"Swindle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his spectacles and feels he has been sold! This life on the other side of Jordan he finds to be what his American cousins would call a "humbug," a downright swindle upon the sympathies and good taste of those who wear long streamers of crape, and groan and sob over his funeral rites! He feels in duty bound (out of consideration for those mourners who expect nothing else) to go scudding through the air in a loose white shroud, ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... be so, are untrue. On the contrary, he assures me that applications of this nature are very seldom made, and most of those that have been made have proved to come from Englishmen, who have thought they might swindle him in this form. I have had at least a dozen such applications myself, but I take it nothing is easier, in general, than to distinguish between an American and a native of Great Britain. It was agreed between us, that in future all applications of ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... him; he has bolted. It's a long-firm swindle that he's been up to. You know what that means? Obtaining goods on false credit, and raising money on them. What's more, young Chadwick is arrested; he came before the magistrates yesterday, charged with being an accomplice. Here it is; read it ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... further investigation. I went and had a good time of it down in the country, for the miners were very jolly fellows; but I was unable to satisfy my employers, and sent up a report which showed the public that the whole thing was a swindle, and so saved a good many people ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... adjoining room - I, as his lieutenant, taking turns. The thing was in its way a little triumph. A few of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they were the victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of the others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one of the phonographs was finally disposed of in this way, falling, by a happy freak of the ballot-box, into the hands of Sir ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... goods or shoes or lamps or furniture, and that's all he knows. If he's an American he'll buckle down to that little business and work night and day, sweat blood and make every one else connected with him sweat it, underpay his employees, swindle his friends, half-starve himself and his family, in order to get a few thousand dollars and seem as good as some one else who has a few thousand. And yet he doesn't want to be different from—he wants to be just like—the ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... left the room. Claude felt sick, humiliated. It was all so perfectly clear. Jim knew nothing about English property. It was only natural he should place himself in Featherstone's hands. He determined to put a stop to such a swindle as was contemplated. But his plan to warn Jim was frustrated by the later realization that Jim was madly in love with Angela. This astonishing fact was sufficient to drive everything else from his mind. He had no ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... It's a deliberate swindle!" shrilled Mr Pilkington. The tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles flashed sparks. "I've been made a fool of! I've been ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... is the man whom the skipper hopes to swindle!' Ping Wang exclaimed, and went off into ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... fifteen minutes. She was ill at ease there; it was no comfort to her to gaze upon the pallid, wasted face of the man she loved when she realized that, by her presence here, she was constituting herself a party to a heart-breaking swindle, and must deny herself the joy of gazing upon that same beloved countenance when, later, it should be glowing with health and youth and high hopes. He was too weak to speak more than a few words to her. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... what was the issue of this Bundelcund Banking concern, I have scarce had patience to keep my counsel about it; and whenever I have had occasion to mention the Company, have scarcely been able to refrain from breaking out into fierce diatribes against that complicated, enormous, outrageous swindle. It was one of many similar cheats which have been successfully practised upon the simple folks, civilian and military, who toil and struggle—who fight with sun and enemy—who pass years of long exile and gallant endurance in the service of our empire in India. Agency houses after agency ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Nobody there. A swindle of the crows. That's what this is. Nobody anywhere. I despise ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... swale; and listening to the swindle of the flail, as it sounds dub-a-dub on the corn, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... that he had not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed the whole fact to Basil's guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a moment of remorse and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then Basil looked at the mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from Niagara without being forced to a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to have a good talk with the Mastersons the last time he was over. He had taken both father and daughter into his confidence, and told them how Squire Lemington, in connection with the powerful syndicate, was trying to swindle his folks out of the rich Alaska claim, which they truly believed belonged to them, and not to ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... you go, we wish to say one word," Fred remarked, calmly, yet firmly. "Ever since we have been at Ballarat, you have contrived a number of ways to swindle us of our money. What you have received we don't wish back into our pockets: but we do give you warning that hereafter, if you interfere in our affairs, we shall take the liberty of administering a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... side you have a picture of injured innocence in the shape of pale despairing mothers and clamoring children, and on the other, villainy triumphant in the form of a police constable or a government official. And to think that you should have been taken in by such a swindle!" ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... tax has been paid on all the alcohol in these things. In many cases, also, a further tax has been paid for the government stamp on patent medicines. That the medicine may be dangerous, that it may be a cruel swindle, that it may take from consumptives and others money which is sorely needed for air and food, and give them in return what is worse than nothing—all these things are nothing to the State if ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... said I. "The Rundles are pretty reliable, plain, uneducated country people. Maybe the paper manufacturers tried to perpetrate a swindle." ...
— Options • O. Henry
... thirty thousand dollars you got on that partnership swindle?" Burke asked, sneering. "I s'pose you didn't ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... judge nor jury seemed much interested in the convict's behaviour to the daughter of the man he had tried to swindle out of money. On the contrary, they jumped to the conclusion that his wife was morally his accomplice; and, indeed, if it had not been for her great beauty she would very likely have gone to the galleys too. There was, however, this difference ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... far as his station at the Bohr. There he had made arrangements with his people that the ivory from Latooka station, 100 miles east of Gondokoro, should avoid my head-quarters, and be conveyed by an oblique course to the Bohr. By this swindle, the government would be cheated out of the share of two-fifths of the ivory which belonged to them by contract ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... was a swindle," hissed Mr. Simp, looking up through red eyes which throbbed like pulses. "What right had you to plunder us upon ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... Tarbes showed that Mme Lacoste's handling of her fortune was careful to a degree, her expenditure being well within her income. This witness also proved that the Fourcades' evidence of Euphemie's misbehaviour could have been dictated from spite. Fourcade had been found out in what looked like a swindle over money which he owed to ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... "he is in league with Miste, and has been keeping him informed of your movements. If you see Devar again, kick him. I had that pleasure myself once, but I'm afraid you will never get the chance. The man has had a finger in every Anglo-French swindle of the last ten years. He dares not show ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... choking laugh. "Life is a big, big swindle," she said. "The only happy people in the world are those who haven't found it out. But you—you say there are other things in life besides suffering. How did you know that if—if you've ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the man who, occupying a position of trust, planned to swindle the Metropolis Trust Company through forged notes and checks," Rochester stated with slow emphasis. "Jimmie Turnbull learned that you, Clymer, were to visit Colonel McIntyre on Monday night, and he went there in disguise to find out if ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... might as well tell it now, I suppose," said the old gentleman; "but it is a great shame about that paper! to advertise that morning papers are to be obtained—it's a swindle, Jasper! a complete swindle!" and the old gentleman looked so very irate that the boy ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... before. He was for a direct front attack—fut, horse, an' guns—an' all for nothin', seem' that I had no thransport to convey the machine away. "I will not argue wid you," sez I, "this day, but subsequintly, Mister Dearsley, me rafflin' jool, we talk ut out lengthways. 'Tis no good policy to swindle the naygur av his hard-earned emolumints, an' by presint informashin'"—'twas the kyart man that tould me—"ye've been perpethrating that same for nine months. But I'm a just man," sez I, "an' overlookin' the presumpshin that yondher settee wid the gilt top was not come ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... place they saw the same kind of people and the same dance. True, there was a baby eating some candy in the back of the hut, but its jaws did all the dancing for it. This was a swindle which the boys would not further encourage by their presence, and ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... prejudice of every other mercantile interest in the Colony. As a natural consequence it was cordially hated, and richly deserved the maledictions which generally accompanied the mention of the Friponne—the swindle—a rough and ready epithet which sufficiently indicated the feeling of the people whom it at ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... therefore, considered the whole affair as too risky to be gone into without unlimited cash; but now he had a chance of making money, he determined to try his hand at the business. True, he knew that he was in for a swindle, but then he was behind the scenes, and would benefit by the knowledge he had gained. If the question at issue had really been that of getting gold out of the reef and paying dividends with the profits, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Look 'ere, Sir, we're the National Telephone Comp'ny with a reputation to lose, and if you've any ideer we want to swindle you, all I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... since, when all's said, you're too noble to stoop to the frivolous cant About crimes irresistible, virtues that swindle, betray ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... delight, I discovered three fugitive sixpences, headed by a vagrant shilling, immerged in the heap in my waistcoat pocket. This discovery gave an immediate elasticity to my mind; and I have therefore devised a scheme, worthier the improved state of my spirits, namely, to swindle your servants out of a horse, under the pretence of a ride upon the heath, and to jog on contentedly homewards. So, under the protection of Providence, and the mercy of footpads, I trust we shall meet again to-morrow; at all events, there is nothing huffish ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... no great risk in doing it, for my confidence in Frank was very great. I thought, of course, this would insure my claim of eighteen thousand dollars, but it eventually proved to be a deep-laid plot to swindle me. Frank had no notes or accounts that were of any value; they were all bogus and got up to deceive his poor old father and others. He had no property shipped to South America. It was all found out, when too late, that he had ruined himself by gambling and bad company, often ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... no swindle. Barker thought he hed a gran' good thing. He got fooled an' the fool complaint is very ketchin'. Got it myself years ago an' I've been doctorin' fer ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... king's power to double its mass, the exchangeable value of gold and silver would have decreased one-half immediately, always on account of this proportionality and equilibrium. The adulteration of the coin was, then, on the part of the king, a forced loan, or rather, a bankruptcy, a swindle. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... son; it pass by gift, it pass by grant, but that NEVARRE THERE PASS A LIE WITH IT! I say it was a gift by a Spanish Christian king to a Christian hidalgo for the spread of the gospel, and not for the cheat and the swindle! I say that this mine was worked by the slave, and by the mule, by the ass, but never by the cheat and swindler. I say that if they have struck the hoss in the mine, they have struck a hoss IN THE LAND, a Spanish ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... antiquity? A little shade darker in iniquity is the selling of stones entirely recut from broken larger ones, so that, though the stone remains identical, the workman puts a new face on it; and even this the antiquary will sell you as a veritable antique. Then there is the unmitigated swindle of the pure imitation, oftentimes so perfect that the most experienced judges are deceived. There is in fact no absolute certainty in the matter. There are antiques of which no doubt can be entertained, with characteristics utterly inimitable; but there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... short nuggety man, and could use his hands, they said; he looked as if he'd be a nasty, vicious, cool customer in a fight—he wasn't the sort of man you'd care to try and swindle a second time. He had a monkey shave when he shaved, but now it was all frill and stubble—like a bush fence round a stubble-field. He had a broken nose, and a cunning, sharp, suspicious eye that squinted, and a cold stony eye that seemed ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... now? An author's Guide. You know the kind of thing; they sell splendidly. Of course I shall make it a good advertisement of my business. Then I have a splendid idea. I'm going to advertise: "Novel-writing taught in ten lessons!" What do you think of that? No swindle; not a bit of it. I am quite capable of giving the ordinary man or woman ten very useful lessons. I've been working out the scheme; it would amuse you vastly, Reardon. The first lesson deals with the question of subjects, local colour—that kind of thing. I gravely advise people, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the money into the Company, I tell you, against your advice. The Company is more or less a swindle." ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... female. Mrs. Mott was chosen President, resolutions were reported, and when everything was in fine working order (except the furnace) Mr. Pomeroy slipped off to his senatorial duties, to watch the grand Kansas swindle now on the tapis, and to protect, if possible, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... popularity of the "Tent on the Beach," which shows his natural pleasure in success. "Think," he says, "of bagging in this tent of ours an unsuspecting public at the rate of a thousand a day! This will never do. The swindle is awful. Barnum is a saint to us. I am bowed with a sense of guilt, ashamed to look an honest man in the face. But Nemesis is on our track; somebody will puncture our tent yet, and it will collapse like a torn balloon. ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... if it does, the wicked certainly have no conception of what they are going to miss. Tom, for example, would never have put buttons in the offering. Doug would not gamble and drink. Poor, painted Nanon would starve rather than sin. Old man Jones, in the amen corner, would not swindle his neighbor; nor would Wetmore, the Baptist, practise the holy calling of shepherd, having in his breast the heart of a wolf. We all, saving a woman here and there, have our sins, little and great, and many times in the day we put in jeopardy that future bliss. But I console myself ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... city," said Dallas, as he and Abel sat, worn out and disconsolate, gazing at a confusion of tents, sheds, and shanties, for it could be called nothing else, on the hither side of a tumbled together waste of snow and ice spreading to right and left. "Is it all a swindle or a dream?" ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... owner of the Diamond K ranch, near Manti," said the stranger, with blunt sharpness that made the Judge blink. "I've a case on in the Manti court at ten o'clock tomorrow—today," he corrected. "They are going to try to swindle me out of my land, and I've got to have a lawyer—a real one. I could have got half a dozen in Manti—such as they are—but I want somebody who is wise in the law, and with the sort of honor that money and ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the things that gall us most. What is it that rises up against us at odd times and smites us in the face again and again for years after it has happened? That we spent all the best years of our life in learning what we have found to be a swindle, and to have been known to be a swindle by those who took money for misleading us? That those on whom we most leaned most betrayed us? That we have only come to feel our strength when there is little strength left of any kind to feel? These things will hardly much disturb a man of ordinary ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... what you want," I said, "in small sums from a number of people, you'll be able to keep control of the thing yourself, and you needn't be afraid of Ascher. Not that I believe Ascher would swindle, you. I think ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... of reserve fund to me. Whenever I was in hard luck I'd go to the crossroads, hook a finger in a farmer's suspender, recite the prospectus of my swindle in a mechanical kind of a way, look over what he had, give him back his keys, whetstone and papers that was of no value except to owner, and stroll away without asking any questions. Farmers are not fair game ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which for the sake of decency I do not care to detail in these columns, appear in recent issues of the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... no alternative. Of course they took care to come for that before they talked of my resigning. I believe it was all planned beforehand. The whole thing seems to me to have been a swindle from beginning to end. By heaven, I'm almost inclined to think that the Duchess knew ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... knowledge of gambler's legerdemain, and the useful consciousness that he must prey or be preyed on. John Rex was no common swindler; his natural as well as his acquired abilities saved him from vulgar errors. He saw that to successfully swindle mankind, one must not aim at comparative, but superlative, ingenuity. He who is contented with being only cleverer than the majority must infallibly be outwitted at last, and to be once outwitted is—for ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Verdun! And how we did suffer!... It appears that we are in for another turn—at least the 5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking about it for a long time. To the devil with it! Every Bavarian regiment is being sent into it, and it's a swindle." ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... as much as I expected—not at night, for instance. Then the existence of an olive disease anywhere near is naturally very degoutant (as they say here). And the Casino at Monte Carlo is simply an organised swindle. It ought to be put down! After staking ten times in succession on "Zero," and doubling my stake each time, I was absolutely cleared out! Only just enough money to take me home. Shall follow your example, and try Torquay for the rest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... see whether there was any truth in the statement that they were heirs to an immense fortune in America. The old count, in his capacity of burgomaster, declared that the affair looked to him very questionable, that he believed it was a mere swindle, and that there was surely nothing in it for them. Whether he returned to them the papers or not, is unknown, but he declared to the day of his death that he had restored them, whereas the Brandts of Aschersleben swear that ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... that the man who had sold the land to Ole Bull had no claim to it whatever, and had perpetrated a barefaced swindle, and now, having the money, he dared his victim to do his worst. The actual owner of the land, who had come forward to assert his rights, became interested in the scheme, and was willing to sell the land at ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... and worth L80,000, which one Madame de la Motte induced the jeweller who "made" it to part with for Marie Antoinette, on security of Cardinal de Rohan, and which madame made away with, taking it to pieces and disposing of the jewels in London; the swindle was first discovered when the jeweller presented his bill to the queen, who denied all knowledge of the matter; this led to a trial which extended over nine months, gave rise to great scandal, and ended in the punishment ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to work and do something for themselves. But you didn't, and I couldn't see what you were trying to do. And then when Wade joined you and Father, I thought he was either helping you put over some kind of a swindle or else he'd started believing in Merlin himself. I should have seen what you were trying to do from the beginning. At least, from when you talked them into cleaning the town up and fixing the escalators and getting the ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... vanished—at any rate, he can't be found. It's just about time this place was broken up. Keller took no chances with the bank." He picked up the faro-box. "Now, in the States this kind of thing would not go. It's a two-card needle-tell swindle." ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... institutions of marriage and the law courts. This is the raison d'etre of the church. You kill a man just as much whether you murder him or hang him after the formalities of a trial. And so with lust and marriage, mutatis mutandis. So again with the professions of religion and medicine. You swindle a man as much when you sell him a drug of whose action you are ignorant, and tell him it will protect him from disease, as when you give him a bit of bread, which you assure him is the body of Jesus Christ, and then send a plate round for a subscription. You swindle him as much by these acts ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... living room almost luxurious. She wore rare gowns, painstakingly chosen; she kept him waiting when he called; she received him with indifference. She seemed to grow as frank with him as he with her, and often enough the frankness was genuine. She told him coolly at the outset that she knew he would swindle her out of her money if he got the chance and that he was not going to get the chance. She informed him that she did not trust him but that that need make no difference in their relations; if she became convinced that the project were safe she would go into ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... and all his life he has longed for vengeance, but never seen his chance. During the last year or two things have gone against him—secret speculation, I think—and he finds himself in a bad way. He determines to swindle his creditors, and for this purpose he pays large cheques to a certain Mr. Cornelius, who is, I imagine, himself under another name. I have not traced these cheques yet, but I have no doubt that they were banked under that name at some provincial town where Oldacre from time to time led a double ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... service. Had Meyerbeer told Wagner to go back to Germany it is just possible Wagner might have gone. Instead, Meyerbeer sent him into a cul de sac—to starve, or get out as he best could. In the whole history of the art of the world no more cruel swindle was ever played on an obscure artist by a man occupying ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... she. "People promise you heaps of money, and when they come by their own, and there is talk of paying they swindle you like—" "Like Elie Magus," she was going to say, but she stopped herself ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... share of all they get, except of what they earn by fortune-telling. They are very clever at making a good bargain; when they know of a rich merchant being in the place, they disguise themselves, enter into communications with him, and swindle him, ... after which they change their clothes, have their horses shod the reverse way, and the shoes covered with some soft material lest they should be heard, and ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... tyranny. No wonder the women of the country-side, rather than waste three precious hours in arguments about a few cheeses, will smuggle them past the authorities under the device of being enceintes; no wonder their wisest old men regard the paternal government as a successfully organized swindle, which it is the citizen's bounden duty to frustrate whenever possible. Have you ever tried to convey—in legal fashion—a bottle of wine from one town into another; or to import, by means of a sailing-boat, an old frying-pan ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... hour. I am not safe to be trusted with your person five minutes out of this lady's presence,—of whom I beg pardon for this strong language. Mr. Venner, I must beg you, as one of the Trustees of this Institution, to look at the manner in which its Principal has attempted to swindle this faithful teacher whose toils and sacrifices and self-devotion to the school have made it all that it is, in spite of this miserable trader's incompetence. Will you look at the paper ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... one," he said to himself. "He means to pocket the contessa's bracelet. What a swindle! I thought there was something more devilish about ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... of Castro presents no other drawback than that he has been arrested in Paris for an insignificant swindle he has committed; but it seems that a rich Cuban wants to get him out of his difficulties on condition that he ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... up. If I said it was a deal of mine—they'd ask where Helena came from—they'd ask where you came from, Flopper. We're beaten—beaten every way we turn. The game has got us—we haven't a move. We played it to the limit, the slickest swindle that was ever worked, and it worked till there's more money than I've tried to count. And then it changed us from thieves, from—from anything you like—and now that we want to quit, now that we want a chance to make good, it's got us in its grip and we can't get away." ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... set down the untasted wine and told the truth. Not all—that was not to be dreamed of. In the depths of his heart he feared Bulmer. The old man's repute for honesty was widespread. He would fling his dearest friend into prison for such a swindle as that arranged between Coke and the shipowner. But it was a positive relief to divulge everything that concerned Iris. From his pocket-book David produced her frayed letter, and Bulmer read it slowly, aloud, through eyeglasses held at ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... disreputable old farmer—to get his land away from him without paying for it. Now, as every one knew such a thing to be ludicrously impossible, it was at once noised abroad in Canaan that Joe had helped to swindle Judge Pike out of a large sum of money—it was notorious that the shyster could bamboozle court and jury with his tricks; and it was felt that Joe Louden was getting into very deep waters indeed. THIS was serious: if the young man did not LOOK OUT, he might find ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... suggesting agreeably something of the smooth brown cloth and neat white linen of a well-to-do city gentleman of the last century. Yet that solemn, massive, prosperous-looking building is the enduring monument of one of the most gigantic shams on record—a sham and swindle that was the prolific parent of a whole brood of shams and swindles; for that building, with honesty and credit and mercantile honor written in its every line and angle, is all that remains of the South Sea House. It is a melancholy place—the Hall of the Kings ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... at once; easy manner). I'd like to know about this swindle that's going to be sprung on him. I didn't mean to startle the old man. You see, on my way here I dropped into a barber's to get a twopenny shave, and they told me there that he was something of a character. He has been ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... all went well, we should be once more at sea in less than twenty-four hours, the disagreeable suspicion for the first time obtruded itself upon my mind that possibly it might prove after all that I had been the victim of a clever swindle, and that I should never see anything more of any of the men to whom I had handed over two months' advance so confidingly. However, about eleven o'clock the next morning, the first of them—William Rogers, the man whom I had shipped as boatswain—put in an appearance alongside, neatly dressed in ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... know the facts, no swindle can deceive you. I spend my life in getting facts. I now have seen enough to know that capitalism is not a swindle. If all hands labored hard and honestly the system would enrich us all. Some workers are dishonest ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... pyramid of fine-looking picture-elephants is an ugly live elephant or two standing on a beer-keg or two, which is a wonderful feat for elephants, of course, but not an entertaining one to human sight-seers; and as a final swindle, the cannon act is a man on a spring disguised as a wooden cannon, who is thus hoisted a few feet into the air, where he catches hold of his swinging bar and completes the usual act of an "aerial acrobat." "Fi on't!" as Hamlet ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... is the way you are going to try to swindle me out of my money, is it, Dave Porter?" he cried. "Well, let me tell you, it won't work. You came here and got those goods from me, and either you'll pay for them or I'll sue your father for the amount. Why, it's preposterous!" The storekeeper turned to his clerk, who was gazing ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... during ten days it waxed more and more violent day by day. The great "Negro University Swindle" became the one absorbing topic of conversation throughout the Union. Individuals denounced it, journals denounced it, public meetings denounced it, the pictorial papers caricatured its friends, the whole nation seemed to be growing frantic over it. Meantime ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... parcel through the street; however poor, some one must perform for him so menial an office: and he would consider it vastly beneath his dignity to accept charity, though if he had the chance would not hesitate to swindle you out of sixpence. But in matters of honesty these good people show a certain discrimination. Your servants, for example, would hesitate to steal money, especially if liable to detection, but not to take wine and sugar and oil: which is ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... have in hand, I picked this thing up, and, being something of a specialist in certain forms of cheating, I made up my mind to try my hand at this and prove for myself its extreme simplicity. You see how easy it is to swindle, gentlemen, and the danger to which you expose yourselves. There is no necessity for me to explain the trick further. The instrument speaks for itself. It is merely a matter of dexterity, and keeping ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... to administer justice to the scoundrel who has deluded thousands into buying worthless mining shares or some such swindling bait, the victims are told that the whole swindle has been legitimized by the great seal of the state, and that their loss is the profits of a business conducted by ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... discontent. He had asserted that, owing to the habit of foreclosing small mortgages, "any one with a hundred guldens could gobble up a peasant a year." The German feudal lords he had declared to be hangmen, who knew only how to swindle the poor man. "Such fellows were formerly called rascals, but now must we call them 'Christian and revered princes.'" Wise rulers are rare indeed: "they are usually either great fools or the worst rogues on earth." ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the broker in question do? He winked to another broker, and these two bid against one another, over their victim's head, and ran everything she wanted up at least a hundred per cent above the value. So open and transparent a swindle I have seldom seen, even in an auction-room. Ha! ha! ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... old bricklayer in Carrick, whose daughter has the divil's bargain in you; and for the like of that you're not bad matched. Tell him from me, Larry Macdermot—tell him from me, that I'm not so owld yet, nor so poor, nor so silly, that he can swindle me out of my lands and house that way. So clever as you think yourself, Mr. Keegan, you may walk back to Carrick again, and don't think to call yourself ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... angrily, "I demand that this farce come to an end. I believe the bidding of this boy to be a premeditated swindle. If so, I will do my best to ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... watch was a midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four hours between them, and each of them tried generously and persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched, straight along ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... is no other remedy for their wrongs. The admirable Constitution just framed at Leavenworth, one well worthy of a free people that has been tried as with fire, will be adopted before these lines are before the public eye. Let them reject the Buchanan-English swindle, put their heel on the Lecompton fraud, set up the Leavenworth Constitution, and erect a State government under it in defiance of the Territorial Usurpation, and they will soon find themselves face to face with the tyranny at Washington. But is there not reason to hope that firmness and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... 'comes out of the pocket of a poor, demented girl, and I would rather starve than swindle her in this manner.'" ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... been merely dogmatic—she must recover under the superlative advice and attention he was able to summon for her. Then his impatience had swung about toward all doctors—they were a pack of incompetent fools, medicine was nothing more than an organized swindle. They had tried baths, cures, innumerable infallible treatments—to no purpose. Finally he had given up all effort, all hope; he had given her up. And since then it had been difficult ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which every one would have eagerly taken and trusted, rather than the baseless trash of bankrupt companies; our government, I say, have still been overawed from a contest with them, and have even countenanced and strengthened their influence, by proposing new establishments, with authority to swindle yet greater sums from our citizens. This is the British influence to which I am an enemy, and which we must subject to our government, or it will subject us to that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... money for his land that was left;" and in the face of such unquestionable facts—much to the credit certainly of his generosity—he was accused of swindling a Queen whom neither Jew nor Gentile had ever yet been sharp enough to swindle; while he was in reality plunging forward in a course of reckless extravagance in order to obviate the fatal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Mr. Meredith has paid him for those forty men?" pursued Joseph. "Where's the advance you made him for those men at Msala? Not one ha'penny of it have they fingered. And why? Cos they're slaves! Fifteen months at fifty pounds—let them as can reckon tot it up for theirselves. That's his first swindle—and there's others, sir! Oh, there's more behind. That man's just a stinkin' hotbed o' crime. But this 'ere slave-owning is enough to settle his hash, I ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... things even stranger than that," he said. "I can introduce you to a man who's in this room now, who was fighting the Ship-building swindle, and he got hold of a lot of important papers, and he took them to his office, and sat by while his clerks made thirty-two copies of them. And he put the originals and thirty-one of the copies in ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... were Mr. Shrumpf's version of his own swindle, and a tolerably correct account of the events which led ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... news as he went. Arrived in London soon after daybreak, he went to Cochrane's house, and there changed his uniform. When the Stock Exchange opened at ten on February 21, 1814, the Funds rose rapidly, and among those who sold on the rise was Cochrane. The next day, when the swindle had been ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... son's suspicions and a can opener | |convinced Andrew Sherrer last Saturday | |that he had been fleeced out of $500 by | |two clever manipulators of an ancient | |"get-something-for-nothing" swindle. So | |strong was the ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... you right, madam," added Peter Conant, "for concocting the plot to swindle Alora's father out of the money his dead wife intended him to have. You are not properly punished, for you should be sent to jail, but your disappointment will prove ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... 'Sit down, sir, and hear me through quietly. It is your best course. It is your ONLY course. Now listen. You have undertaken to cheat my employer. You have rendered false accounts of sales, using your own clerks for sham purchasers, and employing stool-pigeon auctioneers. You have attempted to swindle him generally. I have the whole story here. ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a few articles (for which a leading French paper received L100,000) were instrumental in enabling the Panama Canal Co. to swindle the French public of forty million pounds sterling, and more recently, where through Press agency it became feasible to a combination of Jesuitism and militarism to seduce by far the greater portion of the noble French nation into frenzied agitation and anti-Semitic excesses, and load the ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... turn the matter over in your mind, younker, you'll see that this bus'ness can't be put through without giving the scamps the chance to swindle us the worst sort of way. They won't give up the boy on our promise to pay 'em the money and no questions asked, for they don't b'leve we'll do it; so we've got to give 'em the money and trust to their honor to keep their part. Trust to their honor," repeated Hank, with all the ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... light, and every investigation, in the opinion of the ablest and most sagacious men, confirms the assertion that the late MASON and SLIDELL difficulty was simply an immense stock-jobbing swindle, played in the most heartless manner on this country and on England, without heed as to ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... where roulette is played there is another swindle—the restaurants. They fleece one frightfully and feed one magnificently. Every dish is a regular work of art, before which one is expected to bow one's knee in homage and to be too awe-stricken to eat it. Every morsel is rigged out with lots of ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... pilfer, filch, purloin, peculate, swindle, plagiarize, poach>. (With this group, which excludes the idea of violence, compare the Robber ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... said, by Gall, that we must consider the criminal rather than the crime. The formula does not carry us very far, but the inquiries which have been started look toward an answer of my questions based on science for the first time. If the typical criminal is a degenerate, bound to swindle or to murder by as deep seated an organic necessity as that which makes the rattlesnake bite, it is idle to talk of deterring him by the classical method of imprisonment. He must be got rid of; he cannot be improved, or frightened out of his structural reaction. If, on the other hand, crime, ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... a swindle. It was a fair speculation—a good open deal, and it would have made the fortune of every one who had the savee to see through it. Where's the swindle to sell what others want to buy and at their own valuation? We don't ask them to buy. We don't put up the price. ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... swindlers of millions instead of thousands. But nevertheless it was their story. There was only one grain of consolation. It was in the last paragraph of the news item, and read: "There seems to be no trace of the man and woman who worked this clever swindle. As if by a telepathic message they have vanished at just the time when their whole house ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... abandonment of the crops, the constant advice on the part of Bisyas and others, and the ever-increasing scarcity of valuables that might be given as offerings to the priests and to their assistants—all these contributed to bring about the termination of a religious swindle that victimized ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... was dashed if he wanted to. He said he had had enough of life; it was a rotten swindle from ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... sullenly through a tangle of routine voting. Finally, the question was renewed on Butler's proposition to adopt the Cincinnati platform pure and simple. This was the red flag to the mad bull. Mississippi declared that the Cincinnati platform was a great political swindle on one half the States of the Union; and from that time on the Cotton States ceased to act as a part of the convention. As soon as a lull in the proceedings permitted, Mr. Yancey put in execution his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... easily as a star! But the mere leader of fashion has no genuine claim to supremacy; at least, no abiding assurance of it. He has embroidered his title upon his waistcoat, and carries his worth in his watch-chain; and if he is allowed any real precedence for this it is almost a moral swindle,—a way of obtaining goods under false pretences. But without running into more minute discussion, I say again—that there is no substantial ground of supremacy in aught that is merely accidental or external; and he who rests ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin |
