner among the Essenes ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Soubise and 30,000, who will reinforce the Reich's Armament, were it on foot, and be heard of by and by! So high runs French enthusiasm at present. A new sting of provocation to Most Christian Majesty, it seems, has been Friedrich's conduct in that Damiens matter (miserable attempt, by a poor mad creature, to assassinate; or at least draw blood upon the Most Christian Majesty ["Evening of 5th January, 1757" (exuberantly plentiful details of it, and of the horrible Law-procedures which followed on it: In ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Ploughman and his wife; but he could not help noticing that though everything was neat and comfortable in the cottage, they both seemed to be very unhappy. He therefore asked them why they were so melancholy, and learned that they were miserable because they had ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... "In fact, I feel rather bad about it. I woke up at eight o'clock, and pictured you and Bates and his wife lying about in No. 18 in very uncomfortable and ungainly attitudes. I was so worried and miserable that I telephoned your hall porter to learn the worst, and was quite astonished when he said that Bates had just been chatting with him. You don't understand, of course. I forgot to tell you about the lift. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... through the Broad Top Mountain district in northern Bedford County, Pennsylvania, last summer, came across a lad of sixteen cultivating a patch of miserable potatoes. He remarked upon their unpromising appearance and expressed pity for anyone who had to dig a ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... then her unbridled passions. Associate with a servant? No, that she would never, never do. Show Polly that she approved of her conduct? Not while her own name was Flower Dalrymple. She let all the other happy children go down to the banqueting-hall without her, and strode away, miserable at heart, choking with ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... I a beggar? Should I give my niece a miserable two thousand dollars? Ain't I got no pride? I got to make it five thousand!" He paused while his imagination dwelt on the magnitude of this colossal sum. "Five thousand dollars!" he shrieked again, "and business the way ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... full Ben's character. He agrees to do so, but says it will first be necessary to speak somewhat of Shakspeare and Fletcher; "his rivals in poesy, and one of them, in my opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his superior." Malone observes, that the caution observed in this decision, proves the miserable taste of the age; and Sir Walter, that Jonson, "by dint of learning and arrogance, fairly bullied the age into receiving his own character of his merits, and that he was not the only person of the name that has done ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... form this connection, or at least to enter on its preliminaries, at an early period of her life. We believe there are thousands, who never so much as ask themselves the question, "Is it certain that I must be married, or be miserable?" No, they assume that in one condition only can they be happy, and in that, therefore, let what may betide them, they must centre their ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... treasures, nor the consular lictor, can remove the miserable tumults of the mind, nor cares that fly about panelled ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation, stared it out of countenance. Nothing was the better for it, or thought of being so. If the miserable waste ground lying near it could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... never take a part. Twice a day a dole of food would be thrown on the ground before him to munch as well as he could without the use of his hands; and at night, huddling his greasy tatters about him, he would crawl into some miserable lair of leaves and refuse, where, dirty, cold, and hungry, he passed, in broken ghost-haunted slumbers, a wretched night as a prelude to another wretched day. Such was the only human being deemed fit to associate at arm's length with one who ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Miserable as the state of things happened to be, it gave him pleasure, for they were advancing in the direction of Communism. In the first place, the Administration led towards it of its own accord, since every day a greater number of ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... course it's going to be different. If there weren't something else in front, do you think one could live? Do you think one could be content to struggle through this miserable quagmire if one didn't believe that there was something else on the ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... looked up into his face with eyes which actually had tears in them. "I shall be so miserable if you are cross. I shall feel that I have spoiled your day. I wish now that I had gone in the little boat. I wish I had been upset and drowned. Then perhaps you would have been ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... out from the great world, certainly," wrote one of them, "but we have one within these walls, and a poor miserable, trivial, life-frittering, childish, querulous, useless, hopeless set of inhabitants it contains. This is not the house of Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus—this is not such an abode as Jesus would desire to lodge in. If He were to visit us, it would be to tell us ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... "No, my dear, instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without any mother, I think it my duty and the duty of yourself and all the liberals to be at the next convention and try to reverse this miserable narrow action."[410] ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... come rushing up from the very bottom of my heart, tumbling everything out of the way, never listening to reason, never stopping for thought? How many times since that dreary afternoon in the great, big drawing-room at grandmamma's? And, oh dear me! what miserable heartache comes before that fearful want! Oh, grown-up people, don't you know how sour everything tastes, and how yellow everything looks, and how sick everything makes one, when one ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... his presence, I saw a gleam of hatred and jealousy in his eye. Great heavens! should he, on my return, suspect that my hand had rested in yours, he would expel me from his house like some guilty wretch! The door of our house must remain for ever closed to you. I am miserable indeed. Be a man; and if your heart still holds one atom of the love you once bore for me, prove it by never ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... Somerset's footsteps had been so noiseless over the carpeting of the stairs and landing, that his father was unaware of his presence; he continued at his work as before, which he performed by the help of a complicated apparatus of lamps, candles, and reflectors, so arranged as to eke out the miserable daylight, to a power apparently sufficient for the neutral touches on which he was at that ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the forenoon; for in those days I was an excellent pedestrian, and the distance, as I think I have said, was little over seven miles; fine walking all the way upon the springy turf. The village is one of the bleakest on that coast, which is saying much: there is a church in the hollow; a miserable haven in the rocks, where many boats have been lost as they returned from fishing; two or three score of stone houses arranged along the beach and in two streets, one leading from the harbor, and another striking out from it at right angles; ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... in Madrid, "with empty pockets, but with a head full of treasures that were not, alas, to enrich him." Here he encountered an indifference that he had not dreamed of; and here he remained in the shadow of oblivion, eking out a miserable existence of physical as well as mental suffering, in utter loneliness of spirit, until he was joined in 1856 by one who came to be his lifelong friend and first biographer—Ramon Rodriguez Correa, who had come ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... excuse for introducing it entire. His extensive and flourishing estates south-east of Leipzig have been the bloody cradle of regenerated freedom. The short space of a few days has converted them into a frightful desert, reduced opulent villages into smoking ruins; and plunged his Miserable tenants as well as himself into a state of extreme Want, until means can be found again to cultivate the soil and to rebuild the dwellings. He writes ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... that they had absolutely forbidden him to admit anybody into their apartment who did not ask for them by name; but that, since the Ambassador desired it, he would show him their room. He then conducted them up to a dirty, miserable garret. He knocked at the door, and waited for some time; he then knocked again pretty, loudly, upon which the door was half-opened. At the sight of the Ambassador and his suite, the person who opened it immediately closed it again, exclaiming that they, had made a mistake. ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... of the Revolution. The flamboyant style of his Messiah is to me detestable: nothing can be more unlike the simplicity of Christianity. All such, equally with those by whatever hand that would be religious by being miserable, I reject at once, along with all that are merely commonplace religious exercises. But this at least is very unlike the rest of Pope's compositions: it is as simple in utterance as it is large in scope and practical in bearing. The name Jove may be unpleasant to some ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... was filled with miserable variety. I had taken my dried clothes down from the galley the night before, and the first thing I did was to exchange the cook's garments for them. I looked for my purse. In addition to some small change (and I have a good ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... had a railway compartment to themselves. Bella declined to talk, and lay back in her corner with closed eyes and an expression of undeserved suffering, whilst the unfortunate Jauncy sat silent and miserable opposite. ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... Committee. But the learned Serjeant left me no choice. He, in strong language, begged that nobody who was disposed to reduce the term of sixty years would divide with him. "Do not," he said, "give me your support, if all that you mean to grant to men of letters is a miserable addition of fourteen or fifteen years to the present term. I do not wish for such support. I despise it." Not wishing to obtrude on the learned Serjeant a support which he despised, I had no course left but to take the sense of the House on the second reading. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the most miserable wretches in the universe, having no houses or coverings but the heavens, and no garments except a piece of the bark of a tree tied round the waist. They have no sheep, poultry, or fruits, and subsist wretchedly on a few shell-fish, such as cockles, muscles, and periwinkles, living without ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... and that a single grain or particle of this sand should be annihilated every thousand years. Supposing then that you had it in your choice to be happy all the while this prodigious mass of sand was consuming by this slow method till there was not a grain of it left, on condition you were to be miserable for ever after; or, supposing that you might be happy for ever after, on condition you would be miserable till the whole mass of sand were thus annihilated at the rate of one sand in a thousand years: Which of these two cases would ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... unable to explain. Because of the reasons just mentioned, and because I dreaded that men should know how grave was the ill afflicting me, I shunned the society of women; and, on account of this habit, the same miserable public scandal which I desired so earnestly to avoid, arose concerning me, and brought upon me the suspicion of still more nefarious practices: in sooth it seemed that there was no further calamity left for me to endure."[49] After reading these words, it is hard to believe that a man, afflicted ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Zepplin, stepping forward frowning. "If I did what you deserve, I should send a bullet into your miserable carcass. Instead I'm going to tell you about a little paper I ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... be attended to! The good education I was at such pains to give them—it'll only make them miserable if they're to wear their lives out here. I'm getting old and selfish—that's the truth of the matter. I want to sit here, and have my girls take ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... in the doorway in some stupefying fashion represented the "Fight" and the "Puddle" of Northrup's adventure. If Kathryn thought at all, it was to the effect that she had known from start to finish the whole miserable business, and she acted upon this unconscious conclusion with never a doubt in her mind. The two women, in silence, stared at each other for one of those moments that can never be measured by rule. During the palpitating silence they were driven together, ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... be ye like these mockers and scorners, at the renewing of the Lord's covenant in Hezekiah's days, but rather like those whose hearts the Lord humbled and moved. Be not like those invited to the king's supper, who refused to come, and had miserable excuses, and therefore should not taste of it. We hope better things of you; God hath reserved and advanced you for a better time and use: but if ye draw back, keep silence, and hold your peace, God shall bring deliverance and enlargement ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... actually went to Gouda, and after hanging her head, and blushing, and crying, and saying she was miserable, told him his mother wished her to marry one of those two; and if he approved of her marrying at all, would he use his wisdom, and tell her which he thought would be the kindest to the little Gerard of those two; for herself, she did not care ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... grating of the lock he turned. The gaoler had left him with no light but the rays of the moon, which, shining through a barred window some eight or ten feet from the ground, shed a gleam upon a miserable truckle-bed and left the rest of the room in deep obscurity. The prisoner stood still for a moment and listened; then, when he had heard the steps die away in the distance and knew himself to be alone at last, he fell upon the bed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... been dead for some time. His step-father, James Martin, was a drunkard, and he had been compelled to take away his little sister Rose from the miserable home in which he had kept her, and had undertaken to support her, as well as himself. He had been fortunate enough to obtain a home for her with Miss Manning, a poor seamstress, whom he paid for her services in taking care ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... so miserable, though, as when you first came. Go and eat and drink a little more, and you will do very well. Another slice of cold meat, another draught of Madeira and water, will make you nearly on a par ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... of further extending their empire. But, at least, they should keep silence, and before the horror of crimes to be judged especially by the tribunal of the elite they should not have shown their miserable enthusiasm. "You see," as a clear-sighted Dutch professor[5] has well written on this point, "if these intellectuals were not blinded they would rather have asked themselves if, in this war that stains Europe with blood, the Prussian military authorities were not losing for centuries the reputation ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... and damp of the night air, or the scorching rays of the sun by day. Those who have known what it is to watch beside dying loved ones, witnessing suffering that they were powerless to relieve, can imagine the anguish that Mrs. Boardman endured in seeing her husband so near his end in that miserable place, destitute of the little comforts so needful in sickness. But with heroic determination she repressed her own sorrow, lest it might incapacitate her for assisting him while rallying his expiring energies for one more effort in his Master's cause. The poor worn body, though, ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... will be one unbroken line of hotels and villas. The process is proceeding at a rapid rate. When Arthur Young made this journey a century ago, he described the country around Toulon thus: "Nine-tenths are waste mountain, and a wretched country of pines, box, and miserable aromatics." At the present time, the brilliant red soil, emerald crops, and gold and purple leafage of stripped vine, make up a picture of wondrous fertility. At every point we see vineyards of recent creation; whilst not an inch of soil between the olive trees is ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... I start up the road, those who live below here breathe again, relieved. You cannot imagine the tricks I must resort to in order not to arouse false suspicions. Then, as soon as I open their door they know the reason of my coming, and what poor miserable creatures I often take in my arms and ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Disposer[83] who have confused thy mind! Hast thou not worshipped with salutation and honored the priests, gods, and manes? Hast thou not made horse-sacrifices, the r[a]jas[u]ya-sacrifice, sacrifices of every sort (pu[n.][d.]arika,[84] gosava)? Yet art thou in this miserable plight! Verily is it an old story (itih[a]sa) that 'the worlds stand under the Lord's will.' Following the seed God gives good or ill in the case of all beings. Men are all moved by the divinity. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... despatch of English troupes of players to Germany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for English tragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What is certain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to have lived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of his time; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of English Fontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of English poets; and that absolutely ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... this has lost nothing of the contour of health or the symmetry of youth. I am in possession of all the fame I ever hoped or ambitioned. I wear not the appearance of twenty years; I am now, as I generally am, sad and miserable.' ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... beseechings which James and I could make nothing of, and on which she seemed to set her all and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... smiled slowly. I call him Gentleman Pettit now to myself. It's a miserable name to give a man, but it sounds better than it ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... already estimated the amount of hay in my stack! said Brandur. You have already divided this miserable haycock among yourselves, divided it down to the very last straw. And you have weighed it almost to a gram. Then why speak to me about it? Why not take it just as it is and scatter it to the four winds? Why not?— The voice of the old ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... central tide of life, and that the only rebutting evidence was the cry of the burdened heart that dared not believe a possibility so stern, so appalling. He wrestled dumbly and darkly against these sad convictions, and how many times, in miserable solitude, did he send out a wistful prayer that, if it were possible, some hint, some slender vision might be granted him as a proof that one so dear, so desired, so momently missed, was still near him in spirit. But no answer came back from the dark threshold, and, leaning ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... new to him, one so different from the grateful and gracious enthusiast he had met all these months that he could not comprehend the change, could not at once adjust his confused senses. So miserable was he that suddenly, with one of her swift changes, she smiled at him, even through her sudden tears. "No! No!" she exclaimed. "See! ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... there is no doubt about it. Whether it ever could rise again is to my mind extremely doubtful. The ideal of women in Germany is the lowest in Europe. Infantile mortality is very high, immorality is widespread, and, in consequence, venereal disease is rampant. Notice, too, the miserable and niggardly pittance that is being paid to the wives and families of German soldiers, while nothing whatever is being paid to unmarried wives and their children. True security for women and children ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Mr. Know-All, 'Yes, my lord, we know him; his name is Atheism; he has been a very pestilent fellow for many years in the miserable town of Mansoul.' ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... us; so now began the most serious time when we could not get rest day nor night except under incessant fire. The left of our brigade rested on the Norfolk railroad, and we held this position in the open fields under a July sun for six weeks, the regiments changing position every week. Our food was miserable—musty meal and rancid Nassau bacon. Our bread was cooked at the wagon yard on canal, west side of Petersburg. When the bread had been cooked twelve hours it would pull out like spider-webs. We were on picket or fatigue duty nearly every night. One-third had to stand to ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... adventure was like a picnic to both. It was no such desperate affair as that of Dick's when he was alone on the plain. They further increased their shelter from the snow by an artful contrivance of brush and fallen boughs, and although enough still fell upon them to make miserable the house-bred, they did not care. Both fell asleep after a while, with flurries of snow still striking upon their faces, and were awakened far in the night by the roar of an avalanche farther up the canyon; but they soon went to sleep again and arose ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... her head. It was but a poor attempt at truth, a miserable lying truth to deceive herself with, but it seemed better than to lie the whole truth outright, and say that her father—Beatrice's father—had been dead but just a week. The blood burned in her face. Brave natures, good and bad alike, hate falsehood, not for its wickedness, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... prisoners; and the multitudes without, deserted by those to whom they had looked up for advice, their friends in prison, with the unknown terrors of the law suspended over them, probably then felt that, miserable and lost as they had been before, they had now fallen even lower in the scale of human misery. Criminal proceedings were quickly instituted. Several commissions were sent down to the districts in which these disturbances had take place, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... hereafter in relation to the few Indians yet remaining in that Territory. Their number is believed not to exceed 240, of whom there are supposed to be about 80 warriors, or males capable of bearing arms. The further pursuit of these miserable beings by a large military force seems to be as injudicious as it is unavailing. The history of the last year's campaign in Florida has satisfactorily shown that notwithstanding the vigorous and incessant operations of our troops (which can not be exceeded), the Indian mode of warfare, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... junk-shop in Stanton street, known as the rookery at the corner. (This man lived with Hag Zogbaum.) We returned at night with our booty, and re- ceived our wages in gin or beer. The unsuccessful were set down as victims of bad luck. Now and then the old woman would call us a miserable lot of wretches she was pestered to take care of. At one time there were in this den of wretchedness fifteen girls from seven to eleven years old, and seven boys under eleven-all being initiated into the by-ways of vice and crime. Among the girls were Italians, Germans, Irish, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... rabble," the "scum of the people," "idle and poor people," "rag, tag, and bobtail." The Council reported that there were "hardly two amongst them" who owned estates, or were persons of reputation. Berkeley complained that his was a miserable task to govern a people "where six parts of seven at least are ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... capitulating on condition of receiving a promise that their lives should be spared, and that they should be well treated; but Parysatis persuaded her husband to break his plighted word, and they perished in the ashes. Their miserable fate did not discourage the satrap of Lydia, Pissuthnes, who was of Achaemenian race: he entered the lists in 418 B.C., with the help of the Athenians. The relations between the Persian empire and Greece had continued ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... pass my time trotting about from church to church, from consistory to consistory, when I ought properly to be leading a magnificent army in the battlefield, where you would enjoy a captain's rank, instead of being the chief of a few miserable sbirri?" ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the children, Sam," said the sick woman, raising herself in her miserable bed. "I'll forgive yer everything if you'll do the right thing fur them. Do—do—everything!" said the woman, throwing up her arms and falling backward. Her husband's arm caught her; his lips brought to her wan face a smile, which the grim visitor, who an instant later stole her breath, pityingly ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... presented a picture of that famishing wretchedness to which these lonely fugitives among the mountains are sometimes reduced. Having received wherewithal to allay his hunger, he disappeared, but in the course of a day or two returned to the camp, bringing with him his son, a miserable boy, still more naked and forlorn than himself. Food was given to both; they skulked about the camp like hungry hounds, seeking what they might devour, and having gathered up the feet and entrails of some beavers that were lying ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... 200,000 had deserted San Francisco, and by that much was his food problem solved. Well do I remember that day. In the morning I had eaten a crust of bread. Half of the afternoon I had stood in the bread-line; and after dark I returned home, tired and miserable, carrying a quart of rice and a slice of bacon. Brown met me at the door. His face was worn and terrified. All the servants had fled, he informed me. He alone remained. I was touched by his faithfulness and, when I learned that he had eaten nothing all day, I divided my ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... only in so far as they tend towards happiness, we naturally ask what is meant by 'happiness.' For the term in the common use of language is only to a certain extent commensurate with moral good and evil. We should hardly say that a good man could be utterly miserable (Arist. Ethics), or place a bad man in the first rank of happiness. But yet, from various circumstances, the measure of a man's happiness may be out of all proportion to his desert. And if we insist on calling the good man alone ...
— Philebus • Plato
... upon Clontarf being prohibited, the Repealers would have announced some other gathering in some other place. You that say it is not at an end, tell us why did they forbear doing that? Secondly, Mr O'Connell has substituted for Repeal—what? The miserable, the beggarly petition, for a dependent House of Assembly, an upper sort of "Select Vestry," for Ireland; and that too as a bonus from the Parliament of the empire. This reminds us of a capital story related by Mr Webster, and perhaps within the experience of American statesmen, in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... before the gates, they asked for some days delay, to allow those of their number who had determined not to survive the loss of liberty time to die. It was granted, and not a few took advantage of it. At last the miserable remnant appeared before the gates. Scipio chose fifty of the most eminent to form part of his triumphal procession; the rest were sold into slavery, the city was levelled with the ground, and its territory was ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of Minorca in perpetuity? I fear we must, or else raise twelve millions more next year, to as little purpose as we did this, and have consequently a worse peace afterward. I turn my eyes away, as much as I can, from this miserable prospect; but, as a citizen and member of society, it recurs to my imagination, notwithstanding all my endeavors to banish it from my thoughts. I can do myself nor my country no good; but I feel ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... never really lived till I left there. I was like an animal caught in a net, like a man struggling for air. You can't know what it is to me now to be with people who are thinking of something else than of how to make a few dollars in a miserable country store." ...
— Different Girls • Various
... several days, but I think I will soon return to Sulgostow. I suffer everywhere, and it always seems to me that I will be most happy in whatever place I am not. My lot is brilliant in imagination, but miserable in reality. And yet, my parents have received me well, and have treated me with the greatest kindness. But a matter of comparatively slight importance is one of the causes of my uneasiness here: I have no money; I cannot make the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... be dangerous to oppose them; therefore, if to follow my inclination I should dissuade you from showing the complaisance the emperor expects from you, it may expose you to his resentment, and may render myself and you miserable. These are my sentiments; but before we conclude upon anything let us consult the speaking-bird, and hear what he says; he is wise, and has promised his ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... and, as it was the great boast of the heresiarchs that their Gnosis secured freedom from the dominion of the flesh, multitudes, who secretly sighed for deliverance, were thus induced to test its efficacy. But Gnosticism, in whatever form it presented itself, was a miserable perversion of the gospel. Some of its teachers entirely rejected the Old Testament; others reduced its history to a myth; whilst all mutilated and misinterpreted the writings of the apostles and evangelists. Like the Jewish Cabbalists, who made void the law of God by expositions ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... town by the least inviting road. On one side were rows of miserable houses with broken windows and grimy walls and doors, that looked as if all their brightness had gone into the smart public-houses ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... book. Still later he read it with contemptuous laughter at the poor knight. But when in later life, he lay racked on a bed of pain his attitude of sympathy returned. "Dulcinea del Toboso," he says "is still the most beautiful woman in the world; although I lie stretched upon the earth, helpless and miserable, I will never take back that assertion. I can not do otherwise. On with your lances, ye Knights of the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... are some sins that cannot be taken away—the sins of faithless women, the "LITTLE" sins as they are called nowadays—for we have grown very lenient in some things, and very severe in others. We will imprison the miserable wretch who steals five francs from our pockets, but the cunning feminine thief who robs us of our prestige, our name and honorable standing among our fellow-men, escapes almost scot-free; she cannot be put in prison, or sentenced to hard labor—not ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... might feel towards him as his guardian, there was nothing that he could not forget and forgive in the father of his wife,—which did not make me respect him any more, you may be sure, and showed me that it was useless to appeal to his generosity. My life now was miserable indeed. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... own race was concerned, Free Joe was an exile. If the slaves secretly envied him his freedom (which is to be doubted, considering his miserable condition), they openly despised him, and lost no opportunity to treat him with contumely. Perhaps this was in some measure the result of the attitude which Free Joe chose to maintain toward them. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... on, and Pottinger and I sat on the bench in a mild drizzle at half-past three in the morning, with as miserable a country round about as mortal man ever beheld. By-and-bye one of the subs., a poor Pole, moved by compassion and the hope of reward, cautiously invited us to come into his den. He spoke a very little German and a little ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... crying had seized her that they were much alarmed. Her good parents stood beside the bed, and when she begged them to let her go back, they said that she might do just as she liked. Then her eyes fell on Endrid. Any one so utterly miserable and helpless she had never seen before; and beside him stood his mother, silent and motionless, with the tears running down her face and her eyes fixed on Randi's. Then Randi raised herself on her elbow and looked straight in front of her for ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... The quick temper which always lurked so very little beneath the surface of her cheerfulness was stirred. She felt suddenly chilled and miserable. She tried to tell herself that Freddie was just an amiable blunderer who spoke without sense or reason, but it was no use. She could not rid herself of a feeling of foreboding and discomfort. It had been the one jarring note in the sweet melody of her love-story, this ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... M.P. On his death, Sydney Smith wrote—-"I say nothing of the great and miserable loss we have all sustained. He will always live in our recollection; and it will be useful to us all, in the great occasions of life, to reflect how Horner would act and think in them, if God had prolonged ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... thronging multitudes. The attractions of the city are irresistible, even to those who exist in the most wretched conditions. The tenement districts baffle description, yet nothing is more difficult than to get their miserable occupants to leave their fetid and squalid surroundings for the country. To the immigrants the city is a magnet. Here they find colonies of their own people, and prize companionship more than comfort. "Folks is more company than stumps," said an old woman in the slums to Dr. Schauffler. ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... latter had fallen into decay, and others were being used as miserable homes by those who could afford no better. In one or two, saloons held forth, the light from their swinging doors making yellow patches on ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... Pansey, ferociously; 'aren't we all miserable sinners? Dr Pendle's a human worm, just as you are—as I am. You may dress him in lawn sleeves and a mitre, and make pagan genuflections before his throne, but he is only a worm for ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit. I am sure many of the members who compose even the majority of that body must feel as I do, notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society. Miserable king! miserable assembly! How must that assembly be silently scandalized with those of their members who could call a day which seemed to blot the sun out of heaven "un beau jour"![90] How must they be inwardly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is a representation of desertion. If they are broken, you will be hounded by miserable suspicions of disloyalty ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... a friend—in fact, I felt as if I had no friend. So I sat down on a chair in the yard with the little dog by me, thinking, I remember, that the chair was our own property and no one had a right to object to my being there. And I also remember that the whole miserable affair brought to mind most vividly scenes of eviction that had been illustrated in the papers from time to time, when poor women had been evicted for nonpayment ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... instruction to all, and especially to those who are strong Mediums of deluding and destroying spirits the great Prince amongst whom is Emperor Napoleon. But we write this treatise, to deliver him from those miserable tyrants, and to make him a preacher of peace also to his departed friends. What we write for him, we write that it might ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... from it when her grief was worn out, worn out like her love. She still loved her son, but with a distant, disillusioned affection, which she knew to be futile, and she lost all interest in herself and him. So she dragged through a wretched, miserable year, without his paying her any heed. And then, poor creature, since her heart could neither live nor die without love, she was forced to find something to love. She fell victim to a strange passion, such as often takes possession of women, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... everything was. The stillness of the very early morning is quite different from that of the night. During the latter people are asleep, and may be presumed to be happy. In the former they are about to wake up and be miserable. That, at least, was my notion, as I walked into the ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... obtaining a testimonial from the reigning Pope. Let a solemn procession be held in my honour, and intercession be publicly made for me, and I should ascend forthwith. I have consequently represented my case to many of your predecessors: but, O Alexander, you seventeenth-century Popes are a miserable breed! No fellow-feeling, no esprit de corps. Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! No one was so rude as your ascetic antecessor. The more of a saint, the less of a gentleman. Personally offensive, I ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... of the young woman was with him continually. He went to bed with it; he got up with it. At every moment of the day he was pestered with it. It interfered with his work, got mixed up in his business. What a miserable confession for a man to make; a fine way to waste his time. Was it possible that only the other day he had stood in front of the music store in Bonneville and seriously considered making Hilma a present of a music-box? Even now, the very thought of it made him flush with shame, and this ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted during summer by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of the western point, and a line of hard, white beach on the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... the second paddock, looking as miserable as a bandicoot. Dad made her promise not to meddle with the fire. 'Promise me you won't try any putting out on your own account,' he said; and Norah promised very reluctantly. I was jolly sorry you were out of it, you know, old ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... his copy; a period of experiencing the ever-familiar, but ever-unpleasant, sensation which ensued upon those words as the boy's ear was painfully twisted between two long fingers bent backwards at the tips—such is the miserable picture of that youth of which, in later life, Chichikov preserved but the faintest of memories! But in this world everything is liable to swift and sudden change; and, one day in early spring, when the rivers had melted, the father set forth with his little son in a teliezshka ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... you venture here? This is our island, far better than your miserable Malta. We have taken possession of it, and will hold it against all the world. Begone with you, or we will sink you, and your ship to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... had been dead for some time. His step-father, James Martin, was a drunkard, and he had been compelled to take away his little sister Rose from the miserable home in which he had kept her, and had undertaken to support her, as well as himself. He had been fortunate enough to obtain a home for her with Miss Manning, a poor seamstress, whom he paid for her services in taking ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... "isn't that just like life! You bother and bother about something that doesn't exist and make yourself miserable for nothing. No, ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous growth ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Mlle. O'Hara looked at him in silence for a moment, and she gave a little, troubled, anxious frown. Men can be quite indifferent to suffering in each other if the suffering is not extreme, and women can be, too, but men are quite miserable in the presence of a woman who is in pain, and women, before a suffering man, while they are not miserable, are always full of a desire to do something that will help. And that might be a small, additional proof—if ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... gets more; that is to say, the causes of most of the dissatisfaction and discontent of the world are envy and jealousy. In many cases it may be a righteous sort of jealousy or envy. A woman, especially because she is a rival of her fellow-woman mainly in small things, becomes acutely miserable when she is outstripped by her neighbor and especially if she is passed by her ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... of issuing miserable catch-penny lives of every eminent person immediately after his decease, Arbuthnot wittily styled him "one of the new terrors of death."—CARRUTHERS: Life of Pope ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... console Don Diego by telling him that he was a surgeon, and that if he could only obtain a pair of pincers he would soon remedy that evil; but the Spaniard shook his head and assured him that there was a miserable man in the town calling himself a vendor of physic, who had already nearly driven him mad by attempting several times to pull ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... one of our acquaintance in this country advocate this measure and we are almost certain that 97-100 of the present population are opposed to it." Again it is remarked in this paper: "We left the slave states because we did not like to bring up a family in a miserable, can't-help-one's-self condition," and dearly as he loved the union, he would prefer California independent to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... swiftly for all: Jack Marche taught Barbara Lisle to fish for gudgeon; Betty Castlemaine tormented Cecil Page to his infinitely miserable delight; Ricky von Elster made tender eyes at Dorothy Marche and rowed her up and down the Lisse; and his sister Alixe read sentimental verses under the beech-trees and sighed for the sweet mysteries that young German girls sigh for—heart-friendships, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... is one, and the best, mode of passing to the heavenly state. 'Hinc itur ad astra'. But his earliest predecessors contended that it was the only mode, and to this St. Paul justly replies:'—If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable.' ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... singer, hungering for plunder, now wants to be rich, very rich. She tried her 'prentice hand on Baron Hulot, and soon plucked him bare—plucked him, ay, and singed him to the skin. The miserable man, after trying to vie with one of the Kellers and with the Marquis d'Esgrignon, both perfectly mad about Josepha, to say nothing of unknown worshipers, is about to see her carried off by that ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... your scruples to rest, my dear Karsten. We agreed that it should be so; you had to be saved, and you were my friend. I can tell you, I was uncommonly proud of that friendship. Here was I, drudging away like a miserable stick-in-the-mud, when you came back from your grand tour abroad, a great swell who had been to London and to Paris; and you chose me for your chum, although I was four years younger than you—it is true it ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... sterility of the male partner. Curiously and unfortunately these men never suspect themselves. The wife is the delinquent member, in their estimation. She is the victim of jest and suspicion, and later of jibes and insults. Many women have had their lives rendered miserable and unhappy because of this suspicion. They are compelled by their husbands to submit to examination and unpleasant and painful treatment and operations with the intention of rectifying a defective condition that does not exist. Many conscientious physicians ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... I had witnessed Jacob's punishment I felt miserable. I was restless and excitable, and did not know what to do with myself. I thought my heart would burst within me. I asked myself all kinds of questions: What am I doing here? What did I come here for? What are all those people to me? As if I had come there only the day before, and of my own free ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... of K. Henrie grounded vp a guiltie conscience.] The king was not hastie to purchase the deliuerance of the earle March, bicause his title to the crowne was well inough knowen, and therefore suffered him to remaine in miserable prison, wishing both the said earle, and all other of his linage out of this life, with God and his saincts in heauen, so they had beene out of the waie, for then all had bene well inough as he thought. ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed
... came a period of aggression and resistance. The Stamp Act was passed, but stamp could not be sold, and the lives of stamp-venders became miserable. Soldiers crowded citizens upon Boston Common; citizens mobbed the soldiers; soldiers fired, killing five citizens, and were saved from destruction only by the active interference of the patriot leaders. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... me in," panted poor Netty; "do, please, and I ain't Susy—I'm Netty, and this ain't my little cousin—he's my own brother, and he's bad, very bad. Oh, ma'am, I'm such a miserable girl!" ...
— A Big Temptation • L. T. Meade
... its opposite neighbour, and the Aspen welcomed it gladly. You would have thought it great happiness to live in such a lovely spot, I know, but there is never perfect bliss, and if little folks will be discontented, they make the prettiest place appear wretched and miserable. ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... heavy fur-coat and dropped it. This seemed to be a subject of great interest to the bear, for it was longer in inspecting it than the other things. And now poor Butts went tearing along like a maniac, in his flannel shirt and trousers. He was a miserable and curious object, for his body, besides being very long, was uncommonly lanky, and his legs and arms seemed to go like the wings of a windmill. Never, since the day of his birth, had Davy Butts run at such a pace, in such light clothing, and ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... daughter still! She cried out, and, walking hurriedly to him, laid herself close against him, and he hugged her closer yet—poor, miserable, erring ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... will do . . . and now to slash and slash; Rip them to ribands, rend them every one, My dreams and visions—tear and stab and gash, So that their crudeness may be known to none; Poor, miserable daubs! Ah! there, it's done. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... I select one experience that should encourage all who labor in the Master's vineyard. I had traveled two hundred miles in a day to reach an engagement, and the last seven miles in a buggy over a miserable road. I did not reach the village until nine o'clock. Without supper and chilled by the ride, I threw off my wraps and wearily made my way through the lecture. A little later in my room at the hotel, while I was taking a lunch of bread and milk, a minister entered ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... is the matter? Are you ill? Have you heard bad news? Oh, I forget," continued Josie, as Dorry made no reply; "what a goose I must be! Of course you are miserable without Don, you darling! But I've come to bring good news, my lady—to me, at least—so cheer up. Do you know something? Mamma and Papa are going to start for San Francisco on Wednesday. They gave me my choice—to go with them or to stay with you, and I decided to stay. ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... before he died, he was heard to ejaculate the following prayer, in the anticipation of his speedy departure; "Lord, though I am a miserable and wretched creature, I am in covenant with thee, through thy grace; and I may, I will come to thee, for thy people. Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument to do them good, and Thee service; and many of them have set too high value upon me, though others ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... reason which Johnnie could not fathom, Cis suddenly began to show a great deal of interest in the flat. Indeed, she was by way of making his life miserable, what with her constant warnings and instructions about keeping the rooms neat and clean. And she proved that her concern was genuine by continuing to rise early each day in order to help him ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... not only to the States immediately concerned, but to the harmony of the Union, will have been accomplished by measures equally advantageous to the Indians. What the native savages become when surrounded by a dense population and by mixing with the whites may be seen in the miserable remnants of a few Eastern tribes, deprived of political and civil rights, forbidden to make contracts, and subjected to guardians, dragging out a wretched existence, without excitement, without ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... Colonel may have been to blame in their quarrel of the night before—and the French clock told its own story—still I could not help but feel that Rad should have borne with him more patiently. The scene I had just witnessed in the dining-room made me miserable. The Colonel was a proud man and apology came hard for him, his son might at least have met ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... year 1814, when it was constructed by a company in subscription shares of L.50 each, landing or embarking was rendered generally a miserable task, except during very favorable weather, at the moment of high tide. The practice then was, to cram the passengers promiscuously into a common luggage-cart, till it was drawn out upon the almost level sands sufficiently far for a large wherry to float alongside, into which they ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... have told you that without being able to regain the complete exercise of my faculties, I retained the sense of my danger. I struggled, then, with all my strength, and doubtless opposed, weak as I was, a long resistance, for I heard him cry out, 'These miserable Puritans! I knew very well that they tired out their executioners, but I did not believe them so strong ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... dragging his deformed and tattered person from door to door on his wooden crutches. But he could not make up his mind to go elsewhere, because he knew no place on earth but this particular corner of the country, these three or four villages where he had spent the whole of his miserable existence. He had limited his begging operations and would not for worlds ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... to draw her forth into lively conversation. "She gets into the strangest states—just like her poor mother! And like her I'm afraid, sometimes, will make herself and every one else around her miserable. I pity Leon Dexter, if this be so. He may find that his caged bird will not sing. Already the notes are few and far between; and little of the ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... far from the world, sharing the one chair, and almost happy in the midst of the wretchedness and poverty which filled their souls with emotion. A week passed, and they knew one another as though they had been intimate for years. Mother Fetu's miserable abode was filled with sunshine, streaming from this ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... "Miserable aristocrat! Do you want to have our heads cut off?" he shouted furiously. "You just take to your heels and never show yourself here again. Don't come to me for materials for ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... take. Men dare not print or say what they feel of the judges, the public governors, the action of the police, the controllers of fortunes and of news. This Fear will have about it something comic, providing infinite joy to the foreigner, and modifying with laughter the lament of the patriot. A miserable hack that never had a will of his own, but ran to do what he was told for twenty years at the bidding of his masters, being raised to the Bench will be praised for an impartial virtue more than human. A drunken fellow, the son of a drunkard, having stolen control over some ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... plaster, and guano. His beautiful highly improved home farm is near Newcastle; but that upon which he has met with great success in the use of guano, lies about four miles from Dover. Before he purchased it had become celebrated for its miserable poverty. It is now equally celebrated for its productiveness. The use of guano in that part of the State has now reached a point far beyond what the most sanguine would have dared to predict four years ago; and the benefits are of the most flattering kind. Lands have been increased in ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... we had very little appetite, no ambition, and a miserable sense of malaise and great fatigue. There was nothing for it but to shoulder our packs, arrange our tump-lines, and proceed with the same steady drudgery—now a little harder than the day before. We broke camp at half-past ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... weren't we? But we slipped into it without knowing. Good-by. I don't think I shall ever forget the dear old Pool, and the temple, and—the rest. But you must please forget me and forgive me. I am very miserable about it and about everything. I think we had better not know each other any more, so please don't answer this. Just put it in the fire and think no more about it or me. I wanted to tell you all this when I saw you to-day, but ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... one of the stopping places—where one steps off to think, you know. I don't want to think. I have had nine such miserable years. All through the war there was one's work, one's hospital, the excitement of the gigantic struggle. And now everything seems flat. One struggles on without incentive. One lives ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a snizerable meak—I mean miserable sneak, that fellow is!" exclaimed Harry. "He goes into a dirty piece of business like this, and then he gets down ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... Priests and friars and confessors, necessarily and essentially, a sordid, stupid, and wretched herd; or than they could be in any other country, where an archbishop held the place of an universal bishop, and the vicars and curates that of the ignorant, dependent, miserable rabble aforesaid; and infinitely more sensible and learned than they could be in either.——This subject has been seen in the same light by many illustrious patriots, who have lived in America, since the days of our forefathers, and who have adored their memory ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... of that gown has been a sacred thing to me, ever since. It is always with me, though I never wear it.—A detailed account of the hours which followed, I shall hope to give you some day, my dearest. I cannot write it. Let me hurl on to paper, in all its crude ugliness, the miserable fact which parted us; turning our dawning joy to disillusion and sadness. Garth—it was this. I did not believe your love would stand the test of my plainness. I knew what a worshipper of beauty you were; how you must have it, in one form or another, always around you. I got out my diary in which ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... the beauty of youth, especially, which makes it so fit for purposes of love, spoiled and wasted by the random flood and fire of a violent tempest; the glittering beauty of the Greek "war-men," expressed in so many brilliant figures, and the splendour of their equipments, in collision with the miserable accidents of battle, and the grotesque indignities of death in it, brought home to our fancy by a hundred pathetic incidents,—the sword hot with slaughter, the stifling blood in the throat, the spoiling of the body in every member severally. He thinks of, and records, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... from Cavite, and even making them embark. He says with show of great courage that he is going out, although he is told that such a thing is impossible with the ships that he has, for the enemy have many. Having spent all the money and exhausted the miserable inhabitants whom he has thus burdened, he calls a council at this juncture, and asks whether it is advisable to go out. Since the enemy are so superior they cannot tell him to go out, and in addition they see little gain in it; accordingly it is resolved that it is not advisable to go out. Your ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... the milliner, who had recognized Straker as an excellent customer of the name of Derbyshire, who had a very dashing wife, with a strong partiality for expensive dresses. I have no doubt that this woman had plunged him over head and ears in debt, and so led him into this miserable plot." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... world be closed against this trade, we may then indulge a reasonable hope for the gradual improvement of Africa. The chief motive of war among the tribes will cease whenever there is no longer any demand for slaves. The resources of that fertile but miserable country might then be developed by the hand of industry and afford subjects for legitimate foreign and domestic commerce. In this manner Christianity and civilization may gradually penetrate ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... is looked on as the greatest evil. Now, if the evil of banishment proceeds not from ourselves, but from the froward disposition of the people, I have just now declared how contemptible it is. But if to leave one's country be miserable, the provinces are full of miserable men; very few of the settlers in which ever return to their country again. But exiles are deprived of their property! What, then! has there not been enough said on bearing poverty? But with regard to banishment, if we examine the nature of things, not ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... I knew that!" cried Verhovensky in an access of furious anger. "You are lying, you miserable, profligate, perverted, little aristocrat! I don't ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to bodily health, to the delight of meeting her children, to the glad sensation of security. But as the days went on, a miserable feeling of apathy stole over her: a feeling as if all whom she had loved in the world had died, leaving her living ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... she said. "I was too happy, and too miserable. It's the widest-awake mixture I ever tried." Then, picking up the teapot, she added curiously: "Where's the powder? I expected to see you arrive with a ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... hotel for dinner, the pup lookin' miserable sorrowful. Frenchy was goin' to kick the pup out—he was a low-grade heathen, but he was big an' he didn't mind a little trouble ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... of paper. A week of darkness changed the deep green to a dingy olive. But the experiment could not be continued. The nightly admission of air by lifting the paper covering was insufficient to maintain the imprisoned creatures. They were happy, though captive, while in a mimic ocean, but miserable in a dark dungeon. Languid and spiritless, they lay supine, or crawled listlessly and aimlessly about. This would not do, and so light was again admitted freely to all but one side of the tank; there, a screen of yellow ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... and disturbed. Evidently this sort of thing had been going on for some time and I had just discovered it. It placed me in a miserable light. When Colton had declared, as he had in both our interviews, that the Lane was a nuisance I had loftily denied the assertion. Now those idiots in the village were doing their best to prove me a liar. I should ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... had seen tens and twenties as she hurried them through her trembling fingers, and Sudsville gossiped and talked for two hours after she was led away, still moaning and shivering, to the bedside of poor Clancy, who was the miserable cause of it all. The colonel listened to the stories with such patience as could be accorded to witnesses who desired to give prominence to their personal exploits in subduing the flames and rescuing life and property. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... there. What wonder that when the ashes were raked from the long-smouldering fires of envy, of injustice, of oppression, of extortion, of misrule of every conceivable sort, they sprang into fierce flame? What wonder that when the bonds of silence were loosed from their miserable mouths, such a wild clamor went up to Heaven as made the king tremble upon his throne and his ministers shake with fear? Who could tell at what moment this unlooked-for, unprecedented clemency might be withdrawn and ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... who has spent many a night rounding the mob on lonely Queensland cattle camps where hostile blacks were as thick as dingoes has a peculiar aversion to one plain covered with dead gums, because the curlews always made him feel miserable ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... installed by force." Three or four madmen on it ruled, and if one held any discussion with them, "it was always threats.... Always trembling, always afraid,—that is the way I passed eight months doing duty in that miserable place."—Finally, in medium-sized or large towns, the dead-lock produced by collective dismissals, the pell-mell of improvised appointments, and the sudden renewal of an entire set of officials, threw into the administration, willingly or ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and be a sinner in order to serve him! Then my conscience is not the voice of God in me! How then am I made in his image? What does it mean? Ah, but that image has been defaced by the fall! So I cannot tell a bit what God is like? Then how am I to love him? I never can love him! I am very miserable! I ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... kind? To be kind at any cost. She never calculated the cost of anything; which was another irritating reflection for Miss Jewdwine. Poor as she was, she thought nothing of paying twenty-five or thirty shillings for her board and a miserable lodging, when she might—she ought—to have been living with her relations free of all expense. But there was the sting, the unspeakable sting; for it meant that Lucia would do anything, pay anything, rather than stop another ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... there is said to be, on an average, seventy-three days of rain, and one of snow, between October and April. We remained there only two days, and it rained almost incessantly during the whole time; the place looking very miserable under the circumstances. However, the inhabitants appeared quite used to it, and walked about unconcernedly enough, with their green umbrellas, evidencing at least some sunny days in ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... that strike clear through," he said. "Our union demands were just. Here in this war I am fighting just the same way as we fought against the mine operators in Michigan. I figure it out that Germany represents low pay, long hours and miserable working conditions for the world. I think the Kaiser is the world's greatest scab. I am over here to ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... out. It was not a heartening spectacle. A few water- soaked tents formed the miserable foreground, from which the streaming ground sloped to a foaming gorge. Down this ramped a mountain torrent. Here and there, dwarf spruce, rooting and grovelling in the shallow alluvium, marked the proximity of the ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... all know him now, as a coward and a miserable sneak. What's the good of demonstrating it further? It would ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... Convalescent Home in my mind at the moment, a vast building. In these great blocks what they call ventilation is a steady draught, and there is no 'home' about it. It is all walls and regulations and draughts, and altogether miserable. I would infinitely rather see any friend of mine in John Brown's cottage. That terrible disease, however, seemed to quite spoil the violet bank opposite, and I never picked one there afterwards. There is something in disease so destructive, as ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... a nation, feeling as I do, with you, how adversely it is affected by the prolongation of the "temporary" occupation, which, as matters stand, seems likely to endure till the next war, even should it be postponed till half a century hence, I cannot but feel miserable at the situation of this affair, and I once more ask your pardon for in this way liberating my mind, or, I fear, rather discharging upon you, regardless of your prodigious avocations, this last expression of a regret deeper than that which I ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... really shaken and miserable he felt, the sharpshooter retired to his own quarters at the Barracks and was seen no more that night: but he sent word to Dorothy, the "Little One," that Netty, the lamb, had been given a soft bed close to his own and would be ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... There was an ancient hostelry called the Black Prince in Chandos Street, which is mentioned by Dickens. This was demolished to make way for the Medical College. Opposite was the blacking shop where Dickens spent a miserable part of ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... not help giving a low cry of commiseration. The sound must have been heard by those who were huddled around the miserable fire, for they scrambled to their knees. As the tiny blaze sprang up just then, it showed the scouts the four Stanhope boys looking pinched and wan, with their eyes staring the wonder they must have felt at ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... when he looks backward. When I look backward myself, I have always a ray of comfort: it is in the generous conduct of a sister, who forsook me not when I was forsaken by every one. You have had your reward. You live happy in the esteem and love of all who know you, and I drag on the life of a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel. He has produced me to his friends, since the estate opened to him, as a daughter of a Scotchman of rank, banished on account of the Viscount ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... what determination of long-suffering they won't be offended! with what innocent dexterity they can drop the drop of poison into the cup of conversation, hand round the goblet, smiling, to the whole family to drink, and make the dear, domestic circle miserable!)—I burst out of my parenthesis. I fancy my Baroness and Countess smiling at each other a hundred years ago, and giving each other the hand or the cheek, and calling each other, My dear, My dear creature, My dear Countess, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the poor marquis to such a degree that he thought it best to leave her. After that episode, she returned to her lover; and, rejected by him and her friends, and becoming the subject of the gossip of the entire city, she sought consolation from one acquaintance after another, and was miserable ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... I long to visit Bradford; to spend a few evenings by your firesides, in telling you what I have seen and heard. Alas! we have no fireside, no social circle. We are still alone in this miserable country, surrounded by thousands ignorant of the true God." ... "But we still feel happy in our employment, and have reason to thank God that he has brought us here. We do hope to live to see the Scriptures translated into the Burman language, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... the best of a bad situation, and try to get all the comfort I can. I'm in your hands at present, and we're foes, but just the same we can talk, and try to make each other comfortable so that we can be comfortable ourselves, and try not to be any more miserable than we can help. I'm not going to cry ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... Wolsey's hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529 before the Bishop of London. Three times he refused to recant. He was offered a fourth and last chance. The temptation was too strong, and he fell. For two years he was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver nature prevailed. There was no pardon for a relapsed heretic, and if he was again in the bishop's hands he knew well ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... events that led up to this act. You will hear from her own lips the tragic circumstances of her life, the still more tragic infatuation with which she has inspired the prisoner. This woman, gentlemen, has been leading a miserable existence with a husband who habitually ill-uses her, from whom she actually goes in terror of her life. I am not, of course, saying that it's either right or desirable for a young man to fall in love with a married woman, or that it's his business to rescue ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... state of partial and blind revolt. Discontented, they attributed their suffering to the principles to which they owed all their happiness, and in receding from which they had become proportionately miserable. They have hankered after other gods than the God of Sinai and of Calvary, and they have achieved only desolation. Now they despair. But the eternal principles that controlled barbarian vigour can alone cope with morbid civilisation. The equality of man can only be accomplished by the ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... was left. It was Saturday evening after supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and bustle and shopping and larking, the streets were empty and desolate. Richards and his old wife sat apart in their little parlour—miserable and thinking. This was become their evening habit now: the life-long habit which had preceded it, of reading, knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or paying neighbourly calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago—two or three weeks ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... different from the New York of 1847. It still retained some of the knickerbocker customs of the olden time. The site of the Fifth Avenue Hotel was then a stone- yard where grave stones were cut. All north of Twenty-third street, now the seat of plutocracy, was then sparsely occupied by poor houses and miserable shanties, and the site of Central Park was a rough, but picturesque body of woodland, glens and rocky hills, with a few clearings partly cultivated. Even then the population of New York was about 400,000, or more than three-fold ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... bargain my sister made for me," Jim answered shortly. He had observed the poultry-farm from which the old man had started, with its miserable little hovel of a house and immense spread of chicken-runs, and drawn his own conclusions as to the character of its owner. "You needn't be afraid ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... as follows, by way of exemplifying the position:— "We have a remarkable instance of this in a notorious malefactor, well known by the name of Jack Sheppard. What amazing difficulties has he overcome! what astonishing things has he performed! and all for the sake of a stinking, miserable carcass; hardly worth the hanging! How dexterously did he pick the chain of his padlock with a crooked nail! how manfully he burst his fetters asunder! — climb up the chimney! — wrench out an iron bar! — break his way through a stone wall! ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... charge, no result followed, and Nero was greatly enraged. He sent for Pollio, and assailed him with reproaches and threats, and as for Locusta, he declared that she should be immediately put to death. They were both miserable cowards, he said, who had not the firmness to do their duty. Pollio, in reply, made the most earnest protestations of his readiness to do whatever his master should command. He assured Nero that ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... had asked me. I guessed that your friends consulted your interest less than their own inclination to expose Rousseau; and I think their omission of what I said on that subject proves I was not mistaken in my guess. My letters hinted, too, my contempt of learned men and their miserable conduct. Since I was to appear in print, I should not have been sorry that that opinion should have appeared at the same ime. In truth, there is nothing I hold so cheap as the generality of learned men; and I have often ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... significant words, De Chemerant wished to retire. Croustillac took hold of him and said, in a low tone, "Remain, sir, remain, I desire to surprise, to confound them, the miserable wretches!" ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... fifty passengers, had not on this occasion carried nearly nine hundred, a hundred, at least of whom were children of an unpleasant age. Captain Semmes captured the Ariel once, and it is to be deeply regretted that that thrifty buccaneer hadn't made mince-meat of her, because she is a miserable tub at best, and hasn't much more right to be afloat than a second- hand coffin has. I do not know her proprietor, Mr. C. Vanderbilt. But I know of several excellent mill privileges in the State of Maine, and not one of them is so thoroughly ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... of sinister threats and complications. Iris did not know the wretched circumstances which had come to pass since they parted, and which had changed the whole aspect of his life. How could he tell her? Why should it be his miserable lot to snatch the cup of happiness from her lips? In that moment of silent agony he wished he were dead, for death alone could remove the burthen laid on him. Well, surely he might bask in the sunshine of her laughter for another day. No need to embitter her joyous heart ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... England, that, in fact, its existence is unrecognized. Prostitution thrives, nevertheless; but numbers do not discourage the moralist, and when he reads in the newspapers of degraded females, "unfortunates," he breathes a sigh; and if these reports contain descriptions of miserable circumstance and human grief, he ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... safely placed at about 20 B.C.E. The first part of his life therefore was passed during the tranquil era in which Augustus and Tiberius were reorganizing the Roman Empire after a half-century of war; but he was fated to see more troublesome times for his people, when the emperor Gaius, for a miserable eight years, harassed the world with his mad escapades. In the riots which ensued upon the attempt to deprive the Jews of their religious freedom his brother the alabarch was imprisoned;[40] and he himself was called ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... had observed, with astonishment, that she was extremely beautiful,—though her attire was of the most wretched kind, and her long, loose hair in disorder. He wondered that so handsome a girl should be living in such a miserable and lonesome place. ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... off the fumes of the wine, arose in the morning and going down, missed his pig and saw the door open; whereupon he questioned this one and that if they knew who had taken it and getting no news of it, began to make a great outcry, saying, 'Woe is me, miserable wretch that I am!' for that the pig had been stolen from him. As soon as Bruno and Buffalmacco were risen, they repaired to Calandrino's house, to hear what he would say anent the pig, and he no sooner saw them than he called out to them, well nigh weeping, and said, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the little boy on the beach, who stood with downcast head, and grinding his toes into the sand and looking very miserable and ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... in Tamil is even more explicit: "The hold by which I hold them I will never let go." Ponnamal returned, weary in mind and in body, after three days of travelling and effort; she had caught a glimpse of the baby, and the little face haunted her. The elder child was reported very miserable, and she had seen nothing of her. The guardian, of course, had not dealt with her direct; but she heard he had taken legal advice, and was sure of his position. There was nothing hopeful to report. ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... early at Cosenza; the night air is dangerous, and—Teatro Garibaldi still incomplete—darkness brings with it no sort of pastime. I did manage to read a little in my miserable room by an antique lamp, but the effort was dispiriting; better to lie in the dark and ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... two small windows—one of them is now blocked up. The upper one is the same in design as those others on the south side of the same apartment. These we shall consider presently. Above the central pier at the entrance to this porch is a miserable figure in stone, intended to represent ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... breaking; the longest night will have an end, so will this miserable pain at my heart. Daylight will surely come when I shall be happy with Richard. Don't tell him, Victor, don't; and now leave me, for my head ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... Dudley to the Knight, "when this morning, only half the number of the savages presented themselves; and now doth it pass my understanding how this miserable wretch lost his life." ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... without communication with her ally, in spite of a certain precaution adopted by her mistress, the first thing the latter did when she entered being to take the key of the cellar stairs from her pocket, and release Jean, who issued crestfallen and miserable, and was sternly dismissed to bed. The next day, however, for reasons of her own, Miss Horn permitted her to resume her duties about the house without remark, as if nothing had happened serious enough to ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... should come and ask: "Is love worth trying?" or, "How about religion?" For country life is to each human being a fresh, strange, original adventure. We enjoy it, or we do not enjoy it, or more probably, we do both. It is packed and crowded with the zest of adventure, or it is dull and miserable. We may, if we are skilled enough, make our whole living from the land, or only a part of it, or we may find in a few cherished acres the inspiration and power for other work, whatever it may be. There is many a man whose ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... grow," said he. "But, mother, I say," and his voice quavered as he spoke, "what a miserable room yours is! I can't bear to think of ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... farther improvement would be a light coat of fine manure on the surface. All furrows, in every description of plowing, should be near enough together to move the whole, leaving no hard places between them. The usual "cut and cover" system, to get over a large area in a day, is miserable economy. The more evenly and flatly land can be turned over in plowing, the better it will be; it retards the growth of weeds, and secures a better action upon substances plowed under. An exception to deep plowing is in breaking up the original prairies of the West: they have to be broken ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... pass very pleasantly; he said to himself he might as well remain in Rome and enjoy himself, as go back to England and be miserable. Wherever he went, he could not see Leone. He would not trust himself; he loved her too much, if he were in the same land, ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... cider, to the girls he liked the least. He shunned Cynthia, and when he was accidentally near her, and she asked him if he would get her a glass of cider, he rudely told her—like a goose as he was—that she had better ask Ephraim. That seemed to him very smart; but he got more and more miserable, and began to feel that he was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sorry, and for a moment Vincent's fate seemed somehow to throw a sort of halo round his memory, but very soon the sorrow faded, until at last it became little more than an uneasy consciousness that he ought to be miserable and was not. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... bread and soup. I have returned to the distributing stations at the end of the day and have found men, women, and children sometimes still standing in line, but later compelled to go back to their pitiful homes, cold, wet, and miserable. It was not until eighteen weary hours afterward that they got the meal they missed. The need will continue to be great for many months after peace is declared. Factories have been stripped of their machinery. There is a complete stagnation of industry. It will take months to ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
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