"Hard-fisted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the house of Deacon Jones, a hard-fisted old farmer, whose reputation for parsimony was well known throughout the village, but of this Andy, being ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... hard-fisted civilians, all seemingly intent on erasing him as the most familiar symbol of the Bureau of Seasonal Gratuities. Winfree bobbed to the surface of the maelstrom for a moment, waving his saber, and shouted, "MacHenery! Get these jokers ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... the veriest old skinflint and greatest miser you ever heard of. Wait a moment—what is his name? I don't remember it—can't you help me? Can't you name some one in this town who is known to be the most hard-fisted old ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere (Poquelin)
... The hard-fisted farmers of New Jersey, like many more at that date, had no faith in the 'telegraph machine,' and openly declared that the judge had been a fool for once to put his money in it. The judge, on his part, wearied with the delay, and irritated by the sarcasm of his neighbours, grew dispirited and moody. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... excitement they caused was as great as that roused by the alluvial patches of Otago and Westland. The opening up of the Northern fields was retarded throughout the sixties by Maori wars, and the demands of peaceful but hard-fisted Maori landlords. L1 a miner had to be paid to these latter for the right to prospect their country. They delayed the opening of the now famous Ohinemuri field until 1875. When on March 3rd of that year the Goldfields' ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... A hard-fisted "old hunker," who has made $30,000 in fifty-one years, by saving up rags, old iron, bones, soap-grease, snipping off the edges of halves, quarters, and nine-pences, raised the whole neighborhood t'other evening. He came across a full-faced Spanish ninepence, and ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the dogs had brought a servant to the door, a tall, hard-fisted country clown, with a livery coat put over the under-garments of a ploughman. I requested to see the master of the house, but was told he was at dinner with some "gemmen" of the neighborhood. I made known my business and sent in to know if I might talk with the master ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... but she's married again,—married a man named Tom Allen, a merchant. He knows father, and he flocked it into the old man in great shape," and Nat actually chuckled. "Told me just what kind of a man dad was—hard-fisted and miserly—somebody nobody loved or wanted to associate with. And he warned me not to grow up the same way—not to think money was everything, and all that. He said a boy ought to be known for his real worth, not his dollars ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... double purpose—to tell the truth and to repair his fortunes. It was a sad story. His son had failed in business; his father, of course, had endorsed his notes, and he found himself at the threshold of old age as poor as in the beginning. Such a shock is felt severely enough by tough, hard-fisted men of the world, but to the tender sensibility of a poet it must have been a crushing blow. There can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought and filled his mind ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a swindle!" repeated Pinky. "You're an old hard-fisted money-grubber, and no better than a robber. Three dollars and a quarter for all that work! It doesn't pay for the trouble. We ought ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids. Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his travels as a teacher of horse-taming he met with Mr. Goodenough, a sharp, hard-fisted New Englander, of the true "Yankee" breed, so well-described by Sam Slick, settled in the city of Toronto, Canada, as a general dealer. In fact, a "sort of Barnum." Mr. Goodenough saw that there was money to be made out of the Rarey system—formed ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... angrily called him a brat, and told him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And Jimmy had shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home. Everybody told him to skip. From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted man he knew as his father, and who always had a job for him with the "growler" when he came home, they were having Skippy on the run. Probably that was how he got his name. No one cared enough about it, or about the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... living with you and trying to make some impression on the life of this big, striving city. But as to its not being American to live like these people—well you know they are Americans and that New York is the Mecca of the hard-fisted sons of toil from all over the country who have made money. But you're right, Selma. Those who go in for show and extravagance are not the best Americans—the Americans whom you and I believe in. Sometimes I get discouraged when I stop to think, and now I shall ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... of their High Mightinesses was lowered, and the Yankee standard elevated in its stead, being a dried codfish, by way of a spread eagle. A strong garrison was appointed of long-sided, hard-fisted Yankees, with Weathersfield onions for cockades and feathers. As to Jacobus Van Curlet and his men, they were seized by the nape of the neck, conducted to the gate, and one by one dismissed with a kick in the crupper, as ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... in the evening took them all to a new amusement in the town, a rocking-horse merry-go-round, which they called a "kee-kee," meaning theater; and in a spirit of justice they pulled off the horses' tails, for the proprietors of the show, two hard-fisted countrymen of mine, I grieve to say, unceremoniously hustled them off for a new set, almost at the first spin. I was not a little proud of my Tonga friends; the chief, finest of them all, carried a portentous club. As for the theater, through the greed of the ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum |
