"Absentee" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long and keenly contested. The conclave commenced on the 28th of December, and it was not till the 9th of January, 1522, that the cardinals, conscious of each other's defects, agreed to elect an absentee, about whom they knew little. Their choice fell on Adrian, Cardinal of Tortosa; and it is significant of the extent of Charles's influence, that the new Pope had been his tutor, and was proposed as a candidate by the imperial ambassador on the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... is the way in which religious instruction may be put aside in favor of a blind though legitimate love. Madame refused breakfast, and ordered the meal to be kept hot, just as she kept herself ready, at a moment's notice, to welcome the precious absentee. ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your archaeologists and set out upon your ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White people are more in evidence here, and farmer and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... The long-deserted grounds were filled with labourers; the carpenters were busy at the fences; the house looked alive and stirring; the grooms were exercising the horses in the park,—all betokened the return of the absentee. This seemed to denote that Maltravers had come to reside; and the rector thought of Caroline, and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... invited us, then, for the next day at dinner, warning us at the same time that the evening of that same morrow would see him on his way to the Falls of Schaffhausen. This idea of dining with an absentee puzzled me. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Curate of Netheravon, a village near Amesbury.[7] As he himself said, "the name of Curate had lost its legal meaning, and, instead of denoting the incumbent of a living, came to signify the deputy of an absentee." He had sole charge of the parish of Netheravon, and was also expected to perform one service every Sunday at the adjoining village of Fittleton. "Nothing," wrote the new-fledged Curate, "can equal the profound, the immeasurable, the awful ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... which armies and circus processions have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxiety a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... BUMSTEAD lives there, too—him as is always tryin' to put a head on me. I'll play my points on him yet, though. I'll play my points!" And the rather vulgar young chronic absentee from Sunday-school retired to a proper distance, and from thence began stoning his benefactor to the latter's ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... wish for fixity of tenure, and care but little for compensation for improvements, except as a means of obtaining a practical fixity of tenure; and they would, unquestionably, rejoice to see transferred to themselves, as occupiers of the soil, the rights now enjoyed by absentee noblemen and landlords. It is the opinion of many that the Land question cannot be settled without such a change of owners as would ...
— University Education in Ireland • Samuel Haughton
... a sixth plate laid, but the captain made no further mention of the person who was not out yet till shortly after the coffee was poured, when the absentee appeared, hastily closing his state-room door behind him, and then waiting on foot, with a half-impudent, half-intimidated air, while Captain Jenness, with a sort of elaborate repressiveness, presented him as Mr. Hicks. He was a short and slight young man, with a small sandy ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... in 1779, estimated the rents of absentee landlords alone at L732,000; and Hutchinson, in the same year, stated that the sums remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money, pensions, salaries, and profit of offices amounted, on the lowest computation (from 1668 ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... the paper, and put it in his pocket. A mere bit of ordinary clerkly writing; no character, no allure. Well, the actual chirography of the absentee would be made manifest before long. What was it like? Should he himself ever have a specimen of it in a letter or ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... had impaled himself on the horns of one of those dilemmas which present themselves so frequently to absentee governments and secretaries of state—either reciprocity and an Americanized colony, or a new rebellion as the consequence of a refusal in Britain to consent to a reciprocity treaty.[35] In 1849, "looking ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... available in crop time; if their mental improvement is discouraged by the planter instinct, unchanged in nature though circumscribed in scope; if on many estates they are herded in barracks whose promiscuous life debases still lower their already low morality; if their labors are directed for absentee masters by hired overseers, whose interest is not to create a wholesome confidence between laborers and proprietors, but to get the most they can out of them during their own term of employment; if they are treated with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you know he may be unaware of his residence so near him. Sir Thomas, like too many of his countrymen, has been an absentee for years, and is only a short time in this country, and still a shorter at Red Hall. The young man probably is at large, because he may have escaped. There is evidently some mysterious relation between Fenton and the baronet, but what it is or can be I ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... ownership of the resources has concentrated the control over the natural resources in a small group, not of individuals, but of corporations; has created a new form of social master, in the form of a land-tool-job owner; has thus made possible a type of absentee-landlordism more effective and less human than were any of its predecessors and has decreased the responsibility at the same time that it has augmented the power of the owning group. These changes have been an integral part ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... formidable and respectable appearance had the good effect of detering the multitude so that they became only peaceable spectators." Whether an honorary captain could be called upon for active service in an emergency I cannot say, but Smith's name is not mentioned in the list of absentee ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... content to be one of his mental and eternal friends, or rather friendships—since she existed in abstractu as far as he was concerned. For she did not find him at all physically moving. Physically he was not there: he was oddly an absentee. But his naivete roused the serpent's ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football, however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away. Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment. Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... When on top of this we come to the picture that is actually insulting, we are up in arms indeed. It is supplied by a corporation magnate removed from his audience in location, fortune, interest, and mood: an absentee landlord. I was trying to convert a talented and noble friend to the films. The first time we went there was a prize-fight between a black and a white man, not advertised, used for a filler. I said it was queer, and would not happen again. The next time my noble friend was persuaded to ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... morning of March 1st the group of thirty-two met at the Pagoda Restaurant at Seoul. Pastor Kil was the only absentee; he had been temporarily delayed on ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... waiting for her lord until long past midnight, but her vigil was in vain. Lapierre, after closing up his inn for the night, dropped in, according to his promise, to see if any news of the absentee had arrived. Nothing further could be done in the way of searching for ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... is the landlord and his incompetent family, and not the peasantry. In Ireland, the absentee landlord is bitterly reproached for not administering his estate in person. It is pointed out, truly enough, that the absentee is a pure parasite upon the industry of his country. The indispensable minimum of attention ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Gwendolen got some peace of mind by sending word to the Thompsons, in the neighborhood, that she was coming there to dinner. She wouldn't be reminded, at that table, that there was an absentee who ought to be a presentee—a word which she meant to look out in the dictionary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his CARELESSNESS. But when the neglect is authenticated; when the abandonment is solemnly and voluntarily set forth in a contract in the presence of a magistrate; when the proprietor dares to say, "I cease to labor, but I still claim a share of the product,"—then the absentee's right of property is protected; the usurpation of the possessor would be criminal; farm-rent is the reward of idleness. Where is, I do not say the consistency, but, the honesty ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... their habits and pursuits, so that an unexpected invitation requires a reference to his journal: if you invite him for Saturday next, he will turn to his tablets, apologise for a previous engagement, run his eye eagerly down the column for an occasional absentee, and then invite himself for some day in the ensuing week, to which your politeness cannot fail to accede. You will meet him in London, Brighton, Bath, Cheltenham, and Margate during the fashionable periods; at all of which places he has his stated number of dinner friends, where his presence ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... sophomoric way, the conversation for the most part being in French, the native tongue of the doctor and priest, and spoken with facility by Jean Thompson the lawyer, who was half Americain; but running sometimes into English and sometimes into mild laughter. Mention had been made of the absentee. ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... century. The lighter, more frivolous aspects of English high society are admirably portrayed in her "Belinda" and eight or ten other tales: and she makes a still stronger claim to permanent remembrance in such studies of Irish types, whether in England or on the native soil, as "The Absentee" and "Castle Rackrent." I venture the statement that even the jaded novel reader of to-day will find on a perusal of either of these capital stories that Miss Edgeworth makes literature, and that a pleasure not a penance is ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Lord of the Manor," he said. "You can't refuse to do something for the child. Her father was organist at your own church, and a hard struggle he must have had of it, with an absentee landlord, and a congregation ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... remoteness, than his own children would be satisfied to know him only as a sovereign. He craves the friendship of that one; he longs for compassion, sympathy, assistance such as friend gives to friend; in a word, he looks for love. You cannot love an absentee God any more than you can love an abstraction or ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... time immemorial that absenteeism has been one of the curses of Ireland," I remarked to Salemina; "so, whatever the charms of the cottage in Rostrevor, do not let us take it, and in so doing become absentee landlords." ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... combined with extraordinary quickness and cleverness; and it must be remembered, in trying to measure her place in literature, that in her day the whole great school of English philosophical romance was in its cradle; George Eliot was not in existence; my father was born in the year in which THE ABSENTEE was published. Sir Walter Scott has told us that it was Miss Edgeworth's writing which first suggested to him the idea of writing about Scotland and its national life. Tourgenieff in the same way says that it was after reading ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... and Irish peasants must eat lumpers or starve. Part of the exports go to buy rags and farming tools, which once went for clothes and all other goods to Irish operatives, and the rest goes to raise money to pay absentee rents and imperial taxes. Will you tax our absentees? Will you employ our artisans? Will you abate your taxes, or spend them among us? No; you refuse ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... unfortunate as to become a widow, especially without male issue, she testifies her grief in every imaginable manner, filling the air with her lamentations, tearing her loosened hair, and giving all the demonstrations of the deepest sorrow. At each meal food is placed at the accustomed seat, and the absentee is entreated to return and partake in the most endearing terms. This is continued for a season, when, as if tired of entreaty so unavailingly lavished, and in the true spirit of her sex, the widow changes her tune, and commences to abuse the "dear departed." ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... declare I get a little weary of this Deity of yours. He neglects his business so flagrantly. He really is rather scandalously much of an absentee. And He would be so welcome if He would condescend to deal a trifle more openly with one, and satisfy one's intelligence and moral sense. If, for instance, He would afford me some information regarding this same psychological ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... head's been cut off. Ducks have no repose. Now, my aunt has a shade of hair that suits her, and a cook who quarrels with the other servants, which is always a hopeful sign, and a conscience that's absentee for about eleven months of the year, and only turns up at Lent to annoy her husband's people, who are considerably Lower than the angels, so to speak: with all these natural advantages—she says her particular tint of bronze ...
— Reginald • Saki
... Empire as our standing-ground, we have to write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges. After Frederick II. the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were reasserted by Charles V. upon the platform of modern politics. A power so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted, so impotent to control the development ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... talk, and died away into preoccupation, with a vital undercurrent of rippled lip and thoughtful eye. Another of her shrewd observations was that when the Hon. Percival, referring to Mr. Torrens, still an absentee by choice, said:—"I tried again to persuade him to come down at feeding-time, but it was no go," Gwen came suddenly out of one dream of this sort to say from her end of the table, miles off:—"He really prefers dining by himself, I know," and went ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... raise their incomes, their property values and, therefore, their whole scale of living. In the long run, the profits from Child labor, low pay and overwork enure not to the locality or region where they exist but to the absentee owners who have sent their capital into these exploited communities to gather larger profits for themselves. Indeed, new enterprises and new industries which bring permanent wealth will come more readily to those communities which insist on good pay and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... this agitation lasts. I need not say good appetite to you after your walk. You have no fear of the men, I know. Owain's men are undisturbed; he has them in hand. Absentee masters can't expect continued harmony. Dear, he tells me Mr. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... time wool had fallen much in price: 'Has nobody told you,' writes a west country farmer to his absentee landlord in 1737, 'that wool has fallen to near half its price, and that we cannot find purchasers for a great part of it at any price whatsoever. When most of our estates (farms) were taken wool was generally 7d., 8d., or more by ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... fabric of the church was in so ruinous a condition that the rain streamed through the roof upon the head of our clerical pamphleteer as he was preaching, all these complaints were to no purpose. When the absentee vicar was appealed to he declared his helplessness, and one sentence in his reply is significant; it was thus: "It is as much as my life is worth to come among them!" Allowance must be made for party rancour. It is probable ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... presence on American soil was dispensed with by President Wilson. Von Rintelen's activities belonged to the earlier period of the war, before the extensive ramifications of the criminal phases of the German propaganda were known. At present he was an enforced absentee from the scenes of his exploits, being either immured by the British in the Tower of London, or in a German concentration camp as a spy. This inglorious interruption to the role he appeared to play while in the United States as a peripatetic Midas, setting plots in train by means ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... suppose, as do some people, that there was a large body of resident landed proprietors in Ireland until the land war drove them to seek safety across the Channel. As a matter of fact, long before this had begun there existed an absentee aristocracy dependent on middlemen or agents—"the vermin of the country," Arthur Young called them—who constituted a mere mechanical medium for the collection of rent, and as such were the worst exponents of the amenities ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... saw their homestead, with its garden and clumps of planted eucalypts, willows, and poplars—an oasis in the grassy wilderness—no more. Sometimes a new squatter reigned in his stead, sometimes for years the mortgagee left the place in charge of a shepherd—a new and dreary form of absentee ownership. Meanwhile, in the earlier years the squatters were merry monarchs, reigning as supreme in the Provincial Councils as in the jockey clubs. They made very wise and excessively severe laws to safeguard their stock from infection, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Yangtze cities raised the value of the land around the cities. The small farmers who were squeezed out, migrated to the south. Absentee landlords in cities relied partly on migratory, seasonal labour supplied by small farmers from Chekiang who came to the Yangtze area after they had finished their own harvest. More and more, vegetables ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... we write of, any curate might, with the assistance of the soldiers, fine whom he pleased, and as much as he pleased, or he might, by reporting a parishioner an absentee from public worship, consign him or her to prison, or even to the gallows. But though all the curates were in an utterly false position they were not all equally depraved. Selby was one who felt more or less of shame at the contemptible part he ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... orchards covering the hills around it, the business does not seem to be a very active one. "The city once the abode of the flower of Andalusian nobility," says the intelligent O'Shea in his Guide to Spain, "is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the absentee senorio; their 'solares' are desert and wretched, the streets ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, and denuded of all art and meaning, either past or present." Baedeker gives like reasons for thinking "the traveler whose expectation is on tiptoe as he enters ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: 'Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made-up of Desire and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from Dr. Graham's ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of water, and a quantity of provisions was ready to be put in when needed. Ole stowed himself beneath the sail, which lay under the middle board, extending fore and aft. Before De Forrest took his place in the stern-sheets, Stockwell had discovered the absentee, and communicated the fact of his presence to those near him. The crew of the second cutter were entirely willing to keep his secret, as they were that of any one who needed their help. Among such boys it was regarded ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... clever actor. What was his position in this house? What was his real duty here? Suppose it was not to guard this woman, but to watch her. Let us imagine that it was not the woman he served, but a master, and see where that leads us. For this house has a master, a mysterious, absentee landlord, who lives in St. Petersburg, the unknown Russian who came between Chetney and Zichy, and because of whom Chetney left her. He is the man who bought this house for Madame Zichy, who sent these rugs and curtains from St. Petersburg to furnish it for her after his own tastes, and, ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... Robert, who is away from home at this moment," he said, and his tone deprecated the mere allusion to the rifle owned by the absentee. "I only mentioned Miss Manning's words to show how completely at a loss we all were to account for my father's wound. I helped Tomlinson and Brodie to carry him to the settee in the hall. Then we—Tomlinson, that is—opened his waistcoat and shirt. Tomlinson ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... dependency of Brazil. With the aid of the English the power of the conqueror was broken in 1808, and through a number of years the government was administered nominally by a commission designated by the absentee regent, Dom John, though actually by a British dictatorship. In 1815 Brazil was raised to the rank of a co-ordinate kingdom, and from that year until 1822 the official designation of the state was "the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves." In 1816 the mad queen ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... intentions, only because they applied their remedy too late and thus, to their own great surprise, wasted the generosity of which they were perhaps too conscious. According to Miss HARRISON the gombeenman is the curse of Ireland, the serpent whose presence, if only he can be reduced to being an absentee, warrants us in regarding Ireland as a possible Eden. Miss HARRISON will please to take the preceding sentence as proving my entire sympathy with Irish modes of thought and expression and, generally, with Ireland. Against the gombeener ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... the historian wished to convey to your minds some idea of the antiquity of this Chamber, he would scarcely do it, I think, by saying it was founded in 1768. So few besides the reporters would personally recollect those times. He would rather tell you that it dates back to an epoch when each absentee from the annual dinner was fined five shillings sterling for the offence. Think of that! How eloquently it seems to tell us that there was no Delmonico in those days. I can understand how a people that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... conversation of clever people, who can, with perfect courtesy, make a thousand atrocious, but laughable remarks about their neighbors. In their stifled laughter, and in the little reticences of their sardonic humor, Monsieur, the poor absentee, was not spared. But they pitied, and bewailed greatly, the fate of De Guiche, and it must be confessed that their compassion, as far as he was concerned, was not misplaced. The king and Madame having breathed the horses, and repeated a hundred ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... taking on the habiliments of the genial saint was too much for his imagination. It left him without the power to set James straight in the matter, and Uncle Joe was immediately accepted as Santy by the expectant Sykeses, all of whom revealed a tremendous interest in the avuncular absentee. They even appeared to be properly apprehensive, and crowded a little closer to the knees of the grown- ups, all the while eyeing the door at the upper ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... or to go on at once. The case was urgent, but the need of Sego's arm was also urgent, and he concluded to wait still further. The forenoon, the afternoon, and finally the night came and went, without bringing any signs of the absentee, and at daylight on this day, Lewis and his men made ready to start, resolved not to lose another moment. As they passed down to the river's edge, the delinquent made his appearance and joined them. They crossed the Miami in the ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... and craftiness of Belial and the alluring witchery of his daughters, and also of another city on higher ground—the City of Emmanuel—whereto all may fly from Destruction. They descend and alight in the Street of Pride amidst the ruined and desolate mansions of absentee landlords. They see there kings, princes, and noblemen, coquettes and fops; there is a city, too, on seven hills, and another opposite, with a crescent on a golden banner above it, and near the gate ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... at Bristol charged as an absentee said that he had been so busy wilting poetry that he had forgotten all about military matters. His very emphatic assurance that he will now push on with the War has afforded the liveliest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch—my ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... corporation, the British North Borneo Company, which operates under a royal charter. But the idea of turning over a great block of territory, with its inhabitants, to a corporation whose sole aim is to earn dividends for its absentee stockholders, is in itself abhorrent to most Americans. What would we say, I ask you, if Porto Rico, which is only one-tenth the size of North Borneo, were to be handed over, lock, stock and barrel, to the Standard Oil Company, with full authorization for that company to make its ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... his daring exploits gained for him the flattering surname of Coeur de Lion. He had a right to it, for he certainly possessed the heart of a lion, and he never failed to get the lion's share. He might, however, have been called, in equal truth, Richard the Absentee, since out of a nominal reign of ten years he spent but a few months in England, the remaining time being consumed ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... other countries; her towns swarmed with beggars and thieves, forced there by the desolation which prevailed in the country districts, where people starved by the wayside, and where those who lived barely kept body and soul together to pay the rents of the absentee landlords. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... ears, but it was the absentee's two mistresses who answered for her, volubly, tenderly: "We was going to bring her, but juz' at the lazt she discide' she di'n' want to come. You know, ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... to give substitute lectures at Harvard on history, for a professor who had gone abroad for his health. This he continued, speaking for any absentee on any subject, and tutoring rich laggards for a consideration. Good boys, low on phosphorus, used to get him to start their daily themes, and those overtaken in the throes of trigonometry he often rescued ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams—and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there—the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped—the employer who during the first stupid stages of ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and for the fulfilment of the manifold duties of a landowner who is at once judge, administrator, and constable of his people, I should have entrusted my estate to an ignorant bailiff, and sought to maintain an absentee guardianship over the affairs of serfs whom I have never met, and of whose capabilities and characters I am yet ignorant! To think that I should have deemed true estate-management inferior to a documentary, fantastical management of provinces which lie a thousand versts ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol |
