"Shiftless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eighteen, who had been employed by the farmer to do chores. He was shiftless, and a week or two before had been sent away in disgrace. He had gone no one ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens or of sluts; but when we consider the quantity of work which she managed to struggle or shuffle through with such occasionally admirable and memorable results, we are once more inclined ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 1809, we should have seen an infant just born,—and with what promise of future greatness? Looking ahead ten years, we should have discerned this infant, Abraham, developing into youth, still living in the old log-cabin, with neither doors nor windows, with wolves and bears for neighbors, with a shiftless father. But his mother was dead! Still this mother had left her impress, and she had become in that boy's heart "an angel of a mother." She made him what he afterwards proved himself to be. Follow ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... married any one of the richest and steadiest young men of the country, but of course, in feminine perversity her heart was set on that ne'er-do-well, Paul des Roches. A handsome fellow, a good dancer and a fair violinist, Fiddler Paul was in demand at all festivities, but he was a shiftless drunkard and it was even whispered that he had a wife already in Lower Canada. Renaud very properly dismissed him when he came to urge his suit, but dismissed him in vain. Ninette, obedient in all else, would not give up her lover. The very day after her father had ordered ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... queer, queer as a dog. There wuz piazzas and porticos, and ornament piled on ornament cropped out on every side. It wuz weighted down with cheap little sawed out peaks and pints, and triangles perforated with holes for ornaments, but the hull thing looked shiftless, tippin' and lop sided. I stood lookin' at it in silence for a long time, it looked so queer that it sort o' stunted and brow beat me, and my first words wuz spoke as much to my own soul as to my companion, "It looks ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... Scots, enamoured for a season of the clean-limbed grace and almost feminine beauty ("ladyfaced," Melville had called him once) of this "long lad of nineteen" who came a-wooing her, had soon discovered, in matrimony, his vain, debauched, shiftless, and cowardly nature. She had married him in July of 1565, and by Michaelmas she had come to know him for just a lovely husk of a man, empty of heart or brain; and the knowledge transmuted ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... poor, shiftless kind of a critter. I s'pose the snow went off before he got ready to haul them to the mill; but if he had peeled them in June or July, they would have been all right; but now they will be ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... Frampton. For several years Free Joe had what may be called a jovial time. His wife Lucinda was well provided for, and he found it a comparatively easy matter to provide for himself; so that, taking all the circumstances into consideration, it is not matter for astonishment that he became somewhat shiftless. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... intelligent; when the laborer anywhere casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and shiftless—then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in prejudice against the blacks—not in sectional estrangement—not in the hope of political dominion—but in a deep and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Mr. Easterbrook lots better than she does the violinist. I heard her talking to Mother one day. She said that any one that would look twice at a lazy, shiftless fiddler with probably not a dollar laid by for a rainy day, when all the while there was just waiting to be picked an estimable gentleman of independent fortune and stable position like Mr. Easterbrook—well, she had her opinion of her; that's all. ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... farther cry. How or where were they to help? Others began to come in with white faces and terror-stricken eyes; and before long the sepulchral ruin had little groups all over it, endeavouring in shiftless fashion to bring ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... she herself would have anticipated. She had conceived a liking, almost an affection, for poor, shiftless Pennyloaf, strengthened, of course, by the devotion with which the latter repaid her. But something more than this injury to her feelings was involved in her distress on being excluded from those sorry lodgings. Pennyloaf was comparatively an old friend; ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... street-police, and but for the kindness of the tides would be worse than bad in its sanitary arrangements. No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long, narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the great American people, and lead to angry comparisons. Yet, if all the streets of London ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... forget, Lawrence," she said, "that character is an essential factor in poverty. Poverty there must always be, because of the idle and shiftless." ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is; but everything hinges on the extraordinary fact that the hungry, thin, common, shiftless, luckless man at the very bottom is still a MAN. He will not be a thief, and he will die of hunger and cold, as poor fellows do almost every winter day, rather than take the food that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... weakling, he knew. Everybody in the Wolf River section knew it. Hamlin was lazy and shiftless, seemingly contented to drift along in an aimless way, regardless of what happened to him. There was at Hamlin's feet some of the wealth that other cattlemen of the district were gaining. He had proved on a quarter-section ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... this created one should know more about Potts. It will have been inferred that he was objectionable. For the fact, he was objectionable in every way: as a human being, a man, a citizen, a member of the Slocum County bar, and a veteran of our late civil conflict. He was shiftless, untidy, a borrower, a pompous braggart, a trouble-maker, forever driving some poor devil into senseless litigation. Moreover, he was blithely unscrupulous in his dealings with the Court, his clients, his brother-attorneys, and his fellow-men at large. When I add ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... commercial, and despicable American did this Arcadia fade to the strains of dying and pathetic music. According to another school of writers—mainly authors of personal reminiscences at a time when growing antagonism was accentuating the difference in ideals—the "greaser" was a dirty, idle, shiftless, treacherous, tawdry vagabond, dwelling in a disgracefully primitive house, and backward in every ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... newly colonised countries. Like the majority of other Germans who had emigrated before him, he was aiming for "the States," where, according to the popular idea in Europe, money can be had for nothing in the shape of any expenditure of labour, time, or trouble. Really, the ne'er-do-well and shiftless seem to regard America as a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for the idle, the lazy, and the dissolute—although, mind you, Fritz was none of these, having made up his mind to work as hard in the New ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... whetstone or mower's rifle[670] when it is too late in the season to make hay? Scatter brained and "afternoon men" spoil much more than their own affairs in spoiling the temper of those who deal with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar,[671] a man of superior understanding, said: "I have sometimes remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes to ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... try and make an ally of her. Against her own father? I shrank from the responsibility and counted the cost of failure—certain failure, to judge by her conduct. She began to hoist her lugsail in a dazed, shiftless fashion, while our two boats ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the whole. The home is begun when its founders are yet children. Ignorant and poor, the boy has "took up" with the girl, and it may be they are legally married. A building-bee is announced, a little cabin erected, a few pigs bought or given, a few trees girdled, some corn planted, in so crude and shiftless a way that even an Indian, in his first attempts at farming, would be ashamed to own it, and home life is begun. Into this home of poverty and ignorance come the children. The families are large—eight, ten, ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various
... "the negro doesn't seem able to make use of it. Even if he does own the land and is making money, he still goes on living in a shiftless way. One would hardly believe the kind of shacks I've seen in the last couple ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... stands, or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside were miracles themselves in that, with their liquid contents, they were streets and not bayous. However, they protected their island chapel almost as well as a six-foot ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... the red man reached the trapper's shanty, and at once, without hesitation or delicacy, set about a thorough examination of its contents. Of course there was the toboggan on the roof, and in fairly good condition for such a shiftless owner. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... not dull," replied Helene. "I have my work. There are two men as shiftless and helpless as babes to attend to, and none to ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... her work by candle-light, and Mr Wrayburn, half amused and half vexed, and all idle and shiftless, stood by her bench looking on. Miss Wren's troublesome child was in the corner in deep disgrace, and exhibiting great wretchedness in the shivering stage of ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... those parents who are zealous to maintain a high standard of living, those with talents which they are ambitious to develop, and those who realize keenly the care and expense that children need, are deterred from having many, or any; while the shiftless and happy-go-lucky propagate without scruple. There is, for all except the rich, a premium on childlessness, which the natural desire for parenthood cannot wholly discount. But this ought not to be so. Childbearing and rearing is a very ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... recipient must not have to show that he is in want. Because a writer or investigator is a sober, careful body and quite solvent in a modest way, that is no reason why we should not pay him stimulatingly for his valuable contributions to the general mind, or because he is a shiftless seeker of misfortunes, why we should pay him in excess. But pay him anyhow. Almost scandalous private immorality, I submit, should not bar the literary worker from his pay any more than it justifies ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... was not a better man," she said presently, as if the words were thrust out of her by a chastening conscience. "My pride kept me up after I had married him; but he was born shiftless an' he died shiftless. He never did a day's work in his life that I didn't drive him to. His children have never known how it was, for I've al'ays made 'em think he was a hard worker an' painstakin' to keep back his laziness from croppin' out in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Aunt Lizzie go 'bout three years back," Tom explained. "She got—shiftless and I been sort of batching it ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... answered with calm conviction. "A man couldn't be shiftless with you to do for, Hannah. He'd be obliged ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a miserable little hut, in a pine wood, and I was his only slave. I kept house, and worked for him. He was one of the shiftless kind, and there was nothing he could do. Oh! he was a poor, miserable creature, I tell you, always in debt! Well, we had two children, a girl ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Bracketts knew, was the poor relation that had married shiftless Joe Hemenway, who had died after a time, leaving behind him a little Joe and three younger girls and a boy. John, if possible even better known to the Brackett family, was the millionaire Congressman to whom no Brackett ever failed ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... presumed to be familiar with the external facts of Abraham Lincoln's early life,—the rude cabin, the shiftless father, the dead mother's place filled by the tender step-mother; the brief schooling, the hungry reading of the few books by the fire-light; the hard farm-work, with a turn now of rail-splitting, now of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... woman, who has been accustomed to carry forward her arrangements with well-trained domestics, would meet a thousand trials to her feelings and temper, by the substitution of ignorant foreigners, or shiftless slaves, which would be of little account to one who had ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had scaled his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... childhood of Dickens one may see a forecast of his entire career. His father, a good-natured but shiftless man (caricatured as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield), was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, at Portsmouth. There Dickens was born in 1812. The father's salary was L80 per year, enough at that time to warrant living in middle-class comfort rather than in the poverty of the lower classes, with ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le Pettit. Loveday had gone to fetch the milk. For Loveday's aunt, Senath Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant, soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare. Mercifully, ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... the train, thar was the living human faces of my own blood, John and Marthy, and the eight young uns whose countenances I had never beheld. And as I gazed, women, more scales drapped from my long-blind eyes. In the face of John here, the boy I had allus abused for no-git-up and shiftless, I beheld loving-kindness and onselfishness writ large and fair; looking on little Evy, I seed love divine in her tender eyes, and light raying out from her yaller hair and from the other seven smaller head' bunched around her like cherubim'. ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... opportunity! The land where everyone's rights are respected! The land where the son of a shiftless drunkard can grit his teeth and say, "I'm going to be rich and famous some day!" Here in America we pride ourselves on the fact that everyone has the right to live his own life as he pleases—provided, that is, that he does not infringe upon the ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... him as a shiftless, worthless creature. From the time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects in a red handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he lazily drifted out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... half hours long. Mine are twenty-six just now. If it were not for the fact that several hours each day I am under the influence of Roxanne's repose, I suspect I would run down like a clock that has exhausted its mainspring. Mamie Sue says that Belle says Roxanne is shiftless, but Belle is unable to distinguish shiftlessness from noble composure under difficulties. I told Mamie Sue that it would be best for her to forget all that Belle has ever said to her; and she ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... way in the Hyer family to make the best of things; they had always possessed this virtue to such an extent, that they suffered from it as from a vice. There was hardly to be found in all Southern Tennessee a more contented, shiftless, ill-bestead family than theirs. But there was no grumbling. Whatever went wrong, whatever was lacking, it was "jest like aour luck," they said, and did nothing, or next to nothing, about it. Good-natured, affectionate, humorous people; after all, they got more comfort ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and inhabitants of these dwellings were Indians having physical features common to all American tribes. That their accomplishment differed in degree from that of the shiftless war-making tribes north and east of them, and from that of the cultured and artistic Mayas of Central America, was doubtless due to differences in conditions of living. The struggle for bare existence in the southwest, like that of the habitats of other North ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... after their arrival, had married a neighboring planter. Wishing to be near the sister, our hostess had also married and settled down for life in that wild region. 'I like the country very well,' she added; 'it's a great sight easier living here than in Vermont; but I do hate these lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing niggers; they are so slow, and so careless, and so dirty, that I sometimes think they will worry the very life out of me. I du believe I'm the hardest ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... unrequited toil of the slave is seen in the light of history to be the dearest kind of labor. It was frequently said after the war that the emancipated Negro would be worthless as a laborer; that he was naturally lazy, shiftless, and a shirk, and that he would relapse into a vagabond. But, as a matter of fact, far more good work has been done in the South since the war than before, and for the most part the Negro has done it. Great crops ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... one would wonder little that many Negroes became low and degraded. The very institution of slavery itself produced shiftless, undependable beings, seeking relief whenever possible by giving the least and getting the most from their masters. When the slaves were cut off from the light of the gospel by the large plantation system, they began to exhibit such undesirable ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... it. You may look on it as a test, Bertie. If you have the resource and courage to carry this thing through, I will take it as evidence that you are not the vapid and shiftless person most people think you. If you fail, I shall know that your Aunt Agatha was right when she called you a spineless invertebrate and advised me strongly not to marry you. It will be perfectly simple for ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... lounged about the place, living, apparently, in wretched poverty, spending their time between waiting for the tide to go out, when it was in, and waiting for it to come in, when it was out, to float a canoe or bring fish to their shiftless nets. This, indeed, seemed their only concern in life; while their ill-thatched houses, forsaken of the adobe that once clung to the wicker walls, stood grinning in rows, like emblems ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... in the sneering mouth above the half-formed chin, and in the lowering eyes of undecided colour beneath the receding brow, but also in every shiftless attitude and movement of his great gaunt body, and even in the torn coat and shapeless felt hat—both once black, but both now a dirty gray—his aspect proclaimed him the preeminent rowdy of ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... nicknaming Miss Millar "Baby," because she had been so lachrymose and shiftless when she came to Thirlwall Hall, and had never looked up till she was handed over to Miss Vanhansen, who had given her "airings" and "outings" all very well for a baby, and much to Baby's taste as it seemed, but not exactly severe study. Yet in spite of it ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... economic society denies to workers the just rewards of thrift and efficiency. And this has been true of black laborers in the South from the time of slavery down through the scandal of the Freedmen's Bank to the peonage and crop-lien system of to-day. If the Southern Negro is shiftless, it is primarily because over large areas a shiftless Negro can get on in the world about as well as an industrious black man. This is not universally true in the South, but it is true to so large an extent as to discourage striving in precisely that class of Negroes who most need encouragement. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... at him the same evening she had made up her mind to go, and now he seemed not so shiftless and worthless, but run down and beaten upon by chance. His eyes were not keen, his face marked, his hands flabby. She thought his hair had a touch of grey. All unconscious of his doom, he rocked and read his paper, while ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Jurgen, such as does not salve my conscience. There is no justice in this place, and no way of getting justice. For these shiftless devils do not take seriously that which I did, and they merely pretend to punish me, and so my ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... on the days before Nora's advent seemed like a horrible nightmare from which he was thankful to have awakened. Once in a while he indulged himself in speculating as to how it would feel to go back to the old shiftless, untidy days of his bachelorhood. But he rarely allowed himself to entertain the idea of her leaving, seriously. He was like a child, snuggly tucked in his warm bed who, listening to the howling of the wind outside, pictures himself exposed ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... in Carlisle jail twict fer stealin', an' in summer he jest lives shiftless like along the creek, helpin' hisself to the farmers' stuff. Now he dassent come home no more, for dad says he won't own him fur a son. Mammy cries heaps ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... beach, to keep their signal sheets flying, their signal fires burning. The effect upon their mental condition of this loss of animus was immediate. They became perceptibly more serious. Their first camp—it consisted only of five haphazard piles of bedding—satisfied superficially the shiftless habits of their womanless group; subconsciously, however, they all fell under the depression of its discomfort and disorder. They bathed in the ocean regularly but they did not shave. Their clothes grew ragged ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... She is never idle for one minute, is severe and hard, and despises everything but work. I think she suffers from her husband's shiftlessness. She always speaks of me as "This" or "that woman." The family consists of a grown-up son, a shiftless, melancholy-looking youth, who possibly pines for a wider life; a girl of sixteen, a sour, repellent-looking creature, with as much manners as a pig; and three hard, un-child-like younger children. By the whole ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... argue," Julia was saying as they came. "You did your marketing and simply and plainly left it out there because you were too shiftless to——" ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... was larger by considerable than the Snow house, was situated on the Bay Road, the most exclusive section of the village. Once, and not so many years before, the Bay Road was contemptuously referred to as "Poverty Lane" and dwellers along its winding, weed-grown track vied with one another in shiftless shabbiness. But now all shabbiness had disappeared and many-gabled "cottages" proudly stood where the shanties of the Poverty Laners once ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... it, that I had never had a chance to be. Even Nancy, my old nurse and servant, knew that, and pitied me for it. Nancy is an old maid herself, but she has had two proposals. She did not accept either of them because one was a widower with seven children, and the other a very shiftless, good-for-nothing fellow; but, if anybody twitted Nancy on her single condition, she could point triumphantly to those two as evidence that "she could an she would." If I had not lived all my life in Avonlea I might have had the ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Baltimore.—A big, dirty, shippy, shiftless place, full of goats, geese, colored people, and coal, at least the part of it I see. Pass near the spot where the riot took place, and feel as if I should enjoy throwing a stone at somebody, hard. Find a guard at the ferry, the depot, and here and there, along the ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... shiftless halls, Where pride penurious bides, The while the richness of the hills Runs off to choke the tides; Where every negro cabin stood A freeman's hearthside warm, And broad estates of bramble wood Expunge in many ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... their sons bringing in their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their mothers. Usually the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge, and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey; the house would become too hot ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by the King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. The islands contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese. Everything is staid and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... overboard; and, with a cunning and artfulness which even then seemed incredible to me, laid herself out only too successfully to ensnare me, and by becoming my wife to secure for herself those comforts and luxuries which Merlani—poor shiftless scamp that he was—could never ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... result, even if it is the end of your engagement, do not grieve your heart away over it. Better far to have the end come now than to marry a dependent and shiftless man, who will humiliate your pride by a thousand and one mean traits. The moment a young wife becomes the financial head of a household, and the man depends upon her to keep the family free from debt, sentiment and romance fly from the windows of the ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the Goldsmiths the same shifting, shiftless race as formerly; a "shattered family," scrambling on each other's back as soon as any rise above the surface. Maurice is "every way unprovided for"; living upon Cousin Jane and her husband, and, perhaps, amusing himself by ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He got into debt, fled to Belgium, returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind. In "Alexandre Dumas a la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this Micawber of newspapers. Everything went into it, good or bad, and the name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin. For Dumas, unluckily, was ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... wife. I remember I sniveled a little at being taken at my word, but it served me right for saying one thing when I meant another. However, it don't matter now. Joel is as clever as the day is long, but he is a shiftless critter, never splits his kindlin's till jest bedtime, and Patty is pestered to death for wood, while his snorin' nights, she says, is awful, and that I never could abide; so, on the whole, I'm ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... a decided feeling of depression that Patty Sinclair approached the Watts ranch. Long before she reached the buildings an air of shiftless dilapidation was manifest in the ill-lined barbed wire fences whose rotting posts sagged drunkenly upon loosely strung wire. A dry weed-choked irrigation ditch paralleled the trail, its wooden flumes, like the fence posts, rotting ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... problem developed in a shiftless, irresolute way. Unable to see that China had vastly changed, and that government by rascality had become a physical and moral impossibility, the Legations in Peking adopted an attitude of indifference leaving Yuan Shih-kai to wreak ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... twice married, the second time to the widow West. She had brought with her to her new home a good-looking, long-legged, black-eyed, black-haired ne'er-do-well of a son, a year or so younger than Hiram. He was a shrewd, quick-witted lad, idle, shiftless, willful, ill-trained perhaps, but as bright and keen as a pin. He was the very opposite to poor, dull Hiram. Eleazer White had never loved his son; he was ashamed of the poor, slack-witted oaf. Upon the other hand, he was very fond of Levi West, whom ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... on. There ain't much here of anything, I kin tell yez. Min was pore and as shiftless as Jim. Ef ye opens that drawer over there yez'll find a few baby ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... usually two or three low-minded plants that will not climb the poles, but go groveling upon the ground, wandering off among the potato-vines or cucumbers, departing utterly from the traditions of their race, becoming shiftless and vagrant. When I lift them up and wind them around the poles and tie them with a wisp of grass, they rarely stay. In some way they seem to get a wrong start in life, or else are degenerates from the first. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... Teresa, Almirante Oquendo, and Vizcaya, each of about 7000 tons, and the somewhat larger and very able former Italian cruiser Cristobal Colon. Figures and statistics, however, give no idea of the actual weakness of the Spanish navy, handicapped by shiftless naval administration, by dependence on foreign sources of supply, and by the incompetence and lack of training of personnel. Of the squadron that came to Cuba under Admiral Cervera, the Colon lacked two 10-inch guns for her barbettes, and the Vizcaya was ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... I render? How much ought I to be paid? Of the second kind, nearly every phase of it begins right here, that men and women demand for labor something which they have not earned. They do careless, indifferent, shiftless, reckless work, and then demand a living-wage. The capitalist is not inclined to raise his scale of prices, knowing that he has built up his business by prudence, sagacity, and tireless application—the very qualities which his dissatisfied ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... matters but must submit its acts to the Proprietaries for veto or approval. This was the settlement in Carolina of Albemarle, back country to Virginia, gatherer thence of many that were hardy and sound, many that were unfortunate, and many that were shiftless and untamed. An uncouth nurse of ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... 1796, in Burgundy, near Soulanges, Blangy and Ville-aux-Fayes; nephew of one of the masons who built Mme. Soudry's house. A shiftless farm laborer, exempt from military duty on account of smallness of stature; was at first the lover, then the husband, of Catherine Tonsard, whom he married ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... placards of sheriff's sales; for no estate can be settled, no land set off or chattel sold on execution, no legal meeting of the voters or freemen holden, without previous notice on the sign-post. It used to be known by another name, and marks the spot, where, whilom, petty thieves, shiftless vagrants, and other small offenders against the majesty of the law, were wont to suffer a shameful penalty for their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Abraham Lincoln belonged to the indolent class known as "poor whites," but this is not true. Shiftless and improvident though his father was, he had no use for that class of white slaves, who seemed to fall even ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... turned out to be, Stephen Packard. Come here empty-handed an' try to buck me, would you? Me who has busted better men than you all my life, me who has got my hooks in you deep already, me who ain't no pulin' ol' dodderin' softy to turn over to a lazy, shiftless vagabond all I've piled up year after year. Buck me, would you? Tuck in an' fire my men, butt on my affairs— Why, you impudent young puppy-dog, you: I'll make you stick your tail between your legs an' howl like a kiote ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... specify, for good reasons, that I held myself very strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in business affairs. This was partly because I was married, and I never saw the day in my life when to be regarded as a real Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not have given me the horrors. I would have infinitely preferred the poorest settled employment to such life. I mention this because a very brilliant and singular article entitled "Charles G. Leland l'ennemi ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... an hour in sharpening a lead-pencil. This maxim, while losing in sententiousness would gain in reason if it ran thus: "What is worth doing at all is worth doing as well as the situation demands." "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day," an excellent maxim for the shiftless, must not be taken too literally by the individual already obsessed to do to-day twice what he can ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... was with Link Ferris. Of old he had been known as a shiftless and harddrinking mountaineer with a sour farm that was plastered with mortgages. Now, he had cleared off his mortgages and had cleaned up his farm; and he and his ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... younger than himself, who at the age of sixteen had married and gone, he believed, to Chicago. That was years ago, but he had an idea that he might find her. He was not troubled by his lack of resources; he did not believe that any man would want for a meal unless he were "shiftless." He had always been able to turn ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... means a shiftless, unbusiness-like set of women: they can look after themselves as well as after the poor and forlorn: many of them, were they in the world, would be called strong-minded, blue-stockinged women. At Montreal there is a large establishment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... spite of all her effort, McElroy lay week after week in the back room, looking for hours together into the red heart of the fire, silent, uncomplaining, in no apparent pain, but shiftless as an Indian in the matter ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... had of Mr. Krome. My somewhat intimate association with workingmen for the last three months enables me to say that, so far as I have been able to observe, workingmen often have a precious poor opinion of one another. The plumbers talk of the carpenters as lazy and shiftless, the painters speak ill of the plumbers, the carpenters regard the tinners with derision, and so it ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... search in vain among our celebrities for one whose origin and early life equalled Abraham Lincoln's in wretchedness. He first saw the light in a miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a few barren acres in a dreary neighborhood; his father a typical "poor Southern white," shiftless and without ambition for himself or his children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... said, "to-day you ha' come to man's estate, and I ha' summoned those here who will have to do wi' your future to hear these few words. The charge of you left on my shoulders by your shiftless parents has been a heavy one, but to-day I am quit of it. The deacons of Feldwick chapel have agreed to appoint you their pastor, provided only that they be satisfied wi' your discourse on the coming Sabbath. See to it, lad, that 'ee preach the word as these good men and mysen have ever ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... chief fancy for the room, shaky and insecure as both floor and ceiling seemed, was that dim panel-portrait blistering there above the fire or peeling off with mouldy flakes in past days,—for she had still many a longing for the old family-pictures that once her shiftless father, when put to his trumps, had sold to adorn the halls of ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... and well done! I love to see a maid whose fingers are not all thumbs. But, dear me, Collet, what a shiftless woman are you! Can't you pack those lads out o' door, and have a quiet house for your work? ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... thinking that a little education will give them the privilege of living without manual labor; they are making higher wages the way to less work rather than the way to a higher standard of life; they are shiftless, immoral, and criminal. Now, as I study this race so dividing in the great laboratory of Nature, under the law of God which works on so justly, ofttimes apparently so cruelly, always for the general good of man, I look forward with the hope that this smaller, higher class will increase, ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... I cannot return the compliment," remarked the lady, with a grim smile. "I suppose it is all the care and worry of your great family of children that have aged you so. And Maria was always such a poor, shiftless creature. I daresay, now, with all that your boys and girls cost you, you have two or three servants to keep, instead of making the girls work, and saving the wages and the endless waste that the best ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... liberated, at the death of their owner, by a will, the writer and executor of which had run off into the rebel army, carrying it with him. A distant relative of Mr. Johnson, a worthless, shiftless, ignorant fellow, moved upon the plantation, and claimed not only the property, but the slaves. "When our troops were about leaving Piketon, the most intelligent of the Slone family asked of Captain H——, A. ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... the judge sternly, "you're plain no-account and shiftless, and for this fight I'm going to send you away for a year at ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... too much, Long Jim Hart," said the shiftless one indignantly. "Now an' then I hev to talk a long time, 'cause I know so much that I can't git it all out between sunrise an' sunset, an' the hours then are mighty crowded, too. I reckon that you'd never need more'n five minutes to ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... previous day the lonely cabin had been occupied. Then its owner, a shiftless fellow, who spent his days for the most part at the corner tavern three miles distant, had suddenly grown disgusted with a land wherein one must work to live, and had betaken himself with his seven-year-old boy to seek some more indolent ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... it! Sal left the gas-stove flarin'. I made her get up and come downstairs to put it out. That'll learn her! Of all the careless, shiftless creatures, these coloured people are the worst. Come, Ida, it's long after nine, and I'm tired. You can read in your bedroom if ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... the piano and in the corners; dining at her sumptuous table, we gave but little thought to the fact that the cellar was damp, the house none too healthy, and that there were mosquitoes and rats about the place; nor did it seem to matter, in face of her allurements, that she was shiftless, extravagant, improvident in the management of her affairs. If these things were brought to our attention, we excused them on the grounds of Latin blood ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... was a man in each of them. One was a man who obstinately refused to go to meeting, and after being warned several times was clapped into the bilboes by the tythingman. The other was some poor vagrant who had tried to settle in the town, but because he was needy and shiftless he had been warned out, and as he did not go, ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... abundance of the pleasant sport of Indian-fighting—even now he had only to make believe a little to see the tufted head of a Navajo peer around the columns supporting the Lion of Saint Mark, or to mistake the fringe of facchini on the edge of the Grand Canal for a group of the shiftless half-breeds of New Mexico. In time the ——first Cavalry had been ordered North, where the work was then less pleasant than on the border; and, in fact, it was a distinct unwillingness to execute the Fugitive Slave Law which forced John Manning ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... houses and fences. There was at that time no railroad, and lumber in the open prairie was expensive. "The end proved that we were right," said he; "for, though we had hard work at first, and got ahead slowly, we were soon able to buy out the prairie farmers, who had got into debt and were shiftless, while we prudent Germans were building our place." He added a characteristic story of their early days—that when they first settled at Aurora, having no fruit of their own, he used to buy summer apples for his people from the nearest farmers for a dollar a bushel. These were eaten in the ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... those with families and with small homes unpaid for; no one can measure their losses, for it may mean the savings of a lifetime. It frequently does mean a change in character from an industrious, frugal, contented workman with everything to live for, to a shiftless and discontented man with nothing to live for ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... life working for others should be treated as the enemy of kindred and acquaintance; this was almost the first time in all her history that she had managed to gather and hold a little peace and happiness. There was nothing to do now but to go back to her brother's noisy shiftless house; to work against wind and tide of laziness and improvidence. She must slave for the three boarders, so that her brother's wife could go to New York State to waste her time with a sister just as worthless, though not ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... their time ... settle themselves where land is to be taken up that will produce the necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back country emancipated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the foot of the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... pigpen, and the children runnin' around half naked. And Sam he laughed, and says he, 'Aunt Jane, if we could wear quilts and eat quilts we'd be the richest people in the country.' Sam was the best-natured man that ever was, or he couldn't 'a' put up with Sarah Jane's shiftless ways. Hannah Crawford said she sent Sarah Jane a bundle o' caliker once by Sam, and Sam always declared he lost it. But Uncle Jim Matthews said he was ridin' along the road jest behind Sam, and he saw Sam throw it into the creek jest as he got on the bridge. I never blamed Sam a bit ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... is nature's motto,—and it is written on the stars and the sod alike,—starve mentally, starve morally, starve physically. It is an inexorable law of nature that whatever is not used, dies. "Nothing for nothing," is her maxim. If we are idle and shiftless by choice, we shall be nerveless and powerless ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... one of the scalers, eying him sharply, and tendering his pouch. Thorpe filled his pipe deliberately, and returned it with a heavy-lidded glance of thanks. To all appearances he was one of the lazy, shiftless white hunters of the backwoods. Seized with an inspiration, he said, "What sort of chances is they at your camp for a little flour? Me and Charley's about out. I'll bring you meat; or I'll make you boys moccasins. I ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... buried and nobody cares very much; They have no use in Greylock for drunkards and loafers and such, But I always liked Dave Lilly, he was pleasant as you could wish, He was shiftless and good-for-nothing, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... weeds nor assassinated by cut-worms. Old John Rambo was gradually allowing his son, Henry, to manage in his stead, and the latter shrewdly permitted his father to believe that he exercised the ancient authority. Leonard Clare, the strong young fellow who had been taken from that shiftless adventurer, his father, when a mere child, and brought up almost as one of the family, and who had worked as a joiner's apprentice during the previous six months, had come back for the harvest work; so the Rambos were forehanded, and probably as well satisfied ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... "How shiftless!" cried Annie, indignantly. "What do these men mean by letting their machinery lie out that way? I should think one winter of lying out would hurt it more ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... him but a shiftless youth, In whom no good they saw; And yet, unwittingly, in truth, They made his ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell |
