"Penniless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am glad to hear it, Edmund, for I have long been penniless; and I have great need of something at least to pay this good woman for all the trouble she has been at with me, and for her food which my carelessness has destroyed, as you may have ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... ability and persuasiveness as a public lecturer, she aided greatly in keeping the abolition flag flying, enlightening and changing public sentiment, and hastening the year of jubilee. With what unremitting zeal and energy did she espouse the cause of the homeless, penniless, benighted, starving freedmen, driven by stress of circumstances into the national capital in such overwhelming numbers; and what a multitude were befriended and saved through her moving appeals in their behalf! How like an angel of mercy must she have seemed to them all! ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... "Penniless beggars like me don't marry beautiful wives like—like Miss Farrow," he said with a sort of savagery. "They want men with pots and pots of money, who can buy them motor-cars and diamonds, and all the rest of it." His voice was hurt and angry. Christine ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... cover nakedness. The children's clothes are washed when they go to bed. Life is reduced to its lowest terms. They can move as silently as do the Arabs and do so in the night watches. But they are rarely penniless; they have a little fund always in the bank. They put their young children in institutions from weaning-time until they are old enough to work, then bring them home to swell the family income. Recently a father, whose children had thus been cared for by the state, bought a three-story tenement. ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... for the play of Elvira had been found among the papers of a young penniless Italian who had died, almost of starvation, in his Roman garret, during those teeming years after 1830, when poets grew on every hedge and the romantic passion was abroad. The sketch had appeared in a little privately-printed volume which Edward ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... offence!" said Mr. Lambert, cursing what he believed to be the penniless Highland ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... long while recovering from the wound that had crippled him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had "drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the arm-chair her brother had vacated and sat down, her thoughts drifting backward to the past. Backward four years, and she saw herself, a penniless orphan, dependent on the bounty of that miserly Uncle Roosevelt in Montreal. She saw again the stately gentleman who came to her, and told her he was her father's third cousin, Captain Danton, of Danton Hall. She had never seen him before; but ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... to worship at the shrine of civilisation. The day of his landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried drizzle filtered down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into the delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health, civilised in costume, penniless, and, except in matters of the direst necessity, practically a dumb animal, to toil for James Holroyd and to be bullied by him in the dynamo shed at Camberwell. And to James Holroyd bullying was a labour ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to ask any which could be taken in the nature of an inquiry as to his prospects in life, merely because that might possibly suggest to him that she was thinking of her daughter. And when an Englishman is reticent in such matters, it is utterly impossible to guess whether he be a millionaire or a penniless younger son. Johnstone never spoke of money, in any connection. He never said that he could afford one thing or could not afford another. He talked a good deal of shooting and sport, but never hinted that his ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... I found myself in New York; penniless, weary, and heartsick. I wandered one morning into a tiny park, mouldering in the shadow of the huge skyscrapers with which Manhattan is everywhere defaced. I sank upon a bench, pulled a soiled newspaper from my pocket, and scanned for the fiftieth ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... to be done was to relieve the immediate distress, to feed the hungry, to rescue those who were dying of starvation. The next step was to furnish employment at living wages for those who were penniless until we could help them to get upon their feet again, and finally to devise means and methods to meet such emergencies in the future, because famines are the fate of India and must continue to recur ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Saxifraga cotyledon; yet, in spite of its long name, it is beautiful and poetic. London-pride is the commonest of all the saxifrages; but the one of which I speak is as different from London-pride as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that last Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless some years ago. It is a great majestic flower, which plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa in the spring. At other times of the year you see a little tuft of fleshy leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark places of dripping cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop—one of those weeds ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sound security at reasonable interest. Just so! Note of hand of any respectable person sufficient. That's all right. Advance at a few hours' notice. Excellent! Let me see, the address is Fitz-Guelph Mansions, W. That sounds respectable enough. A penniless shark would hardly live there. By Jove, I'll write, and make an appointment at his own address, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... manhood! You've never amounted to a row of beans since you were out of pinafores. If your little property wasn't tied up hard and fast so that you could only use the income of it, you would have frittered it all away long ago, and left these children penniless. You've never made a dollar in your life, ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... attraction for a young man who wishes to better himself. He leaves both her and Genevieve with perfect nonchalance; though he has good reason for believing that the girl really loves him, however she may have made a peculiar sort of hay when the sun shone, and that both she and his lady are penniless, or ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... those twenty days will pass without a sight of Bettina, for now he frankly adores her. He is happy and he is miserable. He knows by every action and every word that she loves him as truly as he loves her. But he feels it his duty to fight against his own heart's wish, lest the penniless lieutenant might be thought to covet the riches ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... but wasted, Jessica, Thou canst not gain the end that thou dost seek. For even if I have the foolish will (And I assure thee that I have it not) To bring thee back to all the luxury, The silken clothes, the soft and perfumed beds, The shining jewels of thy girlhood days, I could not. I am almost penniless. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... all these scenes. Her father fell beneath the slide of the guillotine; her mother was imprisoned and doomed to die; and she and her brother were turned penniless into the streets. By the marriage of her mother with Napoleon, she became the daughter of the Emperor, and one of the most brilliant and illustrious ladies of the imperial court. The triumph of the Allies sent her into exile, ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... process is still going on, so that ultimately the earth will be left very poor, though not absolutely penniless, at least if the retention of a halfpenny can be regarded as justifying that assertion. Saturn, revolving as it does with great rapidity, and having a very large mass, possesses about L2700, while Uranus and ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... Dan Anderson now which left Ellsworth distinctly uncomfortable. The latter felt himself in some fashion at a disadvantage before this penniless adventurer, this young man whom once he had not cared to have as a regular visitor at his own home back in the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... standing in society, you see-and this cut deep into his mother's pride. And she, you see, was not quite sure where she stood in society, you see, and wouldn't for the world have her pride lessened; so she discarded poor Tom. And the girl has been got out of the way, and Tom has become penniless, and such a wreck of dissipation that no respectable house will admit him. It's a stiff old family, that Swiggs family! His mother keeps him threading in and out of jail, just to be rid of him. She is a curious mother; but when I think how he looks and ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... independence, if the autocrat of Russia, by issuing his orders from St Petersburg, can at any moment stop the importation of ten millions of quarters of foreign grain, that is, a sixth of our whole annual consumption? And are we to render penniless our home customers, not in order to promote the interest of the distant parts of our empire, but in order to ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... account of. Some notorious love affairs at home and abroad; a wild practical joke or two, played on prominent people, and largely advertised in the newspapers; an audacious novel, and a censored play—he had achieved all these things by the age of thirty, and was now almost penniless, and still unmarried. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fifty shares and a quantity of the cargo in her hold; and although he did his utmost to face his misfortune as a brave man should, the tears started to his eyes as he explained to me that the capture of the ship would leave him and his frau absolutely penniless in their old age. I endeavoured to soften the blow to him as much as possible by sympathetically murmuring some idiotic platitude about "the fortune of war," but of course it was no good; the poor old fellow simply shook his head and ejaculated—"Ay—the ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... leading an honest life again. But before going, you must first change clothes with me. You can sell mine at Tunis for enough to buy you a dozen suits like yours; but you must divide with me what money you now have in your possession, for I cannot start penniless." ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... grabbed him by the arm, and the three hurried away from me in the direction from which I had come. The man looked back and made a face at me, shaking his fist. I was left penniless in the road. A milestone told me that I was seventy ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... PENNILESS BENCH. Archdeacon Nares, in his Glossary, says of this phrase: "A cant term for a state of poverty. There was a public seat so called in Oxford; but I fancy it was rather named from the common saying, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... fell in love with Kathy Fairclough, who was considered a blue-stocking, instead of with her younger sister Nell, whom Mrs. Hammersley had chosen for him. Why Mrs. Hammersley desired her wealthy stepson to marry one of Dr. Fairclough's penniless daughters was a secret. How the secret became known, and nearly wrecked the happiness of Kathy and Ronald, is told in the story. But all ends well, and to ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... of the village or pueblo of San Jose (St. Joseph) where we camped. Here we learned that the two owners of the horses intended to go to San Francisco instead of Sacramento, and as we considered the former place a very poor one for a penniless person to go we concluded to break up the company camp and each do the best he could for himself, for our objective point was the gold mines, and the sooner we reached ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain's commission in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South. Masterless, penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting, gone, I determined to work my way to the southwest and attempt to retrieve my fallen fortunes ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the writing—would require thought and changes, and must needs be copied, perhaps, more than once. As to the money, that she had in the house—as much, at least, as Mark now wanted, though the sending of it would leave her nearly penniless. She could, however, in case of personal need, resort to Davis as ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... post was of old heart-of-oak, which is burnt with extreme difficulty; or we may pause a moment in reverence before the noble figure of the good old man, ending a life of unselfish toil without a roof beneath which to lay his head; penniless and comfortless in this world: but sure of his reward in the world ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... said this, the king put into Audun's hand a leather bag, full of silver, saying, "Take this, and even if your ship goes down, you will not be entirely penniless." ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... well fitted to draw recruits in Liverpool. Among the vast number of emigrants, who daily arrive from all parts of Britain to embark for the United States or the colonies, there are many young men, who, upon arriving at Liverpool, find themselves next to penniless; or, at least, with only enough money to carry them over the sea, without providing for future contingencies. How easily and naturally, then, may such youths be induced to enter upon the military ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... husband and I awoke from our honeymoon trance, we found ourselves in California, strangers in a lone land, penniless and jobless. My husband was blessed with neither college education nor profession, but we were both young and undaunted—therefore we pulled through. We rented an apartment, furnished, at $15 per month and buckled in. I might say that the rent didn't have to be ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... being old meant being poor. When President Roosevelt created Social Security, thousands wrote to thank him for eliminating what one woman called "the stark terror of penniless, helpless old age." Even today, without Social Security, half our nation's elderly would be forced ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was weather-beaten and slipshod, and altogether made a most disreputable appearance. A hand was thrust into each of his pockets, and these pockets were destitute of coin. The tramp was hungry and penniless. The little shop with its gay light and tempting articles of stationery, and books and sealing-wax displayed in the window, were quite to the man's taste. He could not see the parlor beyond, nor the peep-hole where Susy was supposed to be able to watch the ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the Alexander he had made nothing; for he had been so ill-used, that he had solicited his discharge in Grenada, where, being paid in currency, he had but little to receive. When he arrived in Bristol from that island, he was quite penniless; and finding the Little Pearl going out, he was glad to get on board her as her surgeon, which he then did entirely for the sake of bread. He said, moreover, that she was but a small vessel, and that his savings had been but small in her. This occasioned him to apply for the Ruby, his ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... red as a poppy, and stammered out in a rage: "Ah! So you confess it, you slut! And pray who is the fellow? Some penniless, half-starved ragamuffin, without a roof to his head, I suppose? Who is it, I say?" And as she gave him no answer, he continued: "Ah! So you will not tell me. Then I will tell you; it is Jean Baudu?"—"No, not he," ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... are not worth a dollar. One man who was reported to be worth $100,000 before the flood now is penniless and has to take his place in the line along with others seeking the necessaries ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... of Emancipation that severed the relation binding them to their masters, left them in a very forlorn and deplorable condition. They were homeless and penniless in a country, that had been rendered more or less desolate, by the ravages of war and bloodshed. No provision had ever been made for the spread of intelligence among them. It has been estimated that only about five per cent ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... cent., investing some in doubtful railroad stocks, and experimenting with the rest, until by some unlucky chance he lost the whole, and, worse than all, had nothing of his own with which to make amends. In short, Maude was penniless, and J.C. De Vere in despair. She had written to him immediately, and he had come, suggesting nothing, offering no advice, and saying nothing at first, except that "the man was mighty mean, and he had ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... Lord Mar and your father? Betrayed by artful declamation, they rush into conspiracies against the existing government, are detected, ruined, and perhaps finally lose their lives! Who gains by rebellion, but a few penniless wretches, that embrace these vaunted principles from the urgency of their necessities? They acquire plunder, under the mask of extraordinary disinterestedness; and hazarding nothing of themselves but their worthless lives, they would make tools of the first men in the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... If a man has brought up the child, whom he took to be his son, and then sets up a home, and after he has acquired children, decides to disinherit the foster child, that son shall not go his way [penniless]; the father that brought him up shall give him one-third of a son's share in his goods and he shall depart. He shall not give him field, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... his private ideas on that point; for, as he well knew, the vow of poverty was somewhat of a formality in the Middle Ages, since the nun who brought to her convent a title and a fortune was usually not treated in the same manner as a penniless commoner. ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... means made use of by d'Ache in his new theatre of operations: a poor hunchbacked girl was his council, and his army was composed of David the Intrepid. He was, moreover, penniless. At the beginning of the autumn Mme. de Combray sent him eight louis by Lanoe, a keeper who had been in her service, and who now occupied a small farm at Glatigny, near to Bretteville-sur-Dives. Lanoe belonged to that rapacious type of peasant whom even a small sum of money never ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... how—but, lack-a-day! thou art one of those that come out for wool, and art sure to go home shorn. Why now, but that I am sworn against laying of wagers, I would risk some consideration that this honest guest of mine sends thee home penniless, if thou darest venture with him—ugh, ugh—at any game which ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... troops, they have proved an easy mark in Paris and the port cities. As soon as they were paid several months' back salary, some of them took "French leave," went on a spree, and did not come back until they were penniless. The officers, fully alive to the danger, are now doing their utmost to cope with the situation; they are seeking to reduce the cash payments to the men and are endeavoring to persuade them to send more of their money home. Court martial and strict ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... But having made up his mind, such trifling difficulties were not likely to deter him. He sailed from Bombay, not merely under the displeasure of his superiors and uncertain as to his own status, but also in that penniless condition, which was not wholly out of place in his character of knight-errant. But with that solid good sense, which so often retrieved his reputation in the eyes of the world, he left behind him the following public proclamation ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... non-commissioned officer of the ex-Imperial guard, who had been cheated out of his retiring pension. The general had already, under other circumstances, done a service to the brave cavalryman, whose name was Groison; the man, remembering it, now told him his troubles, admitting that he was penniless. The general promised to get him his pension, and proposed that he should take the place of field-keeper to the district of Blangy, as a way of paying off his score of gratitude by devotion to the new mayor's ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... him if he yielded to this corpulent adventurer's insistence? Both from experience and observation he knew this for a world plentifully peopled by soldiers of fortune, contrivers of snares and pitfalls for the feet of the unwary. On the other hand, it is axiomatic that a penniless man is perfectly safe anywhere. Besides, there was the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... where the man has absolutely nothing to offer beyond the charms of his more or less blandly persuasive person, excite no surprise abroad. That a penniless male fortune-hunter should marry a girl with wealth is considered in Europe at the present day not only just, proper and quite as it should be, but rather comme il faut than otherwise. Let the case be reversed, and a man of fortune permit himself the caprice of marrying a portionless ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... irresolution of a weak monarch, who had lost his crown by his tyranny, and who had failed to regain it by his courage. In the next place, for his devotion to that cause, he was a banished and an outlawed man, with his life at the mercy of any one who chose to take it. In the next he was well nigh penniless, with the life of another, dear, most dear to his heart, depending ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... to her orders. My aunt is my rival, and I do not feel the least doubt as to his having offered to her half a dozen times. But then she has another lover, Captain Bellfield, and I see that she prefers him. He is a penniless scamp and looks as though he drank. He paints his whiskers too, which I don't like; and, being forty, tries to look like twenty-five. Otherwise he is agreeable enough, and I rather approve of my aunt's ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... first voyage, Columbus has but just turned the corner after the struggles and failures of eight years. He is a penniless adventurer who has staked all his reputation on a scheme in which he has hardly any support. In the second case, Columbus is the governor-general, for aught he knows, of half the world, of all the countries he is to discover; and he knows enough, and all men around him know enough, to see that his ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... that trouble never comes singly! At this crisis of affairs, Captain Carr suddenly succumbed to a malady that had been troubling him for years, and Jessie Bain found herself thrown homeless, penniless upon the world. She was thankful that poor Margaret Moore did not realize the calamity that had overtaken her. That humble cottage roof which had sheltered her so long would cover her head ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... a penniless outcast. The Rameros are powerful here, and the Church will be with them, for it will get my inheritance. I am helpless and alone and I don't ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... will now be in a position to demand its amendment. If a man dies intestate, leaving a wealthy son and half a dozen daughters quite unprovided for, the son takes all the real property, and the daughters may be left penniless, but if the property happens to be leasehold for 1,000 years, the daughters share equally. The present state of the law is a survival of the time when ownership of freehold ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... liked in the community; but it must be owned that, as the Mayor and man of money, engrossed with affairs and ambitions, he had lost in the eyes of the poorer inhabitants something of that wondrous charm which he had had for them as a light-hearted penniless young man, who sang ditties as readily as the birds in the trees. Hence the anxiety to keep him from annoyance showed not quite the ardour that would have animated it in ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... was much bespattered, and in worse case than ever. But, not yet at his worst; for, going into a public-house, and being supplied in stress of business with his rum, and seeking to vanish without payment, he was collared, searched, found penniless, and admonished not to try that again, by having a pail of dirty water cast over him. This application superinduced another fit of the trembles; after which Mr Dolls, as finding himself in good cue for making a call on a professional friend, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... performed. In truth, however, the teaching of Sir Lionel and Harcourt had not been altogether without effect: at this present moment, having just paid to Mr. Neversaye Die his first yearly contribution, he was well-nigh penniless; and, after all, if a rich uncle have money to bestow, why should he not bestow it on a nephew? Money, at any rate, was not in itself deleterious. So much George was already prepared ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... privileges are granted. He has claims on the State, claims for a position that will give him a means of subsistence, if only a scanty one. With talent and industry and much enduring toil, he may reach the highest places. He belongs to the aristocracy of learning,—a poor, penniless aristocracy, it may be, yet one which in Germany yields in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... by his own capital and labour. Even a leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the farm going to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case, though relatively his hardship was less, since his condition, being the lowest possible in all circumstances, could scarcely be worse. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... off, but still the Commandant is undecided. If he strikes to-night, Hines may escape, for the fox has a hole out of town, and may keep under cover till morning. He is the king-devil, and much the Commandant wants to cage him. Besides, he holds the bag, and the Texan will go out of prison a penniless man among strangers. Those ten thousand greenbacks are lawful prize, and should be the country's dower with the maiden. But are not republics grateful? Did not one give a mansion to General McClellan? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... insult, I have taken counsel with my advisers, the ministers of state, and it is my royal will and pleasure to pronounce sentence. Wherefore, I declare that my son, the prince, shall be cast forth into the world, penniless, and shall not return until he shall have learned how to Count Five. And be it further known that none may minister unto his wants should he crave assistance by declaring he is my son, ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... loved: a poor girl of a respectable family, she had taken up nursing; had married a wealthy doctor, and had been in the position of the penniless but beautiful wife of ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... of doll land, or seated carefully in baby carriages. There were walking dolls and talking dolls and dolls who could suck real milk out of real bottles into tin-lined stomachs. Some exquisitely gowned porcelain Parisiennes, with eyelashes and long hair cut from the heads of penniless children, were almost as big and as aristocratic as their potential millionaire mistresses. Humbler sisters of middle class combined prettiness with cheapness, and had the satisfaction of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... a few London balls with the maiden aunt, a personage of some prestige and character. But invitations do not flow to a penniless young woman from the country, nor do partners flock to be presented to strangers in those days, and Amaryllis had spent many humiliating hours as a wall-flower and had grown to hate balls. She was not expansive in herself and ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... became the most obsequious of hosts, and so would remain while it lasted. But Dennis saw that the moment it was gone his purchased courtesy would change, and he trembled at his narrow escape from being thrust out into the wintry streets, friendless, penniless, to beg or starve—equally hard alternatives ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... with which she confided her hand to my hand; I loved her as she stood there, penniless and parentless; for a sensualist charmless, for me a treasure—my best object of sympathy on earth, thinking such thoughts as I thought, feeling such feelings as I felt; my ideal of the shrine in which to seal my stores of love; personification of discretion and ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... life led by him and your mother on that wild African shore; with the account of your birth, and, final and most convincing proof of all, your own baby finger prints upon the pages of it, it seems incredible to me that you are willing to remain a nameless, penniless vagabond." ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Locke as he had known him years ago, in Paris, a man twenty years his senior—penniless and intemperate but with an irresistible charm, rolling stone and waster but proud as a Spaniard; a man of the world with the heart of a boy, the enemy of nobody but himself, weak but lovable; a ragged coat and the manners of a ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... to quit the life I have hitherto led. Your persuasions have influenced me greatly, and I would now gladly follow your wishes; but, alas! all the wealth I possess in the world went down in the hold of the Sea Hawk, and I am now again a penniless adventurer. I could never consent to depend on you, even had you wealth to support me, and I shall therefore once more be driven to follow my old calling on the ocean. Not my own will, but fate, drives me ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... of deck for them, and they are driven by necessity among the bales and boxes of freight, with no avenue of escape in case of accident. These are the people who suffer in cases of snagging and collision, &c. These hardy sons of toil, migrating with their families, are all but penniless, and therefore, despite all vaunt of equality, they are friendless. Had every deck-passenger that has perished in the agony of a crushing and drowning death been a Member of Senate or Congress, the Government would have interfered long ere this; but these miserable wretches perish in their agony, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... fellows were the bargemen, and quite brutal among themselves, though civil enough to their passengers. The barge floated into the wharf to which it belonged, and now came flight by land through a strange, unfriendly town. The travellers were penniless, and at nightfall took ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... obliged to suspend soon after Horace had learned his trade, and, penniless,—for every cent of his earnings beyond what furnished the bare necessaries of life had been sent home to his parents in the wilderness,—he faced ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... a Canadian village that I parted with this gentlemanly and generous New-Englander. When I left him, I was not penniless, but a bitter sense of my loneliness was upon me, and a consciousness of the uncandid and cruel turn I had done my father brought me almost to the verge of suicide. On Sunday morning I entered a church in Toronto, and tears flowed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... man, who would be considered a Macenas, taken from a penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can supply." [Footnote: ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... little more pocket-money before I ran away with any one," said Wodehouse, and tossed the shillings back contemptuously. As for Mr Wentworth, his reasonableness once more came greatly in his way. He began to ask himself whether this penniless vagabond, who seemed to have no dash or daring in his character, could have been the man to carry little Rosa away; and, perplexed by this idea, Mr Wentworth put himself unawares into the position of his ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... heavy soil from which she had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance—words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... said Fran kindly, "I'm sorry to have to do this, but it isn't as if you were adopting a penniless orphan. I'm adopting a home. I want to belong to somebody, and I want people to feel that they have something when ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... Pickering Castle until he paid L2. On the 30th July Thomas Oliver of Sawdon was taken in the same manner and detained for five days. After all this David was summoned and he pleaded guilty. By trustworthy witnesses, however, it was proved that he was penniless and had nothing wherewith to satisfy the king for his offences, and "having regard to the state of his health and condition he was let off." We wonder what the Vicar of Ebberston thought of this lenient treatment ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... The penniless Lincoln was now hankering to become a lawyer, though with some thoughts of the more practicable career of a blacksmith. Unexpectedly, however, he was tempted into his one venture, singularly unsuccessful, in business. Two gentlemen named Herndon, cousins of a biographer ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... and disinherit the man aforesaid, and who, to crown his virtues, pretends to be a miser in order to teach the young woman, also aforesaid, how bad it is to be mercenary, and to induce her to marry the unrecognized and seemingly penniless son; their marriage accordingly, with ultimate result that the bridegroom turns out to be no poor clerk, but the original heir, who, of course, is not dead, and is the inheritor of thousands; subsidiary groups of characters, of course, one which I think rather ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... from him the value of one Barbary ducket. He came nere and with a low leg saluted his mistris, and told her that when she pleased to make choice of a husband he would make her the richest marriage in London, because she was so willing out of her own purse (when he was altogether penniless) to lay out for his adventure. To the pilot, and master, and every officer, and common saylor he gave liberal according to their degree, even to the ship boy, and then to every servant of the house, nay to the very ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... me one and every twenty stories (I think it is twenty) become a book. The English ones were about scapegraces and irresistible ne'er-do-wells, ancestral homes with frayed carpets and faded hangings in which penniless woman-haters (the last of a noble line) sit and brood, living alone with equally gruff, woman-hating family retainers. Sometimes, too, there was an absent-minded dreamer, and villainous business men worked indefatigably in the interests of their own ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... passage to New York, where he arrived at the age of seventeen, almost penniless, and without recommendations. Failing to obtain work here he continued on to Philadelphia, where he arrived, disappointed but not discouraged. He now had but one dollar, and a few copper coins, in the world. Being hungry, he bought some bread, and with one roll under either arm, and eating the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... had totally overlooked the depleted state of his fortune. Elim had some arrears of pay, but now he seriously doubted whether they were collectible. Nothing else. He had emerged from the war brevetted major but as penniless as the morning of his enlistment. He doubted whether, in the hurry of departure, Rosemary Roselle had remembered to bring ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... makes society anxious for the change. The unfortunate custom in France which gave every male member of a noble family a title equivalent to that of its chief, so that a simple viscount with ten stalwart and penniless sons gave ten stalwart and penniless viscounts to the aristocracy of his country, had filled the whole land with a race of men proud of their origin, filled with reckless courage, careless of life, and despising all honest means of employment ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Lucien had spent the last of his money on a little firewood; he was half-way through the task of recasting his work, the most strenuous of all toil, and he was penniless. As for Daniel d'Arthez, burning blocks of spent tan, and facing poverty like a hero, not a word of complaint came from him; he was as sober as any elderly spinster, and methodical as a miser. This courage called out ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... some of it was dropped; this man is always penniless; he has not drawn his wages, and yet he is half tipsy and treating his companions. I hope I am not suspecting him wrongfully, but it looks bad, Lindon, ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... matrimonial engagements; no penniless lovers selfishly and indissolubly linked together to propagate large families Of starving children. Ail the arrangements of the insect tribe, though prompted by sheer instinct are conducted with a degree of rationality that in some cases raises the ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Spencer Stark, late Captain in His Majesty's Black Hussars, gambler, penniless, always well dressed, and always well fed—Terrible. Just as beetles are beetles, whether dressed in tropical splendour or the funereal black of the English type, so are detrimentals ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... added practical considerations. Business men had confidence in it. Workingmen, who longed for the independence of the farmer, owed to its indulgent land policy the opportunity of securing free homesteads in the West. The immigrant, landing penniless on these shores, as a result of the same beneficent system, often found himself in a little while with an estate as large as many a baronial domain in the Old World. Under a Republican administration, the union had been saved. To it the veterans of the war could turn with confidence ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... license for the commission of any sin, there can be no moral doubt; that they exhibited not a single quality needed for the successful prosecution of their enterprise is absolutely certain. With a foolhardiness equal to his ignorance Peter undertook the task, in which he was aided by Walter the Penniless, a man with some pretensions to the soldier-like character. But the utter disorder of this motley host made it impossible for them to journey long together. At Cologne they parted company; and fifteen thousand under the penniless Walter made their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... same day two footsore, despondent, and penniless men stood facing the ruins of the home of a comrade who had sent a message to his mother. 'Tell mother I am coming.' The ruins yet smoked. A relative of the lady whose home was in ashes, and whose son said, 'I am coming,' ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... dear woman. What were pins made for except to curb the ambitious wings of flighty young men who were soaring higher than was good for them. She would let him know that Ruth was a prize not to be too easily won, especially by penniless young gentlemen, however brave and heroic ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a mystery here within a mystery. There is something I have not gotten on to yet. Why should this man secrete the girl Amalie Speir? Every move of this Richards family means something. Why should they become so deeply interested in this penniless girl? It is not within the bounds of possibility that they could have in any way discovered that she is an—" Here the detective stopped short and gave utterance to an expletive more expressive than elegant, and after a little he resumed his ...
— A Successful Shadow - A Detective's Successful Quest • Harlan Page Halsey
... to you a bankrupt, dear Thurston! I have inherited and expended a large fortune since we parted—and now I am more than penniless, for I stand responsible for large sums of money owed by my 'Orphans Home' and 'Emigrants Help'—money that I had ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... sovereigns, gave frequent entertainments in his honor, treating him with the punctilious deference usually shown only to a noble of the highest rank. It cannot be said, however, that envy at the high distinction shown this lately obscure and penniless adventurer was quite concealed, and at one of these entertainments is said to have taken place the ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... the room and down the stairs. In my despair I longed for somebody to whom I could unbosom myself. I thought of Meyer Nodelman. A self-made man and one who had begun manufacturing almost penniless like myself, he seemed to be just the man I needed. A thought glimmered through my mind, "And who knows but he may come to my rescue I was going to call at his warehouse, but upon second thought I realized that the seat ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... giving us this information, remarked that he was penniless, and that as his business concerned the safety of a countryman, he hoped we would assist him. Though we were not quite satisfied with the man's story, we stood the chance of its being true, and furnished ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... for Bunker Bean, had to be done in finance immediately. He had reached the office penniless. He first tried Bulger, who owed him ten dollars. But this was ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Chandragupta who in 305 B.C. had defeated Alexander's general, Seleucus, decided seven years later to hand over the reins of India's government to his son. Traveling to South India, Chandragupta spent the last twelve years of his life as a penniless ascetic, seeking self-realization in a rocky cave at Sravanabelagola, now honored as a Mysore shrine. Near-by stands the world's largest statue, carved out of an immense boulder by the Jains in A.D. 983 ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to communicate with Mrs. Hannaford, a letter from her occasioned him new anxiety. His sister wrote that Olga was bent on making a most undesirable marriage, having fallen in love with a penniless nondescript who called himself an artist; a man given, it was suspected, to drink, and without any decent connection that one could hear of. A wretched, squalid affair! Would the Doctor come at once ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... we've come to encamp just across the street—it's to lay siege to a penniless cousin. (picks up "Quayle on Muscles" off couch, ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... said, "you see before you a pauper,—a penniless pauper! Therefore, and because of which, and by reason of the fact that I am in immediate need of money, I stoop to this means of obtaining it, and, as aforesaid, I'd ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... you lack! You were simply a lot of shopboys, and even the best of you were nothing better than penniless students. As for the workmen, they may well complain; for, if you except a million taken out of the civil list, and of which you made a grant to them with the meanest expressions of flattery, you have done nothing for them, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... moved with a sort of pity, since it was plainer than a pike-staff that Monsieur de Puysange had bundled this penniless young fellow out of Tiverton, with scant courtesy and a scantier explanation. Still, the wording of this sympathy was a ticklish business. I waved my hand upward. "The match, then, is broken off, between ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... a monkey and a hand-organ, both of which were much greater rarities in the Mississippi Valley at that time than they are now. They formerly belonged to an Italian, who, sick, penniless, and friendless, had sunk exhausted by the road-side a few miles from Dubuque. Several persons passed him without heeding his feeble appeals for aid before Cap'n Cod happened along and discovered him. The old soldier at once engaged a team, carried the dying stranger home, and there, ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... character had been an unknown quantity to him. But he was no further from understanding them than any other man. Now an inner consciousness told him that the punishment of Victor had been the undoing of his schemes. Davia had seen the trader bereft of all, homeless, penniless; and she had ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... plan to gain and plan to spend, so that the latter shall counterbalance the former—who lie sleepless in their beds, intent on how to make both ends meet—who are lucky and unlucky—who travel the ups and the downs of life, here grasping fortunes, there turning out the linings of penniless pockets: these are the people whose whole lives are one long succession of monetary sensations. Among them mainly is cultivated the art of looking at two sides of a shilling. They know how to value half-crowns and sovereigns in calling up the long arrear of hard-worked ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... as if she were penniless," continued Salemina; "she has fortune enough to assure her own independence, and not enough to threaten his,—the ideal amount. I hardly think the good Lord's first intention was to make her a minister's wife, but he knows very well that Love is a master architect. Francesca ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... some courage in her heart and some flexibility in her mind supports the shock and does not die under it; but the firmest of us are amazed at it, and stand open-mouthed amid all these strange novelties, like a penniless gourmand in the ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... great struggle in which England was then involved, the navy was esteemed her safeguard; and men must be had at any price of money, or suffering, or of injustice. Landsmen were kidnapped and taken to London; there, in too many instances, to be discharged without redress and penniless, because they were discovered to be useless for the purpose for which they ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a penniless girl, you would desire me to sacrifice my feelings and my honor—to marry ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... his legal rights and make oblation of them when he took the vows. It was not then made clear to him that what he gave would never under any circumstances be restored, although the Society might send him forth at will a penniless wanderer into the world. Yet this was the hard condition of a Jesuit's existence. After entering the order, he owned nothing, and he had no power to depart if he repented. But the General could cashier him by a ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Caroline had never known it; she must never know it, never know it. She drew half her happiness from the past, as, so differently, Sophia did herself, and, drooping a little, her thoughts went farther back to the last year of her teens when a pale and penniless young man had been her secret suitor, had gone to America to make his fortune there—and died. She had told no one; Caroline would have scorned him because he was shy and timid, and he had not had time to earn enough to keep her; he had ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... of view within the solitary traveller was quite as cheerless as the scene without. Friendless and penniless; incensed to the last degree; deeply wounded in his pride and self-love; full of independent schemes, and perfectly destitute of any means of realizing them; his most vindictive enemy might have been satisfied with the extent of his troubles. To add to his other ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... September 28, 1749. They shot him on Christie Hill, at the head of Glenconie. There his body remained concealed for some time, and was later found with a hat marked with his initials, A. R. D. They are also charged with taking his watch, two gold rings, and a purse of gold, whereby Clerk, previously penniless, was enabled to take and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... he found his old regiment about to march for Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
