"Ne'er-do-well" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... charge of small shot in his breast. Crowner's quest had resulted in a verdict of death by misadventure, and the generally received explanation was that the young fellow's own gun had worked the mischief by careless handling in passing through stiff undergrowth. But a certain ne'er-do-well Mountain, a noted striker and tosspot of the district, had mysteriously disappeared about that date, and had never since come within scope of Castle Barfield knowledge. Ugly rumours had got afloat, vague and formless, and ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... subterranean torrent of anguish raving through its hollows and tumbling down hidden precipices, whose voice God only heard, and God only could still. This daughter might, though from her face I did not think it, have gone away against her father's will. That son might have been a ne'er-do-well at home—how could I tell? The woman might be looking for the lover that had forsaken her—I could not divine. I would speak no words of my own. The Son of God had spoken words of comfort to his mourning friends, when he was the present God and they were the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... expulsion from the family roof. But it is not easy to expel a son. Human fledglings cannot be driven out of the nest like young birds. An Honourable John turned adrift into absolute poverty will make himself heard of in the world,—if in no other way, by his ugliness as he starves. A thorough-going ne'er-do-well in the upper classes has eminent advantages on his side in the battle which he fights against respectability. He can't be sent to Australia against his will. He can't be sent to the poorhouse without the knowledge of all the world. He can't be kept out of tradesmen's shops; nor, without terrible ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Hewlett and Judith Grey had been children of a little "smock-frock" farmer, and had not been entirely without breeding; but Molly had been the eldest, and had looked after the babies, and done much of the work of the farm, till she plunged into an early and most foolish marriage with the ne'er-do-well member of the old sawyer's family, and had been going deeper ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for the struggle: I glory in being a poet, and I want to be thought a wise man—I would fondly be generous, and I wish to be rich. After all, I am afraid I am a lost subject. "Some folk hae a hantle o' faults, and I'm but a ne'er-do-well". ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... thou sit at home doing naught? Go to the market and buy us an ass and ply thy work with it." Accordingly, he went to the market and stopped by the ass-stand, where behold, he saw his own ass for sale. So he went up to it and clapping his mouth to its ear, said to it, "Woe to thee, thou ne'er-do-well! Doubtless thou hast been getting drunk again and beating thy mother! But, by Allah, I will never buy thee more."[FN120] and he left it and went away. And they ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... son of a cuckold!" Whereupon the Cook cried out and laying hold of his debtor's collar, said, "O Moslems, this fellow is my first customer[FN14] this day and he hath eaten my food and given me naught." So the folk gathered about them and blamed the Ne'er-do-well and said to him, "Give him the price of that which thou hast eaten." Quoth he, "I gave him a dirham before I entered the shop;" and quoth the Cook, "Be everything I sell this day forbidden to me, if he gave me so much as the name of a coin! By Allah, he gave ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... who came across in a piano-case," he answered, with a laugh, which made me remember that this was a man of station and some standing in Paris, while I was but a vagabond and ne'er-do-well. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... were rather stampeded by this onslaught of the irregular troops—especially Mrs. Bronson. She was placed in the position of a woman taking a man's wisdom from her ne'er-do-well son for the first time in her life. Like any other mother in this position, she felt a flutter of pride—but it was strongly mingled with a motherly desire to spank him. The deputation rose, with a unanimous feeling that they had ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... much faith in him myself," said Mrs. Bradshaw, meaning nothing more by the phrase than that she considered Reuben a ne'er-do-well. The same words would have expressed her lack of confidence in a ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... eclipse must move Each Cause and Man, dear to the stars and Jove; Nor always can the wisest tell Deferred fulfillment from the hopeless knell— The struggler from the floundering ne'er-do-well. A pall-cloth on the Seven Days fell, Mcclellan— Unprosperously heroical! Who could Antietam's ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... give her the unpleasant information of the misbehaviour of her eldest son, who was an assistant in a draper's shop in a neighbouring town. She was full of indignation against want of steadiness, though not willing to direct her indignation against the right object—her ne'er-do-well darling. While she was thus charged with anger (for her brother justly defended her son's master and companions from her attacks), she saw Ruth standing with a lover, far away from home, at such a time in the evening, and she boiled over ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Cousin Martin ("Marty" everybody called the gangling, grinning, idle ne'er-do-well of fourteen), Janice was inclined to be utterly hopeless about him from the start. If he was a specimen of the Poketown boys, she told herself, she had no desire to meet any ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... that it's easy to explain; but it wasn't my jump I was goin' to tell about; it was the jump o' a poor critter—a sort o' ne'er-do-well who jined a band o' us trappers the day before we arrived at this place, on our way through the mountains on a huntin' expedition. He was a miserable specimen o' human natur'—all the worse that he had a pretty stout body o' his own, an' might have made a fairish ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... shrewdness she, remembering his Grandfather Barclay, knew might grow into blind, cruel greed, and when she thought of his voice and his curly hair, and recalled Uncle Leander, the curly-headed, singing ne'er-do-well of her family, and then in the boy's hardening mouth and his canine jaw saw Grandfather Barclay sneering at her, she was uncertain which blood she feared most. So she managed it that John should go into partnership ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... fortunate. He had been a little cross with his father, and perhaps a little cross with all the Whartons generally, who did not, he thought, make quite enough of him. In the event of "anything happening" to that ne'er-do-well nephew, he himself would be the heir; and he reflected not unfrequently that something very probably might happen to the nephew. He did not often see this particular cousin, but he always heard of him as being drunk, overwhelmed with debt and difficulty, and altogether in that position of life in ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... learn how to do needlework, or whenever, at any time, you romp and laugh together, find them all most obliging; but there's one thing that causes me very much concern. I have here one, who is the very root of retribution, the incarnation of all mischief, one who is a ne'er-do-well, a prince of malignant spirits in this family. He is gone to-day to pay his vows in the temple, and is not back yet, but you will see him in the evening, when you will readily be able to judge for yourself. One thing you must do, and that is, from this time ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... and delightful author. His boys are always masterly. Nothing could be truer to Nature, more nicely distinguished as to idiosyncrasy, while alike in expression and in limited range of ideas, or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story. Nick Whickson, too, the good-natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and everybody's way till he finds his natural vocation as an aid to a dealer in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the "heavy father," with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Two libel suits mushroomed into view in as many days, provoked, as it were, out of conscious nothing; unimportant but harassing: one, brought by a ne'er-do-well who had broken a leg while engaged in a drunken prank months before, the other the outcome of a paragraph ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "are from my brother Colin, who is farming in Australia. He was a good many years my senior—and I've always understood that he was a bit of a ne'er-do-well in his younger days. Ultimately, he enlisted in the Army as a Tommy, and in that scrap on the Indian Frontier he was close behind Maurice and saw the whole thing. He got badly wounded then, and was dangerously ill for some time afterwards, so it happened that ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Elementary School Cooley's Language Teaching in the Grades Cubberley's Changing Conceptions of Education Cubberley's The Improvement of Rural Schools Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education Dewey's Moral Principles in Education Dooley's The Education of the Ne'er-Do-Well Earhart's Teaching Children to Study Eliot's Education for Efficiency Eliot's Concrete and Practical In Modern Education Emerson's Education Evans's The Teaching of High School Mathematics Fairchild's The Teaching of Poetry ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... seem unkind, Rowland, but my notion is, that an honest gentleman, such as you, educated, and a clergyman is good enough for any lady; and that a good, religious girl, who has saved my mother's life, is a great deal too good for a ne'er-do-well fellow like me. But I won't fall before I'm pushed, since I'm pretty sure she thinks so too. So, now, cheer up, old boy! and show the heiress what a sermon you can preach; and let her see you don't care a fig for her; and then, by jingo, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... very depressed by her words, and slunk back to his master like a dog with his tail between his legs. When the ogre saw him, he guessed at once what had happened. He gave Antonio a good scolding, and said, 'I don't know what prevents me smashing your head in, you useless ne'er-do-well! You blurt everything out, and your long tongue never ceases wagging for a moment. If you had remained silent in the inn this misfortune would never have overtaken you, so you have only yourself to blame ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... replied in a tone of real and ironical humility, which is exceedingly characteristic: "Most revered father, I have received a letter from you to-day, from which I learn that you have been informed by Lapo and Lodovico. I am glad that you should rebuke me, because I deserve to be rebuked as a ne'er-do-well and sinner as much as any one, or perhaps more. But you must know that I have not been guilty in the affair for which you take me to task now, neither as regards them nor any one else, except it be in doing ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... don't intend to ask you, for I have not a single bribe to offer. I merely intend to marry you. I am a ne'er-do-well, a debauchee, a tippler, a compendium of all the vices you care to mention. I am not a bit in love with you, and as any woman will forewarn you, I am sure to make you a vile husband. Your solitary chance ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Peter, a lazy ne'er-do-well, ran away from home, leaving his parents to die of grief. For being kind to a sick "old woman" he was given a magic violin. Soon after, he was arrested for climbing into a house at night. When he was about to be hanged for a thief, he ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... transient. They only pause at such place on their fighting journey through the wilder life. They pass on in time to other spheres, some on an upward grade, others down the long decline, which is the road of the ne'er-do-well. And with each inhabitant that comes and goes, some detail of evolution is achieved by the little hamlet through which they pass, until, in the course of long years, it, too, has fought its way upward to the mathematical precision and bold glory ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... his participation in a poaching adventure. It is possible that Shakespeare in his youth may have indulged in such a natural transgression of the law, but supposing it to be a fact that he did so, it does not necessarily brand him as a scapegrace. A ne'er-do-well in the country would probably remain the same in the city, and would be likely to accentuate his characteristics there, especially if his life was cast, as was Shakespeare's, in Bohemian surroundings. Instead of this, what are the facts? Assuming that Shakespeare left ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Elizabeth had married James Sheldon in the face of the most decided opposition on the part of her family. Sheldon was a handsome, shiftless ne'er-do-well, without any violent bad habits, but also "without any backbone," as the Ingelows declared. "There is sometimes hope of a man who is actively bad," Charlotte Ingelow had said sententiously, "but who ever heard ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... holler," snarled the Taffy King. "I warn you. One such play as that and I'm through with you. I'm willing to support an idle, ne'er-do-well; but he sha'n't saddle himself with one of those theatrical creatures and bring scandal upon the family. Do you know what I was doing when I was your age? I had a booth at 'Gansett, two at Newport, a big one ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... to King George. I have always been a ne'er-do-well, despised and scouted by a hard father and a villainous brother or two, and life with these good fellows here is, after all, to my mind. There's independence in it, and I prefer to be independent; and danger, and I like danger. A wronged man wrongs others in his turn, ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... Richard Carey evidently believes the story, though from his actions I'm inclined to think him utterly mad. He's going to desperate lengths to search for the treasure. His conduct is tinged a good deal with resentment because Isabel has repeatedly refused to marry him. He's a ne'er-do-well, a blacksheep and ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... irksome which furthered his research, however unreliable he might prove in the humdrum occupation of earning a livelihood, was calculated to impress the boy who realized that his matter-of-fact neighbors had long before catalogued him as a thriftless ne'er-do-well. The great man's hardships, his persistence, and his prosperous and honored old age, made up a fascinating story. Peggy, noticing the effect upon her listener, was more ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... Front. The port contributed a goodly number, but there remained one berth vacant. The long-suffering Consul had a stroke of inspiration. Here was a means of at once swelling the man-power of his country and ridding himself of a pestilent ne'er-do-well. His boys, searching far and wide, discovered John Fanshawe in the back premises of a Malay go-down, oblivious to all things, and bore him inanimate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... me with an indignant pity. I tried in vain to sleep. In the darkness of night our plan came to seem like an atrocious outrage upon a guileless, defenceless ne'er-do-well. For my share of the guilt, I resolved to convey to Potts privately on the morrow a more than perfunctory promise of aid, should he find himself distressed at any time in what he would doubtless term his ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... be done in a more earnest and zealous public spirit than this was done by me. But habit had begot in the town a partiality for the drunken ne'er-do-well, Robin; and this just act of mine was immediately condemned as a daring stretch of arbitrary power; and the consequence was, that when the council met next day, some sharp words flew from among us, as to my usurping an undue ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... chuckled as he addressed it. He pictured himself in the rear room of the bar in the Rue Auber, relating, across the little marble-topped table, this American adventure, to the delight of that blithe, ne'er-do-well outcast of an exalted poor family, that gambler, blackmailer and merry rogue, Don Antonio Moliterno, comrade and teacher of this ductile Valentine since the later days of adolescence. They had been school-fellows in Rome, and later roamed Europe together unleashed, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... she said, "is it not annoying? that dreadful man with the wooden leg is here, and collecting a crowd round the place. Good morning, Mr Gordon. It is the poor woman's ne'er-do-well husband. She is herself so decent and respectable, that she will be greatly harassed. What can we do, Mr Whittlestaff? Can't we get a policeman?" In this way the conversation was led away to the affairs ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... harassing the enemy, picking off his sentinels, holding the woods, from which not a Prussian was to emerge alive; while the truth of the matter was that they had made themselves the terror of the peasantry, whom they failed utterly to protect and whose fields they devastated. Every ne'er-do-well who hated the restraints of the regular service made haste to join their ranks, well pleased with the chance that exempted him from discipline and enabled him to lead the life of a tramp, tippling in pothouses and sleeping by the roadside at his own sweet will. Some of the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... storm of bullets and rescued the riddled flag. Who would have thought it of loutish Tom? The village alehouse one always deemed the goal of his endeavours. Chance comes to Tom and we find him out. To Harry the Fates were less kind. A ne'er-do-well was Harry—drank, knocked his wife about, they say. Bury him, we are well rid of him, he was good for nothing. Are ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... strong our affection for the ingratiating ne'er-do-well, there are certain charges against the poet which we cannot ignore. It is a serious thing to have an alleged madman, inebriate, and experimenter in crime running loose in society. But there comes a time when our patience with his indefatigable accusers is exhausted. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the daughter of the rector, Miriam Ainsley. I thought it was going to be a match, but they were both poor, and the girl suddenly married a young nobleman, a man I disliked very much, a wastrel and a ne'er-do-well. But there were stories about this other young man who was supposed to be in love with her, and perhaps they came to her ears, and drove her to the other man, though it was a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire. The young engineer left the place suddenly, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... scraggy young scamp," continued Coupeau, "that the blouse is the finest garment out; yes! the garment of work. I'll wipe you if you like with my fists. Did one ever hear of such a thing—a ne'er-do-well insulting a workman!" ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... the truth he is a sort of ne'er-do-well," the merchant laughed. "I grant that he has not had much chance. His father died when he was a child, and his mother soon married again. There is no doubt that he was badly treated at home, and when ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... seen or heard of. Passengers explained the term to me. They said that dissipated ne'er-do-wells belonging to important families in England and Canada were not cast off by their people while there was any hope of reforming them, but when that last hope perished at last, the ne'er-do-well was sent abroad to get him out of the way. He was shipped off with just enough money in his pocket—no, in the purser's pocket—for the needs of the voyage—and when he reached his destined port he would find a remittance awaiting him there. Not a large ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... other children except a girl, a foolish creature who knows neither how to behave or talk, nor even the difference between kin and stranger. I also learn that Gopal's son-in-law has turned out a ne'er-do-well, and that his daughter refuses to go ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... Hudson's cost, was his former surly mate, Juet, and a young ne'er-do-well named Henry Greene, who had been cast off by his family for his evil ways and his dissolute living. Hudson had befriended this young man and had offered him a refuge in his own house—and now, to keep him out of mischief, took ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... years. Discharged at the end of his term, he drifted to the streets, the casual wards, and Metropolitan gaols, every one of whose interiors he is familiar with. He became a ringleader of a gang that infested London; a thorough mendicant and ne'er-do-well; a pest to society. Naturally he is a born leader, and one of those spirits that command a following; consequently, when he got Salvation, the major part of his following came after him to the Shelter, and eventually to God. His character since conversion has been ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... soul harm in his life. He has always been ready to open his purse strings in case of distress; he is a man that does not meddle in any way with politics. It is true that he does not go to mass, but that hurts no one; and there is many a ne'er-do-well in the village who never darkens the church door. If he prefers to pray in his own house and in his own way, what matter is it to any one? His cloth mill gives employment to half the village. What we shall do if it is shut up I am sure I don't know. But what do they care ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... scoundrel, miscreant, budmash^, caitiff^; wretch, reptile, viper, serpent, cockatrice, basilisk, urchin; tiger^, monster; devil &c (demon) 980; devil incarnate; demon in human shape, Nana Sahib; hellhound, hellcat; rakehell^. bad woman, jade, Jezebel. scamp, scapegrace, rip, runagate, ne'er-do-well, reprobate, scalawag, scallawag. roue [Fr.], rake; Sadist; skeesicks [Slang], skeezix [U.S.]; limb; one who has sold himself to the devil, fallen angel, ame damnee [Fr.], vaurien^, mauvais sujet [Fr.], loose fish, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... most vexing moral problems are those in which benefit to some must be weighed against benefit to others. Shall a man who is needed by his family risk his life to save a ne'er-do-well? Shall we insist that people unhappily married shall endure their wretchedness and forego the possibility of a happier union in order that heedlessness and license may not be encouraged in the lives of others? Life is full of such two- sided problems; it is not enough that ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... little dame had succeeded in shaking off her ne'er-do-well, the four little ones came every day on the lawn together. Sometimes the mother came near to see how they prospered, but oftener they were alone. They cried no more; they ran about in the grass, and if one happened ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... into a sort of general store, or warehouse, and apportioned out in accordance with rules to be framed by the council. There was a great deal more said that night to the same effect, some of the statements being received with rapturous applause—chiefly by the lazy and ne'er-do-well members of the party; but I could see that although all hands had in the first instance jumped readily enough at the prospect of an easy and luxurious life, free—as they thought—from all restraint, in a land of eternal summer, there ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... to the museum I caught glimpses of what Donald's past life had been, learning incidentally that his father was rich, but since Donald was sixteen he had been considered a ne'er-do-well. He had gone away to sea when he was a boy, and had been third mate on a merchant ship; in a hotel in America he had been a boot-black, and just before he came to Paris he fought a drunken stoker and won a ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... 'a' come to an out-o'-the-way place like this; we didn't never suit his style, ye see; so poor Ann Kenton— whose misfortun' made her Mrs. Ned Joselyn—cried an' wailed fer a day er two an' then crep' back to the city like a whipped dog. Funny how women'll care fer a wuthless, ne'er-do-well chap that happens to ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... hardly got the words out of his mouth when the glitter of something bright he had dropped on the ground, caused me to stoop and to pick up a gold watch bracelet set in diamonds. The same instant I heard a man running on the road behind me, and who should come up but the very "ne'er-do-well" who helped me to wash down ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... Novikh, known throughout the world under the name of Rasputin. A Siberian peasant by birth, immoral, filthy in person, untrained in mind, he had early received the nickname of Rasputin, which means "ne'er-do-well," on account of his habits. A drunkard, and a libertine always, he posed as a sort of saint and miracle worker, let his hair grow long, and tramped about the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... from stress and strain. These facts seem to have aroused their ire. They have assailed his memory with invective that does not stop short at false statement. They have found in the greatest of all Dutch artists a ne'er-do-well who could not take advantage of his opportunities, who had the extravagance of a company promoter, an explosive temper and all the instincts ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... "and I wouldn't take that as a bad omen. Think: nearly ten years ago, when you were a ne'er-do-well and I started you going right, how hard it was for you to do better, and how little faith you had in the possibility that everything would turn out right. But still it did, gradually. Your faith got stronger, and now you're a lad that can ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... leader at the point in the action where its significance cannot fail to be impressed upon the spectators. For example, a certain Selig release was entitled "Through Another Man's Eyes." Before the next to the last scene, which showed the ne'er-do-well lover peering in at the window, while his former friend bends over to kiss his wife—who might have been the wife of the wayward young man, had he been made of different stuff—the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... although our contemporary seems ignorant of the fact, he disclaimed any such intention, A press announcement was circulated by his eldest son, on his behalf, that the rascal was meant to be a sentimentalist and ne'er-do-well, who, whatever his opinions, would have come to a bad end. When the Commonwealth, therefore, talks of Lord Tennyson as "about right," it shows, in a rather vulgar way, the danger of incomplete information. Were we to copy its manners we ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... sir,' said she, 'I wish to goodness you would take your wretched son away and put him in a school for saints, since you think he is so good. As for me, he plagues my life out, and, if you keep him here with his ne'er-do-well ways, you'll come home some evening to ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... to the North Pole to see it, if necessary, and they'd gae farrer still to see the murtherer weel hanggit! Ay, your grace, and what will make it a' the mair exciting, is the rumor whilk goes round to the effect that the ne'er-do-well, hizzie, Rose Cameron, hae turnit Crown's evidence to save her ain life, and will gie up all her accomplices. Sae we are a' fain to hear the mystery ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... inventory of Sergeant Beresford's equipment as a future husband. Fond, but, alas! fickle. A family black sheep, or if not black, at least striped. Likely not to plague you long, if he's sent on many more jobs like the last. Said to be good-tempered, but not docile. Kind, as men go, but a ne'er-do-well, a prodigal, a waster. Something whispers in my ear that he'll make a ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... lie without my telling you," mumbled the witch; "your business is not perhaps such a bad one as it seemed to me at first. Katuti may thank the ne'er-do-well who staked his father's corpse. You don't understand me? Well, if you are really the sharpest of them all over there, what must ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... future, so did Rachel now have such a vision. But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal vigilance on her part and by nothing else—an instant's sleepiness, and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well. She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic, but thus it was! She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings against Louis which ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... "a Lady that loves her Bottle;" her niece Penelope, "an Heroic Trapes;" and Woodcock, the Yeoman, a rich, sharp, forthright, crusty old fellow with a pretty daughter, Belinda, whom he is determined never to marry but to a substantial farmer of her own class: her suitor, a clever ne'er-do-well named Reynard, of course tricks the old gentleman by an intrigue and a disguise. It is Reynard's sister Hillaria, however, "a Railing, Mimicking Lady" with no money and no admitted scruples, but enough beauty and wit to match when and with whom she chooses, ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... which will drag him down deeper in a new land than he would have fallen at home. You know that remittance men are regarded with such contempt in the bush that a man seldom admits he is one, save when he's drunk and reckless and wants money or credit. When a ne'er-do-well lands in Melbourne or Sydney without a penny he will probably buck-up and do something for himself. When he lands with money he will probably spend it all in the first few months and then straighten up, because he has to. But when he lands on the remittance ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... Lady, Saint Mary, worketh miracles at Walsingham, never was poor woman so be-plagued as I, with an ill, ne'er-do-well, good-for-nought, thankless hussy, picked up out of the mire in the gutter! Where be thy wits, thou gadabout? Didst leave them at the Cross yester-morrow? Go thither and seek for them! for ne'er a barley crust shalt thou break this even in this house, ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... humanity I am merely a pawn which is given a certain number upon entrance into this world and retains the same at the time of its exit. I am a cell of feeling long ago registered and classified by my fellow-beings as a 'ne'er-do-well,'" ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... capital of the Grisons, where he asked to be made a member of the Calvinistic Church, and to be recognized as lawful husband of the woman with him; but in a short time the community discovered that the new convert was no good, and expelled him from the bosom of the Church of Calvin. Our ne'er-do-well having no more money, his wife left him, and he, not knowing what to do next, took the desperate step of going to Bressa, a town within the Venetian territory, where he sought the governor, telling him his name, the story of his flight, and his repentance, begging the governor to take him under ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... with the natives. Affairs were a chaos. The region, grown historic as the Transvaal, had been told to arrange its future as it would. The Orange Free State had been kicked outside the British line of empire, with a solatium in money, in the manner that an angry father bids adieu to a ne'er-do-well son. A white man in South Africa hardly knew what flag he was living under, or, indeed, if he could claim any. Panda, on the Zululand frontier, growled over his assegai and knobkerry. Moshesh, the Basuto, hung grimly on the face of Thaba Bosego, a Mountain of Night in very truth. The embers ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... looked at him with a suspicion that was akin to hostility. His son had been a ne'er-do-well. In his heart Wadley was not sure he had not been worse. But he was ready to fight at the drop of the hat any man who dared suggest it. He did not want to listen to any evidence that would lead him to believe ill of the son who ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... felt, had he not been feeling all his days, that Fate had robbed him of the sweetest joy that is given to man, in that she had not come to him loving him with her early spring of love, as she had loved that poor ne'er-do-well? How infinite had been his regrets. How often had he told himself that, with all that Fortune had given him, still Fortune had been unjust to him because he had been robbed of that. Not to save his life could he have whispered a word of this to any one, but he had felt it. He ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... sharp practice in the east becomes highway robbery in the west; but at the same time negative good-nature becomes active self-sacrifice, and a general belief in virtue is translated into a prompt and determined war upon vice. The ne'er-do-well of a family who in one place has his debts paid a couple of times and is then forced to resign from his clubs and lead a cloudy but innocuous existence on a small pension, in the other abruptly finishes his career ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Grandet turned pale and stamped and swore. When at last he found words, he cried: "Serpent! Cursed girl! Ah, deceitful creature! You know I love you, and you take advantage of it. She'd cut her father's throat! Good God! you've given our fortune to that ne'er-do-well,—that dandy with morocco boots! By the shears of my father! I can't disinherit you, but I curse you,—you and your cousin and your children! Nothing good will come of it! Do you hear? If it was to Charles—but, no; it's impossible. What! has that ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... been a sort of ne'er-do-well, otherwise I wouldn't have been called Roving Dick, while you are really the head ...
— Dick in the Desert • James Otis
... profession, but careless of personal success, and much addicted to port wine, and bearing a striking personal resemblance to the young French noble. These persons, and others, being drawn to Paris by various strong inducements, Darnay is condemned to death as a ci-devant noble, and the ne'er-do-well barrister, out of the great pure love he bears to Darnay's wife, succeeds in dying for him. That is the tale's bare outline; and if any one says of the book that it is in parts melodramatic, one may fitly answer that never was any portion of the ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... rather well-off family. The old father makes his two sons an allowance, which one of them, Amos, manages well, while the other does not. Stability in the family is provided by an old maiden aunt, Kate, the sister of the old man. There was also a daughter, Julia, who had married a ne'er-do-well, and who had been shown the door on that account by the old father, but who was still of great concern to the two young men, particularly to Amos, as she had small children, who were so destitute that Amos was spending all his allowance ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... Julius Fenchurch-Streete applied to Lord Ffraddle for a secretaryship, which was ultimately granted to him. Imagine the situation—this rake, this dark-eyed ne'er-do-well, notorious all down Cheapside for his relentless dalliance with the fair, placed in intimate proximity with one of England's most glorious specimens of ripening womanhood. It was, Sheepmeadow writes, like the meeting ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... asked of old colonials in England is, what are the prospects afforded by New Zealand to men of the middle classes? The answer is usually unfavourable, simply because many colonials cannot disassociate the idea of a gentleman adventurer from that of a scapegrace or ne'er-do-well. Secondly, they look at the questioner's present condition; and never take into consideration the power he may have of adapting himself to totally different circumstances. I think this view admits of considerable enlargement, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... met again next evening Lestrade was furnished with much information concerning our prisoner. His name, it appeared, was Beppo, second name unknown. He was a well-known ne'er-do-well among the Italian colony. He had once been a skilful sculptor and had earned an honest living, but he had taken to evil courses and had twice already been in gaol—once for a petty theft and once, as we had already heard, for stabbing a fellow-countryman. He could talk English perfectly ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... man, the liberally educated son of an ambitious self-made soapmaker. The first—with Sue, the pretty waitress—is thwarted by a very persistent and unpleasant clerk; the second—with Virginia, a girl of birth and breeding—is threatened by the intrusion of the girl's cousin, a queerly morbid ne'er-do-well. There is no action to speak of, so one can't speak of it. I can only say that the interest of the shrewd analysis held me, and that if my guess as to the sex of the writer be sound it is noteworthy that more pains and skill are bestowed ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... people had tried to do so) to do nothing quite like other people, not from perversity as some readily declared, or a desire to "be different," but from inability to acquire the point of view from which the most ordinary actions are done. She took no money on Sunday, and this becoming known to her ne'er-do-well neighbours, they made a point of forgetting to come for milk ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... of his first return, shook its head darkly. A tramp—a burglar, even. God knew what! When, on his third visit home, he brought an air of extreme opulence, plenty of money, and a sartorial perfection undreamed of locally, the heads wagged even harder. A gambler probably; a ne'er-do-well certainly; and one to break his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have come from the mother and the nurturing of his stepmother rather than from the shiftless, paternal pioneer who gave the wilderness environment and soil to the nurturing of this stock and was as little paternalistic as the government. Perhaps this ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the temptations of the open country to a man without a slave. When he started down the Ohio ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... Ah, that's not like you. You're unkind and you're harsh. Her husband is the sort of man—well, he's his own worst enemy. A weakling, a ne'er-do-well—he's spent all his money and hers too. She has a child. Do you think you can condemn her for leaving him? As a matter of fact she didn't leave him, ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation; or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word "cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England, where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something, no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... have had a pretty fine-looking farm here thirty years or so ago," I continued, "when he brought his wife to it. This barn was new then. But he was a ne'er-do-well, with nothing to be said in his favor, unless you admit his fame as a practical joker. Strange how the ne'er-do-well is often equipped with an extravagant sense of humor! Turner had a considerable retinue among the riffraff boys of the neighborhood, who made this barn a noisy rendezvous and ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... of Oliver having died, as before truthfully stated, first prophesying that his son would grow up a ne'er-do-well, this son took his new-found wife up to the Fen Country to live with his mother and sister. That he would be Lord Protector of the Farm seems quite the proper thing to say, but that he was dutiful, modest, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... was not alive? She was a widow? Paul Schlieben interrupted the vestryman, and drew a long breath as though of relief. Although he had never spoken of it, he had always had a secret fear of the father: if he turned out to be a drunkard or a ne'er-do-well? A load fell from his mind now—he was dead, he could not do any more harm. Or had he died of an illness after all, of a wasting disease that is handed down to children and children's children? He had been told that the mists on the Venn and the sudden changes in the temperature may easily be injurious ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... with his aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell. She was his mother's sister, but in her breast was no kindly feeling for the sensitive, shrinking boy. Ann Bartell was a vain, shallow, and heartless woman. Also, she was cursed with poverty and burdened with a husband who was a lazy, erratic ne'er-do-well. Young Emil Gluck was not wanted, and Ann Bartell could be trusted to impress this fact sufficiently upon him. As an illustration of the treatment he received in that early, formative period, the following ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... himself heir-at-law to the Haygarth estates; but before he can establish his claim, this Theodore must produce evidence of the demise, without heirs, of one Peter Judson, eldest surviving grandson of Ruth Haygarth's eldest son, a scamp and ne'er-do-well—if living, supposed to be somewhere in India, where he went, as supercargo to a merchant vessel about, the year '41—who stands prior to Theodore Judson in the succession. I conclude that the said Theodore, who, as a lawyer, is likely to do ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... hurry and rushed out by the door, when behold, the husband came bringing with him two of his familiars. So the wife met him at the entrance and said to him, "O Man, O miserablest of men, O thou disappointed, O thou dissatisfied,[FN487] thou hast brought to me a fellow which was a thief, a ne'er-do-well like unto thyself." "How so?" asked he, and she answered, "The man stole the two geese and stole away." Thereupon the husband went out and catching sight of the guest running off shouted to him, "Come back! Come back! even although thou bring only one with thee and take ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Brown, or Mazzini. When a man abandons his business or job and complacently leaves the clothing of his children to wife or neighbors in order to drink flip and talk politics, ordinary folk are content to call him a lazy lout, ne'er-do-well, worthless fellow, or scamp. Samuel Adams was not a scamp. He might have been no more than a ne'er-do-well, perhaps, if cosmic forces had not opportunely provided him with an occupation which his contemporaries and posterity could regard ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... the men who at some time in their lives have not wondered at the vagaries of girlish complaisance: the foolish, the ne'er-do-well, the bully, the careless, the cruel,—it is to these often that a girls' caress ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... hysteria, experienced her first sexual crisis at the age of 13, not long after menstruation had become established, and when she had just recovered from an attack of chorea. Her old nurse, who had remained in the service of the family, had a ne'er-do-well son who had disappeared for some years and had just now suddenly returned and thrown himself, crying and sobbing, at the knees of his mother, who thrust him away. The young girl accidentally witnessed this scene. The cries and the sobs provoked in her a sexual excitement she had never ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... away from Margery Key's, having been delayed but a moment, and the quaver of her blessings was yet in my ears, when verily I did see that which I have never understood. As I live, there passed from the house of that ne'er-do-well next door, which was closed tightly as if to assure folk that all therein were sound asleep, a bright light like a torch, but no man carried it, and it crossed the road and was away over the meadows, and no man whom I saw carried it, and it waved in the wind like a torch streaming back, and ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... You hadn't come yet. Of course, I knew you'd be along some day. I kept it to drink to your very good health, Mr. Ellsworth—the health of the man who told me not to come around his house—told me I was an unsettled ne'er-do-well, and not suitable company for his—why, I don't think I have any corkscrew at all." His voice was slow, but harder ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... the Count Louis de Clameron, who had inherited and ruined the estates of which his brother Gaston had been deprived, discovered this secret from the nurse, and finding on inquiries in London that the child had died, persuaded a young ne'er-do-well Englishman to play the role of his brother's son. He secretly introduced him to Madame Fauvel, and through this means obtained what money he required from the unhappy woman, who feared the discovery of her past secret by her husband. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... commit suicide, and took three whiskies to string my nerve up. In two minutes I was laughing at a Punch and Judy show. If you'll kindly order a quartern of gin in a pint glass for me, I'll fill it up and be quite content all the evening. No one ill-uses me. I'm a soft, harmless, disreputable old ne'er-do-well. That ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... a failure as a mechanic as well? Was I unfit for anything? The other fellows at the shop had a definite foothold in life, while I was a waif, a ne'er-do-well, nearly two years in America with ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... paternity of his brother made him secretly jealous. Why should that incapable fellow, who succeeded in nothing, have a son? It was only those ne'er-do-well sort of people who were thus favored. He, Michel, already called the rich Desvarennes, he had not a son. Was it just? But where is there justice in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... Ivanovich was a tall, handsome, white-haired, fresh coloured man, proud and attractive in appearance and bearing. His family consisted of a vulgar, irritable wife, who wrangled with him continually over every petty detail, a son, a ne'er-do-well, spendthrift and roue—yet a "gentleman," according to his father's code, two daughters, of whom the elder had married well, and was living in St. Petersburg; and the younger, Lisa—his favourite, who had disappeared from home a year before. Only a short while ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... good man, but a ne'er-do-well financially, had loaned his best clothes, watch and pocketbook to a friend to enable him to call on his best girl in captivating style, and said friend expressed his gratitude by eloping with the girl and all ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... that you had a ne'er-do-well brother in Australia, who might at any moment appear and disgrace ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... stern and heroic Communist maintaining his views despite the reproaches of father and mother and the nagging of his wife. It showed also the Anarchist brother (as might be expected from the Bolshevik hostility to Anarchism) as an unruly, lazy, ne'er-do-well, with a passionate love for Sonia, the young bourgeoise, which was likely to become dangerous if not returned. She, on the other hand, obviously preferred the Communist. It was clear that he returned her love, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... proverbial bad shilling. I've grown tired knocking about this big world, and now, at nine-and-thirty, with an empty purse, a light heart, a spotless conscience, and a sound digestion, I'm going to settle down and walk in the way I should go. You are glad to have your ne'er-do-well back ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... were then called—a small, square, gray building with long iron-barred windows, and he had seen, at one of these rather depressing apertures on the second floor, a none too prepossessing drunkard or town ne'er-do-well who looked down on him with bleary eyes, unkempt hair, and a sodden, waxy, pallid face, and called—for it was summer and the jail window ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... him.' 'Get in with you, then,' says he (only we was jabbering that willainous tongue o' theirs), for he sees the name on my traps is the same as that on your traps—and in I get. Now, Mr. Cecil, let me say one word for all, and don't think I'm a insolent, ne'er-do-well for having been and gone and disobeyed you; but you was good to me when I was sore in want of it; you was even good to my dog—rest his soul, the poor beast! There never were a braver!—and stick to you I will till you kick me away like a cur. The truth is, it's only being near of you, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own cousin,—though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well,—had not he come down out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... of this murder having been committed by one of Mr. Glenthorpe's workmen with a grudge against him? Well, it's a very strange thing, but Queensmead was telling me this morning that one of Mr. Glenthorpe's workmen had a grudge against him. He's a chap named Hyson, the local ne'er-do-well, who was almost starving when Mr. Glenthorpe came to the district. Glenthorpe was warned against employing him, but the fellow got round him with a piteous tale, and he put him on. He proved to be just as ungrateful ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... house we had noticed, there resided a white man. He did not, however, make his appearance during our visit, and I imagine he must have been one of those individuals called 'beach-combers,' referred to in so many of the books that treat of the South Sea Islands,—a sort of ne'er-do-well Englishman or American, rather afraid of meeting any of his own countrymen, but very clever at making a bargain between a ship's crew and the natives, with considerable profit ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... boils now when I remember. Child," he demanded, "I can't see why your alluring ways should have set me talking. Fancy, I've never told this tale but twice, and I'm holding forth to a little alien whom I haven't known two days, a young ne'er-do-well not born till forty years after ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... all the kindness of his heart, and the little thing was not in a hurry to go. Indeed, it forgot all about the mill until its father happened along an hour after it should have been at work. His name was Joe Hopper, a ne'er-do-well whose children, by working at the mill, supported ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... beyond Bourke. He spoke as though well educated, and a gentleman—as drovers often are. Why, then, was he on the road? I put him down as a scapegrace, for he had all the winning pleasant manner of a ne'er-do-well. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... morning Stoner laughed mirthlessly as he slowly realized the position in which he found himself. Perhaps he might snatch a bit of breakfast on the strength of his likeness to this other missing ne'er-do-well, and get safely away before anyone discovered the fraud that had been thrust on him. In the room downstairs he found the bent old man ready with a dish of bacon and fried eggs for "Master Tom's" breakfast, while a hard-faced elderly maid brought in a teapot and poured him out a cup of tea. ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville, Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born in obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have been, was a woman of character, and apparently of some education. But she died ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... always shows itself. They are wonderfully charitable, not merely with money. They carp at one another, but let a man make a mess of things, and he is gently treated. I have never heard Tony admit that any man—even one who had robbed him—had not his very good points. Is a man a ne'er-do-well, a drunkard, an idler? "Ah," they say, "his father rose he up like a gen'leman, an' that's what comes o'it." In their dealings, they curiously combine generosity and close-fistedness—close-fistedness in earning, and generosity ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Hatchway, whose presence makes one forgive much. The original preface contained a scurrilous reference to Fielding, against whom he printed a diatribe in a pamphlet dated the next year. The hero of the story, a handsome ne'er-do-well who has money and position to start the world with, encounters plenty of adventure in England and out of it, by land and sea. There is an episodic book, "Memoirs, supposed to be written by a lady of quality," and really giving the checkered career of Lady Vane, a fast gentlewoman ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the master to paint another for Philip. This last has disappeared, while the canvas which remained in Venice cannot be identified with any certainty. The finest extant example of this type of Magdalen is undoubtedly that which from Titian's ne'er-do-well son, Pompinio, passed to the Barbarigo family, and ultimately, with the group of Titians forming part of the Barbarigo collection, found its way into the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. This answers in every respect to Vasari's eloquent description of ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... business at Louisville, early in the century; but in 1812, he failed in this venture, and moved to Henderson, where his neighbors thought him a trifle daft,—and certainly he was a ne'er-do-well, wandering around the woods, with hair hanging down on his shoulders, a far-away look in his eyes, and communing with the birds. In 1818, the botanist Rafinesque, on the first of his several tramps down the Ohio valley,—he had a favorite saying, that the only way for a botanist to travel, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... shall labour in vain, I fancy. If he is destined to grow into a good man, I shall not hurt him; but if the molecule meant him for a ne'er-do-well like his father, then all the pains that I might have taken to make a decent man of him would only be very hurtful to him, Education incessantly crossing the inclination of the molecule, he would be drawn as it were by two contrary forces, and would walk in zigzags along the path of life, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... enterprises, and discredited with the government, from which he vainly sought some reparation for the violence done to his journal; worst of all, he found himself without honor at home, where he was looked upon as a ne'er-do-well and a disgrace to the reputation of a fine old military family. As a last resort he applied for reinstatement in the army, it being a time when Prussia seemed to be girding herself for another struggle with Napoleon. But the attempt to borrow enough money for his military equipment failed, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... could not tell this stranger that it was the ne'er-do-well character of her only brother which caused her panic at the mere hint of taking the responsibility of his daughter, many years motherless and the companion of his wholly slipshod methods of life. In years past Calvin Trent had been ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... 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 ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... fairy lady, who, he suggests, was put in "to prevent the tale becoming an encouragement to theft." He also made Jack's character more consistent by making him more sympathetic and kind at the beginning and less of a "ne'er-do-well," though the noodle element in the selling of the cow could not be eliminated. Andrew Lang, in his Green Fairy Book, gives an excellent version of the story in its most extended form. Both the versions mentioned introduce, when the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... had not been she who had meant to steal my gold; and no matter how she had known some one meant to get at me, with wolves or anything else. It had been just Collins—and the sheer gall of it jammed my teeth—Collins and Dunn, two ne'er-do-well brats in our own mine. I had realized already that they had been missing from La Chance quite early enough for me to thank them for the boulder on my good road, and Collins——But I hastily revised my conviction that it was Collins I had heard the ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... when she married your father. Both her parents died, years ago. They only had a lease of the place they lived in, and I really cannot tell you anything whatever about them. There was a son, who would, I suppose, succeed to any property his father left; but he was a ne'er-do-well, and was seldom at home, and I have never seen or heard ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... Though the organist of the new church at Raxton, and custodian of the old deserted church on the cliffs, he was the local ne'er-do-well, drunkard, and scapegrace. He was, however, a well-connected man, reduced to his present position by drink. He had lived in Raxton until he returned to Wales, which was his birthplace—having obtained there some appointment ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... his eyes upon him gratefully. He might be a ne'er-do-well, and a genuine nuisance around the town on the river where he had grown up, but to the generous-hearted lads from the North he was only a poor hungry human being, and fortune had been ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... was the four room building, combined dwelling and shop of Mrs. Olive Edwards, widow of "Bill Edwards," once a promising young man, later town drunkard and ne'er-do-well, dead these five years, luckily for himself and luckier—in a way—for the wife who had stuck by him while he wasted her inheritance in a losing battle with John Barleycorn. At his death the fine old Seabury place had dwindled to a lone hundred feet of land, the ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... smith reared his children to his trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to do it, in the "state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." Migration to distant occupations or to foreign lands was but for the adventurous few. The ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distant places, but mankind at large stayed at home. Here and there exceptional industry or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth and turned the "man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry and endowment were powerless against the ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"—a form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady worker had a mingled admiration ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... Sicto hurried to keep up with him, but Piang had no wish to be in company with the ne'er-do-well Moro boy, and he did not try to conceal his feelings. The natural dignity of the Oriental kept Sicto from displaying his anger at the repulse, but he sullenly slackened his pace and registered a black mark ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... majority of other Germans who had emigrated before him, he was aiming for "the States," where, according to the popular idea in Europe, money can be had for nothing in the shape of any expenditure of labour, time, or trouble. Really, the ne'er-do-well and shiftless seem to regard America as a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for the idle, the lazy, and the dissolute—although, mind you, Fritz was none of these, having made up his mind to work as hard in the New World as he would have been forced to do in the ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and all The elder comic poets, great and small, If e'er a worthy in those ancient times Deserved peculiar notice for his crimes, Adulterer, cut-throat, ne'er-do-well, or thief, Portrayed him without fear in strong relief. From these, as lineal heir, Lucilius springs, The same in all points save the tune he sings, A shrewd keen satirist, yet somewhat hard And rugged, if you view him as a bard. For this ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... commissions and requests for service, he points out to them what great people the Hanskas and Mniszechs are, what infinite honor and profit it will be to be connected with them, and how desirable it is to keep struggling engineer brothers-in-law and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies out of sight lest they should disgust ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... compelled, to come and bow down before these alms-begging loblollies. To refuse to make obeisance was treason. The entire public thought of a vast section of the country has revolved around the figure of a worthless old grafter in a tattered gray shirt. Every question is settled when some moth-eaten ne'er-do-well lets out what is known as a 'rebel yell.' The most polished and profound speech conceivable is answered when a jackass mounts the platform and brays out something about the gallant boys in gray. The cry for progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is stifled, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... what grief he has caused me!" said Godeschal, "that tall ne'er-do-well of a Georges Marest is his evil genius; he ought to flee him like the plague; if not, he'll bring him to some ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac |
