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Thrifty   Listen
adjective
Thrifty  adj.  (compar. thriftier; superl. thriftiest)  
1.
Given to, or evincing, thrift; characterized by economy and good menegement of property; sparing; frugal. "Her chaffer was so thrifty and so new." "I am glad he hath so much youth and vigor left, of which he hath not been thrifty."
2.
Thriving by industry and frugality; prosperous in the acquisition of worldly goods; increasing in wealth; as, a thrifty farmer or mechanic.
3.
Growing rapidly or vigorously; thriving; as, a thrifty plant or colt.
4.
Secured by thrift; well husbanded. (R.) "I have five hundred crowns, The thrifty hire I saved under your father."
5.
Well appearing; looking or being in good condition; becoming. (Obs.) "I sit at home, I have no thrifty cloth."
Synonyms: Frugal; sparing; economical; saving; careful.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Thrifty" Quotes from Famous Books



... superior an antagonist. With a cowardly prudence they made their just discontent submit to the stern law of necessity, and imposed a hard sacrifice on their pride because their pampered vanity was capable of nothing better. Too thrifty and too discreet to wish to extort from the justice or the fear of their sovereign the certain good which they already possessed from his voluntary generosity, or to resign a real happiness in order to preserve the shadow of another, they rather employed the propitious moment to drive a traffic ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... obliged to "pass money freely over the bar," and in order to make the most of the occasion they usually stayed until morning. At such times the economic necessity itself would override the counsels of the more temperate, and the thrifty door keeper would not insist upon invitations but would take in any one who had the "price of a ticket." The free rent in the park hall, the good food in the park restaurant, supplied at cost, have made three parties closing at eleven o'clock no more expensive ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... he met Eleanor Blair. She, too, was a native of Illinois, but this fact cut a very different figure in her life from that which it cut in his. Her grandfather, a pioneer, forceful, thrifty and probably rather unscrupulous, had settled on the wonderfully fertile land at a time when one had almost to drive the Indians off it. He had accumulated it steadily to the day of his death and died in possession of about thirty thousand acres of it. It was in much this fashion ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... knew how much money was in that pile, but three or four, or maybe five or six hundred million dollars. And maybe I didn't live on the fat o' the land with it, for eight weeks! It would 'a' lasted longer only it was the divil tryin' to be thrifty with my admiral's uniform on, and then one mornin' the Hiawatha came to port, and with what I had left—forty or fifty million, or whatever it was—I gave a farewell party that night at the hotel where the banana grove was in the yard. I wore ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... servant had worked hard for his master, a thrifty farmer, for three long years, and had been paid no wages. At last it came into the man's head that he would not go on thus any longer, so he went ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous

... example, that big man with deliberate step, who suddenly forgets his indifference, made to order, and runs like a schoolboy! He is a thrifty city gentleman, who, with all his fashionable airs, is afraid to spoil ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... are few large farms even—where at least one-fourth of the soil is not either unfit for agricultural use, or so unproductive that, as pasture or as ploughland, it yields less pecuniary return than a thrifty wood. Every prairie has its sloughs where willows and poplars would find a fitting soil, every Eastern farm its rocky nooks and its barren hillsides suited to the growth of some species from our ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... In the end it takes a broom handle poked about diligently under the bottom shelf of our table to make a recovery. Before the key appear chocolates of many shapes and sizes, long reposing in oblivion under the weighty table. The thrifty Spanish woman behind me gathers up all the unsquashed ones and packs them. "Mus' be lots of chocolates under these 'ere tables, eh?" she notes wisely and with knit brows. As if to say that, were she boss, she'd ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... have poured into South America, building docks and railroads and opening up the country, and that development of South America has been to our advantage because quite frequently these enterprises were under the actual management of Americans, using to the common advantage the savings of the thrifty Frenchman and the capital ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... Monday had been thrifty, and when the days of mourning were over, his widow retired to Oxford to pass the remainder of her days with many good presents from Jack Harkaway, given in remembrance of his faithful servant Monday, ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng

... father was born, but his grandfather after that event migrated to a large cotton factory at the Blantyre Works, situated on the Clyde, above Glasgow. His uncles all entered His Majesty's service either as soldiers or sailors, but his father remained at home, and his mother, being a thrifty housewife, in order to make the two ends meet, sent her son David, at the age of ten, to the factory ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... A thrifty farmer will try to keep his soil in such good condition that it will have a supply of water in it for growing crops when dry and hot weather comes. He can do this by deep plowing, by subsoiling, by adding any kind of decaying vegetable matter to the soil, and by ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett

... The thrifty Jean was far from pleased when, on the morning after his lucky moose-shot, he found that the sled-team was short of one dog. As it happened, Jake was the first to note the absence of Bill, the ex-leader; and while he looked this way and ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... wine at length. Fill round to my good friends and guests till the wine leap over the cup. Prosperity to St. Johnston, and a merry welcome to you all, my honest friends! And now sit you to eat a morsel, for the sun is high up, and it must be long since you thrifty men have broken ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... himself characteristically in Antonio, how interesting it will be to hear his opinion of our money-making civilization. It will be as if he rose from the dead to tell us what he thinks of our doings. He has been represented by this critic and by that as a master of affairs, a prudent thrifty soul; now we shall see if this monstrous hybrid of tradesman-poet ever ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... it. In the ice-cream had previously been hidden a dime, a ring, a thimble, a button, and a nutmeg. Whoever chanced to get the ring was destined to be married first. Whoever took the dime was destined to become very wealthy. The thimble denoted a thrifty housewife; the button, a life of single blessedness; and the nutmeg, a ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells

... at Baden-Baden, plaintively gave the attendant a double fee to show that meanness had not caused my apparently thrifty act. Then for the first time in our lives we found what fresh ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... pieces; the natives washed much better, and now and then when the captain went ashore at Honolulu he liked to cut a dash in a smart duck suit. It was only a matter of arranging a price. The father wanted two hundred and fifty dollars, and the captain, never a thrifty man, could not put his hand on such a sum. But he was a generous one, and with the girl's soft face against his, he was not inclined to haggle. He offered to give a hundred and fifty dollars there and ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... local railway service. But he was a Pole, and the fine old hatred which should have been bestowed upon the Radicals fell to the lot of the Russians, and the contempt hurled by his British prototype upon Dissent was cast upon Commerce as represented in Poland by the thrifty ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... was religious,—an Old-School Baptist,—a thoughtful, quiet, exemplary man who read his Bible much. He was of spare build, serious, thrifty after the manner of pioneers, and a kind husband and father. He died, probably of apoplexy, when I was four years old. I can dimly remember him. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... the Revolutionists caused most of the small nobility of the country to forsake their homes and lands, which were consequently sold by the State rvolutionnairement, and they who acquired them were thrifty, sagacious people of the agricultural, mercantile, or official class, whose political principles bent easily before the wind that was blowing, and whose savings enabled them to profit by the misfortunes of those who had so long enjoyed ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... thrifty housewives, as well as those whom poverty has stricken, I respectfully recommend the following recipe. For dried apples: Take a handful, chew slightly, swallow, fill up with warm water and wait. Before long ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... pious. Coutances was proud of its fete. But Coutances was also a thrifty city. Once the cortege had passed, it was high time to snuff out the tapers. Who could stand by and see good candles blowing uselessly in the wind, and one's money going along ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... campaigns of the past two years, these heretofore largely unused strips of tillable land, forming in the aggregate thousands of along-the-road acres in every state, received considerable attention from the thrifty plow and hoe. But in the main, the results were not encouraging. The public will trespass, unintentionally or otherwise, upon the land cropped along the highway. Then, if the farms by the side of the road are to be conserved—used by ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... There the billiard chairs once did service in the old home on the West Side. In the hall beside the Westminster clock stood a "sofa," covered with figured velours. That had once adorned the old Twentieth Street drawing-room; and thrifty Mrs. Hitchcock had not sufficiently readjusted herself to the new state to banish it to the floor above, where it belonged with some ugly, solid brass andirons. In the same way, faithful Mr. Hitchcock had seen no good reason why he should ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... the Sound had a hopeful, thrifty aspect. Port Townsend, picturesquely located on a grassy bluff, was the port of clearance for vessels sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed for its coal-mines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North Pacific Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected as the ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir

... inhabitants, mental as well as physical, the present state of North Queensland offers interesting problems. Save for a fast-disappearing remnant, gone are the original occupiers of the land. The most listless, the least thrifty of the old peoples, have given place to representatives of the most adventurous, the most successful—men and women of British blood, of progressive ideas, vaunting and independent spirit, but with slight respect ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... abroad upon the thrifty fields and the rich glebe of the ploughman, I wonder if the revolutions of peace are not as sweeping and sudden as those of war. He who wrote the certain downfall of this Nation, did not keep his eye upon the steadily ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... astonished him to learn that somebody's foot had held the brush. Somewhere in the vicinity Grace Ferrall had discovered a woman who supported dozens of relatives by painting that sort of thing for the summer residents at Vermillion Point down the coast. So being charitable she left an order, and being thrifty, insisted on using the cards, spite of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... stable where there used to be a cow, the patch of ground planted with onions, had all been bought and paid for by the husband; for he was a thrifty, hard-working Gascon, and had he lived there would not have been one better off, or with a larger family, either in that quarter or in any of the red-washed suburbs with which Gascony has surrounded New Orleans. His women, however,—the wife and sister-in-law,—had done their share in ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King

... can be compared only to that outbreak of public feeling against the Puritans which took place at the time of the Restoration, burst on the servants of the Company. The humane man was horror-struck at the way in which they had got their money, the thrifty man at the way in which they spent it. The Dilettante sneered at their want of taste. The Maccaroni black-balled them as vulgar fellows. Writers the most unlike in sentiment and style, Methodists and libertines, philosophers ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... slowly north of Queen Charlotte Sound, and four years on the "Upper Coast" drag themselves more leisurely than twelve at the mouth of the Fraser River. Big Joe had left her with but three precious possessions—"Tenas," their boy, the warm, roomy firwood house of the thrifty Pacific Coast Indian build, and the great Totem Pole that loomed outside at its northwestern corner like a guardian of her welfare and the undeniable hallmark of their child's honorable ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... whom came to New Brunswick and settled near Fredericton—we find such names as VanHorne, Vanderbeck, Ackerman, Fisher, Burkstaff, Swim, Ridner, VanWoert, Woolley, etc. By the settlement of so many men of this corps in New-Brunswick, the same thrifty "Knickerbocker" element that figured in the development of New-York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania was planted in ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher

... The more thrifty and less liberal owners, who remained the greater part of the year on their estates, were perhaps more respected but still less liked. Any attempt at careful management of the estate was invariably considered to be a sign of stinginess or of hardheartedness. The ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,

... a much more pleasant object when seen through a binocular than when he is close to you. His frizzy locks are generally clotted with rancid butter, his slender garment is not over clean. He is a very plucky individual, as we know, thrifty, and lives upon next to nothing, but many live upon him. Several graybeards came up to salute their sheikh, who was traveling with us, and this they did by pressing his hand many times, and bowing low, but they glanced at us with no amiable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... horse and "drag" into the field; it was Edgar Wilbur, one of the lads whom I had seen the day before while coming from church. The Wilburs lived at the farm next beyond the Edwardses, about three-quarters of a mile distant from us. Mr. Wilbur was not a wholly thrifty farmer, and often borrowed tools at the Old Squire's. Edgar had now come for ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... that they held little in common with him. The neighboring farmers were honest, thrifty souls, and among them were many both shrewd and thoughtful; but they naturally would not force themselves upon the society of the one really rich man in their community, especially as that man had shown ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne

... a manner more flattering to himself he would have felt that there was a good deal to be said for them. In fact, he had put the same thing to himself some time previously, and, in summing up the American matter, had reached certain thrifty decisions. The impulse to knock her down surged within him solely because he had a brutally bad temper when his vanity was insulted, and he was furious at her impudence in speaking to him as if he were a villager out ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... and she is ready to drop from fatigue, are spent in mending and patching. The day is one long GRIND, without rest or enjoyment, or the pleasure of chance intercourse with cultivated people. The few visitors who have "happened in" are the thrifty wives of prosperous settlers, full of housewifely pride, whose one object seems to be to make Mrs. H. feel her inferiority to themselves. I wish she did take a more genuine interest in the "coming-on" of the last calf, the ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... a plump, little old maid of thirty-five, with smoothly drawn, tightly twisted hair that made her look still older. Old-fashioned, too, she was; but antebellum glory did not radiate from her as it did from the Major. She possessed a thrifty common sense, and it was she who handled the finances of the family, and met all comers when there were bills to pay. The Major regarded board bills and wash bills as contemptible nuisances. They kept coming in so persistently and so often. Why, the Major wanted to know, could they not ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... a thrifty, well-to-do man, anxious to give his children greater advantages than he had enjoyed, and to improve the fine place of which he was justly proud. Mrs. Grant was a notable housewife, as ambitious and industrious as her ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... other hand, they were careless, if they allowed him and his eighty thousand men to perish without an effort to save them, the independence which they had ceased to deserve would be lost forever. He had food, he bade the messengers say, for thirty days; by thrifty management it might be made to last a few days longer. In thirty days he should ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... 'schoolma'am' at Valley Road, boarding at 'Wayside,' the home of Miss Janet Sweet. Janet is a dear soul and very nicelooking; tall, but not over-tall; stoutish, yet with a certain restraint of outline suggestive of a thrifty soul who is not going to be overlavish even in the matter of avoirdupois. She has a knot of soft, crimpy, brown hair with a thread of gray in it, a sunny face with rosy cheeks, and big, kind eyes as blue as forget-me-nots. Moreover, she is one of those ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... hierarchy of caste does not exist in the fields, and if the laborer is thrifty, he becomes, by taking a farm in his turn, the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... still persisted in haggling and huckstering over every dollar, and in tricking his friends in the smallest and most underhand ways. Friends in the true sense of the word he had none; those who regarded themselves as such were of that thrifty, congealed disposition swayed largely by calculation. But if they expected to gain overmuch by their intimacy, they were generally vastly mistaken; nearly always, on the contrary, they found themselves caught in some unexpected snare, and ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... repeated and then with great violence, with almost alcoholic violence, with the round eyes and shouting voice and shaken fist and blaspheming violence of a sordid, thrifty peasant enraged, "it's going to end a Damned ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... eldest of five children, and her parents, though poor, were kept removed from want by constant frugality and industry. Her father labored for the neighboring farmers, and her mother was a thrifty, notable housewife, somewhat addicted to loud talking and scolding, but considered a very ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... uncle, together with his place of president a mortier. Vian, Histoire de Montesquieu, 16, 30.] He was recognized in early life as a rising man, a respectable magistrate, sensible and brilliant rather than learned; a man of the world, rich and thrifty, not very happily married, and fond of the society of ladies. In appearance he was ugly, with a large head, weak eyes, a big nose, a retreating forehead and chin. In temperament he was calm and cheerful. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... sensations of joy O'er all my fond bosom were poured, Resumed was each former employ, And gay thrifty order restored: The blaze flickered up to the crook, The reel clicked again by the door, The dame turned her wheel in the nook, And frisked the sweet babes ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte

... conditions, already spoken of, under which Kansas was settled, all classes were represented in its population. Honest, thrifty farmers and well-to-do traders leavened a lump of shiftless ne'er-do-wells, lawless adventurers, and vagabonds of all sorts and conditions. If father at times questioned the wisdom of coming to this new and untried land, he kept his own counsel, and set a brave ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... Polly's attention to the fact that the few apple trees we saw were healthy and well grown, though quite independent of the farmer's or the pruner's care. This thrifty condition of unkept apple orchards delighted me. I intended to make apple-growing a prominent feature in my experiment, and I reasoned that if these trees did fairly well without cultivation or care, others would do excellently well ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... the place quilt making held in the community, and how the many intricate patterns of patchwork pleasantly occupied the spare moments of the women, thus serving as a means of expression of their love of colour and design. The following little domestic picture shows how conveniently near the thrifty housewife kept her quilt blocks: "A low chair with a seat of twisted osier, on which was tied a loose feather-filled cushion, covered with some gay material. On the back of these chairs hung the bag of ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... face—with a possible friendship in it—were exceedingly pleasing, in contrast with the first visitor's nasal twang and 'smart' demeanour. Mrs. Wynn would like to see her often; but the Scotchwoman was thrifty and hardworking, with a large family to provide for: she could not afford to pay visits, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... still keeps up the ancient and honoured custom of bringing in the boar's head—"the chief service of this land"—for dinner on Christmas Day; while on New Year's Day, the Bursar still, as has been done for nearly 600 years, bids his guests "take this and be thrifty," as he hands each a "needle and thread," wherewith to mend their academic hoods; the /aiguille et fil/ is probably a pun on the name of the founder, Robert Eglesfield. The College at these festivities uses the loving, cup, given it by its founder, perhaps the oldest piece of plate in constant use ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... burst of music, touching all The keys of thrifty life,—the mill-stream's fall, The engine's pant along its quivering rails, The anvil's ring, the measured beat of flails, The sweep of scythes, the reaper's whistled tune, Answering the summons of the bells of noon, The woodman's hail along the river shores, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... Skidder, thrifty by every instinct, and now smarting under his wrongs at the hands—and feet—of the Red Flag Club, went away in his gorgeous limousine to find Sondheim, who paid the rental and who lived in ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... at St Lin, Quebec, on November 20, 1841. His ancestral roots were sunk deep in Canadian soil. For six generations Quebec had been the home of Laurier after Laurier. His kinsmen traced their origin to Anjou, a province that ever bred shrewd and thrifty men. The family name was originally Cottineau. In a marriage covenant entered into at Montreal in 1666 the first representative of the family in Canada is styled 'Francois Cottineau dit Champlauriet.' Evidently some ancestral field or garden of lauriers or oleanders gave the descriptive title which ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... could say of Mehetabel that she had been frivolous and forward. Reserved, even in a tavern: always able to maintain her dignity; respecting herself, she had enforced respect from others. That she was hard-working, shrewd, thrifty, none who visited the Ship could ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... insists on a rigorous discipline. She would stimulate industry and the cultivation of moderate abilities, as more likely to win in the long race of life,—even as a barren soil and ungenial climate have generally produced the most thrifty people. She would banish frivolous books which give only superficial knowledge, and even those abridgments and compendiums which form too considerable a part of ordinary libraries, and recommends instead those works which exercise the reasoning faculties ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... lonely cot appears in view, Beneath the shelter of an aged tree; Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through To meet their dead, wi' flichterin noise and glee. His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie, His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie's smile, The lisping infant, prattling on his knee, Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile, And makes him quite forget his labour ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... heard for future profit and pleasure. A few samples of the different ways in which our young travellers improved their opportunities will sufficiently illustrate this new version of the gay grasshopper and the thrifty ant. ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... That done, she set the kitchen to rights, made the beds, sprinkled clean sand upon the floor, wet the web of linen bleaching on the grass in the orchard, then slipped upstairs and set the spinning-wheel to humming. His neighbors said that Mr. Walden was thrifty and could afford to wear a broadcloth blue coat with bright brass buttons on grand occasions, and that Mrs. Walden was warranted in having a ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... loved to meet Samuel Franklin, Uncle Benjamin's son, who also had caught the gentle philosopher's spirit, and was making good his father's intention. Samuel was a thrifty man in ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth

... few fishermen to the Banks of Newfoundland, and that was all. The English had made one or two voyages and appeared to be no longer interested. (See Chapter XIV, Cabot) The Dutch seemed to be only sturdy fishermen, thrifty farmers, or keen traders, occupied much of the time in the struggle against the North Sea, which threatened to burst the dikes and ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton

... So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink From the duty of giving you something for drink, And a matter of money to put in your poke; But as for the guilders, what we spoke Of them, as you very well know, was in joke. Besides, our losses have made us thrifty; A thousand guilders! Come, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... are rangy, and these being particularly strong and thrifty, they soon ran the old hen pretty ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... of practical anti-slaveryism, having been among them. It appears that Thomas's grandson Richard started in life as a blacksmith, which was no strange thing in those primitive times; but, being a thrifty and enterprising man, he lived to establish a line of stage-coaches between Salem and Boston, and this continued in the possession of his family until it was superseded by the Eastern Railway. After this catastrophe, Robert Manning, the son of Richard ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... to our friend Silas, and to most of his class, is a bee hunt. Neither deer, nor 'coons, nor prairie hens, nor even bears, prove half as powerful enemies to anything like regular business, as do these little thrifty vagrants of the forest. The slightest hint of a bee tree will entice Silas Ashburn and his sons from the most profitable job of the season, even though the defection is sure to result in entire loss of the offered advantage; and if the hunt prove successful, the luscious spoil is generally too tempting ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... rest. Tables go with the chairs without extra charge, waiters follow up the tables, and soon all the world is sipping its coffee or cordials, and listening to Zampa. Outside, around the fence enclosing the little park, revolves an endless procession of the poorer people,—thrifty folk who are here as earners, not spenders, and would not dream of melting their two sous into a chair. Round the small enclosure they go, by couples or threes, like asteroids round the sun, staring with interest at the more aristocratic assemblage within,—just as the family circle stares ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... a thrifty plantation, we were in front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout. His ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... shop, and smiles; and when Brede himself comes up for some coffee, she tells him jestingly that he must pay for it like the rest. And Brede actually takes out his lean purse and pays. "There's a wife for you," he says to the others. "Thrifty, what?" ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... from the expulsion of the thrifty Moriscos, who were the descendants of the old Moors. The edict of expulsion against the Valencian Moriscos was issued on September 22, 1609, by the viceroy Caracena. Its political excuse was negotiations between the Moriscos and English to effect a rising against Felipe III. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various

... football match as intended solely to replenish the town coffers, the thrifty townsfolk of Rye, with bicycles and red flags, were, as usual, and regardless of the speed at which it moved, levying tribute on every second car that entered their hospitable boundaries. But before the Scarlet ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... for which they agreed to pay at the rate of five pounds per acre. They paid for it partly in "bills of credit on the Province of Massachusetts," and gave a mortgage for the remainder. And so fertile was this wild land, and so thrifty was the young pioneer farmer Israel Putnam, that within little more than two years he had liquidated the mortgage and received a quit-claim deed from the Governor, as well as purchased his brother-in-law's portion of the ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober

... thread of the pasture you trace, By the river, their milk, for miles, Spotted once with the English tent, In days of the tocsin's alarms, To tower of the tallest of piles, The country's surveyor breast-high. Home of her birth and her love! Home of a diligent race; Thrifty, deft-handed to ply Shuttle or needle, and woo Sun to the roots of the pear Frogging each mud-walled cot. The elders had known her in arms. There plucked we the bluet, her hue Of the deeper forget-me-not; Well wedding ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... spring; but these had long ago been gathered in, and the land was now enjoying its Sabbath, to be continued for six long months, before it would again yield of its productions, for the benefit of its hardy and thrifty owners. ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert

... Or if he will see what a few years of vigorous cultivation will do, he may visit Escondido, on the river of that name, which is at an elevation of less than a thousand feet, and fourteen miles from the ocean. This is only one of many settlements that have great natural beauty and thrifty industrial life. In that region are numerous attractive villages. I have a report from a little canon, a few miles north of Escondido, where a woman with an invalid husband settled in 1883. The ground was thickly covered with ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... his luck had been, he resolved not to be cast down: he was as diligent and as thrifty as ever; and he resolved, when he became Buergermeister of Rapps, to be especially severe on sneaking thieves, who crept into houses that were left to the care of Providence and the municipal authorities. A light was everlastingly ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... lived on her wages; and all the tips added up, and never spent, year after year, went to swell a very comfortable little account at interest in the Birkbeck Bank. This little account had mounted up to a very tidy sum, and the thrifty widow—or old maid—no one ever knew which she was—was generally referred to by the young artists of the Rubens Studios as a 'lady of means.' But this is ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy

... built with such slight regard for pantry room that we are constrained to wonder if, at the last minute, the pantry was not tucked into a little space for which there was absolutely no other use, and there left to be a means of grace to the thrifty housewife, whose pride it is to see her pots and pans in orderly array and with plenty of room to shine in. At this point there comes to her rescue the kitchen cabinet, which not only relieves the congestion in ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... most persistent correspondents was his son-in-law, Nathaniel Sparhawk, a thrifty merchant, with a constant eye to business, who generally began his long-winded epistles with a bulletin concerning the health of "Mother Pepperrell," and rarely ended them without charging his father-in-law with some commission, such as buying for him the cargo of a French prize, if he could ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... have more character between them than you could extract out of fifty of the usual nouvelles, and each lends him or herself to endless further development. Not a few of the separate scenes—the good parents fussing over their daughter's intended cavalcade and her thrifty and ingenious objections; the journey of the uncle and niece (any of the first three of the great novelists mentioned above would have made chapters of this); the dramatic and risky passages at the castle en Barrois; the contrast of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... Entwistle had brought the fainting child from out the flames. The days were long and the weather warm, and the inhabitants of Rehoboth spent the sunny hours in wandering over the moors, never dreaming of hard times and the closing year. A few of the more frugal and thrifty families had secured employment in a neighbouring valley, returning home at the week end. The many, however, awaited the rebuilding of the mill and the recommencement of work at their old haunt. But when the autumn set ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... choked by brambles. Other seeds have been cast out with the chaff upon the dung heap, and after various mutations, have come in contact with a clod of earth, through which they have sent their roots, and have finally grown into thrifty plants. A thought thrown out on the world, if it possesses vital force, never dies. How much is remembered of the work of our greatest men? Only a sentence here and there; and many a man whose name will ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... remaining in the State of Pennsylvania about two years, they came to make their home in Tuscarawas county, Ohio, where, on the 26th day of December, 1825, their son, Stephen Buhrer, was born. That region at that time (fifty years ago) was remarkably wild and rough, and inhospitable, but since, by the thrifty German population, by whom it was mainly inhabited, it has become scarcely inferior to any other part of the State in agricultural wealth. But the father of Stephen Buhrer was not destined to live to see this prosperity. He died in the year ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... of New England, impressed with that thrifty orthodoxy of economy which forbids to waste the merest trifle, had a habit of saving every scrap clipped out in the fashioning of household garments, and these they cut into fanciful patterns and constructed of them rainbow shapes and quaint traceries, the arrangement of which became one of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... use cryin' over spilt milk; we'd better go home an' husk out the rest o' that corn.' Old Foxy could have inherited plenty o' meanness from his father, that's certain, an' he's added to his inheritance right along, like the thrifty man he is. I hate to think o' them two fine girls wearin' their fingers to ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... I was told this story. In a village in a far part of the prefecture there lived a farmer called Yosogi. He was a thrifty and diligent man. When he became old he gave all that he had to his son. But the old man could not stop working. He would go to the farm and help his son. The son did not like this. He wanted his old father to rest. In the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... the infidel yoke, they were allowed to dwell in peace, busy, industrious, with the halo of home-coming in their hearts. They paid, of course, their Turkish taxes, but these were not levied in any oppressive manner, and their colonies were thrifty, self-governing, and prosperous. Already before the war, one-tenth of the cultivated land in Palestine was in their hands, they had their own schools, their own methods of organisation, and, more significant than all, Hebrew became a living language again. Germany, intent on ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... tobacco or unions! The men works eight easy hours a delightful day, six days a week and they are happy, hardy and healthy! Promotion is regular, rapid and regardless! Our employees is all loyal, likable and Lithuanians! They own their own cottages, clothes and chickens, bein' thrifty, temperate and—" ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer

... in the hammock, she mended a pair of brier-torn stockings; and when that thrifty and praiseworthy task was finished, she lay back and thought ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... minding his own farm; he was a small proprietor, possessing a bit of land and a cow or two. Two cows, she informed us, as we chatted on, would suffice for the maintenance of a family of five persons. Such reckoning, of course, only holds good of thrifty, homely France. The magic of property not only turns sands to gold: it teaches the great lesson of looking forward, of confronting the morrow—realizing 'the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... and knifed at the lashings, working to clear the big boat. She was turned down on the skids (the fashion of thrifty 'limejuicers'), bound and bolted to stand the heavy weather. We were handless, unnerved by the suddenness of it all, faulty at the task. The roar of breaking water spurred us on.... A heave together! .... Righted, we hooked the falls and swayed her up. The Mate looked aft for the ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... lay among piles of less distinguished slain. They remained unburied until the overseers of the poor, on whom the living had then more importunate claims than the dead, were compelled by Roda to bury them out of the pauper fund. The murderers were too thrifty to be at funeral charges for their victims. The ceremony was not hastily performed, for the number of corpses had not been completed. Two days longer the havoc lasted in the city. Of all the crimes which men can commit, whether ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... yield the utmost satisfaction to the promoters of the Act, in proving to them the fell measure of their achievement. One example of these experiences was that of a white farmer who had induced a thrifty Native in another district to come and farm on his estate. The contract was duly executed about the end of May, 1913. It was agreed that the Native should move over to the new place after gathering his crops and sharing them with his old landlord, which he did in the third week in June. On ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... touches, and its greatest beauty lay in the details which she could not light up. The soft and rich colours of grain and grass, the waving tints of broken ground and hillside, were lost now; the flowers in the hedges had shrunk into obscurity; the thrifty and well-to-do order of every field and haystack, could hardly be noted even by one who knew it was there. Only the white soft glimmer on a wide pleasant land; the faint lighting of one side of trees and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner

... call it bearberry, I believe; and there is a Latin name for it, no doubt, in the books. But kinnikinnick is the best,—dainty, sturdy, indefatigable kinnikinnick, green and glossy all the year round, lovely at Christmas and lovely among flowers at midsummer, as content and thrifty on bare, rocky hillsides as in grassy nooks, growing in long, trailing wreaths, five feet long, or in tangled mats, five feet across, as the rock or the valley may need, and living bravely many weeks without water, to make a house beautiful. I doubt if there be in the world a vine I ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... since then, and it is often jocularly remarked by Englishmen in the country that so long as an enemy makes things square with the womenfolk they need have no fear of the men. The women may have the reputation of knowing and doing more than the men, but they are certainly not thrifty. They are kind to travellers (provided they come on horseback and not on foot); but their kindness is too often spoiled by the dirt and general undesirability of the atmosphere within their dwellings. A traveller can appreciate a cup of coffee after a long ride; but he likes to ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann

... in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days' notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud, who's deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: 'Come then to Lancaster Gate—to sleep ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... called them Myrmidons,[106] and did not deprive their name {of the marks} of their origin. Thou hast beheld their persons. Even still do they retain the manners which they formerly had; and they are a thrifty race, patient of toil, tenacious of what they get, and what they get they lay up. These, alike in years and in courage, will attend thee to the war, as soon as the East wind, which brought thee prosperously hither (for the East ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... buccaneer had sunk a Spanish galleon laden with pieces of eight and ingots of despoiled Mexico. The people thereabout are a simple, credulous race of Spanish Creoles, speaking no English, keeping the saints' days, and watching the salt-pans of the more energetic but scarcely more thrifty Americans with curious wonder. They chanced in their broken tongue to commit the story of the treasure to a diver of an equally simple faith, who set about putting it to more practical use than to gild an hour with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... cubic feet of timber of all classes annually. Our forests are making annual growth at the rate of less than one-fourth of this total consumption. We are rapidly cutting away the last of our virgin forests. We also are cutting small-sized and thrifty trees much more rapidly ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack

... proved to be a very antiquated sloop called the Spray, which the neighbors declared had been built in the year 1. She was affectionately propped up in a field, some distance from salt water, and was covered with canvas. The people of Fairhaven, I hardly need say, are thrifty and observant. For seven years they had asked, "I wonder what Captain Eben Pierce is going to do with the old Spray?" The day I appeared there was a buzz at the gossip exchange: at last some one had come and was actually at work on the old Spray. "Breaking her ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... "benevolence and other rare qualities of spirit" might to advantage give place to "economy and genius for method." Accordingly, the speech mentally composed, he said aloud that, having heard of Plushkin's talents for thrifty and systematic management, he had considered himself bound to make the acquaintance of his host, and to present him with his personal compliments (I need hardly say that Chichikov could easily have alleged a better reason, had any better ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... rest there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband, taking away much of the energy from what should have been the most active portion of his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him, that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning, I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade) would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr. Dolliver's ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... they sate, Father and Son, while far into the night 125 The Housewife plied her own peculiar work, Making the cottage through the silent hours Murmur as with the sound of summer flies. This light was famous in its neighborhood, And was a public symbol of the life 130 That thrifty Pair had lived. For, as it chanced; Their cottage on a plot of rising ground Stood single, with large prospect, north and south, High into Easedale, up to Dunmail-Raise, And westward to the village near the lake; 135 And from ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... than that the man who warred against the convict system, fought the battle of colonial self-government, was ever the enemy of the land-shark and monopolist, who denounced low wages, and whose dream it was that the thrifty, well-paid colonial labourer could and should develop into the prospering farmer, should be railed at in the Colonies as the enemy of the labourer. The faults of Wakefield's "sufficient price" theory were indeed ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... the mountain of "Two Leaves" is all a-shimmer with the coming day. Thatched roof and bamboo grove are daintily etched against the amber dawn. Lights begin to twinkle and thrifty tradesmen cheerfully ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... ground and these filled between with plaster, and so immaculately whitewashed that they gleamed against the green of the trees which shaded them. Behind the houses was often a kind of pink-and-cream paradise of flowering fruit trees, so dear to the French settlers. There were vineyards, too, and thrifty patches of vegetables, and lines of flowers set in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill



Words linked to "Thrifty" :   penny-wise, thriftiness, economical, careful, saving, stinting, scotch, sparing, wasteful



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