"Nefarious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of that there could be no doubt, a captive in the hands of the giant criminal whose wiles were endless, whose resources were boundless, whose intense cunning had enabled him, for years, to weave his nefarious plots in the very heart of civilization, and remain ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... earnings, sets her free under the necessity of seeking new victims to offset the fine, offers her no incentive to lead any other life, incidentally increases opportunities for police graft, and virtually gives the sanction of the law to the whole nefarious business. The ostrich with his head buried in the sand sees our gravest social problem about as clearly and wholly as do many who are administering laws concerning ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... nefarious trade was generally third or fourth proof whiskey, which, after being diluted by a mixture of three parts water, was sold to the savages at the exorbitant rate of three cups for a single buffalo-robe, each cup holding ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... were singled out to undergo the punishment of death. The first lieutenant also was to be among their victims. The lads could not tell what hour it was, nor how long they would have to remain in their present position. They dreaded that the mutineers would instantly go on deck and carry out their nefarious plans. Young Denham's chief wish was to hurry off and warn those who had been chiefly threatened. "If the officers have time to show a bold front, the men will not dare to act against them," he thought; "but if ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... your nefarious designs, yes!" answered the son of Monte-Cristo, with equal warmth. "You are my friend, my friend of friends, Giovanni Massetti, but the instant you menace that innocent girl's honor my friendship for you ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... law to define their punishment in most states, and no law at all in twenty-four states, as a preliminary security, corrupt opponents of a woman suffrage amendment find many additional aids to their nefarious acts. A briber must make sure that the bribed carries out his part of the contract. Whenever it is easy to check up the results of the bribe, corruption may reign supreme with little risk of being found out. A study of ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... he had been in receipt of large annual retaining fees from the principal commercial firms of the country; that of one shipping company alone amounted to fifty thousand francs. They found it worth their while since, without doing a stroke of work for them, he gave his tacit support to their most nefarious undertakings. A useful man! As a lawyer in private cases his reputation was tremendous. Judges and juries had been known to faint with emotion at his dramatic gestures, his fiery eloquence. He could pull anybody out of a scrape. Wherever he spoke the Court was crowded to listen to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Bwana, as the head-man called him, had surprised "Hanson" in his nefarious work. Would he not guess the truth and possibly be already on the march to overtake and punish him? Baynes had heard much of his host's summary method of dealing out punishment to malefactors great ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of every land abandoned women are so numerous, despite all these centuries of law-making and moralizing, that they find it impossible to earn a livelihood by their nefarious trade—are driven by sheer necessity to seek more respectable employment. The supply of public prostitutes is apparently limited only by the demand, while the number of "kept women" is constantly increasing, and society becoming day by day more lenient to those favorites ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that Byron had too much empeiria (an excess of mondanite—a this-worldliness), found it hard to read Beppo after Macbeth. "I felt," he says, "the predominance of a nefarious, empirical world, with which the mind which introduced it to us has in a certain measure associated itself" (Conversations of Goethe, etc., 1874, p. 175). But Beppo must be taken at its own valuation. It is A Venetian Story, and the action takes place behind the scenes ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... their normal condition, and the traditions say that the Master instructed them regarding the evil courses which they had been pursuing, and bade them desist from their nefarious practices which had wrought such evil consequences ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... subject dropped, but the imp of mischief still flickered defiantly in the golden-brown eyes, and when, after dinner was over, Maria brought in the coffee, Ann threw out a tentative remark which instantly achieved its nefarious purpose of loosening the ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... computation, but generally as a point of hospitality. For I am of the same opinion as M——, a very able friend of mine in Liverpool, who looks upon it as criminal to concede anything a man says in the process of a disputation: the nefarious habit of assenting (as he justly says) being the pest of conversation, by causing it to stagnate. On this account he often calls aside the talking men of the party before dinner, and conjures them with a pathetic earnestness not to agree with him in anything he may advance during the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... final exposition, years of utter ruin to my prospects and my hopes. Wentworth might be married by that time, or indifferent, or dead; Ernie too old to make the matter of a year or two of consequence in the carrying out of the nefarious scheme to sustain which it would be so easy to summon ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a young detective saves the boys from the clutches of Chinese smugglers, of whose nefarious trade they know too much. How the Professor's invention relieves a critical situation is also an ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... the cells is not applied until the end of the work, all that they need do is to demolish the lid, a hard and wearisome task, but not beyond the strength of their mandibles. They therefore attack the door, the cement disk, and reduce it to dust. The criminal is allowed to carry out her nefarious designs without the slightest interference or protest from any of her neighbours, though these must necessarily include the chief party interested. The Bee is as forgetful of her cell of yesterday as she is jealous of her actual cell. To her the present ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... Origen be anathema together with that Adamantius who set forth these opinions together with his nefarious and execrable doctrine, and whoever there is who thinks thus or defends these opinions, or in any way hereafter at any time shall presume to ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Mr. Briggerland. "I fear that he and Hoggins were engaged in some nefarious plan and that in making an attempt to enter—as, of course, they had no right to enter—a block of flats in Cavendish Place, poor Talmot slipped and fell from the fourth floor window-sill, breaking his leg. Hoggins had to ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... studio, in St. James's-street, suggested to the luxuriant mind of the Adonisian D'Orsay, this beautiful combination of costume and upholstery. The eighteen-shilling chintz great-coats, so ostentatiously put forward by nefarious tradesmen as dressing-gowns, and which resemble pattern-cards of the vegetable kingdom, are unworthy the notice of all gentlemen—of course excepting those who are so by act of Parliament. Although it is generally imagined that the coat is the principal article of dress, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... never felt my weakness more acutely than now, Geraldine, but it is stronger than I. Can I cease to interest myself in the fortunes of the unhappy young man who supped with us some hours ago? Can I leave the President to follow his nefarious career unwatched? Can I begin an adventure so entrancing, and not follow it to an end? No, Geraldine, you ask of the Prince more than the man is able to perform. To-night, once more, we take our places at the table of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commonest rights of humanity this nefarious business was allowed to flourish triumphant. The bitter wail of widows and orphans was silenced by the clamour for gold until all nature revolted against it. The earth and the waters under the earth seemed to call aloud for the infamy to be stayed. The rumbling ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... broken any laws. He is an honorable individual. Let's now suppose that in the near future, someone becomes educated by his process and at the age of twelve or so decided to make use of his advanced intelligence in nefarious work?" ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... I went to tell Fadda Pierce of the trouble which had befallen me, and he consoled me with the assurance that the work of destruction had been wrought—not by a human being, as I had surmised, but by cutworms, a kind of reptile that plies its nefarious trade between two days for no other apparent purpose than that of making gentlemen farmers ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... might have eased her of this burthen;" and she desired that he would yet "deal with secretary Walsingham to write jointly to sir Amias and sir Drue Drury to sound them in this matter; "aiming still at this, that it might be so done as the blame might be removed from herself." This nefarious commission Davison strangely consented to execute, though he declares that he had always before refused to meddle therein "upon sundry of her majesty's motions,"—as a thing which he utterly disapproved; and though he was fully persuaded that the wisdom and integrity of sir ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a small gilt clock startled her when at length she stood ready for the next step in her nefarious career: the hour-hand was passing ten. ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... filled with flags, representing almost every nation on earth. Evidently the Santa Marie was willing to fly any colors, which would insure safety, or allay suspicion in her nefarious trade. I dragged these out, and spread them on the deck abaft the cabin, thus forming a very comfortable bed, and at last induced the girl to lie down, wrapping her in a blanket. But, although she reclined there, and ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... whereas in the course of our care and watchings over the order and police of all and sundry the manufacturers, retainers, and venders of poesy; bards, poets, poetasters, rhymers, jinglers, songsters, ballad-singers, &c. &c. &c. &c., male and female—We have discovered a certain nefarious, abominable, and wicked song or ballad, a copy whereof We have here enclosed; Our Will therefore is, that Ye pitch upon and appoint the most execrable individual of that most execrable species, known by the appellation, phrase, and nick-name ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... to do if his friends take advantage of his absence, and go giving him gold medals behind his back? That you have been an accomplice in this nefarious plot—mine own familiar friend whom I trusted and trust—is not to be denied. Well, it is very pleasant to have toil that is now all ancient history remembered, and I shall go to the meeting and the dinner and make my speech in spite of as many possible devils of dyspepsia ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... of England were, however, enabled to punish the French severely for their audacious project of invading our "tight little island," and for their still more nefarious plan, which had been hatched under the sanction of their king, for assassinating the constitutional and Protestant monarch whom her people had chosen, and imposing on them in his stead ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... restricting production through trick or device, by plot or conspiracy against competitors, or by oppression of wage-workers, and then extorting high prices for the commodity it had made artificially scarce, it would be prevented from organizing if its nefarious purpose could be discovered in time, or pursued and suppressed by all the power of Government whenever found in actual operation. Such a commission, with the power I advocate, would put a stop to abuses of big corporations and small corporations alike; it would draw ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... delivered of a numerous offspring. The village saw itself overrun with a race and a perpetuity of Corporal's cats! Perhaps, too, their teacher growing more expert by practice, the descendants might attain to even greater accomplishment than their nefarious progenitor. No longer did the faint hope of being delivered from their tormentor by an untimely or even natural death, occur to the harassed Grassdalians. Death was an incident natural to one cat, however vivacious, but here was a dynasty of ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might reasonably be supposed to exist. But in British Columbia I used to catch them in quantities and with an ease unknown to Englishmen. I am told (by an expert) that using a grasshopper as a bait is no better than poaching, and that I might as well take to the nefarious "white line," or Cocculus indicus. That may be so according to the deeper ethics of the sport, but I am inclined to think many men would have no desire to fish at all after going through the preliminary task of filling a small tin can ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... realized that there was not the slightest prospect of any sleep, and that the morrow looked like being a busy day, we commenced with characteristic fed-up vigour to carry out our nefarious design. ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... not reply for a moment. He was looking at her and thinking how perfect in every way she was now, as she stood there purged of sentimentality, all aglow with curiosity to know how her nefarious plans had succeeded. It was his Ann who stood there, not the author ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... aroused by a long, vociferous pounding on the door. He started up in bed to find himself alone—the victim of his wrathful irony having evidently risen and fled away while his pitiless tormentor slept—"Doubtless to at once accomplish that nefarious intent as set forth by his unblushing confession of last night," mused the miserable John. And he ground his fingers in the corners of his swollen eyes, and leered grimly in the glass at the feverish orbs, blood-shotten, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... stopping, when she had climbed halfway upstairs, of suddenly jerking her head round to see whether any one were looking at her. You would have sworn, had you seen her, that she was deeply engaged upon some nefarious and underhand plot; yet it was not so-she was simply going to dust some of her hideous china treasures ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... of malice infernal spirits possess is evident from their nefarious arts, which are so many that to enumerate them would fill a volume, and to describe them would fill many volumes. These arts are mostly unknown in the world. One kind relates to abuses of correspondences; a second to abuses of the outmosts of Divine order; a third ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... it was so foreign. The upper part of the town had been empty and eerie. This quarter was eerie, alien, and occupied. It was difficult for her to tell what so many people were doing abroad because their aims seemed different from those of daylight. What she couldn't understand struck her as nefarious; and what struck her as nefarious filled her with the kind of terror that ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Coffee—The adulteration of articles of human food is a practice of the most nefarious description, and cannot be too strongly deprecated, although it has been carried to an alarming extent. There is scarcely an article of ordinary consumption but has been unlawfully adulterated, and in many cases rendered injurious by the infamous and fraudulent practice of interested persons. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... clubs, and leaving the gun lying by their nest, the boys slipped over the dike and dashed upon the marauder. So occupied was the latter with his nefarious task that he heard nothing till the boys were within ten feet of him. Then he started up, and ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... assuredly, among his sprinkling of acquaintances, would have believed that he could stoop to lower things, or that he and his equally unscrupulous and useful tool, Victor Nevill, the gay young-man-about-town, had been mixed up in more than one nefarious transaction that would not bear the light of day. He had taken the place in Wardour street within the past five years, and prior to that time he had held a responsible position as purchasing agent—there was not a better judge of pictures in Europe—with the well-known firm of Lamb ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... to omit any mention of the Paul Revere's captain, remembering just in time that hardy riverman's promise to blow his brains out if he even so much as breathed his name in connection with certain nefarious transactions,—and something told him that Cephas Redberry would put a short, sharp stop to any breathing at all on his part the instant he laid eyes on him. He was not afraid of Barry Lapelle but he was in deadly terror of Redberry. The more he thought of Ceph being landed in the same ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... "steam-boating" in general, Ben Wilford was a very unskillful pilot. If he had understood the management of a boat half as well as Lawry, the nefarious scheme might have been successful. He saw his brother; he did not wish to have him come on board, for Lawry might be so obstinate as to induce one of his dissolute companions to fire at him. He rang the bell to stop her, and then to go ahead, at the same time ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... anything was wanting to prove you guilty, it was this fact. Could any one but an expert counterfeiter have in his possession three hundred and ninety-one ducats without a single false one, in these dishonest days? But a coiner, whose nefarious business it is to exchange counterfeit coin for genuine, is not to be deceived ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... target practice given to Marie by the Spaniards, in times past, now found a new reward. She organized the Filipinos into squads for this training, arranged suitable targets for them, supervised the loading and cleaning of their guns, and by voluntary assent became the leader in a whole lot of nefarious mischief in the neighborhood. ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... who, since the attack on Kaspar in 1829, had been curious about him, came to Nuremberg, and 'took up' the hero, with fantastic fondness. Though he recognised Kaspar's mythopoeic tendencies, he believed him to be the victim of some nefarious criminals, and offered a reward of 500 florins, anonymously, for information. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital. I saw knavery in the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... shoved and pushed and clawed her down—that unseen nefarious crowd in the city—and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted at ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... harder part of the work. While Mexico and Peru were under the mother country, the Mita or law of compulsion existed, the Indians being forced to toil against their will in the mines, but since the emancipation of the colonies and the abolition of that nefarious law, they have returned to their agricultural pursuits, and are only occasionally found of their own free will labouring ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... me tightly, and for a moment a chill ran over me at being caught in the nefarious work of breaking and entering a dwelling-house at night. But it was only Kennedy, who had already tucked the precious little tin box ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... medical education, and believed that the sufferings of a few criminals did not weigh against the benefit likely to accrue to innocent people, who could be relieved or cured of disease and suffering as the result of the knowledge gained by dissection of the living. This cruel and nefarious practice was followed "so that the investigators could study the particular organs during life in regard to position, colour, form, size, disposition, hardness, softness, smoothness, and superficial extent, their projection ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... get by ten o'clock the following morning. About eleven o'clock Lucas met Rothschild, and inquired satirically how he, Rothschild, was off for stock. Lucas won the day, and Rothschild is said never to have forgiven "the base, dishonest, and nefarious stratagem." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... farmyard, getting a chip 'ere an' a shaving there, an' making themselves such a nuisance that there was talk of calling the gendarmerie out. They would 'ave done, too, only he'd laid down for a nap an' left strict orders 'e wasn't to be disturbed. Then they slipped into the Camp, trying to lay nefarious 'ands on empty ration boxes, but the Camp police spotted 'em an' chivied them off. I never seen our police so exhausted as they were at the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... Harold, warming to his work, "joined his nefarious comrades, and conversed with them in silent tones. His expression was truly ferocious, and I ought to have said that he was armed to ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... first apparent. The pirate car had been black. This one was built of aluminium and gleamed silvery white. But although the lines were very similar, I soon came to the conclusion that the car we saw before us was not the one which the Pirate had used when engaged upon his nefarious work. One glance at the tyres convinced me that they had never been upon the road, and I fancied that the wheels were smaller and the lines of the body finer altogether. I pointed these things out to Forrest, who, while agreeing that this particular car could not have been ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... not one of the Hollanders' successes. R.R. Wilson says of him, "Bibulous, slow-witted and loose of life and morals, Van Twiller proved wholly unequal to the task in hand." Representing the West India Company, he nevertheless held nefarious commerce with the Indians—it is even reported that he sold them guns and powder in violation of express regulations—and certainly he was first and forever on the make. But before he was removed from office (because of these and other indiscretions) ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... supply of goods which he had brought out for them according to contract; and which he had no other mode of disposing of. He further informed Captain Bonneville that the competition between the Rocky Mountain and American Fur Companies which had led to such nefarious stratagems and deadly feuds, was at an end; they having divided the country between them, allotting boundaries within which each was to trade and hunt, so as not ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... of the Territory; but he knows, also, that under such circumstances the case would have been carried overwhelmingly against the "domestic institution," and thus have rebuked, with all the emphasis that an outraged community could give to the expression of its will, the nefarious conduct which "the party" has pursued from the beginning,—and this was a consummation not to be wished. He therefore wriggles and shuffles, with an absurd and transparent inconsistency, to defeat the popular will, and yet mouth it bravely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... process was William Gordon. Sentenced to be hanged like a pirate, the most prodigious effort was made to have the penalty relaxed with a prospect that the term of imprisonment would be curtailed as soon as decent. It would seem that merchant princes were connected with the lucrative, if nefarious, traffic in which he was a captain. But the offense was so flagrant that the New York district attorney went to Washington to block mistaken clemency. He was all but too late, for the President had literally ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... literature, and put down her book only to listen to the nightingale's-tongues outside. Yea, sun, moon, and stars were all in the conspiracy to lie to her of the loveliness of the world and the good intentions of life. And now, thus unexpectedly, I found myself joining the nefarious conspiracy. Ah, well! was I not twenty myself, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... change in color or its loss are consequently regarded as the unfailing heralds of approaching age. The vast majority of people accept this fact with reluctance, and thus the hair, more than any other feature has become a centre of the nefarious activities of impostors. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... thou gain by winning from the Pandavas their vast wealth? Win the Pandavas themselves, who will be to thee more than all the wealth they have. We all know the skill of Suvala in play. This hill-king knoweth many nefarious methods in gambling. Let Sakuni return whence he came. War not, O Bharata, with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... this nefarious business was conducted mainly through one channel; for, spite of man's inclination to vice and crime, there are but few men, thank God, so low in the scale of humanity as to be willing to degrade themselves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... occupation, from which his front name was derived, was killing deer and selling jerked venison, but if the greater part of his stock was not plain jerked beef, the cattle-men in that section were victims of strange hallucinations and harborers of nefarious suspicions. Although Clubfoot was credited with large numbers of dead steers found on the ranges, he was conscious of his own innocence, due to some extent to the loss of most of his teeth, and he had better ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... how the mistress of the castle saw her progeny depart to protect the distressed lady from the nefarious attacks of robbers and murderers; how her blessing and the consecrated blade were withheld, and how the brave youth sallied forth with a nightcap his only weapon. We know, too, how the bachelor Stoffel, the hereditary custodian of the ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... of Margaret's friendship was well known to Surrey, and he kept up the fiction of Albany's nefarious intentions, in the hope of making her faithful to English interests. Unluckily for his schemes, he did not sufficiently study the springs of her actions, which would have taught him to be more lavish with his bribes. The end of her next letter ought to have opened his eyes ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... weakness, especially if the banker be of middle age, unmarried, and deprived by an unromantic superfluity of adipose tissue of the possibility of living through a romance of his own. Turner had consented to countenance, if not actually to take part in, a nefarious scheme, to rid France and the present government of one who might easily bring about its downfall, on certain conditions. Knowing quite well that Loo Barebone could take care of himself at sea, and was quite capable of effecting an escape if he desired it, he had ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... wicked villain took a light, and was deliberately setting fire to the scenes, which might have caused the death of a portion of the misguided agents in this disgraceful outrage. Moody fortunately perceived him, resolutely interposed, and prevented the perpetration of his nefarious design. The next night that he appeared, he was instantly called upon to beg pardon, for an act which merited the highest gratitude. Moody addressed the audience—"Gentlemen, if by hindering the house from being burned, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... passengers. The stern is usually ornamented with carving, as English vessels used to be in old days. The dhow carries but one sail, lateen-shaped, and the mast stoops forward at a sharp angle. These craft have not unfrequently been engaged in the nefarious slave traffic carried on on the east ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... lesson borne in on Bob, why hesitate? So Harrington ponders a moment and decides; yes, even to that level of iniquity had Abdul Hamid II sunk. The atomiser was one of the instruments of torture he made use of. And when the bad Sultan is finally checked in his nefarious career, and dragged off to prison, where he gets nothing but hard bread to eat and filthy water to drink, Bob retains the impression that all this came about because the Young Turks grew tired of having their ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... the year 1857. Many a slave-ship has sailed from British ports in this very year, and with all our boasted efforts to check the slave-trade it will be found that as large a proportion of British subjects are at present engaged in this nefarious traffic ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... Aggie, Jimmy had thought himself hungry, but once the two women had laid before him their "nefarious baby-snatching scheme"—food lost its savour for him, and one course after another was taken away from ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... figures, and resounded with gay voices, cheerful laughter, and unaffected pleasantry. The apartments in which Louis XVI. had passed such sad and fearful days, where he had laid with his ministers such nefarious schemes, and where royalty had been trodden down under the feet of the infuriated populace—these rooms were now occupied by the hero who had subdued the people, slain the revolution and restored to France ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... in maze or labyrinth were fruitless. The man had appeared like a vision from the past, and vanished. Whither? Out of the country, once more? Over the seas? Had he taken quick alarm at Steele's words, and effected a hasty retreat from the scenes of his graceless and nefarious career? ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... scent was. At the instigation of an ex-ambassador, from whom I had the misfortune to differ in matters of foreign policy, the Moscow Gazette had denounced me publicly by name as a person who was in the habit of visiting daily the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—doubtless with the nefarious purpose of obtaining by illegal means secret political information—and the police had concluded that I was a fit and proper person to be closely watched. In reality, my relations with the Russian Foreign Office, though inconvenient to the ex-ambassador, were perfectly regular and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... were possessed of property had generally acquired it by dishonest means, by keeping grog-shops, gambling-houses, by receiving stolen goods, and by other nefarious practices; they led a life of gross licentiousness; but their wealth and influence were such that one-fourth of the jurors who served in the civil and criminal courts during the years 1834, 1835, and 1836, belonged ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... American vessels have been sold to foreigners, by unprincipled citizens of our country, with a belief or full understanding that they were to be employed in this nefarious trade. In some instances, such vessels have been sold, with stipulations in the contract, binding the seller to deliver them at slave-stations on the coast of Africa; they have been sent out to those ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... says. 'Not a word, or they'll put us off and make us walk. "Veev la Liberty!"' I adds, copperin' the sentiment by shovin' a banana into the source of it. I was certain the general wouldn't recognize me. The nefarious work of the tropics had left me lookin' different. There was half an inch of roan whiskers coverin' me face, and me costume was a pair of blue overalls and a ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Philip the Second, in which they supplicated his intervention in behalf of the Catholic religion, now threatened with ruin. Happily the enterprise was nipped in the bud, and, on the arrest of Artus at Orleans, on his way to Spain, the nefarious conspiracy was fully divulged. The priestly agent, after craven prayers for his life, was immured for a time in a cloister.[1014] Well might the Romish party fear. The curiosity to hear the preaching of the Word of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... that nefarious Siebald the Refectorarius. That fellow is always playing the scout, Creeping and peeping and prowling about; And then he regales The Abbot with ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... not to mention a presbyterian profession. Thus he continued in his wicked obstinate courses to an old age, although his name and estate are now extinct. But death's pangs at last arresting him, and all other refuges failing him under the views of his former wicked nefarious life, in imitation of his master Charles, he feigned himself of the popish profeshon, because a popish priest made him believe, for money, he could pardon all his sins, and even when in purgatory for them, he could bring him to heaven. And so we must conclude he ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... attached somehow externally to a wall—had at length betrayed it. That the accident had happened to himself, and not to a lad balancing a plankful of art-lustre ware on one shoulder, was sheer luck. And now the odd-man, with the surreptitious air of one engaged in a nefarious act, was putting a new tread on the stairs. Thus devoutly ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... exhaustion and chagrin in consequence of these tortures he was completely disappointed. His health was never better,—so much so that he felt constrained in fairness to drink to the health of the Roman banker who had recommended this nefarious route. [See the Doctor's remarks at the end of Letter XXXV.] By Florence and Lerici he retraced his steps to Nice early in 1765, and then after a brief jaunt to Turin (where he met Sterne) and back by the Col di Tende, he turned his face definitely homewards. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... narrow limits the great mass of facts bearing upon his subject, and in synopses and indices has presented all of the more important literature it has induced. In his Monograph, published as Volume II of the Harvard Historical Series, he has traced the rise of this nefarious traffic, especially with reference to the American colonies, exhibited the proportions to which it expanded, and the tenacity with which it held on to its purpose until it met its death in the fate of the ill-starred Southern Confederacy. ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... defied detection, and the credulity of the public was insatiable. In Germany a man imitated Schiller's writing so perfectly that Schiller's daughter bought his letters as fast as they could be produced. At Paris the nefarious trade became ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a person whom he feared and admired absolutely and he had been a most useful spy and agent for the Skipper in certain nefarious plots. It was well for the little hunchback that no one knew of his share in the betraying of old ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... amid ancient records and moldy chronicles, put me in possession of a vast amount of information concerning the doings of the greatest of all pirates; a man unique among his nefarious brethren, in that he played the piratical game so successfully that he received the honor of knighthood from King Charles II. A belted knight of England, who was also a brutal, rapacious, lustful, murderous villain and robber—and ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... was conducted at once to the study in which Mr. Bookam was wont to indulge in various nefarious Stock Exchange adventures. The room was occupied on this occasion by a dejected-looking young man, with pasty face and gold spectacles. The apartment, as Fischer was quick to notice, showed signs of a ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of slaughter and pillage, condemns a certain piece of barbarism. Christianity, profession of, plebeian, whether. Christian soldiers, perhaps inconsistent whether. Cicero, an opinion of, disputed. Cilley, Ensign, author of nefarious sentiment. Cimex lectularius. Cincinnati, old, law and order party of. Cincinnatus, a stock character in modern comedy. Civilization, progress of, an alias, rides upon a powder-cart. Clergymen, their ill husbandry, their place in processions, some, cruelly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was lending his companion a helping hand. It may not have been through generosity that Nick acted thus; perhaps he dimly suspected that the cowardly Leon might wish to draw back, and allow him to carry out the nefarious business alone and unaided; and Nick was bent on making his crony share in the act, so that he could not turn on him and ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... how advantageously my shipmates disposed of their tobacco in Liverpool; but it is to be related how those nefarious commercial speculations of theirs reduced them to sad extremities ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... said that Byron could only represent himself under various disguises, that Childe Harold and The Corsair, Lara and Manfred and Don Juan, are variants of a single personality, the egotist who is at war with his fellows, the generous but nefarious sentimentalist who sins and suffers and yet is to be pitied for his suffering. None the less, with whatever limitations as artist or moralist, he invented characters and types of characters real enough and distinct enough to leave their mark on society ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... after I do it." Nick guessed the fun-loving Propaganda Chief wanted to go along, but decided Cletus would be a better assistant in a plan already formulated. A boon companion, Belial, for any nefarious project. True, he had the quickest wit of the lot, but had worked over-long in the advertising racket, and many of his schemes resembled those of a hen on a ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... Patch, who several times sought asylum in any cellar, and being a most profound diplomat, managed on each occasion and with little delay to negotiate a peaceful settlement and go forth in safety to resume the practice of his nefarious profession. I often hoped he would be caught before reaching the post, but he seemed to know intuitively when the time had come to take leg-bail, for his advent at the garrison generally preceded by but a few hours the death of some ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... indulged in some most unscrupulous "stocking" of the cards without detection. But even one of these, after having dealt himself both bowers and the king, besides two aces, suddenly imagined he had discovered Grump's motive, and so earnest was he in exposing that nefarious wretch, that one of his opponents changed hands with him. Even the barkeeper mixed the bottles badly, and on one occasion, just as the boys were raising their glasses, he metaphorically dashed the cup from their lips by a violent, "I tell you what" and an unsatisfactory ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... most dangerous; the Devil seldom unmasks his heavy batteries until the advance-posts of the soul are taken. It is the business of scandal to break down these barriers, and for scandal this work is as easy as it is nefarious. For curiosity is a hungering appetite, virtue is often protected with a very thin veil, and vice can be made to lose its hideousness and assume charms, to untried virtue, irresistible. There is nothing doing ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... "Thou art the disciple of Yehuda the deceiver!" "Oh, you know my master, do you?" said the Rabbi. "Then in the name of God be every one of you anathematized." For twenty-two years thereafter they carried on their nefarious trade, but all their attempts at violence ended only in disappointment. Then all save one of them came to the Rabbi and craved his pardon, which was immediately granted. The one who did not come to confess his guilt ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the spreading palm; but this is not a desert, nor a gaudy caravan. This is a feast of all angels. This is the day when Nahoum the Nefarious is to be buckled up like a belt, and ridden in a ring. Where ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... silently. The fact that the room was still in darkness made it obvious that something nefarious was afoot. Plainly there was dirty work in preparation at the cross-roads. He stared into the blackness, and, as his eyes grew accustomed to it, was presently able to see an indistinct form bending over something on ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... Mendoza was the prey of thieves, robbers, traitors, and murderers, who formed his party. He was under a noble exterior a man without heart, pity, honour, or conscience. He aspired to nothing but tyranny, and though he would have made use of Gaspar Ruiz for his nefarious designs, yet he soon became aware that to propitiate the Chilian Government would answer his purpose better. I blush to say that he made proposals to our Government to deliver up on certain conditions the wife and child of the man who had trusted to his honour, and that ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... beer, every countess in Mayfair would be reading him, not knowing, the idiot, whether she ought to smile or shed tears, and sending him cards with 'at home' upon them as large as life. Oh! it is disgusting! absolutely disgusting. It is a nefarious world, sir. You will find it out some day. I am as much robbed by that fellow Gushy as men are on the highway. He is appropriating my income, and the income of thousands of honest fellows. And then he pretends he is writing ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... a month on pay-day. Ivry coolie that wins ut gives ut back to him, for 'tis too big to carry away, an' he'd sack the man that thried to sell ut. That Dearsley has been makin' the rowlin' wealth av Roshus by nefarious rafflin'. Think av the burnin' shame to the sufferin' coolie-man that the army in Injia are bound to protect an' nourish in their bosoms! Two thousand coolies defrauded wanst ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... gambling with religion to attain any object whatsoever, and especially of swearing by the Mother of God the renunciation of the Protestant faith and the adoption of Roman Catholicism. The Spaniards, who had a hand in this nefarious proceeding, were quite convinced that, though Hawkins had been a pirate and a sea robber and murderer, now that he had come over to their faith the predisposition to his former evil habits would leave him. These were the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Manuel's gaze kept lifting to the windows. There were three of them, set side by side, each facing south. They were of thick clear glass, of a sort whose manufacture is a lost art, for these windows had been among the spoils brought back by Duke Asmund from nefarious raidings of Philistia, in which country these windows had once been a part of the temple of Ageus, an immemorial god of the Philistines. For this reason the room was ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... trade and commerce were, during the last few years, reduced in France, and to that general laxity of moral conduct which even now distinguishes that country, was Fraudulent Bankruptcy. The merchant, no longer possessing the means of making his fortune by fair speculation, has recourse to this nefarious mode of bettering his condition. He settles with his creditors for a small per centage; disposes of his property by fictitious sales, ventes simulees, and thus enriches himself upon the ruin of his creditors. At a small town in the south ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... of the district had received the most positive information of the nefarious schemes of the rioters, they had not made the slightest efforts to protect the poor creatures threatened in their persons and property, but let the tide of lawlessness flow ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... sitting down. "There is no doubt the necklace has been removed by some one, either for a nefarious purpose or for ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... migrated to the interior, they started a bank. Having managed to put a vast number of their notes in circulation, for which they received produce, they closed the doors, and left the public to be losers by their nefarious schemes. I had the misfortune myself, in my ignorance, to take from a dishonest store-keeper a ten-dollar bill of this spurious currency, and did not detect the imposture until I offered it to the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... a secretary of the Foreign Office, and subsequently ordered him to Shanghai to direct the management of the official newspaper there. Instead of this, however, he dared to remain in Peking pursuing his nefarious designs against the dynasty, and had it not been for the protection given by the spirits of our ancestors he certainly would have succeeded. Kang Yu-wei is therefore the arch conspirator, and his chief assistant is Liang Chi-tsao, M. A., and they are both to ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... place; the deer gazed quietly at me as I passed, being no longer harried by the moss-troopers of Stratford. The only sign of domestic life that I met with was a white cat stealing with wary look and stealthy pace towards the stables, as if on some nefarious expedition. I must not omit to mention the carcass of a scoundrel crow which I saw suspended against the barn-wall, as it shows that the Lucys still inherit that lordly abhorrence of poachers and maintain that rigorous exercise of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... there was a stretch of main line of the railroad over which, or rather along which, the yeggmen seemed to be most active. This principal thoroughfare for their nefarious trade was approximately five hundred miles long; and it was here where the greatest and the ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... embarrassed by the circumstances in which he found himself, possessed, as he now appeared to be, of property to a much greater amount than his own, but which had been obtained in all probability by the same nefarious means through which he had himself been plundered. His first thought was to inquire after the nearest justice of peace, and to place in his hands the treasure of which he had thus unexpectedly become the depositary, telling at the same time his own remarkable story. But a moment's consideration ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... rapidly. He noticed there was only a quarter moon and realized that the darkness had been a part of "Red Mike's" nefarious plotting. He turned to Brennan, whose tensely set face was lighted for a fraction of a second by the accelerated burning of his cigarette as he took ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... neither God nor his father to look to for succor, having forfeited his rights both as priest and as ruler, he saw the possibility before him that any one found him, might slay him, for he was outlawed, body and soul. Notwithstanding, God conferred upon the nefarious murderer a twofold blessing. He had forfeited Church and dominion, but life and progeny were left. God promised him to protect his existence, and also gave him a wife. Two blessings these by no means to be despised; and when he heard the first part of ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... objectionable instruments of political warfare. Would not the dynamiters and throwers of hand-grenades utilise a relaxation of police supervision, as they did in the time of Louis Melikof,* for carrying out their nefarious designs? ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... at the house in Hertford Street took place on the 30th of January, and on the morning of the 28th of February Bunfit and Gager were sitting together in a melancholy, dark little room in Scotland Yard, discussing the circumstances of that nefarious act. A month had gone by, and nobody was yet in custody. A month had passed since that second robbery; but nearly eight weeks had passed since the robbery at Carlisle, and even that was still a mystery. The newspapers had been loud in their condemnation ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... of his Thoughts on the Abolition of Slavery, Mr. Clarkson showed that neither he nor those connected with him, considered their work as accomplished, when the laws of his country clasped with its felons those engaged in the nefarious traffic of slaves. But the efforts of Mr. Clarkson were not confined to his pen. In 1818, he proceeded to Aix la Chapelle, at the time when the sovereigns of Europe met in congress. He was received with marked attention by the Emperor of Russia, who listened to his statements (respecting the slave-trade,) ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... him for a lack of delicacy of speech, and shortly afterward we went to bed. Owing to the root under the tent, and puddles here and there, we could not go to sleep for a time, and we discussed the "nefarious deed," as Tish aptly termed it, that was about ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in an election, to promote a political intrigue, to throw the entire legislature into the hands of the reaction, to conceal corruption, or to take the public mind from too intently watching the nefarious schemes of a political-financial conspiracy—for all these and a multitude of other purposes thousands of secret police agents are at work. The sordid facts of this infamous commerce are no longer in doubt, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... nearly nine o'clock that night when the four conspirators met to carry out their nefarious project. Dick was carrying a bag—in which was the joey—a bull's-eye lantern, various coloured feathers, and other small necessaries, and the party hastened in the direction of Mr. Ham's humble residence. Ham was 'a hatter'—he ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... his cheque when he was "temporarily short for a few hundreds." An excellent linguist in the principal Continental languages, he could also talk like, and assume the manners of, the rough gold-diggers with whom he so frequently associated for his nefarious purposes. Unlike his associates—the Jew, Barney Green (alias Capel), and Pinkerton and Cheyne—he had only once seen the inside of the prison, when as "the Hon. Wilburd Merriton" he was given a sentence of two years' hard labour for forgery ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke |
