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More "Pitiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... above the level of a clown. The destinies of a nation might have rested in the hands that he turned only to selfish fantasy. The whole appearance of him, arresting and almost awe-inspiring as it undoubtedly was, had in it the repulsiveness of the unnatural—and, with that, all the tragedy of pitiful waste. ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... infantine tenderness, as you would suppose such a great-hearted, courageous soul would respect and care for them. He could not be so brave, generous, truth-telling as he is, were he not infinitely merciful, pitiful, and tender. He will give any man his purse—he can't help kindness and profusion. He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind; he admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no flattery, bears no rancour, disdains all disloyal ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gendarmes in brown. A general cry, as for justice, rose up; and one old ragged woman came forward and burst through the throng, howling, and flinging about her lean arms, and baring her old shrunken breast. I never saw a finer action of tragic woo, or heard sounds more pitiful than those old passionate groans of hers. What was your prayer, poor old wretched soul? The gendarmes hemmed her round, and hustled her away, but rather kindly. The Padishah went on quite impassible—the picture ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... relations to Roger, oppressed with shame and complicity in conduct which appeared to her deceitful, yet willing to bear all and brave all, if she could once set Cynthia in a straight path—in a clear space, and almost more pitiful to her friend's great distress and possible disgrace, than able to give her that love which involves perfect sympathy, Molly set out on her walk towards the appointed place. It was a cloudy blustering day, and the noise of the blowing wind among the nearly leafless branches of the great trees ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the stars, his face, with its closed eyes, shone with an expression of divine sweetness, and his long, curling, blond locks seemed to form a halo about his brow. But his little child's feet, made blue by the cold of this bitter December night, were pitiful to see! ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... and I'm considering it. If it only weren't for leaving father and mother again—but I do love the babies and the little children. I want to gather them all and do so many things for them. You know they are all God's babies, and it seems pitiful for them to have to be in such a dreadful world as some ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... little or nothing of the trinket. As she had scoffed at its purpose, when Rose respected it, so she brushed it aside as of no importance when she emptied the pitiful pittance of her forsaken companion into her own pocketbook, when forced to use the funds ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... became terrific. I attempted to steady him by an exertion of strength—I spoke kindly to him, but he writhed in my grasp like an adder, and as an adder was deaf; grief and fear had horrible possession. Myself, almost in a state of desperation—for the sight was pitiful. I at last endeavoured to awe him into a momentary quiescence, and strongly bade him at last to die like a man; but the word "Death" had to him only the effect it may be supposed to have upon a mere animal nature ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... of a Belgian soldier, who sat on the edge of his bed waiting to be washed. He must have been really the most cheerful and (comparatively) uninjured figure in the whole crowd, but he seemed the most pitiful, because of the sheer human insistence of his ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... she heard a great stagger behind her, and a pitiful moan, and Sir Charles fell heavily, striking his head against the edge of the sofa. She looked round—as she knelt, and saw him, black in the face, rolling his eyeballs fearfully, while his teeth gnashed awfully, and a little jet of foam flew ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... enough for me," replied Carrie firmly, and passing over my clever argument with a dignified silence; "it is the drudgery of mere ornamentation that I hate. I will do my best for those dreadful children, Esther. Are they not pitiful little overdressed creatures? And I will try and please their mother though I have not a thought in common with her. And when I have finished my ornamental brick-making—told my tales of the bricks——" here she paused, and looked at ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... abject remorse was pitiful. And so, little by little, a great nature was purged; his spirit was humbled by successive and crushing defeats. At first the animal rebound was sufficient to set him on his feet unashamed. But during the fourth year after his coming of age, an ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them that will of themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered; that is villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... children were born to the couple. But it was one of the most sad, pitiful sights in the world to see Sandy's patient, sad-eyed wife leading him home from the tavern, tottering, reeling, helpless, sodden. Pitiful indeed! Pitiful even from the outside; but if one could only have looked through that outer husk of visible life, and have beheld ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Huayna Capac, named for the first Inca, Manco Ccapac, the founder of the dynasty, was selected as the most acceptable figurehead. He was a young man of ability and spirit. His induction into office in 1534 with appropriate ceremonies, the barbaric splendor of which only made the farce the more pitiful, did little to gratify his natural ambition. As might have been foreseen, he chafed under restraint, escaped as soon as possible from his attentive guardians, and raised an army of faithful Quichuas. There followed the siege of Cuzco, ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... looked into the street, and with his three best nobles, Sir Kay, Sir Bedevere and Sir Baudwin, he watched the rich cavalcades of his lords pass out of the town. Suddenly, as he stood there, a little page-boy, fair of face but for the pitiful sorrow and gauntness upon it, dashed from the throng of a lord's retinue which was passing and threw himself along the ground, his hands clutching the ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... fifty years since. He wrote books; books have done a great deal of harm before now; but read his books—read and ponder. The fellow has the insolence to tell the proconsul that he and the whole government, the whole city and province, the whole Roman world, the emperors, all but the pitiful clique to which he belongs, are destined, after death, to flames for ever and ever. There's loyalty! but the absurdity is greater than the malevolence. Rightly are the fellows called atheists and men-haters. Our soldiers, our statesmen, our magistrates, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... sympathized with his feelings. The poor negro murmured and groaned in a manner that would have enlisted the feelings of a Patagonian; and in this way he continued until about three o'clock in the morning, when his moaning became so loud and pitiful, that the officer of the guard came to the door with an attendant, and unbolting it, entered with a lantern in his hand. He held the light toward his face, and inquired what he was making such a noise about? "Oh! good massa, good ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... sheep, and the joy there is in heaven over the sinner that repenteth. Surely the eternal love she believed in through all the sadness of her lot, would not leave her child to wander farther and farther into the wilderness till here was no turning—the child so lovely, so pitiful to others, so good, till she was goaded into sin by woman's bitterest sorrows! Mrs. Raynor had her faith and her spiritual comforts, though she was not in the least evangelical and knew nothing of doctrinal zeal. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... giving me something to think about." He looked gratified, made some pleasant remark, and after talking a while longer, said good-night again and rode off. While undressing, Miriam and I spoke of nothing else. And when I lay down, and looked in my own heart and saw my shocking ignorance and pitiful inferiority so painfully evident even to my own eyes, I actually cried. Why was I denied the education that would enable me to be the equal of such a man as Colonel Breaux and the others? He says the woman's mind is the same as ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... labouring under the ambiguity of a word, apparently in hopeless eclipse for centuries. Shall I therefore despise it? Before I have time to do so, the power and the light which is thus shut out from the world by so pitiful a cause, is revealed in all its glory. I see this same intelligence forcing its way through a thousand hostile appearances, resisting innumerable obstacles pressing on all sides around it, overcoming deep illusions, and inveterate opinions, almost as firmly ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... which pass for such, in what is called History. The horn lantern of the biographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled, from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to us his pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and of the conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light upon contemporaneous activities; what seemed before half fabulous, rises up in distinct and full proportions; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... done: "Certainly! Whatever flies I shoot on the wing!" But at once after this the difference between the two is manifest. To both whole regions of emotion are unknown, but certain emotions which are outside the nature of one, are potentially the very strongest in the other. Siegfried is not pitiful. The strong, radiant being is incomplete on that side, so that the Christian heart winces a little, here and there, at the bright resoluteness with which he pursues his course when it involves, for instance, death to ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... what a pitiful countenance you put on! Be merry, Gudmund! Be merry! Aye, aye, it comes easy to you, well I wot. [Laughing, to the GUESTS.] He has seen the huldra to-night. She would fain have tempted him; but Gudmund is a faithful swain. ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... spakin' to you," said Naggeneen; "it was you that spoke to me. You called me, and here I am to the fore, though I don't belong to your pitiful little thribe, and I needn't come when you call, if ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... loved him, I adored him. To the end of my days I could have gone on loving him in spite of the cruel return he gave for my love and loyalty. I shall not attempt to tell you of the countless lapses of fidelity on his part. You would not believe me. But he always came back to me with the pitiful love he had for me, and I forgave him his transgressions. These things you know. He confessed many things to you, Mr. Wrandall. He humbled himself to me. Perhaps you will recall that I never complained to you of ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... than drawing. That tiny house in Riverton represented all that was left of the once-great Champneys holdings, and the little widow was hard put to it to keep even that. Before he was seven Peter knew all those pitiful subterfuges wherewith genteel poverty tries to save its face; he had to watch his mother, who wasn't robust, fight that bitter and losing fight which women of her sort wage with evil circumstances. Peter wore shoes only from the middle of November ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... than they had dreamed between this home and the bare tenements they had left that morning, where the children were crying for bread and the wife shivering with cold. Because they loved their own their anger burned the fiercer; and for love of their pitiful scrawny babies that flower-like child in the doorway was hated with all the vehemence of their untamed natures. Their every breath cried out for vengeance, and with the brute instinct they sought to hurt the man through his child, because ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... will find nothing but foolish buffooneries badly put together. In one of these comic operas he makes use of slander against King Theodore and the Venetian Republic, which he turns into ridicule by means of pitiful lies. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... slightest stress, the last least bit of cohesion flits away, and each idea flies apart from its fellows, while all clamour that he do this thing, or think this thing, in the ancient and time-honoured way. He is only a clay-born; so he bends his neck. He knows further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless majority, and that he may do nothing which they do ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... and fathers but now they are all going together. Everything is in a critical condition. There is not much truth in the land. All human affection is gone. There is mighty little respect. The way some people carry on is pitiful." ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... of priests or children meeting them playing by a stream, and taunting them with future damnation, which threat never failed to turn the joyful music into pitiful wails. Often priest or children, discovering their mistake, and touched by the agony of their victims, would hasten back to the stream and assure the green-toothed water sprites of future redemption, when they invariably ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... would have no fear; they would laugh, and would openly march to the church door, in the face of every smile and every word. I have read about it in books, and I have seen it for myself. That is a pitiful love which chooses a secret course. Love naturally begins in secresy because it begins in shyness; but it must live openly because it lives in joy. It is as when the leaves are changing; that which is to grow cannot ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Big Tom's turn. And he would tell of a home bereft, of an old man's pitiful grief (oh, dear, loving Grandpa!), and of two broken-hearted ladies. Doubtless the longshoreman would touch also upon the fact that he was considerably out of pocket, but ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... him, he will fold my letter with the envelope inside, and indorse it with my name and the date of its arrival," the young man would say, "and call everybody in the house to witness that it had not moved him to one softening recollection or one pitiful thought. He will stick to his resolution to his dying day. I dare say, if the truth was known, he is glad that his only son has offended him and given him the opportunity of parading ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... neatest of all. And here I was introduced to Sister, capable, strong, gentle-eyed, who told me something of her work—how many came to her with wounds of soul as well as body; of griefs endured and wrongs suffered by reason of pitiful lack of knowledge; of how she was teaching them care and cleanliness of minds as well as bodies, which is surely the most blessed heritage the unborn generations may inherit. She told me of the patient bravery ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh; and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... their protection, and wanted to lead me forth out of the press; but the crowd, which had at first been scattered over the sidewalk, now became disorderly, and hustled me. All stared at me and begged; and each face was more pitiful and suffering and humble than the last. I distributed all that I had with me. I had not much money, something like twenty rubles; and in company with the crowd, I entered the Lyapinsky lodging-house. This house is huge. It consists of four sections. In the upper stories are ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... said that his father stimulated him with rich food and drink to coax him to work. He was very precocious, and really had unusual talents. His subjects were those of rustic life, and his pictures contain animals wonderfully well painted, but his pigs surpass all. His character was pitiful; he was simply, at his best, a mere machine to make pictures. As for goodness, truth, or nobleness of any sort, there is not a syllable recorded in his favor. Strange to say, the pictures of his best time are masterpieces in their way, and have ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... guards, and the machine itself, which was very beautiful, was all that was worth seeing. The rockets, and whatever was thrown up into the air, succeeded mighty well; but the wheels, and all that was to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted, with no changes of coloured fires and shapes: the illumination was mean, and lighted so slowly that scarce anybody had patience to wait the finishing; and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Blake, in her agitation probably confounding the coroner with the chief justice, "it was just pitiful to see the creature; I am sure his ways got ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... Antony! Thou bravest soldier, and thou best of friends! Bounteous as nature; next to nature's God! Couldst thou but make new worlds, so wouldst thou give them, As bounty were thy being! rough in battle, As the first Romans when they went to war; Yet after victory more pitiful Than all their praying virgins ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people was deeply wounded by Alexander's refusal to aid the Greeks in their struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert. Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... bear out his argument. That these books show that there have been advocates of militarism in England is undoubtedly true. The present war illustrates that there was need of such literature, for a nation which faced so great a trial as the present, with a standing army that was pitiful in comparison with that of Germany and without any involuntary service law, certainly had need of some literary stimulus to self-preparation. No one quarrels with Bernhardi in his discussions of the problems of war as such. It is only when ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... aching head was now bowed on the desk before her, and her sobs were so pitiful, even the most thoughtless girl in the room was silent and sad to see her ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... face had been very pitiful and pleading, brightened up at this, and ran toward the house, while old Morgenstern turned and favoured Dyke ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partly to have the satisfaction of distinguishing and of showing it to be a mistake. Then, he could not quote Goethe without apologising for the warmth of that consummate artist's expressions and explaining some of them away. Again, he was pitiful or disdainful, or both, of Scott's estimate; and he did not care to discuss the sentiment which made that great and good man think Cain and the Giaour fit stuff for family reading on a Sunday after prayers, though as Mr. Ruskin has ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... the spirit of the command, "Be pitiful, be courteous." The graciousness of her spirit always reminded me of Christ. She did not seem to understand ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... now member of Parliament, was there, and Sergeant Parry, and Edward Miall, and Henry Vincent, and a number of others. The Chartists arranged for a convention in London, and I was sent as a member. The meeting cut but a pitiful figure. It soon got into unspeakable disorder. The second day the question was, "What means should we recommend our constituents to use in order to obtain the reforms they desired?" I, extravagant as I had shown myself on many points, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... answer advertisements. Any bad person can say what they choose in an advertisement. If that woman had advertised, she would have described Helene. And there was no Helene." One of the shuddering catches of her breath broke in here. After it, she said, with a pitiful girlishness of regret: "I—I could SEE Helene. I have known so few people well enough to love them. No girls at all. I though—perhaps—we should begin to LOVE each other. I can't bear to think of that—that she never ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Hardy, for example, submitted a humorous poem on how the grapes disappeared from his stone wall,—a poem so amusing and so good-natured yet withal containing such a pitiful little refrain of disappointment that the seniors at once took it upon themselves to see that no more of Lemuel's grapes ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... satisfaction to his friend; faith requires that he should seek to be justified from his sins through the power of Christ's Passion which operates in the sacraments of the Church; and well-ordered pity necessitates that man should succor himself by repenting of the pitiful condition into which sin has brought him, according to Prov. 14:34: "Sin maketh nations miserable"; wherefore it is written (Ecclus. 30:24): "Have pity on thy ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... She poured out the tea, thinking all the while of the sick man lying on his poor narrow bed in the corner of the great studio. It was shameful that he should die; tears rose to her eyes, and she had to walk across the room to hide them. It was a pitiful story. He was dying for her, and she wasn't worth it. She hadn't much heart; she knew it, perhaps one of these days she would meet some one who would make her feel. She hoped so, she wanted to feel. She wanted ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... As the moment draws near when the visitor feels that he is fairly entitled to go away he rises and says abruptly, "Well, I think I..." Then the people say, "Oh, must you go now? Surely it's early yet!" and a pitiful ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... good heart, dear maid!" said Cicely encouragingly. "May be it shall be better than we might fear. 'The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.'" ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... guarantee of good breeding, and these were poor Miss Nibbs' only titles to it. I will admit that, in my fretted mood, I saw her at her worst. Not a wrinkle of her ill-fitting bodice escaped me, not a movement of her ungainly form passed unnoticed, I was dissecting her to a pitiful disadvantage, following up each new discovery with a moral of my own when a half-subdued voice whispered ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... town of Cattaro, where was the station for Marechiaro. For a moment Maurice felt a pang of self-contempt, and of something more, of something that was tender, pitiful even, as he thought of Hermione's expectation disappointed. But it died away, or he thrust it away. The long street was full of people, either preparing to start for the fair themselves or standing ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... boy," the doctor said, with an impatience at once angry and pitiful, "all that has less than nothing ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... left the chamber, the countess, who had been conveyed out of the room, met us, and screaming out in the most pitiful manner upon seeing her husband with his hands tied behind his back like a thief or robber, flew to embrace him, and hanging on his neck, begged, with a flood of tears, we would be so merciful as to put an end to her life, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... that we jostle a brother. Bearing his load on the rough road of life? Is it worth while that we jeer at each other In blackness of heart that we war to the knife? God pity us all in our pitiful strife. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... scare off swine and dogs, and let not such an one as thou be lord over strangers and beggars, pitiful as thou art, lest haply some worse ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... of their father there is never the slightest word of complaint; on the lips of the mother there are these admirable words, which the children in the schools will repeat later on.... Madame de Castelnau was in a little village when her third son was killed. The cure of the village had the pitiful task of telling the already mourning mother of this new blow that had struck her. The cure found Madame de Castelnau, and, in the presence of her great sorrow, he hesitated ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... the human mind is evidenced in the instance of attributing a merit to belief, which has come at last to be stiled a virtue, and is dignified by the name of faith, that most pitiful of all human qualities. When the apostle spoke of faith, hope and charity, he might as well have exclaimed the least of the three is faith, as the ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold, brought little Ned back by main force,—for he was a rough man even in his tenderness,—and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee, pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful sight than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old and experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all the characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many forefathers, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... before her she could see the inherited results of fruitless labor—and more pitiful yet in the bent shoulders of the older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon be permanent. And as these things came to her, she clasped the poor wondering things to her side with a convulsive wish to make life ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... discussed in the chapter on stitches, and I repeat that there is nothing new in the treatment of solid embroideries, (lace stitches having been the only innovation of the last 400 years), though many of the ancient stitches have lost their distinctiveness, and fallen into a pitiful style by gradual descent which reached its lowest point in the early part of this century, as is shown by the robes embroidered for the coronation of Charles X. in the museum of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Assyria, which now began to contend in earnest for the possession of Palestine. Several endeavours were made, even after the destruction of Samaria, to unite the energies of the Twelve Tribes, and thereby to secure the independence of the sacred territory a little longer. But a pitiful jealousy had succeeded to the aversion generated by a long course of hostile aggression; while the overwhelming hosts, which incessantly issued from the Euphrates and the Nile to select a field of battle ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... few yards beyond the surf boomed hollowly on the smooth, shady shore, littered now, I knew, by the pitiful spoils of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... quietly proceeded to take out his pipe, fill, and light it, keeping an eye on Tom, who now sat disconsolately across the branch, looking at the keeper—a pitiful sight for men and fishes. The more he thought of it ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... standing inside her own room, a slight pale woman with a sadly-bereaved face: her arms were stretched out above her as one in supplication. "False God!" she cried in a voice cold and bitter, in which there was no trace of tenderness or pitiful earnestness, "Thou hast made me a lie upon Thy cruel earth. Tribulation Thou hast given me; patience the world forced upon me; hope Thou ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... lie elsewhere, but love of the place itself and the desire to possess it. A great number of women marry solely to obtain this coveted possession. As for those who don't, the advertisement columns of the Church Times, the Christian World, and other papers tell a pitiful story of their need. Ladies 'by birth' (pathetic and foolish little phrase!) are willing to do almost anything in return for just a modest corner, a very subordinate place even in someone else's home. They will be housekeepers, ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... ditches; she made a posy of marshmallows, white mullein, asters and chrysanthemums; the flowers faded in her little hands and it was pitiful to see them when Honey-Bee crossed the old stone bridge. As she did not know what to do with them she decided to throw them into the water to refresh them, but finally she preferred to give them to the "Woman without ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... compelled to remain on duty over night, and at last the morning comes when you return to your home after one of these vigils to find yourself face to face with a horror which you knew existed, but which you had never before comprehended. Ah, it is pitiful; but listen. You find when you arrive, that all is excitement. The servants are running hither and thither; they whisper among themselves, and at first you can get no explanation from them. In vain you call for your sister. Frightened glances, sobs, and groans, ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... her bosom to stop its great heaving, and stood as one smitten by the sudden hearing of her sentence. The sight was pitiful, for her face scarcely changed; the anguish was expressionless. Rinaldo pointed sternly to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... How pitiful and mean must the brightest of earth's gay assemblages appear, to her who, day after day, has held converse with the souls of the departing, as they plumed their wings for the flight heavenward, and accompanying them ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... at last managed to say with cold distinctness. "You are an ass, a coward, a cur, a pitiful thing so low that spittle would be wasted on your face. In such matter Jake Oppenheimer is over-generous with you. As for me, without shame I tell you the only reason I do not spit upon you is that I cannot demean myself nor so degrade ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... pitiful excuses. 'Tis well known what offers I have had, and what fortunes I might have made with others, like a fool as I was, to throw away my youth and beauty upon you. I could have had a young handsome lord, that offered me my coach ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... headpiece of yours in order? See now what tricks you have played me—only think! But I am myself to blame, for being too tender-hearted, instead of having given you a good beating at first; and now I perceive that a pitiful doctor only makes the wound incurable. But you'll go on with your pranks until at last we come to a serious falling-out, and then there will be a long reckoning, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... country people, almost of any age, or young people almost of any condition, and you shall find that, though the name of God be frequently in their mouths, yet the notions they apply this name to are so odd, low, and pitiful, that nobody can imagine they were taught by a rational man; much less that they were characters written by the finger of God himself. Nor do I see how it derogates more from the goodness of God, that he has given us minds unfurnished ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... Lord Jesus will require it at their hands, and lake it as done to himself. Therefore, seeing it is the will of God, and our indispensable duty to one another, who are members of the church, let us put on bowels of mercies and kindness, Col. iii. 12, and be tender-hearted, pitiful, and courteous to each other, Eph. iv. ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... trudge through Albania, and so the Scotchman procured him a free passage to Corfu by steamer. He left us one morning, leading his son by the hand, and over his shoulder a sack containing his worldly possessions, a sorrowful, ludicrous, and pitiful picture. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... were cowards when they cried, "Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians." While a man is in that pitiful mood he cannot rise, he cannot serve God—for he must remain the slave of his own body, of which he is so mightily careful, the slave of his own fears, the slave of his own love of bodily comfort. Such a man does not dare serve God. He ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... most expressive exhibits, and I wish every one might visit it. At an altitude of about eleven thousand seven hundred feet we came to the last tree. It was ragged, and so small that you could have hidden it beneath a hat. It nestled up to a boulder, and appeared so cold and pitiful that Harriet wanted to know if it was lost. It certainly appeared as if it had been lost for a ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... adventures, from the fatal meeting with poor Peter Jensen in Singapore, right up to the present; I sang little chansons to him, and among these he had his favourites as well as those he disliked cordially. If he did not care for a song, he would set up a pitiful howl. I feel convinced that this constant communing aloud with my dog saved my reason. Bruno seemed always to be in such good spirits that I never dreamed of anything happening to him; and his quiet, sympathetic companionship was one of ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... attend! the customary patron of every lively lay; Go forth without delay Thy wonted annual way, To meet the ceremonious holy matron: Her grave procession gracing, Thine airy footsteps tracing With unlaborious, light, celestial motion; And here at thy devotion Behold thy faithful choir In pitiful attire: All overworn and ragged, This jerkin old and jagged, These buskins torn and burst, Though sufferers in the fray, May serve us at the worst To sport throughout the day; And then within the shades I spy some lovely maids With whom we romped and reveled, Dismantled and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... alone nothing can be accomplished; one thirsts for soul, spirit, and actual life. Ah! composing is a misery, and the pitiful children of my Muse appear to me often like foundlings in a hospital, wandering about only as Nos. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... It was pitiful to see the expression of her eyes as she looked in his face without a word. She was leaning back in the wooden arm-chair, one hand lying in her lap, the other hanging limply over the side of the chair. Her hair, which had been fastened in a coil at the back of ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... failure is in myself. My career should be the Church, my pursuit the cure of souls, and—and—this pitiful infirmity! How can I speak the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little god without a single apostle or a prophet—nobody," she wailed, "to spread the ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... devoted to Contemporary France, is a creation worthy, as some one has said, of the author of Tristram Shandy. One cannot forget that Anatole France spent his childhood among the bookshops on the South side of the Seine. We are conscious all the while in reading him of the wise, tender, pitiful detachment of a true scholar of the classics, contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life from a certain epicurean remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons and daughters of men, as if they were little children or ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... But she did not get very far, for the story she was reading told of a grandmother's death. Suddenly she cried aloud: "Oh, now grandmother is dead!" and wept in the most pitiful fashion. Whatever Heidi read always seemed real to her, and now she thought it was her own grandmother at home. Louder and louder she sobbed: "Now poor grandmother is dead and I can never see her any more; and she never got ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... stream, other ruins were found. It seems, then, that in the pueblo of Zuni we have left a pitiful remnant of a numerous people. When the Spaniards first appeared on the scene they were apparently prosperous. The rapid decrease of the Pueblo tribes was owing to several causes. In 1680 they made an attempt to throw off the Spanish yoke. At first this was ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... required by evolution and have so few words. Johnson's Eng. Dictionary had 58,000 words; modern Dictionaries over 300,000. The evidence points to the origin and unity of languages in the days of Noah, and proves the great antiquity of man an impossibility and his evolution a pitiful absurdity. ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... patched up matters remarkably well. The lady listened attentively, said she knew we were hungry the moment she saw us, that she had heard the soldiers were on short rations in consequence of the destruction of the railroad, and turning towards me she went on to say: 'There was such a pitiful, hungry look on this boy's face that it would have haunted me for a long time if I had let you go away without giving you a dinner. Many a hungry soldier,' she continued, 'both of the Northern and Southern army, has had something to eat at this table, and I expect ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... for this disorganization of our family life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where the first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World, while the second generation leads the life of the New. Nothing more pitiful could be written in the annals of the Jews; nothing more inevitable; nothing more hopeful. Hopeful, yes; alike for the Jew and for the country that has given him shelter. For Israel is not the only party that has put up a forfeit in this contest. The nations may well sit by and watch the struggle, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... he distinguished the form of his new shepherd—a collapsed heap prone upon the ground. Surrounding him were the sheep, a pitiful, huddled mass, bleating plaintively, with considerably more ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... at her hand with a bitter, pitiful smile. "I wear it in memory of that girl who died very young"—she pointed to the picture—"and to remind me not to care for anything too much lest it should prove to be a lie." She nodded softly to the picture. ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... solemn, hooded monk, with face concealed by his cowl, who passes down the castle's winding stair, telling his beads; they whisper, it may be, of a lady in white raiment, whose silken gown rustles as she walks. Or the tale, perhaps, is one of pitiful moans that on the still night air echo through some old building; or of the clank of chains, that comes ringing from the damp and noisome dungeons, causing the flesh of the ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... quiet and pretty that no one would have suspected her antecedents. At first she wanted sometimes to anticipate, but after three or four ineffectual attempts—on each of which occasions she told a most pitiful story—she gave it up and took her money regularly without a word. Once she came with a bad black eye, "which a boy had throwed a stone and hit her by mistake"; but on the whole she looked pretty much the same at the end of the three years ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... five o'clock winter and summer, because I'm used to it; and then I've got to, so's to get the work done, for I can't work fast with my rheumatics. It was hardly light enough yet for me to recognize her right away, and she did look so forlorn and pitiful-like walking there so early in the morning in the snow. It had snowed in the night, and it was the first we'd had this season. She didn't see me at first. She was walking slow,—real slow and lingering-like,—like them poor things do. I was standing at the ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... found that father and mother could not save me from punishment, as they themselves had to submit to the same treatment, I concluded to appeal to the sympathy of the groom, who seemed to have full control over me; but my pitiful cries never touched his sympathy, for things seemed to grow worse rather than better; so I made up my mind to stem the ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... crazy. I 've seen that woman as sensible and as shrewd as any sane woman who ever drew breath. Then again, I 've seen her when I would n't get within fifty miles of her. Sometimes she 's pitiful to me; and then again I 've got to remember the fact that she 's a dangerous woman. Goodness only knows what would happen to a person who fell into her clutches when she 's got one ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... not. I swear it. It is finished. All that is over.... I don't know how I shall ever begin again. Perhaps I shall not.... All last night I was struggling to get away from it, to avoid facing it.... They're all mean and ignoble and pitiful; brain-sick most of them; and not fit to live in the same world as you. They're not fit to be exhibited on the public stage, these poor nervous little modern people with their dried instincts and their withered thoughts, clever and helpless, rotting in inaction.... No. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... were leading, and passed through the ancient ruins and the several lines of enemy trenches; those trenches held so stubbornly by the Turk, empty now, save for groups of dead bodies and a few of unhappy wounded who had not been moved during the night. Surely the world offers no scene more pitiful than that of a battlefield after action. I know, by personal experience, the suffering entailed in lying day and night untended with broken limbs, the utter weariness from wounds, and the exhaustion after conflict, ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... Asquiths have— I should by now be a well-educated woman; but this I never had. I am not at all dull, and never stale, but I don't seem to be able to grind at uncongenial things. I have a good memory for books and conversations, but bad for poetry and dates; wonderful for faces and pitiful for names. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... estimate of men often remains unchanged long after the judgment upon the events which gave them celebrity is completely reversed. But history, in the long run, weighs with even scales; and the verdict on Madison's character usually comes with that pitiful recommendation to mercy from a jury loath to condemn. Admiration for his great services in the Constitutional Convention and after it, when its work was presented to the people for their approval, has never been withheld; upon his official integrity ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... through adversities into peace. His means of grace are processes, sometimes gentle, sometimes severe; and our folly is to assume that we have reached His ends when we are only on the way to them. "The end of the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy." "Be patient, therefore," until it shall be spoken of thee and me, "And God ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... of Pax, as he poked Phil in the ribs and winked, that the latter burst into laughter, in which however he was not joined by his companion, who with the goblet in one hand and the other thrust into his pocket, stood regarding his new friend with a pitiful expression till he recovered, and then led him off to a confabulation ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... him everything! Not if I can help it. I'll expose him. I will indeed. Such a pitiful rascal as ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... birdie! How pitiful he looks, and how glad he must be to see some one coming to help him! I'll take him up gently, and carry him home to mother. Don't be frightened, dear, I'm your friend;' and Tilly knelt down in the snow, stretching her hand to the bird, with the tenderest ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... he—Big Bill Dunlavey—said about my brother?" she questioned, her eyes full and moist. Hollis nodded and she continued rapidly, her voice quavering: "Well, he told the truth." Her voice trailed away into a pitiful wail, and she stepped over and leaned against the boulder, sobbing quietly into her hands. "That's why it hurts so," ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... can measure our power with theirs, and fight, not in vain? Why, even now the division is planning there, which will bring them to our feet. And what to us, Sir, were the hazards of one bloody encounter, to the pitiful details of this unhonored warfare?—We are wronged—we ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... Francette had lifted the heavy head with its dull eyes and pitiful hanging tongue, lifted it to her breast, weeping and smoothing the short ears deaf to her soft words, and sat rocking to and fro in an ecstasy of grief. Beyond SHE stood, that tall woman, stood silent and frowning, ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... my part, I am body and soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there is nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knowledge. It seems to me from my personal experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions, and more goodness and tenderheartedness than we read of in the moralists. People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me:—nay, have not the very critics tamed their beardom for me, and roared delicately as sucking doves, on behalf of me? I have no harm to say of your world, though I am ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... on a chair, putting on his pantaloons, can't put his foot where it ought to go, by any means, and bawls all over the house: 'It's an outrage! This is an abominable dive! I'll show you up! ... To-morrow I'll give you twenty-four hours to clear out! ... Do you know, this combination of pitiful helplessness with the threatening cries was so killing that even the gloomy Simeon started laughing ... Well, now, apropos of Simeon ... I say, that life dumfounds, with its wondrous muddle and farrago, makes one stand aghast. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts. It helped to sustain her; and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to bring it to the light of day and examine it. She had a pitiful bit of pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her that the journey of the day ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... choice. Do you want to lie rotting in the debtor's jail and beat hemp till you are bailed by the last trumpet? Would you toil with pick-axe and spade for a morsel of dry bread? or earn a pitiful alms by singing doleful ditties under people's windows? Or will you be sworn at the drumhead—and then comes the question, whether anybody would trust your hang-dog visages—and so under the splenetic humor of some ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... been filling mattresses with hay. Every fatigue party comes back from the hospital, their jackets bulging with hay for the horses. Two bales were condemned as too musty to put into the mattresses, and we were allowed to take them for the horses. They didn't leave a spear of it. Isn't it pitiful? Everything that the heart of man and woman can devise has been sent out for the "Tommies", but no one thinks of the poor horses. They get the worst of it all the time. Even now we blush to see the handful of hay that each ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... (The sword still lieth there!) He would have felt in every vein A lofty purpose thrill. If but his hand had drawn it (The sword still lieth there!) A kingly way he would have walked, Wherever he might fare. But no; he fled affrighted (Oh, pitiful the cost!) And then he knew; but lo! the way ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... These pitiful creatures arose from the subway at Fourteenth Street and took the world in their right hands. From this revolving orb, said they, they would squeeze a luncheon hour of exquisite satisfactions. They gazed sombrely at Union Square, and uttered curious reminiscences ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... It is pitiful to see such a dead place, trying to pretend it is alive. It is the same with Bruges, the great city of the past, and with many cities in Holland, in South Germany, the north of France, the Orient. Standing in the marketplace ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... letting her know, and would suddenly surprise her some day and make her half lose her wits with joy. But they did not come, nor write; and whatever was the reason, Ellen felt it was very sad, and sadder and sadder as the summer went on. Her own letters became pitiful in their supplications for letters; they had been very cheerful and filled with encouraging matter, and in ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... he said eloquently, "went together down the terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of the night, under one umbrella. And I said to myself as they went, dejected and pitiful, 'Well, that's the final exit ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... greet me when I came. No other household meant as much to me. No one understood more clearly than the Hernes the principles I stood for, and no one was more interested in my plans for uniting the scattered members of my family. Before I knew it I had told them all about my mother and her pitiful condition, and Katharine's expressive face clouded with sympathetic pain. "You'll work it out," she said, "I am sure of it," and her confident words were ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... but there was will behind the voice. His wasted face had a gentleness that was most moving to the father. He could not look at the pitiful wreck of his once proud and fearless boy without weeping, and being mindful of Harold's prejudice against sentiment, he left the room to regain his composure. To Mary Mr. Excell said: "I don't know you—but you are a noble woman. I give you a father's gratitude. Won't you tell ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... return of the party from the cinema, Mortimer John describes to Anthony the powers of a drug which induces the most vivid of dreams. He, John, had once been in Anthony's pitiful case, and through the services of this drug had achieved his quest of the ideal woman. Anthony, greatly intrigued, consents to swallow a sample of the potion. It is a simple narcotic, and under its influence ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... they capitulate now, it will no longer be the act of the Governor of Paris. How ingenious this would have been, if it had not been pitiful! ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... thou hast ta'ne an Oath, But such a rash one, that to keep it, were Worse than to swear it; call it back to thee; Such vows as those never ascend the Heaven; A tear or two will wash it quite away: Have mercy on my youth, my hopeful youth, If thou be pitiful, for (without boast) This Land was proud of me: what Lady was there That men call'd fair and vertuous in this Isle, That would have shun'd my love? It is in thee To make me hold this worth—Oh! we vain men That trust out ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great school of impressive ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... visitor, followed by others in swift succession, and in ever-increasing power. Every knock went to Minnie's heart. It excited an unlimited amount of sympathy for the one who had saved her life, and was now excluded from her door. But as the knocks grew violent and imperative, and Minnie grew sad and pitiful, the other ladies grew indignant. Lady Dalrymple was on the point of sending off for the police, and only Minnie's frantic entreaties prevented this. At last the door seemed almost beaten in, and their feelings underwent a change. They were convinced that he was mad, or else intoxicated. Of the madness ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... her little, bare, brown-eyed baby was pitiful." Alaire leaned forward with an earnest appeal in her face, ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... he reflected. Love was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he recalled the look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little thing. If only she'd had a chance!—Why wasn't he rich enough to help the ones who needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no one the wiser, and ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pipes and sat down to smoke. Whilst they were binding us, the chief came in, and taking his station in front of us, made a speech, during which he frequently pointed to his mouth, with the intention probably of intimating to us, that at present they had no intention of starving us. In this pitiful and agonizing position we remained for an hour, not knowing what was to be our fate. When I saw them put the ropes over the rafters, I concluded, of course, that their intention was to hang us, and never have ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... letter is chosen. Some common names are those of the hundred titles of God combined with the prefix abd or servant. Such are Abdul Aziz, servant of the all-honoured; Ghani, the everlasting; Karim, the gracious; Rahim, the pitiful; Rahman, the merciful; Razzak, the bread-giver; Sattar, the concealer; and so on, with the prefix Abdul, or servant of, in each case. Similarly Abdullah, or servant of God, was the name of Muhammad's father, and is a very favourite one. Other names end with Baksh or 'given by,' ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... the girl saw the two nearing each other. The former swore softly beneath his breath while he nervously fingered the pitiful weapon at his hip. The girl pressed her open palms to her cheeks as she leaned forward in stony-eyed, horror-stricken silence. While she had every confidence in the prowess of the godlike creature who thus dared brazenly to face the king of beasts, she had no false conception of ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... beasts, rose above every other sound. Polycarp did not heed it; a voice came to him from heaven, 'Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man;' and, nerved by what other Christians had also heard, he stood at last before Statius. Words, at first pitiful, greeted him: 'Have respect to thine age!—Swear by the genius of Caesar! Say, "Away with the atheists."' The Saint caught up the last word. He 'looked with solemn countenance upon that vast multitude of lawless heathen; and groaning and looking up to heaven, he said, 'Away ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... just time to re-load his revolvers before the surrounding bush burst into a perfect tempest of flame and lead, indicating that the Government troops must be present in force. One of the Sam-riek men, right at his elbow, uttered a pitiful cry, clutched frenziedly at his breast, from which the blood was spouting, and dropped to the ground, his chest torn to pieces by five charges of pot-leg, or stout nails, which had struck him at the same moment; while groans and screams from various parts of the ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... Pietro Varano—who was on his way to join his brother in Camerino in view of the revolt there—he had him strangled in the market-place. There is a story that, with life not yet extinct, the poor youth was carried into church by the pitiful crowd. But here a friar, discovering that he still lived, called in the soldiers and bade them finish him. This friar, going later through Cagli, was recognized, set upon by a mob, and torn to pieces—in ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... he arose and clothed himself; and looking out of the window he saw the streets filled with a great host of people in black, and the weeping and the mourning were pitiful to hear. Knights, with their armour craped, rode in great companies before; then came the men-at-arms with weapons reversed; then the ladies of the household, and after these the priests came, and in their midst was ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... surprising, seeing that the family lives in a single room, with only a screen to divide it for decency's sake. Already the coffin was standing in their midst—a plain but decent shell which had been bought ready-made. The child, they told me, had been a boy of nine, and full of promise. What a pitiful spectacle! Though not weeping, the mother, poor woman, looked broken with grief. After all, to have one burden the less on their shoulders may prove a relief, though there are still two children left—a babe at the breast and a little girl ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... countenance an expression mixed of astonishment, gratification, and confusion, very natural to a poor bhearer who had never before been taken by a Sahib in the very bosom of his family. There was something at once pitiful and comical in the subdued "fidget" with which, applying his joined palms to his forehead, and lowly louting, he made his most obsequious salaam ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... were laying in St. Mary's river when a cunna (canoe) came along side, and three or four black men crawled upon our deck and hid themselves down behind the boat's waist. They wanted to go away with us, telling a pitiful tale of oppression, but slavery was yet in vogue there, and so we forced them to go ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... and her hand went to her throat, as though she were choking, then she looked away, staring into the fire, whilst he watched her, waiting for her answer with almost pitiful anxiety. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... appear to like having to give pain to the young girl, but he frankly told her of the wound of the young man, who could be no other than Bernard Brandon, and the pitiful result. ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... the entire literary output of the classic civilization was contained in these collections. Unfortunately no traces of them remain. Accident and conquest caused their entire destruction. The earlier historians told a pitiful tale of the wanton destruction of the library by the Mohammedan conquerors who in their fanaticism destroyed as useless or harmful all works not devoted to the dissemination of their own doctrines. While it is probably true that the Mohammedans were responsible for a ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... pains to hide or to soften what repelled me in her. I had seen it before, and yet loved; to her it would seem strange that because a man saw, he should not love. I found myself sorry for her, with a new and pitiful grief, but passion did not rise in me. And concerning my pity I held my tongue; she would have only wonder and mockery for it. But I think she was vexed to see me so unmoved; it irks a woman to lose a man, however little she may have prized him when he was her own. Nor ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... (10)Take, my brethren, the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, for an example of affliction, and of patience. (11)Behold, we count those happy who endure. Ye heard of the patience of Job, and saw the end of the Lord[5:11]; that the Lord is very pitiful, and ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... these landlords, our rulers, talk, that the glorious green fields, the deep woods the everlasting hills, and the rivers that run among them, were made for the sole purpose of ministering to their greedy lusts and mean ambitions; that they may roll out amongst unrealities their pitiful mock lives, from their silk and lace cradles to their spangled coffins, studded with silver knobs, and lying coats of arms, reaping where they have not sown, and gathering where they have not strewed, making the omer small and the ephah great, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... was really pitiful," said Lucile, "and it made me so desperate to see all those thoughtless cruel boys following him, hooting at him, and laughing at him and calling poor old battered Bull all sorts of names. So I turned around ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... wits that came after him, wanted either the talents, the malignity, or the courage to follow his example, to imitate him in his daring personalities, or to adopt his merciless satyrical style. They followed his steps, only in his feeble, pitiful paths, and contented themselves with writing contemptible buffoon caricature parodies of the writings of the greatest men. The new comedy never could have raised its head, had the middle comedy continued to be supported by ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... swore softly, but sincerely. Somehow, the pitiful case of the girl who had written that letter with which he had fallen in love, had less and less of appeal to him as the days drifted by. And now, while the duty of which he had assured himself still impelled ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... And the pitiful face is shewn again For an instant ere they close; But it is not discovered to living men— Only to God and ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... immediately designated three young persons whose conduct had been irreproachable to an exceptional degree. He then applied a more delicate test. "Point out to me," said he, "the worst boy." All the children remained motionless, and made no sign; but one little urchin came forward, with a pitiful air, and said, in a very low tone, "It is me." Such were the public sentiment and sense of honor, even in a reform school. This frankness in the lad was followed by reformation; and he became ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... rope for belts, and raw-hide moccasins of their own manufacture in lieu of boots; covered with vermin, and carrying their whole kit in Federal haversacks, the ragged scarecrows who swarmed through the streets of Frederick presented a pitiful contrast to the trim battalions which had hitherto held the Potomac. Their conduct indeed was exemplary. They had been warned that pillage and depredations would be severely dealt with, and all requisitions, even of fence-rails, were paid for on the spot. Still recruits were few. The warworn ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... but I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it? Everybody seems hitherto to have spared a man who ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... from them that we first learned the real horrors of war. Some had only one arm; others had lost a leg; still others were suffering from shell shock. Those who were suffering from shell shock were the most pitiful, as the least ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... straight love-making chapters made her sleepy, they bored her so. She had tried one or two, and she had found it impossible to concentrate her mind upon them. Instead, she had sat and planned what she would do with the money that was steadily accumulating in the bank; a pitiful little sum, to be sure, to those who count by the thousands, but cheering enough to Jean, who had never before had any ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinct ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... help her, then!" she said, scarcely controlling the alarm that brought a pitiful break ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... somebody posts back his Election Address with 'This is pitiful balderdash and most ungrammatical' written plainly at the bottom of it. What would be your feelings if you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... whispered Mark, excitedly. "The beasts! the wretches! the unmanly brutes! Oh, how can those poor blacks be such pitiful, miserable cowards, and not rise up and kill the villains who seize them and treat them ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... dived under the wheel. It was nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so; but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass, as if he had done something great. That girl couldn't seem to have enough of that pitiful 'hero' the rest of the trip; but little I cared; I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... boats are dangerous on their feast days, and no one can tell when they may go juramentadoing to celebrate the occasion. That is the only custom they could celebrate to-day. Look! [He pointed at the pitiful banana-trees.] There are no gifts to adorn them with, no turkeys to kill; and the soldiers' hearts are sad. But the Sabah evidently appreciated her capabilities, and doubtless before night she would again honor her country ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... telling him at the same time, that as these people had great power and authority, it might be of service to us hereafter. This Campbell very unwillingly did, and received from the father, not long after, a pitiful present, not a quarter part of the value of the rim of the watch. We understood afterwards that this had come to the governor's ears, who was highly offended at it, as thinking that if any thing of that sort had been to be had, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... regret that my Baptist brethren, Drs. Hayden and Cranfill, Burleson and Carroll, should have gotten into a spiteful and un-Christian snarl over so pitiful a thing as Baylor's $2,000 presidency—that they should give to the world such a flagrant imitation of a lot of cut-throat unregenerates out for the long green. If one-half that Hayden and Cranfill are saying about each other in ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... which Mirth can afford, The revel, the laugh and the jeer? Ah! here is a plentiful board, But the guests are all mute as their pitiful cheer, And none but the worm is a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... to ponder on! He would have been such a good man—so true to her in all those years! But they were gone, and he had not found her until his foot was on the edge of the grave—until he could hardly count on one year more of a pitiful artificial life, painted, bewigged, stuffed to the semblance of a man by a clever tailor—and she in the bloom of her glory beside him! What he would have given to have old Saracinesca's strength and fresh vitality—old Saracinesca whom ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... town singly and by twos and threes, until hundreds were there to await the morrow. Some few were very pitiful to behold, being feeble and infirm from age and disease, dressed in rags and tags, and presenting an appearance of great distress. But there were many more who were seemingly hearty and vigorous; and these were the lazy ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... great hall of the castle, before her judges. They read to her the articles which had been founded on her answers, and the Bishop previously represented to her "that these doctors were all churchmen, clerks, and well read in law, divine and human; that they were all tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed mildly, seeking neither vengeance nor corporal punishment, but solely wishing to enlighten her, and put her in the way of truth and of salvation; and that, as she was not sufficiently informed in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of a governor's playing such pitiful tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant boy! It was a habit he had acquired. He wish'd to please everybody; and, having little to give, he gave expectations. He was otherwise an ingenious, sensible ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... impossible to have told his mother that he had been with Kirsty Barclay, that he had run a race with her, and that she had left him alone at the foot of the Horn. That he could not be open with his mother, no one that knew her unreasoning and stormy temper would have wondered; but the pitiful boy, who did not like lying, actually congratulated himself that he had got through without telling a downright falsehood. It would not have bettered matters in the least had he disclosed to her the good ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... the reciprocal influence of the naval and merchant services. There was then nothing, in the economical conditions of the United States, to forbid a navy stronger than the Portuguese; yet the consul, in his pitiful appeal to the Portuguese Court, had to write: "My countrymen have been led into their present embarrassment by confiding in the friendship, power, and protection of her Most Faithful Majesty," ... ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Mr. Lascelles' plantation?" asked he, lifting his eyes up with an expression so pitiful that Dan could ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... of the sorrows of the children of the mines and mills in those dismal days, and it must be said for the great heart of England that its beat was still true. The coal- owners made the pitiful plea in extenuation of all the misery and indecency of the mines that without the labor of women and children the collieries must shut down, not only for lack of profit, but for the cogent reason that the flexible vertebra of childhood were especially adapted ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... man in America begins to compare with him," Francesca confessed sadly. "Isn't it pitiful that out of the millions of our own countrypeople we couldn't have found somebody that would do? What do you think now, Lord Ronald Macdonald, of these dangerous ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... touch of your old-time sarcasm in that remark," she said. "Yes, I am willing to continue the comedy. It seems the safest way to protect you—especially from General Marlanx. No one must ever know, Baldos; it would be absolutely pitiful. I am glad, oh, so glad, that you have known all the time. It relieves my ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a pitiful plight. I was weak from the effects of a fever, Gahra lame from the effects of an accident. My money was nearly all gone, my baggage had been lost by the upsetting of a canoe, and our worldly goods consisted of two sorry mules, our arms, the ragged clothes on our backs, ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... his loss; for his beautiful schooner was pierced in the middle by a sharp rock, and she hung, shaken by the waves that broke over her decks and gurgled in the hold. The rigging was torn, the cabin washed away, and the shore strewn with her doors, planks, beams and trade goods. It was a pitiful sight to see the handsome ship bending over like a fallen warrior, while the company's old yacht had weathered the ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... it not thus—not as you mean it. I knew not what I said. But it will indeed change all things for me if you do but come. Then I shall have some one to speak with—some one with whom to laugh at their pitiful Court mummery, their fiasco of dignity. You are not like these other beggarly Scots, my Lord ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... sordid, worn-out, again sat upon the throne, while the Great Man languished on a rock in the Atlantic. Fools that they had been, not to have hidden the little king of Rome as against this very dog! It was pitiful. He never saw a shower in June that he did not hail curses upon it. To have lost Waterloo for a bucketful of water! Thousand thunders! could he ever forget that terrible race back to Paris? Could he ever ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... the Greek Church as [Greek: Pantelee/mon], that is, the "all-pitiful;" and in Latin his name is spelled Pantaleymon and Pantaleemon. Hagiologists seem to have been puzzled, but the compiler of the Acta Sanctorum, for July 27, St. Pantaleon's Day in the Roman calendar (xxxiii. 397-426), ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... he's took up with that motto of his, he's settled down in the harness as steady as a ten-year-old horse. Now I notice if there's anything specially important to be done, Chicky's the one they pick out. There's something almost pitiful in the way he's been trying, when you recollect he has never had any raising, and has shifted for himself all his life. I don't really believe that it's to get the wheel that has made such a change in him ...
— The Quilt that Jack Built; How He Won the Bicycle • Annie Fellows Johnston
... began to consume those mountains with their trees and creepers and little plants, as also with their birds and deer and beasts of prey and reptiles. Soon the summit of that mountain presented a distressing and pitiful appearance, Inhabited by animals of diverse kinds which began to utter cries of woe and pain, the summit soon became bereft of every living creature. That fire of mighty flames, having consumed everything without leaving ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a responsive ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... book. It is not often that a reviewer has the chance of checking local colour with so little pains. And in the third place Mr. JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY informs me, on page 101, that his hero will "gaze one day upon rivers to which the Thames should seem little better than a pitiful rivulet." As Henry never gets further from his native Devon than London in the course of this novel I take it that this is a delicate allusion to the possibility of a sequel. I hope it is so, and that I shall hear of Henry in days to come, after a trip or two with RALEIGH or DRAKE, rebuilding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... Dick nodded Graham up beside him. At first bewilderment was all she betrayed, then her eyes focused first on Dick's face, then on Graham's, and, with recognition, her lips parted in a pitiful smile. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... forlornly out to sea and answered with a brief nod. Seemingly she had long since ceased to be tragic over her pitiful tragedy. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... was washing linen at the well-head, and Mme. Willemsens and the children sat in the summer-house, and there was not the faintest sound in those gardens gay with flowers. Unknown to Mme. Willemsens, all eyes grew pitiful at the sight of her, she was so good, so thoughtful, so dignified with those with whom she came ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... her mother heard her cries and moans—more pitiful, by far, than those wrung from her by bodily pain a year before; and, night after night, if her mother spoke to soothe, she proudly denied the existence of any pain but what was physical, and consequent upon ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... was easier for men to find a place for themselves in the world than for women, and the army or the Church rarely failed to furnish some sort of career for all those who were denied the rights and privileges of the firstborn. The lot of the sister, however, was pitiful in the extreme (unless it happened that the older brother was kind and considerate), for if she were in the way she could be bundled off to a cloister, there to spend her days in solitude, or she could be married against ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Mary, and thinking about her as I walked home, I perceived that her ability to be quiet, to subdue herself, to resist the temptation for a whole evening of drawing attention to herself by telling us what she was enduring, was heroism, and that my contrary tendency was pitiful vanity. I perceived that such virtues as patience and self-denial—which, clad in russet dress, I had often passed by unnoticed when I had found them amongst the poor or the humble—were more precious and more ennobling to their possessor than poetic yearnings, or the power to ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... the whole night around his quarters. All this was done by the advice of his officers, who were anxious to get under cover, and who alleged it was absurd to suppose that Cortes would venture to attack them with so pitiful a handful of men, and that he only advanced from ostentation, or to induce them to come to an agreement. On returning to quarters, Narvaez publickly offered a reward of two thousand crowns to whoever should kill Cortes or Sandoval; and he stationed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... of household, the duties to parents, visitors, children, and the rest; it is part of the education of life to fulfil all these duties well, delightfully, brilliantly, joyously, enthusiastically; these things are not interruptions to life, they are life itself. There was a pitiful magazine article written the other day by some lady complaining that social duties, the having to see her friends, her cook, her gardener, her dress-maker, etc., prevented her from reading Herbert Spencer, and developing her small fragment of soul. Social duties, rightly done, are one ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... return again to that soul depends upon His mere sovereign volition. He has bound himself by no promise to do so. He has established no uniform law of operation, in the case. It is true that He is very pitiful and of tender mercy, and waits and bears long with the sinner; and it is also true, that He is terribly severe and just, when He thinks it proper to be so, and says to those who have despised His Spirit: "Because I have called and ye refused, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... a pretty little Miss Chanced to be walking by; She stopp'd, and looking pitiful, She begg'd me not ...
— Phebe, the Blackberry Girl - Uncle Thomas's Stories for Good Children • Anonymous
... for you to come along," said the Arkansan, and we went two and two, he and Gholson, Harry and I. We reached camp at sundown, and stopped to feed and rest our horses and to catch an hour's sleep. Gholson's fatigue was pitiful, but he ate like a wolf, slept, and awoke with but little fever. The Colonel kept him under his eye, forcing on him the honors of his own board, bed and bottle, and ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... his predecessors, or to tradition. In his hands, at least, it has ceased to be tragedy, but is lowered into "a family picture," in the modern signification of the word. The effect attempted to be produced by the poverty of Electra is pitiful in the extreme; the poet has betrayed his secret in the complacent display which she makes of her misery. All the preparations for the crowning act are marked by levity, and a want of internal conviction: ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Presently the drama, always pitiful, increased in intensity. The old leech who had been her stay and helper died, and left her to face the danger alone. A month later Basterga discovered the secret and henceforth held it over her. From this time ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... left to your female subjects except tobacco? Nothing, except embroidery, knitting, and sewing, pitiful resources, which are more and more restricted by that barbarous ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... slowly raised her head and looked at me long and earnestly. She was very beautiful, like the Virgin of Beltraffio in the National Gallery,—more beautiful than I had supposed possible, her deep, passionate eyes very tender and pitiful in their pleading, beseeching glance. I hardly think I was frightened, or even startled, but lay looking steadily at her as she stood in the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... of Blood River Jack, he had seen no human being since the drive, and his frenzied desire for companionship would have been pitiful, ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... different. That was his salvation. He blurted out the whole pitiful story and threw himself on the mercy of Jesus. And what happened? That which always happens when men thus pray. "Immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand and caught him." And Peter, who had walked and had sunk, rose and walked again. And so ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... to you," said Naggeneen; "it was you that spoke to me. You called me, and here I am to the fore, though I don't belong to your pitiful little thribe, and I needn't come when you call, if I ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... fire. It was the moment when Abel Newt was stealing through his rooms, fastening doors and windows. Hope Wayne was pale and cold like a statue as she listened to the voice of Mrs. Simcoe, which had a wailing tone pitiful to hear. After a long silence she ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... A very paltry and pitiful intrigue at length settled the question between Townshend and Carteret. A marriage had been arranged between a niece, or so-called niece, of one of George's mistresses and the son of La Vrilliere, the French Secretary ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... on the depot platform of a tiny town farther down the line. He had been shabbier after three weeks in Johnny's camp, working on the airplane in hope of a free trip to the Coast. But his shabbiness now surpassed anything Johnny had known, because Bland had evidently made pitiful attempts to hide it. That, Johnny guessed, was because of ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... amused him. He had a passion for cruelty. I never knew it till I married him. I found out afterwards he had been the same even as a child. He loved torturing things." She paused, then added with a simplicity that was infinitely pitiful: "So you see, I had ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... had a brother that liked me." went on the pitiful little voice. "Tom Benson likes Charlie. He likes him an awful lot. And Charlie doesn't do nearly so many things as I do. I guess I oughtn't to tell, Tiger, but you and Tops wouldn't tell tales, so 'tisn't the same as tellin' father, or mother, or Auntie ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... scene had never before been witnessed in the Senate. Exclamations of mock surprise followed by fun-making questions and loud laughter added to the grotesque exhibition. It was so ludicrous as to become pitiful and painful. Although no particular harm was done to anybody, the Government for the moment ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... was open and the doctor, coming out on his front porch to look at the sky before retiring, heard Zip howling somewhere across the street. He was crying in such a pitiful, frightened manner that the doctor knew he must be fast somewhere or hurt so he could not get home. Consequently he hurried across the street to see where his pet was, with the worried ...
— Zip, the Adventures of a Frisky Fox Terrier • Frances Trego Montgomery
... you turned furniture remover? Are you proposing to pack me with the rest of our belongings?" she cried, lifting her chin about a quarter of an inch in feeble imitation of her old scornful tilt. It was very pitiful to see her do it, and Mr Carstairs' lip twitched again, and he turned and began talking to mother, leaving the coast clear for Will Dudley. He looked flushed, but his eyes were curiously ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I should play a very noble part in such a scheme as that. Dearly as I love you, Beatrice, I do not think I could consent to steal you away in such a pitiful and cowardly manner." ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... be led one day to the house where he had met with this sad mischance, and spoke to the master of the house, to whom he related his pitiful case, demanding, as was his right, that there should be granted to him such amends as his condition deserved, in order that ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are machines bereft of understanding and feeling, which perform their operations always in the same way, which learn ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... his club fee—to buy a draught of Forgetfulness—I said, 'Brother, take!' Did brawl break out in your jollities—were knives drawn—a throat in danger—this right band struck down the uproar, crushed back the coward murder. If I did not join in your rogueries, it was because they were sneaking and pitiful. I came as your Patron, not as your Pal; I did not meddle with your secrets—did not touch your plunder. I owed you nothing. Offal that you are! to me you owed drink, and meat, and good fellowship. I gave you ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The prudence of the old commander having been evidently overruled by his ignorant coadjutors, the infantry were put in motion, flanked on one side by the cavalry and on the other by the artillery. It was indeed a pitiful movement, for which they paid dearly. I despatched the Arrapahoes to out-flank and charge the cavalry of the enemy when a signal should be made; the Apaches slowly descended the hill in face of the infantry, upon which we opened a destructive fire ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... strange and pitiful in the hazy moonlight. It was badly tended, and most of the headstones were only of painted wood, warped and buckled by the weather. But in the dimness the rows of crosses and slabs seemed to extend into the far distance, and the moon gave them a cold, eerie whiteness ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... arrested at their homes and sent back as deserters, when they would produce a furlough written by Burnside on a leaf of his pocket memorandum-book, which, as they said, had been given by him after hearing a pitiful story which moved his sympathies. Such inventions were a kind of popular recognition of his well-known neglect of forms, as well as of his kind heart. There was an older story about him, to the effect that, when a lieutenant in the army, he ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... He, Samarc, would continue the search for his battery. As a rule Mowbray was the last to continue in the presence of a man who wanted him to go; and yet, he knew that Samarc hated the field pieces as much as he, and that he did not mean to live through the day. He hesitated. The final urging was pitiful—a sort of tumult ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... darned! It's not the stomach, it's the heart as wants nourishment with yon poor lad. He looketh that pitiful at you sometimes, my faith, I can hardly tell whether to laugh at his newings or cry at the lean face ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... up in wonder and slight concern, "how could I remember? Some letter that somebody had dropped, perhaps, in taking the rest out of the box. It could not matter—certainly not now. You would not bring my youthful misdeeds up against me, would you?" And he turned up a half-comical, half-pitiful face. ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... fainted three times at the heat caused by the throng of his admirers. So long as his fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not take up his pen without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have robbed him near Hyde Park. Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the white feather. Not once was he known to take a purse with his own hand, the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses' heads while his accomplice spoke with the passengers. A poltroon ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... relations of different races to each other,—for instance, of the wolf to the goat, of the goat to man, of man to God, much less of God to man. The attribution of justice, equity, and love to the Supreme Being is pure anthropomorphism; and the adjectives just, merciful, pitiful, and the like, should be stricken from our litanies. God can be regarded as just, equitable, and good, only to another God. Now, God has no associate; consequently, he cannot experience social affections,—such ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... get something for nothing; no teacher can instruct others in anything. He can only awaken thought and arouse impulses. The law of life is harmony. An individual who wastes God's precious time in grumbling and fretting is the most pitiful object in the universe. Try to appreciate that you are part of the divine problem, regarding the conduct of which certain implacable laws have been formulated. To obey these laws means continued life, health, strength, power and ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... into a cold, unfeelin' world where we got to either steal or starve to death? There wouldn't be one tenth as much stealin' and murderin' as there is if they didn't force us into it. Why, doggone it, I've seen some of the most cruel and pitiful sights you ever heard of up there at Sing Sing. Fellers leadin' a perfectly honest life suddenly chucked out into a world full of vice and iniquity and forced—absolutely forced,—into a life of crime. There they were, livin' a quiet, peaceful life, harmin' ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... long. He felt numb. He realized himself to be in a gulf of misunderstanding, from which he could not be extricated, even for the sake of Clemency. It seemed to him again that he must go away, but he remembered Gordon's pitiful plea to him to remain. Finally he went into his room, to find that Emma, in her absurd malice, had left only the coverlid on the bed. She had stripped it of the sheets and blankets. He lay down with his clothes on and ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... a sad time for Leo. He was growing thinner and thinner. His mane was rough and tangled because he had no heart to keep it smooth. And there were several white hairs in his beautiful whiskers. He was fast becoming melancholy; and the most pitiful beast in all the world is a melancholy lion. He had been hoping that something would happen to show that it was all a mistake; but it seemed as though the world was against ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... unromantic, it took some little time to convince them that there had been no choice in the matter, and that the large family had a right to their luxuries which was not to be gainsaid. They had not seen the pitiful emptiness of the Christmas table; they had not seen the chair set ready for the Christ Child. The girls realised as much and dealt gently with them, and in the outcome no one felt the poorer; for the welcome bestowed upon the surprise party was untinged by any shadow of ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... little conversational notes, dated the 11th of April; "my spirits have been harassed. Mary will tell you about the state of the sink, etc. Do you know you plague me—a little—by not speaking more determinately to the landlord, of whom I have a mean opinion. He tires me by his pitiful way of doing everything. I like a man who will say yes ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... taker alike; and, what's more, does not attain it's object, as it only increases poverty. Fathers who don't want to work crowd round the charitable like gamblers round the gambling-table, hoping for gain, while the pitiful farthings that are flung them are a hundred times too little. Have you given away much in your life? Less than a rouble, if you try and think. Try to remember when last you gave away anything; it'll be two years ago, maybe four. You make an outcry and only ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... impossible, and to increase our troubles our stay in a warm climate had made us less capable of standing the exposure to cold and wet, and there were many cases of trench fever, trench foot, and some pneumonia, while the health of all was considerably impaired. One of the most pitiful sights of the war was to see 20 of our men crawling on hands and knees to the Aid Post—their feet so bad that they could ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... but I fear I have nothing to add to what has been said already," he replied, with smiling firmness. "Although in a pitiful minority, I shall have to stand or fall ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... down the candlestick on the altar step, walked distractedly to the end of the low vaulted room, then back to where she stood gazing at him with a pitiful ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... in a day, the scoundrel! And if you would have left the matter to me, Mr. Titmarsh, I would have had you reconciled completely to Mrs. Hoggarty; I would have removed all your difficulties; I would have lent you the pitiful ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Rick said, unperturbed. His sister, even more than Jan Miller, was an incurable romantic. If the ghost turned out to be something other than the pitiful shade of Captain Costin, she would be bitterly disappointed, ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... she ain't crazy. I 've seen that woman as sensible and as shrewd as any sane woman who ever drew breath. Then again, I 've seen her when I would n't get within fifty miles of her. Sometimes she 's pitiful to me; and then again I 've got to remember the fact that she 's a dangerous woman. Goodness only knows what would happen to a person who fell into her clutches when she 's got one of ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
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