"Childless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and shield are gracefully disposed before him. At the corner of the gaddi sits a little representation of himself in miniature, complete even to the sword and shield. This is his adopted son and heir. For all the queens and all the grand duchesses are childless, and a little kinsman had to be transplanted from a mud village among the cornfields to this dreamland palace to perpetuate the line. On the corners of the carpet on which the gaddi rests sit thakores of the Royal house, other thakores sit below, right and left, forming two parallel lines, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... OF CHILDREN.—What is more deplorable and pitiable than an old couple childless? Young people dislike the care and confinement of children and prefer society and social entertainments and thereby do great injustice and injury to their health. Having children under proper circumstances never ruins the health and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... be largely a city of childless widowers. One of the peculiar things a stranger notices is the comparatively small number of women seen in the streets. Of the throngs who walked about the place searching for dear friends there is not ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Mr. and Mrs. Furnace took the risk with a cheerful mind. The woman came from Saltash, where she and her mother had driven a thriving trade in cockles and other shellfish, particularly with the Royal Marines; and being a busy spirit and childless, she hit on the notion of turning her old trade to account. Her husband, William John, had tilled Merry-Garden and stocked it with fruits and sallets with no eye but to the sale of them in Saltash market. But the house was handy ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wilt thou give me when I grow childless?" he exclaimed with his arms around them. "That was the question of Abraham, and it often comes to me. Of course we shall go. But hark! Let us hear what the green chair ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... gentlemen, and noblemen have been defrauded, who by their descent would have inherited and succeeded to these encomiendas. I have thought of a plan suitable to correct this evil, about which I have conferred with grave religious persons—namely, that the childless widow who shall marry after the age of forty years shall hold but a life-interest in the encomienda. Will your Majesty have this considered and provide accordingly, considering the extreme ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl—sort of friend, sort of servant. The young clerk of whom I have been speaking—whose name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mr. Frederick Fairlie's marrying and leaving an heir (the two very last things in the world that he was likely to do), his niece, Laura, would have the property on his death, possessing, it must be remembered, nothing more than a life-interest in it. If she died single, or died childless, the estate would revert to her cousin, Magdalen, the daughter of Mr. Arthur Fairlie. If she married, with a proper settlement—or, in other words, with the settlement I meant to make for her—the income from the ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... prosperous goldsmith there; did work for Anne of Denmark, consort of James VI. of Scotland; in 1603 removed with the court to London and combining banking with his other business, he amassed a great fortune, and, dying childless, left his property to found and endow the educational institution referred to, and which still bears his name; in 1837 the accumulated surplus funds were utilised in establishing 10 free schools in Edinburgh, which, however, were closed in 1885, and the original Hospital reconstructed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... brother of a childless man was bound to marry his widow: or, at least, he "had the refusal of her," and the lady could not marry again till her husband's brother had formally rejected her. The ceremony by which this rejection was performed took place in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... He'll have it all, too—the house, the land, everything, except a share of the money which goes to the gal. It'll make her childbearing easier, I reckon, and for my part, that's the only thing a woman's fit for. Don't talk to me about a childless woman! Why, I'd as soon keep a cow ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... not the reason," said Hemangini quickly. "You must have committed some sin. Look at my aunt. She is childless. It must be because her heart has some wickedness. But what wickedness ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... after Essex's death, his widow was secretly married to Sidney's uncle, the Earl of Leicester. This made a sad change in Philip Sidney's fortunes. As long as Leicester was unmarried and childless, Philip Sidney, as his natural heir, was a man of great prospects and a very desirable match; but Leicester, married, with the probability of children to inherit his titles and wealth, left Sidney ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... addressed, With anger raging in his breast, Sank for a while beneath the pain, Then to Kaikeyi spoke again: "Childless so long, at length I won, With mighty toil, from Heaven a son, Rama, the mighty-armed; and how Shall I desert my darling now? A scholar wise, a hero bold, Of patient mood, with wrath controlled, How can I bid my Rama fly, My darling of the lotus eye? In heaven ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... reawakened her maternal instincts, and filled her with pride. She became keenly interested in her successful soldier-son; and as she grew older much wished to see him again, particularly when, the Marquis dying, she was left a solitary and childless widow. Whether or not she would have gone to him of her own impulse I cannot say; but one day, when she was driving in an open carriage in the outskirts of a neighbouring town, the troops lying at the barracks hard by passed her in marching ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... his poor Susan died, Miss Hobson, by her father's demise, having now become a partner in the house, as well as heiress to the pious and childless Zachariah Hobson, her uncle Mr. Newcome, with his little boy in his hand, met Miss Hobson as she was coming out of meeting one Sunday; and the child looked so pretty (Mr. N. was a very personable, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... left desolate—the children for whom you toiled, and hoped, and planned, have been removed from us—nipped in the bud, or the first blossoming!—And oh, Cecil! take the words of a dying woman to heart, when she tells you, that you will go down childless to your grave, if you do not absolve our beloved Constance from her promise to him whom she can neither respect nor love. She will complete the contract, though it should be her death-warrant, rather than let it be said a daughter of the house of Cecil acted dishonourably—she ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... customary fate of such unions, the marriage although childless turned out happily. For the next ten years or so, the American and his Spanish wife, his name by the way was Willoughby, lived in great magnificence in the various capitals of Europe, maintaining an ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Look through Castile; see all smile, bloom, and flourish. No peasant sleeps ere he has breathed a blessing On his good king; no thirst of power, false pride, Or martial rage he knows; nor would he shed One drop of subject-blood to buy the title Of a new Mars! E'en broken hearted widows And childless mothers, while they weep the slain, Cursing the wars, confess his cause was just. Such is Alfonso, such the man whose virtues Now fill thy throne, Castile, to bliss thy children! What shows the adverse scale! What find we there? My sufferings, mine alone! And ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... David," was what she answered, for this elderly childless couple used an affectionate politeness long since deemed old-fashioned. The remark, however, displeased her, making her feel uneasy, and she did not notice his rejoinder, smiling his pleasure and content—"Except yourself and our bank account, my dear." This passion of his for trees was of old ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... age of Mrs Blair had been more free from trial than is the common lot; but the last few years had been years of great vicissitude. She was now a widow and childless; for though it might be that her youngest son was still alive, she did not know that he was; and his life had been the cause of more sorrow than the death of all her other ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... and Eve, when Cain fled after the murder of Abel, were left childless, or at least without a son. But it was necessary that they should have another, in order that God's chosen people, the Jews, might be derived from a purer stock than Cain's. Accordingly we read that Adam, in his hundred and thirtieth year, "begat a son in his own likeness, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... issued a proclamation calling up ... childless widows between the ages of 20 and 34 comprised in Class 1 of the Military Service ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... been strongly opposed by the oligarchical party. His life had terminated in the year 1650, amidst great civil troubles. He died childless: the adherents of his house were left for a short time without a head; and the powers which he had exercised were divided among the Town Councils, the Provincial States, and the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... found that even Dot's party would not spread out sufficiently to use up the space they had allotted to social events, but to the club members themselves. It was Judge Arthur's fiftieth birthday, and as he was a childless man, quite alone in the world, his friendly neighbors were determined to make the day memorable for him. The meeting was to be at Three Gables, so the journalists were behind the scenes from the start. The only difficulty in the way of their writing it up was that they were so ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... the Western nations, the Chinese have an overmastering desire to have children. More than death itself the Chinaman fears to die without leaving male progeny to worship at his shrine; for, if he should die childless, he leaves behind him no provision for his support in heaven, but wanders there a hungry ghost, forlorn and forsaken—an "orphan" because he has no children. "If one has plenty of money," says the Chinese proverb, "but no children, ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... do for worlds—invite a woman, of whom none of their number had ever heard, to come from Omaha and take the domestic management of his hearth and home. All he knew of her was what he heard there. She was the widow of a volunteer officer who had died of disease contracted during the war. She was childless, almost destitute, accomplished, and so devoted to her church duties. She was interesting and refined, and highly educated. He heard the eulogiums pronounced by the good priest and some of his flock, and Mrs. Fletcher, a ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... so many things I have forgot, That once were much to me, or that were not, All lost, as is a childless woman's child And its child's children, in the undefiled Abyss of what can never be again. I have forgot, too, names of the mighty men That fought and lost or won in the old wars, Of kings and fiends and gods, and most of ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... Love came to me, I was a coward, by reason of worldly considerations, and let it plead in vain, alas! And thus, although my friends were many in those days, my empty heart was always solitary, and now—my friends are mostly dead, and I am—a childless, lonely ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... death, taking his place as president of the bank, during the years her only daughter, Janet, had been off at college and later travelling around the country "on the stage"—of all things for a daughter of Fallon. When hadn't the town been full of these widowed, elderly women made childless alike by life and by death? What others had met successfully, she could also, she told herself sternly, and still the old Rose, still struggling toward happiness, she tried to think with a little enthusiasm ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... before this Harold had met with a piece of rare good fortune, looked at from a worldly point of view, in being adopted as his sole heir by a rich and childless Louisiana planter, a distant relative of ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... angelic tender bein's, half-clothed, fill our streets on icy midnights, huntin' up drunken husbands and fathers and sons. They are driven to death and to moral ruin by the miserable want liquor drinkin' entails. They are starved, they are froze, they are beaten, they are made childless and hopeless by drunken husbands killin' their own flesh and blood. They go down into the cold waves and are drowned by drunken captains; they are cast from railways into death by drunken engineers; they go up on the scaffold ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... the latter qualities. The woman of true intellect is the woman of truest affection. For the rest let Lilith speak, whose life dropped unrecorded from the earliest world. It is the poet's hope that the chords of the mother-heart universal will respond to the song of the childless one. That in the survival of that one word lullaby, may be revivified the pathetic figure of one whose home, whose hope, whose Eden passed to another. Whose name living in the terrors of superstitious peoples, now ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... Francis I, ascended the throne in 1515, five years older then than the century. Henry of England had descended from a family of simple Welsh gentlemen, far indeed at one time from the crown; Francis I was also of a new line of kings, only a distant cousin of the childless Louis XII, whom he succeeded. "That great boy of Angouleme will ruin all," groaned Louis on his death-bed. Ruin the prosperity of France, he meant, for Louis had been a good and thoughtful king, cherishing his land and enabling it to rise to the height of wealth and power, justified by its ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... also grows well in the cavities of the joints, causing rheumatism and crippling; it grows in the heart, causing valvular heart disease, which is incurable, and also in the generative organs of men and women, causing self-made eunuchs and childless wives. It is the cause of most of the severe abdominal diseases of women requiring the use of the knife to cut ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... and procure of Cosmo and Neri permission to return with him to Bologna. The reputed father of Santi was dead, and he lived under the protection of his uncle, whose name was Antonio da Cascese. Antonio was rich, childless, and a friend of Neri, to whom the matter becoming known, he thought it ought neither to be despised nor too hastily accepted; and that it would be best for Santi and those who had been sent from Bologna, to confer in the presence of Cosmo. They were accordingly introduced, and Santi was not ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... likely to wear out of its own accord, for the Count de Ribaumont was an elderly and childless man, and his brother, the Chevalier de Ribaumont, was, according to the usual lot of French juniors, a bachelor, so that it was expected that the whole inheritance would centre upon the elder family. However, to the general surprise, the Chevalier late in life married, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grief, prostrated himself upon the bier, and clasping in his arms the body of his son, poured out a flood of tears, bewailing the unhappy fate which left him childless in his old age. ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... evening we, childless parents, were sitting silently together in the cottage; neither of us had any desire to talk, even had our tears allowed us. We sat gazing into the fire on the hearth. Presently, we heard something rustling outside the door: it flew open, ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... tombstone had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave, upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose innuendo or two when people met for "auction"—that ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the crucifixion of our own will; the sacrifice of our own heart; in short, everything that is still lacking but is indispensable to our salvation lies through that den of lions. One man here is homeless and loveless; another is childless; another has a home and children, and much envies the man who has neither; one has talents there is no scope for; another has the scope, but not the sufficient talent; another must now spend all his remaining ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... l'Arbre-des-Fees.[206] They used to recall the days when the lord and lady of Bourlemont themselves led the young people of the village. But Jeanne was still a babe in arms when Pierre de Bourlemont, lord of Domremy and Greux, died childless, leaving his lands to his niece Jeanne de Joinville, who lived at Nancy, having married the chamberlain of the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... her heart, 'Twould faintly answer, trembling in their petals. Poise but a wild bird's feather, it will stir On lips that even in silence wear the badge Only of truth. Let but a cricket wake, And sing of home, and bid her lids unseal The unspeakable hospitality of her eyes. O childless soul—call once her husband's name! And even if indeed from these green hills Of England, far, her spirit flits forlorn, Back to its youthful mansion it will turn, Back to the floods of sorrow these sweet locks Yet heavy bear in drops; and Night shall see Unwearying as ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of whom she was barren. Because of this, other women shook their heads, and no third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony with the childless widow. But at this time, many hundred miles above, at Fort Yukon, was a man, Spike O'Brien. Fort Yukon was a Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike O'Brien one of the Company's servants. He was a good servant, but he achieved ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... language, since the mortal fall, Has fallen from the lips of all. Ye human wretches, give your heed; For your complaints there's little need. Let him who thinks his own the hardest case, Some widowed, childless Hecuba behold, Herself to toil and shame of slavery sold, And he will own the ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... logical consequences of what we were in for so completely as the people abroad did who caught it later, and that is why, as we began to develop our new floating population of mainly celibate employees and childless people, they had mostly to go into lodgings, they went into the homes that were intended for families as accessories to the family, and they were able to go in because the families were no longer ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Old men and childless, or if sons ye have seen And daughters, elder-born were these than mine, Look on this child, how young of years, how sweet, How scant of time and green of age her life Puts forth its flower of girlhood; and her gait How virginal, how soft her speech, her eyes ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... lives, and Edith still withers; and War stands side by side with the Church, between the betrothed and the altar. Verily, verily, my spirit hath lost its power, and leaves me bowed, in the awe of night, a feeble, aged, hopeless, childless woman!" ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hurriedly in her hand, and put it out of sight. She looked up with a smile of welcome; he was the "apple of her eye," the darling of her life, the Benjamin of her childless old age—the fair-haired, pleasant-faced ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... perhaps to the Inspired Books, this history creeps along the wall, making itself small so as to be inconspicuous, and narrates, as if in secret, by artless mimicry, poor Joachim's despair when a scribe of the Temple named Reuben reproves him for being childless, and rejects his offerings in the name of the Lord who has not blessed him; then Joachim, in sorrow, separates from his wife and goes away to bewail the curse that has lighted on him, till an angel appears to him and comforts ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... had not prompted him, Mr. Minge devoted himself to the rapid accumulation of wealth, and by judicious and successful speculations had doubled his fortune, ere, at the comparatively early age of thirty, he was left a childless widower. Whether he really thanked fate for his timely release, his most intimate friends were never able to ascertain, for he wore mourning, badges for three years, and conducted himself in all respects with exemplary dignity and scrupulous propriety. But the frigid indifference ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... often kept as a kind of pet in the houses of the peasants. Barren women still go to the ruined temples of the forsaken gods in the hope that there is virtue in the stones; and I myself have given permission to disappointed husbands to take their childless wives to these places, where they have kissed the stones and embraced the figures of the gods. The hair of the jackal is burnt in the presence of dying people, even of the upper classes, unknowingly to avert the jackal-god ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... entirely at Rome, though he must have paid not infrequent visits to the Bay of Naples.[534] But in 94 A.D., whether through failing health or through chagrin at his defeat in the Capitoline contest, he retired to his native town.[535] He had married a widow named Claudia,[536] but the union was childless; towards the end of his life he adopted the infant son of one of his slaves,[537] and the child's premature death affected him as bitterly as though it had been his own son that died. Of his age we know little; ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... attachment of the two cousins for each other, he informed his daughter that he intended her to marry Osmyn Bey; but Zuleika eloped with Selim, the pacha pursued them, Selim was shot, Zuleika killed herself, and Giaffir was left childless and alone.—Byron, Bride ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... them hear The truth from you than from a trampling world. If they be in adversity, they'll learn 280 Too soon the scorn of crowds for crownless Princes, And find that all their father's sins are theirs. My boys!—I could have borne it were I childless. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... yet dressed with elegant simplicity, befitting their rank and position in society. The Chevalier Le Gardeur de Tilly had fallen two years ago, fighting gallantly for his King and country, leaving a childless widow to manage his vast domain and succeed him as sole guardian of their orphan niece, Amelie de Repentigny, and her brother Le Gardeur, left in infancy to the care of their noble relatives, who in every respect treated them as their own, and who indeed were the legal inheritors ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... lodges in which were housed the two gardeners and their wives. To be lodge-keeper to the Park was as great a guarantee of respectability in Norton as to be vicar of the parish church itself. Only middle-aged, married, teetotal, childless churchmen could apply for the posts, and among their scant ranks the most searching inquiries were instituted before an appointment was finally arranged. It is safe to affirm that no working couples on earth were more clean, industrious, and alive to their duty towards ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I believe, my grandson. My heart felt drawn towards you from the first; and as I am now childless, I would desire to place you in the position your father would have enjoyed ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon the fears of Morven. The sister of Siror bowed down her head, and survived not long the slaughter of her race. And she left Morven childless. And he mourned bitterly and as one distraught, for her only in the world had his heart the power to love. And he sat down and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... putting it into her mouth. But has not this habit of obedience a higher office than this? It is the first yielding of the untrained will to rightful authority, and as such, has an immense significance. The mother who cannot train her daughters and sons to obedience were better childless, for she is but giving to her country elements of weakness, not elements of strength. She is furnishing future inmates for jails, penitentiaries, and prisons, and putting arms into the hands of the enemies of law and order. And yet, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... in the little one, neither Joe nor his wife gave a look or a thought to Sonny, who was leaping upon them joyously. For years he had been almost the one centre of attention for the childless couple, who had treated him as a child, caressing him, spoiling him, and teaching him to feel his devotion necessary to them. Now, finding himself quite ignored, he quieted down all at once and stood for a few seconds gazing reproachfully ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... many of the leading persons concerned in the emigration were university men that it was not long before a university began to seem indispensable to the colony. In 1636 the General Court appropriated L400 toward the establishment of a college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying childless, bequeathed his library and the half of his estate to the new college, which the Court forthwith ordered to be called by his name; while in honour of the mother university the name of the town was ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She found that it was better religion to annul her womanhood and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing opportunities the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... plucking blackberries, and nursing wounded partridges in the forest, for the command of a nation? My dear Lionel, we are married men, and find employment sufficient in amusing our wives, and dancing our children. But Adrian is alone, wifeless, childless, unoccupied. I have long observed him. He pines for want of some interest in life. His heart, exhausted by his early sufferings, reposes like a new-healed limb, and shrinks from all excitement. But his understanding, his charity, his virtues, want a field for exercise and display; ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... is spoken of. This seems to be the solemn declaration of a childless man to his kinsfolk, recommending some person as his successor. Nothing more was possible before written wills were introduced by the Christian clergy after ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Wood-edge! what would many a childless pair give for a creature one-half so beautiful as thou, to break the stillness of a home that wants but one blessing to make it perfectly happy! Yet there are few or none to lay a hand on that golden head, or leave a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... warm on the flat country, three hundred Israelites were ready for the long march to the Nile. They left behind them a camp oppressed with that heart-soreness, which affliction added to old afflictions brings,—the numb ache of sorrow, not its lively pain. Only Deborah, the childless, and Rachel, the motherless, went with lighter hearts,—if hearts can be light that go forward to meet the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... Frigga, wife of Odin, stands first, an august matron of mysterious knowledge, whom even gods consult, and by whom men swear; she has also to do with marriage, and the childless appeal to her. Etymologically she is scarcely to be distinguished from Freya, wife of Odur, who, however, is lighter in character, and is rather a goddess of love. The goddesses in the Eddas are more shadowy figures than the gods; there ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the estate was carefully entailed, through her, to heirs male through all generations, it was not her good fortune to become the mother of a long line, for she had only one daughter, who became Lady Barnard, and in whom, dying childless, the family became extinct. Shakspeare, like Scott, seems to have had the desire to perpetuate himself by founding a family with an estate, and the coincidence in the result is striking. Genius must be ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... us. For any record of such another we ransack in vain the treasure stores of all history. She is the only mother that ever reigned in her own right over any potent realm; and certainly over our own. Queen Mary of unhappy memory, died childless, and her more fortunate sister, "Good Queen Bess," went down to her grave a maiden queen; but in the case of Victoria, four sons and five daughters found their earliest cradle in her queenly arms. She is said to have been in almost all respects as capable as the ablest of her predecessors, and was ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... said At daybreak, when he crept into my bed, Called me kind names, and promised: 'Grandmother, When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair And lead out all the captains to ride by Thy tomb.' Why didst thou cheat me so? 'Tis I, Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead. Dear God, the pattering welcomes of thy feet, The nursing in my lap; and O, the sweet Falling asleep together! All is gone. How should a poet carve the funeral stone To tell thy story ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... celebrity not in the least to his personal endowments, but solely to the unique character of his position. The First Man could n't help getting a certain reputation, would he, n'ould he. But from Adam to Adrian—silence. Then sudden silvery music. And Adrian—mark the predestination—Adrian is childless. He is the last link. With him the chain, five thousand years long, stops. He is the sudden brilliant flare-up of the fire before it goes out. Well, now, tell me—which end of this stick would you prefer to be? The shining silver handle, or the ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling of motherless children will add ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... attention to him. But a short, bare-headed civilian, who was struggling in the crowd, heard, and shouted in answer, waved his arms, and began to force his way toward the four. It was Roscoe, the secretary of President Hargreaves. The President was a childless widower, and Roscoe lived in the White House with him and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... wills they make none: for want of children his next akin inherits; his own brothers, those of his father, or those of his mother. To ancient men, the more they abound in descendants, in relations and affinities, so much the more favour and reverence accrues. From being childless, no advantage nor estimation ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... spared their quietude, leaving them stranded upon a beach where the tide of active business never flows, all their dignities are gone. The men of foresight and enterprise have drifted away to new centres of influence. The bustling dames in starched caps have gone down childless to their graves, or, disgusted with gossip at second hand, have sought more immediate contact with the world. A German tailor, may be, has hung out his sign over the door of some mouldering mansion, where, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Cartier's marriage was childless, so that he left no direct descendants. But the branches of the family descended from the original Jean Cartier appear on the registers of St Malo, Saint Briac, and other places in some profusion during the sixteenth ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... who lives in the country, be he a practical farmer or not, should plant trees, more or less. The father of a family should plant, for the benefit of his children, as well as for his own. The bachelor and the childless man should plant, if for nothing more than to show that he has left some living thing to perpetuate his memory. Boys should early be made planters. None but those who love trees, and plant them, know the ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... I had never any real chance against Peter Blagden. To begin with,—though Stella herself, of course, would inherit plenty of money when her mother died,—Peter was the only nephew of a childless uncle who was popularly reported to "roll in wealth"; and in addition, Peter was seven years older than I and notoriously dissipated. No other girl of twenty would have hesitated between us half so long as Stella did. She hesitated through a whole winter; and even now there is odd, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... related to each other—seventh cousins, or something of that sort. While still babies they became orphans, and were adopted by the Brants, a childless couple, who quickly grew very fond of them. The Brants were always saying: "Be pure, honest, sober, industrious, and considerate of others, and success in life is assured." The children heard this repeated some thousands of times ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... could not help fancying that symptoms were showing themselves in me with which I was familiar enough in others. Leaving the dying infant to the care of its relatives (when the Spaniard returned he found himself widowed and childless), I hastened to my brother's house. When there, I felt an unpleasant chill come over me, and went to bed at once. Other symptoms followed quickly, and, before nightfall, I knew full well that my turn had come ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... was very tall, and being in bad health might have died suddenly. My being received, argued nothing against this, since the first nine days after a death, the house is invariably crowded with friends and acquaintances, and the widow, or orphan, or childless mother must receive the condolences of all and sundry, in the midst of her first bitter sorrow. There seems to be no idea of grief ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... and wife lived near Rouseville, Pa. Childless, they adopted a boy, John W. Steele. Prior to the discovery of coal oil, the worn out fields of that locality were valueless. Now broad acres were as valuable as the diamond fields of South Africa. Never in the wildest days of the gold excitement ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... wealth our mightier misers drain, Or cross, to plunder provinces, the main; The rest, some farm the poor-box, some the pews; Some keep assemblies, and would keep the stews; Some with fat bucks on childless dotards fawn; 130 Some win rich widows by their chine and brawn; While with the silent growth of ten per cent, In dirt ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... suddenly became cold,—so suddenly that she felt assured the reason was not that which a childless wife might have reason to fear. Unable to discover the real cause, she tried to persuade herself that she had been remiss in her duties; examined her innocent conscience to no purpose; and tried ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... done me no harm, yet because it is war, arranged by princes and kings, we must become murderers. And why should I kill him? because others would misconstrue my act of mercy if I did it not, and brand me a coward, aye and worse, a traitor. Why should I make that mother childless? why must I rob that loving wife of her husband? Why I be the means of making those little children ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... large plethoric man, with a bunch of seals in a large bow-windowed light waistcoat. He has large coat-tails, stuffed with agents' letters and papers about companies of which he is a Director. His seals jingle as he walks. I wish I had such a man for an uncle, and that he himself were childless. I would love and cherish him, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rattled on the aid. "I verified the fact that the young woman is his acknowledged daughter. He has no other lineal heir to the title, for an old, dry-as-dust, retired Edinburgh professor, a brother, childless and eccentric, is living near St. Helier's, in Jersey, in a beautiful Norman chateau farm mansion, where old Hugh proposed once to end his days. It seems to be all square enough. I was as delicate as I could be about it, and the matter is apparently all right. The papers ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... foreseen it; and his taking the long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience. He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities displeased ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... composed to attend to you. Indeed, I ought to be prepared; for I had reason, for years, to expect the stroke; and yet, when it came, it seemed sudden!—it stunned me—put an end to all my worldly prospects—left me childless, without a single descendant, or relation near enough to be dear to me! ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... just left a widower was at this time a man about forty years of age, of good family, and childless. He had led a secluded existence in this college living, partly because there were no resident landowners; and his loss now intensified his habit of withdrawal from outward observation. He was still less seen than heretofore, kept himself still less in time with the rhythm ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... of which he lives. He was one of those tall spare men, black-haired and black-eyed, capable of bearing great fatigue, full to the brim of vitality. He was a great reader, fond of music and art; married to a no less cultivated and active wife, but childless. There never was a man who had a keener enjoyment of existence in all its aspects. It used to be a marvel to me to see at how many points a man could touch life, and the almost child-like zest which he threw into everything which ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... are wise in your vanity—or would be, were it wisdom to shut one's eyes to fate. Let us grant that men are happier than women—than childless women at any rate. You do not know what it is to be a singer, for instance; to wake up each morning to a fear 'Has my voice gone? One of these days it will certainly go, but—Lord, not yet!' We must build on what we have. We must cling to our youth, ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... called the "Son of Heaven," and holds the supreme spiritual and temporal power in his hands. On his accession he gives an arbitrary name to his reign, which also becomes his own. He chooses his successor himself from among his sons. If he is childless he chooses one of his nearest relations, but then he adopts his future successor that the latter may make offerings to the souls of himself and his ancestors. The yellow robe and the five-clawed dragon are the ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... Gentiles, or entire body of Roman citizens bearing the same name with the deceased. So that on failing to execute an operative Testament, a Roman of the era under examination left his emancipated children absolutely without provision, while, on the assumption that he died childless, there was imminent risk that his possessions would escape from the family altogether, and devolve on a number of persons with whom he was merely connected by the sacerdotal fiction that assumed all members of the same gens to be ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... trained in self-reliance, for he had been fatherless from childhood. At the age of sixteen he was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land. At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was childless. His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years. There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... Johnson of Guilford, a grand- niece of his predecessor in Stratford, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson. She died childless many years before him, and he never married again. He was in the full possession of his mental faculties and blessed with a fair degree of health when he resigned, in 1824, the Rectorship of Christ Church. For a time ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... the core. He intended to do his duty, and so should every man subject to his orders. The Government had trusted him and he held himself responsible. This would probably be his last duty, and it would be well done. He was childless, sixty-five years old, and had been idle for years. Now he would show his neighbors something of his skill and his power to command. He did not need the pay; he needed the occupation and the being in touch with the things about him. For the last fifteen or more years he had nursed a sorrow ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... princess Philippa, a daughter of Henry V of England, and shortly after had got Catharine, her niece and Eric's sister, married to Prince John, a son of the German emperor Ruprecht; John being promised the Scandinavian crowns if Eric of Pomerania should die childless. Thus having strengthened and consolidated her power by influential connections and relationships, the Queen, upon whose head the three northern crowns were actually united, now proceeded to realize ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... greatest household change the Misses Leaf had known for years, and they missed him sorely. Ascott was not exactly a lovable boy, and yet, after the fashion of womankind, his aunts were both fond and proud of him; fond, in their childless old maidenhood, of any sort of nephew, and proud, unconsciously, that the said nephew was a big fellow, who could look over all their heads, besides being handsome and pleasant mannered, and though not clever enough to set the Thames on fire, still ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... moment more all was bustle and confusion. The nurse was thoroughly awakened; the doctor cared for the poor childless father with the tenderness of a son; then came back to send John for help, and to give directions concerning what was to ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... to a third department all such inventions and improvements in machinery were committed for trial. Connected with this department was the College of Sages—a college especially favoured by such of the Ana as were widowed and childless, and by the young unmarried females, amongst whom Zee was the most active, and, if what we call renown or distinction was a thing acknowledged by this people (which I shall later show it is not), among the more renowned or distinguished. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... said Jasmine, who had had time to recover her composure, "and remind me of my two old childless aunts," she added, laughing, "who are always quarrelling about the names they would have given their children if the goddess Kwanyin had granted them any half a century ago. As a matter of act, we are three friends reading ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... kingdom left by Turgenef and Tolstoy is now buried in fortresses and dungeons. And as in America mammon has so eaten away literary aspiration as to leave Emerson and Hawthorne, Prescott and Motley, intellectually childless, so in Russia, autocracy has so eaten away the literary material as to ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... to go with them; they could not bear to think of their spending that first evening in their childless home; but Flora gently, but decidedly, refused; and Dr. May said that, much as he wished to be with them, he believed that Flora preferred having no one but Meta. "I hope I have done Margaret no harm," were Flora's last words ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... altar, in the middle of the sacred rites. Giovanni Galeazzo, who followed him, was poisoned by his uncle Lodovico. Lodovico was imprisoned by the French, and died of grief in a dungeon.[1] One of his sons perished in the same way; the other, after years of misery and exile, was restored in his childless old age to a throne which had been undermined, and when he died, his dynasty was extinct. This was the recompense for the treason of Francesco to the State of Milan. It was for such successes that he passed his life in perfidy, privation, and danger.' In these rapid successions we trace, besides ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and hence your rites DOMESTIC GODS! arose. When for his son With ceaseless grief Syrophanes bewail'd, Mourning his age left childless, and his wealth Heapt for an alien, he with fixed eye Still on the imaged marble of the dead Dwelt, pampering sorrow. Thither from his wrath A safe asylum, fled the offending slave, And garlanded the statue and implored His young lost Lord to save: Remembrance then Softened ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... temptations of Satan, and after some years learned the secrets of witchcraft from an old woman. By means of this unholy knowledge, along with several other evil deeds, she so bewitched the whole princely race that the six young princes, who were each wedded to a young wife, remained childless; but no public notice was taken until Duke Francis succeeded to the duchy in 1618. He was a ruthless enemy to witches; all in the land were sought out with great diligence and burned, and as they unanimously named the Abbess ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... he finds that intrigues have arisen and a party has been formed to overthrow him. As the nephew of the childless king he is the next heir to the throne of Cornwall, but, being in fear of his life, he persuades Marke to marry, that he may beget a child to be his successor. Reluctantly King Marke permits him to return to Ireland ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... shalt not offend. Two verses further he threatens, wrathful and grim To make widows of all the women that anger him. Leviticus, 21, verse 14, thou read'st That a widow won't do for the wife of a priest. A chapter further, one verse less, we have read, That a childless widow must eat her father's bread. From Numbers, 30, verse 10, we clearly infer, That a widow's vow is sufficient ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... Smythe of Acton Burnell in Derbyshire. His daughter Mary Anne was married at nineteen to one of the Welds of Lulworth Castle, who died within a year, and afterwards to Thomas Fitzherbert, who left her a childless widow ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... service for unattested single men and childless widowers of military age introduced by PRIME MINISTER. Blandly explained that it is not necessarily compulsory. If this class of citizen who has hitherto held back now likes to come forward and enlist he may do so under the Group system, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... journeyings together, Mrs. Cox had learned from George that he was possessed of an eccentric old uncle; and not long afterwards, she had learned from Arthur that this uncle was very rich, that he was also childless, and that he was supposed to be very fond of his nephew. Putting all these things together, knowing that Bertram had no profession, and thinking that therefore he must be a rich man, she had considered herself to be acting with becoming prudence ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... seat of the Whitneys, within an hour after Torrey left Ranger. It had accumulated confirmatory detail by that time—the bequest was large; was very large; was half his fortune—and the rest of the estate was to go to the college should Arthur and Adelaide die childless. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the baby—Alice had chosen that name "in case it is a girl." Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother during the first three years of Eleanor's healthy and contented little life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions, she called him back from a desk in Los Angeles, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... complain. Five years had elapsed since then, and her father—for whom she had given all she had, herself, her beauty, her brave heart, and her hopes of happiness—her old father, whom she so loved, was dead, the last of his race, saving only this beautiful but childless daughter. What she suffered now—whether she suffered at all—no man knew. There had been a wild burst of enthusiasm when she appeared first in society, a universal cry that it was a sin and a shame. But the cynics who had said she would console herself ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... change. Besides this, she had felt her heart open out, and warm towards the little helpless child, in a strong and powerful manner. Nature had intended her warm instincts to find vent in a mother's duties; her heart had yearned after children, and made her restless in her childless state, without her well knowing why; but now, the delight she experienced in tending, nursing, and contriving for the little boy—even contriving to the point of sacrificing many of her cherished whims—made her happy and satisfied ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... mateless, childless, envied more The peasant's welcome from his door By smiling eyes at eventide, Than kingly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the truce is still in force, Lady Helga visits Brand's wife, Jorun. Childless herself, she desires to foster up one of Jorun's sons in her own cruel way, promising, in return, to procure an honorable peace for Brand; or else, to destroy him. The loving mother staunchly refuses. But soon the weakness of Brand's situation becomes evident. Unable to act ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... that's true, with all of their racket and noise, But I'd rather my personal pleasures be lost than to give up my girls and my boys. Not always they're perfectly good; there are times when they're wilfully bad, But I'd rather be worried by youngsters of mine than lonely and childless and sad. ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... much to tell you, Fillmore. As you know, when I left college, my mother was a widow with a very limited income, which made it difficult to meet my college expenses. Mother had set her heart on my entering the ministry. Her only brother, a childless widower, and a man of some wealth and great influence in the church affairs of his prosperous New England town, promised his assistance. Behold the result! I have just graduated with fair honors from a prominent theological institute. I am to take charge, this coming November, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... may have it yet," replied the discontented beauty, with a weary smile; "I may have it yet; my husband's brother is still childless. If I could be but certain that the grave would receive him a childless man, how proudly I would take precedence of such a ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Avennes, Counts of Hainault. Holland, together with Zeland, which it had annexed, is thus joined to the province of Hainault. At the end of another half century the Hainault line expires. William the Fourth died childless in 1355. His death is the signal for the outbreak of an almost interminable series of civil commotions. Those two great, parties, known by the uncouth names of Hook and Kabbeljaw, come into existence, dividing noble against noble, city against city, father against ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... marriage had accepted a worthy merchant whose father had been in partnership with hers; and he, after a prosperous career crowned by surrendering his seat in Parliament to a defeated cabinet-minister—a patriotic act for which he was rewarded with a knighthood—had died, leaving her well off and childless. She had but one other nephew, Robert Boulger, her brother's only son, but he was rich with all the inherited wealth of the firm of Boulger & Kelsey; and her affections were placed chiefly upon the children ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... very well a beautiful woman, left widowed, and childless, and solitary, and forlorn, to whom, after every other consolation seemed to have failed to awake her from her sorrow and despair, a friend of her own sex said: 'I thought you were one of Edward Hale's girls.' The appeal touched ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... indulgent to his childher an' sometimes to himsilf, an' that she had to darn his socks. Nearly all th' gr-reat men had something th' matther with their wives. I always thought Mrs. Wash'nton, who was th' wife iv th' father iv our counthry, though childless hersilf, was about right. She looks good in th' pitchers, with a shawl ar-round her neck an' a frilled night-cap on her head. But Hogan says she had a tongue sharper thin George's soord, she insulted all his frinds, an' she was much older thin ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... feelings of devotion towards the last of her household which almost bordered on insanity. And, now that her beloved charge, her innocent victim, her future warrior, had, after all her struggles for his preservation, pined and died; now that she was childless indeed; now that Roman cruelty had won its end in spite of all her patience, all her courage, all her endurance; every noble feeling within her sunk, annihilated at the shock. Her sorrow took the fatal form which irretrievable destroys, in women, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... love-hungry eyes. Men are such stupid unfeeling brutes. I am, at least; for I had never read in this dear woman's face until that instant what must have been written there all these years,—the love that might have been given to a husband and children of her own, this lonely, childless woman had ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... mysterious in this honest octogenarian's mood. There was an undercurrent of sorrow which, he was sure, was wholly distinct from the anxieties of his mistress and her household, and he wondered what it might be. Surely, for an old man, though wifeless and childless he had much to make him happy. The devotion of the family in which he had lived for so long, his comfortable home, his freedom from care concerning his future—to the young man struggling amidst a crowd of competitors to make a place ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... explaining, all were happier in the end for her decision. She herself was softened by it, and she yielded one point in return. Paul had steadily opposed his mother's plan of housekeeping, alone with one maid and a man who slept at the stables. The Dunlops, as it happened, were childless for the winter, young Chauncey attending a "commercial college" in a neighboring town. After many interviews and a good deal of self-importance on Cerissa's part, the pair were persuaded to close the old house and occupy the servants' ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... Milan. He allied himself against his rival, Sforza, with Venice, and with Pope Alexander. That he might marry the widowed queen, and preserve her duchy of Brittany for the Crown, he required that his own childless marriage should be annulled. Upon the Legate who brought the necessary documents the grateful king bestowed a principality, a bride of almost royal rank, and an army wherewith to reconquer the lost possessions of the Church in Central ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... fair fleet limbs, were not really what they appeared to be. The curved brow of Apollo was like the sun's disc crescent over a hill at dawn, and his feet were as the wings of the morning, but he himself had been cruel to Marsyas and had made Niobe childless. In the steel shields of Athena's eyes there had been no pity for Arachne; the pomp and peacocks of Hera were all that was really noble about her; and the Father of the Gods himself had been too fond of the ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... mother of a family, much occupied in her mission of domestic work, and accustomed to decide in all matters pertaining to the daily round, is more likely to gain the victory in the event of moral conflict than a childless woman who lives in an enervating atmosphere of domestic idleness, and has accustomed herself to accept her husband's will as her own. Yet both of these women might have the same moral vision. The ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... Aquilo his charioter By boistrous rape th' Athenian damsel got, He thought it toucht his Deitie full neer, 10 If likewise he some fair one wedded not, Thereby to wipe away th' infamous blot, Of long-uncoupled bed, and childless eld, Which 'mongst the wanton gods a foul reproach ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... back the hammer of his rifle and with his eyes upon the distant Confederates considered where he could plant his shot with the best hope of making a widow or an orphan or a childless mother,—perhaps all three, for Private Searing, although he had repeatedly refused promotion, was not without a certain kind of ambition,—he heard a rushing sound in the air, like that made by the wings of a great bird swooping down upon ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... page to Prince Conde, heir of France since Louis XIII. and his brother Gaston were childless, is surprised, while writing a love poem, by a lightning flash which shatters a marble ducal crown. He thinks this a revelation from God, and he prophecies that a Dauphin will be born to the childless Queen. The Dauphin was born, and Rene pushed ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... room And back again, pausing awhile to bask And wink its painted fans on the warm sill; A bird piped in the roses and there came Into the childless mother's ears a sound Of ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... was a childless married woman of past sixty. Her sister, Mrs. Dawson, had the softer face of the two, which, perhaps, was due to her having suffered much and to the companionship of a daughter whom she loved. She was shorter than her sister by several inches, ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... realise to the full the unfortunate position of a childless widow. According to the custom of the country, the nearest male relative on her husband's side should have been her protector, but this duty devolved on a nephew who was an opium smoker, gambler, and unregenerate heathen, and what should have been protection ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... tradesman seemingly the one inhabitant of the coldest city in Scotland who dared face it. He had just closed his shop, had carried home to one of his customers a forgotten order, and was returning to his wife and a childless hearth, when he all but stumbled over the infant. Before stooping to lift him, he looked all about to see if there was nobody to do it instead. There was not a human being, or even what comes next to one, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... not the means of bringing them up. But the King used to have all those foundlings taken charge of, and had note made of the signs and planets under which each was born, and then put them out to nurse about the country. And when any rich man was childless he would go to the King and obtain from him as many of these children as he desired. Or, when the children grew up, the King would make up marriages among them, and provide for the couples from his own purse. In this manner he used ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... she and her Children having been no great Expence to me, the best Part of her Fortune was still left; that my Charge being reduced to my self, a Journeyman, and a Maid, I might live far cheaper than before; and that being now a childless Widower, I might perhaps marry a no less deserving Woman, and with a much better Fortune than she brought, which was but L800. And to convince my Readers that such Considerations as these were proper and apt to produce such an Effect, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... forefathers when they were dragged into bondage from Africa, will be again renewed, and with increased anguish. The shores of America will, like the sands of Africa, be watered by the tears of those who will be left behind. Those who shall be carried away will roam childless, widowed, and alone, over the ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... with the imperial house. The effect of such a marriage went to incapacitate the children who might be born under it, male or female, from succeeding. On that account, as well as because current report had represented her as childless, the widow lady escaped all attempts from the assassin. Meantime this lady, who was no other than Sister Madeline, had been thus indebted for her safety to two rumors, which were in fact equally false. She soon found means of convincing the emperor, who had been the bosom friend ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... whose narrow world denied them so many of the finer thoughts and things, came to counsel with this childless woman, and to learn from her a little of the art of contentment and happiness. Strong men, of rude dress and speech, whose lives were as rough as the hills in which they were reared, and whose thoughts were often as crude as their half-savage and sometimes lawless customs, ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... maladjustments: If we are denied power, influence, or love by society or by individuals, we can obtain these desiderata in our dreams. We can possess in dreams the things which we cannot have by day. In sleep the poor man becomes a Midas, the ugly woman handsome, the childless woman surrounded by children, and those who in daily life live upon a crust in their dreams dine like princes (after living upon canned goods for two months in the Dry Tortugas, the burden of my every dream was food). Where the wished-for things are compatible ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... your name no less? What evil is not here? Your father slew His father, and then eared the mother field Where he himself was sown, and got you from The source of his own birth. Such taunts will fly. And who will marry you? No man, my daughters; But ye must wither childless and unwed. Son of Menoeceus, who alone art left As father to these maidens, for the pair That gave them birth are utterly undone, Suffer them not, being your kinswomen, To wander desolate and poor, nor make Their lot perforce the counterpart of mine. But ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... of nations! there she stands, Childless, and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither'd hands, Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago: The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now; The very sepulchres lie tenantless Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow, Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? Rise, with thy yellow ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux |
