"Pitiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these griefs I have scanty knowledge. It seems to me from my personal experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions, and more goodness and tenderheartedness than we read of in the moralists. People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me:—nay, have not the very critics tamed their beardom for me, and roared delicately as sucking doves, on behalf of me? I have no harm to say of your world, though I am not of it, as you see. And ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... scarcely refer to it without losing patience, even now when I understand more completely the circumstances under which it was written. It was not too plainly written or coherent and seemed to imply that other letters had preceded it. Morley begged for money. He was in "pitiful straits," he declared, compelled to live as no gentleman of birth and breeding should live. As a matter of fact, the remnant of his resources, the little cash left from the Captain's fortune which he had taken with him had gone and he was earning a ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... audible reply, and shuffled so feebly with his feet that Marriott took his arm by way of support. He noticed for the first time that the clothes hung on him with pitiful looseness. The broad frame was literally hardly more than a frame. He was as thin as a skeleton. But, as he touched him, the sensation of faintness and dread returned. It only lasted a moment, and then passed off, and he ascribed it not unnaturally to the distress ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... cheese nor drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn. Their butter is very indifferent, and one would wonder how they could contrive to make it so bad. They use much pottage made of coal-wort, which they call kail, sometimes broth of decorticated barley. The ordinary country-houses are pitiful cots, built of stone and covered with turfs, having in them but one room, many of them no chimneys, the windows very small holes and not glazed. The ground in the valleys and plains bear very good corn, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "ashamed to give any credit to the visions of a jealous fellow, who brought nothing else with him from Italy? Is it possible that the story of the green stockings, upon which he has founded his suspicions, should have imposed upon you, accompanied as it is with such pitiful circumstances? Since he has made you his confidant, why did not he boast of breaking in pieces my poor harmless guitar? This exploit, perhaps, might have convinced you more than all the rest; recollect yourself, and ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... headquarters; but on the third day, so rapidly are these little dramas played, the female bluebird reappeared with another mate. Ah! how the wren stock went down then! What dismay and despair filled again those little breasts! It was pitiful. They did not scold as before, but after a day or two withdrew from the garden, dumb with grief, and gave ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... It would be pitiful to tell how their days were spent to accomplish this end; how the dollars had been saved for thirty years and the picayunes hoarded; and yet, not half enough gathered! But Ma'ame Pelagie felt sure of twenty years of life before her, and counted ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... half-way there before he noticed his isolation, and a sudden flush of scarlet in his cheeks betrayed his emotion at the discovery. It was too late to retreat to his seat, and too late to pretend not to notice his position. With a pitiful attempt at a swagger, he completed his passage to the door, and ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... woman holds her sucking child; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... there. Tarleton burnt it—set it afire with all its beautiful furniture and silver and linen! His hussars ran through it, setting it afire and shooting at the mirrors and slashing the silks and pictures! And when the Major's young wife entered the smoking doorway to try to save a pitiful little trinket or two, an officer—never mind who, for his descendants may be living to-day in England—struck her with the flat of his sword and cut her and struck her to her knees! That ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... matters were exactly as he had foreseen. His uncle was scarcely polite; Kitty gave him sharp, indignant glances when their eyes met, and then averted hers; and from time to time his mother looked at him in so pitiful and imploring a manner that one moment he felt as if he were an utter scoundrel, and the next that he would do anything to take her in his arms and try and convince her that he was not so bad ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... pitiful, this grasping for a poison in an extremity; this seizing of a defective rope to escape ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the pitiful story of what the colony had suffered during his absence: lack of food and illness had carried off nearly half the colonists, and those that remained were weak and discouraged. Death had taken both of his enemies and of his friends, but some who had been opposed to him formerly had been ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... and not even ultimately paid, is very common. There is no fixed rule for satisfying all such claims once a week, and thus debts to laborers are contracted, and when contracted are ignored. With us there is a feeling that it is pitiful, mean almost beyond expression, to wrong a laborer of his hire. We have men who go in debt to tradesmen perhaps without a thought of paying them; but when we speak of such a one who has descended into the ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... more, but the din drowned his voice. As he paused, the people set up their loud shouts again. "Oh, you wicked god! You eat the storm-apple! You have wrought us much harm. You have spoiled our harvest. How you came down in great sheets last night! It was pitiful, pitiful! We would like to kill you. You might have taken our bread-fruits and our bananas, if you would; we give you them freely; they are yours; here, take them. We feed you well; we make you many offerings. But why did you wish to have our huts ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... If she had screamed when she said she did, so some one cried out loudly now. I think that pitiful person was myself. They say I had been standing straight up in my place ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... mouthpiece to his lips, and began to blow into the bag, alas! it would hold no wind. He flung it from him in anger and cried again. Turkey left him crying in the middle of the bog. He said it was a pitiful sight. ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... Low pitiful sobs and sighs were the only sounds the little fellow made till set down in the veranda; but then clinging to his grandfather's hand, he burst out afresh, "O grandpa, I can't go in! I can't, I can't see mamma, for she can't ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... long time ago he very carelessly engaged himself to a giddy little butterfly in Salt Lake City, and he doesn't want to marry her at all, but he feels it is his duty because they have been engaged for so many years. Isn't it pitiful?" ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... the days of Herod," called "the Great," a monster of cruelty, a vassal of Rome, who ruled the Jews with savage tyranny. The political slavery of the people was only less pitiful than their spiritual decline, for religion had become an empty form, a mere system of ceremonies and rites. However, God is never without his witnesses and his true worshipers. Among these were "a certain ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... with what, to Johnny, seemed uncanny swiftness, and squatted, grinning and sinister, in a relentless half circle, the book slipped unheeded to the floor with a clatter that failed to rouse the painter, whose ears were dulled to all else than the pitiful blat of a shivering, panic-stricken calf whose nose sought his mother's side for her comforting ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... Mr. B—y, "what! cruel to a fair female! Oh fie! fie! fie!—a fellow who can be cruel to females and children, or animals, must be a pitiful fellow indeed. I wish we had had him here in the sea. I should like to have had him stripped, and that kind of thing, and been well banged by ten of our clippers here with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Cruel to a fair female? Oh ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... replacing the New York Central's masonry viaduct approaches with a fine steel elevated system. This fraud cost the public treasury about $1,200,000, quite a sizable sum, it will be admitted, but one nevertheless of pitiful proportions in comparison with previous and later transactions of the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... out of the room. This they did, but the prayer would not come. I fell into heavy doubting and despair, and murmured against the Lord that He plagued me more sorely than Lazarus or Job. Wretch that I was, I cried, "Thou didst leave to Lazarus at least the crumbs and the pitiful dogs, but to me Thou hast left nothing, and I myself am less in Thy sight even than a dog; and Job Thou didst not afflict until Thou hadst mercifully taken away his children, but to me Thou hast left my poor little daughter, that her torments may increase mine own ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... clung to me.... As far as it affected my devotion to you it might have happened in another phase of creation." That was the amazing part of it, that he should expect her to be content with such an explanation, that he should try to deprive her of a wife's last poor pitiful privilege, a sense of indignity. She was not only to condone what he had done, but as nearly as possible she was to give ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... January, 104, when Marius entered Rome in triumph, accompanied by evidences of his victories, the greatest of which was the pitiful Numidian king himself, who followed in the grand procession, and was afterwards ruthlessly dropped into the horrible Tulliarium, or Mamertine prison, to perish by starvation in the watery chill. He is said to have exclaimed as he touched the water at the bottom of the prison, "Hercules! ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... said Aunt Cyrilla firmly, "and I've some presents in it that I was taking to my nephew's children. I'm going to give 'em to these. As for the money, I think the mother is the one for it to go to. She's been telling me her story, and a pitiful one it is. Let's make up a little purse among us ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas for such pitiful ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... do some little good in the way of saving souls. Noble work this! So let me intreat you never to let your other avocations interfere with this glorious calling. It is painful to see some men merge the ministerial character in some pitiful clerkship—some book-keeping affair. And worst of all, these parties take it into their head, generally amongst us, to consider themselves and their office as much higher than that of the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... strange old maid took her place among the singers. Her face was full of wrinkles, her chin trembled, and one foot was supported by crutches. The old woman began her song in a grating voice. She sang of her beautiful youth, the happy days in the house of her parents, and the pitiful ways of the present, when all joy had vanished. Then she sang of her lovers, who came in hosts to woo her, and how she had repulsed them all. She concluded ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... can be accomplished; one thirsts for soul, spirit, and actual life. Ah! composing is a misery, and the pitiful children of my Muse appear to me often like foundlings in a hospital, wandering about only as ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... the ground. Verily, for this reason, I would deem death to be preferable to life. O hero that never swervest from virtue, had I with my brothers met with destruction ere this at the hands of our enemies on the battle-field, I would not have found thee in this pitiful plight, thus pierced with arrows. Surely, O prince, the Maker had created is to become perpetrators of evil deeds. O king, if thou wishest to do me good, do thou then instruct me in such a way that I may be cleansed of this ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... neither understanding, and each looking down upon the other—Alan with the scornful pity of the scholar who has delved in the dust of dreary negatives which generations of doubters have gradually heaped up; and Caleb with the pitiful scorn of one who has been into the sanctuary of God, and so learned to understand the ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... is in myself. My career should be the Church, my pursuit the cure of souls, and—and—this pitiful infirmity! How can I speak the Divine ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... they would. They would do anything to repair the injury done to God; and if, by any slight neglects, which appear crimes to them, they have offended their neighbour, what return are they not willing to make? But it is pitiful to see the state of that one who has driven away her Beloved. She does not cease to run after Him, but the faster she goes, the further He seems to leave her behind; and if He stops, it is only for a ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... It would be much nearer the truth to say that of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded again. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason is sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is painted in the flat. "Regret," says George Moore, to change the figure ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... that in the time of the first triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of Caesar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be bought. The augurship would have bought him. "So pitiful," says the biographer, "was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his honor, his opinions, and the commonwealth!" With no more sententious language was the character of a great man ever offered up to public scorn. And on what evidence? We should have known nothing ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... sea made things dim, but in a crowd of queer people and bundles and voices I saw Sam standing and looking perfectly helpless, while that Commissioner of Agriculture stood over by the window, evidently perfectly furious and growling out expletives to the saddest crowd of pitiful people I ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... torch was lit for a few moments while they ate the pitiful scraps of food that Guy distributed with ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... fellow was coming on. The brute ought not to pull through. But it was too late: a new regime had begun; his little period of sway had passed, leaving as a last proof of his art this human jetsam saved for the nonce. And there rose in his heated mind the pitiful face of a resolute woman, questioning him: "You held the keys of life and death. Which have ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... northeast of the village, and before long Count Bismarck discovered in a remote place about twenty men dreadfully wounded. These poor fellows had had no attention whatever, having been overlooked by the hospital corps, and their condition was most pitiful. Yet there was one very handsome man in the group—a captain of artillery—who, though shot through the right breast, was talkative and cheerful, and felt sure of getting well. Pointing, however, to a comrade lying near, also shot in the breast, he significantly shook his head; it ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... selected from the Koran at a venture and a name beginning with that letter is chosen. Some common names are those of the hundred titles of God combined with the prefix abd or servant. Such are Abdul Aziz, servant of the all-honoured; Ghani, the everlasting; Karim, the gracious; Rahim, the pitiful; Rahman, the merciful; Razzak, the bread-giver; Sattar, the concealer; and so on, with the prefix Abdul, or servant of, in each case. Similarly Abdullah, or servant of God, was the name of Muhammad's father, and is a very favourite one. Other names end with Baksh or 'given ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... raked from the polluted stream and held in their finger-like drooping branches human bodies in all shapes and attitudes with a semblance of naturalness which made an everlasting picture on my distraught mind. Of this pitiful gruesome ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... who after months of exposure and fatigue were now obliged to walk ashore penniless. A number of these four hundred passengers had brought back an aggregate of about $4,000,000 from the Klondike; but many among them had brought back only disappointment, and their haggard faces were pitiful to see; indeed, the Doctor told me that out of the thousands who went fortune hunting to Alaska, only about 3 per cent. came back richer ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... family lives in a single room, with only a screen to divide it for decency's sake. Already the coffin was standing in their midst—a plain but decent shell which had been bought ready-made. The child, they told me, had been a boy of nine, and full of promise. What a pitiful spectacle! Though not weeping, the mother, poor woman, looked broken with grief. After all, to have one burden the less on their shoulders may prove a relief, though there are still two children left—a babe at the breast and a little girl of six! How painful to see ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... centre of a vast galanty-show: the phantom houses came and went; from some there shone bright lights; the doors were open, and little figures flitted in and out, the tiny coaches glided to and fro, manikins grotesque but pitiful crept across ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... his return to Bettles too long. When his food was exhausted and he had to go, there came on that terrible cold spell. A little memorandum-book in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there was entry of the awful cold. He had no thermometer, but he knew the temperature was -50 deg. or lower by the cracking noise ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... done before her, Angel dragged out the weary years, almost hopeless; and the one object of her toil and solicitude, was only a pitiful wreck of the former stalwart William Way. Only a miserable, wretched creature, that grovelled in the mire of its own degradation, and from whose bosom the last spark of manhood seemed to have forever fled. To look upon him, you would ask, 'Can ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men, and even of inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary I took heart again. My uncle would never consent to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vicissitudes, Rupert Gunning, arrayed in a green swallow-tailed calico coat, short white cotton trousers, and a skimpy nigger wig, presented a pitiful example of the humiliations which the allied forces of love and jealousy can bring upon the just. Fanny Fitz has since admitted that, in spite of the wrath that burned within her, the sight of Mr. Gunning morosely dabbing his long nose with the repulsive sponge that was shared by the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... pitiful sight, this, when the men are first brought in, from some camp hospital broke up, or a part of the army moving. These who arrived yesterday are cavalry men. Our troops had fought like devils, but got the worst of it. They were Kilpatrick's cavalry; were in the rear, part of Meade's ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... she told herself in the fever of the night, had not yet come. Her pitiful achievements, her beauty, her French and Spanish, her sober book reading, and her little affectations of fine linen and careful speech, all seemed to crumple to nothing. She seemed again to be the furious, helpless, seventeen-year-old Harriet of the Watertown ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... too well for his own peace of mind the pitiful diversions of the old man's day. It sapped his powers of resistance. In the morning there was the doctor, a weary little man, untemperamental and mercifully impervious to insult, who chugged up ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... others suffered violent death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion, dislike or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is not ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... Little-Faith would have had their revenge and satisfaction upon Christian and Hopeful had they seen those two so Pharisaical old men taken in the Flatterer's net. For it was nothing else but the swaggering pride of Hopeful over the pitiful case of Little- Faith, taken along with the hard and hasty ways of Christian with that unhappy youth Ignorance, that so soon laid them both down under the small cords of the Shining One. This word of the wise man, that pride goeth before destruction, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... pretence of intercourse with the spirits of the dead through the legs of their tables and chairs, seemed to me the most melancholy testimony to an utter want of faith in things spiritual, of belief in God and Christ's teaching, and a pitiful craving for such a faith, as well as to the absence of all rational common sense, in the vast numbers of persons deluded by such processes. In this aspect (the total absence of right reason and real religion demonstrated by these ludicrous and blasphemous juggleries ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... she never named you and evidently meant not to name you.... Poor child! She may have thought herself strong, and then things have come over her wave on wave. Her grandfather—that dark upbringing on tenets harsh and wrathful—certainty of disgrace. Pitiful!" ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... swift-footed and silent, was too much for Sir Philip. He sank on his knees by the side of his unconscious son, whimpering like a child—a weak and helpless old man. There was no trace of the dignity of the Herediths or pride of race in the wrinkled face, now distorted with the pitiful grin of senility, as Sir Philip crouched over his son, stroking his ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... frightened, now, and snuffling, clinging desperately to the hand of the loved mistress she had run away to serve. The flute-player, almost fainting from the heat and weariness, strove bravely to conceal this from his daughter, and, with pitiful assumption of fine strength, smiled down at her, through the thick gloom, from time to time, with reassurance, attempting to instill in her a courage which he, himself, she ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... quenches the spark of both. It is not that Lord Byron is sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate, and sometimes moral—but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful hoax upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. It is as if the eagle were to build its eyry in a common sewer, or the owl were seen soaring to the mid-day sun. Such a sight might make one laugh, but one would not wish or expect it ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... sudden pallor of their men, by men who heard the cry of their women? I heard it in the streets, spoken quite brutally sometimes, by men afraid of breaking down, and with a passionate tenderness by other men, sure of their own strength but pitiful for those whose spirit fainted at the spectre of ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... midst of all his sufferings he murmurs not nor for a moment gives way to revenge; he leaves the persecutor in the hands of God. Stand off, Christian; pity the poor wretch that brings down upon himself the vengeance of God. Your pitiful arm must no strike him—no, stand by, 'that God may have his full blow at him in his time. Wherefore he saith avenge not yourself—"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Give place, leave such an one ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... rest in his bed till he had cleared it all up and settled it for ever, one way or the other. If Tilgate wasn't his, by law and right, he wanted none of it. If his father was trying to buy off the real heir to the estate with a pitiful pittance, in order to preserve the ill-gotten remainder for Lady Emily's son, why, Granville for his part would be no active party to such a miserable compromise. If some other man was the Colonel's lawful heir, let that other man take the property ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Dirk's cry was very pitiful, and, whether he understood the fact of the gun being loaded or not, he turned and swam slowly ashore, climbed on the rock and stood dripping and disconsolate, without trying to scatter the ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... smile was charming, and her large blue eyes expressed both gentleness and goodness. Seen beside this smiling and serene countenance, the appearance of the stranger was downright repulsive, and Monsieur de Lamotte could hardly repress a start of disagreeable surprise at the pitiful and sordid aspect of this diminutive person, who stood apart, looking overwhelmed by conscious inferiority. He was still more astonished when he saw his son take him by the hand with friendly kindness, and heard ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... odd mixture of thankfulness and reserve, put himself into the doctor's hands with almost a boy's confidence, but kept himself free, with a determination that in the circumstances was touching, however pitiful, from the stretched-out hands of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... very pitiful. Her hand came to his. "But this—this is different. Why should you do without her? You know ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... pitiful fact that many mothers apparently are wholly unconcerned as to the whereabouts of their little folks, even after dusk; this is unwise to say the least, for a boy or girl under twelve years of age should be found under the ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... blessed Torello, and commend them to him, that by means of his prayers God would restore their health. And going to him, she commended them to him with faith and tears and hope beyond the power of words to describe. And truly it was not in vain; for the holy man, who was most pitiful, kneeled down and prayed to the Lord for her and her children as only the true servants of God pray; and having so done, he took some water from the spring of which he usually drank and gave it to the children, and they were entirely ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... you choose. It is pitiful to observe what sort of troubles most unhappy people are afflicted with. I have seen a beautiful young woman grow care lined and faded just from imagining she was being "slighted" or ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... paper and all, and crammed it into the dying fire. Then suddenly she burst into tears. The world was all wrong, justice was wrong and suffering was wrong and mankind wrong, all was wrong and inexplicable and pitiful too. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... scolded in the beech-trees. Nellie, who had broken her prison bars, called again and again from the playground, while slowly but surely up the roof crawled the ever-increasing flames. But 'Mazin' Grace heard nothing, saw nothing; she lay unconscious on the roof, an absurdly pitiful little figure in her ragged dress and pink ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... blood and birthplace, a time-server, had to hurry away. I took his measure; nor did his protestations of alarm excite my sympathy, and yet somehow I did not feel unkindly towards him; a weak man is a pitiful object in times of trouble. Some of our countrymen who were living in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State at the outbreak of the war have been placed in such difficult positions and torn by so many conflicting emotions that they must be judged very tolerantly. How few men are ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... part and depredations on the settlements. In the year named two of them were caught stealing pigs, and were sent to the workhouse and given thirty-nine lashes on the bare back. When set free they went home in a fury, and told a pitiful tale of the disgrace they had suffered, being whipped by the black driver of the workhouse in the presence of felon slaves. The story roused the blood of all their fellows, who felt that they had been outraged by this ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... doing so with a sharp eye to the advantages to be derived from it. That weary round of giving a self-regarding hospitality, and then getting a return dinner or evening entertainment from each guest, which makes up so much of the social life among us, is a pitiful affair, hollow and selfish. What would Jesus say—what does Jesus say—about it all? The sacred name of hospitality is profaned, and the very springs of it dried up by much of our social customs, and the most literal application of our Lord's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pitiful on me that am a goddess, if ever by word or deed I gladdened thy heart. My daughter, whom I bore, a sweet plant and fair to see; it was her shrill voice I heard through the air unharvested, even as of one violently entreated, but ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... with the folly which it had shown in the Anglo-Russian attack upon Holland, raised against it a Maritime League under the leadership of a Power which England had offended as a neutral and exasperated as an ally. Since the pitiful Dutch campaign, the Czar had transferred to Great Britain the hatred which he had hitherto borne to France. The occasion was skilfully used by Bonaparte, to whom, as a soldier, the Czar felt less repugnance than to the Government ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... knows well he is not my father's heir. He has known it since the hour of my father's death. He knows that I know it. Yet he has kept the lands to this day." Another uneasy perambulation. "Do you think of that when you talk of revenge? Manliness? He has none. He is a pitiful, truculent, groveling coward, ready to buy profit at any price. He has robbed me of my inheritance. He stands in my place. He is a living lie. Revenge? It ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... dear maid!" said Cicely encouragingly. "May be it shall be better than we might fear. 'The Lord is very pitiful, and of ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... attributes it to jealousy. "It was strongly suspected," says he, "that he was fretting with chagrin and envy at the singular honor Dr. Johnson had lately enjoyed." It needed the littleness of mind of Boswell to ascribe such pitiful motives to Goldsmith, and to entertain such exaggerated notions of the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... very little more; that scarcely mattered however, as I easily concluded that the persons tucked away in so snug a corner were Jasper Nettlepoint and Mr. Porterfield's intended. Tucked away was the odious right expression, and I deplored the fact so betrayed for the pitiful bad taste in it. I immediately turned away, and the next moment found myself face to face with our vessel's skipper. I had already had some conversation with him—he had been so good as to invite me, as he had ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... found himself ebbing down through some soft and feathery emptiness that he seemed to hear a pitiful and imploring voice call thinly out, "Mack!" Still fainter he seemed to hear it, "Mack! Come up! I'm dying!" He remembered, lazily, that it sounded like the distant voice of Keenan—but where ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... satisfaction came to him. He hoped his task would be easier than he had anticipated. His evil nature rose to the occasion, and, for the moment, his own troubles and fears were forgotten. There was a cat-like licking of the lips as he contemplated the pitiful picture before him. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... to be so stingy another time." So we both ran home laughing, in spite of our disappointment. But we were not so fortunate as to get off without a scolding. The next day the lady came to Madama and complained of our impertinence. Madama scolded us a little; but when she heard what a pitiful buona mano the lady had given us, she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... her stage associates, and her paramours, she was still a little unschooled in the world. Her heart was essentially poetic and innocent. No one had ever given her much of anything—not even her parents. Her allowance thus far in life had been a pitiful six dollars a week outside of her clothing. As she surveyed these pretty things in the privacy of her room she wondered oddly whether Cowperwood was growing to like her. Would such a strong, hard business man be ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... up a pitiful whimper, and tried to possess herself of his hand; she kissed his coat-sleeve instead. "That you will return with ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... once all the journey, and that was about half way, to complain in a sort of hopeless, pitiful tone that she was cold. It was ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... friendship in which nothing was to be counted upon except the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in general—and Mr. Stevenson in ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... made his rage into a dark and stormy specter, that possessed him and made him dream of abominable cruelties. The tormentors were flies sucking insolently at his blood, and he thought that he would have given his life for a revenge of seeing their faces in pitiful plights. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... lamenting, it cruelly devours him. It is thus with the hypocrite, who, for the smallest matter, has his face bathed with tears, but shows the heart of a tiger and rejoices in his heart at the woes of others, while wearing a pitiful face. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... beliefs, that have come to weigh upon humanity through twenty centuries of Gothic Christianity. But that can only be upon condition that it is a generous faith, earnestly desirous of the good of others. But instead of that, what happens? The most pitiful egoism. A handful of loose-living men and women trying to give their senses the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of risk, while they take good care that the rest shall drudge for it.—Yes, no doubt, they have their parlor Socialism!... But they ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... pale woman with a sadly-bereaved face: her arms were stretched out above her as one in supplication. "False God!" she cried in a voice cold and bitter, in which there was no trace of tenderness or pitiful earnestness, "Thou hast made me a lie upon Thy cruel earth. Tribulation Thou hast given me; patience the world forced upon me; hope Thou ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... camp could scarcely walk, by the twenty-eighth, and their sensations of hunger were deminishing. This condition forebode delirium and death, unless stayed by the only means at hand. It was in very truth a pitiful alternative offered to ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... they have no clan, no family-names among them, therefore. This idiot-boy, chosen by God to be anointed with the holy chrism, is only "Tom,"—"Blind Tom," they call him in all the Southern States, with a kind cadence always, being proud and fond of him; and yet—nothing but Tom? That is pitiful. Just a mushroom-growth,—unkinned, unexpected, not hoped for, for generations, owning no name to purify and honor and give away when he is dead. His mother, at work to-day in the Oliver plantations, can never comprehend why ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... They hung the baby to a tree later, and when they got ready they killed its mother. It was the only merciful thing they done, I guess, in all their raid, for they made her die a thousand deaths before they really cut off her poor pitiful life." ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... say, which is poured out in self-denials and sacrifices to bless others. But really the wasted lives are those which are devoted to pleasure and sin. Those who live a merely worldly life are wasting what it took the dying of Jesus to redeem. Oh, how pitiful much of fashionable, worldly life must appear to ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... direction of Purvis's eyes and saw Kate sitting on a rock at a little distance from the shanty in which she lived with her father. She made a pitiful figure, her chin cupped in her hand, and her eyes staring fixedly down the valley. He was recalled from her by the general ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... establishment, which is only to exist for one year, costs L2,000 or L3,000 more or less, and to declare that the sum actually spent by Lord Gosford shall be the maximum of Lord Durham's expenditure, is so manifestly absurd that it proves the pitiful and spiteful spirit in which the motion was conceived. Suppose they had succeeded, and that after such a vote Durham (as he well might) had resigned the appointment. This must have been an enormous embarrassment to the public service, incurred without any object of commensurate importance. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... me if it was the Prince. I answered that it was, and instantly brought him in.' Among all the stout Highland hearts which were ready to risk everything for him, Charles never found one more brave and pitiful than that of the girl who was introduced to him in ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... and with trembling, pitiful fingers touched the velvet muzzle. Then suddenly indignation, fierce, overwhelming, headlong, swept over her, crowding out even her horror. She stood up and faced Nap in such a tornado of fury as had never ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... astonishment as they straggled out of the woods, a worn-out army of perhaps six hundred men, with faces haggard, clothing in tatters, and many barefooted and bareheaded. Over eighty had died in the wilderness, and a hundred were on the sick list. So pitiful and so ludicrous was their appearance that one man wrote in his diary that they "resembled those animals of New Spain called {30} orang-outangs," and "unlike the children of Israel, whose clothes waxed not old in the wilderness, theirs hardly ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... village was laid out with some regularity and had taverns, stores, butchers' shops and monte tables." One cannot but smile at the idea of "monte tables" in connection with the Drytown of to-day; pitiful as is the reflection that men had braved the hardships of the desert and toiled to the waist in water for gold, only to throw it recklessly in the ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... only by the keen air of the hills, was creased and soiled, and his boots were thickly covered with mud and clay. His face and hands were unwashed, and his hair hung unbrushed over his forehead. Phebe's whole heart was stirred at this pitiful change, and she laid her hand on his shoulder with ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... entirely with a view to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the "theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but they were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating, wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... with neglecting her lover to the common danger.... The inspector said the man was in a pitiful state, morally quite uncombed and infested with ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... he knew so well; the acceleration and the total energy necessary to drive a ship to the nearest stars. Even a ship's Pulsors, pouring energy out steadily, were pitiful compared to that job. Schoolboys knew the figures; mankind had dreamed ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... Saviour to save him from his sins, to lift him above his weakness, to help him overcome his bad habits; that His name was called Jesus, because he shall save his people from their sins. John listened with a strange new thrill. This was what he needed—a Friend, all- powerful, all-pitiful, who would undertake for him and help him to overcome himself—for he sorely felt how weak he was. Here was a Friend that could have compassion on the ignorant and them that were out of the way. The thought brought tears to his eyes and ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... cross, and say, "Behold your God! This He did, this He condescended, this He dared, this He suffered for you, and such as you. This is what He, the Maker of the universe, is like. This is what He has been trying to make you like, in your small degree, every time a noble, a generous, a pitiful, a merciful emotion crossed your heart; every time you forgot yourself, even for a moment, and thought of the welfare ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... flock. Domestic disasters in his parish came to his ears from time to time; cases of young girls whose heads were turned by soldiers, so that they were about to become mothers. They seemed to him pitiful indeed; but he could not forgive them for their giddiness, for putting temptation in the way of brave young men, fighting, or about to fight. The glamour which surrounded soldiers was not excuse enough. When the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and the baker, fully confiding in its judgment, was not disappointed. The sailors were very fond of it, and treated it as a companion; but the pilot, a cruel, heartless man, abused the animal, despite its pitiful looks and gestures, as it placed its hand upon its heart, and then stretched it towards him, to tell the pain it felt. However, it did not resent his continued ill-treatment, but refused to take any nourishment; five days after it died of hunger and a broken ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... told of priests or children meeting them playing by a stream, and taunting them with future damnation, which threat never failed to turn the joyful music into pitiful wails. Often priest or children, discovering their mistake, and touched by the agony of their victims, would hasten back to the stream and assure the green-toothed water sprites of future redemption, when they invariably resumed ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... pitiful ululation. He fell forward from the chair, asprawl on wobbly hands and knees, on elbows and knees as he tried to press away the torrent of agony that hammered back and forth from temple to temple. James watched Brennan with cold detachment, Professor White and Jack Cowling looked on ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Kirsty Barclay, that he had run a race with her, and that she had left him alone at the foot of the Horn. That he could not be open with his mother, no one that knew her unreasoning and stormy temper would have wondered; but the pitiful boy, who did not like lying, actually congratulated himself that he had got through without telling a downright falsehood. It would not have bettered matters in the least had he disclosed to her the good advice Kirsty gave him: she would only have been furious at the impudence of ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... everything! Not if I can help it. I'll expose him. I will indeed. Such a pitiful ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... spawn? Is not humanity the commonest and cheapest thing in the world?" But as yet his faith was unshaken, and he repelled the doubt as a temptation of Satan. Blessed is the man who can assign promptly everything which is not in harmony with himself to a devil, and so get rid of it. The pitiful case is that of the distracted mortal who knows not what is the degree of authority which his thoughts and impulses possess; who is constantly bewildered by contrary messages, and has no evidence as to their authenticity. Zachariah had his rule still; the suggestion ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the voice of honor and patriotism, but reflection and solitude induced him to pocket up his wrongs and his "merced" together. The states-general also sent the correspondence to the Walloon provincial authorities, with an eloquent address, begging them to study well the pitiful part which La Motte had enacted in the private comedy then performing, and to behold as in a mirror their own position, if they did not recede ere it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... is all pitiful," she continued, her voice deep and broken with almost a sob in it. "Denzil is so like you—it was an easy transition to find that I loved him—because I was only loving the imaginary you I had made for myself. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, Sadly sang the Birde as she sat upon the tree! There seemed a crimson plain, Where a gallant Knyghte lay slayne, And a steed with broken rein Ran free, As I laye a-thynkynge, most pitiful to see! ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... paused to think that they would look on it as their honour which she had played with. His rather pitiful dignity hurt her more than anything that had ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... neck and look mournfully around at the unsightly leg which he had come to understand was the cause of all his misery. There would come into his great eyes a look of such pitiful melancholy that one might almost fancy tears rolling out. Then he would be roused by an exasperated driver, who jerked cruelly on the lines and used his whip as if it ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... well-garnished table. Under the pretext of good humor and of sentiment people tolerate these poverties: but this good humor and this sentiment ought to be carefully proscribed. The Muses of the Pleisse, in particular, are singularly pitiful; and other Muses respond to them, from the banks of the Seine, and the Elbe. If these pleasantries are flat, the passion heard on our tragic stage is equally pitiful, for, instead of imitating true nature, it is only an insipid and ignoble expression ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... been summoned by the tactful Masha appeared in the doorway, waiting an order to remove his young master. It was time. Madame Dravikine's voice could no longer override the noise from below. Moreover, Ivan had now ceased to eat, and was sitting motionless, his mouth drawn into a pitiful line, a spot of vivid red flaming from each pale cheek, his great eyes wistfully, anxiously, seeking those of his mother, which as persistently avoided them. Suddenly there came from below a piercing scream: a scream holding in it a note at which Caroline, forgetting ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... norice** in this case *believe **nurse It had been hard this ruthe* for to see: *pitiful sight Well might a mother then have cried, "Alas!" But natheless so sad steadfast was she, That she endured all adversity, And to the sergeant meekely she said, "Have here again your ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... is affable as ever when he sees me, but growing more and more preoccupied with his own thoughts I do not know whether to look upon him with execration or profoundest pity, nor can any man guide me or satisfy my mind as to whether I should blame his jealousy or Orrin's pride for the pitiful tragedy which once darkened my life, and turned our pleasant village ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... for all that; he feels his weakness, and tears them off the distant mountains with the mercilessness of an avalanche. The Stone pines of the two Italian compositions are fine in their arrangement, but they are very pitiful pines; the glory of the Alpine rose he never touches; he munches chestnuts with no relish; never has learned to like olives; and, by the vine, we find him in the foreground of the Grenoble Alps laid utterly and incontrovertibly on ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... mumbling, their feet stumbling and heavy. They begged for coal, and the agent gave to each, while he could, what one might carry in a cloth, men standing over the supply with rifles to see that fairness was enforced. After obtaining such pitiful store, men started back home again, often besought or ordered not to leave the town, but eager to die so much the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... to keep it, were Worse than to swear it; call it back to thee; Such vows as those never ascend the Heaven; A tear or two will wash it quite away: Have mercy on my youth, my hopeful youth, If thou be pitiful, for (without boast) This Land was proud of me: what Lady was there That men call'd fair and vertuous in this Isle, That would have shun'd my love? It is in thee To make me hold this worth—Oh! ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... remembered that Isabelle was "queer," but there was something passionate about the way she threw herself into their reminiscences, that struck her as unnecessary. They spoke of Mrs. Benjamin, with tears on Agnes's part. She told of Mr. Benjamin's pitiful efforts to go on with the school. He had been forced to give up the struggle, and Agnes lamented the necessity of going to a new school when she ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... cared all the time—cared still! It was written in the lines of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger understanding which had come to her, that ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... pitiful that a wretched, brainless dog, when placed in a position like this, should be able to scramble out, while I, with the power of thinking given to me, with reason and some invention, ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... 4th—the marvellous audacity with which half-a-dozen lawyers belonging to a pitiful minority in a Chamber elected by universal suffrage walked into the Hotel de Ville and said, "The Republic is established, and we are its Government," history has told too recently for me to narrate. On the evening of the 5th the Council of Ten met again: the Pole; the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before her she could see the inherited results of fruitless labor—and more pitiful yet in the bent shoulders of the older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon be permanent. And as these things came to her, she clasped the poor wondering things to her side with a convulsive wish to make life ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... you not try to bring that time?" he said with pitiful simplicity. "When you speak I believe all you say; other people would ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... be more pitiful than the manner in which the infamous affair of Cracow is treated on all hands. There is not even the affectation of noble feeling about it. La Mennais and his coadjutors published in La Reforme ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... supply—has been despised because of his unsettled habits, but I was told that there was a special deity to look after him. In the town we had left there was delightful woodwork, but most of the draper's stuff was pitiful trash made after what was supposed to be foreign fashions. I may also mention the large collection of blood-and-thunder stories upon Western models which were piled up in the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... black heap. I left it there, with the water rippling round it, under the still stars, and giving it a wide berth pursued my way towards the yellow glow of the house; and presently, with a positive effect of relief, came the pitiful moaning of the puma, the sound that had originally driven me out to explore this mysterious island. At that, though I was faint and horribly fatigued, I gathered together all my strength, and began running again towards ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... I don't always say it; I don't think I ever said it," she answered quietly. "I know that one cannot like people who are not likable. But Georgie," (with much earnestness,) "I know, and you know, that it is God's will, that it is God's command, that we should be kind, and tender, and gentle, and pitiful to every one, whether we ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... whether Jennie had learned about his bad record, but he took no chances—he told her everything, and thus took the sting out of it. Yes, he had been trapped into evil ways, but it wasn't his fault, he hadn't known any better, he had been a pitiful victim of circumstances. He told how he had been starved and driven about and beaten by "Old Man" Drubb, and the tears glistened in Jennie's grey eyes and stole down her cheeks. He told about loneliness and heartsickness and misery in the orphan asylum. ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... than the pain by which it was necessary that a dear and erring soul should be taught its lessons. But at heart she did not doubt that, though she could not forgive Paris for being the scene of those infinitely sad and pitiful memories. Then she shook those thoughts off; they concerned that past which was absolutely dead in so far as it was painful and bitter, and lived only in the greater tenderness and pity of which her own ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... and reproaches. "If she were my wife," said blunt old Bruce, "I'd pack her off home to that doting father she's always prating about, and I'd keep her there until she arrived at years of discretion. It is simply pitiful to see a big, stalwart, soldierly fellow like Forrest led around by the nose like a ringed bull by that ridiculous and lackadaisical creature." Beyond doubt there would have been far more happiness all around if Forrest had firmly set down ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... month's absence has almost entirely vanished. Wappers's hand, as I thought, seemed to have grown old and feeble, Verboeckhoven's cattle-pieces are almost as good as Paul Potter's, and Keyser has dwindled down into namby-pamby prettiness, pitiful to see in the gallant young painter who astonished the Louvre artists ten years ago by a hand almost as dashing and ready as that of Rubens himself. There were besides many caricatures of the new German school, which are in themselves caricatures ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sight; it was a delightful sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... a tense silence for a moment or two. Benson, his face marked with baffled desire and scarcely controlled fury, glared at the others. Blake's expression was pitiful, but his lips were resolutely set; and Harding's eyes were very ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... her in the watches of a sleepless night, when, through the tears of disenchanted passion, she stared back upon her past. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltry poverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of sentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room where, for so many years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been alive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a throng of mean suspicions, of unavowed ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... a great share of pride, which always kept her in mind of her former influence at court; and she therefore holds her present husband as cheap as the dust under her feet, and keeps him in a most pitiful state of subjection. He dares not sit down before her, unless she permits him, which she very seldom does; and she is moreover so jealous, that there is no slave in her harem who does not excite her suspicions. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... eyes were dry, for he was suffering according to the way of strong men with the agony that clutches at the breast and twists a cord about the temples. In his helplessness before the peril he was pitiful to see, since all his confidence had gone, his pride in his power, his faith in his ability to surmount all things by the mere force of his will. And the present weakness of the man augmented the girl's own sorrow, even though his being there ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... "The beasts! the wretches! the unmanly brutes! Oh, how can those poor blacks be such pitiful, miserable cowards, and not rise up and kill the villains who seize them and treat them in ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... "Art thou on the gallows, thief, or at thy last moment, to use pitiful entreaties of that sort? Cowardly, spiritless creature, art thou not in the very place the fair Magalona occupied, and from which she descended, not into the grave, but to become Queen of France; unless the histories lie? And I who ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... intrinsic merits. Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor, the easy husband for the most part rests content, his vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that quarter is averted. Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful and mean-spirited transaction. The danger is averted, but the glory of the achievement also is lost. Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and dashing fashion. Out of several dozen squaws whom he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pitiful flatterer of thy master's imperfections; thou maukin made up of the shreds and ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... is no danger of tiring God: we come ceaselessly, endlessly. The cries of earth go up to Him, pitiful, ignorant, foolish cries; but they find God ready to hear and answer, fortunately not according to our ignorance but according to His great mercy. We think of the clouds of prayer in all ages, from all nations, in all tongues, and the very vastness of them ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... have absolutely no officers. There is nothing but what you see there in the forest; the rest are pitiful remnants—some 200 soldiers ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... He let himself become a prisoner, and was thankful to gain a three years' accession of life in captivity. He was tamed like a wild beast by his belly, and by wine; Antony took himself out of the world in a cowardly, pitiful, and ignoble manner, but, still in time to prevent the enemy having his person ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough |
