"Pittance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... somewhat unimportant brains. But Constance, in the truest spirit of melodrama, and having long sought him in vain under the guidance of a quarta persona, of whom more presently, realises almost the whole of her fortune, except a small pittance, dashes it down before him in the nick of time, and saves ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... or assistance, to come to you and not trouble my kindred. I am in distress, Miss Thusa, and it is my own fault. I'm in debt. I owe money that I cannot raise; I cannot tax my father again to pay the wages of sin. Tell me now how you can aid me; you, poor and lonely, earning only a scanty pittance by the flax on your distaff, and as ignorant of the world as simple-hearted ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... gotten a word out of him. Promises, threats, nothing has any effect. One day I thought I would try an experiment; and, instead of letting him have his breakfast, I said to him, 'You shall have nothing to eat till you say, "I am hungry."' At the end of twenty-four hours I had to let him have his pittance; for he would have starved himself sooner ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... would spare her the miseries that brought her mother, my own dear child, to an early grave. I would leave her—not with resources which could be easily spent or squandered away, but with what would place her beyond the reach of want for ever. You mark me sir? She shall have no pittance, but a fortune—Hush! I can say no more than that, now or at any other time, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... partners of his power must be indifferent financiers, when, after spending such a pittance on the nation, they contrive to wind up every year with a deficit. The balance of 1858 showed a deficit of nearly half a million sterling, which does not prevent the government from promising a surplus in ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... been the star that has guided my bark,—thee, my compass—my north pole,—and when the magnet refuses its aid to the seaman, then will he believe that you have foundered in affection, or think that I would prove faithless from the loss of earthly pittance. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... refill thy cup With reverie's wasteful pittance up, And while the fire burns slow away, Hiding itself in ashes gray, I'll think,—As inward Youth retreats, Compelled to spare his wasting heats, When Life's Ash-Wednesday comes about, And my head's gray with fires burnt out, While stays one ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... poor fellow came for sympathy and conversation. It is difficult to imagine a situation more forlorn and isolated than that of this man,—a Greek at Seville, with scarcely a single acquaintance, and depending for subsistence on the miserable pittance to be derived from selling a few books, for the most part hawked about from door to door. "What could have first induced you to commence bookselling in Seville?" said I to him, as he arrived one sultry day, heated and fatigued, with a small bundle of books secured together ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... willingly received them. She had a mere pittance, and lived in a boarding house; but, by joining their slender purses, they took the cottage in ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bit of ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... him those errors which are rather the result of vanity than the natural offspring of an imperfect education. But we, as a nation have a worthy aversion to paying a dear price for the maintenance of dignity; hence Bolt, whose salary was but a paltry pittance in an atmosphere of singular extravagance, soon found himself becoming involved for the adjuncts necessary to such a connection. A happy thought, however, soon flashed across his mind: was he not protected by the sacred character ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... safety of the country in order that they may cancel their present debts by paying the same in depreciated dollars. Nor should it be forgotten that it is not the rich nor the money lender alone that must submit to such a readjustment, enforced by the Government and their debtors. The pittance of the widow and the orphan and the incomes of helpless beneficiaries of all kinds would be disastrously reduced. The depositors in savings banks and in other institutions which hold in trust the savings of the poor, when their little accumulations are scaled down ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... days and nights of ceaseless rain they toiled, sometimes through fierce storms of thunder and lightning, and before terrific seas lashed into foam and fury by swift and sudden squalls, with only their miserable pittance of bread and water to keep body and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... likely to be of use to them. On the 22d of November, they left the ship, with as gloomy a prospect before them as can well be imagined. The nearest land was about one thousand miles to the windward of them; they were in open boats, weak and leaky, with a very small pittance of bread and water for support of so many men, during the time they must necessarily be at sea. Sails had been prepared for the boats, before leaving the ship, which proved of material benefit. Steering southerly by the wind, they hoped ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... expression. The dedication of some of these books to the pope secured for him certain small preferments, which, in his most profitable condition, aggregated about thirty scudi a month (perhaps equal to $20 of our money). On this miserable pittance he supported his wife and four children. In 1556 he was discharged from his place as a pontifical singer, on account of his marriage, a fact which had been ignored by the pope who appointed him. He then held the post of chapel master at the Lateran. In 1561 he was transferred ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... left a thousand pounds to the old aunt who brought your mother up, and has a very scanty pittance, it would be worthy of your kindly nature, and ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... up as we are by the enemy's squadron upon our coast, corked up by our still more unmerciful embargo and non-importation laws, calculated as it were to fill up the little chasm in the ills which the enemy alone could not inflict; the entire coasting trade destroyed, and even the little pittance of intercourse from one port to the other in the same state destroyed [by the embargo], the planters of the Southern and Middle states, finding no market at home for their products, are driven to the alternative of wagoning them hundreds of miles, in search of a precarious market in the Northern ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... She had read of the contract system under which ignorant Negroes, not knowing the contents of the papers signed, practically sold themselves into slavery, agreeing to work for a number of years for a mere pittance and further agreeing to be locked up in a stockade at night and to pay for the expense of a recapture in case they attempted to escape. She had heard much of the practice of peonage, how that planters and contractors would enter into collusion ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... drawn from antiquated rules? What is her use? Point out one wholesome end. Will she hurt foes, or can she make a friend? 30 When from long fasts fierce appetites arise, Can this same Virtue stifle Nature's cries? Can she the pittance of a meal afford, Or bid thee welcome to one great man's board? When northern winds the rough December arm With frost and snow, can Virtue keep thee warm? Canst thou dismiss the hard unfeeling dun Barely by saying, thou art Virtue's son? Or by base blundering statesmen sent to jail, Will Mansfield ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... their deficiencies. As soon as the stamp becomes dry it falls off, and quite a collection of stamps of sundry values can thus be gathered at every clearing of the box, and the postal clerk reaps thence a daily harvest that goes a long way towards the eking out the small pittance paid him by Government. It is interesting to see the directions taken ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... a man who knows himself found out. I knew him well enough to be certain that, had he intended the pension awarded madame de Valentinois to come from his own privy purse, he would scarcely have consented to bestowing on her more than a shabby pittance of a thousand livres per annum. It is scarcely possible to conceive an idea of the excessive economy of this prince. I remember, that upon some great occasion, when it was requisite to support the public treasury, which ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... show our miserable bondage and slavery, and unto what small pittance and allowance we were tied, for every five men had allowance but five aspers of bread in a day, which is but twopence English, and our lodging was to lie on the bare boards, with a very simple cape to cover us. We were also forcibly and most violently shaven, head and beard, and within ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... her fostering arms to receive and restore to his long lost birthright, the trampled and abused child of poverty: to bid him stand up a free inheritor of a free soil, who so long laboured for a scanty pittance of bread, as an ignorant and degraded slave, in the country to which you now cling with such passionate fondness, and ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Neither had Claude any money beyond the fifteen hundred dollars a year he earned in his father's office. He was in the habit of saying to himself, and in confidence to his friends, that it was "damned hard luck" that he should be compelled to live on a pittance like that, when Thor, within a few months, would come into a ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... would have come to some decision. If you can save the property of course you ought to do so. If you can live on what pittance ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... the uninviting pittance set aside for his midday repast, remained for several days untouched. Samuel made his appearance regularly as ever, and bore with the same meekness the gibes of his fellow-pupils, or the taunts of Madame Durer, and worked with the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the end! The little warmth and love of his cherishing arms about her cold body completed the pittance of happiness ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... most crushing poverty all his life oppressed him. For, though his nominal salary as Astronomer Royal was large enough, yet the treasury was so exhausted that it was impossible for him ever to obtain more than a pittance. What a sad tragedy do these words, in a letter to Maestlin, reveal:—"I stand whole days in the antechamber, and am nought for study." And then he adds the sublime compensation: "I keep up my spirits, however, with the thought that I serve, not the Emperor alone, but the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... defiance. Still, he was sensible enough to see that he could not go on with his present life for long. "Work on a farm" had turned out very different from his vague ideas of it. He could not, for years to come, hope to earn more than the barest pittance, and he felt that if he were always to remain the companion of the sort of people he was now among, he would not care to live. And gradually another idea took shape in his mind—he would emigrate! He saw some printed papers in the village post-office, ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... any other Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not tie the world unto it Title of barbarism to everything that is not familiar To give a currency to his little pittance of learning To make their private advantage at the public expense Under fortune's favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace Vice of confining their belief to their own capacity We have lived enough for others We have more curiosity than capacity ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... been a clergyman with a small living in Devonshire, and had now been dead some fifteen years. His mother and two sisters were still living in a small cottage in his late father's parish, on the interest of the money arising from a life insurance. Some pittance from sixty to seventy pounds a year was all they had among them. But there was a rich aunt, Miss Stanbury, to whom had come considerable wealth in a manner most romantic,—the little tale shall be told before this larger tale is completed,—and this aunt had undertaken to educate and place ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... his pittance, his lot might be more tolerable. But it is the almost universal complaint, that, either from inability or disinclination, the planter does not keep his agreements. Sometimes the overseer, when the work has been done, and well done, arbitrarily retains a quarter, or even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... story I. To you my friend who happier days have known And each calm comfort of a home your own, This is bad living: I have spent my life In hardest toil and unavailing strife, And here (from forest ambush safe at least) To me this scanty pittance seems a feast. I was a plough-boy once; as free from woes And blithesome as the lark with whom I rose. Each evening at return a meal I found And, tho' my bed was hard, my sleep was sound. One Whitsuntide, to go to fair, I drest Like a great bumkin in my Sunday's best; A primrose posey ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... responsible for this depopulation. The peasant on his little homestead could not compete with the wealthy noble whose vast estates were worked by gangs of slaves. The artisan could not support himself and his family on the pittance that kept his slave competitor alive. Peasants and artisans gradually drifted into the cities, where the public distributions of grain, wine, and oil assured them of a living with little expense and almost without exertion. In both Italy and the provinces ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... right! For a bag full of gold. Put her down in your ledger, and label her "Sold" She's only a beauty with somebody's name, And the Church for a pittance will wash out ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... thus, not because they are worthless or because they are wholly without ambition or desire to live otherwise, but because they must thus continue as economic slaves receiving still the miserable pittance of a wage of eighteen pence or 36 cents a day that was paid to their forefathers at the dawn of emancipation. The system is now so well established that the employers apparently regard it as their ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... real Christian—one who took delight in the duties of his holy office, and who served God because he loved him. I am fully aware how laborious is the life of a country priest, and how contracted and mean is the pittance he in common receives, and how much more he merits than he gets, if his reward were to be graduated by things here. But this picture, like every other, has its different sides, and occasionally men do certainly enter the church from motives as little as possible connected with those ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... George Gordon Byron, afterwards Lord Byron, was born in London on the 22d of January, 1788. While he was yet an infant, his father—Captain Byron—a dissipated man, deserted his mother; and she went with her child to live upon a slender pittance at Aberdeen. She was a woman of peculiar disposition, and was unfortunate in the training of her son. She alternately petted and quarrelled with him, and taught him to emulate her irregularities of temper. On account of an accident at his birth, he had a malformation in one of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the scales Are held by some just woman, who maintains By spinning wool her household,—carefully She poises both the wool and weights, to make The balance even, that she may provide A pittance ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of him for three reasons: first, he had only two hundred a year plus a pittance from the insurance company that put up, as he expressed it, with his services; second, he had been Alan Craig's close friend; third, she suspected that he saw through her affectations. That he had been ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... attempt to break through that inflexible ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent them momentary victory, but their movement was ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... did not like it, being of that class of persons who cannot be happy out of a great town. After the Civil War he was deprived, and his successor had not the decency (the late Dr. Grosart, constant to his own party, made a very unsuccessful attempt to defend the delinquent) to pay him the shabby pittance which the intruders were supposed to furnish to the rightful owners of benefices. At the Restoration he too was restored, and survived it fifteen years, dying in 1674; but his whole literary fame rests on work published a quarter of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... preserved in William of Newbridge, Adrian IV. would seem to have pushed integrity in money matters to a harsh extreme; and so to have proved himself the antipodes of those popes who afterwards practised nepotism. For it is related of him, that rather than award a pittance towards the relief of his aged and destitute mother out of those ample revenues, which as pope he had at his disposal, but which he did not feel himself justified in diverting to private uses, he allowed her to subsist as best she could on the alms of the ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... had a friend or two. There was an usher at Westminster, and a hack writer of Lintot's in Little Britain. He did not propose to live on them, who had hardly enough to feed themselves. But he looked for them to put him in the way of some pittance, and they did. The usher had news that, after Ascension-Day, Westminster would be wanting a writing master, for the man in possession hoped by then to marry the dean's cook and set up an ale-house. The author procured ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... of night by the silhouette of old Zelig in nightdress, sitting up in bed and counting a bundle of bank notes which he always replaced under his pillow. She frequently upbraided him for his niggardly nature, for his warding off all requests outside the pittance for household expense. She pleaded, exhorted, wailed. He invariably answered: "I haven't a cent by my soul." She pointed to the bare walls, the broken furniture, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... strangers for work. He found none. It was a time of business and industrial depression, and laborers were idle by thousands. He envied the men working on the streets relaying the pavements. They had at least a pittance, and something to ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... than the most abandoned prostitutes, have sold yourselves and your posterity for hire—for a paltry price, to be refunded with interest by some minister, who will indemnify himself out of your own pockets; for, after all, you are bought and sold with your own money—the miserable pittance you may now receive is no more than a pitcher full of water thrown in to moisten the sucker of that pump which will drain you to the bottom. Let me therefore advise and exhort you, my countrymen, to avoid the opposite extremes of the ignorant clown ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... they paid by his administratrix and deputy, Munny Begum? Not a shilling. No fewer than forty-nine petitions, mostly from the widows of the greatest and most splendid houses of Bengal, came before the Council, praying in the most deplorable manner for some sort of relief out of the pittance assigned them. His colleagues, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, men who, when England is reproached for the government of India, will, I repeat it, as a shield be held up between this nation and infamy, did, in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... true taxer who "calleth all the world up to be taxed:" and the distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted betwixt the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem!—His exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air! So far removed from your sour parochial or state-gatherers,—those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of welcome in their faces! He cometh to you with a smile, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... 'I meant no offence, and I will take none, at your hands at least. I will confess I care not, in love and soforth, a single bean for the girl; she was the mere channel through which her father's wealth, if such a pittance deserves the name, was to have flowed into my possession—'twas in respect of your family finances the most economical provision for myself which I could devise—a matter in which you, not I, are interested. ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... defunct at the moment of his death, which community is only valid through his consent. In the Jura and the Nivernais, he may pursue fugitive serfs, and demand, at their death, not only the property left by them on his domain, but, again, the pittance acquired by them elsewhere. At Saint-Claude he acquires this right over any person that passes a year and a day in a house belonging to the seigniory. As to ownership of the soil we see still more clearly that he once had ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... by the same frugality, if we may dignify it by that name. He was a large dealer in ready-made under-clothing, for the making of which he paid starvation prices; but, unfortunately, the poor sewing-girls, whom he employed for a pittance, were not so well able to defend themselves against imposition as the smart little boot-black, who "knew his rights, and knowing, ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... that some of the investments poor father made would turn out badly, and that our income would be reduced to a mere pittance? For I tell you, Miss Belding," added the invalid less vehemently, "that we have almost nothing, divided by three, to live on. That is, an income for one must support us three. Aunt Jinny is one ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... ashes, now here, now there, is a hole dug out in the ground, and heated with dead wood. Potatoes, milk, hard cheese, blackberries, and a small cask of old gin that he had distilled himself, were his daily pittance; but he knew nothing about love, although he was accused of all sorts of horrible things, and therefore nobody dared abuse him to his face; in the first place, because Bru was a spare and sinewy man, who handled his shepherd's ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the joyous maid Alike were blest—the unknown traveler stayed His weary limbs beneath their roof-tree's shade, While home from toil the husbandman returned, His honest hands the honest pittance earned, Willing to share his humble meal with one Whether from ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... was Beauty whose toilet, superb and unique, Cost underpaid industry many a week Of arduous labor of eye, and heartache, Its starving inadequate pittance to make; There were mischievous maidens and cavaliers bold, Whose blushes and glances and coquetry told A tale of the monarch who held them in thrall— Who met, as by chance, at the ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... writers he would have kept it, but to a German poet it was not worth while. What is a native poet to the great German king? A phantom that he knows not, and believes not. As great as he is, the king showed himself very small to me. I sang him as a poetess and he bestowed a pittance upon me as one would to a beggar in ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... by others. His personal history bears all the evidences of romance. He was the son of a poor widow, who, having spent all her property to give him an education, found her boy at the conclusion of his studies desirous of making the usual academic tour. She has but a pittance left, so she puts into his hand twelve kreutzer, and a rusty old coin, as a pocketpiece. Her eyes follow him until they are blinded in a flood of tears. Years pass on and Valentine comes home, having travelled, by dint of self-denial and perseverance, over the most interesting ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... blest indeed, and crown'd of fate As kings are crowned, as bards in their estate Are rapture-fraught, re-risen above the dust. Then were I torture-proof, and on the crust Of one kind word, though as a pittance thrown, I'd live for weeks! My tears I would disown And pray, contented with my discontent, As hermits pray ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... wind, or snow. Here they subsist on the coarsest fare, holding life on a tenure as uncertain as does the leader of a forlorn hope; excluded from all the advantages of civilization; often at the mercy of a hard contractor, who wrings his profits from their blood; and all this for a pittance that merely enables them to exist, with little power to save, or a hope beyond the continuance of the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... eldest of four children, and his father a poor wool-comber, much care devolved upon him. It is said that at thirty his hair was white from trouble and anxiety. His kind and loving disposition is proved by the fact that in his poorest days he saved part of his pittance to educate his young brothers and support his aged father. Columbus was determined, shrewd, and intensely religious. He believed and announced himself to be divinely called to "carry the true faith into the uttermost parts of the earth." Inspired by this ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... is weak, and constantly becoming weaker; and nothing can ever make him strong but our continued injustice and oppression. He appeals not to our fears, but to our compassion. He asks not to rule us: he only craves of us leave to toil; to hew our wood and draw our water, for such miserable pittance of compensation as the competition of free labor will award him—a grave. If we deny him this humble boon, we may expect no end to our national convulsions but in dissolution. If we promptly grant it, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sacrificed their various situations and appointments, and whose wives struggled on a very meagre separation allowance. Fully aware were they also that while they were manning the trench as infantrymen and receiving as remuneration a miserable pittance, munition workers in England were receiving excessively high wages for congenial work and enjoying freedom from all discomfort and danger ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... abundantly realized. It will be easy to show that the benefits and blessings anticipated from the actual enjoyment of cheap postage, have fully equalled the most sanguine expectations of the friends of the measure, and have far exceeded in public utility, the pittance of income to the treasury, which used to be wrung out by the tax upon letters. The same examination will also show, that there is no substantial reason, either in the system itself, or in any peculiarity of our circumstances, why the same system is not equally practicable and equally applicable ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... to the subject, and this was apparently complied with, the 27th of November being appointed for the payment of the men. On that day three months' pay only was offered to them, notwithstanding all they had achieved. This paltry pittance was refused. ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... scoundrel, a disgrace to society—to—to—" Then in sudden fury he went on: "When a man gets down to playing for a mere pittance, as he does, in a disreputable theatre, and dwelling in a squalid neighbourhood, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... says I. 'I never yet drew upon honest toil for its hard-earned pittance. The dollars I get are surplus ones that are burning the pockets of damfools and greenhorns. When I stand on a street corner and sell a solid gold diamond ring to a yap for $3.00, I make just $2.60. And I know he's going ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... and found themselves almost penniless. Grizel and her mother, financially assisted by some friends, journeyed to London, to petition the Government for an allowance out of the confiscated estates, and after much difficulty succeeded in obtaining a paltry pittance of L150 a year. ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... will not spare us according to his merciful capitulation at Sodom; if his goodness please not to pass over a great deal of bad for a small pittance of good, or to look upon us in the lump, there is slender hope for mercy, or sound presumption of fulfilling half his will, either in persons or nations: they who excel in some virtues being so often defective in others; few men driving ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... father. I swore I would be an honest woman, and I sought employment to earn a living for my babe and myself, but every avenue was closed to me. I washed and scrubbed while I was able to teach music splendidly, but I could get no pupils. I made shirts for a pittance and daily refused, to me, fortunes for dishonor. I have gone hungry and almost naked to pay for my baby's board, but I was ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... Captain with a bitter laugh; "a sovereign once a quarter—the scrapings of your pittance! That help won't ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... name, his social rank, and his personal address secured him from some of the great insurance companies. But these resources did not survive him; he only rented the house he had occupied; and the young Comte de Camors found himself suddenly reduced to the provision of his mother's dowry—a bare pittance to a man of ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... silver on the counter. The whole price, or even double, would have been a mere pittance, the widow's mite indeed; but here was robbery of even that. What, in such a case, was this poor creature to do? She had six young and helpless children at home,—no husband to defend her,—no friend to stand between her and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... converted into daily allowance for bread. The people were amused with games and festivals, fed like slaves, and of course lost at last even the semblance of manliness and independence. They loitered in the public streets, and dissipated in gaming their miserable pittance; they spent the hours of the night in the lowest resorts of crime and misery; they expired in wretched apartments without attracting the attention of government; pestilence, famine, and squalid misery thinned their ranks, and they would have been annihilated but for ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... it must, I think, be either by means supernatural, or by a method altogether out of any road yet known to the learned. But I conceive the fact directly otherwise, and that many of them lose the greatest part of the small pittance ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... grounds on which geologists and palaeontologists of the highest rank assert that the theory of evolution has not the slightest scientific basis; and they support their assertion with an amount of evidence of which the above items are a miserable pittance. ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... immediately. "Dimitri has received a mere pittance from that which they had stolen from him. It is a thing which is done everywhere. On the banks of the Rhine, when a traveler is ruined at roulette, the conductor of the game gives him something wherewith ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... full attention, and yet the affairs of the late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at all. But the appeal to Ralph's humanity had little chance of being heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had been broken down, with the result that though ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... fund was rapidly decreasing and that there was no other prospect of support. But Caroline Beaufort possessed a mind of an uncommon mould, and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. She procured plain work; she plaited straw and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... young men then in fashion were teaching the art of running through an inheritance; but he had one last leg to stand on in his province, in the shape of a secure establishment. He was simply an heir who had passed without any transition from his pittance of a hundred francs a month to the entire paternal fortune, and who, if he had not wit enough to perceive that he was laughed at, was sufficiently cautious to stop short at two-thirds of his capital. He had learned at Paris, for a consideration of some thousands of francs, the exact value of harness, ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... had sent thee. And now let me see whether thou hast not some, also, brother." Thereupon he thrust his hand into the pouch of the fat Friar and drew thence a bag like the other and counted out from it threescore and ten pounds. "Look ye now," quoth he, "I knew the good Saint had sent thee some pittance that thou, also, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... officers and all; or else I must speak as I found them. I hope they were not a just sample of their whole nation; for these gentry would exercise every imposition, and even insinuate the thing that was not, the more easily to plunder us of our hard earned pittance of small change. Had they shown any generosity, like the British tar, I should have passed over their conduct in silence; but after they had stripped our men of every farthing, they would say to them—"Monsieur, you have won all our money, now lend us a ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... these years, if I had but exposed your dishonesty and duplicity? You defrauded your only brother during his lifetime; you have persistently ignored your son, your own flesh and blood; and now you would rob him, not only of his father's name, but of his father's fortune,—cast him off with a mere pittance,—and put this stranger in the place which is rightfully his, and wish that you had been given such a son as he! You are in my power, and you know it only too well; and I will make you and your high-born, purse-proud family ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... labourer—the hewer of wood, the drawer of water—slouching wearily to his toil; sleep clinging still about his leaden eyes, his pittance of food carried tied up in a dish-clout. The first stroke of the hour clangs from Big Ben. Haste thee, fellow-slave, lest the overseer's whip, "Out, we will have no lie-a-beds here," descend upon ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory supplied—her cheerful industry, her brave struggle to live like a gentlewoman on a pittance, her tender thought for the welfare and happiness of her children—she felt she could walk through a burning fiery furnace if by so doing she could earn ease and repose ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... confidence of a child. The responsibility for the neglected stepdaughter had similarly been flung upon his shoulders. And, satisfied with this manner of disposing of his worldly concerns, Standing intended to fare forth, shorn of any possession but a bare pittance for his daily needs, to lose himself, and all the shadows of a haunted mind, in the dim, remote interior of the unexplored forests of Northern Quebec. The whole ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Clary, but I think that fellow Granger might give you more pin-money. Five hundred a year is a beggarly pittance for a ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... pitched shirt and brimstone head gear as a naked man is to go to his bed, and it would seem you have not much more reluctance to the ceremony. But I still wear that which clings to me. My wealth is still my own, and I thank Heaven it is a decent pittance whereon to live; my life, too, is that of a hale old man of sixty, who is in no haste to bring it to a close; and if I were poor as Job and on the edge of the grave, must I not still cling to my daughter, whom your doctrines ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... world is this! The slave that digs for gold, receives his daily pittance, and sleeps contented; while those, for whom he labours, convert their good to mischief; making abundance the means of want. O shame! shame! Had fortune given me but a little, that little had been still my own. But plenty leads to waste; and shallow streams maintain their currents, while swelling ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... stand for yourself alone. You exist as a unit of humanity. Think of your responsibilities. You have found for yourself a beautiful corner of the world. That is all very well for you, but how about the rest? How about the millions who are chained to the cities that they may earn their living pittance, whose wives and children fill the churchyards, the echoes of whose weary, never-ceasing cry must reach you even here? They are the people, the sufferers, fellow-links with you in the chain of humanity. You may ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... church at the end of this peninsula had, not many years since, to be deserted for a new one, lest it should some day carry its congregation with it when it slides, as it soon will slide, into the sea. But as none had dared to pull down the old church, a custodian had to be found who for a pittance would take charge of it and of the important monuments it contains. Such a custodian was found in Wynne, who lived in the cottage already described on the Wilderness Road. Along this road (which passed both the new church and the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 1775. Kit Smart, once a Fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, ended his life in the King's Bench Prison; 'where he had owed to a small subscription, of which Dr. Burney was at the head, a miserable pittance beyond the prison allowance. In his latest letter to Dr. Burney, he passionately pleaded for a fellow-sufferer, "whom I myself," he impressively adds, "have already assisted according to my willing poverty." In another letter to the same friend he said:—"I bless God for your good nature, which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Christ, we have denied our Lord. More, ours has been the guilt, not of Peter only, but of Judas. Too often we have betrayed Him for the veriest pittance of this world's good. ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... from the hall of the corporation, it is of incalculable benefit to the community at large, who, by means of this charity, are spared the pain of beholding so great an addition, as otherwise there would be, of our destitute fellow-creatures seeking their wretched pittance in the streets, liable to be taken up as vagrants and sent to the house of correction, and probably subjected to greater evils and disgrace.' The major has a pet scheme for extending the usefulness of the institution. It implies that individuals should make foundations of from L.300 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... man of my habits call live on his pay and a hundred a year?" George cried out in great anger. "You must be a fool to talk so, Dobbin. How the deuce am I to keep up my position in the world upon such a pitiful pittance? I can't change my habits. I must have my comforts. I wasn't brought up on porridge, like MacWhirter, or on potatoes, like old O'Dowd. Do you expect my wife to take in soldiers' washing, or ride after the regiment in ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at Pondicherry a Lally, a devil of an Irish spirit,—who will cost me, sooner or later, above 20,000 livres annually [have rents in our INDIA COMPANY, say 1,000 pounds a year, as my Angels know], which used to be the readiest item of my Pittance. But M. le Duc de Choiseul will triumph over Luc in one way or other; then what joy! I suppose he shows you my impertinent reveries. Do you know, Luc is so mad, that I don't despair of bringing him to reason [persuading him to give up ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... present to the Laureate's lodgings, its proportions were always so small as to excite the ire of the insulted Ben, who would growl forth to the messenger, "He would not have sent me this, (scil. wretched pittance,) did I not live ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... at Quebec increased daily. Somewhat less than a hundred men, women, and children were cooped up in the fort, subsisting on a meagre pittance of pease and Indian corn. The garden of the Heberts, the only thrifty settlers, was ransacked for every root or seed that could afford nutriment. Months wore on, and in the spring the distress had risen to such a pitch that Champlain had wellnigh resolved ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... lightly. 'You, an incarnate sinecure and vested interest, a creature revelling in an unearned income of fabulous Oriental magnificence—I dare say, putting one thing with another, fully as much as five hundred a year—to ask me, the unbeneficed and insignificant, with my wretched pittance of eighty pounds per annum and my three pass-men a term for classical mods, how I scrape together the few miserable, hoarded ha'pence which I grudgingly invest in my pots and pipkins! I save them from my dinner, Mr. Bursar—I save them. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... me to admit that this was pretty cool—considering. And there was another thing, too. It seems that for the last six months (she had been assisting two ladies who kept a kindergarten school in Bayswater—a mere pittance), Flora had insisted on devoting all her spare time to the study of the trial. She had been looking up files of old newspapers, and working herself up into a state of indignation with what she called the injustice and the hypocrisy of the prosecution. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... days and nights In low resorts, mid brawls and fights, In which his heart greatly delights, But stops not to inquire, If wife and child have needed care, Or from his draughts he may not spare The pittance they should justly share, ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... of your long implicit submission to their laws; of the sacrifice which you and your forefathers made of your natural advantages for commerce to their avarice,—formed a deliberate plan to wrest from you the small pittance of property which they had permitted you to acquire. Remember that the men who wish to rule over you are they who, in pursuit of this plan of despotism, annulled the sacred contracts which had been made with ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... though I tell her that so much wealth will be a heavy burden to me. Eight hundred a year—that is all she will accept, and it is to be settled on her children. Eight hundred; it is a mere pittance." ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... simple in mind and devout in thought, she possessed that faculty of quick observation which is learned as readily, and exercised perhaps as constantly, in the midst of a small community, where each member is in some measure dependent upon all the rest for the daily pittance of ideas, as in ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... discursive notes, there is a very old-world figure passing our verandah every now and then; he is our night watchman, called a Chowkidar or Ramoosee. He is heavily draped with dark cloak of many vague folds, and carries a staff and lantern; he belongs to a caste of robbers, and did he not receive his pittance, he and his friends would loot the place—and possibly get shot trying to do so. He flashes his lantern through your blinds as you try to sleep. Then if he wakens you by his snoring, you steal out and pour water ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... backbone of every great nation. Tradesmen!" exclaimed my grandfather. "Where would any of us be were it not for trade? We sell our tobacco and our wheat, and get money in return. And your father makes a deal here and a deal there, and so gets rich in spite of his pittance." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
