"Taskmaster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... olden time. The wild river had been tamed; the spirit of the falls, whose hoarse voice the Indian once heard in the dashing of the great water down the rocks, had become the slave of the arch conjurer, Art; and, like a shorn and blinded giant, was grinding in the prison-house of his taskmaster. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... have been my foe? She had been a cockering, fawning nurse to me not so many months ago. Months!—yesterday. Why should the steward, who was used to flatter and caress me, now frown and threaten like some harsh taskmaster of a Clink, where wantons are sent to be whipped and beat hemp. I slunk away scared and cowed, and tried to learn a chapter out of Deuteronomy; but the letters all danced up and down before ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... feared that he would find Mr. Goodwyn a hard taskmaster, on account of this incident; and he regretted it very much, believing it would handicap him more ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... "go" with her gown; but how much sympathy is given to her whose husband refuses to harmonize with the pose of the moment? Scant justice has, for instance, been done to the misunderstood wife whose husband persists in understanding her; to the submissive helpmate whose taskmaster shuns every opportunity of browbeating her; and to the generous and impulsive being whose bills are paid with philosophic calm. Mrs. Fetherel, as wives go, had been fairly exempt from trials of this nature, for ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... led them out to a rock in one of the fields, and ordered them to fall to work at blasting, hewing, and dragging stones. They toiled patiently, and made as if it was only sport to them. From morning till night their taskmaster made them labour without ceasing, standing over them constantly, to prevent their resting. Still their obstinacy was inflexible; and at the end of some weeks his pity for them was so great, that he was obliged ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... that; it is the comprehension of the meaning of life and the appreciation of its beauty. And grim as is the age-long struggle with evil, insistent as is the duty to toil and suffer and achieve, it were a harsh taskmaster who should refuse to poor driven men and women the right to snatch such innocent joys as they can by the way, to try to understand the whirl of existence in which they are caught; in short, to really live, as well as to earn a ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... foolish way often. 'Fire is a good servant but a bad master.' That was the sentence. The times I've written it, thick down strokes, thin upstrokes! Well, that's like any of these ologies—biology especially. It's a good teacher. You don't have to let it be a taskmaster." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... still—whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn't have let her go! I should have kept her chained on—her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side. Moses knew. Don't you call to mind ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... it never does) of claims which they have heard that God should make on the hours, it is dismissed with the thought that it really cannot signify to him how creatures, condemned by his appointment to toil all the rest of the week, may wish to spend this one day, on which the secular taskmaster manumits them, and He, the spiritual one, might surely do as much. An immense number pay no attention whatever to any sort of religious worship; and many of those that do give an hour or two to such an observance, do so, some ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... be only a material screen to shield us from an embarrassing near view of the immediate action of God in all the various phenomena of the world; for not many find it a comfortable thought thus to live continuously beneath the great Taskmaster's eye. ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... interest. The great crisis in Moses' early manhood came when he woke to a realization of his kinship with the despised and oppressed serfs and an appreciation of the cruel injustice of which they were the helpless victims. Was Moses justified in resisting the Egyptian taskmaster? Are numbers essential to the rightness of a cause? What right had Ramses II to demand forced labor from the immigrants within his border? Was he justified in his method of exacting tribute? Is peonage always disastrous not only ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... exercise of their functions—we submit to the decrees of Providence, because they are not to be resisted—a coward submits to be insulted—a pusillanimous wretch to be despised—and a knave, if detected, must submit to be scouted—a slave submits to his Taskmaster; but, the Freeholders of Westmoreland, cannot, in reason, be said to submit to the House of Lowther naming their Representatives, unless it can be proved that those Representatives have been thrust ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... was soon seated at it, and engaged in rendering the English answers into German. A sentiment of keen pleasure accompanied this first effort to earn my own living—a sentiment neither poisoned nor weakened by the presence of the taskmaster, who stood and watched me for some time as I wrote. I thought he was trying to read my character, but I felt as secure against his scrutiny as if I had had on a casque with the visor down-or rather I showed him my countenance ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... now overspread the face and form of the Pagan, as he looked down steadfastly on the deities of his worship engendering his destruction beneath him. His cheek—the cheek which had rested in boyhood on his mother's bosom—was pressed against the gilded breast of the god Serapis, his taskmaster in life—his pillow ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... single dollar had the idle, drunken father earned during the week, that he had not expended in self-indulgence; and yet, in his brutality, he could roughly chide this little girl, yet too young for the taskmaster, because she had lost half a dollar of her week's earnings through an accident, the very nature of which he would not hear explained. So grieved was the poor child at this unkindness, that when supper was on the table she ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... of its dry difficulty as through scorn of its admitted weakness, its inability to do more than compromise; through contempt of its pretended beneficences and its frequent inefficiency and harmfulness. In the law he saw plainly the lash of the taskmaster, driving all those yoked together in the horrid compact of society, a master inexorable, stone-faced, cruel. In it he found no comprehension, seeing that it regarded humanity either as a herd of slaves or ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... had crossed the highway and been saluted by a passing teamster in the digger dialect; yet the mistake left no sting in her memory. And, like the digger, she shrank from that civilization which had only proved a hard taskmaster. ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... I am satisfied that his particularly soulless laugh was not derived from any amusement he actually felt, yet I could not say it was forced. In his accurate imitations, I fancied he was only trying to evade any responsibility of his own. THAT devolved upon his taskmaster! In the attention he displayed when new ideas were presented to him, there was a slight condescension, as if he were looking down upon them from his three thousand years ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... should know and lament (to himself) his own shortcomings—should mourn over and mend, as he best can, the "confusions of his wasted youth;" he should feel how ill he has put out to usury the talent given him by the Great Taskmaster—how far he is from being "a good and faithful servant;" and he should make this rather understood than expressed by his manner as a writer; while at the same time, every man should deny himself the luxury of taking his hat off ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. I am too late! I am already months behind! I have received my pay beforehand! Oh, wayward and desultory spirit of genius! Ill canst thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation, wounds thee like a scourge ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... a slave can have a home) for thirteen or fourteen years? Were not the connexions, friendships, and associations of her mature life formed there? Was it not there she hoped to spend her latter years in domestic tranquillity with her husband, free from the lash of the taskmaster? These considerations may appear light to Mr. Wood, but they are every ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... eminence by any other man who so habitually, so constitutionally, did to others as he would have them do to him. Without any pretensions to religious excellence, from the time he first was brought under the observation of the nation he seemed, like Milton, to have walked 'as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye.' St. Paul hardly endured more indignities and buffetings without complaint. He was not a learned man. He was not even one who would deserve to be called in our day an educated man—knew little rather than much of what ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... scourged her husband, she departed in due course to visit her own taskmaster, little guessing what awaited her at his hands. After all, there is a deal of poetic justice in the world. Little Smith, fresh from his mother's apron-strings, is savagely beaten by the cock of the school, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... are discouraging recreation. Let us be hearty in our pleasures, as in our work, and not think that the gracious Being Who has made us so open-hearted to delight, looks with dissatisfaction at our enjoyment, as a hard taskmaster might, who in the glee of his slaves could see only a hindrance to their profitable working. And with reference to our individual cultivation, we may remember that we are not here to promote incalculable quantities of law, physic, or manufactured goods, but to become ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... Chnem-hotep, at Beni Hasan, there is a wall painting of a horizontal loom with two weavers, women, squatting on either side, and at the right in the background is drawn the figure of the taskmaster. There are also figures represented in the act of spinning, etc. For the present we are concerned with ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that of a poor feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy, devout, severe puritan, was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept steadily at work,—although he was not able to do much, for his body was about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right use of an axe, and when ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... are to blame?' he returned, so harshly that I remained silent: 'it is no fault of yours if people will not be silent. But all the same I am sorry that you know; your opinion of me is quite changed now, eh? You think me a hard-hearted taskmaster of a brother. Well, it does not matter: Gladys would have made you believe that ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... himself, and lay a little longer. It was a pleasant thought that there was no stern taskmaster to force him up. He might lie as long as he wanted to, till noon, if he chose. Perhaps he might have chosen, but the claims of a healthy appetite asserted themselves, and ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... hard taskmaster. Before the end of the week Jim realized that he would not get out of Tuck's hands until he knew every inch of the design of the great dam from the sluice gates and the drainage holes to the complete vertical section. He had no patience with mistakes and Jim took his grilling in silence, for the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and endeavoring to leap and gambol in the shafts, before a load that any one out of this locality would have thought the direst cruelty. Nor do the older or more powerful dogs seem to become accustomed to it. When his cruel taskmaster halts with his wares, instantly the dog, either by sitting down in his harness, or crawling over the shafts, or by some unmistakable dog-like trick, utterly scatters any such delusion of even the habit of servitude. The ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... worship of mechanism and mechanical efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individual character, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who have achieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutal taskmaster. But the convulsions of war have thrown up things that are deeper than these, primaeval things, which, until recently, civilization was believed to have destroyed. The old monstrous gods who gave their names to the days of the week are alive again in Germany. The English soldier of to-day ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... 5] For the burdensome yoke and the crossbar on his shoulder, The rod of his taskmaster, thou breakest as in the day of Midian. For every boot of the warrior with noisy tread, And every war-cloak drenched in the blood of the slain Will be completely burned up as ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... the fight for mastery as between body and spirit: evolution proceeds apace when spirit takes command and bids the body minister to its progress, but evolution halts when the body clogs the spirit. Then Nature, our taskmaster, punishes us, ever choosing that way which is entirely appropriate and induced by the fault itself: this is the purpose and the cause of our pecks of trouble. The battle has to be fought—and won—by each of us: the only ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... water. His shirt, too, was soak'd; and as she pass'd her fingers down his shoulder she left a sharp twinge in her heart, for she knew that moisture to be the hard wrung sweat of severe toil, exacted from her young child (he was but thirteen years old) by an unyielding taskmaster. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite above and around, but not in the finite. He insisted on the community of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... languages, which he (the schoolmaster) could at one time have easily taught them; but of which they could not now understand a word. He turned his daughters into reading-machines. It is appalling to think of such a task. That Mary should revolt, and at last, after repeated contests with her taskmaster, learn to hate her father—that she should, when some one spoke in her presence of her father's approaching marriage, make the dreadful speech that "it was no news to hear of his wedding, but if ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... exercise. Some distance away stood a house, and at the front gate was a man, and Romulus knew man to be the meanest and most cruel of all living things and the conscienceless taskmaster of weaker creatures. So Romulus avoided the house and struck out across the fields. Presently he came upon a very large thing which awed him. It was a live-oak, and the birds were singing in the foliage. But his persistent ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... desire to break away from the herd. It will force him to place the good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the individual to the whole. And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness of his conscience. Then he has no words ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... overalls's hard voice and words did not really mean the terrible threats they conveyed, although the speaker intended to be obeyed, started again briskly shipping the cargo and lowering it down into the hold, grinning the while one to another as if expressing the opinion that their taskmaster's bark was worse ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... chum. As confidence was out of the question with The Avenger in the hall, which could merely be regarded in the light of an antechamber to the keyhole, I sent him to the Play. A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park corner to see ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... merrily at the cost of a soul, which is no good but to cause fear and pain? We take men's souls and liberate them from all pain and care and remorse, and we give in exchange money, much money, to procure comforts and ease; we enrol men as vassals of our great lord, and he is no hard taskmaster to those who own ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... for Richer; for, happen how it will, there have been more people in the world who could dance on a rope like the one than who could paint like Sir Joshua. The latter was but a bungler in his profession to the other, it is true; but then he had a harder taskmaster to obey, whose will was more wayward and obscure, and whose instructions it was more difficult to practise. You can put a child apprentice to a tumbler or rope-dancer with a comfortable prospect of success, if they are ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... reclined, and the unwearied children sported, and the young men and maidens often danced to flute-music. "Glorious summer twilights," cries Teufelsdrockh, "when the Sun, like a proud Conqueror and Imperial Taskmaster, turned his back, with his gold-purple emblazonry, and all his fireclad bodyguard (of Prismatic Colors); and the tired brickmakers of this clay Earth might steal a little frolic, and those few meek Stars would ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a government which does not exist for the purpose of adding to human happiness has no excuse for being. And once when he was down among his own people he saw an Egyptian taskmaster or foreman striking an Israelitish workman, and in wrath he arose and killed the oppressor. The only persons who were witnesses to this affair were two Hebrews. The second day after the fight, when Moses was attempting to separate two Hebrews who had gotten into ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... like the bole of a tree, alight with fire, determination, love of sport, and hunger for the task in hand. He was no easy taskmaster, but always a just one. Many a young man of that period will remember, as I do, the grinding day's work when everything seemed to go wrong, when mere discouragement was gradually giving way to actual despair, when, somewhat clogged with mud and dust and blood, he felt a sudden slap on the ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... the cold grey sky, God Almighty may be a hard taskmaster, and the Kingdom of Heaven is attained only by much endeavour; but in Cordova these things come more easily. The aged priest walks in the sun and smokes his cigarillo. Heaven is not such an inaccessible place after all. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... but the longer he was at it the stiffer it seemed to turn. And after about four hundred turns he was fain to breathe and rest himself. He took three minutes' rest, then at it again. All this time there was no taskmaster, as in Egypt, nor whipper-up of declining sable energy, as in Old Kentucky. So that if I am so fortunate as to have a reader aged ten, he is wondering why the fool did not confine his exertions to saying he had made the turns. My dear, it would not do. Though no mortal oversaw ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... lorded over by the taskmaster, Israel toiled in his pit. Though this condemned him to a sort of earthy dungeon, or gravedigger's hole, while he worked, yet even when liberated to his meals, naught of a cheery nature greeted him. The yard was encamped, with all its endless rows of tented sheds, and kilns, and mills, upon ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... overhead. After breakfast, in which the now resuscitated members of the crew and Constantio took part, Frank called them forward and told them of the fate of Malvoise. None of them seemed particularly grieved, as the man had undoubtedly been a hard taskmaster. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... answered Odysseus, "I am no stranger to blows, for I have been sore buffeted on land and sea. The belly is a stern taskmaster, which compels us to face both ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... wicked cease from troubling, And there the weary be at rest; There the prisoners repose together, Nor hear the taskmaster's voice. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... "Old Welborne is charging you too high interest. You ought to shift the mortgage to somebody more human—somebody with at least a thimbleful of soul. That man is the hardest taskmaster on earth. He'd skin a flea for its ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... little of rest or recreation; from the editor's chair up to the pulpit, they are under a lash as relentless as that of the taskmaster of Egypt. For instance, we might refer to Buchanan, of the Mercury. He has sat at his desk until he has become an old man, with the smallest imaginable subtraction of time for food and sleep, writing night and day, and carrying, in his comprehensive brain, the whole details ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... And now listen: if you marry me, I'll treat 'ee like a span'el dog. Fetch you shall, an' carry, for my pleasure. You shall be slave, an' I your taskmaster; an' the sweetness o' your love shall come by crushin', like trodden thyme. Shall ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the Reformed Churches in Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, and France. Besides his "Institutes," he found time to write Commentaries on nearly all the books of the Bible; was a man of masculine intellect and single-hearted devotion to duty, as ever in the "Great Taskmaster's" eye. His greatest work was his "Institutes," published in Basel in 1535-36. It was written in Latin, and four years after translated by himself into French. "In the translated form," says Prof. Saintsbury, "it is beyond ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... closely connected, if not identical, officials. They had charge of the levy, the local quota for the army, or for public works. Hence "levy-master" and "warrant-officer" are suggestive renderings. For the former official, "taskmaster," the one over the gang of forced laborers and reminiscent of the old time press-gang officers, is a fair translation. "Field cornet" would perhaps suit the military side. For some aspects of their office the ancient "reeve" may be compared. Whether the "catcher" actually was a local policeman, whose ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... is but a mere hulking, lazy brute who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then? How could one face a regime in which the everlasting taskmaster held control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there only, the socialist system is ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... Natalie had to work so hard. Not only must they practice in secret. Leslie decreed that they would have to practice in the gymnasium with the other two chosen members of the team in order to keep up appearances. She was a hard taskmaster, but she kept her companions in good humor by expensive presents and treats. Further, she assured them that once they had beaten the sophs they could drop basket ball for the ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... time, "in the days that were earlier," when the writing of a book was a rare and solemn task, to be approached—like the writing of "Paradise Lost"—after years of devout and arduous preparation, under the "great Taskmaster's eye." Now it is all a rush and a fever and a fret, and the mad breathlessness of the New York newspaper office has spread from journalism to literature, and novelists cheerfully contract to write books in the next century, quite unregardful of whether ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that last crash which is the great taskmaster. Nobody can do anything with it. I have seen Copley Fielding come very close to the jerk and nod of the lifted threatening edge, curl it very successfully, and without any look of its having been in papers, down nearly to the beach, but the final fall has no thunder in it. Turner ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... and while Nicol tore open the dirty envelope, and read his taskmaster's orders, Tough lit a pipe, and watched him out of the corners of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... no more moved when was done than before; and being very angry, he said that he should gain nothing by this his cunning and shrewdness against the Egyptians;—and he commanded him that was the chief taskmaster over the Hebrews, to give them no relaxation from their labors, but to compel them to submit to greater oppressions than before; and though he allowed them chaff before for making their bricks, he would allow ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... often for the most trivial faults—a word, a look—and had them flogged by sentence of the court, by the scourger of the district, till the blood streamed from their backs. Knowing how little consideration there is for the unhappy convict in all cases of difference with his taskmaster, and that however unjust or unreasonable the latter's complaints may be, they are always readily entertained by the subordinate authorities, and carefully recorded against the former to his prejudice, I took care to give him no offence. To say nothing ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... the old man prayed, and a more sincere, heart-touching prayer never went up from human lips to that God "who hath made of one blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth." Though clothed in rags, and in feeble age at the mercy of a cruel taskmaster, that old slave was richer far than his master. His simple faith, which saw through the darkness around him into the clear and radiant light of the unseen day, was of far more worth than all the wealth and glory of this world. I know not ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... for himself a severe taskmaster, with plenty of added work, yet, with some special kindliness in trustful tones that proved part-pay, some needed, minor chord was touched in the soul-life of the lad, that gave him hope in himself and in his future, which proved very true. He has long been a kind and ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... more he and "Uncle Sim" were at outs. With Mr. Daley's assistance and encouragement, and by a really earnest period of application on his own part, he had successfully weathered the previous storm and had even been taken into Mr. Simkins' good graces. But football is a severe taskmaster, if one allows it to become such, and what with a strong desire to distinguish himself on the second—animated to some extent by the wish to show Mr. Robey what he had missed for the 'varsity—and a commendable effort to profit by Marvin's teaching, he had soon begun to ease up ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Apollonius was likewise of a merry humour, every whit as ready for a jest as Bruno or Buffalmacco. All three itched sore to play off some trick on the old painter, who was a just man and a god-fearing, but hard-fisted withal and a cruel taskmaster. Accordingly one night, after listening to the old fellow's customary address to the Virgin, the three comrades fell a-laughing under the bed-clothes and cutting a hundred jokes. Presently, when they heard him snoring, they began asking ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the father became more and more addicted to drink. Just at this time, a new lodger appeared, who was something of a musician, and arranged to teach the boy in part payment for his room. Ludwig wondered if he would turn out to be a more severe taskmaster than his father had been. The times and seasons when his instruction was given were at least unusual. Tobias Pfeiffer, as the new lodger was called, soon discovered that father Beethoven generally spent his evenings at the tavern. As an act ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... for the freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an inflexible and cold-eyed taskmaster. Oh yes! It must have been a pretty sight. He saw it all, he could talk about it with scorn and bitterness; he had a minute knowledge of it by means of some sixth sense, I conclude, because he swore to me he had remained apart without a glance at them and at the boat—without one single glance. And ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the horrors of discomfort and vexation endured by simple-hearted citizens in pursuit of a light-hearted Saturday and Sunday, we often wonder how it is that humanity will so gleefully inflict upon itself sufferings which, if they were imposed by some taskmaster, would ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... safe! By this good hand, too, that wrought your misery. Oh! that a life of penitence and prayer might atone for my guilt. It was a thought inspired by Heaven, prompted me to set on fire that insatiate demon, to whom my taskmaster offered those wretched victims, and every month a bride, on pain of his own destruction. What might be the nature of that skeleton form, or their compact, thou canst neither know nor understand. Even I, though nightly witnessing ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... he was accountable before God—that he had run away, but from one who considered him as a mere machine, from which it was his only interest to get as much work at as little cost as possible. He fled from a taskmaster, not from one who was in any ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... only way he could keep a hold upon himself, by keeping up a pose of cynicism. The fragrance of her hair, the curved mouth so close to his own, maddened him. He who could have been her lover had been only her guardian, her taskmaster. And now she was ready to give herself to a boy, who thought life was a romance, and who would probably sit at her feet reading ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... a "cause," an agent of mighty purposes. This it is that more than excuses, it glorifies, his repeated magniloquent allusions to himself throughout the prose works. Holding himself on trust or on commission, he must needs report himself, not only to his great Taskmaster, but also from time to time to men, his expectant and impatient beneficiaries. Even in Lycidas he is thinking of himself as much as of his ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... War is a stern taskmaster, demanding long years of preparation and combination of effort for one end. The political separation of the two countries does not alter the fact that they are, in the military sense, one area of operations ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... elements of a devout life, as here enjoined on Solomon. The first requisite is to walk before God; that is, to nourish a continual consciousness of His presence, and to regulate all actions and thoughts under the thrilling and purifying sense of being 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.' Only we are not to think of Him as only a Taskmaster, but as a loving Friend and Helper. A child is happy in its little work or play when it knows that its father is looking on with sympathy. The sense of God's eye being on us should 'make a sunshine in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... prayer to live this life as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye, and whose Paradise Lost is the colossal epic of the loss of Eden through sin; (2) JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688), whose Pilgrim's Progress addressed itself in simple, earnest English to each individual human being, telling him what he must do to escape the City of Destruction and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the Old Testament, very like each other, and yet presenting different facets or aspects of the same great truth. Sometimes we read about 'walking before God' as Abraham was bid to do. That means ordering the daily life under the continual sense that we are 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye' Then there is 'walking after God,' and that means conforming the will and active efforts to the rule that He has laid down, setting our steps firm on the paths that He has prepared that we should ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... crown of eternal life sparkles on his forehead. Such faithfulness and wisdom (which are at bottom but two names for one course of conduct) find their motive in that watchfulness, which works as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye, and as ever keeping in view His coming, and the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... old master give us all our ages. I think when they say we was free that meant every man was to be his own boss and not be bossed by a taskmaster. Cose old master was good to us but we wanted to have our own way 'bout ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... as they were out upon the open sea, and in fear of perishing by starvation, they had never had a thought about pirates. Then the sight of a prau—even with the certainty of its being a piratical craft—would have been welcome; since death by the Malay kris, or slavery to the most cruel taskmaster, would have been a relief from the sufferings they were enduring, from hunger as from thirst. Now, however, that these were things of the past, and they were not only safe delivered from the perils of the deep, but seemed in no farther danger of starvation, the pirates had become the subject ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... she answered. "I have had it specially prepared from a recipe given me ten years ago at a time when I thought of resorting to the same contrivance to escape from my taskmaster." ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... commune owned the land it tilled, they all shared the benefit of the harvests, paid their tax to the state, and all was well. If not, it swarmed like a community of bees to some wealthy neighbor's estate and sold its labor to him, and then if he proved too hard a taskmaster—even for a patient Russian peasant—they might swarm ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... he may know that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and of that he knows how very far he has fallen short. Of this nobler humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much. It is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many proud {93} confessions that he knows ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... he pleased. This slackness of rule might have been ruinous to a boy of slow understanding, who, feeling labour in the acquisition of knowledge, would have altogether neglected it, save for the command of a taskmaster; and it might have proved equally dangerous to a youth whose animal spirits were more powerful than his imagination or his feelings, and whom the irresistible influence of Alma would have engaged ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... which every hard-working brain knows of; but it is an enemy, not of the workman, but only of the taskmaster. The student may resort to what healthful contrivances he pleases to avoid fatigue; but when it appears, he should not excuse himself, but yield to its impulse. He should learn to distinguish indolence, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... all, I think, to have a just appreciation of one's own powers or lack of powers," said Denham, slowly. "Ambition, without the corresponding strength to gratify it, is a cruel taskmaster." ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... postponed, nothing undone. In sorrow as in joy, when life was young, and the love of husband and family joys were new, as when husband and children were taken away, and she was an old woman, lonelier because of her throne, she laboured as 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.' That was serving her nation by the will of God. She served her people by that swift, sincere sympathy which claimed a share alike in great national and in small private sorrows. Was there some shipwreck or some storm, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Fame and Fortune," the career of Dave Dashaway has been told. The father of the young airman had been a noted balloonist, and when he died a mean old skinflint named Silas Warner had been appointed Dave's guardian. Warner had acted the tyrant and hard taskmaster for the youth. A natural love for aeronautics had been born in Dave. He had made an airship model which his guardian had maliciously destroyed. Warner had also appropriated a package dropped accidentally by a famous aviator, named Robert King, from ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... brighter spiritual era slowly emerge—an era in which there shall be no England, no France, no Germany, no America, no this people or that, but one family, the human race; one law, peace; one need, harmony; one means, labor; one taskmaster, God. ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... approximately contemporary with the latest of the archaic statues of the Athenian Acropolis (pages 151 f.). On one side we have one of the old stock subjects of the vase-painters, treated with unapproached vivacity and humor. Among the labors of Heracles, imposed upon him by his taskmaster, Eurystheus, was the capturing of a certain destructive wild boar of Arcadia and the bringing of the creature alive to Mycenae. In the picture, Heracles is returning with the squealing boar on his shoulder. The ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... thought is too vague, too far, to bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye." ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of this urchin, who would, indeed, have forgotten any number of such directions, that he looked on the present period of anxiety in the light of a holiday and festival, devoutly praying that his taskmaster might never come back again. Finally in despair poor Bargrave cast himself on the sympathy of Dorothea, who listened to his bewailings with stolid indifference when sober, and replied to them by surmises of the wildest ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... mother's loss most bitterly. We had been all in all to each other, and I should have broken down altogether with grief, had not my kind host roused me up and advised me to go out and try and do something to gain my livelihood. Hunger is a severe taskmaster; it makes ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... shoemakers ply the awl, glassmakers blow through their tubes, metal founders watch over their smelting-pots, carpenters hew down trees and build a ship; groups of women weave or spin under the eye of a frowning taskmaster, who seems impatient of their chatter. Did the double in his hunger desire meat? He might choose from the pictures on the wall the animal that pleased him best, whether kid, ox, or gazelle; he might follow the course of its life, from its birth in the meadows to the slaughter-house ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... must always live. The Montero is rarely a slaveholder, but is frequently engaged on the sugar plantations during the busy season as an overseer, and, to his discredit be it said, he generally proves to be a hard taskmaster, entertaining an intuitive dislike to ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the relief of your sorrow, a life of work, or a life of pleasure. But work needs to be done under the influence of the Gospel of Progress. Without a belief in progress, man cannot believe that work is prayer, and that God is a taskmaster. His soul wakes up. He commits suicide or crime. Or he deserts the city, and goes, as you have done, up into ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... "refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, rather suffering afflictions with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season." Rather be counted with the poor despised, afflicted slaves under the taskmaster's lash than be a king or an absolute monarch. This brought out his characteristic prohibition of sin,—the renouncing of every worldly ambition, He here made the choice, at the time when the temptations were greatest, for all that the world could offer was his. He gave all and paid the price ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... indeed, to have said that he rejoiced in the old age which delivered him from a severe and importunate taskmaster. —Athen., lib. 12, p. 510. But the poet, nevertheless, appears to have retained his amorous propensities, at least, to the last.—See Athenaeus, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more for you than for any one I ever knew upon the world. But absorbing occupations, which still engage me, have prevented my informing your ladyship of this. Moreover, knowing that you know love needs no taskmaster, and that he who loves doth not sleep, I thought the less of using go-betweens. And though I seemed to have forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about, in order to effect a thing that was not looked for, my ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Hanover troops. It is likely to turn out as laborious a session as ever was. All the comfort is, all the abuse don't lie at your door nor mine; Lord Carteret has the full perquisites of the ministry. The other day, after Pitt had called him "the Hanover troop-minister, a flagitious taskmaster," and said, "that the sixteen thousand Hanoverians were all the party he had, and were his placemen;" in short, after he had exhausted invectives, he added, "But I have done: if he were present, I would ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... taskmaster over them, so they were forced to be such, not only to their servants, but in a sorte, to their dearest children; the which, as it did not a little wound ye tender harts of many a loving father and mother, so it produced likewise ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... as he leaned for a while upon his hoe and gazed down the road after the rapidly disappearing car. He must have remained thus for several minutes oblivious to everything else. Neither did he see his hard taskmaster watching him in the distance. But when he again resumed his hoeing he worked more fiercely than ever, and there was danger at times lest the frail hoe should break beneath his tremendous strokes. Up one row and down another ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... be unhappy about. You know how blameless he has always been at Eton and Oxford; and though he may view his work rather in a school-boy aspect, and me as a taskmaster, as long as he is doing right the growth is going on. Don't be unhappy, Jenny! His great clear young voice is delightful to hear; he is capital at choral practices, and is a hero to all the old women and boys, the more so for the qualities that earnestness cannot ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... its tale of an attack upon some solitary hut, the slaughter of the old and infirm, and the dragging away of the men and women into slavery. Others spoke of long periods of labor, in a bent position, in a mine, under the cruel whip of the taskmaster. All had their tale of barbarity and cruelty to recite and, as each speaker contributed his quota, the anger and excitement of the ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... position and Percy Dacier's threw the fancied danger into remoteness. The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge; and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him down for an offence. She saw their situation as he did. The course of folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all: Disguise degraded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... will be displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon. ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the olden time is your father, Sir Henry! It is strange I should not have seen him before;—but I heard my father often speak of him as being among the flower of our real old English gentry. By the mode in which he began to school me, I can guess you had a tight taskmaster of him, Albert—I warrant you never wore hat ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... fourth. He found that he was well up with the class in everything save Greek and Latin, and these, Greek especially, soon proved hard sledding. The instructor, Mr. Simkins—or "Uncle Sim," as he was called—was no easy taskmaster. He entertained a profound reverence for Aristotle and Vergil and Cicero and Homer and all the others, and failed to understand why his classes thought them tiresome and, sometimes, dry. His very enthusiasm, however, made him easy to impose on, and many a fellow received good marks merely ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Even so!—but not so stupid, blind, that I, Whom thus the great Taskmaster of the world Has set to meditate, mistaken work, My dreary face against a dim blank wall, Throughout man a natural life-time,—could ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... chattered; and Toby, believing that everything which he had said had been understood by the animals, went out of the door to meet his other taskmaster. ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... be done at all. This is to make the command the last word, and the end of God's speaking. Doth not the child of God frequently sit down and droop over his duty, while he looks upon the Egyptian taskmaster, the command, charging the whole work and portion of brick, and giving no straw to work upon? So are many in duties. While the aim and eye is upon some measure according to the perfect rule, the hands fall down feeble, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... great cane-cutting in the canebrake above, and, when sufficient had been procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... service well, (9) reward and humour him. Thus, when the rider perceives that the horse takes a pleasure in the high arching and supple play of his neck, let him seize the instant not to impose severe exertion on him, like a taskmaster, but rather to caress and coax him, as if anxious to give him a rest. In this way the horse will be encouraged and fall into ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... That hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully indulgent to those who serve him well. While Bough, the keeper of the tavern, was yet turning about the open letter in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the chances attending the sending of it against the chances of keeping ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... reason must be quickened to convince him of the necessity of acting aright. The same is true of any other moral obligation. The instant Duty becomes onerous. Right Reason steps in to prevent our shirking it. Giri thus understood is a severe taskmaster, with a birch-rod in his hand to make sluggards perform their part. It is a secondary power in ethics; as a motive it is infinitely inferior to the Christian doctrine of love, which should be the ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... of what it would be to be employed by Mr. Graham. Tom Tripp worked early and late for a dollar and a half per week, without board, for a hard and suspicious taskmaster, who was continually finding fault with him. But for sheer necessity, he would have left Mr. Graham's store long ago. He had confided the unpleasantness of his position to Herbert more than once, and enlisted his sympathy and indignation. ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... pious office, the mothers must fasten them on their backs, and, with this double load, follow their husbands in the fields, where they too often hear no other sound than that of the voice or whip of the taskmaster, and the cries of their infants, broiling in the sun. These unfortunate creatures cry and weep like their parents, without a possibility of relief; the very instinct of the brute, so laudable, so irresistible, runs counter here to their master's interest; and to that ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching there was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the grinder seemed to embarrass ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the acts which they help him to understand. He has entered upon his work at least in a true and faithful spirit, not regarding it as an amusement for leisure hours, but as something to be done seriously, if done at all; as if he was as much 'under the Great Taskmaster's eye' in this as in any other duty of his calling. In certain passages and scenes he seemed to me to have been a little too bold for the taste and temper of this age. But having written them deliberately, from a conviction that morality is in peril from fastidiousness, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... its eyes, closed its ears to every cry of protest or of agony, and said: "We will not aid you nor protect you. Though you are ignorant, from you will we demand the works of wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be required at your hands." Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation said: "There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. Yet be it less, or more, or soon, or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great taskmaster's eye. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... follow them in singleness of heart? To a certain extent, yes; but he had not been thorough; he had not given up all for God. He knew that very well he had done little as compared with what he might and ought to have done, but still if he was being punished for this, God was a hard taskmaster, and one, too, who was continually pouncing out upon his unhappy creatures from ambuscades. In marrying Ellen he had meant to avoid a life of sin, and to take the course he believed to be moral and right. With his antecedents and surroundings it was the most natural thing in the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Shall I compare thee to poor Poland's hope, Bright flower of hope killed in the opening bud? Farewell, sweet blossom! better fate be thine And mock my boding! Dim similitudes Weaving in moral strains, I've stolen one hour 20 From anxious Self, Life's cruel taskmaster! And the warm wooings of this sunny day Tremble along my frame and harmonize The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes 25 Played deftly on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hard under a burning sun; half-starved; scourged; loaded with the grossest abuse. All this ends in a rapid decline of health; and his story terminates with an account of his death, his last moments being dignified by a strong sentiment of piety, and of forgiveness towards his inhuman taskmaster. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... might become eminent) and a small portion with works of benevolence, just to keep us in love and charity with our poor neighbours; and the rest I do not grudge to society and hunting. Do you think that I am a hard taskmaster? Not very, I think. More especially as you will not be led away by my good advice. You see that I cannot bear to think of you hunting and ballet-dancing when you are "fair, fat and forty-five." Do prepare yourself ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... other hand, experience is a severe taskmaster, and it taught me to be somewhat insubordinate in my notions. I fear I must confess that this spirit of insubordination has ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... manager, governor, rector, comptroller. superintendent, supervisor, straw boss; intendant; overseer, overlooker^; supercargo^, husband, inspector, visitor, ranger, surveyor, aedile^; moderator, monitor, taskmaster; master &c 745; leader, ringleader, demagogue, corypheus, conductor, fugleman^, precentor^, bellwether, agitator; caporal^, choregus^, collector, file leader, flugelman^, linkboy^. guiding star &c (guidance) 693; adviser &c 695; guide &c (information) 527; pilot; helmsman; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the temple grounds we saw a number of men and boys at work, as the dragoman had stated. These excavators scooped the sand and debris into small baskets, while a taskmaster stood over them, whip in hand. Then placing the filled baskets on their heads they started off in long lines, singing as they marched to the deposit heap. The men, we were informed, earned twenty-five cents a ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... his friends writes of him, "He was a severe and unsparing taskmaster, and allowed no shirking. No other officer could have got half the work out of the men that he did. He used to keep them up to the mark by exclaiming, whenever he saw them flag: 'Another five minutes gone, and this not done yet, my men! We ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... sailor's shoulder, "it is useless for you to try to lessen the services you have rendered us. Think of what I was but an hour since — a captive with the most horrible of all fates before me, and with the belief that my father was dying by inches in the hands of some cruel taskmaster, and now he is beside me and I am free. This has been done by two strangers, men of a nation which I have been taught to regard as an enemy. It seems to me that no words that I can speak could tell you even faintly what I ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... thee how wrong and robbery may triumph over right and innocence. Thou hast raised thyself, good Bumpkin, from the humblest poverty to comparative wealth and a lawsuit: but boast not overmuch lest thou find Law a taskmaster instead ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... hours practising the piano, and one of the earliest stories of his life is of the five-year-old little child made to stand on a bench before the piano laboring over the notes, while the tears flowed fast down his cheeks at the cold and aching pain, from which his hard taskmaster would not release him. Besides his father, a clever musician who lodged in the house, Pfeiffer, an oboist at the theatre, gave him lessons. Beethoven used afterward to say that he had learnt more from this Pfeiffer than ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... scene was attractive enough to fix any newcomer's eyes; but Frank could see nothing but a long wide stretch of desert country, at the horizon of which were a few palms overshadowing dingy, sun-baked mud buildings, houses formed of the brick made of straw now as in the days when the taskmaster-beaten Israelitish bondmen put ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... have not made up the required sum sobbing bitterly in anticipation of the treatment in store for them. Give them a penny or two, should they ask it, reader. You will not miss it. It will go to the brutal parent or taskmaster, it is true, but it will give the little monkey-faced minstrel a supper, and save him from a beating. It is more to them than to you, and it will do you no harm for the recording angel to write opposite the follies and sins of your life, that you cast one gleam of sunshine into the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... day that he saw one of the Egyptian taskmasters treating one of the poor Israelite slaves with great cruelty, beating him most unmercifully with a long whip. This made Moses so angry that he rushed in to defend the slave, and dealt the taskmaster such a ...
— The Babe in the Bulrushes • Amy Steedman
... bullets or bayonets. But the method of scoring is the same in each case—one down or one up. And of them all the bayonet is the counter which is at once the most deadly and the most intolerant of mistakes. A good friend, a hard taskmaster is the bayonet, and O'Shea was the greatest of all its prophets. . . . The main object of his life was to imbue his men, and any one else he could persuade to listen, with its song. His practical teaching was sound, very sound; his verbal ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... of my childhood were Dawson Turner and Hudson Gurney, who in this respect resembled each other, that they were both bankers and both antiquarians more or less distinguished. Dawson Turner was a man of middle height and of saturnine aspect, who had the reputation of being a hard taskmaster to the ladies of his family, who were quite as intelligent and devoted to literature as himself. He published a 'Tour in Normandy'—at that time scarcely anyone travelled abroad—and much other matter, and perhaps as an autograph-collector was ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Regina," he said, steadily controlling himself. "I want to propose that we shall give way a little on both sides. I won't hurry you; I will wait a reasonable time. If I promise that, surely you may yield a little in return. Money seems to be a hard taskmaster, my darling, after what you have told me about your uncle. See how he suffers because he is bent on being rich; and ask yourself if it isn't a warning to us not to follow his example! Would you like to see me too wretched to ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... has made this district famous, and we could have lingered long in the region of the Trossachs, and should have been delighted to see Loch Katrine, close by, which the "Lady of the Lake" had rendered so familiar, but time is a hard taskmaster and we had to be content with what Loch ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... series of Readings at the very period when he was producing one of his imaginative works in monthly instalments. He appeared to give himself no rest whatever, when repose, at any rate for a while, was most urgently required. He seemed to have become his own taskmaster precisely at the time when he ought to have taken the repose he had long previously earned, by ministering so largely and laboriously to ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... haughty Syrian, "shall spend their superfluous strength, as did their Samson of old, in grinding corn for their victors, or in tilling the fields which they once called their own, with the taskmaster's lash to quicken their labours. Ha! ha! it were good subject for mirth to see the lordly Maccabeus himself, with blinded eyes, turning the wheel at the well, and bending his proud back to serve as my footstool when I mount my Arab ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'Villette' and 'Shirley'; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind, there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff dying of joy—an unnatural, unreal joy—his panther nature paralysed, aneanti, in a ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the ascended king, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth; for ever asking Him for His Holy Spirit, to put into our minds good desires, and to enable us to bring these desires to good effect. And so we shall live for ever under our great taskmaster's eye, and find out that that eye is not merely the eye of a just judge, not merely the eye of a bountiful king, but more the eye of a loving and merciful Saviour, in whose presence is life even ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... say to them?" Lord John spoke but after a long moment, during which he had only looked hard and—an observer might even then have felt—ominously at his taskmaster. ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... beginning," the slightest means of defence—if we have supplied a solitary text to meet any one of the manifold wrongs with which woman, in her household life, is continually pressed by her tyrannic taskmaster, man,—we feel that we have only paid back one grain, hardly one, of that mountain of more than gold it is ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannot believe even in itself. Reflecting thus, he can scarcely fail to realize that materialism, everywhere entrenched, was entrenched strongest in the camps of the rich—-not the idle rich, for materialism is so terrible a taskmaster that it makes its votaries its slaves. These slaves, in turn, made a slave of the artist, a minister to their pride and pretence. His art thus lacked that "sad sincerity" which alone might have saved it in a crisis. When the storm broke militant democracy turned to the engineer, who produced ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... for opposing him with the speech of the honest and true, it had scratched his stony heart, and he had perceived the powerlessness of all his wealth to buy them if he had addressed himself to the attempt. So, even while he was their griping taskmaster and never gave them a good word, he had written their names down in his will. So, even while it was his daily declaration that he mistrusted all mankind—and sorely indeed he did mistrust all who bore any ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and oppressive nature still remain. But the grand misfortune is that the spirit which these oppressive laws engendered remains. The Protestant still looks upon the Catholic as a degraded being. The Catholic does not yet consider himself upon an equality with his former tyrant and taskmaster. That religious hatred which required all the prohibiting vigilance of the law for its restraint has found in the law its strongest support; and the spirit which the law first exasperated and embittered ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... share of Colonel von Kronau. This gentleman, at all other times ready to proceed with stringent severity wherever he discovered slight breaches of discipline or of the mechanical details of drill, and who knew no clemency where nothing was to be feared for himself by playing the rigid taskmaster, in this instance tolerated this shameful thing; for he knew that interference in this particular would mean for him, in any case, serious inconvenience. Two things were possible. Either he would be charged with falsely accusing others, or ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... or bitter memories of his past life crowding on his mind, and the dreary prospect spreading before him, to the end of his life, of no change from his rude and slavish occupation under the burning sun, hearing no voice but that of the harsh taskmaster; his eyes saddened and his heart sickened by the open and daily spectacle of immorality and woe, with no ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... your servant; especially because it has been my earnest wish to perform more for you than for any one I ever knew upon the world. But absorbing occupations, which still engage me, have prevented my informing your ladyship of this. Moreover, knowing that you know that love needs no taskmaster, and that he who loves doth not sleep, I thought the less of using go-betweens. And though I seemed to have forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about in order to effect a thing that was not looked for. My purpose ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds |
