"Shiftless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feller, and a good workman an' all, and one as'll look after her an' treat her kind.' But I mind what I said to Mrs Pinhorn on that very day: 'I hope it may be so,' I says, 'but it takes an angel, and not a man, to bear with a woman as weak an' shiftless as Hepzibah, and not lose his temper.' And now look at 'em! There's Dan'l taken to drink, and when he's out of himself he'll lift his hand to her, and they're both of 'em miserable. It does a deal o' harm for a woman to be weak like ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... an hour in sharpening a lead-pencil. This maxim, while losing in sententiousness would gain in reason if it ran thus: "What is worth doing at all is worth doing as well as the situation demands." "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day," an excellent maxim for the shiftless, must not be taken too literally by the individual already obsessed to do to-day twice what he can ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... natural, in a state of nature; undressed; in dishabille, en deshabille[Fr]. unqualified, disqualified; unfitted; ill-digested; unbegun, unready, unarranged[obs3], unorganized, unfurnished, unprovided, unequipped, untrimmed; out of gear, out of order; dismantled &c. v. shiftless, improvident, unthrifty, thriftless, thoughtless, unguarded; happy-go-lucky; caught napping &c. (inexpectant) 508[obs3]; unpremeditated &c. 612. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in tan shoes and a brown derby. An 1890 Villon handicapped by a home-loving wife; an incurable romantic married to a woman who judged as shiftless any housewife possessed of less than two dozen bath towels, twelve tablecloths, eighteen wash cloths, and at least three dozen dish towels, hand-hemmed. Milly Pardee's idea of adventure was testing the recipes illustrated in the How To Use The Cheaper Cuts page in the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... nominal value of forty cents per acre, were irresistible to thousands of land-loving Virginians and Carolinians whose ambition of proprietorship was larger than their means. Accompanying this flood of emigrants of good faith was the usual froth and scum of shiftless idlers and adventurers, who were either drifting with a current they were too worthless to withstand, or in pursuit of dishonest gains in fresher and simpler regions. The vices and virtues of the pioneers were such as proceeded from their environment. They were ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... certain qualifications which must be complied with, except the profession of homemaking. A young man and a young woman say: "I believe we'll get married" and forthwith they do. The state sanctions it, and the church blesses it. They may be consumptive, epileptic, shiftless, immoral, or with a tendency to insanity. No matter. They may go on and reproduce their kind. They are perfectly free to bring children into the world, who are a burden and a menace to society. ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... his father wasn't shiftless, the young 'un wouldn't need to be leavin' 'ome, an' I say it again," ejaculated the cobbler, with arms akimbo, standing directly in front of John ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... that any myself," concurred Jack Harpe. "Old Dale seems like a good feller, sort of shackles along a mite too shiftless maybe, but his daughter takes the ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... and the house lookin' like a pigpen, and the children runnin' around half naked. And Sam he laughed, and says he, 'Aunt Jane, if we could wear quilts and eat quilts we'd be the richest people in the country.' Sam was the best-natured man that ever was, or he couldn't 'a' put up with Sarah Jane's shiftless ways. Hannah Crawford said she sent Sarah Jane a bundle o' caliker once by Sam, and Sam always declared he lost it. But Uncle Jim Matthews said he was ridin' along the road jest behind Sam, and he saw Sam throw ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... lose your needle you lose your day's work. Spoken to shiftless persons who complain loudly on the least trifle going ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... were, in essence, inevitable. Each side was struggling for very life. They had, to inspire them, not only profoundly hostile convictions, but the memory of years of angry strife and alternate persecution. But these difficulties were aggravated by the intrigues at Court, by the shiftless vacillation of the King, and by the underlying suspicion, which perhaps haunted Clarendon more than he admitted to himself with respect to the King, that concession might pave the way for indulgence to the Roman Catholics, ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... was a poor and shiftless character, a thin, stoop-shouldered man. He was only thirty-five years of age, but, being married, that was enough to secure for him the title "Old Man." In Sanger, if Tom Nolan was a bachelor at eighty years of age he would still be Tom ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... peace, contentment, and a good dinner. The Dutch regarded this as good enough religion for them—better, perhaps, than that preached by the man of the church of progressive ideas. The school-master could sing a good song, and, although an idle, shiftless fellow, got more invitations to supper than any other man in the settlement. As for the inn-keeper, he was a merry little man, who made everybody laugh, and was held in high esteem by all the ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... Christianity to them, there is no hope for these Indians. Their fate will be the same as Indians on the reservation in the State of New York, who have been for one hundred years in the midst of our best civilization, but are still lazy and shiftless, their reservation being permeated through and through with unmentionable vices. They have no interest in the civilization of the present. They are living in the past, dreaming over the glory of their ancestors. They cannot be reached ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 1, January 1888 • Various
... as a shiftless, worthless creature. From the time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects in a red handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he lazily drifted out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation of '56, they never expected anything better of him. ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening adagio; the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The movement had no blandness in its solemnity; and so still and shiftless was the grouping of the harmonies, that a frigidity, actual as well as ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such tense yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboe, pianissimo over the piano-surface, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... labourers over a great part of the south and east, at least, of England,—though never so well off, for several generations, as they are now—are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth clothes, instead of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... hunting, and lived at first under a tree in a bark shanty, but later moved into a large, barn-like building, back of the Clemens home on Hill Street. There were three male members of the household: Old Ben, the father, shiftless and dissolute; young Ben, the eldest son—a doubtful character, with certain good traits; and Tom—that is to say, Huck, who was just as he is described in the book—a ruin of rags, a river-rat, kind of heart, and accountable for his conduct ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... solicitude. Such persons usually have intelligence and good hearts. They return to us, sometimes with usury, the sums that we lend them. Such restitutions recoup us in the long run for the losses we occasionally incur through impostors, shiftless creatures, or those whom misfortunes have rendered stupid. Through such persons we often obtain invaluable help in our investigations. Our work has now become so vast, its details are so multifarious, that we no longer suffice of ourselves to carry it on. So, for the last year we have a physician ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... interested in her shiftless life, and she made him laugh with the fantastic narration of her struggles. He asked her why she did not try her hand at literary work of a better sort, but she knew that she had no talent, and the abominable stuff she turned out by the thousand words was not only tolerably paid, but ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... mended, that unto Rome wended.' Your American axe is useless without American energy, and would not, if introduced here, mend the present shiftless style of wood chopping: evidently the people will one day take it up and try it—when their minds and arms are free. As it is, the genuine Romans live through their winters without wood in a merry ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in plenty and make the land rejoice? See! Here is the truth. When the Great Spirit draws the game away so that the hunting is poor, ye sit down and fill your hearts with murder, and in the blackness of your thoughts kill my brother. Idle and shiftless and evil ye are, while the earth cries out to give you of its plenty, a great harvest from a little seed, if ye will but dig and plant, and plough and sow and reap, and lend your backs to toil. Now hear and heed. The end is come. For this once ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... before he was nine years old, the father brought his family across the Ohio River into Illinois, and there in the unfloored log cabin, minus windows and doors, Abraham lived and grew. It was during this time that the mother died, and in a short time the shiftless father with his family drifted back to the old home, and here found another for his children in one who was a friend of earlier days. This woman was of a thrifty nature, and her energy made him floor the cabin, ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... up, lazy-like an' shiftless," enlightened the parson. "Ther old man 'lowed thet hit wouldn't hardly be no fallacy ter name him Lizzie or Lake Erie, but he swore on a hull stack of Bibles thet he aimed ter make a man ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... reckon there ever was a more shiftless, do-easy pair than my father and mother," rejoined Martin Hastings. "They were ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... been guilty of nicknaming Miss Millar "Baby," because she had been so lachrymose and shiftless when she came to Thirlwall Hall, and had never looked up till she was handed over to Miss Vanhansen, who had given her "airings" and "outings" all very well for a baby, and much to Baby's taste as it seemed, but not exactly ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... settled, no land set off or chattel sold on execution, no legal meeting of the voters or freemen holden, without previous notice on the sign-post. It used to be known by another name, and marks the spot, where, whilom, petty thieves, shiftless vagrants, and other small offenders against the majesty of the law, were wont to suffer a shameful penalty for their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... outstanding fixtures between us. Then Todd became one of the best-known fellows in the school, and strolled up the hill with Worcester, Acton, Vercoe, and other heroes as to the manner born. The old, lazy, shallow, shifty, shiftless Gus was drifting into the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... excitement this created one should know more about Potts. It will have been inferred that he was objectionable. For the fact, he was objectionable in every way: as a human being, a man, a citizen, a member of the Slocum County bar, and a veteran of our late civil conflict. He was shiftless, untidy, a borrower, a pompous braggart, a trouble-maker, forever driving some poor devil into senseless litigation. Moreover, he was blithely unscrupulous in his dealings with the Court, his clients, his brother-attorneys, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the poor and the weak, the negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent are fastened upon the industrious and prudent as a responsibility and a duty. On the one side, the terms are extended to cover the idle, intemperate, and vicious, who, by the combination, gain credit which they do not deserve, and ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... appetite for strong drink. When the corn crop was short, and gave out in the spring, or had been squandered for rum, they borrowed of the traders, paying two hundred per cent for it at harvest. They became poor, shiftless, and dependent. They even pledged their children as security, to be held as slaves in default of contract. They knew they were debased, and despised by the superior race, and felt their degradation. To this condition ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... twenty-seven thousand married men in New York who are supported by their wives, who are mainly dressmakers, milliners, boarding-house keepers, artists, teachers, musicians, and actresses. Here we have an army of shiftless, dependent men, more than a quarter of one hundred thousand strong, having each a vote to cast or perchance to sell to the highest bidder, while the real bread-winners, the actual wealth-producers, in this case have no voice ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... White Sands people would not have given you the most favourable opinion in the world of Old Man Shaw. First and foremost, they would have told you that he was "shiftless," and had let his bit of a farm run out while he pottered with flowers and bugs, or rambled aimlessly about in the woods, or read books along the shore. Perhaps it was true; but the old farm yielded him a living, and further than that Old Man Shaw had no ambition. He was as blithe as a pilgrim ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of his own, he lived by visiting his friends; left his wife and children to the support of others, and seemed incapable of any other than this shifting and shiftless existence. This natural imbecility was greatly increased during a long period by his constant use of opium, which kept him, a greater portion of his life, in a world of dreams. He was fortunate in having a sincere and appreciative friend in Mr. Gilman, surgeon, near London, to ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... way in the Hyer family to make the best of things; they had always possessed this virtue to such an extent, that they suffered from it as from a vice. There was hardly to be found in all Southern Tennessee a more contented, shiftless, ill-bestead family than theirs. But there was no grumbling. Whatever went wrong, whatever was lacking, it was "jest like aour luck," they said, and did nothing, or next to nothing, about it. Good-natured, affectionate, humorous people; after ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the collar, and violently swinging them around with his vast strength until they stood back to back; "what are you going to fight about? Suppose there are Lunarians in the Moon! Is that a reason why there should be Lunatics in the Projectile! But, Ardan, why do you insist on Lunarians? Are we so shiftless that we can't do without them when we ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... orange, a four-bladed knife, and the reversionary interest in much of Rupert's personal property, became more subdued. Sitting there with their arms entwined about each other, the sunlight searching the shiftless desolation of their motherless home, the few cheap playthings they had known lying around them, they beguiled themselves with those charming illusions of their future intentions common to their years—illusions they only ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... are opening up. Jungle is fast disappearing. Agriculture has wonderfully improved; and wherever an indigo factory has been built, progress has taken the place of stagnation, industry and thrift that of listless indolence and shiftless apathy. A spirit has moved in the valley of dry bones, and has clothed with living flesh the gaunt skeletons produced by ignorance, disease, and want. The energy and intelligence of the planter has breathed on the stagnant waters of the Hindoo intellect the breath of life, and the living ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... objections, about "stirring up class hatred," about "dividing-up the wealth with the lazy and shiftless," trying to "destroy religion," advocating "free love" and "attacking the family," all these and the many other matters contained in your letter, I shall try to answer fairly and ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... doesn't seem able to make use of it. Even if he does own the land and is making money, he still goes on living in a shiftless way. One would hardly believe the kind of shacks I've seen in the ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and struck, and sang a little, very niggardly, and so, as the lights in the west sank and faded, the shiftless lover continued in vain to seek to give the bird one note more than the magician, his master, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... white hands when their owner knows not how to use them. Though keeping up an outside show, he was really very poor, and when he heard of the doctor's misfortune he went to his chamber and wept as few men ever weep. As Hannah well expressed it, "he was shiftless," and did not know how to take care of himself. This James De Vere understood, and after the sale at Laurel Hill he turned his attention to his unfortunate cousin, and succeeded at last in securing for him the situation of bookkeeper in a large establishment ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... the days before Nora's advent seemed like a horrible nightmare from which he was thankful to have awakened. Once in a while he indulged himself in speculating as to how it would feel to go back to the old shiftless, untidy days of his bachelorhood. But he rarely allowed himself to entertain the idea of her leaving, seriously. He was like a child, snuggly tucked in his warm bed who, listening to the howling of the wind outside, pictures himself exposed to its harshness in order to luxuriate the ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... self-dependence—and to do it immediately. Make it a matter of conscience. Bear constantly in mind, that whatever has been done, may be done. Shame on those who, knowing the value of self-dependence, and having the power to acquire it, pass through life so shiftless, that they cannot do the least thing without aid—the aid of a host of relatives or menials. It is quite time that woman should understand her power and her strength, and govern herself accordingly. It is quite time ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... go 'bout three years back," Tom explained. "She got—shiftless and I been sort of batching it since. Clean, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the journey and hastening to have it over with. As they broke through a screen of brush and came out to the edge of what had been a clearing back of a huge log bunk-house, the man who had shouted came rapidly forward to meet them. There was a certain shiftless, sullen, yet authoritative air about him as ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... that they succeeded in catching very little. Besides which there were few among the colonists who had any idea of what work meant. More than half the company were "gentlemen adventurers," dare devil, shiftless men who had joined the expedition in search of excitement with no idea ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place, My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face; They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host, And—I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost." The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame, And he thought of Holy Charity, but he thought of his own good name:— "Now ye could haste my coal to waste, and sit ye down to fry: Did ye think of that theft for yourself?" said ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... shipwrecked, only to torture her with what she couldn't have. It was worse than if it had never shown itself at all. Love had appeared with one man, money with the other. Love and money were two of the three things she cared for; the poor, shiftless family was the third. Since the first two had gone, the last must follow them. Quite consciously and deliberately Rosie lifted her hands with a little lamentable effort, letting them drop again, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and break down your children," said Mr. Eldridge. "Women and children can't stand it. Now there's that man they were speaking of; he lived down my way. He sued a poor, shiftless fellow that had come from Pennsylvania to his daughter's funeral, and had him arrested and taken off, crying, just before the funeral begun—after they'd even set the flowers on the coffin; and nobody'd speak to him after that—they just let him alone; ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... frontier existence compounded; and of the growing thousands who turned their faces toward the setting sun, comparatively few yielded to discouragement and went back East. Those who did so were usually the land speculators and people of weak, irresolute, or shiftless character. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... is a poor, shiftless kind of a critter. I s'pose the snow went off before he got ready to haul them to the mill; but if he had peeled them in June or July, they would have been all right; but now they will be about sp'iled by ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... and spoons. She'll scrape and scald and polish the pots and pans and does the china beautiful, but she will leave the knives and forks and even hides them away dirty. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Emmy can't explain it unless it's due to the shiftless streak in ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... had secretly dreaded a meeting with his old partner in the "haunts of fashion;" whatever was the cause that made Uncle Jim seek this obscure retirement affected him but slightly; he even was thrilled with a vague memory of the old shiftless camp they had both abandoned. A certain instinct—he knew not why, or less still that it might be one of delicacy—made him alight before they reached the first house. Bidding the carriage wait, Uncle Billy entered, and was informed by a blowzy Irish laundress ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Indiana, as a young girl would devour a love story? Whence came that all-absorbing ambition to be somebody in the world; to serve his country with no selfish ambition? Had his father been rich and well-educated instead of a poor man who could neither read nor write and who was generally of a shiftless and roving disposition, there is no likelihood that Lincoln would ever have become ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... working-man: How much service must I render? How much ought I to be paid? Of the second kind, nearly every phase of it begins right here, that men and women demand for labor something which they have not earned. They do careless, indifferent, shiftless, reckless work, and then demand a living-wage. The capitalist is not inclined to raise his scale of prices, knowing that he has built up his business by prudence, sagacity, and tireless application—the very qualities ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... to appear at the usual hour. The boys walked about nervously—they smoked many pipes, and took hurried drinks, and yet she did not appear. The boys looked suggestingly at her husband, and he himself appeared to be anxious; but being one of the shiftless kind, he found ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... masses are the burden not only of the South, but of the American people at large. Ignorant labor is shiftless and wasteful labor. The growth of varied and inter-related manufactures cannot rest upon a labor element of clumsiness and stupidity. Civil duties demand intelligence and morals. The best patriotism of the South ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... drunk when his father has any money to give him, and just smart enough to keep the old man mesmerized. Lately Henry's been in a mighty serious peck of trouble. Last fall he got married to a girl here in town. Three weeks ago a family named Johnson, the most shiftless in the county, the real low-down white trash sort, living on a truck patch out Rollinson's way, heard that Henry was on a toot in town, spending money freely, and they went after him. A client of mine rents their ground to them and told me all about it. It seems ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... die rich. Mr. Jerdan, a gentleman who, in his Autobiography, advises energetic youth to betake themselves to the highway rather than to literature, was, we understand, in the receipt of an easy income, and was a welcome guest in pleasant houses; but living in a careless, shiftless, extravagant way, he was presently poor, and, instead of giving his memoirs the motto, peccavi, and inditing a warning, he dashes off a truculent defiance. Practical publishers and practical men of all sorts invest ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Gloucester merchant. When Warren Hastings was born, the fortunes of the house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the means of bringing an illustrious son into the world. He seems to have been weak, foolish, shiftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren Hastings. Pynaston married again, entered the Church, when he was old enough to take holy orders, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... but a shiftless youth, In whom no good they saw; And yet, unwittingly, in truth, They made ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... take what you want. The price of everything is marked good and plain, and another sign says to put the money in the drawer and make your own change. The blacksmith was at him for doing business so shiftless, and Barnaby laughed and said that if anybody wanted anything he had bad enough to steal it, whoever it was, he was good and welcome to it. That just shows how crazy he is. Most of the time he's roaming around the country, with his yellow dog at his heels, making outlandish ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... must not have to show that he is in want. Because a writer or investigator is a sober, careful body and quite solvent in a modest way, that is no reason why we should not pay him stimulatingly for his valuable contributions to the general mind, or because he is a shiftless seeker of misfortunes, why we should pay him in excess. But pay him anyhow. Almost scandalous private immorality, I submit, should not bar the literary worker from his pay any more than it justifies our stealing his boots. We must deal with immorality as immorality, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... when his work pushed him he would require his cook and house-maid, the only slaves he owned, to assist in the fields. At the time of my commencing to work for him he had white men hired who were worse, if any thing, in their habits of shiftless laziness than the lazy blacks. These whites, whom the negroes usually termed "white trash," were, as a general thing, the most vicious, brutal, thieving, shiftless, and lazy human beings imaginable. They were ignorant in the greatest degree, and would not ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... ancestors, how one of them, the most remote of all, was called a saint, and was supposed to possess certain mysterious secrets often alluded to in the papers as the 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant.' And then with an abrupt transition he recalled memories of his father and of the strange, shiftless life in dingy lodgings in the backwaters of London, of the dim stucco streets that were his first recollections, of forgotten squares in North London, and of the figure of his father, a grave bearded man who seemed always in a dream, as if ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... you haven't been giving all your time and beauty-sleep doing too much of that settlement work, Ruthie—and Heaven only knows what germs you will get there—of course I should be the first to praise any work for the poor, ungrateful and shiftless though they are—what with my committees and the Truegate Temperance Home for Young Working Girls—it's all very well to be sympathetic with them, but when it comes to a settlement-house, and Heaven knows I have given them all the counsel and suggestions I could, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... to tell, for poor Mrs. Kennedy was a shiftless, broken-down woman, who could only 'sozzle round,' as Mrs. Grover said, and rub along with help from any one who would lend a hand. She had lived out, married young, and had no faculty about anything; so when her husband died, and she was left with ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... the old settlers of Jackson county, meaning those who were there before the Saints, were of a shiftless, ignorant class from the Southern States. They made but little improvement in their homes, being content to live in small, log huts, many of them without windows or board floors. They all believed it right to have negro slaves. ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... men are the real losers, and especially those with families and with small homes unpaid for; no one can measure their losses, for it may mean the savings of a lifetime. It frequently does mean a change in character from an industrious, frugal, contented workman with everything to live for, to a shiftless and discontented man with nothing to live ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... where still pleasanter haunts invite their presence. Germany abounds with watering-places, which are usually rendered agreeable by a judicious disposition of walks, and by other similar temptations. In nothing are the money-grasping and shiftless habits of America rendered more apparent, than in the inferiority of her places of public resort. In all these particulars nature has done a good deal for some of them, but nowhere has man ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pervasive, had recurred, creating a receptive spirit, so deep a religion of assent that shadow and substance intermingled to my bewilderment? I was permitted to be a sensitive percipient in the midst of the ashes of shiftless folk who had passed away, catching but a casual and deceptive glimpse of the coming of the desolating ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Some were of the gentry of the surrounding country, some the humbler white folk, some the negroes who had managed to acquire small tracts of land which they farmed successfully or otherwise. Among them, too, was the typical shiftless, "triflin' no-'count" darkey who "jist sits 'round a-waitin'," though it would be hard for him to tell what he was ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... sleep; his heart was sick with fear. Finally he fell into a troubled sleep, and, sleeping, had a dream. A fairy came to his bedside; it was Fairy Old Boy, the friend of the people. "Ah, my poor Wang," said the fairy, "all this trouble you have brought upon yourself by your shiftless, lazy habits. When others work, why do you lie down and sleep your time away? Why don't you get up and shake your lazy legs? There is no place in the world for such a man as ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... becomes scarcer, and there are more women left adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... proper remedies against the canker worm, the various cut worms, and other noxious caterpillars? A law carried out by a proper State entomological constabulary, if it may be so designated, would compel the idle and shiftless to clear their farms ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... was busy at her work by candle-light, and Mr Wrayburn, half amused and half vexed, and all idle and shiftless, stood by her bench looking on. Miss Wren's troublesome child was in the corner in deep disgrace, and exhibiting great wretchedness in the shivering ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham. We had explained ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... way. The conviction is extending that diligence is the mother of good luck; in other words, that a man's success in life will be proportionate to his efforts, to his industry, to his attention to small things. Your negligent, shiftless, loose fellows never meet with luck; because the results of industry are denied to those who will not use the proper efforts ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... begun for the ones who were dear to them, when both left for the war. At once General Anderson had promised immunity from arrest to every peaceable citizen in the State, but at once the shiftless, the prowling, the lawless, gathered to the Home Guards for self-protection, to mask deviltry and to wreak vengeance for private wrongs. At once mischief began. Along the Ohio, men with Southern sympathies were clapped into prison. Citizens who had joined the Confederates were pronounced guilty ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... being a rather shiftless fellow, often spoilt his boys as much as the average white father spoils his, for he never thrashed them, though they frequently deserved it, and having given in to them on many previous occasions, he had now let them take the dogs. But speaking of parents' treatment of children, even an old ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... say, Reuben Miller, if I die for it," said she, "I haven't had so much as a pound of white sugar nor a single lemon in my house for two years, and I do think it's a burnin' shame for you to go on sellin' 'em to them shiftless Greens, that'll never pay you a cent, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and his habit of chewing tobacco was not to be commended. In short, he was a "shiftless" character, and nice persons had very little to ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... the circular fire was the visible indication. Crosstrees, of four pieces of squared timber, lay near the fire, with a tireless wheel placed flat upon them, the hub in the square hole at the center. Shiftless farmers always resisted having tires set until they would no longer stay on the wheel. The inevitable day was postponed, time and again, by a soaking of the wheels overnight in some convenient puddle of water; ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... institution once fairly settled at College Green will spare them the pains of enterprise, and will show how large industries can be created and sustained without capital, without business knowledge, without technical skill, and for the sole purpose of affording the shiftless population of Ballyshannon regular wages at the week's end. The gentlemen who lean over the quaint bridge, with its twelve arches and sharply-pointed buttresses, are merely waiting for the factories, which are to spring from the earth fully-equipped at a wave of the enchanter's hand, to be a blessing ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back country emancipated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... paid any bills? had you? You won't answer, but you needn't think to escape and deceive me by such a shallow trick. If you'd paid a bill you'd been keen enough to tell it: you'd have shouted it out long ago. Pretty management! Just like you, shiftless! Why in the name of the five senses didn't you pay out the money before you lost the purse? You might have known you were going to lose it: you always ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... typify the two prominent classes of the backwoods people. The frontier, in spite of the outward uniformity of means and manners, is preeminently the place of sharp contrasts. The two extremes of society, the strongest, best, and most adventurous, and the weakest, most shiftless, and vicious, are those which seem naturally to drift to the border. Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large influx of people drawn from the worst immigrants ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... entertained very nicely by the little girls and Sammy. Cap'n Bill Quigg was a simple-minded man, after all; he did not seem to deserve the bad name that the crabbed old lock-keeper had given him. He might have been slow and shiftless; but he was scarcely any more grown ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... say this to you in confidence now, Harry. Of course, I would be denounced by our people if I said it. But many of our famous men, Harry, have not approved of it. The great Washington said slavery, with its shiftless methods of farming, was draining the life out of the land, and he was right. Haven't we seen ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a satisfactory footing, the Squire had but little more trouble, and it soon came to be understood that he was not to be trifled with, and that Crowswood was no longer a place for the idle or shiftless. Two or three of the farmers left at the termination of their year, but better men took their places, and John Thorndyke, having settled matters to his satisfaction, now began to attend more to other affairs. He had been, when he first came back, welcomed ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... good wishes for the continuance of a happy married life. And when we got to our house we found waiting in the kitchen Mag Trawl, who had that day brought her fish from Swampy Arm—a dull girl, slatternly, shiftless: the mother of ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... white men than that of Philadelphia, while there is not a river-bottom in the whole South in which the extremes of heat during the summer are so great as in St. Louis. Slave-labor cultivates, in a miserable, shiftless manner, less than two per cent, of the area of the Cotton States; and upon this insignificant portion a crop of cotton has been raised in one year ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... geographic distribution of organised beings, in mutual affinities, as indeed in every other direction, the idea of nature reveals itself, in one and the same phenomenon and at the very same time, as circumspect and shiftless, niggard and prodigal, prudent and careless, fickle and stable, agitated and immovable, one and innumerable, magnificent and squalid. There lay open before her the immense and virgin fields of simplicity; she chose to people them with ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... her on wings. All her own attempts to get what she wanted had come to nothing; but she had always attributed her lack of success to the fact that she had had no one to second her. It was strange that Elmer Moffatt, a shiftless out-cast from even the small world she despised, should give her, in the very moment of his downfall, the sense of being able to succeed where she had failed. It was a feeling she never had in his absence, but that his nearness always instantly revived; and he seemed nearer to her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... writer in Le Jour,—Jesen—a brilliant man, an absolutely wonderful writer, but shiftless. Do you know what Falkenberg has done? The paper was in the market, the controlling share of it, and he bought it, or rather he put the money into Jesen's hands to buy it with. The whole tone of the paper with regard to foreign ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Indian-fighting—even now he had only to make believe a little to see the tufted head of a Navajo peer around the columns supporting the Lion of Saint Mark, or to mistake the fringe of facchini on the edge of the Grand Canal for a group of the shiftless half-breeds of New Mexico. In time the ——first Cavalry had been ordered North, where the work was then less pleasant than on the border; and, in fact, it was a distinct unwillingness to execute the Fugitive Slave Law which forced John ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the apparently exorbitant percentage of profit, few country merchants become rich. In a year of drouth, or of flood, many of their debtors may not be able to pay their accounts, even though their intentions are of the best. Others may prove shiftless and neglect their fields. Still others may be deliberately dishonest and, after getting as large advances as possible, abandon their crops leaving both the landowner and the merchant in the lurch. These creditors must then either attempt to harvest the crop by hired ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... which kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside were miracles themselves in that, with their liquid contents, they were streets and not bayous. However, they protected their island chapel almost as well as a six-foot moat could have done. There was a small paved space on the sidewalk that served to ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... pharmaceutical journals, calling attention to the styptic properties of plantain leaves—Plantago major—having attracted my attention, I determined to try a few experiments when opportunity offered. Having a shiftless neighbor whose yard produced a bountiful crop of the article, I was easily able to secure an abundant supply for my experiments. Believing that better results would be obtained from fresh plants than from dried, I expressed the juice from them ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... writer's judgment, on the other hand, that for their own good it is as important that workmen should not be very much over-paid, as it is that they should not be under-paid. If over-paid, many will work irregularly and tend to become more or less shiftless, extravagant, arid dissipated. It does not do for most men to get rich too fast. The writer's observation, however, would lead him to the conclusion that most men tend to become more instead of less thrifty when they receive the proper increase for an extra hard day's work, ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... Measles, of course," said Pirlaps. "I told you we were coming to see them! They live with their mother, Mrs. Sneeze, and their grandfather, Old Man Cough. Avrillia thinks she can help them, but they're a shiftless lot. Haven't a particle of get-up-and-go! Always waiting for ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... he said, "to-day you ha' come to man's estate, and I ha' summoned those here who will have to do wi' your future to hear these few words. The charge of you left on my shoulders by your shiftless parents has been a heavy one, but to-day I am quit of it. The deacons of Feldwick chapel have agreed to appoint you their pastor, provided only that they be satisfied wi' your discourse on the coming Sabbath. See to it, lad, that 'ee preach the ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... army usury, and with it would be removed the worst cancer of which the whole army suffers. Once the certainty that ultimately they are sure of their money would be gone, these leeches would no longer trouble the gay and shiftless young officer whom they now pursue with the persistence of bloodhounds. But what is the use of saying this? H. M. himself is not without blame in these things. As long as his personal example all tells the other way, how can we expect the army to ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... conviction. "A man couldn't be shiftless with you to do for, Hannah. He'd be obliged to have everything ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... great plains, like the Platte and the Kansas and the Arkansas, are so wasteful of their supply in the spring that by July they are gasping for a shower. So, part of the year they revel in luxury, and during the rest they go shabby—like shiftless people. ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... helpless as a new-born child. While we contemplated their naked bodies, their unwieldy disproportioned abdomina, and their heads, too heavy for their necks to support, we could not but wonder when we reflected that these shiftless beings in a little more than a fortnight would be able to dash through the air almost with the inconceivable swiftness of a meteor, and perhaps in their emigration must traverse vast continents and oceans as distant as the equator. So soon does Nature ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... Sal left the gas-stove flarin'. I made her get up and come downstairs to put it out. That'll learn her! Of all the careless, shiftless creatures, these coloured people are the worst. Come, Ida, it's long after nine, and I'm tired. You can read in your bedroom if you ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... fain to concoct a story about a strained back that would not allow Jerry to rise from the bed. When it was deemed prudent to tell her, the task fell to Theodore, who was very tender of his sister, remembering that though he considered Jerry a shiftless, poor shack of a creature, Armida probably had affection for him. She ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... at the jewel-case factory, and asked Miss Gibbs to take me back. But I was already adjudged a "shiftless lot," not steady, and was accordingly "turned down." Then once more I ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... half-bloods were a lazy, shiftless set, and the full-blooded Spaniards did not seem to care about taking the trip across ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... brand new Republic than his actual experience warranted. The roughness of the strong, uncultured young life grated upon him. It jarred upon his sensibilities. But of Italy he wrote with very different feeling. What though the places were dirty, the people shiftless, idle, unpunctual, unbusinesslike, and the fleas as the sand which is upon the sea-shore for multitude? It mattered not while life was so picturesque and varied, and manners were so full of amenity. Your inn might be, and probably was, ill-appointed, untidy, the floors ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... organs of the human body are just as shiftless as the one that owns 'em. The systems o' these fair ladies couldn't do their own work. The physician an' the surgeon were added to the list o' their servants, an' became as necessary as the cook an' ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller |
