"Shiftless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... use to argue," Julia was saying as they came. "You did your marketing and simply and plainly left it out there because you were too shiftless to——" ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... a thicker stratum of some 100,000, or 111/2 per cent., largely composed of shiftless, broken-down men, widows, deserted women, and their families, dependent upon casual earnings, less than 18s. per week, and most of them incapable of regular, effective work. Most of the social wreckage ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... married, the second time to the widow West. She had brought with her to her new home a good-looking, long-legged, black-eyed, black-haired ne'er-do-well of a son, a year or so younger than Hiram. He was a shrewd, quick-witted lad, idle, shiftless, willful, ill-trained perhaps, but as bright and keen as a pin. He was the very opposite to poor, dull Hiram. Eleazer White had never loved his son; he was ashamed of the poor, slack-witted oaf. Upon the other hand, he was very fond of Levi West, whom he always called "our Levi," and ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... 7000 tons, and the somewhat larger and very able former Italian cruiser Cristobal Colon. Figures and statistics, however, give no idea of the actual weakness of the Spanish navy, handicapped by shiftless naval administration, by dependence on foreign sources of supply, and by the incompetence and lack of training of personnel. Of the squadron that came to Cuba under Admiral Cervera, the Colon lacked two 10-inch guns for her barbettes, and the Vizcaya was so foul under ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... two Cordovas, he found the girl Lucretia a mere walking vanity bag: idle, shiftless, eager for compliments, and without two ideas in her vain little head. "Whoever is at the bottom of the affair, she isn't," was his mental comment. "She is just a gadfly, just a gaudy, useless insect, born without a sting, or the spirit to use one ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... franchises of the poor commons. "With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear." Often have his candles been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights has he wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys has he made, and great sums has he expended, in order to secure the purity, the independence, and the sobriety of elections, and to give a check, if possible, to the ruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction of the right ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... instead of complaining about his shiftless workers who do not know how to spend intelligently the wages they receive, carried on a campaign of education for a period before a large division of profits was to be made to them, and on checking up the disposition they made of their share, accounted for ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... a story about a strained back that would not allow Jerry to rise from the bed. When it was deemed prudent to tell her, the task fell to Theodore, who was very tender of his sister, remembering that though he considered Jerry a shiftless, poor shack of a creature, Armida probably had affection for him. She took her loss ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... no home of his own, he lived by visiting his friends; left his wife and children to the support of others, and seemed incapable of any other than this shifting and shiftless existence. This natural imbecility was greatly increased during a long period by his constant use of opium, which kept him, a greater portion of his life, in a world of dreams. He was fortunate in having a sincere and appreciative friend in Mr. Gilman, surgeon, near London, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... good as a treaty with Germany!" she murmured and threw it aside, though I knew that the old note and the new hundred and fifty would go forward on the morrow; for she had spoken again of the debtor's large family. She said it was wonderful what good breeders the shiftless are. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... stood in Mrs. Dunn's eyes as she thanked Marjorie and the other girls over and over for their thoughtful kindness. The Dunns were often accounted shiftless, but the poor woman found it difficult to take care of her growing family and by her industry provide for ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... what suspicion John Kollander would have viewed the kindergarten, if he had been told that it was part of a temple. For he had no sort of an idea of letting the rag-tag and bob-tail of South Harvey into a temple; he knew very well they deserved no temple. They were shiftless and wicked. How Wright & Perry would have sniffed at any one who would have called the dreary little shack, where Laura Van Dorn held forth, a temple. For they all pretended to see only the earthly dimensions of material things. But in their hearts ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of the Pueblos of Taos, were collected in front of his dwelling striving to gain admittance. While they were effecting an entrance, he, with an axe, cut through an adobe wall into another house; and the Mexican wife of the occupant, a clever though shiftless Canadian, hearing him, with all her strength rendered him assistance. He retreated to a room, but, seeing no way of escaping from the infuriated assailants, who fired upon him from a window, he spoke to his weeping wife and ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... tropics are, in other words, apt to be eliminated by natural selection. On the other hand, nature furnishes a bountiful supply of food without much labor. Hence, the tropical environment of the negro failed to develop in him any instinct to work, but favored the survival of those naturally shiftless and lazy. Again, the extremely high death rate in Africa necessitated a correspondingly high birth rate in order that any race living there might survive; hence, nature fixed in the negro strong sexual propensities in order to secure such a high ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... freely translated, seemed to mean: "If I had an impudent, lazy, immoral, shiftless, unlicked cub like you, I'd grind him up for ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... giving way. The conviction is extending that diligence is the mother of good luck; in other words, that a man's success in life will be proportionate to his efforts, to his industry, to his attention to small things. Your negligent, shiftless, loose fellows never meet with luck; because the results of industry are denied to those who will not use the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the course of a few months, nor was the supply of skilled labour sufficient to fill the ranks of her industrial army. By the autumn of 1862, although the strenuous efforts of every Government department gave the lie to the idea, not uncommon in the North, that the Southern character was shiftless and the Southern intellect slow, so little real progress had been made that if the troops had not been supplied from other sources they could hardly have marched at all. The captures made in the Valley, in the Peninsula, and in the Second Manassas campaign ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Every window and door was open; the two or three grass hammocks swung emptily between the columns; the bamboo chairs and settees were vacant; his heavy footsteps on the floor had summoned no attendant; not even a dog had barked as he approached the house. It was shiftless, it was sinful—it boded no good ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... cutting. "We shall see.... This is now a white man's country. I have offered to divide the rancho. What if I should take it all? Where would you go? You, the proud Senora and the shiftless young Benito?" ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... Indian-fighting—even now he had only to make believe a little to see the tufted head of a Navajo peer around the columns supporting the Lion of Saint Mark, or to mistake the fringe of facchini on the edge of the Grand Canal for a group of the shiftless half-breeds of New Mexico. In time the ——first Cavalry had been ordered North, where the work was then less pleasant than on the border; and, in fact, it was a distinct unwillingness to execute the Fugitive Slave Law which forced John Manning to resign his commission ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... patrol the beach, to keep their signal sheets flying, their signal fires burning. The effect upon their mental condition of this loss of animus was immediate. They became perceptibly more serious. Their first camp—it consisted only of five haphazard piles of bedding—satisfied superficially the shiftless habits of their womanless group; subconsciously, however, they all fell under the depression of its discomfort and disorder. They bathed in the ocean regularly but they did not shave. Their clothes grew ragged and torn, and although there were scores of trunks packed with ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... slowly, with the shiftless slouch of Southern trains, the man at the plough vanished, and ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... of eighteen, who had been employed by the farmer to do chores. He was shiftless, and a week or two before had been sent away in disgrace. He had gone no ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... in the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, that the "Court, in alluding to this presentment, remarked that 'he was not surprised at finding prejudice existing against them (the negroes) among the respectable portion of the people, for they were indolent, shiftless and dishonest, and unworthy of the sympathy that some mistaken parties extended to them; they would not work when opportunity was presented, but preferred subsisting by thieving from respectable farmers, and begging from ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... impulse of our charity visitor is to be somewhat severe with her shiftless family for spending money on pleasures and indulging their children out of all proportion to their means. The poor family which receives beans and coal from the county, and pays for a bicycle on the instalment plan, is not unknown to ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... means a shiftless, unbusiness-like set of women: they can look after themselves as well as after the poor and forlorn: many of them, were they in the world, would be called strong-minded, blue-stockinged women. At Montreal there is a large establishment of the Sisters of the Congregation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... for good reasons, that I held myself very strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in business affairs. This was partly because I was married, and I never saw the day in my life when to be regarded as a real Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not have given me the horrors. I would have infinitely preferred the poorest settled employment to such life. I mention this because a very brilliant and singular article entitled "Charles G. Leland ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... I wuz there talkin' to them noble wimmen, dear to me because they're tacklin' the most needed work under the heavens, wagin' the most holy war, and tacklin' it without any help as you may say from Uncle Sam, good-natered, shiftless old creeter, well meanin', I believe, but jest led in blinders up and down the earth by the Whiskey Power that controls State and Church to-day, and they may dispute it if they want to, but it is true as the book of Job, and fuller of biles ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... coming down in disappointment. Here and there was one of a different quality, a scantily-dressed woman with a thin, wasted face and hollow eyes, who had been fighting the wolf and keeping fast hold of her integrity, or a tender, innocent-looking girl, the messenger of a weak and shiftless mother, or a pale, bright-eyed boy whose much-worn but clean and well-kept garments gave sad evidence of a home out of which prop and stay had been removed. The strong and the weak, the pure and the defiled, were there. A ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... eight counties were created;[1] while an official census in April, 1635, showed nearly five thousand people, to which number sixteen hundred were added in 1636. The new-comers during Harvey's time were principally servants who came to work the tobacco-fields.[2] Among them were some convicts and shiftless people, but the larger number were persons of respectable standing, and some had comfortable estates and influential connections in England.[3] Freed from their service in Virginia, not a few attained positions as justices ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... she herself would have anticipated. She had conceived a liking, almost an affection, for poor, shiftless Pennyloaf, strengthened, of course, by the devotion with which the latter repaid her. But something more than this injury to her feelings was involved in her distress on being excluded from those sorry lodgings. Pennyloaf ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... usual hour. The boys walked about nervously—they smoked many pipes, and took hurried drinks, and yet she did not appear. The boys looked suggestingly at her husband, and he himself appeared to be anxious; but being one of the shiftless kind, he found anxiety ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... have struggled for two years here at Broughton, and now find myself back where I was when I first stepped out of school with a foolish faith in being equipped for something. One thing, my eyes have been opened anyway, and I no longer judge so harshly the shiftless and unambitious among my people. I hardly see how a people, who have so much to contend with and so little to hope for, can go on striving and aspiring. But the very fact that they do, breeds in me a respect for them. I now see why ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... man who truly used his head a great deal more than he used his hands. He had always been a shiftless fellow, but he was no fool, and this his sister found out soon after she asked him to come and make his home with her. She had not done this because she wanted a man in the house, for she had lived two or three years without that convenience ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... frontier, in spite of the outward uniformity of means and manners, is preeminently the place of sharp contrasts. The two extremes of society, the strongest, best, and most adventurous, and the weakest, most shiftless, and vicious, are those which seem naturally to drift to the border. Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... census returns for New York City reveal the fact that there are twenty-seven thousand married men in New York who are supported by their wives, who are mainly dressmakers, milliners, boarding-house keepers, artists, teachers, musicians, and actresses. Here we have an army of shiftless, dependent men, more than a quarter of one hundred thousand strong, having each a vote to cast or perchance to sell to the highest bidder, while the real bread-winners, the actual wealth-producers, in this case have no voice in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... district, chiefly at Duck Lake, St. Laurent, and Batoche. Many of these men had migrated from Manitoba to a country where they could follow their occupation of hunting and fishing, and till little patches of ground in that shiftless manner characteristic of the Metis. The total number of half-breeds in the Saskatchewan country were probably four thousand, of whom the majority lived in the settlements just named. These people had certain land grievances, the exact nature of which it is not easy even ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... their hired man altogether satisfactory. He was lazy and shiftless by nature, and work ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of the human body are just as shiftless as the one that owns 'em. The systems o' these fair ladies couldn't do their own work. The physician an' the surgeon were added to the list o' their servants, an' became as necessary as the cook an' the chambermaid. ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... not the most extraordinary part of it," went on Ben; "while there are half a dozen of the Arabs' canoes down there, there are a lot of others, that must have belonged to a bunch of natives from their shiftless look—and I could see the bare imprint of the savages' feet in the mud, coming after the Arabs had ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... eagerly said the little man, "for I don't want you to hit the breeze just now. I know you are not Will Bransford because I know Bransford intimately. I was his chum for several years. He could drink as much as I. He was lazy and shiftless, but I liked him. We were together in Tucson—and in other places in Arizona. Texas, too. We never amounted to much. Do you need to know any more? I can ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to run the farm alone. Now they raised poultry, which his wife had always attended to. And he knew she had a habit of setting hens on duck eggs. He had never inquired her reasons, being shiftless, but that fact he knew. Well, come to investigate the hen-house, there was duck eggs, and hens on 'em, and also a heap of hens' eggs, but no more hens wishing to set. So the man, having no judgment, persuaded a duck to stay with those eggs. Now it's her I'm chiefly interested in. She ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... these efforts to maintain public worship, they were far from being a religious community; nor were they a peaceful one. Gossip and scandal ran riot; social jealousies abounded; and under what seemed entire democratic equality, the lazy, drunken, and shiftless envied the industrious and thrifty. Wells was infested, moreover, by several "frightfully turbulent women," as the chronicle styles them, from whose rabid tongues the minister himself did not always escape; and once, in its earlier days, the town had been indicted for not providing a ducking-stool ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... annoyed. "One sister ran off—married a papist—died, and left you on my hands. I was about sending you off again, when news came that your father had died on his voyage home from Canton, and been buried in the deep: so here you stayed. Brother—spendthrift, shiftless, improvident—marries a West Indian papist; turns one; dies with his wife, or, at least, soon after her leaving another ne'er-do-weel on my hands. I wish you'd all gone to purgatory together. To be shut up in my old days with two wild papists is abominable!" ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... kept her own windows upon that side as clear and bright as diamonds, and her curtains in the stiffest, snowy slants, lest her terrible mother-in-law should have occasion to impeach her housekeeping, she being a notable housewife. The habits of the Louds of Loudville were considered shiftless in the extreme, and poor Fanny had heard an insinuation of Mrs. Zelotes to ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... childhood of Dickens one may see a forecast of his entire career. His father, a good-natured but shiftless man (caricatured as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield), was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, at Portsmouth. There Dickens was born in 1812. The father's salary was L80 per year, enough at that time to warrant living ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... to resound like a sort of heraldic proclamation to call around us all that softly shiftless class, who, for some reason or other, are never to be found with anything in hand at the moment that ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... was the leader writer in Le Jour,—Jesen—a brilliant man, an absolutely wonderful writer, but shiftless. Do you know what Falkenberg has done? The paper was in the market, the controlling share of it, and he bought it, or rather he put the money into Jesen's hands to buy it with. The whole tone of the paper with regard to foreign affairs has turned completely round. Every other day there ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Why should I? You're shiftless. You won't work. When you do find a little gold you squander it. You have nothing but a gun. You can't ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... good it is as important that workmen should not be very much over-paid, as it is that they should not be under-paid. If over-paid, many will work irregularly and tend to become more or less shiftless, extravagant, arid dissipated. It does not do for most men to get rich too fast. The writer's observation, however, would lead him to the conclusion that most men tend to become more instead of less thrifty when they receive the proper increase for an extra hard day's work, ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... commenced growin' up, lazy-like an' shiftless," enlightened the parson. "Ther old man 'lowed thet hit wouldn't hardly be no fallacy ter name him Lizzie or Lake Erie, but he swore on a hull stack of Bibles thet he aimed ter make a ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... little settlement straggling back from Blackburn Hill. It was a forsaken looking place, and the people, as a rule, were poor and shiftless. Between Blackburn Hill and Enderly Road very little social intercourse existed and, as the Road people resented what they called the pride of Blackburn Hill, there was a good deal of bad feeling between ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... be ashamed of yourself," she told him. "Willie Whip-poor-will is a good-for-nothing rascal. Everybody talks about the way he prowls through the woods all night and seldom goes to bed before morning. And his wife is no better than he is. They're too shiftless even to build themselves a nest. Mrs. Whip-poor-will leaves her eggs on the ground. And that's ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... toil that brought their faculties into play, and gave them relief from somberer thoughts. But Gaston was too normal a man not to consider the gravity of conditions that were developing. His hopes of Jude had long ago sunk into a contemptuous understanding of the shiftless fellow. He had, however, believed that the hold he had upon him insured a comparatively easy life for Joyce. This, too, he now ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... looking at him. Good-for-nothing was written in every line of the shiftless, shambling figure, and pictured in every rag of the fluttering raiment, and yet—the fellow really was hungry,—and again came the thought of that fifteen cents. The young man was hungry himself; had ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... Aunt Lizzie go 'bout three years back," Tom explained. "She got—shiftless and I been sort of batching it since. Clean, though, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le Pettit. Loveday had gone to fetch the milk. For Loveday's aunt, Senath Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant, soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare. Mercifully, for Loveday, though she appeared sullen, had ever more ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... this class were many students and men with responsibilities, who had been carefully selected by the labor agents. The second type was composed of men who had been picked up promiscuously and transported to the North. These were for the most part single men and in habits were shiftless and undependable; and in numbers this class far exceeded the former type. It will, therefore, be of interest to know what was the behavior of the Negroes in the various industries ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... that the end of the world for which she had so fondly prepared would come, but as the days wore on she sank into a numb despondency. When she thought of the loss of her property, she groaned and turned her face to the wall. And Samuel Anderson sat about the house in a dumb and shiftless attitude, as do most men upon whom financial ruin comes in middle life. The disappointment of his faith and the overthrow of his fortune had completely paralyzed him. He was waiting for something, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... young men of the country, but of course, in feminine perversity her heart was set on that ne'er-do-well, Paul des Roches. A handsome fellow, a good dancer and a fair violinist, Fiddler Paul was in demand at all festivities, but he was a shiftless drunkard and it was even whispered that he had a wife already in Lower Canada. Renaud very properly dismissed him when he came to urge his suit, but dismissed him in vain. Ninette, obedient in all else, would not give up her lover. The very day ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Touching at Java in 1850, I found refreshments at the shop of a Canton man who showed a manifest superiority to the natives of the island. Is it not to be regretted that the Chinese are excluded from the Philippines? Would not the future of that archipelago be brighter if the shiftless native were replaced by ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... world, had on one side a beautiful border of all sorts of greeneries, just as Nature, with her inimitable touch, had placed them. It was a home and a cover for small birds; it was a shade on a warm day; it was a delight to the eye at all times. Yet in the farmer's eye it was "shiftless" (the New Englander's bogy). The other side of the road he had "improved;" it gloried in what looked at a little distance like a single-file procession of glaring new posts, which on approaching were found to be the supports of one of man's neighborly ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... He must have been lying on his back on some grass-plot, right in the centre of everything, with that whole half-sphere of sky luring his spirit out toward the infinite, with a pillow that was eight thousand miles thick. If I had been his teacher I might have called him lazy and shiftless as he lay there, because he was not finding how to place a decimal point, I'm glad, on the whole, that I was not his teacher, for I'd have twinges of conscience every time I read one of his big thoughts. I'd feel that, while he was lying there growing big, I was doing my best to make ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... where land is to be taken up that will produce the necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back country ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... that you are the dearest, prettiest, and best girl they ever knew; and they already love you almost as well as they do me—only they feel sorry for you; and mother says if you could not make caps, she don't know what would become of you, you are so dreadful shiftless." ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... is a poor, shiftless kind of a critter. I s'pose the snow went off before he got ready to haul them to the mill; but if he had peeled them in June or July, they would have been all right; but now they will be about sp'iled by ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... about, and were as helpless as a new-born child. While we contemplated their naked bodies, their unwieldy disproportioned abdomina, and their heads, too heavy for their necks to support, we could not but wonder when we reflected that these shiftless beings in a little more than a fortnight would be able to dash through the air almost with the inconceivable swiftness of a meteor, and perhaps in their emigration must traverse vast continents and oceans as distant as ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... Ship Island at noon and found about the most God forsaken, miserable hole, man ever got into. The sand was ankle deep everywhere. And such a lot of Negroes; shiftless, lazy dogs, black as the ace of spades and twice as natural. But the little "nigs" kill me outright, they looking so much like a lot of monkeys, I know of nothing so comical. I could sit half the morning watching ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... when Danvers turns American and runs for office," scoffed Latimer, remembering Joe's shiftless disposition and making the most improbable comparison that he ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... that you would speak less harshly of those here. At any rate the man I seek is young and fair-looking, and would, I should think"—and he smiled as he remembered Alfred's studious habits—"be one of the most shiftless of ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... exotic in our New England climate and society, and his life is perpetually misunderstood by his neighbors, because he shares none of their uneasiness about getting on in life. He is even called lazy, good-for-nothing, and "shiftless,"—the final stigma that we put upon a person who has learned to wait without the exhausting ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... others, will work, and are well acquainted with gold-working. But they work in their own way; and, save under exceptional conditions, they are incapable of regular and continuous labour. It gives one the heart-ache to see their dawdling, idling, shuffling, shiftless style of spoiling time. They are now taking to tribute, piece and contract work. The French mines supply them with tools and powder, and, by way of pay and provisions, allow them to keep two-thirds of the produce. It is evident that such ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... He was a shiftless man indeed who could not provide ample food for his own needs. The history of Virginia during colonial times was intimately connected with the tobacco crop. The general welfare of the people rose and fell with the value placed ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier
... absolutely a "lady." Susan's forebears had really been rather ordinary folk, improvident and carefree, enjoying prosperity when they had it with the uneducated, unpractical serenity of the Old South, shiftless and lazy and unhappy in less ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... 'harmless critters.' Now, a bear ain't harmless, leastways, not as you'd notice it. Bear will take young stock, an' they're particularly partial to young pig, an' down among these here foothills we've been passin' through there's a lot o' shiftless hog-rustlers as depends on pork fer a livin'. As for bearskins, why, o' course you use the pelts. What's the idee o' leavin' them around? It ain't any kind o' good tryin' to spare an animal's feelin's when he's plenty good an' dead. But I've made this ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Not only in the sneering mouth above the half-formed chin, and in the lowering eyes of undecided colour beneath the receding brow, but also in every shiftless attitude and movement of his great gaunt body, and even in the torn coat and shapeless felt hat—both once black, but both now a dirty gray—his aspect proclaimed him the preeminent rowdy of ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... been guilty of nicknaming Miss Millar "Baby," because she had been so lachrymose and shiftless when she came to Thirlwall Hall, and had never looked up till she was handed over to Miss Vanhansen, who had given her "airings" and "outings" all very well for a baby, and much to Baby's taste as it seemed, but not exactly severe ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... mysterious terrors felt; From frightful dreams he waking sobb'd in dread, Till the good lady came to guard his bed. The Father wish'd such errors to correct, But let them pass in duty and respect: But more it grieved his worthy mind to see That Stephen never would a farmer be: In vain he tried the shiftless Lad to guide, And yet 'twas time that something should be tried: He at the village-school perchance might gain All that such mind could gather and retain; Yet the good Dame affirm'd her favourite child Was apt and studious, though sedate and mild; "That he on many a ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... Burns" was a poor and shiftless character, a thin, stoop-shouldered man. He was only thirty-five years of age, but, being married, that was enough to secure for him the title "Old Man." In Sanger, if Tom Nolan was a bachelor at eighty years of age he would still be Tom Nolan, "wan of the bhoys," but if he married at twenty he ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sure. But they are going to put a lot of money into doing it over, and Dr. Adair has offered to take entire charge of it. For my part I think it is a great mistake. Just think what that money would mean to our poor mission out in Mukden! These shiftless people here at home have every chance to live decently. It's not our fault if they refuse to take advantage ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... He led a colony of Frenchmen, in 1562, to what is now South Carolina, built a small fort on a spot which he called Port Royal, and left it in charge of thirty men while he went back to France for more colonists. The men were a shiftless set, depended on the Indians till the Indians would feed them no longer, and when famine set in, they mutinied, slew their commander, built a crazy ship and went to sea, where an English vessel found them in a starving condition, ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... uncomfortable and slightly contemptible to feel obliged to square one's self with a standard. One's standard was the ideal of one's own good-humored prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take. To expand, without bothering about it—without shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other—to the full compass of what he would have called a "pleasant" experience, was Newman's most definite programme of life. He had always hated to hurry ...
— The American • Henry James
... slow an' shiftless as they shore be, at the wind-up Silver Phil's found guilty, an' is put in nom'nation by the presidin' alcade to be hanged; the time bein' set in a crazy-hoss fashion for a month away. As Silver Phil—which he's that bad an' hard he comes mighty clost to bein; ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the upper, on the other hand in Virginia there was an insurmountable distinction between the owners of plantations and the so-called "mean whites" or "white trash." This class was originally formed of men and women who had been indentured white servants, and was increased by such shiftless people as now and then found their way to the colony, but could not win estates or obtain social recognition. With such a sharp division between classes, an aristocratic type of society was developed in Virginia as naturally as a democratic type was ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... yon shiftless halls, Where pride penurious bides, The while the richness of the hills Runs off to choke the tides; Where every negro cabin stood A freeman's hearthside warm, And broad estates of bramble wood ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... pay? The second is that of the working-man: How much service must I render? How much ought I to be paid? Of the second kind, nearly every phase of it begins right here, that men and women demand for labor something which they have not earned. They do careless, indifferent, shiftless, reckless work, and then demand a living-wage. The capitalist is not inclined to raise his scale of prices, knowing that he has built up his business by prudence, sagacity, and tireless application—the very qualities ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... was supposed to possess certain mysterious secrets often alluded to in the papers as the 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant.' And then with an abrupt transition he recalled memories of his father and of the strange, shiftless life in dingy lodgings in the backwaters of London, of the dim stucco streets that were his first recollections, of forgotten squares in North London, and of the figure of his father, a grave bearded man who seemed always in a dream, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... be recoverable in court, that would be the end of army usury, and with it would be removed the worst cancer of which the whole army suffers. Once the certainty that ultimately they are sure of their money would be gone, these leeches would no longer trouble the gay and shiftless young officer whom they now pursue with the persistence of bloodhounds. But what is the use of saying this? H. M. himself is not without blame in these things. As long as his personal example all tells the other way, how can we ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... the darkeys!" sighed Rhoda. "I think it is all perfectly lovely but the negroes. There are so many of them, and they one and all look thoroughly shiftless." ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... detail of pueblo construction are the careless and shiftless modern methods so conspicuous as in the stone steps of the upper terraces of Tusayan. Here are seen many awkward makeshifts by means of which the builders have tried to compensate for their lack of foresight in planning. The absence of a definite plan for a house cluster ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... hung on. He come of a race never known to give up what they catched on to. Some way he gained ground too, for, with that shiftless dad at the head of things at the homestead, there was need of a wise counsellor to back up Kitty in the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by the King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. The islands contain a population of about 200,000, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at the Day homestead was very different now from what it had been when Janice first came there to live. Like many people of the town, the Day family had got into a rut. Uncle Jason was frankly shiftless, although he was a good farmer and able to earn a fair wage at carpenter's ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... scale that injures orange and olive, and a white scale that is worse. Apples are not free from worms; the gopher is sure to go for every root it can find. There was a serpent even in the original Eden. The historian remarks: "The cloddish, shiftless farmer is perhaps safer in Massachusetts." I think of experiences at "Gooseville," and decide not to buy, nor even rent a ranch, nor accept one if offered. "Fly to ills I know not of?" ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... very large portion of which have a climate less hot and less unsuitable for white men than that of Philadelphia, while there is not a river-bottom in the whole South in which the extremes of heat during the summer are so great as in St. Louis. Slave-labor cultivates, in a miserable, shiftless manner, less than two per cent, of the area of the Cotton States; and upon this insignificant portion a crop of cotton has been raised in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sign says to come in and take what you want. The price of everything is marked good and plain, and another sign says to put the money in the drawer and make your own change. The blacksmith was at him for doing business so shiftless, and Barnaby laughed and said that if anybody wanted anything he had bad enough to steal it, whoever it was, he was good and welcome to it. That just shows how crazy he is. Most of the time he's roaming around the country, with his yellow dog at his heels, making outlandish noises on ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... entertained very nicely by the little girls and Sammy. Cap'n Bill Quigg was a simple-minded man, after all; he did not seem to deserve the bad name that the crabbed old lock-keeper had given him. He might have been slow and shiftless; but he was scarcely any more grown up than ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... said Fordham. "I am sure you could do a great deal to help and brighten Allen; and," he added, smiling, "in the name of spoilt and shiftless heirs, I ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... light of a sacrifice? "Parbleu!" she would explode, when the subject was touched on, "it was a lucky thing for him that Paul had had an old mother to keep him from burning his fingers. Paris! What did the provinces want with Paris? Paris had need enough of them, the great, idle, shiftless, dissipated, cruel old city, that ground all their sons to powder, and then scattered their ashes abroad like so many cinders. Oh, yes, Paris couldn't get along without the provinces, to plunder and rob, to seduce their ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... realise it—to think it possible. And then his mind wandered off to other days, to far different times. He thought of their courtship; of his first seeing her, an awkward beautiful rustic, far too shiftless for the delicate factory work to which she was apprenticed; of his first gift to her, a bead necklace, which had long ago been put by, in one of the deep drawers of the dresser, to be kept for Mary. He wondered if it was there yet, and with a strange curiosity ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... up on the bank, was a rude ferry, which served in the rainy season as a miserable substitute for a bridge; and once in a while, far back from the road, we caught sight of an old country-seat, whose dingy, unpainted walls, broken down fences, and dilapidated surroundings reminded one that shiftless working men, and careless, reckless proprietors, are the natural products of slavery. Thus we rode on for several hours, till, turning a slight bend in the road, we suddenly halted before the gateway of my friend's plantation. I had observed for half a mile that the woods which lined the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... all her effort, McElroy lay week after week in the back room, looking for hours together into the red heart of the fire, silent, uncomplaining, in no apparent pain, but shiftless as an Indian in ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... touching, laughable, lofty and shiftless qualities of the old Russian student, passing—and God knows if for the better?—into the realm of historical memories, he possessed still another amazing ability—to invent money and arrange for credit in little restaurants and cook-shops. All the employees of pawnshops ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... was busy at her work by candle-light, and Mr Wrayburn, half amused and half vexed, and all idle and shiftless, stood by her bench looking on. Miss Wren's troublesome child was in the corner in deep disgrace, and exhibiting great wretchedness in the shivering ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... that their barns may be in perfect order and everything connected with the business neat and clean, in order that their material may come into the hands of the manufacturer in a perfect condition—if heedless, lazy, shiftless, dishonest, ignorant, good-for-nothing D. keeps about him a herd of sick, disconsolated racks-of-bones, to wander over his arid and desolate fields in search of food and drink in summer, or with backs humped up, hover together for shelter under ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... de cracks 'twixt de logs was chinked up tight wid red mud and, let me tell you, Honey, dey was keerful to lay on so much red mud over dem sticks dat chimblies on our place never did ketch fire lak dey did on some of de places whar dey done things sort of shiftless lak. Dem cabins had two rooms and a shed room 'crost de back whar day done de cookin'. Two famblies lived ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... there's a family of Donnells, for one thing. They've rented Peter Sloane's old house. Peter has hired the man to run his mill. They belong down east and nobody knows anything about them. Then that shiftless Timothy Cotton family are going to move up from White Sands and they'll simply be a burden on the public. He is in consumption . . . when he isn't stealing . . . and his wife is a slack-twisted creature that can't turn her hand to a thing. She washes her dishes SITTING ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and abounded in the dense chaparral around the lower Rio Grande. In that year, however, it was suddenly discovered that their hides had a market value, being worth four bits—that is, half a dollar—apiece; and many Mexicans and not a few shiftless Texans went into the business of hunting them as a means of livelihood. They were more easily killed than deer, and, as a result, they were speedily exterminated in many localities where they had formerly been numerous, and even where they were ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... dead and buried and nobody cares very much; They have no use in Greylock for drunkards and loafers and such, But I always liked Dave Lilly, he was pleasant as you could wish, He was shiftless and good-for-nothing, but he ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... into a room filled chiefly with that shiftless and noxious element of Southern society known as "mean whites." Pipes and drinks, and excited arguments, engaged these people as they stood or sat in groups. The host addressed those who were gathered ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... say this to you in confidence now, Harry. Of course, I would be denounced by our people if I said it. But many of our famous men, Harry, have not approved of it. The great Washington said slavery, with its shiftless methods of farming, was draining the life out of the land, and he was right. Haven't we seen ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the class one can help. And Lady Shuttleworth, I am afraid, disapproves of shiftless people too much to do anything in the way of ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... with the privilege of spending the girl's blood money in drink or dissipation, and unmercifully beating her when he feels inclined that way. The pair call this place their home, and as they are shiftless in their habits, and careless of sickness, they are frequently in a condition of chronic impecuniosity and are thus liable to be "fired out" by the heartless agent. Many of these girls, from their association with vicious society, become thieves, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... tribes living in fixed habitations and cultivating regular crops of corn, beans, and pumpkins. On the other hand, the Algonquins along the St. Lawrence, as well as some of the western tribes, were shiftless and roving, growing no crops and having no settled abodes, but depending on fish, game, and berries for subsistence, famished at one time, at another gorged. Probably the highest representatives of this extensive family were the Shawnees, at its ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... more likely to refer to recent experience. Whatever may have been the reason for his caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy, its cause was evidently of a later date than his departure from Stratford. It was no shiftless runagate nor fugitive from justice who went to London in, or about, 1585-87; neither was it a wrathful Chatterton, eating out his heart in bitter pride while firing ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Reginald Harrington Lind called at a house in Manchester Square and found Mrs. Douglas at home. Sholto's mother was a widow lady older than Mr. Lind, with a rather glassy eye and shaky hand, who would have looked weak and shiftless in an almshouse, but who, with plenty of money, unlimited domestic service, and unhesitating deference from attendants who were all trained artists in their occupation, made a fair shew of being a dignified and interesting old lady. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... occasion, the uncle had, in the lightness of his heart, indulged in what, for him, was a piece of extravagance. In all such regions there are broken-down, elderly men, who live by taking fish. Liquor has usually been their great enemy, and all have the same generic character of laziness, shiftless and ill-regulated exertions, followed by much idleness, and fits of intemperance, that in the end commonly cause their deaths. Such a man fished between Oyster Pond and Shelter Island, being known to all who dwelt within his beat, by the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... deep we lie, and if I gave him place, My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face; They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host, And—I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost." The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame, And he thought of Holy Charity, but he thought of his own good name:— "Now ye could haste my coal to waste, and sit ye down to fry: Did ye think of that theft ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... his jaws, and a complexion so yellow that the uncropped brownness of his beard does not materially darken it. He wears a grayish coat, low grimy shirt, and the usual carpet slippers of threadbare red over his shifting and shiftless feet. His head is bent forward, and seems to be anxiously trying to catch the tenor of the trial. Many persons outside of the court, Atzerott, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... a matter of conscience. Bear constantly in mind, that whatever has been done, may be done. Shame on those who, knowing the value of self-dependence, and having the power to acquire it, pass through life so shiftless, that they cannot do the least thing without aid—the aid of a host of relatives or menials. It is quite time that woman should understand her power and her strength, and govern herself accordingly. It is quite time for her to stand upright in her native, heaven-born ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... I'll admit, but the inefficient and the shiftless are bound to suffer, no matter what form of government ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... It will have been inferred that he was objectionable. For the fact, he was objectionable in every way: as a human being, a man, a citizen, a member of the Slocum County bar, and a veteran of our late civil conflict. He was shiftless, untidy, a borrower, a pompous braggart, a trouble-maker, forever driving some poor devil into senseless litigation. Moreover, he was blithely unscrupulous in his dealings with the Court, his clients, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... American did this Arcadia fade to the strains of dying and pathetic music. According to another school of writers—mainly authors of personal reminiscences at a time when growing antagonism was accentuating the difference in ideals—the "greaser" was a dirty, idle, shiftless, treacherous, tawdry vagabond, dwelling in a disgracefully primitive house, and backward in every aspect ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... and crying, and at last it all came out. It seems that when she went to the closet to get down her jacket, a coat of her husband's fell off the hanger. The pockets was stuffed with letters, the shiftless way men-folks have, and they went sprawling all over the floor. She picked up this among the rest. It was addressed to W. Thompson, at some hotel in Cleveland, and it had been forwarded to the city office of his firm. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... monsieur does not know why, yet gradually his passion for red will wane, then fail. Later in the game, he will be affronted by the colour, even as the gentleman cow in the pasture. It is not the colour, dear madame, but the shiftless garment, ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the large meat packer can undersell the small packer because the by-products, such as bristles, which are wasted by the local killer, are a source of income to the large packer. Now, this does not infer that the small packer is shiftless and neglects to save his bristles, but that on the scale on which he operates it would cost him more to save the bristles than ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... Temple Bow, where she had once been wont to sit, tormenting Mr. Mason or bending to the tale of Harry Riddle's love. Little she cared for flowers in those days, and now they had become her life. With such thoughts in my mind, I listened unheeding to her talk. The place was formerly occupied by a shiftless fellow, a tailor; and the court, now a paradise, had been a rubbish heap. That orange tree which shaded the uneven doorway of the kitchen she had found here. Figs, pomegranates, magnolias; the camellias dazzling in their purity; the blood-red ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Si had of Mr. Krome. My somewhat intimate association with workingmen for the last three months enables me to say that, so far as I have been able to observe, workingmen often have a precious poor opinion of one another. The plumbers talk of the carpenters as lazy and shiftless, the painters speak ill of the plumbers, the carpenters regard the tinners with derision, and so it ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... and inhabitants of these dwellings were Indians having physical features common to all American tribes. That their accomplishment differed in degree from that of the shiftless war-making tribes north and east of them, and from that of the cultured and artistic Mayas of Central America, was doubtless due to differences in conditions of living. The struggle for bare existence in the southwest, like that of the habitats of other North American Indians, was intense; but ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... runnin' around half naked. And Sam he laughed, and says he, 'Aunt Jane, if we could wear quilts and eat quilts we'd be the richest people in the country.' Sam was the best-natured man that ever was, or he couldn't 'a' put up with Sarah Jane's shiftless ways. Hannah Crawford said she sent Sarah Jane a bundle o' caliker once by Sam, and Sam always declared he lost it. But Uncle Jim Matthews said he was ridin' along the road jest behind Sam, and he saw Sam throw it into the creek jest as he got on the bridge. I never blamed ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... their possessors, and exciting the envy or emulation of the multitude. The other change is the growth of a class of people resembling the "mean whites" of the Southern States of America, loafers and other lazy or shiftless fellows who hang about and will not take to any regular work. I heard them described and deplored as a new phenomenon, but gather that they are not yet numerous. Their appearance, it is to be feared, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... nothing in the house wherewith to entertain them, a proceeding severely trying to the temper of Xantippe, whose cause would unquestionably be defended by the matrons of any nation. It was nothing but the mortification of a high-spirited woman at the acts of a man who was too shiftless to have any concern for his domestic honour. He would not gratify her urgent entreaties by accepting from those upon whom he lavished his time the money that was so greatly needed at home. After his condemnation, she carried her children with her to his prison, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... be greatly involved; she had been obliged to part with much of it to support her children—four girls and a boy. She had been compelled to withdraw the girls from the convent at Santa Clara to help about the house; the boy was too young—she feared, too shiftless—to do anything. The farm did not pay; the land was poor; she knew nothing about farming; she had been brought up in New Orleans, where her father had been a judge, and she didn't understand country life. Of course she had been married too young—as all girls were. Lately she had thought of selling ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... across some writhing figure, find it immovable, and turn with a groan to some farther cry. How or where were they to help? Others began to come in with white faces and terror-stricken eyes; and before long the sepulchral ruin had little groups all over it, endeavouring in shiftless fashion to bring rescue ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... I sit me down, and did glow a little with relish, in that I should now eat four of the tablets; for, indeed, these were my proper due, by reason of my shiftless fasting ere I came so wotless to my slumbering. And the memory of that eating doth live with me now, so that I could near to smile; for the eagerness of mine inwards was proper and human; yet were even four tablets but a little ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... pioneers cannot live in regular society. They are too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal, and too shiftless to acquire either property or character. They are impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality, and grumble about the taxes by which the Rulers, Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported. . . . After exposing the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... stopped, but to whom idleness was so pleasant, and the fame of their misfortunes so gratifying, that they preferred to scramble on in dismantled homes, on the alms extracted by their woes, to setting about such labor as would place them in comfort. Then that large class—the shiftless— was now doubly large, and there were widows and orphans in abundance, and there was hardly a bed or a blanket ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... father, is described by some as a very rare flower to have bloomed amid the bed of ugly weeds which surrounded her. These friendly writers make her a gentle, lovely, Christian creature, too delicate long to survive the roughness of frontier life and the fellowship of the shiftless rover to whom she was unfittingly wedded.[14] Whatever she may have been, her picture is exceeding dim, and has been made upon scant and not unquestionable evidence. Mr. Lincoln seems not often to have referred to her; but when he did so it was with ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... great part of the south and east, at least, of England,—though never so well off, for several generations, as they are now—are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth clothes, instead of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... man reached the trapper's shanty, and at once, without hesitation or delicacy, set about a thorough examination of its contents. Of course there was the toboggan on the roof, and in fairly good condition for such a shiftless owner. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... tells of an amusing experience he had in a mountainous region in a southwestern state, where the inhabitants are notoriously shiftless. Arriving at a dilapidated shanty at the noon hour, he inquired as to the prospects for ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... While Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt. In 1836 his Pickwick was published, and life was changed ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... confronts practically all discharged soldiers—that of readjustment, not to the life of pre-war days, but to one newer, better, more ambitious, and efficient. Farrel realized that a continuation of his dolce-far-niente life on the Rancho Palomar under the careless, generous, and rather shiftless administration of his father was not for him. Indeed, the threatened invasion of the San Gregorio by Japanese rendered imperative an immediate decision to that effect. He was the first of an ancient lineage who had even dreamed of progress; he had progressed, and he could never, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... maxim, while losing in sententiousness would gain in reason if it ran thus: "What is worth doing at all is worth doing as well as the situation demands." "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day," an excellent maxim for the shiftless, must not be taken too literally by the individual already obsessed to do to-day twice what he can and quadruple what ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... of the growing thousands who turned their faces toward the setting sun, comparatively few yielded to discouragement and went back East. Those who did so were usually the land speculators and people of weak, irresolute, or shiftless character. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg |
