"Pittance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... velvets, laces, woolen goods, and the richest articles of beauty and luxury, in which to array themselves, were put upon the market at a trifling cost, compared to what they were manufactured at in my own country. Pallid and haggard women and children, working incessantly for a pittance that barely sustained existence, was the ultimatum that the search after the cause of cheap prices arrived at in my world, but here it traveled from one bevy of beautiful workwoman to another until it ended at the Laboratory where Science sat throned, the grand, majestic, humane ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... beggar of his last pittance? Break the lame man's crutch, and cast the fragments at his feet? How? Have I the heart to do this? And when he hastens home, impatient to reckon in his daughter's smiles the whole sum of his happiness; and when he enters the chamber, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was workin' as head salesman for the Gaflooey Auto Company at a pittance of ten thousand a year, he come up to the flat for dinner one night. I seen right away that somethin' was wrong, because he only eat about half of the roast duck and brung along his own cigars. After nature could stand no more, and we had dragged ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... Gourlays. He had been too long in their service to be of use to any other; while there was a hand's turn to be done about the House with the Green Shutters he was glad to have the chance of doing it. His respect for his surly tyrant was as great as ever; he took his pittance of a wage and was thankful. Above all he worshipped young Gourlay; to be in touch with a College-bred man was a reflected glory; even the escapades noised about the little town, to his gleeful ignorance, were the signs of a man of the world. Peter chuckled when ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... with them were other passages of true expression. The dedication of some of these books to the pope secured for him certain small preferments, which, in his most profitable condition, aggregated about thirty scudi a month (perhaps equal to $20 of our money). On this miserable pittance he supported his wife and four children. In 1556 he was discharged from his place as a pontifical singer, on account of his marriage, a fact which had been ignored by the pope who appointed him. He then held the post of chapel master at the Lateran. In 1561 ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... monastery for hunting, nor any dogs save watch-dogs. Persons in religion who come to the monastery are to be entertained there for two days, during which time the cellarer is to give them bread and wine, and the pittancer {40} pittance. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... dramatic poetry before he began a play, he smiled and replied, 'Shakspeare wrote without rules.' He ended at last in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper, to which he was recommended by his friend Arnall, and received a small pittance for pay.—P. B. Franklin seems to have thought that his friend Ralph was alluded to here. See ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... "It is so, Mr. Gray, that in this case it cannot be avoided. I wish you to understand, that all pecuniary arrangements are to be made for Mrs. Western which she herself may desire. Were she to ask for everything I possess she must have it,—down to the barest pittance." But at this moment he had not received his ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... into the great maelstrom of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to thrill waiting millions from the rostrum with my "Tale of the Broncho Cow." And so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must toil on from daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings, while others are born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and wring tears of ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... in the streets of Olympia, the capital of that far-off north-west territory. So the poor widow, who keeps a boarding house, manufactures shirts, or sells apples and peanuts on the street corners of our cities, is compelled to pay taxes from her scanty pittance. I would that the women of this republic, at once, resolve, never again to submit to taxation, until their ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... fortunate. Almost at once, she procured a humble employment in the Emporium, the great department store owned by Edward Gilder. To be sure, the wage was infinitesimal, while the toil was body-breaking soul-breaking. Still, the pittance could be made to sustain life, and Mary was blessed with both soul and body to sustain much. So she merged herself in the army of workers—in the vast battalion of those that give their entire selves to a labor most stern and unremitting, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... thou hast not some, also, brother." Thereupon he thrust his hand into the pouch of the fat Friar and drew thence a bag like the other and counted out from it threescore and ten pounds. "Look ye now," quoth he, "I knew the good Saint had sent thee some pittance that thou, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... helpless otherwise, and who has had a very bad husband, and several very careless and cold-hearted children; but she has one son who comes to see her regularly once every three months, and brings her the scanty pittance on which she subsists; and surely I, with youth, and health, and work to do, should try to be cheerful, even though the work is not such as I could prefer.—— And you have been in France as well as England since I saw you last in August. I want to hear further particulars ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... flock thither to celebrate the praises of her son. She had loved her son, as warmly as other mothers love their children; but she had loved him as a hard-working labourer, earning for herself and for him their daily pittance; not as a mighty General, courted and complimented by the rich and great of the land. She had begged him not to go out into the town on the morning when he had been so instrumental in saving his townsmen from ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... information, Mrs. Harwood left the store, well convinced that the richly-wrought cape, for which she had paid Mrs.—fifteen dollars, had been worked by the hands of Mary Graham, for which she received but a mere pittance. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... a child. The responsibility for the neglected stepdaughter had similarly been flung upon his shoulders. And, satisfied with this manner of disposing of his worldly concerns, Standing intended to fare forth, shorn of any possession but a bare pittance for his daily needs, to lose himself, and all the shadows of a haunted mind, in the dim, remote interior of the unexplored forests of Northern Quebec. The ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... her heart, did not at all thank Captain Aylmer for his generosity. She would have had everything from him, or nothing. It was grievous to her to think that she should owe to him a bare pittance to keep her out of the workhouse to him who had twice seemed to be on the point of asking her to share everything with him. She did not love her cousin Will as she loved him; but her cousin Will's assurance to her that he would treat her with a brother's care was sweeter to her by far ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... me contribute my little pittance to the general fund," added John. "It isn't much—but it is all ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... William of Newbridge, Adrian IV. would seem to have pushed integrity in money matters to a harsh extreme; and so to have proved himself the antipodes of those popes who afterwards practised nepotism. For it is related of him, that rather than award a pittance towards the relief of his aged and destitute mother out of those ample revenues, which as pope he had at his disposal, but which he did not feel himself justified in diverting to private uses, he allowed her to subsist as best she could on the alms of the Chapter of ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... take him a long while to pull his connection together again, and the time of waiting will be one of much anxiety for him. Then, most of our investments, which used to pay such good dividends, are worth hardly anything now, and only bring us in a pittance compared with former years. Instead of being rich people, we shall have to be very careful indeed to make ends meet. To return to Rotherwood is utterly out of the question, and with the price of everything doubled and trebled, and our ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... The fisheries have always afforded impressive illustrations of the iron rule of the business world that the more arduous and more dangerous an occupation is, the less it pays. It was for the merest pittance that the fishermen risked their lives, and those who had families at home drawing their weekly provender from the outfitter were lucky if, at the end of the cruise they found themselves with the bill ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... to decay, and a large proportion of her people, willing to toil at six cents per day in occupations that have been transmitted for centuries in the same families, are either driven to the culture of the fields or compelled to spin and weave for a pittance the jute which is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... unmerciful embargo and non-importation laws, calculated as it were to fill up the little chasm in the ills which the enemy alone could not inflict; the entire coasting trade destroyed, and even the little pittance of intercourse from one port to the other in the same state destroyed [by the embargo], the planters of the Southern and Middle states, finding no market at home for their products, are driven to the alternative of wagoning them hundreds ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... other views for Barbara, and as it happens I have the power to enforce them, or at any rate to prevent their frustration by you. If Barbara marries against my will before she is five and twenty, that is within the next two years, her entire fortune, with the exception of a pittance, goes elsewhere. This I am sure is a fact that will influence you, who have nothing and even if it did not, I presume that you are scarcely so selfish as ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... places, like the camp, were turned into markets, whither every one repaired to exchange superfluities for necessaries. There the rarest articles, the value of which was not known to their possessors, were sold for the merest pittance; while others of little worth, but more showy appearance, were purchased at the most exorbitant prices. Gold, from being most portable, was bought at an immense loss with silver that the knapsacks were incapable of holding. Everywhere soldiers were seen seated on bales of merchandise, on heaps ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... novels, the meager sum of fifty dollars. I sold some of my wife's trinkets to purchase paper and ink, and worked diligently, you can guess how many weeks, until they were in English as readable as the French of their author. The task accomplished, I went to my patron, expecting of course to have the pittance counted down in current notes or gold; but——the market for such literature was by this time over stocked; he had supplied it too liberally; and with some insulting ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... shall receive on the Feast of S. Valentine, for the whole of the ensuing year, one quarter of oats; also, about the feast of S. John the Baptist, two bushels of salt, or the current price; also, on the feast of S. Julian, and at the feast of S. Alban, one penny for the accustomed pittance; also, at Easter, one penny, which is called by them 'Flavvones-peni'; also, on Ascension Day, one obolus for buying pot herbs; also, on each Wednesday in Lent, bolted corn[b] of the weight of one of their loaves; also, on the feast ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... starving millions. A land which opens her fostering arms to receive and restore to his long lost birthright, the trampled and abused child of poverty: to bid him stand up a free inheritor of a free soil, who so long laboured for a scanty pittance of bread, as an ignorant and degraded slave, in the country to which you now cling with such passionate fondness, and leave with ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... tendencies were the very reverse of my own. I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real surname—an English one, for he was of English extraction—having since become celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... entertainment. Not far away he may have his choice of theatres and moving-picture shows. If he is aesthetically or intellectually inclined, there are art-galleries and libraries beckoning him. If his earnings are a pittance and he cannot afford the theatre, and if his tastes do not draw him to library or museum, the saloon-keeper is always ready to be his friend. The youth from the country would be welcomed at the Young Men's Christian Association ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... time, while the smooth gloss Of Courts would slide o'er his forgotten name And call Captivity a kindness—meant To shield him from insanity or shame— Such shall be his meek guerdon! who was sent To be Christ's Laureate—they reward him well! Florence dooms me but death or banishment, Ferrara him a pittance and a cell,[309] Harder to bear and less deserved, for I 140 Had stung the factions which I strove to quell; But this meek man who with a lover's eye Will look on Earth and Heaven, and who will deign To embalm with his celestial flattery, As poor a thing as e'er was spawned to reign,[310] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... I blest indeed, and crown'd of fate As kings are crowned, as bards in their estate Are rapture-fraught, re-risen above the dust. Then were I torture-proof, and on the crust Of one kind word, though as a pittance thrown, I'd live for weeks! My tears I would disown And pray, contented with my discontent, As hermits pray ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... Dunstable, "that we expect clergymen to do their duty, and don't give them a sufficient income—give them hardly any income at all. Is it not a scandal, that an educated gentleman with a family should be made to work half his life, and perhaps the whole, for a pittance of seventy pounds a year!" Mark said that it was a scandal, and thought of Mr. Evan Jones and his daughter; and thought also of his own worth, and his own house, and his own ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Jack, I have been considering that I am so strong and hearty, I may continue to plague you a long time. Now, Jack, I am sensible that the income of your commission, and what I have hitherto allowed you, is but a small pittance for a lad ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... get over it. You don't suppose I'm going to sit down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid living on a pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Association. But my heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by that is that I know that what has happened to me with Marcus will not happen to me ever again. ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... old Adam's Ale. A very ancient colloquialism for water. In Scotland 'Adam's wine' and frequently merely 'Adam'. Prynne in his Sovereign Power of Parliament (1648), speaks of prisoners 'allowed only a poor pittance of Adam's ale.' cf. Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), The Lousiad, Canto ii, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... do separately; perhaps we can make a pittance together," she said. "We'll do good simple things; our voices blend well, and if we practice enough there's no reason why we ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of eighteen or nineteen, and his mother, a lady of about fifty, or it might be less. The mother wore a widow's weeds, and the boy was also clothed in deep mourning. They were poor—very poor; for their only means of support arose from the pittance the boy earned, by copying ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... have touched it. But there it is; money paid, and I've had to borrow; and engaging that Italian firm for the job was the best thing I could manage. What English firms wanted was out of all reason. I don't wonder at Lloyds selling wrecks for anything they will fetch. A pittance in cash is better than getting into the hands of these sharks" (sharks was heavily underscored). "And what guarantee have I that the firm will pocket even that pittance? How do I know that I shall see ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... Kepler. The most crushing poverty all his life oppressed him. For, though his nominal salary as Astronomer Royal was large enough, yet the treasury was so exhausted that it was impossible for him ever to obtain more than a pittance. What a sad tragedy do these words, in a letter to Mstlin, reveal:—"I stand whole days in the antechamber, and am nought for study." And then he adds the sublime compensation: "I keep up my spirits, however, with the thought that I serve, not the Emperor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... prostitutes, have sold yourselves and your posterity for hire—for a paltry price, to be refunded with interest by some minister, who will indemnify himself out of your own pockets; for, after all, you are bought and sold with your own money—the miserable pittance you may now receive is no more than a pitcher full of water thrown in to moisten the sucker of that pump which will drain you to the bottom. Let me therefore advise and exhort you, my countrymen, to avoid the opposite extremes ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... answered John with a sigh; 'and how we're to pay it, I don't know. If I could only get well, I shouldn't mind; for I'd rather break stones on the road, or sweep a crossing, than see my poor girl slaving from morning to night for such a pittance.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... receive his pittance, his lot might be more tolerable. But it is the almost universal complaint, that, either from inability or disinclination, the planter does not keep his agreements. Sometimes the overseer, when the work has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... heatedly, "the Church has fought truth desperately ever since the Master's day! It has fawned at the feet of emperor and plutocrat, and licked the bloody hand of the usurer who tossed her a pittance of his foul gains! In the great world-battles for reform, for the rights of man, for freedom from the slavery of man to man or to drink and drugs, she has come up only as the smoke has cleared away, but always in time to demand the spoils! She has filched from the systems ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... pity that, as a penalty upon the people of the county, he could not be quartered upon them as long as he lived. For they were the more culpable criminals. Belonging to one of the richest divisions of the State, with vast interests at stake, they had not been ashamed to pay a judge this contemptible pittance, and they deserved to have their law badly administered. This feeling was undoubtedly wide-spread in the Senate; but, on the other hand, there was the duty we were sworn to perform, and the result was that the judge was removed ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... amidst perpetual snows. Its charms are experienced alike, by the savage who roams the wilds of an American forest, and the courtier who rolls in luxury and prescribes rules of refinement to the civilized world; by the miscreant who wrings from the cold hand of charity the pittance that sustains his life, and the monarch who sways his sceptre over half the globe; by him who is bent with woes and years, and him whose cheek is covered yet with boyhood's down. Hence we might conclude it capable of giving strength to the weary, vivacity to ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... O Elsie, how could they think so? Could I ever forget how they and you gave of their little pittance to maintain the child found in the Black Forest, and how you all lavished kindness on her who had neither father nor mother to care for her? I must go at once and ask them what I have done that they should have thought so badly of me even for ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... question. To take half of her little pittance! I wonder you can even suggest the thing. It—it is almost an insult," says ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... conversation. It is difficult to imagine a situation more forlorn and isolated than that of this man,—a Greek at Seville, with scarcely a single acquaintance, and depending for subsistence on the miserable pittance to be derived from selling a few books, for the most part hawked about from door to door. "What could have first induced you to commence bookselling in Seville?" said I to him, as he arrived one sultry day, heated and fatigued, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Elleray were destined to be fleeting. The fortune of its master was melted away by the mismanagement of others, leaving him but a slender pittance. He bore his loss like a man, sorrowing, but not repining. The estate was given up, and a new home found with his mother, in Edinburgh. This was in 1815. Four years later, fortune had smiled on his cheerful labors, and given him the wherewithal to provide a home of his own for his wife and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... being a devout and real Christian—one who took delight in the duties of his holy office, and who served God because he loved him. I am fully aware how laborious is the life of a country priest, and how contracted and mean is the pittance he in common receives, and how much more he merits than he gets, if his reward were to be graduated by things here. But this picture, like every other, has its different sides, and occasionally men do certainly enter the church from motives as little as possible connected with those ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... turned me off with such a pittance it wouldn't have happened," he said, sullenly. "Out of your abundance you only ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... he) I meant nothing more than to lay down a comfortable plan of living within the bounds of our fortune, which is but moderate.' 'Sir (said she), you are the best judge of your own affairs — My fortune, I know, does not exceed twenty thousand pounds — Yet, even with that pittance, I might have had a husband who would not have begrudged me a house in London' — 'Good God! my dear (cried poor Baynard, in the utmost agitation), you don't think me so sordid — I only hinted what I thought — But, I don't pretend to impose —' 'Yes, sir (resumed ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... while. What is a native poet to the great German king? A phantom that he knows not, and believes not. As great as he is, the king showed himself very small to me. I sang him as a poetess and he bestowed a pittance upon me as one would to a beggar in ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... and nights of ceaseless rain they toiled, sometimes through fierce storms of thunder and lightning, and before terrific seas lashed into foam and fury by swift and sudden squalls, with only their miserable pittance of bread and water to keep body and soul together. Now and then a little rum was given after any extra fatigue of baling, but only at the times ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... his speech were not altogether to her taste. "I trust that pride does not lead me astray," she said. "But if I can read my own soul aright, there is no thought of myself in the grief which now tears my heart. What is power to me? What do I desire? A little room, leisure for my devotions, a pittance to save me from want—what more can I ask for? Why, then, should I covet power? If I am sore at heart, it is not for any poor loss which I have sustained. I think no more of it than of the snapping of one of the threads on ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you in the face. They are a sort of Jacks o' the Green, with a sprig of laurel, a little tinsel, and a little smut, but still playing antics and keeping in incessant motion, to attract attention and extort your pittance of approbation. Whether they talk of the town or the country, poetry or politics, it comes to much the same thing. If they talk to you of the town, its diversions, 'its palaces, its ladies, and its streets,' they are the delight, the grace, and ornament of it. If they ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... discovered afterwards that the real reason lay in his unbusinesslike methods, and the effeminacy consequent on the delicate way in which he had been nurtured in early life, which made him incapable of developing the energy necessary for his work. On a miserable pittance of fifteen hundred francs a year, he led a weary existence, full of anxiety. With nothing in view but a lonely old age, and the probability of dying in a hospital, it seemed as if our society put new life into him; ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... sound. I wish there were more of them. What troubles me is only a trifling matter of two linear inches on the back of my neck. Your general principle, Madam, is admirable. I merely plead for a slight relaxation of the rule. I ask only for a mere pittance ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... not be well to offer part of your money to Oliver? half of it will pay the fine of Bumppo; and he is so unused to hardships! I am sure my father will subscribe much of his little pittance, to place him in a station that is more ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Charlotte presently found employment for her skill in fine needlework. Mrs. Peak was incapable of earning money, but the experiences of her early married life enabled her to make more than the most of the pittance at her disposal. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... death, and to her complaints the answer is that she is being expensively administered. To fleece a poor man of his pittance and to justify the action by telling him that it is on every appurtenance of a spendthrift to which he objects that it is being spent is scarcely to provide a satisfactory justification. The two cases are exactly parallel, ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... was shipwrecked on his coast, and whether any of the crew had escaped she knew not, as she had seen none of them since her being cast ashore on a plank; but as now the hopes of her reaching the sacred house were cut off, if the sultan would allot her a small hut, and a trifling pittance for her support, she would spend the remainder of her days in prayers for the prosperity of himself ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... through the narrow, crowded street, the hands of each upon the shoulders of the one in advance, the leader beating with his cane upon the stone pavement, and all beseeching alms. It was a strange sight. The Chinese Government gives to every blind person a small monthly pittance, and well-dressed passers, I observed, generally bestowed a cash ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... character the builders of the good times, accordingly, never left out of sight; so that, if their means were limited, they lavished all upon one point,—made that overflow with riches, and left the rest plain and bare; never did they spread their pittance thin to cover the whole, as we do. It is for this reason that so few of the great cathedrals were finished, and that in buildings of all kinds we so often find the decoration in patches, sharply marked off from the rest of the structure. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... be at the backbone of every great nation. Tradesmen!" exclaimed my grandfather. "Where would any of us be were it not for trade? We sell our tobacco and our wheat, and get money in return. And your father makes a deal here and a deal there, and so gets rich in spite of his pittance." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tempest-worn and desolate, A pilot journeying through the wild Stopped to solicit at the gate A pittance for his child. ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... invective, such wild despair. But, since I learnt how and why you married me, I will tell you what I have made up my mind to do. I am going after the inquest to turn you out of this house, and give you a pittance to live on so long as you remain here. I wish you to become a visible moral, a walking monument of disgrace in the neighbourhood you ruled. Should you attempt to escape me, the payment will be stopped; should you obtain employment, your character shall be exposed. At every ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... purpose, lest I wear thee out, Thee and thy friends, to seek at early dawn The city, there to beg—But give me first Needful instructions, and a trusty guide Who may conduct me thither; there my task Must be to roam the streets; some hand humane Perchance shall give me a small pittance there, A little bread, and a few drops to drink. Ulysses' palace I shall also seek, 380 And to discrete Penelope report My tidings; neither shall I fail to mix With those imperious suitors, who, themselves Full-fed, may spare perhaps some boon to me. Me shall they find, in whatsoe'er ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... to give music-lessons touched his father on a tender point. 'And so,' Leopold writes, with more bitterness than he has ever shown before in his letters—'and so you will throw away chances of earning money, whilst your old father has to run from house to house for a wretched pittance in order to support himself and his daughter, and to send the little that remains to you, instead of paying his debts!' He begs Wolfgang to reflect whether he was not treating him as hardly as the ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... at a nominal price fixed by themselves. To be paid at all, indeed, appears to have been a favor, for it has not been done in full now for several years in succession. Spain regularly remains indebted to the unlucky peasants in the amount of the miserable pittance allowed, from one year's end to another. The Government ordered the officials to exact a higher return from the impoverished population of the tobacco districts; and even rewarded informers who, after pointing out fields already owned, but which were considered suitable ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... encouraged to recruit her crops, her growing infirmities, and, above all, the tortures, of a stubborn hip gout, which she found would yield to no remedy, determined her to break up her business, and retire with a decent pittance into the country, where I promised myself, nothing so sure, as my going down to live with her, as soon as I had seen a little more of life, and improved my small matters into a competency that would create in me an independence on the world: for I was now, thanks to Mrs. Cole, wise enough to ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... door, And, at the watchman's lantern borrowing light, Finds a cold bed her only comfort left. Wives beggar husbands, husbands starve their wives, On Fortune's velvet altar offering up Their last poor pittance—Fortune, most severe Of goddesses yet known, and costlier far Than all that held their routs in Juno's heaven.— So fare we in this prison-house the world. And 'tis a fearful spectacle to see So many maniacs dancing in their chains. They gaze upon the links that hold them fast With ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... over he had made up his mind to take his L300 a year and be silent. The Marquis, he now found, was not so infirm as he had thought, nor the Marchioness quite so full of fears. He must give it up, and take his pittance. But in doing so he continued to assure himself that he was greatly injured, and did not cease to accuse Lord Kingsbury of sordid parsimony in refusing to reward adequately one whose services to the family had been so faithful ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... his brother died childless. It is divulging no secret that the income that passed with the title varied between five and seven thousand pounds a year, according as coal was high, and tenants prosperous or not—a mere miserable pittance, of course, for the Earl of Montdidier and Kirkudbrightshire; so that all his ventures, and therefore ours, had one avowed end—shekels enough to lift the mortgages from ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... who freely bared his breast to the shock of a hundred battles for his country, his fireside and his little ones, could then have sent his pittance of eleven dollars a month to that fireside, with the consciousness it might buy those dear ones bread at least. But long before the darkest days fell upon the South, his whole month's pay would not buy them one pound ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... and enthusiastic condition. And so the graveyard of Five Forks, in which but two of the occupants had died natural deaths; the dreary, ragged cabins on the hillsides, with their sad-eyed, cynical, broken-spirited occupants, toiling on day by day for a miserable pittance, and a fare that a self-respecting Eastern mechanic would have scornfully rejected,—were not a part of the Eastern visitors' recollection. But the hoisting works and machinery of the "Blazing Star Tunnel Company" was,—the Blazing Star Tunnel Company, whose "gentlemanly superintendent" had received ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... man of twenty-five without a name, who might, if they were granted, become a colonel at thirty. Max accordingly sent in his resignation. The major —for among themselves Bonapartists recognized the grades obtained in 1815—thus lost the pittance called half-pay which was allowed to the officers of the army of the Loire. But all Issoudun was roused at the sight of the brave young fellow left with only twenty napoleons in his possession; and the mayor gave him a place in his office ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... crosses the path of those who are living up to the utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory supplied—her cheerful industry, her brave struggle to live like a gentlewoman on a pittance, her tender thought for the welfare and happiness of her children—she felt she could walk through a burning fiery furnace if by so doing she could earn ease and repose for ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... power. But Madam Esmond would not hear any of these reasons. Feelings were her reasons. Here was a chance of making Harry's fortune—dear Harry, who was left with such a slender younger brother's; pittance—and the wretches in London would not help him; his own brother, who inherited all her papa's estate, would not help him. To think of a child of hers being so mean at fourteen year of age! etc. etc. Add tears, scorn, frequent innuendo, long estrangement, bitter outbreak, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... found them. I hope they were not a just sample of their whole nation; for these gentry would exercise every imposition, and even insinuate the thing that was not, the more easily to plunder us of our hard earned pittance of small change. Had they shown any generosity, like the British tar, I should have passed over their conduct in silence; but after they had stripped our men of every farthing, they would say to them—"Monsieur, you have won all our money, now lend us ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... of Asia. [59] From these stately palaces issued a swarm of dirty and ragged plebeians, without shoes and without a mantle; who loitered away whole days in the street of Forum, to hear news and to hold disputes; who dissipated in extravagant gaming, the miserable pittance of their wives and children; and spent the hours of the night in the obscure taverns, and brothels, in the indulgence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... straw, on the damp stones, had been for five weary weeks the bed of Alice Benden. She was allowed no change of clothes, and all the pittance given her for food was a halfpenny worth of bread, and a farthing's worth of drink. At her own request she had been permitted to receive her whole allowance in bread; and water, not over clean nor fresh, was supplied for drinking. No living creature came near ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... himself up latterly to this fatal comparison. The hour when gold was entrusted to his charge found him feverish and irritable. He asked himself whether he was a mere machine to transfer money from spot to spot, and he spurned at the pittance bestowed upon honesty in this life. Where could Boyne's Bank discover again such an honest man as he? And because he was honest he was poor! The consideration that we alone are capable of doing the unparalleled thing may sometimes inspire us with fortitude; but this ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "It is different with my father. My father has what is called a regular income. One of these days I shall inherit it. It will keep us out of the poorhouse. But meanwhile I have only the pittance that he allows me." ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... end! The little warmth and love of his cherishing arms about her cold body completed the pittance of happiness ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... classes; but this most odious, this most galling tax, is felt even in the cottage of the labourer, who cannot return to refresh himself after his day of toil with his favourite beverage without paying twice its value out of his hard-earned pittance, to swell the dividend of the Company, and support these ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... kept on the 1st of July while the market lasted. The church itself was impropriated to the Abbey of Inchaffray, founded by the Earl of Strathearn about the beginning of the twelfth century, and was served by a vicar, to whom that monastery delegated the clerical duty, doubtless on the usual pittance ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... nothing extraordinary about it at all," he answered. "Your father died and left you friendless in a parish of which I am Lord of the Manor. He received a starvation pittance for his labors, which it was my duty to augment, a duty which, with many others, I neglected. I simply gave orders that you should be ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is a scoundrel, a disgrace to society—to—to—" Then in sudden fury he went on: "When a man gets down to playing for a mere pittance, as he does, in a disreputable theatre, and dwelling in a squalid neighbourhood, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... to all the world, whether a wiser, a better, a more honourable, or a more justifiable project could have been thought of. They were then reduced to slavery and beggary by the English rebels, many thousands of them murdered, the rest deprived of their estates, and driven to live on a small pittance in the wilds of Connaught; at a time when either the Rump or Cromwell absolutely governed the three kingdoms. And the question will turn upon this, Whether the Catholics, deprived of all their possessions, governed with a rod of iron, and in utter despair of ever ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... about the helplessness of women, and the readiness of men to let them earn money in abundance by shame, while they grind them down to the merest pittance for honorable work. Shame on society, that women are forced to surrender themselves to an abandoned life and death, when so many are enjoying wealth and luxury in extravagance! I do not wish them to divide their estates with the poor; I am no friend to communism ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... sighed the girl, "how I pity him! Life has been very hard to him. Why are some men born to be gentlemen, with untold wealth at their command, while others are born to toil all their weary lives through for the meager pittance that suffices to keep body and ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... 1870 the law of primogeniture was as much respected in Rome as in England, and was carried out with considerably greater strictness. The heir got everything, the other children got practically nothing but the smallest pittance. The palace, the gallery of pictures and statues, the lands, the villages and the castles, descended in unbroken succession from eldest son to eldest son, indivisible in principle ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... suggested, but the child was too weak and spent to inhale the steam of vinegar, and the attempts to make her swallow produced fruitless anguish. They could not discover how long it was since she had taken any nourishment, and they already knew what a miserable pittance hers had been at the best. Mrs. Kelland gave her up at once, and protested that she was following her mother, and that there was death in her face. Rachel made an imperious gesture of silence, and was obeyed so far as ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... almost foppish, in his attire; not strictly fashionable, for he liked bright colors, flowing cravats, and hats that suggested the hunter or ranger rather than the law clerk; yet the pittance for which he worked was very small, and his poverty extreme. He therefore economized upon his food. He lived for months together upon dry biscuits and water. Here is a touching entry from his diary: "Had an opportunity to buy a desk to-day worth forty-five ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... this farm known as Major's Smith's pasture land. It could have been bought for a mere song. But now some of the land had brought over six thousand dollars an acre. How she did wish that her father had been far-seeing enough to have bought up all this shore when he could have done so for a mere pittance! ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... thy cup With reverie's wasteful pittance up, And while the fire burns slow away, Hiding itself in ashes gray, I'll think,—As inward Youth retreats, Compelled to spare his wasting heats, When Life's Ash-Wednesday comes about, And my head's gray with fires burnt out, While stays one spark to light the eye, With the ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... life,—scarcely one of its meanest luxuries,—derived from the neighbouring shore of Gaul, were occasionally enjoyed by British Princes: in our time, the daily meal of the pauper who obtains his precarious and scanty pittance by begging, is supplied by a navigation of some thousand miles, from countries in opposite parts of the globe; of whose existence Caesar had not even the remotest idea. In the time of Caesar, there was perhaps no country, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... was uppermost in his mind was the thought of his wife," he repeated. "His fairest hope in the future was the hope of making her happy, and lavishing upon her the pittance which he had won by the force of his own strong arm in the gold-fields of Australia. I saw him within a few hours of his reaching England, and I was a witness to the joyful pride with which he looked forward to his re-union with his wife. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... indulgence be dealt out to them? May not the want in most instances be inferred from the demand when the service can be proved, and may not the last days of human infirmity be spared the mortification of purchasing a pittance of relief only by the exposure of its own necessities? I submit to Congress the expediency of providing for individual cases of this description by special enactment, or of revising the act of the 1st of May, 1820, with a view to ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... you would have come to some decision. If you can save the property of course you ought to do so. If you can live on what pittance is left ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... private soldier is in all countries very small, much less than the wages of a day-labourer; and in some countries it is so mere a pittance, that it is quite astonishing how it can be ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... old beggar, and sat down near the door. Telemachos handed Eumaios a whole loaf of bread and as much meat as he could hold in his two hands, and bade him take it to the beggar. And he told him to tell the poor old man to ask a pittance from every ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... aunt the chteaux of Ay, Mareuil, Boursault, and Chouilly, together with a large patrimony in land and money; but a mania for gambling brought him to utter ruin, and he dispossessed himself of money, lands, and chteaux in succession, and was reduced, in his old age, to earn a meagre pittance as a violin-player at the Paris Opera House. The old chteau of Boursault, which still exists contiguous to the stately edifice raised by Mme. Clicquot on the summit of the hill, was risked and lost on a single game at cards by this pertinacious gamester, whose pressing pecuniary difficulties ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... desired for that portion of each recurring year when his labor was specially valuable in connection with the cotton crop, while for the remainder of the time he might shift for himself. By this detestable process the "master" had the labor of the "servant" for a mere pittance; and even that pittance did not go to the servant, but was paid into the treasury of the county, and thus relived the white men from their proper share of taxation. There may have been more cruel laws enacted, but ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... was not born to the fortune that passed to me by the death of a distant relation, who had, in my earlier youth, children of his own. I was an only son, left an orphan at the age of sixteen with a very slender pittance. My guardians designed me for the medical profession. I began my studies at Edinburgh, and was sent to Paris to complete them, It so chanced that there I lodged in the same house with an artist named Auguste Duval, who, failing to gain his livelihood as a painter, in what—for ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
