"Eke out" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoughts of private profit and by the pursuit of worldly advancement, the lower ranks were left in a position degrading alike to themselves and to religion. In the country a clergyman was little above a peasant in social consideration, and seldom equal to him in the comforts of life. To eke out the sustenance of himself and family, hard labor in his own garden was by no means the most menial of the services he was obliged to perform. His wife was usually a servant-maid taken from a neighboring country house, and the kitchen was his most ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Helena wondered not, she grieved when she found it was his intention to leave her. He ordered her to go home to his mother. When Helena heard this unkind command, she replied, "Sir, I can nothing say to this, but that I am your most obedient servant, and shall ever with true observance seek to eke out that desert, wherein my homely stars have failed to equal my great fortunes." But this humble speech of Helena's did not at all move the haughty Bertram to pity his gentle wife, and he parted from her without even the common civility of a ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... characters wander widely over the face of Europe and even come in contact with strange Eastern climes, so the writers of romantic tales ransacked the remotest corners of literature and history for sensational matter. The much elaborated chronicle of the Moors was made to eke out substance for "The Arragonian Queen" (1724), a story of "Europe in the Eighth Century," while "Cleomelia: or, the Generous Mistress" was advertised as the "Secret History of a Lady Lately Arriv'd from Bengall." The ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... saturity|; high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide; fill, load, bumper, bellyful[obs3]; brimmer[obs3]; sufficiency &c. 639. V. be complete &c. adj.; come to a head. render complete &c. adj.; complete &c. (accomplish) 729; fill, charge, load, replenish; make up, make good; piece out[Fr], eke out; supply deficiencies; fill up, fill in, fill to the brim, fill the measure of; saturate. go the whole hog, go the whole length; go all lengths. Adj. complete, entire; whole &c. 50; perfect &c. 650; full, good, absolute, thorough, plenary; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... control a mad elephant; You can shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; You can ride a lion; You can play with the cobra; By alchemy you can eke out your livelihood; You can wander through the universe incognito; You can make vassals of the gods; You can be ever youthful; You can walk on water and live in fire; But control of the mind is better ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... voters of Michigan to give the ballot to women. The want of the ballot prevents woman from possessing knowledge and power. If a woman performs the most menial services for the sake of her children, to eke out for them a subsistence, she does not do it because the law demands it, but because there is no other way open to her to obtain a livelihood. She did not ask for the ballot because the laws of the State are barbarous. She did not believe ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a small office in the customs, and my mother and I eke out his salary by making lace. We are called poor, but we do not feel ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tobacco-trader that sailed between Port Glasgow and Virginia. Tea-drinking was beginning to spread more openly, in so much that by the advice of the first Mrs. Balwhidder, Mrs. Malcolm took in tea to sell to eke out something to the small profits of her wheel. I lost some of my dislike to the tea after that, and we had it for breakfast at the manse as well as in the afternoon. But what I thought most of it for was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... extensive use of sun-dried bricks of adobe has grown up within quite recent times. It is apparent, however, that the Zui builders preferred to use stone; and even at the present time they frequently eke out with stonework portions of a house when the supply of adobe has fallen short. An early instance of such supplementary use of stone masonry still survives in the church building, where the old Spanish adobe has been repaired ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... seem vital in her eyes, and they usually are so. To Great Britain, whose major policy is that she must be mistress of the seas, it is vital that she should be. Her people are surrounded by the ocean, and unless they are willing simply to eke out an agricultural existence, it is essential that she should be able to manufacture articles, send them out in ships to all parts of the world, and receive in return money and the products of other lands. In order that she may be able to do this, she must feel sure that no power on earth can ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... would be pleased if he could look in on us to-night," thought the little freshman happily. Then, as the college clock chimed out the hour, her brow wrinkled with anxiety. The kitchen must be swept, —Dora had decided views about Mrs. Bryant's housekeeping,—and the "surprise," which was to eke out the entertainment afforded by the sugaring-off proper, had yet to be prepared. The unaccustomed responsibilities of hostess weighed heavily upon Dora Carlson as she traversed the long mile that stretched between the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... more, very material assistance to Mr Dillon and his friends, was not himself a Member of Parliament, but was doing far better work as a citizen, studying, from his quiet retreat on the shores of Clew Bay, the shocking conditions of the Western peasantry, who were compelled to eke out an existence of starvation and misery amid the crags and moors and fastnesses of the west, whilst almost from their very doorsteps there stretched away mile upon mile of the rich green pastures from which their fathers were evicted during the clearances that followed the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... lived on a small New Hampshire farm and she had just been graduated from the village academy and had come to town to visit her aunt. The latter was a tall, lean woman, who, after the death of her husband had been forced to keep lodgers to eke out a living. Ruth showed me pictures of her mother and father, and they might have been relatives of mine as far as looks went. The father had caught an expression from the granite hills which most New England farmers get—a rugged, strained look; the mother was lean and kind ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... to give an opinion of her own on something else than dress,—who presumed as it were, to set the world thinking hard on a particular phase of religious history! Then, as one after the other talked and whispered and commented, the story of Angela's own private suffering began to eke out bit by bit,—how she had been brutally stabbed m her own studio in front of her own picture by no other than her own betrothed husband Florian Varillo, who was moved to his murderous act by a sudden impulse of jealousy,—and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... who was related to one of the sergeant-majors, and who was, of course, booked by his relative for promotion. It was never, so far as I can learn, a part of army etiquette, but it was a common practice at that time, to steal the belongings of a new arrival, and in that way to eke out a deficiency in the kit of the plunderer. My valise had not been served out to me a week before it was denuded of one-half its contents, and I was reduced to a draft of one penny a day for pocket-money until such time as the depredations ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... best people, and good families, as I supposed nobody in this country ever did,—in earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke out somebody's unhappiness,—to keep the high-born daughter from marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in talking in that way. Such things ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... ground, beyond the reach of an enemy's spear-thrust. The Moro Samal Laut of the southern Sulu Archipelago avoid the large volcanic islands of the group, and place their big villages over the sea on low coral reefs. The sandy beaches of the shore hold their coco-palms, whose nuts by their milk eke out the scanty supply of drinking water, and whose fronds shade the tombs of the dead.[588] The sea-faring Malays of the Sunda Islands, in thickly populated points of the coast, often dwell in permanently inhabited rafts moored near the pile dwellings. Palembang on the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... magistrate's clerk, was almost a power in Sauveterre; and the greatest personages there paid their court to him. His official duties were of very humble nature, and ill paid; but he knew how to eke out his income by other occupations, of which the court took no notice; and these added largely both to his importance in the community ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... who had hidden in the runo reeds of Argwan continued to eke out an existence and to pass her time in weaving abak cloth. One day as she was about to eat she found a turtledove's egg in one of her weaving baskets and she was glad, for meat and fish were scarce. But when the hour to eat arrived she forgot the egg. Thus it happened day after day until ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... feelings of envy as they cast one careless glance at our carriage. Weary and foot-sore, they will only obtain a few quattrini in the town for all their toil and trouble, and then they must retrace every step up the long hill-side, with their little stock of provisions to help eke out a miserable existence. Yet can any life in such a climate and amid such surroundings be truly accounted miserable, we ask, no matter how humble the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... To eke out the salt meat that was reserved for the military, two Cape cows, which would not breed, were killed and served out to them during ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... not harboring a single revengeful thought at us for the trouble we had given him. Of course the issue of the matter was, that we all paid a few sous for the sight—not to the chamois, which would have been the most equitable way, but to those who had appropriated his gifts and graces to eke out their ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... stood up and bade me reach forth my arm to rest her thereon. O! what sweet burden to my next song. Petrarch shall eke out good matter for ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... With true observance seek to eke out that Wherein toward me my homely stars have fail'd To equal ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... this now almost-forgotten race—the Saracen—are still to be found on the northern seaboard of Africa, in the kingdom called Morocco, where they strive to eke out a scant existence from the arid plains of that ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... proverbially known as "the mother of invention," and practically the step-mother of ministers' daughters, had made me eke out the silken facings of the front with cambric linings for the back and sleeves. Accordingly, in the full blaze of the concert-room, there sat I, "accoutred as I was," in motley attire,—my homely little economies patent to admiring spectators: on either shoulder, budding wings composed of unequal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... supply, with the few wild ducks and pigeons which they could shoot from time to time, the little flour they were able to buy on credit from the trading houses, and the half-grown potatoes they stole from the fields, enabled them to eke out a scanty subsistence. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... approach, for the curling bark had not yet blackened and the fat chuckle of it was still insistent. He laughed a little at himself. He might have repudiated the scheme of creation and his own place in it, but he did love things: dear, homespun, familiar things, potent to eke out man's well-being with their own benevolence and make him temporarily ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Floyd Vandecar would be finished when the gray-eyed Flea, so like her own father, went away with the one-armed man, to eke out her destiny amid the squalor ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... parties, had long been an abandoned spot. All the Colonel's keepers under fifty had gone to fight; and there was left only an old head keeper, with one decrepit helper, who shot the scanty game which still survived on strict business principles, to eke out the household rations of the big house. The Ipscombe woods were rarely visited. They were a long way from the keeper's cottage, and the old man, depressed by the difference between war and pre-war conditions, found it quite ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... edge of a swamp or deep in the solitudes of the forest. They put rude honey boxes up in the trees to serve as beehives, and it is from this honey and from the game that they kill with their bows and arrows and traps and spears that they manage to eke out a meager living. ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... mellow tones that are his, 'I guess there were times when I almost gave up the struggle. I recall one spell, not so many years ago, when I camped informally on the Holden lot, sleeping where I could find a bed and stinting myself in food to eke out my little savings. Yet I look back upon that time'—he mischievously pulled the ears of the magnificent Great Dane that lolled at his feet—'as one of the happiest in my career, because I always knew that my day would come. I had done only a few ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... character, runaway boys, truant apprentices, drunken mechanics, and broken-down mankind generally. Among these are men who have seen better days. They are decayed gentlemen who appear regularly in Wall street, and eke out the day by such petty business as they may get hold of; and are lucky if they can make enough to carry them through the night. In all lodging-houses the rule holds good, "First come, first served," and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... monthly price more suited to his means than those which he had temporarily taken at the Adams House on his arrival there the previous evening. Always frugal in regard to his personal expenditures, he knew that, in order to eke out the full term with his scanty resources, he must carry his habitual thrift to its fullest extent. He therefore scoured the town for apartments, aided by references from Professor Cochran, principal of the Normal, and finally ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... make a good match. If large-footed, this would be impossible; but such hopes are sometimes doomed to disappointment, or after marriage reverses may ensue; and so it happens that many small feet stamp about in poverty and try to eke out a living under disadvantages from which their less genteel neighbors are free. The most remarkable feature in the streets is the total absence of women of any class except such as drudge alongside of men, and even these are not numerous, for man appears to monopolize ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... him the means to the utmost of our ability. If you concur, I think he would better be informed that we are not pushing him beyond this position; and that, in fact, our judgment is rather against his going beyond it. If he can only maintain this position, without more, this rebellion can only eke out a short and feeble existence, as an animal sometimes may with a thorn ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... which almost atones for his dishonesty; and there is about him a strange dislike to conventionality and to law which is so interesting as to make up the balance. I have always regarded your father as a most excellent man, but thoroughly dishonest. He would rob any one,—but always to eke out his own gifts to other people. He has, therefore, to my eyes ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the Pale, because he would be the only sober man amongst a population that cannot resist the temptations of strong drink. Strange spectacle indeed! Men banished from places where they wish to live because they are too good for their surroundings! forced to remain where they can hardly eke out a miserable living. The question, surely, is justified. How did that poverty-stricken mass of oppressed people succeed in preserving its freedom from a national vice in a country where its ancestors have dwelt for long generations? Can a great virtue be maintained by sorcery? ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... had been so often in print for praise or reprobation had so few intimates as myself,—when I recollected that before I left Highgate for the seaside you had been so kind as to intimate that you considered some trifle due to me,—whatever it be, it will go some way to eke out the sum which I have with a sick heart been all this day trotting about to make up, guinea by guinea. You will do me a real service, (for my health perceptibly sinks under this unaccustomed flurry of my spirits,) if you could make it convenient to inclose to me, however small ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... time M. Chebe had sought a place which would enable him to eke out their slender income. But he sought it only in what he called standing business, his health forbidding any occupation that ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... have to pin myself together elaborately, and whenever I want to get anything out of my pocket I have cautiously to unpin myself, with the dread of falling to pieces before my eyes. For my food, I allowance myself, in order to eke out as long as possible my resources. I dine and breakfast at a second-class restaurant. Cat, dog, rat, and horse are very well as novelties, but taken habitually, they do not assimilate with my inner man. Horse, doctors ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... packages for different merchants in the adjoining villages, as well as to and from the settlement. Possessing a pair of excellent horses and a good wagon, I found it a profitable business, and the only one I could well do, to eke out the proceeds of my ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... was a rigid disciplinarian, but withal a very kind-hearted man. He no doubt paid for those chickens rather than have one of his boys suffer for his foraging escapade. Perhaps I ought to say a word about these foraging expeditions to eke out the boys' larder. These men were not thieves in any sense and very few attempted this dubious method, but the temptation was almost beyond the power of resistance. The best way to test this temptation is to diet yourself on "hardtack" ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... concert with the notes of the musicians. In attitude and gesture they are almost as bad as their pious sisters of the temples. The endeavor is to express the passions of love, hope, jealousy, despair, etc, and they eke out this mimicry with chanted songs in every way worthy of the movements of which they are the explanatory notes. These are the only women in Hindustan whom it is thought worth while to teach to read and write. If they would but make as noble use of their intellectual as they ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... marriage, but gave Faith to understand that if she persisted in marrying a poor man, when a good half million awaited her acceptance, she did it at her own peril, not a penny of his should go to eke out the scanty living of a poor clerk. The end of it all was a quiet wedding one morning in her uncle's parlour, and a hasty flitting away of the young couple—away from ominous looks and cold politeness, out ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... together, and laugh heartily at the strange speech of which they could not understand a word. The boys spoke English with difficulty, and very imperfectly, like persons struggling to express their ideas in a foreign tongue. In speaking it, they had to eke out their words with many gestures and signs to make themselves understood; but in talking together in their own language, they used no gestures and spoke very fluently. She remembers that the words which they used ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... sleep had faded from its prime, The hour, when housewives, who a scanty fare Eke out with loom and distaff, rise in time To wake the embers, and the night outwear; Then call their handmaids, by the light to share The task, that keeps the husband's bed from shame, And earns a pittance for the babes. So there, Nor tardier, to his toil the Lord of Flame Springs ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... name might be coupled with that of a pretty actress, and people would only smile knowingly. But let a hint of his betrayal of Etta Stampa and its attendant circumstances reach the ears of those who hated him, and he would sink forthwith into the slough of rich parvenus who eke out their lives in vain efforts to enter the closely guarded circle from which ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... every Sunday afternoon the good citizens of Ringeby walked out along the fjord, with their wives on their arms. On these occasions most of the men wore frock coats and grey felt hats; but Enebak, the tanner, being hunchbacked, preferred a tall silk hat, as better suited to eke out his height. ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... appeared so bitterly discontented as now; but, like any wife who is really attached to her husband, she considered it unworthy of a superior woman to condescend to the shameful devices by which the wives of some officials eke out the insufficiency of their husband's salary. This feeling made her refuse all intercourse with Madame Colleville, then very intimate with Francois Keller, whose parties eclipsed those of the rue Duphot. Nevertheless, she mistook the quietude of the political thinker and the preoccupation ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... at this moment that Mr. Oscar Swenson, one of the thriftiest souls who ever came out of Sweden, perceived that the chance of a lifetime had arrived for adding substantially to his little savings. By profession he was one of those men who eke out a precarious livelihood by rowing dreamily about the water-front in skiffs. He was doing so now: and, as he sat meditatively in his skiff, having done his best to give the liner a good send off by paddling round ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... after the blight of the potato crop in 1846 the cottiers and small farmers managed to eke out a subsistence by the sale of their pigs and any little effects they had. But pigs, fowl, furniture, and clothing soon went, one after another, to satisfy the cravings of hunger. The better class of farmers lived upon their corn and cattle; but they were obliged ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... this sentiment, to trace it to its roots: it was so universal among successful sea-faring men that it must have had its origin in some trait distinctively peculiar to their profession. All the other women in the town or the village might eke out the family incomes by whatever devices they pleased; but the captains' wives were to be ladies. They were to wear silk gowns brought from many a land; they were to have ornaments of quaint fashion, picked up here and there; ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Mabie as they came filing in. "Back already, and only out two hours? Got some meat, too, I see. That's good. Such appetites as you boys are developing threaten to eat us out of house and home soon, unless we eke out with game. Who cut ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... yield was only about fifteen bushels per acre. In the corn country farmers now often produce a hundred. He continued to raise corn only because it was essential for his negroes and hogs. In 1798 he contracted with William A. Washington to supply him with five hundred barrels annually to eke out his own crop. Even this quantity did not prove sufficient, for we find him next year trying to ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's; neither of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole department, from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born lord, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exceedingly useful members of a community; and so are engineers, and bakers, and blacksmiths, and artists, and chimney-sweeps. But we can't all be bakers, and we can't all be painters in water-colours. There is a dim West Country legend to the effect that the inhabitants of the Scilly Isles eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another's washing. As a matter of practical political economy, such a source of income is worse than precarious—it's frankly impossible. "It takes all sorts to make a world." A community entirely composed of scientific ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... highly prized, and read with avidity. Certainly not, as a matter of course, where there was a large family of children, and where all must share every thing in common, and where each must perform an allotted part in household duties, perhaps to eke out a scanty salary. Not in a farm-house, where the income will yield but a bare competency for the support of ten or twelve children. If there is a good and wise father and mother at the helm, it is under such conflicting circumstances ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... to make a parade, I might mention some hundreds more of marbles and pictures, which I really saw at Rome; and even eke out that number with a huge list of those I did not see: but whatever vanity I may have, it has not taken this turn; and I assure you, upon my word and honour, I have described nothing but what actually fell under my own observation. As for my critical remarks, I am afraid you ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... ill of a fever, and the Duchess de Biron(806) goes next week to Switzerland:—mais qu'est que cela vous fait? I must eke out this with a few passages that I think will divert you, from the heaviest of all books, Mr. Malone's Shakspeare, in ten thick octavos, with notes, that are an extract of all the opium that is spread through the works of all the bad playwrights of that age. Mercy ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... wears the shiny hat. And hair. And gold pin. And gold chain," said the just Aristides, putting periods for commas to eke out his breath. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... short time;" nevertheless, the Convention "observed," with Roger Sherman, "that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several states would probably by degrees complete it." Economic forces were evoked to eke out moral motives: when the South had its full quota of slaves, like Virginia it too would abolish the trade; free labor was bound finally to drive out slave labor. Thus the chorus of "laissez-faire" increased; and compromise seemed ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... casual acquaintances to call. It is even less the custom there than it is with us. A book about Cuba, published a few years ago, gives a somewhat extended account of what is called "home life," but it is the home life of workmen and people who do laundry work to eke out a meagre living. It is not even the life of fairly paid artisans, or of people of modest but comfortable income. It is no more a proper description of the domestic life of the island than would be a presentation of the life in the palaces of the wealthy. ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... condition of Harvard College a few years prior to the Revolution, Professor Sidney Willard observes: "The Buttery was in part a sort of appendage to Commons, where the scholars could eke out their short commons with sizings of gingerbread and pastry, or needlessly or injuriously cram themselves to satiety, as they had been accustomed to be crammed at home by their fond mothers. Besides eatables, everything necessary for ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... infirmities of age. She husbanded her money, with the utmost frugality, and contrived to save even a few sous daily, out of her own wages, to add to her grandmother's stock. This she could not have done, but for the circumstance of there being so much in the house of their early stores, to help eke out the supplies of the moment. But, at the end of a fortnight, Adrienne found herself reduced to her last franc, including all her own savings. Something must be done, and that without delay, or Madame de la Rocheaimard would be ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Cambridge; and after travelling abroad, married the daughter of Sir Thomas Owthorp in Nottinghamshire, who does not appear to have lived long. His extravagance keeping him poor, he was compelled to eke out his means by translating works from the French and Italian, including those of a spirit somewhat kindred to his own—Montaigne. At the age of forty, he obtained a captain's commission in the army, and went to Ireland. There he met with his second wife, Mary, Countess ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the performance in the ring. Some of the people are already getting up to go out, and stand for this last act, and will not mind the shouts of "Down in front! Down there!" which the boys eagerly join in, to eke out their bliss a little longer by keeping away even the appearance of anything transitory in it. The country-jake comes stumbling awkwardly into the ring, but he is perfectly sober, and he boldly leaps astride the mule, which tries all its arts to shake him off, plunging, ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... to be free to do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat- shops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... account of a fall, which injured her spine, when a small child, she has been unable to walk for years. She cuts and sews carpet rags, given her by friends and neighbors, and from their sale to a carpet weaver in a near-by town, helps her widowed mother eke out her small income." ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... try to preserve as at present a considerable portion of my time free from the grind of teaching. Then much as I despise the method of rushing into print prematurely in order to achieve a newspaper scientific reputation, I should expect to eke out my income by occasional magazine articles and presently a book. With twenty-five hundred or three thousand a year we ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... to do then? To steal would be to go to the penitentiary or the State prison. She didn't like to live in either, and yet she had taken the first erring step to go there. She is, in short, a fast woman, yet driven to a gay life in order to eke out a precarious existence, to gratify her love of dress. Fearing that she might get into the hands of the police if she staid in the city, Maria engages a passage on one of the Boston boats every alternate day, for the purpose of affording "noctural accommodation" to gentlemen ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... bad authors eke out their existence entirely by the foolishness of the public, which only will read what has just been printed. I refer to journalists, who have been appropriately so-called. In other words, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... irregular and massive in design. It may be placed among Chopin's greater works: the two Etudes in C minor, the A minor, and the F sharp minor Prelude. The bass requires an unusual span, and the suggestion by Kullak, that the thumb of the right hand may eke out the weakness of the left is only for the timid and the small of fist. But I do not counsel following his two variants in the fifth and twenty-third bars. Chopin's text is more telling. Like the vast reverberation of monstrous waves on the implacable coast of a remote world is this ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... remaining uncompleted, of which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the complement? He says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul for the Church in any form of correct expression be said to eke out the sufferings that were complete? In one sense it is true to say that there is one offering once offered for all. But it is equally true to say that that one offering is valueless, except so far as it is completed and repeated in the life and self-offering of all. This is the Christian's ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... of the Censorship are pressing hard on war correspondents. Official news of importance trickles in in driblets: for the rest, newspaper men, miles from the front, are driven to eke out their dispatches with negligible trivialities. We know that Rheims Cathedral is suffering wanton bombardment. And a great many of us believe that at least a quarter of a million Russians have passed through England on their way to France. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... the Caribbean Sea, out of sight of land for the most part, on the lookout for the plate and bullion galleons from Mexico; and when we finally sail from here I wish to take on board as much fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables as I can, to help eke out the ships' stores. Now I do not want to carry about with me nearly three hundred men who will be of no use to me, and who will only help us to eat up our provisions faster than I wish. Moreover, these men are a constant menace to us ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... reached latitude 68 degrees and, as penguins were plentiful, Archer and Clissold, the cooks, made us penguin stews and "hooshes" to eke out our fresh provisions. Concerning the penguins, they frequently came and inspected the ship. One day Wilson and I chased some, but they continually kept just out of our reach; then Uncle Bill lay down on the snow, ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... anxious lest Raffles should select from out of the surplus "goes" one of those with the heads which were to eke out in a last emergency. But when he saw that the duke's second helping consisted of a prime "waist" he ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... on half-rations for several days in order to make my food eke out and, consequently, was miserably nourished. A death by drowning is preferable any day to the slower tortures of starvation; I made up my mind to cross the river at once, at whatever cost. I began to forget my fear of the ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... triumphantly with The Times for Prospect House or The Telegraph for Orville Lodge, and so on through the crowd of applicants until all are satisfied. This is the great event of our day. At the grocery stores on the opposite side of the road, news telegrams are shown on a board, and with these we eke out the knowledge of our fluctuating fate. Close by, too, is posted up a proclamation by the officer commanding the troops in the Island. He bids us not to walk too near a fort or to convey to any casual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... must not imagine we are now about to call his credulity in aid to eke out any interest he may feel in our story; the old crone was but a vulgar gipsy, and she predicted to Walter the same fortune she always predicted to those who paid a shilling for the prophecy—an heiress with blue eyes—seven children—troubles about the epoch of forty-three, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has his reasons. If he be a minister, he sees in his offices some hundred clerks, belonging to the middle class. He knows that these active and intelligent, but underpaid men, are for the most part obliged to eke out a livelihood by secretly following some other occupation: one keeps the books of a land-steward, another those of a Jew. Whose fault is it? They well know that neither excellence of character nor length of service are carried to the credit of the ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... the proceeds—about $2500—he took a farm at Ellisland, in Nithsdale. But his habits were such that he made sad failure a second time in the experiment of farming; and, after two years of mismanagement, to eke out his scanty income he accepted an appointment as exciseman. In 1791, "unfortunately both for his health and for his reputation," he removed to Dumfries, where, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... of mind nor matter, so the modernists teach, to build mission houses, gather the people, old and young, and frighten them with the thought that when they die they shall pass into an environment worse than the one in which they are endeavouring to eke out a handicapped existence. Let us do the wise thing—go not so much to the prayer meetings, but to the legislatures, get bills passed, laws made that will drive out the false and disastrous conditions now obtaining; legislate so that it will no longer be possible for people to drink themselves ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals,—the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... handicap—a drawback he had never felt during the years of struggle preceding his marriage. His means were indeed small. He tried to eke out a little income writing articles for the newspapers and magazines. But the recompense was pitiful. He could not bear, without a pang, to see Angela in the dingy surroundings that he could barely afford ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... bitterly, "this affectation of sentiment and disinterestedness sits very prettily on the heiress of Ditton-in-the-Dale, Long Netherby, and Waltham Ferrers, three manors, and ten thousand pounds a year to buy a bridegroom! Poor I, with my face for my fortune, must needs make my wit eke out my want of dowry. And I'm not one, I promise you, siss, to choose love in a cottage. No, no! Give me your Lord St. George, and I'll make over all my right and title to poor George Delawarr this minute. Heigho! I believe the fellow is smitten ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... resented bitterly the attitude of the people, and at one time seems to have appealed to the mayor. It was perhaps by this very act that she focussed the suspicion of her neighbors. To go over the details of the trial is not worth while. Diana Crosse probably escaped execution to eke out the remainder of ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... probably has a hundred or so in some remote company, the will of the eminent labour reformer reveals an admirably distributed series of investments, the bishop sells tea and digs coal, or at any rate gets a profit from some unknown persons tea-selling or coal-digging, to eke out the direct recompense of his own modest corn-treading. Indeed, above the labouring class, the number of individuals in the social body whose gross income is entirely the result of their social activities is very small. Previously in the world's history, saving a few quite ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... yet a little lad, his father departed for unknown lands to seek fame and fortune, leaving the boy and his mother to eke out a scanty existence ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... evinced that he was not in the least mistaken. "He wished to be acquainted with me," he said. "It was all nonsense for us to be bothering one another, when we had no cause to quarrel." He used occasionally to eke out his pension, and his scanty allowance as forester, by catching a basket of fish for himself from off the rocks of the Hill; and he had just discovered a projecting rock at the foot of a tall precipice, which ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... shelter of his command, and I continued the work of constructing the post as laid out by him. In those days the Government did not provide very liberally for sheltering its soldiers; and officers and men were frequently forced to eke out parsimonious appropriations by toilsome work or go without shelter in most inhospitable regions. Of course this post was no exception to the general rule, and as all hands were occupied in its construction, and I the only officer present, I was kept busily employed in supervising matters, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... battle, on condition that Dawdle would engage Crowe; and this condition was accepted. For, though Davy had no stomach to the trial, he could not readily find an excuse for declining it. Besides, he had discovered the captain to be a very bad horseman, and resolved to eke out his own scanty valour with a border of ingenuity. The servants were immediately ordered to unpack the armour, and, in a little time, Mr. Sycamore made a very formidable appearance. But the scene that followed is too important to be huddled in at the end of a chapter; ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... fresh young boys and girls four years with paper books?—a man the very thought of whom has ruined more men and devastated more faiths and created more cowards and brutes and fools in all walks of life than any other influence in the nineteenth century, and who is trying to eke out at last a spoonful of atonement for it all—all this vast baptism of the business world in despair and force and cursing and pessimism, by perching up before it ——- University, like a ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... face. The gate operated simply, and could be raised to let loose an entire flood. And indeed this was the whole purpose of the dam. It created a reservoir from which could be freed new supplies of water to eke out the dropping spring freshets. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... to a great many things that savoured of scandal during our visit to the country, but this was one thing which it was impossible to ignore. So wretched indeed is the pay of the State teachers that they push on the children of those parents who give them employment as private tutors in order to eke out a livelihood, to the neglect ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... regulating its trickle, because if it were turned on too full the water instantly ran cold, and if not full enough the stove blew up inside and mysteriously flooded the house; and Costanza and Angela running up and down bringing pails of hot water from the kitchen to eke out what the tap did. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... famous medicinal sweet-meat, known as Pate de gimauve from the root of the Marsh Mallow. In Palestine, the plant is employed by the poor to eke out their food; thus we read in the book of Job (chap. xxx. ver. 4), "Who cut up Mallows by the bushes, and ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... his book, "Russia as it is," which was soon followed by another work entitled, "America and Europe." Both of them met with a favorable reception, but, after losing his government position, it became a difficult matter for him to eke out a maintenance, and his disposition, if possible, became still more embittered. At an evening party I took part by chance in an animated discussion upon the subject of dueling. Suddenly my eye lighted upon Count Gurowski, who had just entered the room. Calling ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... constantly entreating Eyre to return. It was only after a journey of 160 miles that they came to a place where, by digging, they could obtain fresh water in very small quantities. They were now forced to eke out their failing provisions by eating horseflesh. Baxter was altogether disheartened; and, if to return had not been as dangerous as to go forward, Eyre would himself have abandoned the attempt. The three natives, however, ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... and to grapple with the more serious fact that she had crept into his heart, which for the first time was active and demanding its share in his being. Then arose the horror that it was repelled by what it found in his imagination, cold, solitary, tortured souls, creatures who should be left to eke out their misery in private solitude, who had nothing to justify their exhibition to the world, who shamelessly reproached their fellows for the results of their own weakness, wretched clinging women, men hard ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... left a bit of scalp at the back, being in rather too great a hurry to do their work as handily as usual; and a new skin growed over, after a little—a babyish sort of skin, that wasn't half thick enough, and wouldn't bear no new crop of hair. So I had to eke out and keep my head comfortable with an old yellow handkercher; which I always wore till I got to San Francisco, on my way back here. I met with a priest at San Francisco, who told me that I should look a little less ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Commissioners were left to their intrinsic weakness. There were members for all the localities, but there were none for them. There were members for every crotchet and corrupt interest, but there were none for them. The rural guardians would have liked to eke out wages by rates; the city guardians hated control, and hated to spend money. The Commission had to be dissolved, and a Parliamentary head was added; the result is not perfect, but it is an amazing improvement on what would ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... newspapers there is usually one column entirely devoted to facetiae, which appear to have been clipped out of the columns of other country papers. They live on each other, just as the natives of the Scilly Islands are feigned to eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in each other's washing. It is averred that one American journal, the Danbury Newsman, contains nothing but merriment—a fearful idea! We have nothing like this at home, and as for writers who make a ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... drawing so large a number of criminal cases into the Star-chamber seems to have been twofold: first, to inure men's minds to an authority more immediately connected with the crown than the ordinary courts of law and less tied down to any rules of pleading or evidence; secondly, to eke out a scanty revenue by penalties and forfeitures. Absolutely regardless of the provision of the Great Charter, that no man shall be amerced even to the full extent of his means, the counsellors of the Star-chamber ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... a mind for them. He was of the number who had a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read, to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can serve to eke out evil. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... intelligent little fellow, though amusingly ignorant of affairs in general. His chief employment was acting the part of a scarecrow by frightening birds from the cornfields, and running on errands into Bideford for any of the neighbours, by which means he enabled his mother to eke out her scanty pittance. I used to share with him my school pasty, and now and then I saved a piece of bread and cheese, or I would bring him a cake or a roll from Bideford. He never failed to carry a portion to his mother, sharp-set as he always was himself. The poor fellow soon conceived a strong ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... army to fight against a brutal system of exploitation. In years and years of excessive labour we have produced millions for a class of idle parasites, who enjoy all the luxuries of life while our wives have to leave their firesides and our children their schools to eke out a miserable existence." And this for the militia: "The lowest aim of life is to be a soldier! The 'good' soldier never tries to distinguish right from wrong, he never thinks, he never ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... represented thousands of old slave mothers, who, after having been worn out under the yoke, were frequently either offered for sale for a trifle, turned off to die, or compelled to eke out their existence on ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, sugar-cane, and tobacco.[275] Of the two groups of islands the eastern is the more fertile and the inhabitants are more addicted to agriculture than are the natives of the western islands, who, as a consequence of the greater barrenness of the soil, have to eke out their subsistence to a considerable extent by fishing.[276] And there is other evidence to shew that the Eastern Islanders have attained to a somewhat higher stage of social evolution than their Western brethren;[277] ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... under which she executed her great task would ordinarily be looked upon as altogether prohibitory. She was the wife of a poor minister and school-teacher. To eke out the family income she took boarders. She had five children of her own, who were too young to be of any material assistance, and, in addition, she occasionally harbored a waif that besought her protection when fleeing from slavery. Necessarily the most of her time was spent ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... superstition. It never undermines the true interests of society more than when it goes to work with pseudo-scientific tools. Its most repellent form, that of sheer spiritualism, has in recent years declined somewhat, and the organizations for antilogical, psychical research eke out a pitiable existence nowadays. But the community of the silent or noisy believers in telepathy, mystical foresight, clairvoyance, and wonder ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... all their savings into the venture of a ship, which had for a long time made trading voyages from Cardiff. Every year, it came back bringing great profit to the owners and shareholders. In this way, daddy was able to eke out his income, and keep himself, his wife and daughters comfortably clothed, while all the time the table was well supplied with good food. Nor did they ever turn from their door anyone who ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... hadn't better come back to Baltimore with me," mused Jason. "I can eke out a living somehow for ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... Patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons were drawn from all ranks of life. No special training at first was considered necessary to fit them for their duties, though the more celebrated ministers were often highly educated. To eke out their salaries the clergy sometimes carried on business as farmers and shopkeepers. Where, however, a church had sufficient funds to support its bishop, his engagement in secular affairs was discouraged and finally prohibited. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... have to stand the stare of a crowd of people at every new place for hours: all usually talk as quickly as their glib tongues can; these certainly do not belong to the tribes who are supposed to eke out their language by signs! A few indulge their curiosity in sight-seeing, but go on steadily weaving nets, or by beating bark-cloth, or in spinning cotton, others smoke their big tobacco pipes, or nurse a baby, or enjoy the heat of the bright morning sun. I walked across the north end of the island, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... from which the perfectly unconventional form adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new; and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his invention. ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... of these unfortunates spend years of time and thousands of dollars in money attempting to fit themselves for careers, only to end in utter failure. Some, even after they have made a comparative failure of their education, eke out a tortured existence, hoping against hope for the golden ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... old clothes, or other materials that would serve to eke out. I tried the lids, but both were strongly locked. The larger chest looked very ancient and rotten: its hinges might be loose. I pulled one end of it out from against the wall, to examine the back. The hinges were immovable. Despondent, I ran my hand further down the back at random, and, to my ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and then Amory disappeared again. All we know is, that he died in 1788, at the very respectable age of ninety-seven. So little is known about him, so successfully did he hide "like a but" through the dusk of nearly a century, that we may be glad to eke out the scanty information given above by a passage of autobiography from the preface of the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... sell at an advance; merely in one case it was shares, in the other merchandise. Of course it was foolish for inexperienced country folk with small means to dabble in stocks and bonds, but why should not city people who were clever and had clever friends in the business eke out the cost of living by shrewd investments? In an old-fashioned sense it might be considered gambling; but, if it were true, as Wilbur and Mr. Williams both maintained, that the American people were addicted to speculation, was not the existence of the habit strong ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... this kind. This L. 5, however, is included in the total rent of L. 20 paid for cottage, land and garden. The man was not only content, but wished to get some more land. The next class consists of those who have not enough land to live on but eke out their livelihood by casual labour. Usually a man of this sort requires from 35 to 50 acres of land mostly pasture. He can attend to it and yet give a certain number of days to estate work. The third ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a fresh joint whilst any of the last remains uneaten —hash it up, and with gravy and a little management, eke out another day's dinner. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... place as Luz, surrounded by numerous excursion points of great interest, guides would be abundant; here, however, there are only a few, and these are obliged to pursue the callings of agriculture and hunting to eke out a subsistence. So, when I demanded a guide, Madame Cazean said she would send to the fields for Jaques St Laur, who was the best guide to the Breche. And indeed if strength of limb and a huge sinewy frame were the chief qualifications for the affair, Jaques, I apprehend, would have stood ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... some kind of claim, and from that time till his death, lived entirely alone. He managed to cultivate a small portion of the land, which supplied him with provisions, and he at times followed the trade of a cooper, to eke out his slender means. His family troubles had broken his spirits, and destroyed his ambition, and for years he lived a lonely dispirited man. He was possessed of sound common sense and had also received a tolerable education, to ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... it. The farmer has a literature of his own, which every year is growing in proportions and value. He also has time for the best literature of the world. It is his own fault if he remains akin to the clod he turns. Is it not more manly to co-work with Nature for a livelihood than to eke out a pallid, pitiful existence behind a ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... a large draft of men, there were they to be seen as they had never been seen before, even in their own country, where all labor was reduced to the individual efforts of each, just sufficient to eke out a miserable life. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... said before, nothing venture, nothing gain," replied Lawrence to the old merchant's good advice. "I am not content to eke out a thousand or two dollars every year, and, at the age of fifty or sixty, retire from business on a paltry twenty or thirty thousand dollars. I must get rich fast, or ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... highest to the lowest citizen, the bakers were permitted to deal but a scanty allowance per head, even to those who paid for it; and, in cards of invitation to dine in the richest houses, the guest was notified to bring his own bread. To eke out the existence of the people, every person who had the means, was called on for a weekly subscription, which the Cures collected, and employed in providing messes for the nourishment of the poor, and vied with each other in devising such economical compositions ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... brought that Osbourne had been killed by the Indians, and life began to bear heavily upon the young wife and mother, stranded without means in a strange city. She put on widow's weeds and looked about for employment with which to eke out her fast diminishing store. When she was a little girl she had learned to do fine sewing on the ruffles for her father's shirts, and had always made her own and her child's dresses. This talent, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... to make an impression upon the conscience of one who has done wrong, and who cannot by other means be brought to submission. But the pupil, in such cases, understands, or at least he believes, that the teacher applies to religious truth, only to eke out his own authority, and of course, it produces no effect. Another teacher thinks he must, to discharge his duty, give a certain amount weekly, of what he considers religious instruction. He accordingly appropriates a regular portion ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... master-brother has applied you as the best investment of his human capital. It is true, he takes all your wages; but then, by acquiring uncommon facility, you hope to accomplish your daily tasks in shorter time, and thus obtain some extra hours to do jobs for yourself. These you can eke out by working late into the night, and rising when the day dawns. Thus you calculate to be able in time to buy the use of your own limbs. Poor fellow! Your intelligence and industry prove a misfortune. They charge ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... kind," replied Monsoon, "he says, or he's going to say, 'Major, I have a nice bit of dinner waiting for me at home, enough for two, will feed three, or if there be a short-coming, nothing easier than to eke out the deficiency by another bottle of Moulton; come along with us then, Monsoon, and we shall be all the merrier ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the "Crown" we git up little barnies, to eke out the 'Arrygate lot, For even the Spa's a bit samesome for six times a week when it's 'ot; Though they do go it pooty permiskus with pickter-shows, concerts, and such; Yus, I must say they ladles it out fair and free, for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... I have no fancy for being shut up in my own blindness, when other people offer me their eyes to eke out the defects of my own with. But ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... be, as it were, suffering personified; while of the extent to which my life has been sought by foes, no words, no colouring, no (if I may so express it?) painter's brush could ever convey to you an adequate idea. And now, at length, in my declining years, I am seeking a corner in which to eke out the remainder of my miserable existence, while at the present moment I am enjoying the hospitality of a neighbour of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... emptied at an earlier date, in shorter time, and by customers who proposed to themselves a much longer credit than he anticipated. There was enough in it to furnish every mess in the division something to eke out a Christmas ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... carpeting of the stairs and landing, that his father was unaware of his presence; he continued at his work as before, which he performed by the help of a complicated apparatus of lamps, candles, and reflectors, so arranged as to eke out the miserable daylight, to a power apparently sufficient for the neutral touches on which he was at ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... regarded my distress as a symptom that I was on the point of confessing with repugnance something monstrous), sought to pacify me; as with him the discovery was the all-important matter. In this he only partly succeeded; but so far, however, that I could eke out my story to the end. Though satisfied of the innocence of the proceedings, he was still doubtful to some extent, and put further questions to me, which excited me afresh, and transported me with pain and rage. I asserted, finally, that I had nothing more to say, and well knew that I ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... annum; one, 35l.; three, 30l.; and the rest, ranging from 25l. down to as low as 12l. per annum. Of course the priests could not subsist on these incomes without some other aid, and this was obtained by taking small farms, from which they endeavoured to eke out a living. ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... ply on the lake carrying chiefly ore and wool. Some of the islands in the lake are inhabited by Indians who eke out a precarious living. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... already obliged to increase my respirations to eke out of this cell the little oxygen it contained, when suddenly I was refreshed by a current of pure air, and perfumed with saline emanations. It was an invigorating sea breeze, charged with iodine. ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... of the period were, as a rule, especially in the remoter districts, men of inferior standing, often of low origin and of little learning. They were badly paid, generally speaking, and often had to eke out a slender income by taking to farming pursuits. It was not at all unusual for the clergyman to marry the lady's maid or other of the upper servants in the great family of his neighbourhood. Queen Anne, to relieve the poverty of the poorer livings, founded the fund known as Queen Anne's Bounty, giving ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... coat's done, and Mamsie can send the bundle back to-night when she gets home"—for Mrs. Pepper was away helping one of the village housekeepers to make her supply of soft soap. Many and many such an odd job did Mother Pepper get, for which she was thankful enough, as it helped her to eke out her scanty pittance. ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... little garden, and hope to raise a few vegetables to eke out a miserable subsistence for my family. My daughter Ann reads Shakspeare to me o' nights, which ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... from the looms of Lyons, Venice, and Genoa, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The first perfectly simple in manufacture, trusting wholly to beauty of design, and the play of light on the naturally woven surface, while the latter eke out their gaudy feebleness with spots and ribs and long floats, and all kinds of meaningless tormenting of the web, till there is nothing to be learned from ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... vegetable dishes two abreast, borne by the lesser lights of the staff (lids off, of course: none of our glory was to be hidden under covers); tailing along with the rejected and gravy boats came laden soup-plates to eke out the supply of vegetable dishes; and, last of all, that creamy delight of bread sauce, borne sedately ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... appeared, alone, in the schoolroom, where I was taking a class in geometrical drawing. I must explain that, at this time, to eke out my ridiculous salary and, at all costs, to provide a living for myself and my large family, I was a mighty pluralist, both inside the college and out. At the college in particular, after two hours of physics, chemistry or natural history, came, without respite, another ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... members of the Willox family have been supposed for generations to profess knowledge of the occult science. Those of the nineteenth century, to whom the hidden secrets of their fathers have been imparted, eke out a livelihood by cultivating a small patch of land in a mountainous district, and vending nostrums for the cure of diseases in man and beast, and selling charms to counteract witchcraft. Persons have been known to travel more than a hundred miles to consult a Willox. That ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... glasses and two toothmugs had received their exact portion of the bitter stuff, which had been allowed to foam copiously in order to eke out, the five desperadoes solemnly touched glasses and Slops Barnett, who had visited in Princeton, led them in that whispered toast that is the ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... perhaps have been possible for Egyptian engineering skill to have blocked the valley at Silsilis, or at the Gebelein, and to have thus turned Upper Egypt into a huge reservoir always full, and always capable of supplying Lower Egypt with enough water to eke out a deficient inundation. But this could only have been done by an enormous work, very difficult to construct, and at the sacrifice of several hundred square miles of fertile territory, thickly inhabited, which would have been covered permanently by the artificial lake. Moreover, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... persistent sheep-counting, much later to sleep, Shelby woke with the morning far advanced and the hour of his departure near. It was necessary to eke out his wardrobe with a purchase or two against the journey with the governor, and between his shopping and his breakfast, the deliberate talk he had meant to have with Mrs. Hilliard bade fair to dwindle to a handshake. As the morning brought no grounds for ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... was descried as being a big dog that belonged to a "Dutch Count." The "Dutch Count" was an outcast German noble, who had drifted to the West, and, after failing in the mines and failing in the cattle country, had died in a squalid log shanty while striving to eke out an existence as a hunter among the foot-hills. His dog, I presume, from the description given me, must have been a boar-hound or ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... Olympia inquired, as the youth was dilating to his mother on the wonders to come. "Private soldiers get just thirteen dollars a month; and if you continue smoking—as I am informed all men do in the army—I expect to have to stint my pin-money expenses to eke out your tobacco bills." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... thought probably that they had gone down to the shore to try and catch fish, or collect mussels, or anything that might have been thrown up. He and his companions were searching about for the same object, that they might eke out the diminishing store of their more nutritive food, and give the captain a larger supply. Peter, when not thus employed, read to the captain, as also to the other men, and Bill and the black were well pleased to listen, as were ...
— The History of Little Peter, the Ship Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... for the straggling maskers in armour whom he met one day in Via Borgognissanti, with their visors up for their better convenience in smoking. They were part of the chorus at one of the theatres, and they were going about to eke out their salaries with the gifts of people whose windows the festival season privileged them to play under. The silly spectacle stirred Colville's blood a little, as any sort of holiday preparation was apt to do. He thought that it afforded him a fair occasion to call at Palazzo Pinti, where ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... poor Gipsy fulfils a work which is a very great convenience to dwellers in out-of-the-way places—brushes, baskets, tubs, clothes-stops, and a host of small commodities, in themselves apparently insignificant, but which enable this tribe to eke out a living which compares very favourably with the hundreds of thousands in our large cities who set the laws of the land as well as the laws of decency at defiance. As to education—well, let them get it, if possible; but ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... with glades, while the western portion is principally marshes cut up by numerous creeks. All the sea islands produce the long staple cotton known as sea-island cotton, and before the war a very valuable variety. A few negroes occupy the places abandoned by the proprietor, and eke out a scanty livelihood. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... hygiene comprehended only talking about sex to working-girls—to laundry-girls, for example, who, after a day's work of ten hours at the machines, go at night to their boarding-houses where they wash dishes to eke out a living,—then this program would not be unlike the advice of a physician who tells a poor man with tuberculosis that he must go to the country for a year and live on cream ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... his comrades are scattered, and he himself has nothing to do, not even the poor resource of having to study economy on half-pay, or of looking for more additional means to eke out ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... respect of both—yet it was a sad disappointment to him. It was in 1893, when I saw him for the last time, that I found it out, by a chance remark he dropped when sitting with my first book, "How the Other Half Lives," in his hand, and also the sacrifice he had made of his own literary ambitions to eke out by hack editorial work on the local newspaper a living for his large family. As for me, I would have been repaid for the labor of writing a thousand books by witnessing the pride he took in mine. There was at last a man of letters in the family, though he came by a road not down on ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... decked the meadows and grassy banks, the blossoms had opened, and the song-birds had begun to break the dreary silence that had reigned in the hedgerows and the woods, for in those days Old France could let the little warblers sing without at once devoting them to eke out the rustic meal. Perhaps in all the west of France there was no tract of country in which this season was more peculiarly attractive, or could present a more charming landscape, than that overlooked from the terrace of the old Chateau ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... the hotel, developed the fact that Dee Dickinson was a notary, did a little real estate business, and drew a few papers for his neighbors, thus managing to eke out a precarious living. So far as the girls were able to find out, Dickinson's character was above reproach. Miss Elting chided herself for having formed a wrong opinion of the man. Still she could not overcome her ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... He took a simple, natural pleasure in the kinds of things they were able to do, as well as the kinds of things he could do. With these, then, and a type of girl who might not be classed above the clerk or manicure class, he and they managed to eke out a social life, the outstanding phases of which were dances, "parties," dinners at one simple home and another, flirting, boating, and fishing expeditions in season, evenings out at restaurants or the theater, and I know not what else. He could sing (a very fair baritone), ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... ground outside was higher, and to get the requisite elevation the earth was thrown up on both walls from the intervening space, as well as on the exterior wall from the outside. Each of the walls runs completely round the enclosure, except where the steep bank of the little stream was utilized to eke out the inner wall for five or six rods on the west side, as shewn on the plan. Opposite the south end of this gap was the original entrance through the outer wall. The walls have been cut through in one or two other places, doubtless by ...
— The Country of the Neutrals - (As Far As Comprised in the County of Elgin), From Champlain to Talbot • James H. Coyne
... unawares. We had now only one horse, Tetel, that was ridden by my wife; I therefore determined to start on foot on the following morning, and to set the pace at four miles an hour, so as to reach the Rahad by a forced march in one rapid stretch, and thus to eke out our scanty supply of water. Accordingly we started, and marched at that rate for ten hours, including a halt when half-way, to rest for one hour and a half. Throughout the distance, the country was ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker |
