Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Meager   /mˈigər/   Listen
Meager

adjective
1.
Deficient in amount or quality or extent.  Synonyms: meagerly, meagre, scrimpy, stingy.  "Meager fare"



Related search:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Meager" Quotes from Famous Books



... third-rate American dwelling-house, fine for a small town, but plain for a city. And the Severence fortune by contrast with the fortunes so lavishly displayed in the fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... belong, friend?" cried my uncle to a meager, but fiery postillion, who, with tremendous jack boots and cocked hat, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... "Aussage'' (Test VI) was very meager. She only recalled 10 details of the picture. On cross- examination she gave correctly 14 more items and was wrong on 3 of them. She accepted only 2 out of 5 suggestions offered and these were ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... A meager diet.—Besides fresh milk there were then as now a number of things which were made from milk. The Hebrews on the desert took some milk and cream and poured it into a bag made of skin, and hung it by a stout cord from a pole. One of the ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... then, the quality will be in directly," rejoined the other peremptorily, throwing a scrutinizing look at the table, whereon a somewhat meager collation of cherries, raspberries and gooseberries and a more generous bowl of sack-posset had been arranged by Mistress Charity and Master Courage under ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... hope for the time—to please the gentlemen civilians—when he, the victorious leader of the ——th Army, would be used again merely for reviews? Was he to await impatiently going back to that other hopeless struggle between a meager salary and a life polished for show, a struggle in which the lack of money ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... directed affairs in general. For a while they probably held the power of life and death over their own people, but the capital cases were punished later by authority of Babylon (Jer. 29:22.) (4) Their religion. Here also the information is meager and must be gathered from statements and inferences found in several books. Several things are certain: (a) For the most part they preserved their genealogies, thus making possible the identity of the Messiah as well as their proper place ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell

... white-haired gentleman, who for several years was an assistant professor in one of the departments of natural science. Wealthy by inheritance, he had chosen the field of education for his life work solely from a desire to be of some material benefit to mankind since the meager salary which accompanied his professorship was not of sufficient import to influence him in ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... orchestra silenced these protests and a ripple of expectation passed over the audience as the curtain rose, disclosing a sylvan glade and a startled nymph in meager draperies hiding from a faun. The music trembled for a moment and then, as the nymph was discovered, broke into wild concords through which the violins sang tunefully as the chase began. It was not for some moments that the audience awoke ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... overgrown, pretentious Norwood villa and one of those saturnine Institutes for cripples the train passes as it slinks ashamed through South London into Surrey. It was "wealthily" furnished and at first sight imposing, but on closer acquaintance revealed a meager personality, barren and austere. One looked for Rules and Regulations on the walls, all signed By Order. The place was a prison that shut out "the world." There was, of course, no billiard-room, no smoking-room, no room for play ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain ...
— Why We are at War • Woodrow Wilson

... is like the stock of specimens of it in museum collections,—meager and unsatisfactory. We need to know in detail how that species is faring to-day, and what its prospects are for the immediate future. In 1900, I saw great piles of skins from it in the fur houses of Seattle, and the sight gave ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... but also his leg and hip were affected. The savages were both fishermen and hunters; the fish being taken with nets, the game killed with bows and arrows. Peccaries were shot from a blind made of palm leaves a few feet from a runway. Fishing brought rather meager results. Three Indians fished all night and caught only one fish, a perch weighing ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... by habits, morals, institutions, pursuits, and every conceivable difference in their modes of thought and action. They still spoke the same language, as do Austria and Prussia; but beyond that tie of language they had no bond but that of a meager political union in their Congress at Washington. Slavery, as it had been expelled from the North, and as it had come to be welcomed in the South, had raised such a wall of difference that true political union was out of the question. It would be ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... statesmanship, and the endeavor has been to set forth the work as well as the workman. It is hoped that the library notes appended to each chapter will be of assistance to the earnest student, in supplementing the meager outlines of this volume with the abundance of personal detail and wealth of dramatic incident which give life and ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... imagine it, but the announcement that I am about to make a journey always seems to create a general atmosphere of depression throughout the house, as though Euphemia and Eliza, and Thomas, the stableman, were already subsisting, in imagination, on Mrs. Klopton's meager fare. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... and his father this fort building fell not heavily. They had a tight roof and a warm hearth close by. But their hearts ached to see hundreds of their fellow-countrymen toiling half-clad in the bitter weather, with no reward but their meager daily bread. These poor peasants had many of them been the owners of happy homes, whence the merciless fiat of Le Loutre had banished them. The hill of Beausejour lies open to the four winds of heaven, one or the other of which is pretty sure ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts

... there was no furniture in the building, and only a few of the early comers possessed such a luxury as an old army blanket or a knife, cup, and tin plate. As a rule, the prisoner, by the time he reached Libby, found himself devoid of earthly goods save the meager and dust-begrimed summer garb in which he had made ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various

... trimmer, a rank side-stepper, steeped in deceit and ever ready to mouth the abominable phrase "political expediency." It were rash to affirm this, for no analyst has ever fathomed the heart of a man who has come to his late forties a bachelor by choice. One may but guess from the ensuing meager data. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... is reason to believe that about the year 1000 A.D. the northeast coast of America was discovered by a Norse voyager named Leif Ericsson. The records are very meager; but the discovery of our country by such a people is possible and not improbable. For an account of the pre-Columbian discoveries see Fiske's Discovery of America, Vol. I., ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... although slight, her body was delicately full, and that her shoulders held a droop which somehow resembled the shadow on her voice. She bore an unmistakable refinement of being, strange in that locality of meager humanity. Her speech totally lacked the unintelligible, loose slurring ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer

... brain forgets, the imagination misleads, with them as with us, and consequently they must have books of some kind—which implies a written or printed language. It is probable that this language does not correspond with the very meager one of which we occasionally hear them pronounce a few words. The latter is, I am convinced, used only for names and interjections, and sometimes to call the attention of the person addressed, while the former must be a rich and carefully elaborated system of literary expression, ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... and the same quality also shows that he excels in swiftness. An athlete whose arms from exercise show a full spring and play of the muscles, is a beautiful sight, and he, likewise, is best fitted as a combatant. Thus the true species is never without its utility, as even a meager judgment easily ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser

... and I, our guns resting on the already cooling earth, beside the pool that forms the center of the meager oasis, hidden behind a kind of hedge of alfa. The setting sun was reddening the stagnant ditches which irrigate the poor garden plots ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit

... hatched from a fifth egg to begin with; and every one knows the disadvantage of beginning life with four sturdy older birds on top of one. It was a meager egg, and a feeble baby that pipped its shell. The remainder of the family stood and took nearly all the food so that she almost starved in the nest, and she never really knew the luxury of a hearty meal until her elders had flown. That lasted only a few days; ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter

... Telephone system: meager telephone service; principal switching center is Asuncion domestic: fair microwave radio relay network international: satellite earth station - 1 Intelsat ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... might suffer should Rene prove permanently fickle. The thought of it aroused all her natural honesty and serious nobleness of character, which lay deep under the almost hoydenish levity usually observable in her manner. Crude as her sense of life's larger significance was, and meager as had been her experience in the things which count for most in the sum of a young girl's existence under fair circumstances, she grasped intuitively the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... War to telegraph you the news. For some reasons never mentioned to us by General Grant, they have not been sent, though we have seen outside intimations that they took part in the expedition against Jackson. General Grant is a copious worker and fighter, but a very meager writer or telegrapher. No doubt he changed his purpose in regard to the Ninth Corps for some sufficient reason, but has forgotten to notify us ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... suffering unless some money is made available pretty soon. The worst of it is that this is the height of the tourist season and Europe is full of school-teachers and other people who came over for short trips with meager resources carefully calculated to get them through their traveling and home again by a certain date. If they are kept long they are going to be in a bad way. One of our American colony here, Heineman, had a goodly store of currency and had placed it at the disposal of ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... years through his shrewd mode of management, and every year he grew more economical. His wife had died ten years before. She had worked hard for very poor pay, for the squire's table was proverbially meager, and her bills for dress, judging from her appearance, must have ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger

... [retorted] largely to these: he asked, whether he had consecrated his chain to the household gods according to his vow; though he was a scribe, [he told him] his mistress's property in him was not the less. Lastly, he asked, how he ever came to run away; such a lank meager fellow, for whom a pound of corn [a-day] would be ample. We were so diverted, that we continued that supper to ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... the body are connected by the nervous system. The subtle play of sensory and motor impulses, of sentient and spiritual forces, indicates a perfection of nervous endowments nowhere paralleled, and barely approached by inferior animals. This meager reference to brainless animals, whoso knots of ganglia throughout their bodies act automatically as little brains, shows that instinct arises simultaneously with the development of the functions over which it presides. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... southern possession, by the secession of Virginia; and the vast resources of her navy-yard—only partly crippled by the haste of the Federal retreat—stimulated the Government. A meager appropriation was passed for the construction of the "Merrimac;" or rather for an iron-clad ship upon the hull of the half-destroyed frigate of that name. Had the whole amount necessary for her completion been given, the vessel would have been ready weeks ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... yards in the rear, he might, like thousands of others, who were distant spectators of the scene, have honestly conceived that his troops were doing the fighting. General Rousseau's report contradicts his statements, and in a meager way accords the credit ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... 1915 was one of meager results, the advantages remaining on the side of the Central Powers, with this understanding, however: The Allies were growing stronger because Great Britain was making rapid progress in marshaling her resources for war. On the west front, the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... Kryloff produced his first, and very creditable, specimen of his future talent, though obliged, by extreme need, to enter government service at the age of fourteen, at his father's death. He filled several positions in different places at a very meager salary, until the death of his mother (1788), when he resigned and determined to devote himself exclusively to literature. He engaged in journalistic work, became an editor, and soon published a paper of his own. But his real ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... before they die. Two captains ride before them on shaggy ponies, the taller in armor, stained and rusted with many a storm and fray, the other in brilliant inlaid cuirass and helmet, gaudy sash and plume, and sword hilt glittering with gold, a quaint contrast enough to the meager garron which carries him and his finery. Beside them, secured by a cord which a pikeman has fastened to his own wrist, trots a bare-legged Irish kerne, whose only clothing is his ragged yellow mantle, and the unkempt "glib" of hair, through which his eyes peer out, right ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to be finished "to-day," at one blow, immediately, or he would never return home, because he had no desire to live thus. How to finish? By what means? No ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... soldier worked his way into a dense thicket as a measure of precaution, before he ate the remnants of food that he had carried away with him the night before. It was a meager breakfast and he could have eaten four times as much if he had had it. But even crumbs were grateful to him ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall

... are primitive, to say the least. When Thompson inquired about southbound passage, he was told to go down and board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at eleven that night. So he took all his meager belongings, which he could easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled, clean-decked steamer, and ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the time of the report, his bizarre face, without expression, and his sobriquet, as mentioned, making him an object of great curiosity. He wore the Cross of Honor, and nothing delighted him more than to talk about the war. To augment his meager pension he sold a pamphlet containing in detail an account of his injuries and a description of the skilfully devised apparatus by which his declining life was made endurable. A somewhat similar case is mentioned on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... of Red river. It was located on the southwest quarter of section 27, near the site on which Valliant was located in 1902. It is reported, that Henry Crittenden was the principal contributor towards the erection of this building. His cash income though meager was greater than others and he gave freely in order that a suitable place might be provided both for public worship and a ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... welcome which the Chief Beralsea extended to them the second night after their arrival at Venture Island. Besides the clams referred to there was an abundance of fish, several varieties, besides game and meats, and the only thing which they seemed to lack, or which was rather meager ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... why the meager lunches of preserve-sandwiches and pickles more than satisfy the girls whom I was prepared to accuse of spending their money on gewgaws rather than on nourishment. It is fatigue that steals the appetite. I can hardly taste what I put in my mouth; the food sticks in my ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... yellow-haired, lean and eager; the other redhaired, heavy and pondering; and if it be true that two heads are better than one, it is truer that four hands are better than two. In any case, their united and repeated efforts bore fruit at last, if anything so hard and meager and forlorn can be called a fruit. It weighed loosely in the net as it was lifted, and rolled out on the grassy edge of the well; ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton

... special sight-seeing trains, by appreciative guides, and by courses of lectures. The Canal staff is also housed by the State—in wooden structures, built upon piles, and protected by mosquito-proof wire screening. The accommodation for bachelors is somewhat meager; but married couples are treated very liberally, and their quarters are brightened by pretty little gardens. The rates of pay are high, and there are numerous concessions which to one of Indian experience appear exceedingly generous. But the expenditure throughout is on a lavish ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... has a clue—a meager and unsatisfactory one, he admits—and to-day sent officers to Ganlook to investigate the actions of a strange man who was there last week, a man who styled himself the Count of Arabazon, and who claimed to be of Vienna. Some Austrians ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... might be more than the cosmos of life." His "Lyra" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to execute his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at least a meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal just as he felt beauty. He was in eternity already; the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass, seizing it with both hands, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... street-car undertakings, land developments, government revision of the tariff, war between France and Turkey, famine in Russia or Ireland, and so on. The first Atlantic cable had not been laid as yet, and news of any kind from abroad was slow and meager. Still there were great financial figures in the held, men who, like Cyrus Field, or William H. Vanderbilt, or F. X. Drexel, were doing marvelous things, and their activities and the rumors concerning them counted ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... left Dorothy Purnell, promising to find his friend for her sake, he had assumed a confidence that he was far from feeling. No man knew the country thereabout any better than he did, and he realized that there was, at best, only a meager chance of trailing the miscreant who had succeeded in trapping his victim somewhere in the mountains. A weaker man would have paused in dismay at the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken, but Lem Trowbridge was neither weak nor capable of feeling dismay, ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony

... of the population, and indeed that which had the most valid claim to aboriginality, the so-called Negritos, were not involved. Their isolation, their lack of every sort of political, often indeed of village organization, also their meager numbers, render it conceivable that the greatest changes might go on among their neighbors without their taking such a practical view of them as to lead to their engaging in them. Thus it can be understood how they would take no ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... instance, at least, an attempt is made at an accurate and intensive psychological analysis of the biological forces which were at the bottom of a career of habitual stealing. No attempt is made at hard and fast formulations. Our knowledge concerning the criminal is still too meager to justify one in drawing dependable conclusions. But it is felt that this clinical material emphasizes sufficiently the necessity of the psychopathological mode of approach to the problem of criminology. For that matter, the excellent work being carried on by Dr. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... when Preacher Bonds stood before his meager audience, the familiar face of Deacon Gramps was absent. His unusual absence from the Church was very noticeable, and Preacher Bonds suggested in the introductory remarks of his sermon that unquestionably Brother ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison

... her grandfather's, Squire Alden's, stepping-stone to fortune was the loss of the brig Capricorn, which was wrecked in the vicinity of a comfortable port, on her passage out to the whaling-ground. An auger had been added to the meager outfit, and long after the sea had leaked through the hole bored through her bottom, and swallowed her, and the insurance had been paid, the truth leaked out that the captain had received instructions, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... connection with the buildings themselves. The word architect was little used until after the Renaissance. The owner and the "surveyor" were the people responsible, and the plans, directions and details given to the workmen were astonishingly meager. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... still held by the Belgians. Here, in a suburb of the city, Father De Smet decided to dock for the night. A distant clock struck eleven as the hungry but thankful family gathered upon the deck of the "Old Woman" to eat a meager supper of bread and cheese with only the moon to light their repast. Not until they had finished did Father De Smet tell them all that had happened to him during the few terrible moments when he was in the hands of ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... down-stairs and slept in the sitting-room, the five or six hours of day-light sleep which were all he required. And at night, while he was at the mill, Rudolph sat and dozed and kept watch below. Twice a day some meager provisions were left at the top of the stairs and her door was unlocked. She would creep out and get them, not because she was hungry, but because she meant to keep up her strength. Let their vigilance slip but once, and ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... paleness in her cheek was seen; Her meager skeleton scarce cased with skin; Her looks awry; an everlasting scowl Sits on her brow; her teeth deform'd and foul; Her breast had gall more than her breast could hold; Beneath her tongue coats of poison roll'd; No smile e'er smooth'd her furrow'd brow but those ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... in a garden is almost the best of it, I think. Spring with its thrill of promise, summer with its fulfilment—meager or abundant, according to the season—are over. Then comes September and October, the season of cool, even brisk, mornings and mellow afternoons. It is remnant-day in the garden, the time to take a basket and go bargain-hunting on the "as is" counter. Where the carrots ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... reasoning. I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of my results, for as contrasted with what might be obtained by further study, and with what must be obtained if we are adequately to describe the mind of the orang utan, they are meager indeed. ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... could not understand what had happened to him—everything looked so different today. It was as if his eyes had been rubbed with some wonderful ointment; even the meager lands of the Crow's Nest looked beautiful and promising. A new day had dawned for him ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... as Charybdis to the sea; they are devouring and desolating, making all things disappear that come in their grasp; and so, spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and overshadowing, discontented and lamenting, meager and insane,— spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine, and unsatisfied hope. So you have, on the one side, the winds of prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... he regrets bitterly his idealism and in his heart envies the rich. For they, ignorant and arrogant, may purchase his services, his brains and self-sacrifice and buy these ingredients of himself with the air of one purchasing a machine. So the idealist finds himself condemned to a meager life, unless his idealism brings him wealth, and he drifts in spirit away from the character of his youth. It is the strain of life, the fear of old age and sickness, the silent pressure of the deprivations of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... sons by its dry bracing air, toughens them by its harsh conditions of life, organizes them into a mobilized army, always moving with its pastoral commissariat. Then when population presses too hard upon the meager sources of subsistence, when a summer drought burns the pastures and dries up the water-holes, it sends them forth on a mission of conquest, to seek abundance in the better watered lands of their agricultural neighbors. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... is omitted that is the only difference, and in some cases the result is worse than where no plant food is supplied. It seems to hurt the plant worse to throw its food supply completely out of balance than to leave it with nothing except what it draws from the meager store in the seed planted. Of course all the pots were planted with the same kind of seed at the same time, and they were all ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins

... our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and suffering—he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted. Not that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his name) mentioned his condition; it was determined ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... I devoted a great deal of fussy attention to myself. Never did my own wardrobe seem so meager and ill-assorted; never did I cut myself so many times while shaving; never did I use such unsatisfactory shoe-polish. I finally gave up in despair my effort to appear genteel, and devoted myself to the bouquet. ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton

... seen so much and been so constantly on the wing that I wondered that all things here should have stood still. I expected to hear of many births, marriages, deaths, and social upheavals, but the village news was remarkably meager. This hunger for home news on returning is common, I suppose, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall, diagonally crossed by black joists, a meager pear-tree sometimes leans, and the ground floors have at their door a small swing-gate, to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... Hall in time for luncheon. The old place looked deserted and ruined. The half-pay Indian officer's poverty was visible everywhere—in the time-worn furniture, the neglected grounds, the empty stables, and the meager staff ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... wharf. A number of them had simultaneously arrived at the conclusion that they would fare better perhaps camping on Professor Brierly's trail than they would in following the Higginbotham group and the meager information that the police ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... broom of hickory splints which did its work to perfection, and Ree sharpened up his knife and carved from a whitewood block several plates and trays to add to their meager collection of dishes. Both boys improved the opportunity also, while shut in, to give their wardrobes attention, making themselves stout moccasins, coon-skin caps and ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden

... costing eight thousand dollars (in Salt Lake City it would have been worth fifty thousand dollars), I was offered eight hundred dollars. My fanaticism would not allow me to take so meager a sum for it. I locked it up, selling only one stove out of it, for which I received eight yards of cloth. The building, with its twenty-seven rooms, I turned over to the committee, to be sold to help the poor away. The committee afterwards ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee

... wall, rocks and earth rolled and washed in from the outside were encountered on the right, the side toward the mouth of the cavern. These reached from the bottom to the surface, and were continuous with the bank of talus. As results had been meager along here, the sides of the trench were turned to the northward and northwestward. The entire trench was 43 feet long and varied in width from 30 feet in the central parts to 18 feet at the extreme northern end. The left face reached, in its entire length, ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... is another personality, of a different sort, in Blakeley, the district attorney. My accounts are meager and bald, and yet I catch glimpses of a striking personality. This district attorney, I should imagine, is a man with the best ideals of the legal profession, honest, capable, sincere, and unafraid; a man, withal, who knows life and politics and can play the game without being soiled ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... Justice] of the United States is, in his person, tall, meager, emaciated; his muscles relaxed, and his joints so loosely connected, as not only to disqualify him, apparently for any vigorous exertion of body, but to destroy everything like elegance and harmony in his air and movements. Indeed, in his whole appearance, and ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... intelligence; and in all such instances it has been assumed that federation and union grew out of that conformity in mode of thought which is characteristic of peoples speaking identical or closely related tongues. Accordingly, while the grouping of eastern tribes rests in part on meager testimony and is open to question at many points, it is perhaps the best that can be devised, and suffices for convenience of statement if not as a final classification. So far as practicable the names adopted for ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee

... acute moment the greasy yellow irradiation of a newly lit gaslamp as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a darkling marsh of homes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and emergent, meager churches, public-houses, board schools, and other buildings amidst the prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right, very clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden pit-mouth was marked by a gaunt lattice bearing a great black wheel, very sharp and distinct ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... Betty got back on to the bed, and gradually came down to facts, which were meager enough. For Captain Hume had instantly pulled himself up, it appeared; and he had merely said that, as her first husband had been killed in a row, Lady Tancred had cause to have tragedy imprinted ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn

... company a middle-aged German named Charles Oberdieck. According to the company descriptive book, he was a native of the then kingdom of Hanover, now a province of Prussia. He was a typical German, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, quiet and taciturn, of limited and meager education, but a model soldier, who accepted without question and obeyed without a murmur the orders of his military superiors. Prior to the war he had made his living by chopping cord-wood in the high, timbered hills near the mouth of the Illinois river, or by working as ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... his appearance shocked her. His eyes were hollow, his tall form looked meager and shrunken. He was growing to be an old man. She ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... from which he had filched it in true pioneer fashion. Concerning Cooper's "costly contest with the soil," Mr. Keese tells us: "The inspiring beauty of its commanding views caught Cooper's fancy for buying it far more than any meager money returns its two hundred acres ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips

... something very intensely. It was the hardest kind of a look to resist. She had often threshed this subject out with the House Surgeon before; for it was her theory that when a body's material condition was rather poor and meager there was all the more reason for scraping together what one could of a spiritual ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... pattern, intersected by clay-colored dikes, straight ditches full of stagnant brown water, here and there a busy windmill, and in the distance the smooth-flowing watercourses which bounded the landscape. The picture was laid on from a meager palette; a few browns and greens, slightly relieved and enlivened by the vigorous tones of the whitewashed walls of the laborers' cottages, some standing apart, some collected ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... appeared from the door of a hovel that stood half-way down an alley just across the way. She had a ragged shawl over her head, her thin cotton shirt flapped about her meager limbs, and her feet were incased in men's boots. She ran swiftly to the old man, routed the urchin, and with many pitying, comforting words began gathering up the contents of the wagon. Elizabeth longed to stay and help and comfort them both; she listened ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... been to me to give thanks, and to make a meager offering for the recovery of his lost title-deed! He ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... furnished the material upon which this little book is based. But the author feels that some of them will not agree with all the statements made and the inferences drawn, and for this reason is unable to do better than give this meager return for a service which was by ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... setting in. Poor oppressed Finland suffers under a hard climate with August frosts, an eight months' winter in the north, and five months of frost in the south. Idling in sleepy Abo, where the public buildings were so mean and meager and the houses for the most part built of wood, I saw on every hand the disastrous result of the attempted Russification of the country. The hand of the oppressor, that official sent from Petersburg to crush and to conquer, was upon the honest Finnish nation. The Russian bureaucracy ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux

... to ask him something. She would detain him only a few minutes. The questions she put to him had been suggested to her by something she had read that morning—a most meager and unsatisfactory passage. She held in her hand the volume which, although she did not tell him so, had taken her a half-hour to select in Mr. Petter's book room. Shortly they were seated together, and he was ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton

... taste by having attached to them all sorts of figures representing the hours, days of the week, or feasts of the Church. Probably one reason for this was that as the education of the populace was too meager to give them much knowledge of numerals, and as they had but little business of importance to transact, they were far less interested in the time than in the dumb show gone through with by the little carved dolls. Furthermore, having no calendars, these figures served the purpose ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... the financial returns of Dr. Grant's practice must be more than meager. If I had had any money with me I would have given it to this poor creature, but I had no pockets and had never thought of the need of a vanity bag and purse for a visit ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick

... frugally on the meager income derived from the husband's insignificant appointments. Two children had been born of the marriage, and the earlier condition of the strictest economy had become one of quiet, concealed, shamefaced misery, the poverty of a noble family—which in spite of misfortune ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... time; and it was clear that the photograph had been mislaid. Somers was in hopes she would not be able to find it; though he had but a meager expectation of over-throwing the claims of his rival to the name of Allan Garland. It was a hot day, and the windows of the house were all open. His legs seemed to promise the only satisfactory solution ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic

... read that even hardened criminals have become confused before a shopkeeper and betrayed themselves. Of course, Dick Turpin and Jerry Abershaw could call for pistols in the same easy tone they ordered ale, but it would take a practiced villainy. But I in my innocence wanted nothing but the meager outline of a pirate's life, which I ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... rest, which is an advantage. The only practical level, if {286} level there must be, is that of mediocrity, if not of absolute worthlessness: any attempt to secure equality of strength will result in equality of weakness. Efficient development may be cut down into meager brevity, and in this way only can apparent equality of plan be secured throughout. It is far preferable to count upon differences of execution, and to proceed upon the acknowledged expectation that ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... There being nothing more that he could do in the way of self-adornment, Happy Jack went out again into the hot afternoon. At his best, Happy Jack could never truthfully be called handsome; just now, clothed inadequately in gray Stetson hat and two meager sheepskins, ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... succeeded in smothering it—though the effort almost clicked him. He, with a wealth which would have seemed to her as the treasure of the Incas, was falling under suspicion as a lazy fortune-hunter, seeking haven in the meager opulence of a mountain farm! Yet he dared not confess that wealth now because such admission ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... the contrary, it is only the required minimum of culture which society insists that all youth shall receive during their minority to make them barely fit for citizenship. We should consider it a very meager education indeed that ended there. As we look at it, the graduation from the schools at the attainment of majority means merely that the graduate has reached an age at which he can be presumed to be competent ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... When the meager little memories were all done he sat down on his bed again and felt that nothing mattered, since she was to marry Albert Wellesly and would surely believe him guilty of all that was charged against him. He felt no jealousy of her chosen husband, and no ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... districts of Missouri recently made his first visit to New York. Shortly after his arrival he went into a restaurant and ordered what seemed to him like a rather meager meal. When the bill was presented it totaled $8.35. The Missourian looked at the amount twice to make sure his eyes were not deceiving him. Then he smiled. "Waiter," he called, "you've made a mistake. I've got more money ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... meager. It is not easy for us, in the midst of the luxuries, comforts, and necessities of a later civilization, to realize the conditions of western life previous to 1825. But the situation must be understood if one is to know the life ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham

... shipboard. For the first time she suddenly realized how very little indeed Mr. Caldwell had told her about himself or his past life. That he had been born in Africa and educated in Paris was about all she knew, and this meager information had been the result of her surprise that an Englishman should speak English with such ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... arriving at the corner in "a hack," was, despite ten years' residence, a complete stranger to her neighbors. She was quiet and well-behaved; she wore good clothes and shamefully neglected her child. These were the meager facts upon which gossip ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... and turned his head the other way. It hurt. He caught himself thinking, as he saw them, of Stock Exchanges, two-penny-tubes, Belgravia dinner parties, private views, "small and earlies," musical comedy, and all the rest of the dismal and meager program. These harmless little modern uniforms were worse than ludicrous, for they formed links with the glare and noise of the civilization he had left behind, the smeared vulgarity of the big cities where men and women live in their ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... the adult. Activity is essential to growth. Having attained physical growth, the adult does not demand as much physical activity as does the child and as years increase the tendency toward physical activity decreases. There is real danger in this becoming too meager to maintain efficiency, and we recognize more and more the necessity for vacation periods when some of the old spirit of play or of joyful activity may be indulged in and a re-creation process be set up. This recreation ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper

... value to the store, at even that meager salary. He was no good at driving bargains or at palavering with the trade. He tried to keep out of sight as much as possible among the boxes and shelves. His clothing was poor and shabby, his hair and beard ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden

... only be ascribed to that merciful dispensation of God which has carried us through many a trial. Our habitation was now the open field, drenched in a dust storm that blew constantly. We sat on the roadside and ate our meager fare, making joke and jest of our ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy

... sun was still below the eastern crags. Ambrose, with several other cowboys, had brought up buckets of spring-water, and hot coffee and cakes. Madeline's party appeared to be none the worse for the night's experience. Indeed, the meager breakfast might have been as merrily partaken of as it was hungrily had ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... him careful attention, even the Dominican. The jeweler was a tall, meager, nervous man, very dark, dressed in the English fashion and wearing a pith helmet. Remarkable about him was his long white hair contrasted with a sparse black beard, indicating a mestizo origin. To avoid the glare of the sun he wore constantly a pair of enormous ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... store had no place among them. But practical Ida was really interested in the project. It wasn't such a bad idea, she decided. Our money was dwindling, the newspaper would not become a paying proposition for some time, and the only revenue from the post office was the meager ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... before, and carried them into the kitchen, where a pine ironing board was supported by two empty barrels. Lila was busily preparing a bowl of gruel for one of the sick old Negroes who still lived upon the meager ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... catching them. He makes the net by mere labor, but he catches the fish by means of labor and the net. Without such instruments to aid in production a dense population could not live at all, and a very sparse one could live only in a meager and precarious way. If the instruments are artificially made, or if they are furnished by nature in limited amounts, they are forms of wealth, or goods; but as their function is not to minister directly to consumers' wants, ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... of the work, the meager outline and simple colors—glaring whites and limpid blues, with here and there a dash of red to indicate a scarf or sash—astonished his old teachers. Here were pictures painted in an hour that outmatched any of the carefully worked out, methodical attempts of the Academy! It was all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... which kings with envy viewed, Where now thy might which all those kings subdued? No martial myriads muster in thy gate; No suppliant nations in thy Temple wait; No prophet bards, thy glittering courts among, Wake the full lyre, and swell the tide of song. But lawless Force and meager Want are there, And the quick-darting eye of restless Fear; While cold Oblivion, 'mid thy ruins laid, Folds his dark ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... room, if we except the plain muslin curtains which shaded the windows, destitute of blinds. Taking it by itself, the room looked tolerably well, but when compared with the richly furnished apartments around it, it seemed meager and poor indeed; "but if they wanted anything better, they could get it themselves. They were welcome to make ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes

... Brookside Farm from his father, the equipment of farm implements which his father turned over to him was meager; indeed, the few that answered the name of implements were so old and had been so badly neglected, by being exposed to all kinds of weather, they ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson

... meager force these infatuated and misguided men pushed one hundred and thirty-two miles across a barren desert to the boundary line of Mexico at the Sonoita (Clover Creek), where there is a little stream of water struggling for existence in the sands. At the Sonoita the invaders were met by a proclamation ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston

... my Correspondents, who writes himself Mat Meager, complains, that whereas he constantly used to Breakfast with his Mistress upon Chocolate, going to wait upon her the first of May he found his usual Treat very much changed for the worse, and has been forced to feed ever since ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... journeyman had left, the meals had become more meager than ever. The masters had not had enough money in the spring to buy a pig. So there was no one to consume the scraps. Now they had to eat them all themselves. Master Andres was never at the table; he took scarcely any nourishment ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... meager and unimportant mail, wrote a few replies, and then turned to the pile of volunteer manuscripts which it was her duty ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... for a look around." Mr. Heatherbloom, having transferred their meager possessions to the tent, now addressed Miss Dalrymple, or Sonia Turgeinov, or an indefinite space between them. "Better stay right here while I'm gone." His tones had a firm accent. "Sorry there are only biscuits for breakfast, but perhaps there'll be better fare before long. If ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... landlords holding similar property. Unless civic responsibility develops beyond this comparatively helpless position, no such improvement of the situation as may lead to dramatic growth may result from this foundation. At the same time, even this meager measure of civic control of the dramatic situation has bettered Northampton's chances in the matter of drama. It has shielded the town from utter helplessness against dramatic deterioration through receiving whatever ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various

... six state prisons, in which were to be confined those disaffected persons who were too powerful to be left at liberty, but whose trials in open court would have revealed troublesome facts. The censorship of the press was likewise reestablished with iron rigidity, and the publishers purchased the meager immunities they were permitted to enjoy by the payment of whatever pensions the Emperor chose to grant to needy men of letters. Chenier the poet, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the author of "Paul and Virginia," and others enjoyed, in addition to decorations of the Legion of Honor, substantial incomes ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... as being quite wealthy and aristocratic by those who saw nothing of their inner life—who knew nothing of the many shifts and turns in the kitchen to save money for the decoration of the parlors, or of the frequent meager meals eaten from the pantry shelf, in order to make amends for the numerous dinner and evening parties which Eugenia and Alice insisted upon giving, and which their frequent visits to their friends rendered necessary. Extensive servant-hire was of course too expensive, and, as both Eugenia ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes

... its slow march again. It was a one-horse express-cart, belonging, as I afterwards learned, to a compatriot of Korwsky the tailor. This man, Simon Karlin, earned a meager living for himself and his family by miscellaneous delivery in his neighborhood; but now he was so fascinated with Carpenter that he had dropped everything in order to carry the prophet about. I mention it, because next day in the newspapers ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair

... He was all that was dirty, and mean, and contemptible, and cowardly in the eyes of a brave man, and yet, notwithstanding all this, Billy Byrne was no coward. He was what he was because of training and environment. He knew no other methods; no other code. Whatever the meager ethics of his kind he would have lived up to them to the death. He never had squealed on a pal, and he never had left a wounded friend to fall into the hands of ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... with only my meager salary, to collect which I have to get the curate's approval and make a trip to the capital of the province, what could I do against him, the foremost religious and political power in the town, backed up by his Order, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... limit. Rushing to the telephone, she called a cab and prepared to go forth on her difficult quest; but first, while she was putting on her hat and coat, she insisted that her sister, Mary Anthony, should start the fund by contributing one thousand dollars from her meager savings, and this Miss Mary did. "Aunt Susan" made every second count that day, and by half after three o'clock she had secured the necessary pledges. Several of the trustees of the university, however, had not ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... nationality, language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... over-sensitive about one's poverty. If Peter was saving his money surely that was excuse enough. He had a right to live as he pleased. Furthermore what possible difference could it make in their friendship? Nat himself lived simply but very nicely on the meager salary that he earned. He and his mother rented two tiny bedrooms, a sunny little living-room, and a microscopic kitchen in a part of the town which, to be sure, was cheap and ugly; but Mrs. Jackson, Peter soon found, was ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett

... in them. In time he wrote them all down and made a book of them, which it is said was printed by John Worthington & Son in the Strand, London, in 1712, under the name of "Ye Melodious Rhymes of Mother Goose." But even this story of Martha Gooch is based upon very meager and unsatisfactory evidence. ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum

... because every side-show of the carnival company had insisted on occupying space around the court-house, and because this space was meager, that the country folk and excursionists and townsmen showed in such compressed numbers at every turn. In reality, however, they were by no means countless; and if Robert's eagle glance continued to travel from face to ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... then, must be got out of the rather meager piece of information that there is a red counter in the xy'-Square. Hence our Conclusion is "some x are y' ", i.e. "some new Cakes are not-nice (Cakes)": or, if you prefer to take y' as your Subject, "some not-nice Cakes are new (Cakes)"; ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll

... was there at all Of thee, or who to councell thee did call; The subiect whereupon these lines I spend For thee was most vnfit, her timelesse end Too soone thou wroughtst, too neere her thou didst stand; Thou shouldst haue lent thy leane and meager hand To those who oft the help thereof beseech, And can be cured by no other Leech. In this wide world how many thousands be, That hauing past fourescore, doe call for thee. 10 The wretched debtor in the Iayle that lies, Yet cannot this his Creditor suffice Doth woe thee oft ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... there was a flare of mirth hidden within its velvet duskiness. And there was only one way to deal with such shallowness—that was with firm and unmistakable severity. He leaned forward and pounded one meager knee for emphasis as ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... so than I could find any justification for in the meager facts and surmises he had ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... thorn in the side of the enemy. And since he did not know who was the enemy, or where he was, nor why he was an enemy, nor when he would attack, he proposed to find out these things for himself preparatory to making the said enemy as uncomfortable as his meager resources would permit, when eked out by an honest ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... itself master of the situation; it is the small capitalist and the small landholder that would suffer," etc. Should be, "The large capitalist ... himself," etc. Again: "The small farmer would ... be despoiled ... of the meager profit which strenuous labor had conquered from the reluctant soil." Not only are the epithets in italics superfluous, and consequently weakening in their effect, but idiom does not permit strenuous ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... preliminary verification of the previous results, I was convinced that to pass from these comparatively meager statistics, gathered under limited conditions in a very special case, to the general statement that the optical illusion is reversed in the field of touch, is an altogether unwarranted procedure. When one reads the summarized conclusions of these previous investigators, one finds ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... next morning he overhauled his suit and patched it. He got fresh oxygen and bought a meager supply of food. He had one more good meal and started out south again with the single stone in ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis

... hunger also, turning its back upon the meager home and heightened by the monotony and semi-independence of early toil, takes to the street. The quest is quickly commercialized and debauched by the public dance halls which are controlled by the ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... with an almost commercial prudence. However, this examination was favorable to him, for when he had finished his meager meal she licked his boots with her powerful rough tongue, brushing off with marvelous skill the dust gathered in ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac

... Mayberry, who went calmly on attending to the needs of a fresh hatching of young chickens. Mrs. Peavey lived next door to the Doctor's house and the stone wall that separated the two families was not in any way a barrier to her frequent neighborly and critical visitations. She was meager of stature and soul, and the victim of a devouring fire of curiosity which literally licked up the fagots of human events that came in her way. She was the fly that kicked perpetually in Mother Mayberry's cruse of placid ointment, but received as full a mead of that ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... waked, ate a meager breakfast, and hit the trail up the mountain. We knew the general range of our cougar. It is necessary in all his tracking to get in the field while the dew is on the ground and before the sun dissipates it, also before the goats obliterate ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... on the bed was breathing heavily, his lips moving at every breath in a way to form a grimace. He made in this condition the whole room as tawdry as a tavern tap. And at the feet of this thing he was tossing his meager store of ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... each two pairs of pants, one coat, one hat and one pair of coarse shoes. These shoes before being worn had to be greased with tallow, with a little tar in it. It was always a happy time when the men got these winter goods—it brought many a smile to their faces, though the supply was meager and the articles of the cheapest. The women's dresses for winter were made of the heavier wool-cloth used for the men. They also had one pair of shoes each and a turban. The women who could utilize old clothes, made for themselves what were called pantalets. They had no stockings or undergarments ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes

... endurance. It is doubtful if the world ever can run along without the work of women but the time will surely come when society will be so constituted that no woman in the first flush of her youth will be forced to squander it on the meager temporary reward, and forfeit her birthright. If she wants to, well and good. No one need be deeply concerned for those that launch out into life because they like it. Women in civilized countries are at ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... toward the sentries, a white-burnoosed figure approached the shadows at one end of the hut. The meager intellect of the creature denied it the advantage it might have taken of its disguise. Where it could have walked boldly to the very sides of the sentries, it chose rather to sneak upon them, ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... own morbid, fantastic tales. His career leaves a painful sense of incompleteness and loss. With greater self-discipline, how much more he might have accomplished for himself and for others! Gifted, self-willed, proud, passionate, with meager moral sense, he forfeited success by his perversity and his vices. From his own character and experience he drew the unhealthy and pessimistic views to which he has given expression in the maddening poem, The Conqueror ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... account of the Jewish spiritual movement at a time of great spiritual awakening is meager, the picture of Herod's great buildings, despite occasional confusion and vagueness, is full and valuable. He gives us an excellent description of Caesarea and Sebaste, the two cities which the king established as a compliment to the Roman Emperor, and an ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... John Merrick's only brother, was endowed with a mediocre mind and a towering ambition. When left a widow with an only daughter she had schemed and contrived in endless ways to maintain an appearance of competency on a meager income. Finally she divided her capital, derived from her husband's life insurance, into three equal parts, which she determined to squander in three years in an attempt to hoodwink the world with the belief that ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne

... proposed Memphis and El Paso Railroad. In my opinion, however, no one who knew Baron Boilleau well ever doubted his integrity. He was a man of decidedly literary tastes and, like many persons of that character, possessed but meager knowledge of business. It seems that General Fremont had obtained from the Legislature of Texas a grant of state lands in the interests of the railroad just referred to, which was to be a portion of a projected transcontinental line from Norfolk, Virginia, to San Diego and ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur



Words linked to "Meager" :   deficient, scarce, insufficient, minimal, measly, minimum, stingy, exiguous, sufficiency, hardscrabble, adequacy, bare, ample, paltry, spare, hand-to-mouth, miserable, scanty



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com