"Starveling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inclination may take me to the lower city. Like a poor starveling I wander in the haunts of wealth where the buildings are piled to forty stories, and I spin out the ciphers in my brain in an endeavor to compute the amount that is laid up inside. Also, lest I become discontented with my poverty, I note the strain and ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... have it from this miserable starved foreigner, who comes here to learn to eat meat and put himself on an equality with men. Evidently he was weaned too soon; but if the starveling hungers for infant's food, let him in future milk the cats that warm themselves beside the fire, and can be caught without a lasso, even by ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... carpenter, Snug the joiner. Bottom the weaver. Flute the bellows-mender. Snout the tinker, and Starveling the taylor] In this scene Shakespeare takes advantage of his knowledge of the theatre, to ridicule the prejudices and competitions of the players. Bottom, who is generally acknowledged the principal actor, declares his inclination to be for a tyrant, for a part ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... nun demure—of holy port; A sprightly maiden—of love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations. A queen in crown of rubies drest, A starveling in a scanty vest, Are all, as seems to suit thee best, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... now thy alms is given, thy letter's read, The body risen again, the which was dead, And thy poor starveling bountifully fed. After this banquet my soul doth say grace, And praise thee for it and zealously embrace Thy love, though I think thy love in this case To be as gluttons', which say 'midst their meat They love that best of which they most ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... prigs, who never had a good horse in their lives, they despise such low fellows thoroughly. Their chief companions, or rather, their most intimate friends, are the fellows who hang about livery stables, betting-rooms, race-courses, and hippodromes; crop-eared grooms, chaunters, dog-stealers, starveling jockeys, blacklegs, foreign counts, breeders, feeders; these are all "d—d honest fellows," and the "best fellows in the world," although they get their living by cheating the fast fellows, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... led the British peerage to fortify itself by American alliances is healthy and well inspired. Thanks to it, we shall still have a few people to maintain the tradition of a handsome, free, proud, costly life, whilst the craven mass of us are keeping up our starveling pretence that it is more important to be good than to be rich, and piously cheating, robbing, and murdering one another by doing our duty as policemen, soldiers, bailiffs, jurymen, turnkeys, hangmen, tradesmen, and curates, at the command of those ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... little starveling pope Who strives to make his sermons new By stringing florid scraps of hope And faith and love to dazzle you: From Stopford Brooke a phrase or two, A gleaming line from Arnold's page, Whole screeds of Browning and a few Stolen thunders from ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... brings out also the other disastrous fact, namely, that this large black population has been living from the time of their introduction into America, a period of more than two hundred years, in a state of unlettered rudeness. The Negro all this time has been an intellectual starveling. This has been more especially the condition of the black woman of the South. Now and then a black man has risen above the debased condition of his people. Various causes would contribute to the advantage of the men: the relation of servants to superior masters; attendance at courts ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... short homeward journey. At their heels trudged Levi and on the other side of Reb Shemuel walked Eliphaz Chowchoski, a miserable-looking Pole whom Reb Shemuel was taking home to supper. In those days Reb Shemuel was not alone in taking to his hearth "the Sabbath guest"—some forlorn starveling or other—to sit at the table in like honor with the master. It was an object lesson in equality and fraternity for the children of many a well-to-do household, nor did it fail altogether in the homes of the poor. "All Israel are brothers," ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... am only miserable about myself. Do you know what it is to have a firm presentiment of calamity that is coming to you—and yet to hope that your own positive conviction will not prove true? When I first met you, before my marriage, and first felt your influence over me, I had that hope. It was a starveling sort of hope that lived a lingering life in me until to-day. You struck it dead, when you answered my ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... man looked up, for a moment, as though puzzled. Then a light broke suddenly across his face, a light which seemed somehow to become reflected in the face of the starveling youth. ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... live to see the question answered, though even now it is in the way of answering. Yet I know that their wickedness shall fall upon their own heads, and I seem to see them, the proudest of the peoples of the earth, bereft of fame and wealth and honour, a starveling remnant happy in nothing save their past. What Drake began at Gravelines God will finish in many another place and time, till at last Spain is of no more account and lies as low as the empire ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... so extensive; be you in habits of pigeon-and-hawk-like intimacy with scores of them, for years, you shall never meet one—from the noble, well-lampooned prince of St Georgio, and the courtly Count of Milan, to the poor starveling old man whose cotton pocket-handkerchief contains all his stores, with no patent of nobility to stand him in stead should he be detected in a fraud—one who will not cheat as much as, and whenever he can. As the King of Naples said of his ministers, in objecting to change them, sono ladri ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Fletcher's most interesting plays. But The Maid in the Mill and The Martial Maid are good farce, which almost deserves the name of comedy; and The Knight of Malta is a romantic drama of merit. In Women Pleased the humours of avarice and hungry servility are ingeniously treated, and one of the starveling Penurio's speeches is among the best-known passages of all the plays, while the anti-Puritan satire of Hope-on-High Bomby is also noteworthy. The next four plays are less noticeable, and indeed ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... on me unawares, and startled me away from the nest I found! You have eaten the last two eggs; and I found them, and they were mine! Must I go hungry for you—starveling, robber! A miserable little boy alone and lost in the forest, naked, all scratched and bleeding with thorns, with no courage in his heart, no strength in his hands! Look at me! I am not weak, but strong and black and fierce; I live here—this is ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... dead forefathers at present?' he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. 'In hell, with all other unbelievers,' was the imprudent answer. 'Mighty well!' replied Radbod, removing his leg; 'then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.'"[S] And if he, too, died a heathen, it is certain that one continued to live in Bishop Wolfran. For it is men of his narrow and brutal theology who are not yet converted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... one of the racks and undressed. An unclean starveling wrapped a gaudy table-cloth about his loins, and hung a white rag over my shoulders. If I had had a tub then, it would have come natural to me to take in washing. I was then conducted down stairs into the wet, slippery court, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... flagging does man after man cross yonder street? What plebeian Lear or Oedipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too cross over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of the starveling's wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Marryat, we are sorry to say, has taken to the same line. Both these popular authors may rely upon our warning, that they will live to see their laurels fade unless they more carefully cultivate a spirit of self-respect. That which was venial in a miserable starveling of Grub Street is perfectly disgusting in the extravagantly paid novelists of these days—the caressed, of generous booksellers. Mr Ainsworth and Captain Marryat ought to disdain such pitiful peddling. Let them ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... seat about half-way up the aisle while Dr. Kraft ascended to the organ. It was an enormous one, the procession of pipes ranging from long, starveling whistles to thundering fat guns; they covered all the rear wall of the church, and the organist's figure, reaching its high perch, looked like that of some Lilliputian magician ludicrously daring the attempt to control a monster certain to ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... representatives. And so, instead of 'the blessed hope of everlasting life,' the bereaved have been driven to this pathetic and miserable substitute, the barbaric belief in ghosts and daemons, which was old before Christianity was young. And what a starveling hope it is that necromancy offers us! An existence as poor and unsubstantial as that of Homer's Hades, which the shade of Achilles would have been glad to exchange for serfdom to the poorest farmer, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Envy has been let blood without causing pain, and even more so from the fact that all the supporters of that flagitious proceeding confess that a perfectly notorious fact has been hushed up by bribing the jury. Besides, the wretched starveling mob, the blood-sucker of the treasury, imagines me to be high in the favour of Magnus—and indeed we have been mutually united by frequent pleasant intercourse to such an extent, that our friends the boon companions of the conspiracy, the young chin-tufts, speak of him in ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... taper, slim, slight-made; scant, scanty; spare, delicate, incapacious^; contracted &c 195; unexpanded &c (expand) &c 194 [Obs.]; slender as a thread. [in reference to people or animals] emaciated, lean, meager, gaunt, macilent^; lank, lanky; weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky [U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... abolitionism. Let them attend the receptions of the Duchess of Sutherland, the soirees of English agitators, and the orgies of Exeter Hall. Let GEO. THOMPSON introduce them as the first fruits of his philanthropic labors in America. Let them travel among the starveling English operatives, who would gladly accept slavery if assured of a peck of corn each week; let them wander among European serfs, whose life, labor, and virtue are the sport of despots, compared to whom the crudest slave driver is an angel—and ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... roar, He cared not with what jest; of all from Greece To Ilium sent, his country's chief reproach. Cross-eyed he was, and halting moved on legs 260 Ill-pair'd; his gibbous shoulders o'er his breast Contracted, pinch'd it; to a peak his head Was moulded sharp, and sprinkled thin with hair Of starveling length, flimsy and soft as down. Achilles and Ulysses had incurr'd 265 Most his aversion; them he never spared; But now, imperial Agamemnon 'self In piercing accents stridulous he charged With foul reproach. The Grecians ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... were among the first to land. The moment of arrival on Japanese soil brought a pang of disappointment. The sea-front at Nagasaki seemed very like a street in any starveling European town. It presented a line of offices and consulates built in Western style, without distinction and without charm. Customs' officers and policemen squinted suspiciously at the strangers. A few women, in charge of ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... starveling at a palace gate Sees curtained gleams from banquet-litten halls, Hears song out-ringing from the festal walls, Scents viands that shall princely palates sate, Yet in the outer gloom may only wait, Crouched in the cold, thrice-thankful ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... more convenient season—which would probably never have arrived. It is easy to imagine the contempt with which John Allan would have perused it. Not so John Kennedy. Busy lawyer and successful man of letters and of the world though he was, he had gone out of his way to stretch a hand to the gifted starveling he had discovered struggling for a foothold on the bottommost rung of the ladder of literary fame, and had not only helped him up the ladder but had drawn him, in his weakness and his strength, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... buzzing thing, Some starveling songster on a tiny wing,— (N.B. They call the insect Bob, I know, I heard a printer's devil call it so)— So fondly tells his admiration vast No one can call the chastened strains bombast, Though epitheted substantives ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of us, however, could not prevent an element of pity from tincturing our amusement. If his self-conceit was comical, by reason of its candour, it was surely pitiable, because of the poor, dwarfed starveling of a soul that it revealed. Here was a man, with life in his veins, and round about him the whole mystery and richness of creation—and he could seriously think of nothing save how, by his dress, by his speech, his postures, to render himself ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... and cyclamen, though their pots were shrouded in pinafores of white paper skilfully calculated to conceal any undue lankiness of stem, left us unmoved. But the sight of the starveling little fir tree reminded us that in the school hospital lay two sick boys whose roseate dreams of London and holidays had suddenly changed to the knowledge that weeks of isolation and imprisonment behind the window-blind with the red cross lay before them. ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Poor starveling bard, how small thy gains! How unproportioned to thy pains! And here a simile comes pat in: Though chickens take a month to fatten, The guests in less than half an hour Will more than half a score devour. So, after toiling twenty days To earn a stock of pence and praise, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... gains. How is it Shrapnel doesn't expose the trick? He must see through it. I like that letter of his. People is one of your Radical big words that burst at a query. He can't mean Quince, and Bottom, and Starveling, Christopher Sly, Jack Cade, Caliban, and poor old Hodge? No, no, Nevil. Our clowns are the stupidest in Europe. They can't cook their meals. They can't spell; they can scarcely speak. They haven't a jig in their legs. And I believe they're losing their grin! They're nasty when their blood's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... starveling band, with lightweight knapsacks, scantly packed, most dear Veranius thou, and my Fabullus eke, how fortunes it with you? have ye borne frost and famine enow with that sot? Which in your tablets appear—the profits or expenses? So with me, who when I followed ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... in his throat. There was a rather deep ledge for a space of four or five feet. And there was Dillon. No, not Dillon. Just Dillon's clothes. They lay flat and deflated, but laid out in one assembly beside a starveling twisted bush. It would have been possible for a man to stand there to take off his clothes, if he wanted to. But a man who takes off his clothes—and why should Dillon do that?—takes them off one by one. These garments were ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... extort from men who had to repair the ravages of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling. It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon, an annual address, a few scattered societies to keep a human glow in the bosom of ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... be content to give a Belgian or Polish starveling a bare bit of bread, and a lonely stick of wood, and a rag of cloth. Bite and stick and cloth are good, but it's a meal and a fire, and some clothing, the man wants. And you have both ready at hand. Things are good, provided by money and skill and research and painstaking efforts. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... schoolmaster now bestowed both whip and heel upon the starveling ribs of old Gunpowder, who dashed 10 forward, snuffling and snorting, but came to a stand just by the bridge with a suddenness which had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a plashy tramp on the bank of the stream, by the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... like the whole world of that old England—the maids of the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns, the beaux, the starveling authors—all alive; all (save the authors) full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the lusty old militant world? What will become of us, and ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... own shortcomings the cause of the Queen's now manifest hostility, he presently conceived that he had found it in the influence exerted upon her by the Seigneur Davie—that Piedmontese, David Rizzio, who had come to the Scottish Court some four years ago as a starveling minstrel in the train of Monsieur de Morette, the ambassador ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... and encouraged by the nods and winks of the wooers who sat near, Irus was only too ready to take up the challenge. "Hark to the old starveling cur!" he shouted. "How glib of tongue he is, like any scolding hag! Get thee to thy fists then, since thou wilt have it so, and I will knock all thy teeth out, if thou hast any left"; and he thrust Odysseus with ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... should sing who labour i' the sun, but thy starveling love, thou clod, 'twere fit to tell to thy mother when she stirs in ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... doctors unhesitatingly pronounced them typhoid. The number mounted rapidly. Soon there were a hundred. Soon there was an epidemic. And the Spectre showed no deference to rank. It not only stalked into the tenements of River Court and Railroad Alley—and laid its felling finger on starveling children and drink-shattered men—It visited the large and airy homes on Elm and Maple Streets and Wabash Avenue, where those of wealth and ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... a fairy shape, if such on earth there be. And nightlong as we sat there, methought that the tent was roofed above with basil-sprays, all fragrant in dewy eve— Sweet basil, from Halyah dale, its branches abloom and fresh, that fills all the place with balm—no starveling ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pinnace, and landed at Fort Caroline, accompanied, says Laudonniere, "with gentlemen honorably apparelled, yet unarmed." Between the Huguenots and the English Puritans there was a double tie of sympathy. Both hated priests, and both hated Spaniards. Wakening from their apathetic misery, the starveling garrison hailed him as a deliverer. Yet Hawkins secretly rejoiced when he learned their purpose to abandon Florida; for although, not to tempt his cupidity, they hid from him the secret of their Appalachian ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... starveling, you eel skin, you dried neat's tongue, you stockfish! Oh for breath to utter what is like thee!—you tailor's yard, you sheath, you ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... young men who forage about cities in apparent contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and lonely. His shrewd starveling face broadened with joy at dinner, and he blurted, "Gee whillikins, Mrs. Babbitt, if you knew how good it is to have home ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... rises clear, Serene in primal strength, compelling The hearts and minds of all who hear. You sit forever gluing, patching; You cook the scraps from others' fare; And from your heap of ashes hatching A starveling flame, ye blow it bare! Take children's, monkeys' gaze admiring, If such your taste, and be content; But ne'er from heart to heart you'll speak inspiring, Save your own ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... any more than a Judge Basil? And yet there is a Judge, for Joyce has told me so. She, at least, cannot lie to me. At last," he thought, "the dream of my happiness is over. Invincible in her prejudice as all these Virginians, Joyce Basil has made her bed amongst the starveling First Families, and there she means to live and die. Five years hence she will have her brood around her. In ten years she will keep a boarding-house and borrow money. As her daughters grow up to the stature and grace of their mother, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... The starveling Brother of the Wolf took me by the hand and led me on. Then in another moment came the sense of lights and wider spaces, the rustle of many people settling down to attention; and I knew that I was in the presence of the famous ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... present?" he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. "In Hell, with all other unbelievers," was the imprudent answer. "Mighty well," replied Radbod, removing his leg, "then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling hand of Christians in Heaven." Entreaties and threats were unavailing. The Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause an eternal separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had lived, a heathen. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that Scott could try to clamber up to him. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Kidd's money in exacting usury. This suited Tom, who promised to screw four per cent. a month out of the unfortunates who might ask his aid, and he was seen to start for town with a bag which his neighbors thought to hold his crop of starveling turnips, but which was really a king's ransom in gold and jewels—the earnings of Captain Kidd in long years of honest piracy. It was in Governor Belcher's time, and cash was scarce. Merchants and professional men as well as the thriftless went to Tom for money, and, as he always had it, his ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... their marriage; and then her promise to run away with him in event of her parent's persisting in his hard-hearted resolution to separate them, seemed to Molly most wonderful and touching; but when the mother came in and berated the lover, Julien, as "a rascal, a starveling, a dissipator"; and when Louise defended him as being "so good, so courageous," and the mother retaliated by calling him the pillar of a wine shop and attempted to beat her daughter, Molly covered her eyes and wept, all unconscious of the amused ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... hither, Mall, is none here but we two? When didst thou see the starveling schoolmaster? That rat, that shrimp, that spindle-shank, That wren, that sheep-biter, that lean chitty-face, That famine, that lean envy, that all-bones, That bare anatomy, that Jack-a-Lent, That ghost, that shadow, that moon ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... said, 'we shall be treated as counts and kings; but you, you starveling wretch, who haven't a penny, and never will have one, who do you think will care a ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... his pipe from his mouth, awaited with inquiring aspect the address of this equivocal personage. The stranger eyed old Jack for a moment, so portly in his dimensions, and decked out in gorgeous apparel; then cast a glance upon his own threadbare and starveling condition, and the scanty bundle which he held in his hand; then giving his shrunk waistcoat a twitch to make it meet his receding waistband; and casting another look, half sad, half humorous at the sturdy yeoman, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... contrary. You are the comeliest youth ever lodged in this house; hair like gold: he is a dark, sour-visaged loon. Besides, you know how to take a woman on her better side; but not he. Natheless, I wish he would not starve to death in my house, to get me a bad name. Anyway, one starveling is enough in any house. You are far from home, and it is for me, which am the mistress here, to number your meals—for me and the Dutch wife, your mother, that is far away: we two women shall settle that matter. Mind thou thine own business, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... appearance: one would have concluded the house to be totally uninhabited, were it not for a little thread of blue smoke, which now and then curled up like a corkscrew, from the centre of one of the wide chimneys, when my uncle's starveling meal ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... starveling rogue of a Mouse had, with much pushing application, made his way through a small hole in a corn-basket, where he stuffed and crammed so plentifully, that, when he would have retired the way he came, he found himself ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... chairs stood together at the far end; and the room was illuminated by no less than four windows, and warmed by a little crazy sidelong grate, propped up with bricks in the vent of a hospitable chimney, in which a pile of coals smoked prodigiously and gave out a few starveling flames. An old frail white-haired officer sat in one of the chairs, which he had drawn close to this apology for a fire. He was wrapped in a camlet cloak, of which the collar was turned up, his knees touched the bars, his hands were spread ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mellow as the note of an organ. Finn remarked her fine voice with sincere approval. Like all hounds, he detested a sharp, high, or yapping cry. A few seconds later Desdemona came to a standstill beside the stem of a starveling yew-tree, and just below the crest of the Down. Her muzzle was thrust into an opening in the steep side of the Down, over which there hung a thatch of furze. But though her head entered the opening, her shoulders could not pass it and there was wrath and excitement ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... sake This scarecrow from the shelf I take; Three starveling volumes bound in one, Its covers warping in the sun. Methinks it hath a musty smell, I like its flavor none too well, But Yorick's brain was far from dull, Though Hamlet pah!'d, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and tiara, and the monogram of Pius, prove that this country dwelling of a Pope must once have been rich in details befitting its magnificence. With the exception of the very small portion reserved for the Signori, when they visit Pienza, the palace has become a granary for country produce in a starveling land. There was one redeeming point about it to my mind. That was the handsome young man, with earnest Tuscan eyes and a wonderfully sweet voice, the servant of the Piccolomini family, who lives here with his crippled father, and who showed us over ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... some deal chairs stood together at the far end; and the room was illuminated by no less than four windows, and warmed by a little, crazy, sidelong grate, propped up with bricks in the vent of a hospitable chimney, in which a pile of coals smoked prodigiously and gave out a few starveling flames. An old, frail, white-haired officer sat in one of the chairs, which he had drawn close to this apology for a fire. He was wrapped in a camlet cloak, of which the collar was turned up, his knees touched the bars, his hands were spread ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indicated more or less picturesquely by the names which he selects for them. There are, for example, Bottom, the weaver; Flute, the bellows-maker; Snout and Sly, tinkers; Quince, the carpenter; Snug, the joiner; Starveling, the tailor; Smooth, the silkman; Shallow and Silence, country justices; Elbow and Hull, constables; Dogberry and Verges, Fang and Snare, sheriffs' officers; Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, and Bull-calf, recruits; ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... money—roused them into tumult and activity in a moment. "Two of you for more lanterns, if you have them! Two of you for the pickaxes and the tools! The rest after me to find the beam!" They cheered—with shrill starveling voices they cheered. The women and the children fled back on either side. We rushed in a body down the churchyard path to the first empty cottage. Not a man was left behind but the clerk—the poor old clerk standing on the flat tombstone sobbing and wailing over the church. The servant was still ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... recruits of the army of Sir John Falstaff. "A half-faced fellow," so thin that Sir John said, "A foeman might as well level his gun at the edge of a penknife" as at such a starveling.—Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV. act iii. sc. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer |
