"Motherless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lastly, my wife and children! Whoever meddles with my gods becomes my enemy; I would kill him like a hare, remorselessly. My catechism is short, but it is good. Do you know why, in the year 1816, after their cursed disbanding of the army of the Loire, I took my little motherless child and came here, I, colonel of the Young Guard, wounded at Waterloo, and became ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... clumsily. The girl linked her arms round her neck and kissed her warmly, repeatedly, feeling through all her motherless sense the satisfaction of a long hunger in the contact of the old face ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the motherless boy was sent with his elder brother to Westminster, in 1803, and the same year the Duke married Lady Georgiana Gordon, a daughter of the fourth Duke of Gordon, and her kindness to her stepchildren was marked ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... mother were added to her keen remorse as she bent over the motherless kittens, whispering: "I will care for you, as she would have done; but oh, remember this, that honesty is the best policy, and all is not fair ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it—motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion—I have for twenty-three years secured the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... number of them might be greater, but "'t is enough, 't will serve," in Mercutio's modest phrase, so far as frequency is concerned. For a just estimate of the importance of the singular circumstance, it might be proper to consult the languid survivors, the widowed husbands, and the motherless children, as well as ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it," answered the Old Maid. "It seemed so true. A thought suddenly comes to you. I think of them sometimes, as of little motherless babes creeping ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... came down, he missed her more and more again, and he whimpered as he limped along, a miserable, lonely, little, motherless Bear—not lost in the mountains, for he had no home to seek, but so sick and lonely, and with such a pain in his foot, and in his stomach a craving for the drink that would nevermore be his. That night he found a hollow log, and crawling in, he tried to dream that his Mother's great, ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... at her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him. She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... said he; and she, with tears, told him she was homeless, houseless, motherless. Then he fell in love with her sweet face and soft words; so he asked her to be his bride, and she went with him to the palace, her heart full of gratitude to the Sun, who had sent her such ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... did not think of the wrong then. You were a motherless babe, then, and I was a childless mother. For you must know, you must have felt in your inmost soul that I was ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... beginning the exorcism. And she did believe that somehow it would; not because the doctor said so, but because she could not believe God would let a child's mother be changed in that way, at any rate while she was bearing it. To do so would be to make it more motherless than any little living thing on earth. Milly had always been quietly but deeply religious, and she struggled hard against the feeling of peculiar injustice in this strange affliction that had been sent to her. She prayed earnestly to God every ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... sea) to Tarsus, intending to leave her with Cleon, the governor of that city, and his wife Dionysia, thinking, for the good he had done to them at the time of their famine, they would be kind to his little motherless daughter. When Cleon saw Prince Pericles, and heard of the great loss which had befallen him, he said, "O your sweet queen, that it had pleased Heaven you could have brought her hither to have blessed my eyes with the sight of her!" Pericles replied, "We ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... which all could taste), but it brought in its train the assiduous attendance of Mrs. Simons. To see the kindly brown face bending over it with smiling eyes of jet, to feel the soft, cool hand pressed to its forehead, was worth a fever to a motherless infant. Mrs. Simons was a busy woman and a poor withal, and the Ansells were a reticent pack, not given to expressing either their love or their hunger to outsiders; so altogether the children did not see so much of Mrs. Simons or her bounties as they would have liked. Nevertheless, in a ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... harboring an undefined resentment which may adversely affect both lives. The doctor can help the bereaved father to cling to his dream of family life, can assist him in building a happy home for his motherless child or children, or can advise him on problems which may arise out of finding a ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... morning brought us the sad, sad news of the death of Lady John Russell. God give strength to her poor unhappy husband, and watch over his dear little motherless children. ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and brought it close to Paula. "No, you hardly have any similiarity in your face, but your voice is like hers. Now, let me hug you once more, my treasure." And Teresa pressed to her heart the motherless child. ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... to see his motherless daughter well married before he should be called away from her. So, one evening, he sent for Sybil to come into his sitting-room, and when she obeyed his summons, and came and sat down on a low ottoman beside his arm-chair, he said, laying his hand lovingly on her black, ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... to record the good conduct and life Of this well-beloved, motherless boy, In the hope that it may to his absent sire's heart Convey some ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... little children. The scene of the first story was in America, nearly five and twenty years ago; that of the second story was in London, only a few weeks since. A young English girl had taken service in a family going to America, and her special duty was the charge of the three motherless children of her widowed master. One cold day in December they all embarked in a great Mississippi steamboat bound for the far North West. Day after day they steamed through the swollen river, where ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... say that Sava, father of the young peasant girl, who stands by the side of an old woman, at the head of her companions in the court-yard, is immured in one of these subterranean jails. Sava was always about the Count, who, it was said, had brought him from some distant land, with his little motherless child. Sava placed her under the care of an old man and woman, who had the charge of the bees in a forest near the palace, where he came occasionally to visit her. But once, six long months passed, and he did not come! In vain Anielka wept, in vain she cried, "Where is my father?" No father appeared. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... a South American trader, who, as he changed his residence often, was glad to leave the boy in his brother's charge. The Captain's wife, this boy's mother, was a lady of Buenos Ayres, of Spanish descent, and had died while the child was in his cradle. These two motherless children were as strange a pair as one roof could well cover. Both handsome, wild, impetuous, unmanageable, they played and fought together like two young leopards, beautiful, but dangerous, their lawless instincts showing through all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... though it would exceed our genealogical knowledge to point out the precise line by which this descent was claimed. Young Roswell was of respectable blood on both sides, without being very brilliantly connected, or rich. On the contrary, early left an orphan, fatherless and motherless, as was the case with Mary Pratt, he had been taken from a country academy when only fifteen, and sent to sea, that he might make his own way in the world. Hitherto, his success had not been of a very flattering character. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... whose husband had gone down in the crash at the saddlery, came and took Nell's hand in hers and laid a strong arm around her shoulders, while Harriet went over and took from the arms of the young father the little motherless mite who had been rescued from the pillow floating on the river. Billy shook hands with a young tanner in tight but wholly new clothes, to whom Luella May Spain introduced ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... seigneur of Cotenoir, which had developed from a mere business acquaintance into friendship, Captain Paget had discoursed with much eloquence upon the subject of his motherless daughter; and M. Lenoble, having daughters of his own, also motherless, lent him the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... be that so long as Christ is the present Helper that he is to me now; and you do not need to be told that I daily thank him for giving me my husband. But I think you will understand better than many would how earnestly I desire to fill the place of mother, to my bright young motherless Gracie, with her dangerous beauty and her dangerous talents and her capacity for being miserable. Oh, I want to do more than my duty; I want to love her with all my heart, and to have her love me. If it were not for that man, who always hated me, and who, I believe in ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... "You poor motherless little thing," breathed Cordelia, cuddling the baby in her arms. "Look, Josiah," she said, trying to rouse her brother. "Look ...it's ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... is the will of God. If we see any of our brethren sick, we claim it to be the will of God. If we see the father of a family taken away, we bow our heads and say God's will be done. If we see a family of children left motherless, again we bow our heads and say God's will be done. If we see a beautiful infant snatched by death from the breast of it's heart-broken mother, we meekly bow again, and, with heart full of sorrow, say, it's the will of God. I tell you it ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... the Bunk, had been for some years inhabited by an elderly half-pay naval officer, Captain Carnegy, and his motherless boys and girls. The other house was the Vicarage, the habitation of Mr. Vesey, the good old vicar, his invalid wife, and a pair of excitable Yorkshire terriers, Splutters and Shutters, thus curiously named for the sake of rhyme, it is to ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... sorry to appear interfering, but you are a motherless little girl. Your dress to-night ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... necessary grumbling at the inferior quality of the bridegroom's presents, comes to my room later on, and says: "I have been examining these, and perceive that the silver used is not pure in quality." Having shown that she, though motherless, is not easily taken in, she accepts my exhortation to be a good child and to be thankful for what she has, and without further ado begins her preparations for the day when she ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... and misfortune having obliged him to sell his collection, Mr. Franks took to buying pictures and bric-a-brac for profit, and during the last ten years of his life was associated in that capacity with a London firm. Norbert, motherless from infancy and an only child, received his early education at expensive schools, but, showing little aptitude for study and much for use of the pencil, was taken by his father at twelve years old to Paris, and there set to work under a good art-teacher. ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... but I have wandered a motherless child; nor have I a father like the sons of men: alone ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... around and bit him sharply in the neck. It hurt, hurt awfully, but he persisted, only to receive another sharp bite, this time more savage. Sounding a baby whimper of despair, he ran back to the door and out into the motherless corral. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... gorgeous displays. Its work is an exemplification of the living, practical Christianity of today. In almost every state in this fair land of ours can be found Odd-Fellows' homes, within whose walls the orphan is no longer motherless. For each and every little one within these homes, one million Odd-Fellows feel a father's love and pledge a ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... to his brother-in-law, Chia Cheng, recommending Yue-ts'un, his daughter's tutor, to his consideration. Dowager lady Chia sends to fetch her granddaughter, out of commiseration for her being a motherless child. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... something of the child in her appearance, which made a plea from her lips most difficult to refuse. Now she seemed a child on whom the world pressed heavily before her time for suffering had come; she had so motherless a look. Even Garratt Skinner moved uncomfortably in his chair; even that ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... and rough on his friends; And he didn't have many, I'll let you know; He hated a dog and disgusted a cat, But he'd run off his legs for a motherless brat, And I guess there's many ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... it must be understood that she was motherless, brotherless and sisterless. She had been Mr. Grey's only child, and her mother had been dead for fifteen or sixteen years. She was now about thirty years of age, but was generally regarded as ranging somewhere between forty and fifty. "If she isn't nearer fifty than forty ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Heaven." And with these words Upon her lips, the Lady Mildred passed Unto the rest prepared for her pure soul; Words that meant only this: I cannot trust Unto her earthly parent my young child, So leave her to her heavenly Father's care; And Heaven was gentle to the motherless, And fair and sweet the maiden, Gladys, grew, A pure white rose in the old castle set, The while ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... forgotten quiet he might dwell, With such allowance as his wants required; For wishes he had none. To a lodge that stood Deep in a forest, with leave given, at the age 275 Of four-and-twenty summers he withdrew; And thither took with him his motherless Babe, [15] And one domestic for their common needs, An aged woman. It consoled him here To attend upon the orphan, and perform 280 Obsequious service to the precious child, Which, after a short time, by ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... pictured in most of the faces of those dark warriors, when passing the Great Oak's wigwam they beheld the moist eyes and tender leave-taking of that heroic old Chief and his motherless child, whose future depended so much on the coming contest, as following one after another they disappeared ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... features: He was precociously intelligent, and knew more than most children older than himself." When Meneval—the former secretary of his father, giving up his post in Austria with Maria Louisa, as he was about to rejoin Napoleon—took farewell of the Prince in May 1815, the poor little motherless child drew me towards the window, and, giving me a touching look, said in a low tone, "Monsieur Meva, tell him (Napoleon) that I always love him dearly." We say "motherless," because Maria Louisa seems to have yielded up her child at the dictates of policy to be closely ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... child of the brave, careless Renaud d'Avesne des Meloises, of an ancient family in the Nivernois, Angelique grew up a motherless girl, clever above most of her companions, conscious of superior charms, always admired and flattered, and, since she left the Convent, worshipped as the idol of the gay gallants of the city, and the despair and envy of her own sex. She was a born sovereign ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... worked at the trade of schoolmaster. Perhaps if some of my lords and baronets in the Shell had known that far away, in a tiny cottage at Boulogne, this same contemptible Frenchman was keeping alive from week to week, with his hard-earned savings, a paralysed father and three motherless little girls, who loved the very ground he trod on, and kissed his likeness every night before they crept to their scantily- covered beds—if they had known that this same poor creature said a prayer ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... Froebel was left motherless at a very early age, and during his first four years of life his father was entirely engrossed with parish duties, and the child had only occasional supervision from a hard-worked servant. Thus it happened that he was frequently alone long hours at a time in a dusky ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... am not free to say; but when, after a few years of wedded life, the prospect of maternity began to grow less shadowy and more reliable, her heart did seem to swell at rare intervals with a real, or assumed pity for the little woman who had been left to wander about motherless and friendless, spending her young life, unheeded, among the cheerless apartments ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... No one who saw her but acknowledged it. He marvelled as he recalled the change wrought in the face of the matron and because of her gentleness to the little girl forgave her all that she had not been to his motherless boyhood. ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... days when he was trying to find excuses for marrying Robina, it was in considering her connections that he found his finest. The Vicar had informed his conscience that he was marrying Robina because of what she could do for his three motherless daughters—and himself. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... illness, through which my kind, well-meaning aunt had patiently nursed me. At the first news of my sickness she had, unsummoned, left her comfortable home in Rockland, in mid-winter, and had crossed the mountains to watch beside the feverish pillow of her motherless niece. Careful and kind was her nursing; and even the physicians owned that to her patient watchfulness I owed my life. How grateful was I; and with what looks of love did I gaze on her trim, spinster figure, as she moved earnestly and pains-taking around my chamber; but, alas! the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the home to which Emily Bronte clung with the passionate love of the Swiss for his white mountains, with a homesickness in absence that strained the very cords of life. Yet her childhood in that motherless home had few of the elements of childish happiness, and its busy strictness of daily life was saddened by the loss of Maria and Elizabeth, dear, never-forgotten playfellows. Charlotte, now the eldest of the family, was only two years older ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... was necessary for Lieutenant Morris to return to India, and he could not take his motherless and tender infants thither. He wrote to the parents of his departed Maria; he told them of her last request, breathed by her last words; he implored them, as they had once loved her, during his absence ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... to mesilf, 'flesh and blood can bear it no longer,' and I ran away to the city uv Dublin where an aunt by me mother's side lived. Me aunt was a poor woman, but she gave a warm welcim to her sister's motherless boy; she trated me kindly and allowed me to share her home, although she could ill afford it, till I got a place as sarvant in a gintleman's family. As for my father, he niver throubled his head ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... over the deep grief which preyed upon the hearts of the unfortunate brothers, for weeks after they had been compelled to acknowledge the stern truth that they were indeed motherless. Those who have, at that tender age, known what it is to lose an affectionate mother, and under circumstances at all similar to those just described, will be at no loss to comprehend the utter desolation of their ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Leam behaved to the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known all the compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then? Yet beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... girl of sixteen thought how delighted her mother would be to know she had met one of her old playmates, who said so many complimentary things about her. He talked very tenderly about the loss of his wife, and once went back to his own seat to get a picture of his motherless little girl, and a box ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... cloud that hovers over the small boy, even when the cane is descending upon him. Trifles please the poor little fellow and help him to forget the gloom which surrounds him. Coventry Patmore, in that most touching poem, "The Toys," tells of a father who struck his motherless son, and sent him weeping to bed, and, being tardily remorseful, the father looked at the sleeping boy, whose undried tears were still on his cheek, and found that before going to sleep the stricken lad had arranged his trivial toys, all the cherished possessions of his pocket, so that his ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... sir; and oh! so sorrowfully! She was only nineteen, two years younger than I am now; and her son was motherless the hour ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... she sat, her eyes cast down, wondering what he would say or do, whether he would take her hand, or draw her softly to his breast and let her cry her heart out there, as she almost longed to do—poor fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless girl, who in her husband alone must ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... standing moodily by the window, while his brother Johnny, overcome by a repletion of excitement and collation, was asleep on the single arm-chair. Their presence was not unusual, as Mr. Ford, touched by the loneliness of these motherless boys, had often invited them to come to his rooms to look over ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... sister Betsey had brought up a flock of motherless brothers and sisters, and done it wisely and well, though she never got any thanks or praise for it, and never expected any for doing her duty faithfully. If it had not been for aunty, Harry and Kitty would have long ago carried out their favorite plan, and have run away together, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... it! but in tragedy something far higher ought to be aimed at. The end of this drama is reached when Hamlet, having attained the possibility of doing so, performs his work in righteousness. The common critical mind would have him left the fatherless, motherless, loverless, almost friendless king of a justifiably distrusting nation—with an eternal grief for his father weighing him down to the abyss; with his mother's sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with the knowledge in his heart that he had sent ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... little more encouragement, and he would most certainly have offered her his name and the half of his worldly goods in return for her help in quelling the riotous behaviour of his motherless brood. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... in which Miss Ludington lived had become, through habit, so endeared to her that when, a few years after she had been settled in her ghostly village, a cousin died in poverty, bequeathing to her with his last breath a motherless infant boy, it was with great reluctance that she accepted the charge. She would have willingly assumed the support of the child, but if it had been possible would have greatly preferred providing for him elsewhere to bringing him home with her. This, however, was impracticable, ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... not sleep for contemplating her project of the morning. According to her Jewish ideas, the motherless son of her husband was as much hers as though she had brought him into the world. And thus she, poor, unloved and childless wife, was delighted with the son that she thought had dropped ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Guadalupe was only a negra! Then, for the first time, Carmen spoke so crossly to the child as to frighten her. But the pious woman's heart smote her the next moment for that first harsh word;—and she caressed the motherless one, consoled her, cheered her, and at last explained to her—I know not how—something very wonderful about the little figurine, something that made Chita's eyes big with awe. Thereafter she always regarded the Virgin of Wax as an object mysterious ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... to remembrance. Esther wondered till she was sick of wondering, in what way she was taking the affair. In some manner it would be a terrible blow for the poor, motherless girl; with her dreadful father, too, who was to Esther a ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... dead on his return, he would shoot her through the head." Partly through fear, and partly from the goodness and rectitude of her mind, Lady Lovat devoted her attentions so entirely to the care of the delicate and motherless boy, that she saved his life, and won his filial reverence and affection by her attention. He loved her as a real parent. The skill in nursing and in the practical part of medicine thus acquired, was never lost; and Lady Lovat was noted ever after, among those who knew her, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... death of a wife and mother. Ah! here is a bereavement which the child alone can fully feel. When the mother is laid upon the cold bier, and sleeps among the dead, the center of home-love and attraction is gone. What children are more desolate and more to be pitied than the motherless ones? She, who fed them from her gentle breast and sung sweet lullaby to soothe them into sleep,—she, who taught them to kneel in prayer at her side, and ministered to all their little wants, and sympathized with them in all their little troubles,—she has now been ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... double weight of grief and the small-pox, was just sunk at rest in the grave. It was suggested, I say, that if the colonel's little children, dressed in mourning, were to fall at the knees of lord Rawdon, he would pity their motherless condition, and give to their prayers their only surviving parent. They were accordingly dressed in black, and introduced into his presence: they fell down at his knees, and, with clasped hands and tear-streaming eyes, lisped ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... know that Joy has great excuse for her faults. Even if they were twice as great as they are, one wouldn't think much about them now; the poor child is in great trouble, lonely and frightened and motherless. Think, if God took ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... I love him? I am a motherless child, and have lived alone with a father who has been constantly persecuted on account of his principles; I shared his ideals from a very early age, and I have never abandoned them since. Then one day I was given the chance of making these ideals real. "What I long to do, you shall accomplish!" ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... take care of. Poor little darlings! they are bringing back the life in her heart already. There is actually a little colour in her cheek—the dawn, I trust, of the eternal life. That is Miss St. John's way. As often as she gets hold of a poor hopeless woman, she gives her a motherless child. It is wonderful what the childless woman and motherless child do ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... days and nights,—the interminable sewing, that now, for her own reasons, she would trust to no hands but her own,—conscious incapacity to be what all the women about her were, stirring, active, hardy housekeepers,—a vague sense of shame, and a great dread of the future,—her comfortless and motherless condition,—slowly, but surely, like frost, and wind, and rain, and snow, beat on this frail blossom, and it went with the rest. June roses were laid against her dark hair and in her fair hands, when she was carried to the lonely graveyard of Greenfield, where mulleins and asters, golden-rod, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... frail little life it was—feeble beyond expression, and ugly with the ugliness of savagery. She wriggled and screwed up her skinny features with inane ferocity. A motherless wallaby would have submitted to human solace and ministrations with daintier mien; but the whole household thrilled with excitement. Could the spluttering spark of life be made to glow? That was the all-absorbing topic for days. Gradually some sort of a human rotundity became ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... pity for the motherless child welled up in Dino's heart and he longed to be her protector. He could understand now why Cornelli looked so strange; he had even noticed it as soon as he had seen her. There was no mother to fix everything ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... and even civilians' children, who see the service devoid of sweet sounds, and under its blackest and most revolting aspect, still are strangely fascinated thereby. Julie had heard about one of these, a lonely motherless boy, whose chief joy was to harness Granny to his "hearse" and play at funeral processions round the drawing-room, where his dead mother had once ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Dr. Trenire was only too gentle and kind and patient with his four motherless children; but to-day, when they slowly, and at a discreet distance, followed Jabez into the study, Kitty felt a sudden conviction that things were not going to be quite as simply and easily got over ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... looks.... His mother, in Mrs. Bridget Evanwy's private opinion, had been a hussy.... Was David his father's son? Hadn't she once caught Mrs. Howel Williams kissing a young stranger behind a holly bush and wasn't that why Bridget had really been sent away? She had returned to take charge of the pretty, motherless little boy when she herself was a widow disappointed of children, and the child was only three. Would she ever turn against her nursling now, above all, when he was showing himself such a son to his old father? Not she. He might be who and what he would. He was ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... it is, Miss Judy," she said, "someone is putting thoughts into your head what oughtn't to do it. You are a motherless child, and there's someone filling your head with arrant nonsense. What do you know about engagements and—and disappointments, and dreams what proves but early mists of the morning? what do you know of fickleness and broken promises? There, child, you won't get any of that bad sort ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... woman yearned after an occupant for the old wooden cradle, and treasured up the bits of baby things that had belonged to Tom and Bill, and nursed up any young thing that came to hand and wanted care, bringing up a motherless blind kitten with assiduous care and patience, as if the supply of that commodity was not always largely in excess of the demand, and lavishing more care on a sick lamb or a superfluous young pig than most of the ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... was a queer combination of weakness and strength. He was physically brave but a moral coward. The motherless son of a man wholly immersed in business, he had been much neglected in his youth and his unstable character was largely the result of this neglect. On leaving college he refused a business career planned ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... family, whom she liked at once, Kate, Ethel, and the eight girls started for Camp. It was situated in a stretch of woods on the banks of the Muskingum river. One of the girls—Patty Sands—became Ethel's chum. She was motherless and the only child of Judge Sands, ex-congressman of Ohio, and greatly respected. The rest of the girls were also congenial save two—one a Mattie Hastings, whom Ethel avoided saying that her eyes were too close together. Mattie's parents were ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... nothing, nothing," replied his cousin, a look of ineffable pain passing over his fine features; "she was a mere infant when I was arrested. When I broke loose, I had to flee for my life. When I could set searchers after her, she had vanished. Poor motherless thing; I imagine she is the slave of some gay lady at Antioch or ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... mother, that you would look a little after that motherless child,' he said, in a sort ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... doing; all the doing of her simple father! But he too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means. For all the Cricket tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... a bad woman. She spent much in feeding those who perhaps were not hungry; but she fed the hungry also: she indulged a good deal in silk brocades; but she bought ginghams as well, and calicos for poor women, and flannel petticoats for motherless girls. She did go to sleep sometimes in church, and would sit at a whist-table till two o'clock of a Sunday morning; but having been selected from a large family by an uncle as his heir, she had divided her good things with brothers and sisters, ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... existence in the shack, the hard nights pulling the nets and the varied scrapes Tess had tumbled into. Then, suddenly, came the shooting of the game keeper, his own arrest, trial and conviction. The white glare of hateful publicity had been thrown, without warning, upon him and his motherless brat. He'd been torn away from his quiet haunts at the lake side and shut up in the narrow confines of a fetid cell. The enforced separation from his daughter, at the critical period between girl and womanhood, had left her alone in the shanty and exposed her to countless perils and ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... around the room, divined—he could not tell why—that these girls were motherless. His eyes fell on the open book which the elder sister laid on the chair as she rose. The firelight enabled him to read its page-heading, printed in thick, blunt type—"King Lear"! These girls, the one of them ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... fortified with arguments against prayer for the departed, had been nursing her sick sister and taking care of the little daughter of the house. The sister died, and the same evening the motherless girl knelt down at her aunt's side to say her prayers. "Auntie, may I say God bless dear mother?" The whole drift of the aunt's training and theology would have led her to say "No" point blank. There was no time for argument ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... to confirm the custom. It was an unnatural life for the child, seeing no bright little faces peering into his own (for Augharad was, as I said before, five or six years older, and her face, poor motherless girl! was often anything but bright), hearing no din of clear ringing voices, but day after day sharing the otherwise solitary hours of his father, whether in the dim room, surrounded by wizard-like antiquities, or pattering his little feet to keep up with ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of winter were sweeping those northern latitudes. The health of Hortense was extremely frail. She was fatherless and motherless, alienated from her husband, bereaved of one of her children, and all her family friends dispersed by the ban of exile. She had no kind friends to consult, and she knew not which way to turn. Thus ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Billy's girl! Been brought up like a wild thing! Sails a boat like an old tar! Swims like a fish! Motherless—old Billy, a poor shote, according to the gossip! The women have a sort of pitying contempt for him; the men keep their mouths shut, but you can fancy the training of this girl. I'm always interested in heredity ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... well-spring of joy,—the one joy of her days,—flowed in through her son, and that pure fount was all-sufficient to water the flowers that sprang in her path. Maurice had awakened her womanly compassion, first, because Ronald had found in him a brother; next, because he was motherless and almost heart-broken, and finally, because his noble attributes won her admiring affection. But, although Mrs. Walton had no facility in making friendships, when she did become attached, it was with a sympathetic and absolute devotion which extended itself ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Schoolmaster," said Mr. Keene. "Jim's a good boy; and Madge is good, Mr. Schoolmaster; and poor starved and stunted motherless Little Stumps, he is good as gold, Mr. Schoolmaster. And I want to be a mother to 'em—I want to be father and mother to 'em all, Mr. Schoolmaster. And I'll follow your advice. I'll put 'em all ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... except by moments, to his younger children. He was not, indeed, an unkind father to any of them; but he had never forgiven Providence for leaving him with his motherless family upon his hands, a man so utterly unfit for the task. Perhaps he did not put this exactly into words, but he felt it deeply, and had never got over it. There were so many things that he could have done better, and there were so many people who could ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent, and was pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large- eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within- doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood than that ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stood looking into her eyes, her hand in his while he made his adieux. He had determined, before Morris fired the bomb which shattered his hopes, to ask if he might see her again, and where, and if there could be found no place fitting and proper, she being motherless and Miss Felicia but a chaperon, to write her a note inviting her to walk up through the Park with him, and so on into the open where she really belonged. All this was given up now. The best thing for him was ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and do this lovely work, keeping up other studies if you are strong enough? It will be so sweet for you to feel that out of your own sadness you can comfort and brighten the lives of these lonely, suffering children and these motherless or fatherless ones. It will seem hard to begin, no doubt; but new life will flow in your veins when you take up your active, useful work again. The joyousness that God put into your soul before you were born, my Polly, ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... defenceless woman from injury. That woman was my daughter—some of you know her well—ah, Thompson! you may well hang your head—would you slay the deliverer of her whose good nursing saved the life of your motherless child?—Wilson, it was but last week that she sat beside your dying mother, and soothed and comforted her—but for this good and brave man she would now have been with her ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... endowed William with the qualities of a great ruler; and education had developed those qualities in no common degree. With strong natural sense, and rare force of will, he found himself, when first his mind began to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the chief of a great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heir to vast and indefinite pretensions, which excited the dread and aversion of the oligarchy then supreme in the United Provinces. The common ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... interminable hours, hours with the pale cheek pressed against the windowpane, hours of mechanical and repeated lonely 'games', which had lost their savour, and were kept going by sheer inertness. Not unhappy, not fretful, but long,—long, long. It seems to me, as I look back to the life in the motherless Islington house, as I resumed it in that slow eighth year of my life, that time had ceased to move. There was a whole age between one tick of the eight-day clock in the hall, and the next tick. When the milkman went his rounds in ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... out an artisan, A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin, Pushed from her ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... head of a different species. The ends of the world had been searched to make this patchwork of blood. The women raved over the cruel display; they gloated over our beauty; but they cared nothing for the pathetic story the hats told of rifled nests and motherless young. ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... died in childbirth! I am very, very sorry, yet I keep my grief within bounds. What seems to me so lamentable is that two honourable ladies should in the very spring-time of life have been carried off at the moment of becoming mothers. I am grieved for the infants who are left motherless at their birth; I am grieved for their excellent husbands, and grieved also on my own account. For even now I retain the warmest affection for their dead father, as I have shown in my pleading and my books. Now ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... home to: John's majority was the thing that really gave savour to life. But the first faint line of Europe brought my child to my horizon; and all the rest of the way she kept her place, holding out her little arms to me, beckoning me on. Her four motherless years brought compunction to my heart and tears to my eyes; she should have all the compensation that could be. I suddenly realized how ready I was—how ready!—to have her back. I rebelled fiercely against John's decision ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... legislation than is the picture in Little Hodge of the ten deserted children starving under the thatch, the eldest girl frozen and pallid, the father shot by a gamekeeper, after having failed to support his motherless brood. Swift would have put in some matchless touches, but the picture seems adapted to our day of average, mechanical commonplace. It has a nerve of tenderness in it which will work upon the gentler souls of our communities. The father of Little Hodge is represented as an honest field-laborer, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... life itself, can man look upon it. The travail of nature has been transformed into the pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making [25] Dionysus, as Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out among its enemies, motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest, the legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to definite sacred objects and places, the venerable relic of the wooden image which fell into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-flash, and which the piety of a ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... see, Ed came into the country bringing you, a little motherless babe. He always said your mother was a fine woman, but I never so much as saw a picture of her. She was an educated woman, he said—a Southern woman—and her name was Virginia, but that's about all I can tell you of her. Now, I am going to let Ross ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... she hears the carriage roll away): Poor girl! Poor, happy, unconscious, motherless child! If only I had the power to stay the blow! ... Who can it be, then, that ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... looked like a heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had, a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age. Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others, starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the school that ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... for feelings as much like love as childhood can know them, full of kindling charm and mystery. Her friendship had been of course different, but it also left deep mark. A tall, consumptive girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick's, had for some time taken notice of Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance, than a remarkable gift for story-telling. She was ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the Motherless Girl.—Nowdays, the wealthy widower, instead of putting his young daughter at the head of the household, secures some woman of good reputation and social standing as his daughter's chaperon. She ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... The hours of the day slipped by. The breeze came pouring over the prairie from the far southwest where the purple notches stood sentinel. The warm afternoon sunlight streamed in at the door. The while these childless men planned together for the welfare of one motherless, and worse than fatherless, little girl away in the Clover Creek Valley in Ohio, waiting for a home and guardianship and love under far ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... this boy from his infancy fell to my charge—a weighty and anxious trust to one whose thoughts are beyond the barrier of life. I have reared him as became a youth of gentle blood; for on both sides, lady, he is noble, though an orphan, motherless and sireless." ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is in the Paradise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... the court, an attendant on the Prince and Princess, while his father is known to be a staunch adherent of the Pretender—a Jacobite. He was your father's closest friend, and I knew his poor wife—Andrew's mother—well. It was very sad her dying so young, and leaving her motherless boy to the tender mercies of a hard world just when dissensions led his father to take the other side. The Princess knows everything about him, and it was at my request that he was placed here, where I could try and watch over him. Now, ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... unfortunate as to be the youngest of five children who, soon after I was born, were left motherless. I had to bear the humiliating name "Hakadah," meaning "the pitiful last," until I should earn a more dignified and appropriate name. I was regarded as little more than a plaything by ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... mood came over him. "Tubby," he said in a weary voice, "you've got to be a good girl ... What do you suppose it costs me to see to it that you are? To bring up a motherless child is no easy job for an old sinner. Go, child, brew me a grog, a fine one ... an infernally fine one ... that'll do ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... acres produce fruits and corn free to all, nor is a longer than annual tillage agreeable, and a successor leaves him who has accomplished his labor by an equal right. There the guiltless wife spares her motherless step-children, nor does the portioned spouse govern her husband, nor put any confidence in a sleek adulterer. Their dower is the high virtue of their parents, and a chastity reserved from any other ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... to the preservation of the little one she had left him; and when he quitted the spot his anxiety might be directed to the child, in the idea that he might one day see his Ba-rang-aroo revive in his little motherless Dil-boong. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... bluff, the beautiful Christian home, which was a pattern for all the Chinese, was broken up. The young doctor was compelled to leave his patients, and taking his motherless children he returned with ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... and the girl disappeared, the father hung over the verandah smoking, beside the Englishman, to whom he was clearly attracted. He spoke quite frankly of his daughter, and her bringing up. "She is motherless; her mother died when she was ten years old; and since, I must educate her myself. It gives me many anxieties, but she is a sweet creature, dank sei gott! I will not let her approach, even, any of these modern ideas about women. My wife hated them; ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was broken! scarcely could he lift up his head; and his work, though sturdy as before, was more mechanical, less high-motived: and many a year of dreary widowhood he mourned a loss all the greater, though any thing but bitterer, for the infants so left motherless. To these, now grown into a strapping youth and a bright-eyed graceful girl, had he been the tenderest of nurses, and well supplied the place of her whom they had lost. Neighbours would have helped him gladly—sometimes did; and many was the hinted offer (disinterested enough, too, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... stood lost in amazement, it drew near him, and looked up in his face with its tender and beautiful eyes, and then at the child, and then in his face again, as much as to say—Here is a poor motherless one; she has no friends in the wide world; who will take care of her, if you do not? Indeed, he fancied that it did say so; and that a voice softer than silence whispered to him, "Feed my Lambs." His heart was touched with pity, and he lifted her ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... guided her father through the door had an effect upon the men who sat around the office. Kind-hearted fellows they were, and they felt sorry for the poor little motherless girl, sorry for "old Doc" too. One after another they went home, feeling ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... looking away, "was a Russian noblewoman. Sophia is Farrell's daughter by adoption only. Farrell was once my closest friend. When my wife died...." He covered his eyes with his hand and remained silent for a few seconds. "When Sophia was left motherless, an infant in arms, Farrell offered to adopt her. Because I became, about that time, aware of this horror that has poisoned my life—this thing of which you have seen something to-night—I accepted on condition that the truth be never revealed to her. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... had denied her nothing; he had never demanded even a trifling sacrifice from her; there was no fear that she would cross his will if he told her seriously that he had set his heart on this marriage; and he felt no pity for the motherless young creature, who in her beauty and innocence appealed so strongly to his protection. In his strange nature love was only another form of pride; his egotism made him ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... father but a short time, and left her children orphaned while they were yet very young. Gustavo was but nine and a half years old at the time of his mother's death. Fortunately an old and childless uncle, D. Juan Vargas, took charge of the motherless boys until they ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... not leave his little ones motherless when they were so young, and so he determined to marry again, and this time he was not so fortunate, for he chose a rather plain, cross woman, many years older than himself, who was a widow. He thought perhaps she would be a careful manager, but ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... chest of the invalid heaved two or three times, there was a spasmodic twitching of the slender fingers lying on the young girl's hand, then all was still, and Edith Allandale was motherless. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... had finished the hymn I said, "Boys, I am going to tell you the story of my father's conversion." For I had to convince my padre friend that they were not sceptical. I took them to the gipsy tent and told them of my father and five motherless children, and of how Jesus came to that tent, saving the father and the five children and ...
— Your Boys • Gipsy Smith
... and mayest thou obtain fine, fat waterfowl. O thou who art the father of the orphan, the husband of the widow, the brother of the woman who hath been put away by her husband, and the clother of the motherless, grant that I may place thy name in this land in connection with all good law. Guide in whom there is no avarice, great man in whom there is no meanness, who destroyest falsehood and makest what is true to exist, who comest to the word of my mouth, I speak that thou mayest hear. Perform ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... lately, at the Home Farm on their grandmother's place. We became great friends. I found out that they were motherless, and that they were being cruelly ill-treated by ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... said he, "I have offered marriage to your motherless and pious French protegee, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... sorely perplexed and pushed away his half-eaten supper. He knew himself what it was to be friendless and lonely, and his heart softened toward this worse than motherless child. ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... cease from this. Let us discuss no further. Let me care for Hester in my own way so long as I do no sin and harm no one; and be you father to us, and bless us who else must go unblessed. For Hester, also, is fatherless and motherless, and you must be to her as you ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London |
