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More "Penniless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of her will, or securing her property to me in some way, that my wife took offence and ran away from me. Carry was just a little too hard upon her, and I was away in Paris. But consider, I expected to be left penniless, just as you see me left, and Carry was determined to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... of the most delightful stories Mr. Chambers has ever written. It is the romance of a bewilderingly pretty girl and a young New York society man. Just as they come to know each other, Fate steps in and renders them both penniless by wrecking the great firm in which their fortunes are invested. How the idle young man, without occupation or profession, is moved to swing about and take up the business of life in dead earnest is told with the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... reading, or, rather, studying, Dombey and Son with voluptuous abandon till I found myself literally penniless. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... development and field for the genius which he believed he possessed. His friends at Christiania idolized him, and were loath to let him go, but nothing could stay him, so with pilgrim's staff and violin-case he started on his journey. Scarcely twenty-one years of age, nearly penniless, with no letters of introduction to people who could help him, but with boundless hope and resolution, he first set foot in Paris in 1831. The town was agog over Paganini and Mme. Malibran, and of course the first impulse of the young artist was to hear these great people. One night ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Deane's best friends gave him up, before many years had passed. M. de Lomnie, in his interesting sketch of Beaumarchais, has tried hard to show the justice of his demands on the United States, but without much success. He does not attempt to explain how Beaumarchais, notoriously penniless in 1775, should have had in 1777 a good claim for three millions' worth of goods furnished. The American public looked upon Paine as a victim to state policy, and his position with his friends did not suffer at all in consequence of his disclosures. Personally, he exulted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... gave way to these foolish reflections, he suddenly noticed the arrival of a penniless scholar, Chia by surname, Hua by name, Shih-fei by style and Yue-ts'un by nickname, who had taken up his quarters in the Gourd temple next door. This Chia Yue-ts'un was originally a denizen of Hu-Chow, and was also of literary and official parentage, but as he was born of the youngest stock, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... no money, so he was penniless. Most boys would have possessed themselves somehow of a good axe and spade. He had neither. An old plane blade, fastened to a stick with nails, was all the axe and spade he had, yet with this he set to work and offset its poorness as a tool by dogged persistency. First, he selected ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... clerk in a lawyer's office—unjustly dismissed. He has given readings from Shakespeare—infamously neglected. He has been secretary to a promenade concert company—deceived by a penniless manager. He has been employed in negotiations for making foreign railways—repudiated by an unprincipled Government. He has been translator to a publishing house—declared incapable by envious newspapers and reviews. He has taken refuge in dramatic criticism—dismissed ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... the words to be heard far out across the open meadow. "Say to hell with me, does he? Holds my stock for pasture money, does he? Defies me to do my worst, him a young, penniless whippersnapper, me a millionaire an' a man-breaker! Why, curse it, he's a man already, Blenham! He's a Packard to his backbone, I tell you! By the Lord, I've a notion to jump into my car ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... he would become thorough master of his trade; but when he had reached the age of eleven, the sudden death of his father made an entire change in his career, and threw him upon the world a helpless and penniless orphan. ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... on her from the beginning. However, they had scarce settled, when up turned a young man, a native, and wanted to marry her. He was a small chief, and had some fine mats and old songs in his family, and was "very pretty," Uma said; and, altogether, it was an extraordinary match for a penniless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... good to be carrying messages hither. You need not rail at his poverty, mademoiselle; it was you brought him to it. It was for you he was turned out of his father's house. But for you he would not now be lying in a garret, penniless and dishonoured. Whatever ills he suffers, it is you and your false ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... have his way.—Bitter, bitter years lay behind her. The physician had spoken only too truly. The hardest blows of fate had brought her—the proud daughter of a noble father—to a course of cruel humiliations. The life of a friendless though not penniless relation, taken into a wealthy house out of charity, had proved a thorny path to tread, but now-since the day before yesterday—all was changed. Orion had come. His home and the city had held high festival ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... came into Huna-water (a firth to the north of Thorhall-stead), and had on board a man called Thorgaut. He was foreign by birth, big of body, and as strong as any two men. He was unhired and unmarried, and was looking for some employment, as he was penniless. Thorhall rode to the ship, and found Thorgaut there. He asked him whether he would enter his service. Thorgaut answered that he might well do so, and that he did not care much ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... or precious jewels. His raiment was accumulative. His spending-money came to him through an allowance that his grandmother considerately delivered to him at regular periods, but as is the custom with such young men he was penniless before the quarter was half over. At all times he was precariously close to being submerged by his obligations. Yet trouble sat lightly upon his head, if one were to judge by outward appearances. Beneath a bland, care- free exterior, however, there lurked in Edward's bosom a ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... "Died penniless;—but e' war good on e' own plantation," rejoins another. "One ting be sartin 'bout nigger-he know how he die wen 'e time cum; Mas'r don know how ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fiancee! ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... Twenty-Eighth Street, there was an odor of stale tobacco, permeating the confusion created by a careless person. Dresser had been occupying them lately. He had found Sam Dresser, whom he had known as a student in Europe, wandering almost penniless down State Street, and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... right," I observed to Noah; but I am, at this moment, as penniless as the good woman herself. I really do not see what we are to do, unless Bob sends her back his ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of lawyers practising in the courts are reputable to the highest degree, and many of the rest merely to a safe degree. Many devote themselves to philanthropic work whenever a prisoner is penniless. But the percentage of shysters is high. Kahn belonged in the latter class, although his days of doing dirty work himself were passed. He had a large force of incipient shysters for that purpose. As for himself, he handled only the big cases in which he veneered the dirty ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... instantly at work, for he saw with the utmost satisfaction that he had been entirely successful in disarming all suspicion; therefore his next move must be the defeat of that man's devoted defender, Gabrielle, the one person who stood between his own penniless self ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... had been in a desperate plight—frightened, penniless, outraged by what had happened, and not knowing (with a woman like Mrs. Murrett) what fresh injury might impend; and Darrow, meeting her in this distracted hour, had pitied, counselled, been kind to her, with the fatal, the inevitable result. There ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... abundance. Here one is rated by his personal worth. Here the deed is held to be fine, not the mere thing. Here you are valued as the great Otasite, and all men give you honor for your courage. There you are Jan Queetlee, a penniless clod, and all men despise ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... her, when mists on the moorland hung white, Bareheaded past nightfall remain; She has followed a landless and penniless knight Through battles and ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... considerations were asserting themselves. I had thought of the Prince and the conspirators if I had thought at all, certainly not of myself; and now came the reflection that I had pledged my last sovereign in the endeavour to catch the yacht, and that I was to be landed again in that foreign port penniless. Was it under the stimulus of that thought that I recalled of a sudden the first appearance of the Sea Queen in my life, and remembered ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... safe return of the prisoners. The offer of the bribe was reported to the lieutenant, who at once ordered the delinquents to be searched, and all the scrip found upon them was confiscated, as contraband of war, and appropriated to rebel uses, leaving our two unfortunate friends penniless. They were further threatened with condign punishment for offering to bribe the guard. One said "Shoot them;" another, "Let 'em stretch hemp;" several recommended that they be taken to the swamp and "sent after Sherman's raiders,"—referring, probably, to the manner in which they had ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... was only the faery nonsense in his head that made him miserable, and had marshaled before him the irrefutable blessings of his life. Had he not been cared for from the first minute of his landing from Ireland, a penniless piper of nineteen, as though the holy saints themselves were about him? Had he not gone direct to Father Delancey, sent by the priest in Donegal, and had not Father Delancey at once placed him in the Wilcox family, kindliest, heartiest, and most stirring of New England farmers? ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband nowadays if she is penniless," Crevel remarked, resuming his starchiest manner. "Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather alarm intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too expensive to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... what he said. He told me that if I had been a penniless girl, he should have proposed to me ever so long ago. And he is to ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... glimpse of his character was the cold brutality with which he treated Lady Ruth when she went to see him. Then we went down to his country place in Cornwall. There was a small child there, whose father had been the organist of the village, and who had died penniless. There was no one to look after her, no one to save her from the charity schools and domestic service afterwards. The church was on Wingrave's estate, it should have been his duty to augment the ridiculous salary the dead ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... read in bed during the winter evenings, because I could not afford a fire." Travelling on foot to Bath, he there obtained an engagement as a cellarman, but shortly after we find him back in the metropolis again almost penniless, shoeless, and shirtless. He succeeded, however, in obtaining employment as a cellarman at the London Tavern, where it was his duty to be in the cellar from seven in the morning until eleven at night. His health broke down under this confinement in the dark, added to the heavy work; and he then ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... we lose our tempers. She wants women to have professions; at present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and the sight of luxury! It seems as if we produced the situation, to create an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things are improving for them; but we groan ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Why alone? Where were her natural protectors then? What would be her fate a-gypsying through a land blackened with war, or haunting camps and forts, penniless, in rags—and her beauty ever a flaming danger to herself, despite her tatters and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... clerk he found himself a tiny pawn in that gigantic game of graft which made fat fortunes in the North and cost tens of thousands of soldiers their lives. He himself took typhoid, and when the war was over he returned to New York, weak, penniless, to ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... so myself, till a short time since my uncle informed me that I was penniless, and must learn ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... the solitary traveller was quite as cheerless as the scene without. Friendless and penniless; incensed to the last degree; deeply wounded in his pride and self-love; full of independent schemes, and perfectly destitute of any means of realizing them; his most vindictive enemy might have been satisfied with the extent of his troubles. To add ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... gone; a stranger fills the Stewart's throne," I replied, with real sadness. "Kooltopa's sold to a Melbourne company, and is going to be worked for all it's worth. And I'm thinking of the carrier, coming down with the survivors of a severe trip, and the penniless pedestrian, striking the station at the eleventh hour. These people will miss ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... faint grey began to show in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might be a false dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart—what a leap of the stagnant blood—answered to it! He was no longer penniless. He had never loved money or thirsted for estate, but the thought of that sum of seven thousand pounds solidly invested, and the house that stood in its walled garden on the cliffs at Herion, looking out on the wild, tumbling grey-white ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a penny; all the furniture went to pay the spirit-merchant. I went to Ireland; I lived with relations who were poor and ignorant: I heard the cry of want of money there too. A father and mother and seven children, and me, the penniless orphan: we all wanted money—all cried for it. At last my cry was answered in a black way; I saw the sight of money at last; a purse heaped, overflowing with money, was put into my hands. My brain got ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... impossible to live as a Jew," he replied, bitterly. "You took from me my children to send them to the army; you deprived me of the lands I had cultivated and left me penniless; you despised and degraded me, and when I had suffered until the fibres of my heart were torn, you showed me a glowing picture of the happiness that awaited me here and in heaven if I became a Christian. I allowed ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... la vorton sen eraro, he defined the word without an error. La rivero sencxese fluas, the river flows without ceasing. Tio estas ne nur senutila sed ecx malutila, that is not only useless but even harmful. Li ne plu estas senmona, he is no longer penniless. Li sentime alproksimigxis al gxi, he fearlessly ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... manner,' Beaufort angrily interposed: 'I will not brook the disgrace your obstinacy has brought upon me; and you have yourself alone to blame that you are not the mistress of a princely fortune. Go to your beggarly lover, if he will receive you when penniless and homeless—the tie between us is broken,' And with these words he rose to ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... years since the first of the south Jersey colonies was started.[4] There had been a sudden, unprecedented immigration of refugees from Russia, where Jew-baiting was then the orthodox pastime. They lay in heaps in Castle Garden, helpless and penniless, and their people in New York feared prescriptive measures. What to do with them became a burning question. To turn those starving multitudes loose on the labor market of the metropolis would make trouble of the gravest kind. The alternative ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... all that before, Gregory. Don't talk it any more. How can you blame me if I did not wish to marry a penniless man ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... signs of the end of the world, which is? All the years your poor father has been here, and never so much as send him a hare, and now this young penniless interloper; and he to dine at Trebooze off purple and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... she was like her mother, too much wrapped up in herself to have many thoughts for any one else, and they all regarded Zell as a mere child still. Mr. Allen, who would have been very anxious had Zell been receiving the attentions of some penniless young clerk or artist, laughed at her "flirtation with old Van Dam" ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... not imperfectly educated! As a matter of fact, he knows more about most things than we do; but that's not important. Mind, I'm admitting nothing of all that you suggest, but you might have said that I'm a penniless girl, living on your husband's charity. I must confess that ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... 'shamed to ate the bread he didn't airn; and that she might go home to her mother as soon as she liked, for an iligant young lady as she was. Zack Bunting overheard the strife, and the same night, on his return home, dropped a hint to the girl Libby—short for Liberia—his wife's orphan and penniless niece, who dwelt with them as a servant, and whose support they were anxious to get off their hands; and so, to her own prodigious astonishment, the recalcitrant Biddy found herself superseded, and the American help hired a ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Billy was penniless, yet he had no doubt but that he should eat when he had discovered food. He was thinking of this as he walked briskly toward the west, and what he thought of induced a doubt in his mind as to whether it was, after all, going to be so easy to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... eventually changed all that and brought him a permanent reprieve. Thenceforth, instead of sending the happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care felon to the gallows, they turned him over to the press-gang and so re-consigned him, penniless and protesting, to ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Money settled on their male issue, and money in hand; by the Lord! we've always had the look of a pair of highwaymen lurking for purses, when it was the woman, the woman, penniless, naked, mean, destitute; nothing but the woman we wanted. And there was one apiece for us. Greg, old boy, when will the old county show such another couple of Beauties! Greg, sir, you're not half a man, or you'd have carried her, with your, opportunities. The ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her, because all the usual legends were already repeated about her wherever she went. It was said that she was really an ugly woman of thirty-five who had been married to a Spanish count of twice that age, and that he had died leaving her penniless, so that she had been obliged to support herself by singing. Others were equally sure that she was a beautiful escaped nun, who had been forced to take the veil in a convent in Seville by cruel parents, but who had ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... and thence to Belgium, settling afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of "companions," taking up different work with that facility of adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them and set ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and the soldiers received six pesos each. The captains also asked and received some compensation. The discontent was so great that Ronquillo declares that no resolution can command men so ragged and starving, penniless and unpaid; and that they are already saying that they cannot eat good words. He concludes this section by asking for twenty thousand pesos and eight hundred Indian rowers, and for ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... but to win no laurels. He was unsuccessful, at first, in the Chamber. He became a radical, and that party flattered him. They were poor—he was rich and generous. He gave freely for his party, and found himself almost penniless. He gave to all who needed, so long as he had anything to give. At this time a man wrote to him—"I die of hunger." The poet sent five hundred francs, and begged pardon for not sending more, adding—" You have all ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... Sidonie. "That love which I renounced long ago because I was a young girl—and young girls do not know what they are doing—that love nothing has ever succeeded in destroying or lessening. When I learned that Desiree also loved you, the unfortunate, penniless child, in a great outburst of generosity I determined to assure her happiness for life by sacrificing my own, and I at once turned you away, so that you should go to her. Ah! as soon as you had gone, I realized that the sacrifice was beyond my strength. Poor little Desiree! How I cursed ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... took Lonergan and his wife, and they were buried in the dead-pit at Liscannor; it left Andy, but it left him blind. Then the neighbours began to have their doubts whether he was a Changeling after all; for the Fairies are faithful, and who ever heard of a Changeling being left blind and penniless? If he was only mortal he had been cruelly treated, so to make amends they gave him the fiddle that had belonged to the "Dark" Man—that is the blind man—of St. Bridget's Well, who had lately starved. There was still a feeling ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... post brought a ship letter. Guthrie Carey was in port. He had been there long enough to hear the news that Deborah Pennycuick was penniless, and that Claud Dalzell had deserted her. So he had written to her at length—the longest letter of ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... have no right to ask any such question," he said, "and I shall not answer it. I will just say this to you. Do you suppose that Lord Dunseveric would accept me, a penniless man, the son of a Presbyterian minister, a member of a Church he despises, and connected with a party he hates—do you suppose he would accept me as a suitor for ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... has yet beheld the lovely spot. With unlimited wealth at his command he still confines himself to the smoke and dust of civilisation, leaving the free air and the brilliant beauty of the wilderness to the wild-fowl and the penniless hunter, and ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children he left fatherless and penniless. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... would; it isn't that. I assure you I am not making excuses; you should have it directly if it were possible; but I am as penniless as a fellow can be, not so much as a postage-stamp ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... stocks of grain in the village storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a condition in which they have no assured means ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... and much dreaming, time passed until the world outside loomed up again at close quarters. The present view was a new struggle. The great money question intervened. There had come a blight upon his father's dollar crop, and when Grant Harlson left the university he was so nearly penniless that the books he owned were sold ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... confusion of words, which seems to have been traditional upon the stage. Thus, she says that Captain Absolute is the very "pine-apple of perfection," and that to think of her daughter's marrying a penniless man, gives her the "hydrostatics." She does not wish her to be a "progeny of learning," but she should have a "supercilious knowledge" of accounts, and be acquainted with the "contagious countries." There is a satire, which will come home to most of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... all the convicts were gone, Jack was sorely tempted to follow the shilling-a-month men. He quietly slipped ashore, hurried off to Botany Bay, and lived in retirement until his ship had left Port Jackson. He then returned to Sydney, penniless and barefoot, and began to look for a berth. At the Rum Puncheon wharf he found a shilling-a-month man already installed as cook on a colonial schooner. He was invited to breakfast, and was astonished and delighted with the luxuries lavished on the colonial seaman. He had ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Robert looked unconcerned and Mr. Haswell rubbed his hands and whistled cheerfully. Almost he could envy them, these men who were realizing great fortunes amidst the bustle and excitement of that fierce financial life, whilst he stood penniless and stared at the trees and the ewes which wandered among them with their lambs, he who, after all his work, was but a failure. With a sigh he turned away to fetch his cap and go out walking—there was ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... so fair, so young, Whose head was happy on this breast; If you could have heard the songs I sung When the wine went round, you wouldn't have guess'd That ever I, Sir, should be straying From door to door, with fiddle and dog, Ragged and penniless, and playing To you to-night ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... suspended payment, and all her available funds were locked up in it. She said she had considerable money invested in Western land, which she might be able to turn into cash later, but until she could do so she would be absolutely penniless—she had not even enough ready money to defray her hotel bill, which had been presented that day. Then with apparent reluctance and confusion she remarked that she had often heard me admire her diamond crescents, and so she had ventured to come and ask me if I would purchase them and thus relieve ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Laura, a penniless woman two years his senior and handicapped by her disreputable belongings, was not the wife Gertrude Morrison would have chosen for him: still it might have been worse, for Laura was well-born and personally irreproachable, while Clowes, hot-blooded and casual, was as ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... he had rammed into his pocket, for he would not want it again. He had his hair cut short and his face neatly shaved, and when he went to his room, he trimmed his mustache in such a way that it greatly altered the cast of his countenance. He was not the penniless man he had represented himself to be, who had not three francs to jingle together, for he was a billiard sharper and gambler of much ability, and when he appeared in the street, the next morning, he was neatly dressed in a suit of second-hand clothes which ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... I am not thinking of being married," said John, a half-comic, half-contemptuous look in his strong face. "Miss Brandon could do better than marry a penniless politician, and besides, even if I wanted it, I care too much for Miss Brandon's friendship to risk losing it by ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... and drag him down by bringing him in contact with the accused man Birchill, whom he had met in prison. Sir Horace Fewbanks was the self-appointed guardian of a young woman named Doris Fanning, the daughter of a former employee on his country estate, who had died leaving her penniless. Sir Horace had deemed it his duty to bring up the girl and give her a start in life. After educating her in a style suitable to her station, he sent her to London and paid for music lessons for her in order to fit her for ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... neglected in the least particular. Making a virtue of necessity, she had come to be regarded in Wiltstoken as a model wife and mother. At last, when a drag ran over Mr. Goff and killed him, she was left almost penniless, with two daughters on her hands. In this extremity she took refuge in grief, and did nothing. Her daughters settled their father's affairs as best they could, moved her into a cheap house, and procured a strange tenant for that in which they had lived during many ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... fellow wants us to buy information from him. He pretends to have broken with his employers on our account (though his explanation of getting here to Halfa on their dahabeah is ridiculous) and that, having come for our benefit against their wishes, he's without pay, penniless, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... cannot alter my decision, my man," said the Colonel. "Do as I said: go right away and get work; but I know it is hard upon a man to be out of work and penniless. You are a good hand, and ought not to be without a job for long, so in remembrance ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... be hopeless to look for him in his store at night. It would be nearly nine o'clock before they could reach any hotel. What was to be done? Charlie was certain that no hotel clerk would be willing to give them board and lodging, penniless wanderers as they were, with nothing but one small valise to answer as luggage for the party. They could have no money until ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... now plenty of money, but he did not know how to use it, so he spent it and gave it away, till in the course of a little time he found himself once more penniless. At last he came into a country where he heard that the king's daughter ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... I couldn't have complained. There wasn't the least obligation upon you to look after a penniless stranger." ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... be dead to-morrow, and hence it was folly for them to hoard their treasure. 'Live to-day,' was their maxim, 'to-morrow may take care of itself.' Those, therefore, who were worth millions to-day, robbed by courtezans and stripped at the gaming table, were often penniless in a week—destitute of clothes and even the necessaries of life. They had therefore no recourse but to return to the sea, and levy new contributions, to be dissipated ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ruler's interest identical with the wickedness of his people, and holds out a comparative immunity in evil-doing for the rich, it was better that crime should be punished by money rather than not be punished at all. A severe tax, which the noble reluctantly paid and which the penniless culprit commuted by personal slavery, was sufficiently unjust as well as absurd, yet it served to mitigate the horrors with which tumult, rapine, and murder enveloped those early days. Gradually, as the light of reason broke upon the dark ages, the most noxious features ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... yonder, well in sight as he turns a corner of the lane, stands the house where he dwelt so many, many years; where the events of his life came slowly to pass; where he was born; where his bride came home; where his children were born, and from whose door he went forth penniless. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... went to the palace, and on his way he picked a common white rose from a wayside garden. He was ushered into the Emperor's presence, who sent for his daughter and said to her: "This penniless minstrel has brought you what he claims to be the blue rose. Has he accomplished ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Edin., where he remained on the usual happy-go-lucky terms until 1754, when he proceeded to Leyden. After a year there he started on a walking tour, which led him through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. How he lived it is hard to say, for he left Leyden penniless. It is said that he disputed at Univ., and played the flute, and thus kept himself in existence. All this time, however, he was gaining the experiences and knowledge of foreign countries which he was afterwards to turn to such excellent account. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Though nearly penniless, the noble deputy, with the vanity of the born courtier, was flattered, and accepted the mission, setting out on December fifteenth, 1778, by way of Italy with his two sons Joseph and Napoleon. With them ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... provocation, bombarded him in his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of Cesare Borgia, a sort of epidemic fell on the petty tyrants; few of them outlived this date, and none to t heir own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by insignificant princes ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... week later, and we were sitting on the verandah looking out across Essex County towards Manhattan. To us, who some five years before had been shaken from our homestead in San Francisco and hurried penniless and almost naked across the continent, our location here in the Garden State, looking eastward towards the Western Ocean and our native isle, had always appeared as "almost home." We endeavoured to impress this upon our friends in England, explaining that "we could be home in ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... In the dramatis personae of Redwood Camp he was a simple "super"—who had only passive, speechless roles in those fierce dramas that were sometimes unrolled beneath its green-curtained pines. Nameless and penniless, he was overlooked by the census and ignored by the tax collector, while in a hotly-contested election for sheriff, when even the head-boards of the scant cemetery were consulted to fill the poll-lists, it was discovered ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... dire, The man who murdered Laius, is here; In name a foreigner, a native born In fact, as will to his small joy appear. For he who now has sight will go forth blind, He who is rich will go forth penniless, Groping his way to dwell in a strange land; Brother of his own offspring he has been, As all the world shall know, husband of her That brought him forth, with incest stained, and stained With parricide. Get thee ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... were eagerly accepted by the all but penniless widow. She had some difficulty, however, in persuading young Trevor to, as he expressed it, sell his independence. In the end her wishes prevailed. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, took honours there, and now at ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... was consumed, and there remained only the dull glow of red embers. Then I wandered out into the night, stupefied and broken-hearted by the crowning calamity that had overtaken me, afraid even to face my neighbours of the village, naked, penniless, and alone. ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... so wonderful! Your messenger, with the ten thousand dollars which you say you already have recovered from those miscreants who robbed Ricca, came aboard our ship before we landed. It was a godsend; we were nearly penniless,—and oh, so shabby! ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close: both are leaders of bands and each requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to organize his band, needed the Revolution.—"Of low birth, without patronage," penniless, every office being filled, and "the Paris bar exorbitantly priced," admitted a lawyer after "a struggle," he for a long time wandered jobless frequenting the coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the bars. At the Cafe de l'Ecole, the proprietor, a good natured ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... What redress can a penniless tramp secure against a stout inspector of police able and willing to spend a considerable sum of money in his own defence, and with the entire force ready and eager to get at the tramp and put him out of business? He ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... education and become a teacher. In 1830 he married Miss May, a descendant of the well-known Sewells and Quincys, of Boston. Louise Chandler Moulton says, in her excellent sketch of Miss Alcott, "I have heard that the May family were strongly opposed to the union of their beautiful daughter with the penniless teacher and philosopher;" but he made a devoted husband, though poverty was long ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... him as long as his money lasted; when he had no more to throw away upon her she perfidiously betrayed him. And for all this there was a reason as simple as casting up the number of shillings in the pound. No matter how penniless the sailor himself might be, he was always worth that sum at the rendezvous. Twenty shillings was the reward paid for information leading to his apprehension as a straggler or a skulker, and it was largely ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... necessity. Sofia had not one shilling of her own. But those two had robbed her, what she took was not so much as a thousandth part of the money of which they had despoiled her. Moreover, she dared not go out penniless to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Stoddart was penniless. The two hundred and fifty dollars that he expected to contribute to the capital of the new combination was swept away in the failure of the Fidelity Bank. He had looked forward to Gustave for help, and all the while ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... from the Ebernburg. He was offered a high place in the service of the King of France; but, as a true German, he refused it, and fled, penniless and sick, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Quebec, or more frequently in some river town, would fling into the hands of sharks and harlots and tavern-keepers, with whom the bosses were sometimes in league, the earnings of his long winter's work, and would wake to find himself sick and penniless, far from ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... I shall end by doing a thesis on the 'color-words' in Keats and Shelley. A penniless devil was ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... there now of my doing any good?" the young Englishman asked himself, bitterly. "This place is again in the hands of the Dutch, and the English ships stand clear of it, or only receive supplies by stealth. I am friendless here, I am penniless; and worst of all, if I even get a passage home, there will be no home left. Too late! too late! What use ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Louis landed there with his queen and the remains of his once brilliant army; and when Walter Espec, penniless and pensive, but still hoping to hear tidings of his lost brother, leapt ashore with Bisset the English knight, and returned thanks to heaven for having escaped from the power of the Saracens and the perils of ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... to Brighton, and everywhere else where people meet, and people are met with, who would not meet or be met with elsewhere. I have seen many nice girls; but the nice girls were, like myself, almost penniless; and I have seen many ill-favoured, who had money: the first I could only afford to look at— the latter I have had some dealings with. I have been refused by one or two, and I might have married seven or eight; ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... session far into the night of March 3d. Sectional feeling ran high. Two fist-fights occurred in the House and at least one in the Senate.[290] It seemed as though Congress would adjourn, leaving our civil and diplomatic service penniless. Douglas frankly announced that for his part he would rather leave our office-holders without salaries, than our citizens without the protection of law.[291] Inauguration Day was dawning when the dead-lock was broken. The Senate voted the appropriations ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... be that you and my sisters would be penniless, I sleeping in mud, and living on junk and hoe-cake. Another result, probable, only a little more remote, is that the buzzards would pick my bones. Faugh! Oh, no. I've settled that question, and it's a bore to ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... were let alone in the imperial city on the Seine; but, unfortunately, the important state functionaries soon became as tired of the countess's plaints as their brothers on the Neva. Reduced to the shifts of the penniless aristocrats, the two lived like the shabby genteel. They made a desperate attempt to entrap their Grand-duke again. But the victim had warning and the pair were stopped at Warsaw. Here a beam of the sun, long ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... do all she could for Sylvia; Philip had told her to take care of his wife and child; but she had the conviction that Sylvia had so materially failed in her duties as to have made her husband an exile from his home—a penniless wanderer, wifeless and childless, in some strange country, whose very aspect was friendless, while the cause of all lived on in the comfortable home where he had placed her, wanting for nothing—an object of interest and regard to many friends—with ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with you. Since your poor mother died my life has been nothing but trouble and vexation. I can't manage you, you are too strong for me. So she hasn't left her room; crying her eyes out, because I won't consent to her marrying a penniless young officer! But I will not squander my money. I made it all myself, by my own industry, and I refuse to ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... have known better days, coupled with a nervous apprehension lest his family should ascribe to her any attempt to ensnare a very young man of considerable worldly pretensions into a marriage with a penniless niece, seemed to account for much that had at first perplexed and angered him. And if, as he conjectured, Mrs. Cameron had once held a much higher position in the world than she did now,—a conjecture warranted by a certain peculiar conventional undeniable elegance which characterized her habitual ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In his early penniless life he had migrated from his more northern native State, settled in the county, and, shortly after his arrival, had married the relict of the late lamented Major John Talbot of Pocomoke. This had been greatly to ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that some members of the Crewys family had agreed that Lady Mary Setoun had done well for herself, "a penniless lass wi' a lang pedigree;" for Sir Timothy was rich. Others had laughed, and said that Sir Timothy was determined that his heirs should be able to boast some of the bluest blood in Scotland on their mother's side,—but that he might have waited a ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... a penniless orphan until thirteen"—the interruption was ignored—"and, so far as we've heard, she has never had a fortune left her, and yet after nine years' absence she comes back, has a beautiful home, a horse, and a runabout, keeps three servants, ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... small quantity of ale or spirits which he imbibed to drown his mental anguish acted like poison upon a weak and ailing body, now more than usually debilitated by insufficient food. In the winter of 1823, Clare found himself almost penniless; yet with inborn loftiness of mind, he hid the fact from his family, so as not to distress them. His wife and parents, therefore, lived as well as ever, while he, to save expenditure, got into the habit of absenting himself at meal-times, pretending to call upon friends and acquaintances. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... devoted to him. By his treason all his honours and estates were forfeited. At the time his heir, Simon Fraser, only twenty-one years old, was a prisoner in the Castle of Edinburgh, attainted for high treason. But so good was his conduct that in 1750 he received a pardon. Then, a penniless man, he was called to the Scottish Bar. But another career was in store for him. Some years later when Pitt formed his design to use the Highlanders in the Seven Years' War he made Simon Fraser Colonel of a battalion, to be raised on the forfeited estates of his family ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... carefully in baby carriages. There were walking dolls and talking dolls and dolls who could suck real milk out of real bottles into tin-lined stomachs. Some exquisitely gowned porcelain Parisiennes, with eyelashes and long hair cut from the heads of penniless children, were almost as big and as aristocratic as their potential millionaire mistresses. Humbler sisters of middle class combined prettiness with cheapness, and had the satisfaction of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... PENNILESS BENCH. Archdeacon Nares, in his Glossary, says of this phrase: "A cant term for a state of poverty. There was a public seat so called in Oxford; but I fancy it was rather named from the common saying, than ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... husband or son, she spends all or nearly all her money. Or if she finds him, it may well be that he has no funds with which to help her. In the little buildings on one side of the refuge for the sick are rooms where some sixty-five can receive decent lodging and nourishing food; and if actually penniless, the Commission will procure them tickets and send them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... place, hastened to join his regiment, and gave George, who was deemed unfit for service, a letter to his mother and sisters who resided in Dartmouth. The letter was all that the captain could give him, for he was penniless as ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... Firio's and the Doge was Ignacio's. In his shanty back of Bill Lang's the Mexicans and Indians lost their remaining wages in gambling after he had filled them with mescal. It happened that Gonzalez, head man of the laborers under Bob Worther, who had saved quite a sum, came away penniless after taking but one drink. Every ounce of Bob's avoirdupois ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the ex-Imperial guard, who had been cheated out of his retiring pension. The general had already, under other circumstances, done a service to the brave cavalryman, whose name was Groison; the man, remembering it, now told him his troubles, admitting that he was penniless. The general promised to get him his pension, and proposed that he should take the place of field-keeper to the district of Blangy, as a way of paying off his score of gratitude by devotion to the new mayor's interests. The appointments ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... had cast from me all these outward embellishments; I came without pomp, denuded of every emblem of wealth, of every sign of power; as a poor fugitive gentleman, I came, hunted, proscribed, and penniless—for Lesperon's estate would assuredly suffer sequestration. To win her thus would, by my faith, be an exploit I might take pride in, a worthy ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... he an exile from Rome, the scene of all his hopes, his glories, his triumphs, but he was under the ban of an outlaw. If found within a certain distance from the capital, he must die, and it was death to any one to give him food or shelter. His property was destroyed, his family was penniless, and the people whom he had so faithfully served were the authors of his ruin. All this may be urged in his behalf, but still it would have been only consistent with Roman fortitude to have shown that he possessed something of the spirit ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... representatives of the above noble families, who, on the issuing of the required patent, receive as their perquisite a fee, which, although insignificant in itself, is yet of importance to the poor Kuges, whose penniless condition forms a great contrast to the wealth of their inferiors in rank, the Daimios. I believe that this is the only case in which rank can be bought or sold in Japan. In China, on the contrary, in ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... cheat. With thirty pounds in his leaking pockets, later he set out from home for Cork, and thence, according to his magnificent plans, for America. He was not destined to become an Empire-builder in the Colonies. Six weeks saw him home again as happy as ever, and quite penniless. Neither he himself nor anyone else ever knew, or ever will know now, what in the meantime had happened to the good fellow. He had exchanged a capital horse for a lank and bony creature of which he appeared very fond, called Fiddle-back. According to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... Mr. Bayne, that though she gets the child's estate if he dies or continues lost—if he lives and this expenditure goes on, she will be penniless—you don't realize that. She will be a poor woman—she will have nothing left of her provision ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the question, what was I to do? My plight was almost as desperate as it could well be; for not only was I utterly bereft of every one of those who were nearest and dearest to me, but I was likewise homeless, and literally penniless. The house which I called home was destroyed; every horn and hoof of my father's stock had been stolen, and would probably never be recovered; and as to money, there was none, for my father, instead of banking the profits of the farm and allowing them ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... hitherto of my affairs, that all we are living on is an annuity your father bought for me, before the catastrophe to his fortunes. That, you will understand, ceases with my life. At my death you will be absolutely penniless, a beggar in the street. Even were you to sell these trifles"—and she pointed to the Sevres cups and the miniatures—"the few pounds they would bring might keep you from starving for perhaps a month or two—after that—well, enough—that question is impossible. I can obtain no news of your father. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... George Osborne, Esquire, son of John Osborne, Esquire, son of—what was your grandpapa, Mr. Osborne? Well, don't be angry. You can't help your pedigree, and I quite agree with you that I would have married Mr. Joe Sedley; for could a poor penniless girl do better? Now you know the whole secret. I'm frank and open; considering all things, it was very kind of you to allude to the circumstance—very kind and polite. Amelia dear, Mr. Osborne and I were talking about your poor brother Joseph. How ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was as good as his word. He sailed in the next packet, and arrived in Paris almost as penniless as ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the summer of this year went the army, some into East-Anglia, and some into Northumbria; and those that were penniless got themselves ships, and went south over sea to the Seine. The enemy had not, thank God, entirely destroyed the English nation; but they were much more weakened in these three years by the disease of cattle, and most ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... confess I am surprised to see you so content with your present circumstances. If your aunt's property legally reverted to you, if you had any sort of family claim on it, that would make some little difference; but you know that any sudden quarrel between you might leave you penniless to-morrow." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... woman. Duchess Sarah melted to him as none had ever seen her melt to man before. She had heard many stories of him from her lord, and was prepared to be gracious, but when she beheld him, she was won by another reason, for he brought back to her the day when she had been haughty, penniless Sarah Jennings, and the man who seemed to her almost godlike in his youth and beauty had knelt ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... what happened. I know the consequences if you speak of it. No one can be made to understand exactly how it happened, and I will protect myself; of that you may be sure. If you speak of what I did, driven to it by my love for you, I say I will turn your father and mother into the street. They will be penniless in their old age. Your brother Tom is a thief. He has been stealing from me ever since he came to my office. Only last night I laid a trap for him and caught him in the act of stealing fifty dollars. He took the money and lost it at Welch's ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... fact. He had no power to sign; he could not draw a cheque for thirty shillings. Until he could produce legal evidence of his uncle's death, he was a penniless outcast—and as soon as he produced it he had lost the tontine! There was no hesitation on the part of Morris; to drop the tontine like a hot chestnut, to concentrate all his forces on the leather business and the rest of his small but legitimate inheritance, was the decision of a single ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... years the guilty wretch had wandered the earth, but he could not escape the knowledge of his deed. And at last his conscience had driven him back to the scene of his crime, friendless, penniless, fearful of the sunlight, slinking by night like a ghost about the house in which he had murdered his master, and hounding his miserable wife for money with which to buy food and drink. The poor woman had kept her terrible ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... it matter to her? Vane had done her a service and it was only right she should repay him in some sort. This was how she tried to sum up the position. Whether Mr. Gay befriended him or not, their acquaintance would have to cease. He was penniless and so was she. If she confessed as much as this to him he would be embarrassed and distressed because ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... Captain in His Majesty's Black Hussars, gambler, penniless, always well dressed, and always well fed—Terrible. Just as beetles are beetles, whether dressed in tropical splendour or the funereal black of the English type, so are detrimentals detrimentals. Jones ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... witch, after which he helps himself to the treasures in the hag's cottage, and goes off to the nearest town, where he puts up at the best inn and gets himself fine clothes. Then he determines to requite the King, who had sent him away penniless, so he summons the Dwarf[FN390] and orders him to bring the King's daughter to his room that night, which the Dwarf does, and very early in the morning he carries her back to her own chamber in the palace. The princess tells her father that she has had ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... could not conceal her regard for him, had returned with tenfold violence. The same honourable principle which had before decided him—that of not taking advantage of her prepossession in his favour, and permitting her to throw away herself and her large fortune upon one of unknown parentage and penniless condition,— militated against his passion, and caused such a tumult of contending feelings, as could not but affect a person in his weak state. A slow fever came on, which retarded the cure, and even ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was first; that he would not give me an uncomfortable minute for anything on earth; and that Bella had been perfectly right to leave him, because he was a sinking ship, and deserved to be turned out penniless into the world. After which mixed figure, he poured himself something to drink, ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... flourishes as intensely as in a village. During one of the cotton manias a young gentleman, barely of age, in possession of an income of some two thousand a-year from land, and ready money to the extent of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, joined an ingenious penniless gentleman in speculating in cotton, and found himself in less than twelve months a bankrupt; thus sacrificing, without the least enjoyment, a fortune sufficient for the enjoyment of every rational pleasure, or for the support of the highest honours ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... vouched for by the Manners and taken up by Mr. Fox and my Lord Comyn. Inquiries are not pushed farther. I could not help seeing the hardness of it all, or refrain from contrasting my situation with that of the penniless outcast I had been but a little time before. The gilded rooms, the hundred yellow candles multiplied by the mirrors, the powder, the perfume, the jewels,—all put me in mind of the poor devils I had left wasting away their lives in Castle Yard. They, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to London, and there learned at his club the singular story in regard to old Mr. Scarborough and his son. Mr. Scarborough had declared his son illegitimate, and all the world knew now that he was utterly penniless and hopelessly in debt. That he had been greatly embarrassed Harry had known for many months, and added to that was now the fact, very generally believed, that he was not and never had been the heir to Tretton Park. All that still increasing property ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... of honesty, and for the first time for a long while, I ate my dinner with some zest. After I had finished, I took a twenty pound note, and laid it in my desk, the remainder of the five hundred pounds I put in my pocket, to try my last chance. In an hour I quitted the hell penniless. When I returned home I had composed myself a little after the dreadful excitement which I had been under. I felt a calm, and a degree of negative happiness. I knew my fate—there was no more suspense. I sat down to reflect upon what I should do. I was to commence the world again—to ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... they leave their employment to proceed to the nearest public-house and plunge into a course of drinking. After the endurance of a week's delirium, madness, and unconsciousness, they generally find themselves, when robbed of the greater portion of their hard-got earnings, thrust upon the world penniless, wretched, dispirited, and sick, to seek employment and re-enact the same scenes of solitary penance ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... Maria paid a visit to the town, to speed a fleet sent, with disastrous results, against Spain. The expedition was in a miserable plight to begin with. For some while before it was able to leave the country, a hungry penniless army had been thrown upon the citizens of Plymouth. An enormous debt had been created in equipping it, and the soldiers' allowances were hopelessly inadequate to provide them with a proper supply of food or clothes. 'A more ragged, ribald, and rebellious ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... its return," Cuthbert replied, "and I landed with my followers, well-nigh penniless, at Zara, and have since made my way across the Tyrol. I have, then, as you may well suppose, neither silver nor gold about my person; and assuredly neither Philip of France nor John of Austria would give a noble for my ransom; and it would ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... straightened the bed-clothes above him; another might have touched his hair or hand; another kissed his cheek. But not even because he was like her departed husband, like the man who five and fifty years before had courted a certain cold and proud, handsome and penniless Miss Augusta Gallup, would Mrs. de Tracy do these things. She had had her sensation, such as it was, her secret moment of emotion, and was satisfied. She left the room as she had come, the candle casting exaggerated shadows of herself upon the walls where Carnaby's bats ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... money. Five thousand pounds, in the English funds, had been settled on her, by the marriage articles of her parents; and twenty years of careful husbandry, during which every shilling had been scrupulously devoted to accumulation, had quite doubled the original amount. So far from being penniless, therefore, Maud's fortune was often alluded to by the captain, in a jocular way, as if purposely to remind her that she had the means of independence, and duties connected with it. It is true, Maud, herself, had no suspicion that she had ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... penalty with so little to reproach myself for,—than to put aside the adventure,—waive the wondrous probability of such best fortune, in a fear of the barest possibility of an adverse event, and so go to my grave, Walter the Penniless, with an eternal recollection that Miss Burdett Coutts once offered to wager sundry millions with me that she could throw double-sixes a dozen times running—which wager I wisely refused to accept because it ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... little through laziness, but nevertheless moved always by distress or misfortune in others. Maggie was not distressed—she was quite cheerful and entirely unsentimental—nevertheless she had been very ill, was almost penniless, had had some private trouble, was an orphan, had no friends save two old aunts, and was ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... his way a young girl, charming, penniless, and alone in the world. He married her. This was in 1855, and the following year brought to Dr. Reynaud a great sorrow and a great joy—the death of his old mother and the ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... Pompeii, reclined a form fast asleep, the arm propped on the hard stone supporting the head, and the limbs uneasily strewn over the stairs. The dress of the slumberer was travel-stained, tattered, yet with the remains of a certain pretence; an air of faded, shabby, penniless gentility made poverty more painful, because it seemed to indicate unfitness to grapple with it. The face of this person was hollow and pale, but its expression, even in sleep, was fierce and hard. I drew near and nearer; I recognized the countenance, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with excitement and strong, animal emotion. Loerke was kept away from Gudrun, to whom he wanted to speak, as by a hedge of thorns, and he felt a sardonic ruthless hatred for this young love-companion, Leitner, who was his penniless dependent. He mocked the youth, with an acid ridicule, that made Leitner red in the face and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... to spend the likes o' that!" And so he drank, and gambled, and wasted his time in hunting and horse-racing, until after a while he found the chests empty and the cupboards poverty-stricken, and the stockings lean and penniless. Then he mortgaged his farm-house and gambled away all the money he got for it, and then he bethought him that a few hundred pounds might be raised on his mill. But when he went to look at it, he found "the dam broken, and scarcely a thimbleful of water in the mill-race, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... you are saying?' stammered the mother. 'You will learn no trade, and have only the five gold pieces left you by your father, and can you really expect that the sultan would give his daughter to a penniless bald-pate like you?' ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... for the penniless, halcyon days for the toady and the sycophant. There was still much of the old oriental munificence about the court, and sovereigns like Mazarin and Louis XIV. granted pensions for a copy of flattering verses, or gave away places as the reward of a judicious speech. Sinecures were legion, yet to ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... she had been as wife and widow after the theatrical career had been abandoned in disaster. Something in her nature would have yearned toward Dauntrey if he had had nothing to recommend him to her ambition; but she would have resisted her own inclination for a penniless man without a title. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his debts he will be penniless, and I don't know a worse punishment than to be a ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... more. Soon, she had sold out every one of our securities. Then she won, and went half mad with the joy and excitement, but the joy didn't last long. She lost all, again—literally, our all. We were penniless. There was nothing left to pay the hotel bill. I went out, and found a Mont de Piete, just beyond the limits of the Principality; they aren't allowed inside. I pawned all our jewellery, and as we had a great many valuable things, I got several thousand francs. I thought the money would last ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... children." But the stern rules of the service prevailed. The battalions bound for America were allowed but a limited number of soldiers' wives, and the surplus were of necessity left to their fate. Some had money; more were penniless, and nearly naked. Men and officers were then greatly in arrear, but nevertheless a subscription was got up, and its amount divided amongst the unfortunates, thus abandoned upon a foreign shore, and at many hundreds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... I've been cruel to thee in saying that that penniless Dick o' thine sha'n't marry thee, ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... nothing more than a strange young woman in a car with a New York license. If her tiny gift could so please him, how poor he must be. "He probably lives on some barren farm," she thought, "or he's a penniless mechanic hoping for a good job in Seattle. How white ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... stirrings of rebellion were moving in him. It was not that he blamed her in the least. She was scarcely nineteen, the magnet for the eyes of all the unattached men in the district. Was it reasonable to suppose that she would give her love to a penniless puncher of twenty-eight, lank as a shad, with no recommendation but honesty? None the less, Jack began to doubt whether eternal patience was ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... facts:—It appeared that ever since she was a child, Miss Heston had been addicted to drinking fits, and that it was on account of this constitutional weakness, which was of course concealed from me, that she had been allowed to engage herself to a penniless subaltern. It appeared, too, that the habit was hereditary, for her mother had died from the effects of drink, and one of her aunts had become ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the abundant hair that plays so prominent a part in Hogg's relentless portrait. Eliza, being nearly twice as old as Harriet, stood in the relation of a mother to her. Both of these young ladies, and the "Jew" their father, welcomed Shelley with distinguished kindness. Though he was penniless for the nonce, exiled from his home, and under the ban of his family's displeasure, he was still the heir to a large landed fortune and a baronetcy. It was not to be expected that the coffee-house people should look upon ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the thought of her father, who had walked out of his house, left—yes—his family, without any intimation. Then, erratically, it turned to Vigne, to Vigne and young Sandby with his fresh cheeks and impending penniless years acquiring a comprehension of the bond market. She said, "I wonder if she really likes Bailey?" Arnaud's energy of dismay was laughable, "What criminal folly! They haven't ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... made a fearful resolve to leave Montreal, and never see his wife or children more. Accordingly one evening, instead of returning as usual from his store, he left for parts unknown, leaving his wife and children almost penniless behind. ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... Holmes and Miss Forrest were still walking and talking together. It was the morning after this mysterious consultation that the cold developed; and those kindly spirits who had promptly decided that the handsome but penniless New York girl was setting her cap to cut out Nellie Bayard with the Chicago millionaire were balked in their hopes of seeing further developments by the circumstance of her keeping her room and not again ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... multitude roared his name, proclaiming it divine. His nostrils spread to inhale this incense of adoration, his eyes flashed and slowly he waved his arms, as though in benediction of his worshippers. Perchance there rose before his mind a vision of the wondrous event whereby he, the scorned and penniless outcast, had been lifted to this giddy pinnacle of power. Perchance for a moment he believed that he was indeed divine, that nothing less than the blood and right of godhead could thus have exalted him. At least he ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... having no ready money to speak of, rely almost entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong, violent man struggling for months ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hem of the black skirt. Decoud's eyes also remained fixed there, while in an undertone he added that Miss Avellanos was quite aware of his new and unexpected vocation, which in Costaguana was generally the speciality of half-educated negroes and wholly penniless lawyers. Then, confronting with a sort of urbane effrontery Mrs. Gould's gaze, now turned sympathetically upon himself, he breathed out ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... arrival and your long mysterious conversation with madam alarmed me. I thought exposure imminent. I feared to lose this home, which, lonely, dreary, hopeless as it is to me, is yet the only refuge I have left on earth. I am penniless and helpless; and but for this kind family I should be homeless and friendless. Think if I had been cast out upon the world what must ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... pocket on the wallet which contained the treasure that was to open up the brilliant scheme by which he hoped to support his mother and sister. He went out of the hotel without any definite idea of where he intended to go. It was ten o'clock by this time. He was not penniless now, as he had been before. He was rich enough to spend the night, or even a week or a month, at the Witherill House; but the idea of going there, or to any other public house, did ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... having come in for five days, we were to-day again penniless. In answer to prayer five shillings sixpence came in, and some trinkets were sent, the names of which the donor does not wish to be known. Thus we were helped through this day. Observe here how the Lord allowed five days to pass ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... from some of the hospitals with their wounds not yet fully healed, and their exertions in traveling had caused them to break out afresh. Here they were, in a miserable shanty, sick, bleeding, hungry, penniless, and with only their soiled clothing. Mrs. Bickerdyke at once took them in hand. Washing their wounds and staunching the blood, she tore off the lower portions of the night dresses for bandages, and as ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... a bucket was ice-bound. So cold was the studio that it froze inside as hard as it did out of doors, for, having been penniless for a whole week, Mahoudeau had gingerly eked out the little coal remaining to him, only lighting the stove for an hour or two of a morning. His studio was a kind of tragic cavern, compared with which the shop of former days evoked reminiscences of snug comfort, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... shall be so frightened to be alone in England with my child, and no one to take care of us. Yet I must come to you, I must bring my child, my little Alfred, to his father, the big, beautiful Alfred that I love so much. Oh, write and tell me where I shall come. I have some money. I am not a penniless creature. I have money for myself ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... missionaries, or as sometimes happened he went alone, drop a tract here or there and speak a seasonable word. He spoke to me as a youth, as some of our saintly old pastors used to do to the children of the penniless where they stayed. He wrote me occasionally. A ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... purse was very low, and he had a good many more miles to go, and not feeling quite sure of his welcome he did not care to be penniless, so he went round the town with his advertising-board and very soon was painting doors in Bathurst. He found the natives stingier here than in Sydney, and they had a notion a traveler like him ought to work ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... themselves. If the sovereigns of Spain had trusted Columbus and his brothers fully and completely, had established trading-stations and imposed a moderate tribute, and had absolutely prohibited the overrunning of the country by penniless and worthless adventurers, they would have had a rich and prosperous colony. The discontent and rebellion of the natives were solely caused by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... Donnington with a cordiality of liking which surprised herself. His selfless love for the girl touched her more than she had thought it possible for anything now to touch her worldly heart. And whereas she would naturally have considered a marriage between the penniless Donnington and brilliant, clever, popular Bubbles as being out of the question, she was beginning to feel that such a marriage might be, nay, almost certainly was, the only thing likely to ensure for Bubbles a reasonably happy and normal life. Blanche Farrow knew enough of human ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... incomprehensible philosophy, they seem cheerfully to resign themselves to their fate. They have plenty to eat; spirits to drink; clothing to keep them warm; a hammock to sleep in; tobacco to chew; a doctor to medicine them; a parson to pray for them; and, to a penniless castaway, must not all this seem as a luxurious ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... Dodd's, where a woman is left penniless and another woman needs her practical aid, the two meet half-way and the kitchen atmosphere is serene. Quite different is the case in ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... I found myself in New York; penniless, weary, and heartsick. I wandered one morning into a tiny park, mouldering in the shadow of the huge skyscrapers with which Manhattan is everywhere defaced. I sank upon a bench, pulled a soiled newspaper from my pocket, ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... which her brother had sent her as the only support of the closing days of her life. Auntie Sue believed that her money was safe in the bank. That belief was to her a daily comfort. Auntie Sue did not know that she was almost penniless;—that the man whom she had saved with such a wondrous salvation had robbed her, and left her so shamefully without means for the necessities of life. Auntie Sue did not know. But she would know,"—that inner voice went on. "The time would come when she would learn the truth. It was certain ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... last man in the world asked her. She told him of her first engagement and how it had resulted disastrously, how she had loaned the object of her affections large sums of money, until finally he ran away, leaving her penniless, and she had been compelled to work for a living. Von Barwig was very sympathetic that morning and it was this sympathy ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... briskly administered a narcotic as being the easiest and simplest way to handle a patient who seemed friendless and penniless. "The man is simply delirious with fever. He looks like a man emaciated from lack of food. What do you ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... of vengeance or criminal folly involved Daublaine in the same financial ruin as himself, and through this tragic occurrence the firm in which Barker was beginning to be securely established came to an end. Callinet, being absolutely penniless, was not prosecuted, but ended his days in the employ of Cavaille as ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... women that they carefully secure to themselves. In 1869, the "protectors of women" enacted a law which exempted a homestead from being sold for the payment of debts so long as the man who held it might live, while it allowed his widow and children to be turned out penniless and homeless. It was not until 1875 that this law was so amended that the exemption extended to the widow and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... was deeply wounded. He had been petted and admired by women during the ten years of his widowhood, favoured and a favourite everywhere. He had made up his mind deliberately to marry this penniless girl. Looked at from a worldling's point of view, it would seem, at the first glance, an utterly disadvantageous alliance: but Dr. Rylance had an eye that could sweep over horizons other than are revealed to the average gaze, and he told himself that ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... "If you don't love me, what is there in marriage for you? There are plenty of women who would be delighted to have you. Why should you want to marry a girl without any influence or position—a shop-girl, absolutely penniless?" ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... the mutual friend wrote, the life of Mrs. Stedman and her husband was thoroughly miserable. Stedman blamed her because she came to him penniless. The rich aunt, who had heartily disapproved of the artist, had spoken of him so frankly that Frances had quarrelled with her, and from her no longer would accept money. In his anger at this Stedman showed himself ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... weeks after our young people were absolutely penniless, and only one way lay open. They must go to the Labour Company. So soon as the rent was a week overdue their few remaining possessions were seized, and with scant courtesy they were shown the way out of the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... remain behind for several weeks, and at an expense that so rapidly diminished their small store of money that when, at last, they set out on their long journey across the country, they were almost literally penniless. ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... respectable, and my education had been too good, to leave me now any very keen regrets on such a subject, in a state of society like ours; but there was truly a wide chasm between the heiress of Mrs. Bradfort and a penniless mate of a ship. Lucy understood me; and, slipping her arm through mine, she walked into the library, saying archly, as ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... If a man has brought up the child, whom he took to be his son, and then sets up a home, and after he has acquired children, decides to disinherit the foster child, that son shall not go his way [penniless]; the father that brought him up shall give him one-third of a son's share in his goods and he shall depart. He shall not give him ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... he said, "of the turned cheek and of the contriving of good for him that had despitefully used me! Be satisfied, O young and zealous servitor of Love and Christ. I am alone, unarmed and penniless, among a people whom I have never been at pains even to despise. Presently I shall be taken by this vermin, and afterward I shall be burned alive. Theodoret is quite resolved to make of me a candle which will light ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... leaves her penniless, she will, if possible, clothe her children with her pen, but if her literary wares are a drug on the market, she will turn bravely to other fields, and find her daily bread made sweet by thankfulness. She does not hesitate to hold out her hands to help a fellow-creature, either ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... perfection; solid, heavy taciturn man:—of whom there is nothing notable but this only, That last year his Wife brought him a little Daughter, Catharine the name of her. His Wife is a foolish restless dame, highborn and penniless; let her nurse well this little Catharine: little Catharine will become abundantly distinguished in a thirty years hence; Empress of all the Russias that little girl; the Fates have so appointed it, mocking the prophecies of men! ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... enthusiasts, led by a poor knight called Walter the Penniless, was cut to pieces by the natives of Bulgaria, a few only reaching Constantinople. A second multitude, forty thousand strong, was headed by Peter the Hermit. It was similar in character to the preceding. Whenever a town came in ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... well enough to go, however, I managed, by means of Copperhead influence and returned prisoners, to send a letter to my father and receive an answer. You can imagine what both contained; and so I found myself penniless, but not poor, an outcast, but not alone. Old Bent treated me like a prodigal son, and put money in my purse; his pretty daughters loved me for Margaret's sake, and gave me a patriotic salute all round ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... the nick of time, as H. came an hour or two after it arrived, and with many apologies told me he was quite penniless. The poor old fellow was quite overcome when I told him of how matters stood, and it was characteristic that as soon as he got his breath again, he wanted to know when he would begin teaching the children! I sent him to get an order on the Naples bank for discharge ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the self-denial that would yield her with a smile. But such a crisis was far away, and there was no necessity for now contemplating it. Indeed, there was no certainty it would ever arrive; it was only a possibility. The child was not beautiful, although to him she was lovely, and, being also penniless, was therefore not likely to attract attention; while, if her being unfolded under the genial influences he was doing his best to make powerful upon her, if she grew aware that by them her life was enlarging and being tenfold enriched, it was possible she might not be ready to fall in love, and ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... in the police-boat. The lieutenant, in turn, who knew all the "rules and regulations" by heart, explained that the harbor police were not ferrymen, and that the police-boats had other functions to perform than that of transporting belated and penniless sailor-men to their ships. He also said he knew the sampan men to be natural-born robbers, but that so long as they robbed within the law he was powerless. It was their right to collect fares in advance, and who was he to command them to take a passenger and collect fare at the journey's ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... of doubt, affairs assumed a new feature. Charles received a letter from a friend, stating that the banking institution, in the stocks of which his mother's entire property was invested, had failed, and that she was penniless. ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... lies in the moral character of the three. Ribera was a great artist, and the others were noble men. Ribera passed a youth of struggle and hunger and toil among the artists of Rome,—a stranger and penniless in the magnificent city,—picking up crusts in the street and sketching on quiet curbstones, with no friend, and no name but that of Spagnoletto,—the little Spaniard. Suddenly rising to fame, he broke loose from his Roman associations and fled to Naples, where he ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... and penniless, if the gospel story were not true, how could it have had preachers? They at ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... now seemed to him—a wild longing. Knowing nothing of it, he had pictured it a paradise, a land of roses. He seemed to have no knowledge of why she had left it; but years later his father spoke of finding her in Boston in the days when he preached there, penniless, searching for work as a teacher of singing. How she became jettisoned in that—to her—cold and inhospitable port, Stefan did not know, nor how soon after their marriage the two moved to the still more alien peninsula ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Bines, multimillionaire, with a lone pack-mule to bear his meagre outfit, picked up float-rock, tapped and scanned ledges, and chipped at boulders with the same ardour that had fired him in his penniless youth. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... required to spend a million dollars in one year in order to inherit seven millions. He must be absolutely penniless at that time, and yet have spent the million in a way that will commend him as fit to inherit the larger sum. How he does it forms the basis for one of the most crisp and breezy romances of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... been sending back some of the French refugees whom they drove before them in their retreat. There are groups of five hundred at a time who now and then are sent over the border either from Germany or Switzerland. They are penniless and not only have no money or food or clothes; they do not know whether their families are living or dead and in any case have no way to reach them. The French government is to try to arrange some plan by which homes may be secured for these unfortunate people ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... other views include yourself. Are you thinking of reserving the prize for your own special benefit? A penniless guardian—a rich ward; as a situation, it is perfect; full ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... and a back. The back—flat and straight and broad—indicates one side of his character—the side that belongs with the square chin and the blue eyes that always look at you with such frank directness. It was this side of the man that brought him barefooted and penniless to Arizona in those days long gone when he was only a boy and Arizona a strong man's country. It was this side of him that brought him triumphantly through those hard years of the Indian troubles, and in those wild and lawless times made him respected and feared by the evildoers ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... full of idle men. My last hope, a promise of employment in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... chapel. She may have continued kneeling there, motionless, for some quarter-hour more; in itself the act of suspense is an absorbing one. So much was I possessed by it that I forgot all beside it—that I was a lover, not of this shrouded unknown, that I was penniless and outcast, that I was hungry, ignorant, uncertain, unforgiven. I think that, in some indefinable way, the spirit of Aurelia may have been about me, pervading this cold church, linking me and that other; I think that Aurelia's soul ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... century, being old meant being poor. When President Roosevelt created Social Security, thousands wrote to thank him for eliminating what one woman called "the stark terror of penniless, helpless old age." Even today, without Social Security, half our nation's elderly would ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... president of the bank, had won the sympathy of every one by the modest way in which, with eye-glasses in hand, he had testified to the particulars of the loss which had left him penniless, and had ruined others whose little all was in his hands. And then, in reply to the formal question, he had testified, amid roars of laughter from the court-room, that it was not he who robbed the safe. At this, even the judge and Wood's lawyer ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... of Arthur's temperament, the novelty of being turned away into the street, like a penniless vagabond, at every house where he asked for a lodging, presented itself in the light of a new and highly amusing piece of experience. He went on, with his carpet-bag in his hand, applying for a bed at every place of entertainment for travellers that he could find in Doncaster, until ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... if I loved a penniless girl, you would desire me to sacrifice my feelings and my honor—to marry solely ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... left for dead at Dunkirk. On his return to England, he found Lucy Sacheverell—his "Lucretia," the lady of his love—married, his death having been reported. All went ill. He was again imprisoned, grew penniless, had to borrow, and fell into a consumption from despair for love and loyalty. "Having consumed all his estate," says Anthony Wood, "he grew very melancholy, which at length brought him into a consumption; became very ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... entrance of five old soldiers of noble birth, part of the body-guard they had left behind at Mittau, relying on the protection of Paul. The "mad Czar" had decreed their immediate expulsion, and, penniless and almost starving, they made their way to Louis XVIII. All the money the royal family possessed was bestowed on these faithful servants, who came to them in detachments for relief, and then the Duchess offered her diamonds to the Danish consul ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... commences. Don't forget your part, boy. We're sailoring men back from a cruise to Jamaica and pretty near penniless. Lost our jobs, and looking for others. Told there was a factory somewhere in this part of the world that had to do with shipping, and have walked down from London. Took six days, mind; don't forget that. And ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... wind up. I have been to Bath, to Cheltenham, to Harrogate, to Brighton, and everywhere else where people meet, and people are met with, who would not meet or be met with elsewhere. I have seen many nice girls; but the nice girls were, like myself, almost penniless; and I have seen many ill-favoured, who had money: the first I could only afford to look at— the latter I have had some dealings with. I have been refused by one or two, and I might have married ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... find them. Perhaps you can explain to me how Lind should care so little for the future of his daughter as to propose—with the possibility of our marrying—that she should be left penniless?" ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... he couldn't put a married man out in that way. And that same married man came in here penniless four years ago, has been working for dad all the time for wages; and he could retire to-morrow and live on the interest of ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... ever. Would this woman steal her pocketbook? How could she ever get away from the place if penniless? ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... "to keep this writing in memory of her? This is the last lesson I shall have the honor of giving her, and that which I have just received in these words may serve me for an abiding rule of life. I left Spain, a fugitive and penniless, but I have to-day received from my family a sum sufficient for my needs. You will allow me to send some ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... coming; hardly a remembered face, scarcely a future hope. The glitter of a passing troop of cavalry drew my mind for an instant to Edith Brennan, but I crushed the thought. Even were she free, what had I now to place at her proud feet,—I, a penniless, defeated, homeless man? No, that was all over, even as the cause for which I had fought; love and ambition must lie buried in the same grave. The clothes I wore, that tattered suit of faded gray, soiled by months of hard service in the open, was all I possessed ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... Mollie Farrell, the penniless daughter of an impoverished house—jumped up from her chair, and clasped her hands in dismay. In blissful contemplation of imagining chiffons and cotillions, the prosaic duties of reality had slipped from her mind, and recollection brought with ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... pathetic or he could never have done what he did—sell to the old gentleman, on the strength of the knowledge he had imparted to him, a house and lot upon terms so easy that he might drowse along for a little time and then wake to find himself both homeless and penniless. This was the promoter's method, and for so long a time had it proved successful that he had now grown mildly affluent and had set up a buggy in which to drive about and see his numerous ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... find it here. Remember that you are nearly thirty years old, and that you are nothing but an obscure Bohemian—a penniless correspondent of an ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... I would 'come down.' It is a system of blackmailing, like any other. An account is opened to some young rascal; and, when the amount is reasonably large, they take it to the family, saying, 'Money, or I make row.' Do you think it is to you, who are penniless, that they give credit? It's on my pocket that they were drawing,—on my pocket, because they believed me rich. They sold you at exorbitant prices every thing they wished; and they relied on me to pay for trousers at ninety francs, shirts at forty ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance—words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... were few, and when John Wesley's income was thirty pounds a year he gave two pounds for charity. When it was sixty pounds a year he gave away thirty pounds; and here seems a good place to say that, although he made more than a hundred thousand pounds during his life from his books, he died penniless, just as he had wished ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... that, while the people of Sangamon have cast me off, my old friends of Menard, who have known me longest and best, stick to me. It would astonish, if not amuse, the older citizens to learn that I (a stranger, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat at ten dollars per month) have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction. Yet so, chiefly, it was. There was, too, the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... I was of course unable to carry through the profitable series of abductions in the world of High Finance that I had contemplated. Hence my misfortunes, and now on this beautiful Sunday morning, penniless but for the coppers and the postage-stamp, with no breakfast in sight, and, fortunately enough, not even an appetite, I turned to my morning paper ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Southern States. Under the potent shield of State Rights, the game would be in their own hands. Does any sane man doubt for a moment that the men who followed Jefferson Davis through the late terrible Rebellion, often marching barefooted and hungry, naked and penniless, and who now only profess an enforced loyalty, would plunge this country into a foreign war to-day, if they could thereby gain their coveted independence, and their still more coveted mastery over the negroes? Plainly enough, the peace not less than the prosperity of this country is involved ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... occurred to me in that light," said I, laughing heartily, as much at the cool and quiet insolence of the waif's manner as at his suggestion. "But then, you see, there are difficulties in the way. Young ladies who dwell in fine mansions are not fond of marrying penniless doctors." ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... Irish Rebellion the fixed residence of herself and her husband had been in (Pall Mall?) London. Here her relatives from Ireland and elsewhere gathered round her; and here in 1644 her youngest brother, the future chemist, turning up brown and penniless, a foreign-looking lad of eighteen, after his six years of travel abroad, had been received with open arms. He had remained in her house about five months, and then had retired to his estate of Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, where he continued mainly till 1650, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... and went on enjoying herself, thinking that the day of judgment was very, very far away. But it swooped down on her sooner than she expected—the momentous hour when she must choose between the pearl necklace with Mulke and a penniless stranger from Yuchovitch who was reputed to be ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... a quiet business-like voice Marsworth put the case of the penniless one—his qualifications, his ambitions, and the particular post under the Army Medical Board on which he had set his hopes. If only somebody with influence would give him ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it isn't that. I assure you I am not making excuses; you should have it directly if it were possible; but I am as penniless as a fellow can be, not so much as a ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... ample provocation, bombarded him in his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of Cesare Borgia, a sort of epidemic fell on the petty tyrants; few of them outlived this date, and none to t heir own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... passed on a Mississippi plantation. He had years ago heard more or less idle gossip about the hard, miserly nature of the old planter, Hamilton, and of his bitter opposition to his daughter's match with penniless young Carleton. There had been an elopement, or something. It came back to him like some hideous nightmare. His pure, spotless darling—his promised wife! Could there be sin or shame enveloping such a being? He must know. He wrote to Mrs. Carleton. ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... ancient and hallowed institution, and would not advise a friend against taking such a step, even at the present and ever-increasing high cost of living. I do not use such language. Since I first put on long trousers I have hunted high and low for a wife, and with a persistence equalling that of a young penniless widow, but without success. Just when it seems that within a few days I shall be the happy recipient of the congratulations of my friends who in their hearts feel certain I am about to fall victim to the wiles of a designing female person, cruel fate steps in and with peremptory ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... sleep, eat, nor amuse himself, he is brooding over his million, it makes him run about all over Europe; he worries himself, goes to the devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes a liquidation, such as I have seen myself, which very often leaves him penniless and without a reputation or a friend. The spendthrift, on the other hand, takes life as a serious game and sees his horses run. He loses his capital, perhaps, but he stands a chance of being nominated Receiver-General, of making a wealthy marriage, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... penniless orphan daughter of a noble, but impoverished Scotch family. She had been left, by the death of her parents, dependent upon harsh and cruel relatives. She had been given in marriage, at the age of fifteen, to a wealthy old gentleman, whose years quadrupled hers. But he had used her very kindly, and ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... orders. My aunt is my rival, and I do not feel the least doubt as to his having offered to her half a dozen times. But then she has another lover, Captain Bellfield, and I see that she prefers him. He is a penniless scamp and looks as though he drank. He paints his whiskers too, which I don't like; and, being forty, tries to look like twenty-five. Otherwise he is agreeable enough, and I rather approve of my aunt's taste ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... I," said Jessica. "My allowance lasts about two days, and then I am penniless for the rest of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... am I to do, if you want to leave the children penniless? That is what I cannot quietly submit to. You know that I am not grasping, and that I ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... bent of Mrs. Poyser's mind with regard to Adam; and though she and her husband might have viewed the subject differently if Hetty had been a daughter of their own, it was clear that they would have welcomed the match with Adam for a penniless niece. For what could Hetty have been but a servant elsewhere, if her uncle had not taken her in and brought her up as a domestic help to her aunt, whose health since the birth of Totty had not been equal to more positive labour than the superintendence of servants and children? ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
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