"Shifty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... West's shifty gaze slid over him. The proposal of a hunt suited him. He must have a supply of food to carry him to Lookout. Whaley was a good shot and an expert trailer. If there were caribou or moose in the vicinity, he was likely to make a kill. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... revolt of the slaves in the West Indies, beginning in 1781, gave the growing anti-slavery sentiment an immense impetus. It also gave the slave owners pause. The cotton-gin had not yet been invented. Slavery was on a shifty economic basis in the South. Great Britain passed the first law to limit the slave trade in 1788; the United States outlawed the trade in 1794. In 1824 Great Britain declared the slave trade piracy. During these years, and during the years that followed, ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... an ordeal for Jorth. He seemed a victim of contending tides of feeling. Some will or struggle broke within him and the change was manifest. Haggard, shifty-eyed, with wabbling chin, he ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... hung over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit up his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter lack of any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... that this man, with his shifty looks and suspicious appearance, would be about the last man he ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... I'd rather trust you than that shifty plausible fellow there. Just look at me, Dick, and then say if you can let this cruelty go on. If you knew all I've suffered since I have been among those infernal boys, you would pity me, you would indeed.... If you send me back there ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... of chatter about shifty untrustworthy eyes," he said. "The greatest liars I have ever known could look St. Peter straight and serenely in the eye. It's a matter of steady nerves, nothing more. Somebody says that so and so is a fact, and we go on believing it ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... think of that?" demanded Haynes to himself. "Turned down for that fellow Prescott—-that shifty dodger and cheap bootlick! And I shook hands with you yesterday, Prescott! I never will again! Confound you, you turned out in togs at this late hour, just to put me out of ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... attire would have imagined him to be the same raving human brute whom we had just seen urging on his devilish hounds to tear a fellow-creature and a helpless horse to fragments and devour them. Now he seemed a heavy, loutish man, very strongly built and not ill-looking, but with shifty eyes, evidently a person of dulled intellect, whom one would have thought incapable of keen emotions of any kind. The Khania need not be described. She was as she had been in the chambers of the Gate, only more weary looking; indeed her eyes had a haunted air and ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... her?" I asked, looking straight into her face and noticing for the first time a curious shifty look in her eyes, such as I had never before noticed in her. She tried to remain calm, but, by the nervous twitching of her fingers and lower lip, I knew that within her was concealed a ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... was quietly walking, at half past twelve one night, through the arcade that connects Friedrich street with the Linden, and a disgusting fellow sidles up to me, wretched, undergrown, and asks me with a kind of greasy, shifty impudence: Doesn't the gentleman want something real fetching? And these show windows in which, right by the pictures of noble and exalted personages, naked actresses, dancers, in short the most shocking nudities are displayed! And finally this Corso—oh, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... eyes, and injuriously affects the optic nerves. The eyes of boys who use cigarettes to excess grow dull and weak, and every feature shows the mark of the insidious poison. The face is pallid and haggard, the cheeks hollow, the skin drawn, there is a loss of frankness of expression, the eyes are shifty, the movements nervous and uncertain, and all this is but preliminary to the ultimate degradation and loss of self-respect which follow the victim of the cigarette habit, through years of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... public life do not anywhere show that his politics shifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularly regardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though an alien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of the soldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges of the knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that place might follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves to party uses to get their full requital. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... you the Ruthful union show * My lords! Shall e'er I win the wish of me or no? A visit-boon by you will shifty Time vouchsafe? * And seize your image eye-lids which so hungry grow? With you were Union to be sold, I fain would buy; * But ah, I see such grace doth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... Rosamund saw the ugly, shifty face of Slippery Seal drawing near to them, and he was followed by another of the same crew, peering eagerly this way and that, as though they looked to see Tom pinioned in the midst ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... think of all this, of the spiritual evolution of her nursling, of his identity with the vicious, shifty, idle youth whose uncanny gift of design seemed to have been completely lost after his stay in South Africa? David Vavasour Williams had left home to the relief of his father and the whole village, if even to the half-pitying regret of his old nurse, in 1896. He had spent ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... were English products like primroses. An American would probably retort on my charge of scene-shifting by saying that at least he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth; and that in England it is the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have changes from day to day that would seem to him as distinct as different magic-lantern slides; one view showing the Bay of Naples and the next the North Pole. I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in American weather; but as a ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... we had a few more of them. I like a well-conducted regiment, but these pasty-faced, shifty-eyed, mealy-mouthed young slouchers from the Depot worry me sometimes with their offensive virtue. They don't seem to have backbone enough to do anything but play cards and prowl round the married quarters. I believe I'd forgive that old villain on ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... eyes shifty. And I reckon I'll never forget that room. Likely I saw what wasn't really there. In the excitement, the suspense, I must have made shadows into real substance. Anyway, there was the half-circle of bearded, swarthy men around Blome's table. There were the four rustlers—Blome brooding, perhaps ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... himself into a near frenzy. His face had become bloated with passion, he was breathing fast. But Lawler noted that his eyes were shifty, that he turned them everywhere except ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... from the outside to an important position with a house he generally gets a breathing-space while the old men spar around taking his measure and seeing if he sizes up to his job. They give him the benefit of the doubt, and if he shows up strong and shifty on his feet they're apt to let him alone. But there isn't any doubt in your case; everybody's got you sized up, or thinks he has, and those who've been over you will find it hard to accept you as an equal, and those who've been your equals will be slow to regard you as a superior. When you've ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... of talking? Walls have ears, you know, and those Jivros of yours look pretty shifty ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... to this crisis, an overlooked part of him appeared. The inheritance from his mother, from the forest, had always been obvious. But, after all, he was the son not only of Nancy and of the lonely stars, but also of shifty, drifty Thomas the unstable. If it was not his paternal inheritance that revived in him at this moment of confessed failure, it was something of the same sort. Just as Thomas had always by way of extricating himself from a failure ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... it any more, Bunch," I said. "They are shifty young guys in the theatrical business nowadays, and they sidestep the hammer-throwers. Mr. Stale is a back number, and his harpoon can't stop a dollar bill from flutering into ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... to run, and with the precocity and importance of wifehood at sixteen, she dilated to her companions on her mother's constant attendance on the Queen, and the perpetual plots for that lady's escape. "She is as shifty and active as any cat-a-mount; and at Chatsworth she had a scheme for being off out of her bedchamber window to meet a traitor fellow named Boll; but my husband smelt it out in good time, and had the guard beneath my lady's window, and the fellows are in gyves, and to see the lady ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that I had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought him to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... are again" cried a cheery voice from within and at the same moment a tall well built man came forward. He was a contrast to his wife in every way, being fairly stout, dark and brown eyed. He had a kind though stern looking face. He greeted Helen very cordially with none of the shifty glances his wife had made use of and then introduced Hugh to her. He was only 17-1/2 with dark hair and eyes and very much ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... made by the printer, this first issue is scarcely representative of the club's entire personnel, but that which still remains affords, after all, a fair index to the character and ideals of the new organization. The editorials by John T. Dunn are both frank and fearless. We detest a shifty club whose allegiance wavers betwixt the United, the Morris Faction and the National, and so are greatly pleased at Mr. Dunn's manly and open stand for the one real United. The editor's opinions on acknowledgment ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... his son recovered thenceforth certain supports and opportunities of which hitherto the accusation of heresy and the judgments of the court of Rome had robbed them; their neighboring allies and their secret or intimidated partisans took fresh courage; the fortune of battle became shifty; successes and reverses were shared by both sides; and not only many small places and castles, but the largest towns, Toulouse amongst others, fell into the hands of each party alternately. Innocent III.'s successor in the Holy See, Pope Honorius ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the men enclosed behind the walls of the old Prison rose into the ranks of the utterly reliable, the indefatigable, the fearless and the fine, or sank into those of the shifty, unhearty, unreliable, and unworthy—save the few who remained steadily mediocre, well-meaning, unsoldierly, fairly trustworthy—a useful second line, but not to be sent on forlorn hopes, dangerous reconnoitring, risky despatch-carrying, scouting, or ticklish night-work. One siege is very ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... blow dealt against Urartu, Assyria did not immediately regain possession of north Syria. The shifty Mati-ilu either cherished the hope that Sharduris would recover strength and again invade north Syria, or that he might himself establish an empire in that region. Tiglath-pileser had therefore to march westward ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... too weak to be fretful. Mrs. Bines spoke to her, while Percival bought a morning paper from a tiny newsboy, who held his complete attire under one arm, his papers under the other, and his pennies in his mouth, keeping meantime a shifty side-glance on the policeman a block away, who might be expected to interfere with ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... not peculiar to the Norsemen, but is found in all the popular tales of Europe. Germany was full of them, and there St Peter often appears in a snappish ludicrous guise, which reminds the reader versed in Norse mythology of the tricks and pranks of the shifty Loki. In the Norse tales he thoroughly ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... newcomer with blank amazement. The latter was blinking in the bright light of the corridor, and peering at us and at the smouldering fire. It was an odious face—crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... service on him, and piled it up with every extra kindness one castaway man could render another. . . . And the devil, as he recovered, lay watching me, under half-closed eyes, with never a sign of gratitude, but, for all my reward, this shifty sneer. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... your window when the moon is dead, And I will come again. The men say everywhere that you are faithless, The women say your face is a false face And your eyes shifty eyes. Ah, but I love you, Gormflaith. Do not forget your window-latch to-night, For when the moon is dead the house ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... man to act as cook. Evidently the Bradleyburg citizens had no love for the mountain realms in the last days of fall. For the double wage that he promised he was only able to secure a half-rate man,—Vosper by name, a shifty-eyed youth from one of the placer mines, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... means is time lost through all eternity. Did Mark think of these things years afterwards in Egypt when he was doubly ruined and doubly betrayed to his good friend Octavius by that hot, jealous, selfish, shallow, shifty, strumpet, Cleopatra, and Octavius was after his scalp with a certainty of getting it? He did—and he ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... not always the popular vote," said Ronsard; "They are selected by the Premier. And if the Premier should happen to be shifty, treacherous or self-interested, he chooses such men as are most likely to serve his own ends. And it can hardly be said, Sir, that the People truly return the members of Government. For when the time comes for one such man to be elected, each candidate secures his own ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... not new to either of them. Ostrander knew it as an artist and as an American reader of that French historic romance—a reader who hurried over the sham intrigues of the Oeil de Boeuf, the sham pastorals of the Petit Trianon, and the sham heroics of a shifty court, to get to Lafayette. Helen knew it as a child who had dodged these lessons from her patriotic father, but had enjoyed the woods, the parks, the terraces, and particularly the restaurant at the park gates. That day they took it like a boy and girl,—with ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... cause which he considered just and of vital importance to the country. Slow to form antipathies, he was immovable in them once formed, and as constant in his confidences once he found them merited. To his intense conservatism and antagonism to shifty politics was probably due the unvarying opposition of the "Times" to Home Rule and all other attempts at infringement of the British Constitution, but so far as my own experience goes he never attempted to influence the views of the correspondence. There were points in which, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... frank and bold, but something in his look, as he blinked at his partner, might have given Flint cause for uneasiness, had the Billionaire noticed that oblique and dangerous glance. One might have read therein some shifty and devious plan of Waldron's to dominate even Flint himself, to rule the master or to wreck him, and to seize in his own hands the reins of universal power. But Flint, bending over his note-book and making careful memoranda, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... clothes, which mitigated very little the cruel and nervous demeanor which no one who has come under his control will ever forget. His thugs were there, also dressed in their best clothes, which only exaggerated their coarse features and their shifty eyes. Mrs. Herndon, the thin-lipped matron, was ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... I.B.H. "Brayco, Brummagem Bantam! His style of hitting is straight and smart, in the ring or out of it. Hope the over-rated Hawardian Old 'Un and his Company relish the pepper young JOE has administered to the shifty Veteran and his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 7, 1891 • Various
... had heard nothing. So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi. Jim Hurd's widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky "professor of elocution," with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the floor beneath her in Brown's Buildings, and had been wont to come in of an evening and play comic songs to her and the children. Marcella was vehemently sure that he was a charlatan—that he got his living by a number of small dishonesties, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order, at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still—the Opera having at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as the Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square bristled between, I could yet occasionally ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... any assault and battery motions? It don't. All the result is to narrow them shifty eyes of his and steady 'em down until he's lookin' me square in ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... of my father's estate; still less the man who might be Margery's father. He had the face of all the Stairs of Ballantrae without its simple Scottish ruggedness; a sort of weasel face it was, with pale-gray eyes that had a trick of shifty dodging, and deep-furrowed about the mouth and chin with lines that spoke of indecision. It was not of him that Margery got her firm round chin, or her steadfast eyes that knew not how to quail, nor aught of anything she owed a father save only her paternity, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... with Eleanor flashed upon her. "I was an idiot last fall. Now I have come to my senses—" that was what she had said. When her voice broke, it must have been because she was sorry for the change—sorry that the old, shifty, unreliable self had come back to take the place of the strange new one whose ideals had proved too hard and too high to live by. The sad, hunted look that Madeline had spoken of was explained too. Eleanor was sorry. But was she sorry, as she ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... go? How far may Serbia come? Shall Austria be cut off from the sea? Is Hungary to become an independent kingdom? Is Montenegro to disappear? What is Greece to get? The only one of these questions that can be answered with any certainty is the last. Greece, as the result of her shifty and even treacherous attitude, will get very little consideration. On the decision of these questions hangs the future of the Balkan peoples. Though their final settlement must, of course, be deferred until the coming of peace, some regard will have to be paid, after all, to actual ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... the city folk, a middle-aged gentleman, with white hands and shifty eyes, especially made life interesting for me. We called him the "Repeater," what of his ways. When from the porch we implored him to desist, he was wont slowly and casually to direct his steps toward the fence, simulating finely ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Arnold, as I dimly gather, had got married, apparently a Wife with portion; bought the Mill from his Father, he and Wife co-possessors thenceforth;—"Rosine his Spouse" figuring jointly in all these Law-Papers; and the Spouse especially as a most shifty litigant. There they continue totally silent to mankind for about eight years. Happy the Nation, much more may we say the Household, "whose Public History is blank." But in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his graound-tackle's kinder shifty," said Dan, laughing. "Whale's fouled it. . . . Dip Harve! Here ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... interest, and got into a way of watching for her as she passed Truslow Manor every morning to her work. She was tall and very powerfully built, her features were coarse and swollen, and there was something repelling and yet fascinating to Biddy in her cunning, shifty glance. The way in which she strode along the road, too, swinging a rake, or hoe, or pitchfork in her hand, gave an impression of reckless strength which made the little nurse-girl shudder, and yet she felt unable to remove her gaze as ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... the day, eight years ago, in a lumber camp to the north when a shivering, meager, shifty-eyed youngster had come among them asking for work. They had taken pity on him, those big lumberjacks, put him up, given him money, kept ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... mark of bravado in his advance now. If he had possessed an over-growing confidence, Gargantua's attack had set it back, and he stole like a shifty fox through the night. Driven into his brain was the knowledge that all things were not afraid of him, for even the snapping beaks and floating gray shapes to which he had paid but little attention had now become a deadly menace. His egoism had ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... done with no promising. But—ought he to tell her now, or to wait?... And what would she say when she knew the whole shameful truth about him—knew that for nearly a year Surface Senior and Surface Junior, shifty father and hoodwinked son, had been living fatly on the salvage of ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... photograph of the showman who had called himself Hardman. All the trimmings were lacking, to be sure—the fierce mustache, the long hair, the buckskin trappings, none of them were here. But beyond a doubt it was the same shifty-eyed villain. Nor did it shake Bucky's confidence that Mackenzie had seen him and failed to recognize the man as his old cook. The fellow was thoroughly disguised, but the camera had happened to catch that curious furtive glance of his. But for that O'Connor would never have known ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... wanted to open the dining room door and see him at the table. I finally forced him away. He was sallow complexioned, 28 or 30 years of age, I imagine, had a dark overcoat on, not so extra well dressed, smooth face. I noticed his eyes particularly—they were rather shifty—and he was very, very persistent in getting to the dining room. He was a man of about five feet ten; this happened at 7 o'clock at the ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... help all that, Miss Etta,' and I could tell by the voice that the woman meant to be insolent. 'A promise is a promise, and must be kept, and poor Bob must not suffer from your procrastinating ways. You are far too slippery and shifty, Miss Etta; but I tell you that money I must and will have before this week is over, if I have to go to master myself ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... their way to the post and to run in accordance with the figures they saw upon the bookmakers' slates. "Let's not have any arguments, boys. All little pals together, eh?... Now, getting down to business, as the fellow said when he was digging the well, Isaiah is a pretty shifty old selling plater when he's at himself; but you know and I know that the best day he ever saw he couldn't beat Fieldmouse at a mile with a feather on her back. She'll walk home alone. The most Isaiah can ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... agog with joy," interrupted old Lady Storms who heard. "She was a woeful disappointment to many a gossiping woman, and a lesson to all the shifty fools who sell themselves to a man, and then trick him out of ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wherefore in liking." Hartopp, therefore, had taken, from the first moment, to Waife,—the staid, respectable, thriving man, all muffled up from head to foot in the whitest lawn of reputation,—to the wandering, shifty, tricksome scatterling, who had not seemingly secured, through the course of a life bordering upon age, a single certificate for good conduct. On his hearthstone, beside his ledger-book, stood the Mayor, looking with a respectful admiration that puzzled himself upon the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gathered up awkwardly, with a curious over-motion of his broad shoulders, as if he would conceal the action, various articles in his path. When he opened the door into the bedroom he crammed them behind it with a quick, shifty motion. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... certainly handsome in his way. His features were good, though of the pronounced Jewish type; but his dark, brilliant eyes had a shifty look in them—probably, as Mrs. Godfrey suggested, from their being set a little closely together. In age he appeared to be ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... built young man in his twenty-fourth year, was of a pallid, muddy complexion, with great, shifty, greenish eyes, and a thick, pendulous nose. The protruding upper lip of his long, thin mouth gave him an oafish expression, which was increased by his habit of carrying his ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... strong puff of wind. His skinny arms and legs hung on to his body like the claws of a spider, his fair hair inclined to red, his white skin appeared nearly bloodless, and the consciousness of weakness made him timid, and gave a shifty, uneasy look to his eyes. His whole expression was uncertain, and looking only at his face it was difficult at first sight to decide to which sex he belonged. This confusion of two natures, this indefinable mixture of feminine weakness without grace, and of abortive boyhood, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... There was a shifty light in Einstein's eyes as he mumbled, "I can tell you something else, if you'll do the right thing." Braun searched the young villain's face. "Go ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... the Grand Hotel, took the gilt off the gingerbread of such queenings, to a marked extent, making them look make-shifty, lamentably second-rate and cheap. Hence Henrietta's fretfulness in part. For with the exception of Lady Hermione Twells—widow of a once Colonial Governor—and the Honourable Mrs. Callowgas nee de Brett, relict of a former Bishop of Harchester, they were but scratch ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the incarnation of Filipino hostility to Spain. Judging by appearances—his zeal in 1896, bargain with Spain in 1897, fighting again in Luzon in 1898, acquiescence in peace with the United States, reappearance in arms, capture, and instant allegiance to our flag—he was a shifty character, little worthy the great honor he received where he was known and, for a long time, here. But if he lacked in constancy, he excelled in enterprise. Spaniards never missed their reckoning more completely than in thinking they had quieted Aguinaldo by sending him to China ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... was utterly blind to the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung upon his every word? That he did not foresee that they would think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this. With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... forward and looked fairly into his shifty eyes. "You are not in a position to say that, Freddy. I am mistress both of the situation and of Hubert's millions. Go away," she pushed him toward the door. "Take time to think over your position, and confess ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... had a look of a Joonie doorie, being all run to shoulders, and no neck on him at all. His arms hung well to his knee, giving the man the appearance of a powerful animal. His face was brown as a smack's sail, and his eyes red and shifty as ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... Little encouragement could be gathered from the noncommittal responses. Hall's restless, drumming fingers and lowered gaze threw the suppliant out of countenance. McDevitt, in turn, grew silent and drank the last of his mild refreshment. Hall looked up, with shifty eyes. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... of men in costume in a manner burlesques their shifty and uncertain taste in literature. A book or a certain fashion in letters will have a run like a garment, and, like that, will pass away before it waxes old. It seems incredible, as we look back over the literary history of the past ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this did shifty Atherton Make gag rules for the Great House? Wiped we for this our feet upon Petitions in our State House? Plied we for this our axe of doom, No stubborn traitor sparing, Who scoffed at our opinion loom, And took to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... an' make yerself at home. Powerful glad ter see ye—-war 'feard night would overtake ye. Ye fund the water toler'ble high in all the creeks an' sech, I reckon, an' fords shifty an' onsartain. Yes, sir. Fall rains kem on earlier'n common, an' more'n we need. Wisht we could divide it with that thar drought we had in the summer. Craps war ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... know whether ye are or not. 'Seems to me you will be 'f ye say 'no' to my offer," and Theo looked straight into the shifty eyes of ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not ill-looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the doorpost, and heard me state my case. All I asked was a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Deadwood, had picked a quarrel with his wife and attempted to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter and the "bull-whackers" bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of the ranch. She now had a man named Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed ne'er-do-well, who was suspected of stealing ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... and was instantly asleep, embracing the canvas bag in both arms. Every man in the crew was in a somewhat similar condition, saving Hovey, with his gray-blue, steady eyes, and Cochrane, with his glittering, shifty black. These two watched the rest descend toward swinish unconsciousness; they saw, and waited coolly, and now and then glanced at each other with ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... a nom-de-plume, a mere identification mark; but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city. Porlock is important, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... as it respects themselves, and insulting as it relates to us; and I fear it will prove that the late treaty of peace with France portends nothing favorable to these United States." Washington's patience had been sorely tried by the delays and shifty evasions of Spain, but he was now on the brink of success, just as he ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... King of the Jann, being as human in their jealousy about the virtue of their lovers as any children of Adam, and so their metamorphosis to fleas has all the effect of a surprise. The troupe is again drawn with a broad firm touch. Prince Charming, the hero, is weak and wilful, shifty and immoral, hasty and violent: his two spouses are rivals in abominations as his sons, Amjad and As'ad, are examples of a fraternal affection rarely found in half- brothers by sister-wives. There is at least one fine melodramatic situation (iii. 228); ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... with him she more and more felt that she was face to face with a resourceful and strong-willed opponent. She noticed, through all the outward Celtic gentleness, the grim and passionate mouth, the keenness of the shifty yet penetrating hazel-gray eyes, the touch of almost bull-dog tenaciousness about the loose-jointed, high-shouldered figure, and, above all, the audacity of the careless Irish-American smile. That smile, she felt, trailed like a flippant and fluttering tail to the kite ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... cab, Ralph noticed that his eyes were dull and shifty, his hands trembled and he bore all the appearance of a man who had been recently ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... up a word to say. He cleared his throat loudly once or twice, but the men ignored him utterly. He kept casting his shifty little sidewise glances at the boss, wondering why he didn't go away, but Bannon continued to stand there, giving an occasional direction, and watching the progress of the work with much satisfaction. The little delegate shifted his weight from one ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... him at the first glance, and disliked him still more at the second, as she caught his shifty eyes fixed on her with a ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... he might have caught a glimpse of Iris's pink muslin skirt disappearing behind a clump of rhododendrons, were not his shifty eyes screwed up in calculation—or perchance, the gods blinded him in behalf of one who was named after ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... these words with a sneer upon his face. He was about the same age and size as Hector, but his features were mean and insignificant, and there was a shifty look in his eye that stamped him as unreliable. He did not look like the Roscoes, though in many respects he was in disposition and character similar ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... Kotal in the same mountain range. Somewhat further on he met the Ameer, and was unfavourably impressed with him: "An insignificant-looking man, . . . with a receding forehead, a conical-shaped head, and no chin to speak of, . . . possessed moreover of a very shifty eye." Yakub justified this opinion by seeking on various pretexts to delay the British advance, and by sending to Cabul news as to the numbers of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... pieces was a secret between himself, a great man in the United States (who condescended to answer the Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort, with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the Palace of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and Europeanism generally in a rather French style because he had lived in Europe for some years—in ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous politician made himself indispensable to the Conservatives, and overcame by political moves which were little short of genius, the leadership of the opposition. Indeed, he may be said to have transformed Conservatism, giving it a new rallying cry, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... meantime, had given Lord Rotherwood and Lady Merrifield seats near the judge, where Miss Mohun was already installed. Alfred Flinders was already at the bar, and for the first time Lady Merrifield saw his somewhat handsome but shifty-looking face and red beard, as the counsel for the prosecution was giving a detailed account of his embarrassed finances, and of his having obtained from the inexperienced kindness of a young lady, a mere child in age, who called him uncle, though without blood ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Saint-Omer' devoted an article to the three melons of Madame Cornouiller, and published a portrait of Putois from descriptions furnished by the town. 'He has,' said the paper, 'a low forehead, squinting eyes, a shifty glance, crow's-feet, sharp cheek-bones, red and shining. No rims to the ears. Thin, somewhat bent, feeble in appearance, in reality he is unusually strong. He easily bends a five-franc piece between the first finger and the thumb.' There were good reasons for attributing to him a long ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... course is his attempt to nullify the Missouri Compromise by subtle indirection. This was the device of a shifty politician, trying to avert suspicion and public alarm by clever ambiguities. That he really believed a new principle had been substituted for an old one, in dealing with the Territories, does not extenuate the offense, for not even he had ventured to assert ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... wounded men on the white ship: but their outstanding characteristic is an invincible humanity. Beneath the mud and blood they are men—white men. But this strange throng are grey—like their ship. With their shifty eyes and curiously shaped heads, they look like nothing human. They move like overdriven beasts. We realise now why it is that the German Army has ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... McElroy, after trading hours, strolled down to the gate between the bastions, whom should he behold but the hulking figure of his erstwhile trapper, sulky of appearance, shifty eyes flitting everywhere but toward his old factor. And farther down the bank, among a group of warriors, a brown baby on his shoulder and his long curls shining in the sunset, was that incomparable adventurer, Alfred ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... passing they will drop out. A school should sift such out; but so far, in all our professional training, it is only the best medical schools which are inflexible in dealing with mediocrity. Most teachers know better, but let the shifty and dull pass by. The newspaper itself has to be inexorable, and no well-organized office helps twice the man who is dull once; but he and his kind come often enough to mar ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... and Todd and I parcelled out the 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 ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... case of a young man who, for several years, practiced masturbation several times a day, so far depleting his powers that he could not walk erect, his muscles were flabby, his testes were very soft and small, his eyes shifty, his hands clammy and his mind incoherent in its working. He seemed to be a candidate for the asylum and would probably have gone there if radical means had not been adopted to break him of the habit. He was broken, however, absolutely, and never performed the act after his nineteenth birthday. ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... be a sunburnt, middle-aged man, rather bluff and hearty in his greeting. The younger engineer, Blake, was a tanned, thin-faced individual, with a shifty gaze and constrained manner. The third fellow they introduced as a lineman named Somers. Neale had not anticipated a cordial reception and ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... quarrelling and intemperate speech, she was practically excluded (like a lightkeeper on his tower) from the comforts of human association; except with her own indoor drudge, who, being but a lassie and entirely at her mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of "the mistress's" moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... opened again to admit the last of the guests. A woman entered. Desmond was immediately struck by the contrast she presented to the others, Mortimer with his goggle eyes and untidy hair, Max, gross and bestial, Behrend, Oriental and shifty, and the scarecrow figure of ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... blue trousers belted with a piece of ordinary rope, plus a thick-set ruffianly personage the most prominent part of whose accoutrements were a pair of hideous whiskers. I leaped to my feet and made for the door, thrilled in spite of myself. By the, in this case, shifty blue eyes, the pallid hair, the well-knit form of the rope's owner I knew instantly a Hollander. By the coarse brutal features half-hidden in the piratical whiskers, as well as by the heavy mean wandering eyes. I recognised ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... in the North there 'tis always unsettled; I fancy we shan't be so shifty down South. No, really there's not the least call to be nettled, Or down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... from his attire, to follow the profession of a sailor. Tom Frost was sobbing bitterly. One of Robert Ashford's hands was bandaged up. As he was placed in the dock he cast furtive glances round with his shifty eyes, and as they fell upon Cyril an expression of deadly hate came over his face. The men of the watch who had captured them first gave their evidence as to finding them in the act of robbery, and testified to the desperate resistance ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... under rule of a Catholic sovereign. And he whom the Pope addressed, with the dignity of the Apostolic See in its reverence for the power which is a delegation of God, as Roman emperor and Christian prince, was in his private life scandalous, in all his public rule shifty and tyrannical, and in belief, if he had any, an Eutychean heretic. It may be added, as a fact of history, that the emperor went before the divine judgment sooner than the Pope; that during the seven years which intervened between the letter and his death he utterly disregarded ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... was not so long as you would imagine to look at the Pot Hunter. As time went on the marking of the pot came out on him very plainly. He acquired the shifty, sidelong gait of the meaner sort of predatory creatures. His clothes, his beard, his very features have much the appearance that his house has, as if the owner of it were distant on another occupation, and the camise has regained a considerable portion ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... listened open-mouthed, and I wondered what pleasure he got out of all that rigmarole. The heroes of Homer and of Virgil seemed to me very bloodless, boneless creatures after my kings and wizards out of Mr. Galland's book; even Ulysses, who was a thrifty, shifty fellow enough, with some touch of the sea-captain in him, was not a patch upon my hero, Sindbad of Bagdad, from whose tale I believe the Greek fellow stole half his fancies, ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and imposing, with an effulgent complexion and a prosperous presence. He wore a double-jeweled ring on his apoplectic finger, and a scarab scarf-pin. His eyes were keen and shifty; his teeth had acquired the habit of clutching his fat black cigar viciously while he snarled his rather loose lips about them in conversation. Uncle Ramsay never looked one in the face when he was talking. He looked off into space, where he appeared to have the topic under ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Parish-Clerk, about ten Years ago, it seems, had made a Promise of to one Trim, who is our Sexton and Dog-Whipper.—To this you write me Word, that you have had more than either one or two Occasions to know a good deal of the shifty Behaviour of this said Master Trim,— and that you are astonished, nor can you for your Soul conceive, how so worthless a Fellow, and so worthless a Thing into the Bargain, could become the Occasion of such a Racket as ...
— A Political Romance • Laurence Sterne
... up one night and stayed with them until morning, after the open-handed custom of the range-land. Billy Louise did not talk with him very much. He had shifty eyes and a coarse, loose-lipped mouth and a thick neck, and, girl-like, she took a violent dislike to him. But John Pringle told her afterwards that he was Buck Olney, the new stock inspector, and that he was prowling around to see if he could ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... was obliged to beat a quick retreat from their dormitory. I strongly believe that they will die out of this country fast. It seems, looking at them, so manifestly absurd to suppose it possible that they can ever hold their own against a restless, shifty, striving, stronger race." ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Purlieu with her books, her dogs, and her horses. And gradually, she knew not how, it was borne in upon her that the father who had seemed such a paragon of chivalry, was weak, unreliable, and shifty. She fought against the suspicions that poisoned her mind, charging herself bitterly with meanness of spirit, but one small incident after another brought the truth home to her. She recognised with a shiver of anguish that his standard of veracity was utterly different from ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... Street. This disreputable and lawless nest of river-side alleys was called Alsatia, from its resemblance to the seat of the war then raging on the frontiers of France, in the dominions of King James's son-in-law, the Prince Palatine. Its roystering bullies and shifty money-lenders are admirably sketched by Shadwell in his Squire of Alsatia, an excellent comedy freely used by Sir Walter Scott in his "Fortunes of Nigel," who has laid several of his strongest scenes in this once scampish region. That great ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... on was a smooth-tongued, tall, lean individual with shifty eyes, and a flow of talk of the coffeeshop variety. At the end of his first sentence any fool would have known that he had been put up to quiz Abdul Ali, in order that Abdul Ali might have an excuse to justify himself. ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... with anxiety, broken teeth and limp hair. His wife, as so often happens in French marriages, had evidently been the manageress. She was unbeautiful in rusty black; her clothes were the ill-assorted make-shifts of the civilian who escapes from Germany. Her eyes were shifty with the habit of fear and sunken with the weariness of crying. The boy was a bright little fellow, full of defiance and anecdotes ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... I, getting a great deal of pleasure out of seeing again, and thus intimately, his round, ruddy face—like a yachtman's, not like a drinker's—and his shifty, laughing brown eyes. "The game down town has given me enough excitement. I haven't had to continue it up town to keep ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... insist on full letter; confidence in oath much shaken; wires most shifty; gross neglect of crab, grandmother ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... long-limbed man, with a sharp-featured face and shifty eyes, sat listening intently to the faint echo of the refrain ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... and I decided it was May Irwin. We were mistaken, though, as Irwin has this woman lashed to the mast at any time or place. As soon as Mike the Dago espied the dame it was all off. He rushed, and drove a straight-arm jab, which had it reached would have given him the purse. But Shifty Sadie wasn't there. She ducked, side-stepped, and landed a clever half-arm hook which seemed to stun the big fellow. They clinched, and swayed back and forth, growling continually, while the orchestra played this trembly Eliza-crossing-the-ice music. Jim, ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... head off, if he strikes him. Feinting, dodging, stopping, hitting, countering,—little man's head not off yet. You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit the little man's intellectual features. He needn't have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles at all. Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... know so. Oh, he's pretty shifty on his feet, and he's got a good many people hoodwinked—your uncle always gave him too much credit, incidentally—but his New York correspondents happened to be clients of mine when I was practising law, and ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... you ain't overly rich right now," said Droop, apologetically; "but it warn't no secret thet ye might hev hed Joe Chandler ef ye hadn't ben so shifty in yer mind an' fell betwixt two stools—an' Lord knows Joe Chandler was as rich as—as Peter Craigin down ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... shifty, coarse, underhand, or gossipy was foreign to that heroic soul. Tom and I could not help growing up respectable characters, having such a mother and such a father, for the father, too, was one of nature's noblemen, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... for various sorts of work, with which their names are strongly associated: the Dominican for pulpit eloquence, the Capuchin for rough-and-ready street-preaching, the Benedictine for literary work, the Sulpitian for the training of priests, and the ubiquitous Jesuit for shifty general utility with a specialty of school-keeping. These and a multitude of other orders, male and female, have been effectively and usefully employed in the arduous labor Romanam condere gentem. But it would seem that the superior stability of the present enterprise of planting Catholicism ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... an uncommonly pasty complexion. A little forked beard, flecked with grey, lengthened his face, which was surmounted by a bald, pallid forehead, beneath which gleamed a pair of small, prominent, restless, shifty eyes. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... were, had stopped outside the post office to light a cigar. He sat easily on his big horse, and Jack could not help admiring the noble animal. The man himself was a fine physical specimen, but he had a hard, cruel face, and shifty eyes. There was no one in the immediate vicinity of the post office at that time, for Jack had delivered the mail an hour before, and he had sauntered back to the office, after doing some errands about town, to have a talk with Jennie. The other mail would not arrive ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... them of the judicia. Under a law of Varius, who is said by Cicero to have been the assassin of Drusus and Metellus, Italian sympathisers were brought to trial, and either convicted and banished, or overawed into silence. Among the accused was Scaurus. But now, as ever, that shifty man emerged triumphant from his intrigues. He aped the defence of Scipio, and retired not only safe, but with a dignity so well studied that but for his antecedents it might have seemed sincere. A Spaniard accused him, he said, and Scaurus, chief of ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... which comes to every storekeeper at the close of the day, and she was just wondering when Miles was coming to lock the door and fold the shutter over the one small window, when she heard a slouching step outside, and, glancing up, saw Oily Dave entering at the door. He looked more shifty and slippery than usual, but his manner was bland, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... her—but he went away and never came back. The village she lived in was a few miles from Coombe Keep and she gave birth to a boy. His childhood must have been a sort of hell. When other boys had rows with him they used to shout 'Bastard' after him in the street. He had a shifty, sickened look and when he died of measles at seven years old no doubt he was glad of it. He used to run crying to his wretched mother and hide his miserable head in ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and drifting off across the fields like smoke when the old ricks burn in damp weather—a long, broad-sheeted mist; and in it were bits of moving gold, shreds of bright colors vaguely seen, and silvery gleams like the glitter of polished metal in the sun. And as he looked the shifty wind came down out of the west again and whirled the cloud of dust away, and there he saw a long line of men upon horses coming at an easy canter up the highway. Just as he had made this out the line came rattling to a stop, the distant drumming of hoofs was ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... the reassuring calm, generally characteristic of the endings of Greek tragedy: is itself excited, troubled, disturbing—a spotted or dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn- skins of its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty, twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild creature himself. Let us listen and watch the strange masks coming and going, for a while, [60] as far as may be as we should do with a modern play. What are its charms? What is still alive, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and a large red rose in his buttonhole. If his boots were slightly run down at the heel, so trivial a detail passed unnoticed in the general splendor of his attire. Upon a close or hostile inspection there would have been some features of his ostensibly good-natured face—the shifty eye, the full and slightly drooping lower lip—which might have given a student of physiognomy food for reflection. But whatever the latent defects of Wain's character, he proved himself this evening a model of geniality, presuming not at all upon his reputed ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... felt drowsy, but the voices would not let him sleep. He rose, dressed, and went out in the stable-yard. There he found Doctor Gordon, Aaron, and a strange man, small, and red-haired, and thin-faced, with shifty eyes, holding by the ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... Pammer, it's all up with ye: ye lose two points. But ye come right back at him with an upper cut: 'Do ye live on th' Lake Shore dhrive?' If he doesn't, ye have him in th' nine hole. Ye needn't play with him anny more. But, if ye do play with him, he has to spot three balls. If he's a good man an' shifty on his feet, he'll counter be askin' ye where ye spend th' summer. Now ye can't tell him that ye spent th' summer with wan hook on th' free lunch an' another on th' ticker tape, an' so ye go back three. That needn't discourage ye at all, at all. Here's yer chance ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... before him," says Gudmund; "dark brown is his hair, and pale is his face; tall of growth and sturdy. So quick and shifty in his manliness that I would rather have his following than that of ten other men; but yet ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... twenty-five years following the Peace of Utrecht, peace was the chief aim of the ministers who directed the policy of the two great seaboard nations, France and England; but amid all the fluctuations of continental politics in a most unsettled period, abounding in petty wars and shifty treaties, the eye of England was steadily fixed on the maintenance of her sea power. In the Baltic, her fleets checked the attempts of Peter the Great upon Sweden, and so maintained a balance of power in that sea, from which she drew not only a great trade but ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... were dreadful to her. And yet she hardly understood them. How could the pure rectitude, the scrupulous honour, of such a nature be comprehended by a woman like Olive O'Brien, a creature of wild impulses, whose notions of morality were as shifty as the quicksands, whose sense of right and wrong was so strangely warped? For the first time in her life the strong accusing light of conscience seemed to penetrate the murky recesses of her nature with an unearthly radiance that seemed to scorch her into nothingness. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Paine cried out again before his spirit passed: "Have I followed the sea for thirty years to die in the dark at last? Curse on her work that has nipped me here with a shifty trick unkind— I have gotten my death where I got my bread, but I dare not face it blind. Curse on the fog! Is there never a wind of all the winds I knew To clear the smother from off my chest, and let me ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... a sudden urge to lash out and hit the man. That eternal drooling of smoke out of his nostrils, that everlasting cigarette dangling limply from one corner of his mouth, the shifty eyes, the dirty fingernails, ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... hand the young man raised a bumper to his lips, whilst eying Sir Michael with the shifty and inquiring eye ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... Four pale, anemic, shifty-eyed young fellows who were seated at a table near the door, took one look at George, reached under their chairs for their hats, and faded away through the door into the night. Mother, with a happy smile, piloted her little brood over to an empty table, and ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... young negro, clothed in rags unspeakably vile, which scarcely concealed his nakedness, was standing in the midst of a group of white men, toward whom he threw now and then a shallow and shifty glance. The air was heavy with the odour of stale tobacco, and the floor dotted with discarded portions of the weed. A white man stood beside a desk and was addressing ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... fine, but the Judge avoided my direct gaze. Seaward he turned a shifty eye, and I knew that he was lying. He looked depressed and down at the heel, and bore the signs of recent illness. I led him, unresisting to the nearest cafe, and properly stimulated, he told me that the Washington summer had proven too much for him, that ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... more exquisite in expression of passionate fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's besetting sin of laxity, his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he had set himself—and yet which he had hardly set himself—to run. And ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne |
