"Shifty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feet and dragged up his prisoner. The man was a heavy-set, bowlegged fellow of about forty, hard-faced, and shifty-eyed—a frontier miscreant, unless every line of the tough, leathery countenance told a falsehood. But he had made his experiment and failed. He knew what manner of man his captor was, and he had no mind for another lesson from him. He slouched to his horse, under propulsion of ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... Rosamund saw the ugly, shifty face of Slippery Seal drawing near to them, and he was followed by another of the same crew, peering eagerly this way and that, as though they looked to see Tom pinioned in the ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hideous enough to Lord Mount Dunstan and his elder son—but they were not so hideous as was, to his younger son, the childish, shamed frenzy of awakening to the truth that he was one of a bad lot—a disgraceful lot, from whom nothing was expected but shifty ways, low vices, and scandals, which in the end could not even be kept out of the newspapers. The day came, in fact, when the worst of these was seized upon by them and filled their sheets with matter which for a whole season decent London avoided reading, and the fast ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... condition. The School Board visitor's book showed that in a representative district of Bethnal Green, out of 1204 families, no less than 530 had removed within a twelvemonth, although such an account would not include the lowest and most "shifty" class of all. Between November 1885 and July 1886 it was found that 20 per cent. of the London electorate had changed residence. To what extent the uncertain conditions of employment impose upon the poor this changing habitation cannot be yet determined; but ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... means the varying phases of the struggle are traced almost step by step, through the preachings of John Knox and the early image-breaking outrages, to the comparative lull of the reign of James the First of England, and thence again from the renewed exasperating of opposition by the shifty and infatuated Martyr King to the climax of the "Killing Time" under the younger of his sons. Few incidents of really primary or representative importance are omitted, and the skill shown by the Author in stringing the pearls of history upon the thread of his narrative is not the least of the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... and the golden mist of memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy, middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... a way of watching for her as she passed Truslow Manor every morning to her work. She was tall and very powerfully built, her features were coarse and swollen, and there was something repelling and yet fascinating to Biddy in her cunning, shifty glance. The way in which she strode along the road, too, swinging a rake, or hoe, or pitchfork in her hand, gave an impression of reckless strength which made the little nurse-girl shudder, and yet she felt unable to remove her gaze as long as the ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... he were, had stopped outside the post office to light a cigar. He sat easily on his big horse, and Jack could not help admiring the noble animal. The man himself was a fine physical specimen, but he had a hard, cruel face, and shifty eyes. There was no one in the immediate vicinity of the post office at that time, for Jack had delivered the mail an hour before, and he had sauntered back to the office, after doing some errands about town, to have a talk with Jennie. ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... into a near frenzy. His face had become bloated with passion, he was breathing fast. But Lawler noted that his eyes were shifty, that he turned them everywhere except ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... that, looking back across an interval of many years and a distance of half the circumference of the globe, I have never ceased to be impressed with the manliness and sincerity of his character, his complete honesty of purpose, his high moral standard, his scorn of everything mean or shifty, his firm determination to speak what he held to be truth at whatever cost of popularity. And for these things "I loved the man, and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... his attire, to follow the profession of a sailor. Tom Frost was sobbing bitterly. One of Robert Ashford's hands was bandaged up. As he was placed in the dock he cast furtive glances round with his shifty eyes, and as they fell upon Cyril an expression of deadly hate came over his face. The men of the watch who had captured them first gave their evidence as to finding them in the act of robbery, and testified to the desperate resistance they had ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... him, a big mouthed, shifty, kind of man, 'bout as cynical lookin' in the face as a black bass, and full of wind as a toad fish. I exchanged drinks for principles of socialism, and doin' so happened to display my roll. Murdock slipped away and made talk with a friend, then, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... in law what he conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent for a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous politician made himself indispensable to the Conservatives, and overcame by political moves which were little short of genius, the leadership of the opposition. Indeed, he may be said to have transformed ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... into the moribund republican system until at last, during the same first decade of the present century, it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it, whatever its outward form, whether constitutional monarchy, or republic, essentially democratic. So government became shifty, opportunist, incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist, beyond a certain point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not alone the industrial civilization it ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... cab, Ralph noticed that his eyes were dull and shifty, his hands trembled and he bore all the appearance of a man who had been recently indulging ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... the night, and Peter Doane was the first to leave, but after his departure Sim Squires permitted a glint of deep anxiety to show in his narrow and shifty eyes. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... at the dispersion of the household goods and gods of that man who so hated the vulgar crowd. Gazing through the open windows they could see the tall trees waving their heads in a sorrowful sort of way in the summer breeze, throwing their shifty shadows over the neglected grass-grown paths, once the haunt of the stately peacocks, whose medieval beauty had such a strange fascination for Rossetti, and whose feathers are now the accepted favors of his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... He struck first. The waiter crashed against the wall. The hulking, shifty-eyed one fared worse. He went down with his face to the cracks in the floor. Thomas dashed ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... one night and stayed with them until morning, after the open-handed custom of the range-land. Billy Louise did not talk with him very much. He had shifty eyes and a coarse, loose-lipped mouth and a thick neck, and, girl-like, she took a violent dislike to him. But John Pringle told her afterwards that he was Buck Olney, the new stock inspector, and that he was prowling around to see if he ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the gas on the landing and I must say that I had never seen exactly that manner of face on her before. She wriggled, confused and shifty-eyed, before me; but I ascribed this behaviour to her shocked modesty and without troubling myself any more about her feelings I informed her that there was a Carlist downstairs who must be put up for the night. Most unexpectedly she betrayed a ridiculous consternation, but only ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... hitting, countering,—little man's head not off yet. You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit the little man's intellectual features. He needn't have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles at all. Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, collapsing, sprawling, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and Greenland traders of the East Coast was generally some wild, inaccessible part abutting directly on the German Ocean or the North Sea. London skippers in those trades favoured the neighbourhood of Great Yarmouth, where the maze of inland waterways constituting the Broads enabled the shifty sailor to lead the gangs a merry game at hide and seek. King's Lynners affected Skegness and the Norfolk lip of the Wash. Of the men who sailed out of Hull not one in ten could be picked up, on their return, by the gangs haunting the Humber. They went ashore ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... in a life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day is yielding just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes from the far horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields and willow-woods, upon the shifty weather-vanes and long-pointed windows of the tower on the square—from which the Angelus is sounding—with a momentary promise of a fine night. I prefer the Salut at Saint Vaast. The walk thither is a longer one, and I have a fancy ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... She's a shifty party with her hands and feet, for with a couple of body twists Mrs. Flynn is on her knees behind him with his arms pinned to the ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... adventure had hardened into wrought metal a character never very ductile. Tom was now, in his own way, an altogether accomplished man of the world, who knew (at least in all companies and places where he was likely to find himself) exactly what to say, to do, to make, to seek, and to avoid. Shifty and thrifty as old Greek, or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps nothing he could not endure. He had watched human nature under every disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the savage, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... from the outside to an important position with a house he generally gets a breathing-space while the old men spar around taking his measure and seeing if he sizes up to his job. They give him the benefit of the doubt, and if he shows up strong and shifty on his feet they're apt to let him alone. But there isn't any doubt in your case; everybody's got you sized up, or thinks he has, and those who've been over you will find it hard to accept you as an equal, ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... blazin' brilliant under the close-clipped crop of Grand Duke whiskers. I don't know what there is special about a set of frosted face shubb'ry that sort of suggests bank presidents and so on, but somehow they do. Them and the long, thin nose gives him a pluty, distinguished look, in spite of the shifty eyes and the weak mouth lines. But I ain't in a ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... dressed in the best of clothing. The word convict is stamped upon every grey face, as plainly as the Government mark is stamped upon their clothing. The servants of sin have their marks also. Look at the shifty eyes, and downward glance of the knave and the false man; mark the flushed brow and cruel eyes of the angry man; see the weak lips and trembling hand of the drunkard; they bear the marks of their slavery very plainly. So, too, the sensualist who lives for his body, ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... exchanges other undesirable citizens with its northern and southern neighbors in cases where no extradition treaty provides for their return; and the borders of the individual states are crossed and recrossed by shifty gentlemen seeking to dodge the arm of the law. The fact that so many State boundaries fall in the Southern Appalachians, where illicit distilling and feud murders provide most of the cases on the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and intemperate speech, she was practically excluded (like a lightkeeper on his tower) from the comforts of human association; except with her own indoor drudge, who, being but a lassie and entirely at her mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of "the mistress's" moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at a loss which way to steer his tongue, the wind being so shifty. At last he observed a little haughtily that "he never made Mr. Dodd of so much. importance as all this. He owned he had quizzed him, but it was not his intention to quiz him any more; for I do feel under considerable obligations to Mr. Dodd; he has brought us safe across ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... together. It was the same with the captain. Indeed, he seemed to take pains to avoid me, except when others were present, thereby causing me some perplexity and chagrin. And if we happened to find ourselves alone he appeared ill at ease, and would look at me in a strange and shifty manner, as though he had something on his mind. But for all that the time did not hang heavily on my hands, nor was the voyage an uneventful one to me, as I shall relate in ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... husband, an unshaven, shifty-looking horror, who dealt her, as it seemed to her then, the ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... eyes and looked him fairly in the face, till his blue eyes lighted up with a smile. Then patting me on the cheek, he said, addressing Sister Agnes, "Nothing shifty there, at any rate. It is a face full of candour, and of that innocent fearlessness which childhood should always have, but too often loses in an evil world. I dare be bound now, little Janet, that thou art ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... woollen stockings, and innumerable warm garments; or, perhaps, if Anna had not been so afraid of her mother, but had appealed to her candidly and without fear, she might have obtained relief. This, unfortunately, was not Anna's way, for Anna's ways were still as crooked and shifty as her glances. She would think out this plan and that plan to avoid the only one that was straightforward and right, though it must be said for her that she did try to be more open and honourable—at times she tried ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... squat figure of a man, shifty-eyed, with hard mouth and a nervous, restless air, came down a long hallway, smoking a cigarette. His eyes rested with no uncertain dislike ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... folks,—Mister Me. Ther' 's times when I'm unsoshle ez a stone, An' sort o' suffercate to be alone,— I'm crowded jes' to think thet folks are nigh, An' can't bear nothin' closer than the sky; Now the wind's full ez shifty in the mind Ez wut it is ou'-doors, ef I ain't blind, An' sometimes, in the fairest sou'west weather, 120 My innard vane pints east for weeks together, My natur' gits all goose-flesh, an' my sins Come drizzlin' on my conscience sharp ez pins: ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... memory of her last interview with Eleanor flashed upon her. "I was an idiot last fall. Now I have come to my senses—" that was what she had said. When her voice broke, it must have been because she was sorry for the change—sorry that the old, shifty, unreliable self had come back to take the place of the strange new one whose ideals had proved too hard and too high to live by. The sad, hunted look that Madeline had spoken of was explained too. Eleanor was sorry. But was she sorry, as she had been in the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... whether it was a passion of denunciation against some of the abuses that vexed his righteous spirit, or of yearning for the society of an absent friend. He was vehement in affection, as in doctrine. I will not deny that there may have been, along with his vehemence, something shifty, and for the moment only; that, like many men, and many Scotsmen, he saw the world and his own heart, not so much under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme flashes of passion, true for the moment, but not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cloudy, I never saw but one that didn't have shifty eyes. He was a little missionary chap that worked in a slum settlement and would have taken his eye-teeth out for anybody. Oh, I don't mean that old guy to-day looked shifty. I should say he was just dull and uninteresting. ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... them half as well will have no trouble in conceiving how these trade-calculations can consist with a great deal of true love. And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard Plain—set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains and public places—which owed their independence to being too near a ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... slimly built young man in his twenty-fourth year, was of a pallid, muddy complexion, with great, shifty, greenish eyes, and a thick, pendulous nose. The protruding upper lip of his long, thin mouth gave him an oafish expression, which was increased by his habit of carrying his head ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... court-house yard, and so sinning in the very eye of the law, two swarthy, shifty-looking gentlemen were operating (with some greasy walnut shells and a pea) what the fanciful or unsophisticated might have been pleased to call a game of chance; and the most intent spectator of the group around them was Mr. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... way to an Alaskan mine, of which the latter was to assume control. Many other passengers were strolling about the decks of the "Corsair." There were seasoned miners with bearded faces; sharp-eyed, sharp-featured men with shifty eyes; pale-faced prospectors on their way to the land of promise, in quest of the yellow metal; capitalists going to Alaska to look into this or that claim with a view to investment; and, more in evidence than all the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... acquainted with in a big open space where there was room for him to explode. He was apt to be either gay or outrageous, and that about any little thing. He was simple and furious and very hearty, and that all made him good company. The negroes looked murderous, and the other white man shifty and dirty, but he was a ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... I know so. Oh, he's pretty shifty on his feet, and he's got a good many people hoodwinked—your uncle always gave him too much credit, incidentally—but his New York correspondents happened to be clients of mine when I was practising law, and they've both asked me about ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... realized I knew the terms of the will and would demand my share of his income. Can you blame me? He hadn't made good as an artist and this was my only chance to get back some of the hard earned savings I had advanced him. But Jason Jones isn't square, Alora; he's mean and shifty, as perhaps you have discovered. He gave me some money at first, when I followed him to New York, as you know; but after that the coward ran away. That provoked me and made me determined to run him down. I traced him to Europe and followed him there, but he evaded ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... responses. Hall's restless, drumming fingers and lowered gaze threw the suppliant out of countenance. McDevitt, in turn, grew silent and drank the last of his mild refreshment. Hall looked up, with shifty eyes. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... he was almost in the mood to give up the whole scheme and do as Mary V wished him to do: settle down there at the ranch and work out his debt where he had made it. Looking down into the grimy, friendly faces of those who had braved desert wind and sun for him, the sallow, shifty-eyed face of Bland Halliday seemed to epitomize the sordid avariciousness of the man and made him wonder if any measure of success would atone for the forced intimacy with the fellow. Mary V, had she known his mood then, might have won her way with him ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... or obligation, whereby the heart, otherwise shifty, is bound to the work intended, sometime by a single promise, sometime by an oath or vow, and sometime more publicly by a solemn covenant. And this last and highest degree is that which the prophet speaks, at ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... persistent and wanted to open the dining room door and see him at the table. I finally forced him away. He was sallow complexioned, 28 or 30 years of age, I imagine, had a dark overcoat on, not so extra well dressed, smooth face. I noticed his eyes particularly—they were rather shifty—and he was very, very persistent in getting to the dining room. He was a man of about five feet ten; this happened at 7 o'clock at the Gilpatrick ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... reader of The Pink 'Un, ardent bachelor, Basker in short, suddenly finds the dukedom of Cheviot thrust upon him. Quite unlike his egregious ancestors, who went out and biffed their enemies in the gate, especially the Gorndykes, who were an unpleasant shifty kind of raiders, George proposes to resign all the Cheviot places, emoluments and responsibilities to his cousin and heir, Richard de Lacorfe, on the day the said Richard shall marry. Now Richard is a de Lacorfe ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... popular tales of Europe. Germany was full of them, and there St Peter often appears in a snappish ludicrous guise, which reminds the reader versed in Norse mythology of the tricks and pranks of the shifty Loki. In the Norse tales he thoroughly preserves ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... nothing having occurred since 1881 to form real grounds for accusations. There had, on the contrary, been an exhibition of unwearied friendly endeavours on the part of Great Britain to maintain loyal peace with an ever-shifty and truculent Government, and to induce it to desist from scandalous intrigue against imperial interests in South Africa, and to adopt a more rational attitude towards Uitlanders, which in itself would have precluded troubles like that of the Johannesburg revolt and ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... man, with a sharp-featured face and shifty eyes, sat listening intently to the faint echo of the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... of relief. He passed his hand over his forehead, and his eyes—rather shifty, rather narrow, pale blue eyes which Merriton had instinctively disliked ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... modelled himself as much as he dared upon the carriage of his master, when his master was not by, and, like the most of such copying apes, he overdid the part. His face was curiously unpleasant, long and yellowish white and inexpressive, with drooping eyelids masking pale, shifty eyes, with a drooping, ungainly nose, and a mouth that seemed like a ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... knows he comes over to me, his jaw set firmer'n I ever see it shut before, and a kind of shifty look in his eyes. He hands me ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... I had to make the terms with Farrington. The first glance aroused my suspicions of him. He was shifty-eyed, and his face had a hard and mercenary look. In spite of, perhaps rather because of, my repugnance we quickly came to an agreement, and as I left the apartment I mentally resolved to keep my ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... was Job Grinsell, landlord of the inn, a man with a red nose, loose mouth, and shifty eyes—not a pleasant fellow to look at, and regarded vaguely as a bad character. He had once been head gamekeeper to Sir Willoughby Stokes, the squire, whose service he had left suddenly and in manifest disgrace. His companion was the stranger, the negro ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... the North there 'tis always unsettled; I fancy we shan't be so shifty down South. No, really there's not the least call to be nettled, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... discussing the various features of the face and discovering that only a vague relationship to character existed. The thick, moist lower lip is the sensual lip, say the physiognomists, but there are saints with sensual lips and chaste thoughts. Squinty eyes may indicate a shifty character, but more often they indicate conjunctivitis or some defect of the optical apparatus. A square jaw indicates determination and courage, but a study of the faces of men who won medals in war for heroism does not ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... was a photograph of the showman who had called himself Hardman. All the trimmings were lacking, to be sure—the fierce mustache, the long hair, the buckskin trappings, none of them were here. But beyond a doubt it was the same shifty-eyed villain. Nor did it shake Bucky's confidence that Mackenzie had seen him and failed to recognize the man as his old cook. The fellow was thoroughly disguised, but the camera had happened to catch that curious furtive glance of his. But for that ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... lot of talking? Walls have ears, you know, and those Jivros of yours look pretty shifty to me." ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... almost from infancy, the tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another—the gipsy—stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of "spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life, it must be acknowledged, this ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... dilated nostrils at the unfamiliar smell of the breeze, threw up their little heads, fetched a compass at top speed and so returned; then crowded flank to flank, shoulder to shoulder, and again blankly gazed at the fire which reflected itself in the whites of their shifty eyes. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... you," returned Sam. "This learned gentleman here is rather a shifty sort of chap; and it strikes me that two of us isn't a bit too ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... without a bag is known only to himself. He has read every scrap of print within reach, and now lies on his side, with his face to the wall and one arm thrown up over his head; the jumper is twisted back, and leaves his skin bare from hip to arm-pit. His lower face is brutal, his eyes small and shifty, and ugly straight lines run across his low forehead. He says very little, but scowls most of the time—poor devil. He might be, or at least seem, a totally different man under more favourable conditions. He is probably ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Velo!" He held Velo's shifty eyes. "You get to work here. If you don't, I shall shoot you, just as I would shoot a dog. There is no time to talk. Get to work! You hear what I ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... up awkwardly, with a curious over-motion of his broad shoulders, as if he would conceal the action, various articles in his path. When he opened the door into the bedroom he crammed them behind it with a quick, shifty motion. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... which loved to run, and with the precocity and importance of wifehood at sixteen, she dilated to her companions on her mother's constant attendance on the Queen, and the perpetual plots for that lady's escape. "She is as shifty and active as any cat-a-mount; and at Chatsworth she had a scheme for being off out of her bedchamber window to meet a traitor fellow named Boll; but my husband smelt it out in good time, and had the guard beneath my lady's window, and the fellows are in gyves, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit up his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter lack of any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes the vacant, ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... Fran had become one of those mysterious flying serpents which bite from afar. He felt the sting of her terrible eyes and his gaze grew shifty. It wandered away, and, on returning, found her teeth bared, as ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... shifty eyes were continually turning with an expectant look to the door. Ambrose found himself watching the ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... other side of her face and remove two false teeth from her mouth, actions which completed the transformation from that of a comely, interesting-looking, youngish woman to that of an elderly, extremely commonplace person with foxy, shifty eyes. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung upon his every word? That he did not foresee that they would think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Mrs. Druce sat disconsolately in her drawing-room, the curtains parted gently, and her father-in-law entered stealthily, as if he were a thief, which indeed he was, and the very greatest of them. Druce had small, shifty piercing eyes that peered out from under his grey bushy eyebrows like two steel sparks. He never seemed to be looking directly at any one, and his eyes somehow gave you the idea that they were trying to glance back over his shoulder, as if he feared pursuit. Some ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... is the real back, for all the others are in front of him and consequently his is the most important position. He must have a shifty pony well trained to riding work. He has to defend the goal, and therefore must be an expert "backhander," that is, quick to send back the ball to the opposing rank when it comes in the direction of his goal. It is the place ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... have disappeared as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself. He was unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man's departure from Paris. Some of O'Hara's old acquaintances maintained that they had seen the last of him two months before, but a shifty-eyed person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening in Maxim's and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries about M. O'Hara. Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of money; whereupon the cheaply smart ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... province being deemed to be a part of the Visigothic, the second of the Ostrogothic, dominions, Gundobad obtained nothing, but lost some towns on his southern frontier—a fitting reward for his tortuous and shifty policy. ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... for he it was, had a look of a Joonie doorie, being all run to shoulders, and no neck on him at all. His arms hung well to his knee, giving the man the appearance of a powerful animal. His face was brown as a smack's sail, and his eyes red and shifty as a ferret's. ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... quick retreat from their dormitory. I strongly believe that they will die out of this country fast. It seems, looking at them, so manifestly absurd to suppose it possible that they can ever hold their own against a restless, shifty, striving, stronger race." ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... were going to get married, did we? Knew! Why, does anybody know anything about you, you shifty bitch!' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... half-hour which remained before train-time I fought the wretched battle all over again, back and forth and up and down until my brain reeled. At the end there was a shifty compromise. I was still fully determined to drop out and go to California; at one stroke to break with Polly Everton, and to put myself beyond the reach of the woman with claws; but I weakly decided to go by way of Denver, ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... stared at the newcomer with blank amazement. The latter was blinking in the bright light of the corridor, and peering at us and at the smouldering fire. It was an odious face—crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-gray eyes ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it's all up with ye: ye lose two points. But ye come right back at him with an' upper cut: 'Do ye live on th' Lake Shore dhrive?' If he doesn't, ye have him in th' nine hole. Ye needn't play with him anny more. But, if ye do play with him, he has to spot three balls. If he's a good man an' shifty on his feet, he'll counter be askin' ye where ye spend th' summer. Now ye can't tell him that ye spent th' summer with wan hook on th' free lunch an' another on th' ticker tape, an' so ye go back three. That needn't discourage ye at ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... against whom, however, I cherished a hatred almost as intense as my passion for the infatuated girl who had flown from her home for his sake. We had heard of her being on the Continent with her husband, and learned that the man's shifty life had eventually taken him to the East. For some years nothing more had been heard of the poor girl. It was a melancholy history, and its ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... had avenged both the wronged white and the wronged black people. Peter looked at the men in the cabin clearing, and saw the thing nakedly, and from both angles. For instance, consider Mosely, who had done things—with a clasp-knife. And that other man, the farm-hand, shifty-eyed and mean, always half drunk, a bad citizen: they would be sure to be foremost in affairs like this. They had precious little respect for the law as law. And here they were, making the holy night indecent with bestial behavior. Again a sick qualm shook ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... went to the Casino. Mrs. Wellington drove to market in her carriage. Mr. Wellington remained in his study and among other things had Buffalo on the telephone for half an hour. Armitage spent the morning with the boys and showed them several shifty boxing and wrestling tricks which won Ronald to him quite as effectually as the jiu-jitsu grip had won his ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... his public life do not anywhere show that his politics shifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularly regardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though an alien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of the soldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges of the knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that place might follow fawning. His great talents had only to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Town, some forty miles farther south, there to wring out the remaining sum. The Detachment marched by night, not courting notice; but people had heard of its coming; and five Prussian Postilions,—shifty fellows, old hussars it may be, at any rate skilful on the trumpet, and furnished with hussar jackets and an old pistol each, determined to do something for their Country. The Swedish Detachment had not marched many miles, when,—after ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... seventeenth. In accordance with the old-fashioned custom, I was given the name of the saint whose festival fell on the tenth day after my birth. My godfather was a certain Anastasy Anastasyevitch Putchkov, or more exactly Nastasey Nastasyeitch, for that was what everyone called him. He was a terribly shifty, pettifogging knave and bribe-taker—a thoroughly bad man; he had been turned out of the provincial treasury and had had to stand his trial on more than one occasion; he was often of use to my father.... They used to "do business" together. In appearance he was a round, podgy figure; and his ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to the Marches, Herr Nussler, as natural, was again the person employed. Nussler, shifty soul, wide-awake at all times, has already seen this Country; "noticed the Pass into Glatz with its block-house, and perceived that his Majesty would want it." From September 22d to December 12th, 1742, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... them all, but the last the most, For I sought a word of a Russian post, Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword And a gray-coat guard on the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... still with that look of perplexity in his shifty eyes; "perhaps I have been wrong. You have told me that I was. But, you see, I looked on your brother as a child almost. And if I let him talk of Rosebud, it was, as I once told you, because he is headstrong. But now he has gone ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... Calline herself appeared in the doorway, striving to look calmly indifferent at everything in general and nothing in particular; but the expression in her bright black eyes was shifty, and the color in her cheeks vied with that of the bow on her hair; and by this time Zekle's entire anatomy exposed to view shared the tint of ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... of all this, of the spiritual evolution of her nursling, of his identity with the vicious, shifty, idle youth whose uncanny gift of design seemed to have been completely lost after his stay in South Africa? David Vavasour Williams had left home to the relief of his father and the whole village, if even to the half-pitying regret of his old nurse, in 1896. He had spent a year ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... of men in costume in a manner burlesques their shifty and uncertain taste in literature. A book or a certain fashion in letters will have a run like a garment, and, like that, will pass away before it waxes old. It seems incredible, as we look back over the literary history of the past three centuries only, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... intelligence is replaced by repulsive vulpine cunning. If you can look at a little group of the stay-at-homes while they are discussing the prospects of a race, you will see something that Hogarth would have enjoyed in his large, lusty fashion. The fair human soul no longer shines through those shifty, deceitful eyes; the men have, somehow, sunk from the level of their race, and they make you think that Swift may-have been right after all. From long experience I am certain that if a cultured gentleman, accustomed ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... shifty Atherton Make gag rules for the Great House? Wiped we for this our feet upon Petitions in our State House? Plied we for this our axe of doom, No stubborn traitor sparing, Who scoffed at our opinion loom, And took to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... uneasy feeling that Balta was laughing at him, and when the shifty soldier politician invited him into his ship for the ride back to Tarog, Murray had a compelling intuition that he would not be in a position to step out of the ship when it landed on the parkway of Scar ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... girl," he said gravely, "you put me in mind of a weather-cock in a shifty wind. Nobody can tell for half an hour together what quarter it'll be pointing to. 'Tis the shifty wind that does the most mischief and is hardest to bear with. When you came in just now, I'd have said you were pointing straight south, but a few minutes later you've ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... forward and looked fairly into his shifty eyes. "You are not in a position to say that, Freddy. I am mistress both of the situation and of Hubert's millions. Go away," she pushed him toward the door. "Take time to think over your position, and confess everything ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... a painful contrast. His eye was shifty, his expression weak and sensual, and the hard lines of his face and the indifference of his manner told the story of a man old in criminal thoughts if not in years and deeds. For he looked no more than twenty-five, and may have been ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... Philip could not make her understand that he did not know Miss Wilkinson. Then her two daughters appeared. They seemed hardly young to Philip, but perhaps they were not more than twenty-five: the elder, Thekla, was as short as her mother, with the same, rather shifty air, but with a pretty face and abundant dark hair; Anna, her younger sister, was tall and plain, but since she had a pleasant smile Philip immediately preferred her. After a few minutes of polite conversation the Frau Professor took ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the shifty, scheming, treacherous city youth turn and search on the drive outside the door, recover the cigarette stub he had tossed away, relight it, and inhale the smoke with a relish that told of a habit fixed beyond breaking. ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... made by the printer, this first issue is scarcely representative of the club's entire personnel, but that which still remains affords, after all, a fair index to the character and ideals of the new organization. The editorials by John T. Dunn are both frank and fearless. We detest a shifty club whose allegiance wavers betwixt the United, the Morris Faction and the National, and so are greatly pleased at Mr. Dunn's manly and open stand for the one real United. The editor's opinions on acknowledgment of papers is certainly just ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Naturally, they are dirty and unshaven,. So are the wounded men on the white ship: but their outstanding characteristic is an invincible humanity. Beneath the mud and blood they are men—white men. But this strange throng are grey—like their ship. With their shifty eyes and curiously shaped heads, they look like nothing human. They move like overdriven beasts. We realise now why it is that the German Army has ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... looked at it for a second, then into her eyes, waveringly, uncertain as to the impulse that moved her. He suddenly regained control of himself. He grasped the slender hand in his great, crushing fingers; the sullen, repellent glare leaped back into his eyes; alert and shifty, he held up his free hand to command the silence of David. Then, like a hunted creature at bay, he glanced over his shoulder. Seeing an open door almost at his elbow, he resolutely drew his wife after him into the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... a mere identification mark; but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city. Porlock is important, not for himself, but for the great man with whom he is ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Urartu, Assyria did not immediately regain possession of north Syria. The shifty Mati-ilu either cherished the hope that Sharduris would recover strength and again invade north Syria, or that he might himself establish an empire in that region. Tiglath-pileser had therefore to march ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... it was May Irwin. We were mistaken, though, as Irwin has this woman lashed to the mast at any time or place. As soon as Mike the Dago espied the dame it was all off. He rushed and drove a straight-arm jab, which had it reached would have given him the purse. But shifty Sadie wasn't there. She ducked, side-stepped, and landed a clever half-arm hook, which seemed to stun the big fellow. They clinched, and swayed back and forth, growling continually, while the orchestra played this trembly Eliza-crossing-the-ice music. Jim, I'm not swelling ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Madame Omber, Popinot strode dramatically over to confront Lanyard and explore his features with his small, keen, shifty eyes of a pig; a scrutiny which the adventurer suffered with ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... cannot say there is nothing behind his charge, because, with regret, we have seen within these pages this master of the tender virgins and calm saints of God as being vindictive (that affair before the Eight with Aulista di Angelo comes to our thought), disloyal, and shifty in his business dealings (here the Orvietans and their Chapel of S. Brizio are an instance), and always consistently keen on getting the best side of a bargain. It does come as something of a shock—at any rate to me—to turn from this serenely devotional art to this record of the ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... naturally genial and generous, ready to divide anything he had with one in distress; only in this case he felt that it was along the line of casting pearls before swine, for that ugly little gleam in the corner of Stackpole's shifty eye warned him against trusting the fellow ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... hour afterward in walks an oldish chap with a stoop and a gray goat's beard. He wanted a ditty-box, too; something extra large and old, and strong, and a tray with a lock-up till in it. He was a fireman on the Anne Traylor, I found; a shifty sort of chap that couldn't look you in the face. He offered to go to a couple of pounds for the right thing. I told him I'd look through our stuff and let him know if we had one ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... the man, raising himself for the first time out of his lounging position on the saddle. "Guess you're gettin' wolfish. I'm for you—stick, fist, or whiphandle, rifle or bowie-knife. Should like to see the man as could leather Isaac Shifty!" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... shifty eyes," said Anne, "and I had a feeling that his dislike for America was all put on to shock us. I feel so warm and sleepy," she continued drowsily when the lights were put out and they had snuggled down in the soft, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... before it has had time to expand. For what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years—to harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive, to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to quench the joy of their hearts, to numb their sympathies, to cramp their expansive energies, to narrow and ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... that I knew one of these gentlemen. We had not, it is true, met for a dozen years; but I seldom forget a face, and I was sure that I could not be mistaken in this instance. That mean appearance, those small, shifty grey eyes, that red, pointed nose could belong to nobody except Van Koop, so famous in his day in South Africa in connexion with certain gigantic and most successful frauds that the law seemed quite unable to touch, of which frauds I had been one of the many victims to the extent of L250, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... this man, with his shifty looks and suspicious appearance, would be about the last man he would ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... bell-bottomed pants, no waistcoat, very short black paget coat, white shirt with no collar, and a gaudy neckerchief round the bare throat. Their boots were marvels, very high in the heel and picked out with all sorts of colours down the sides. They looked "varminty" enough for anything; but the shifty eyes, low foreheads, and evil faces gave our two heroes a sense of disgust. The Englishman thought that all the stories he had heard of the Australian larrikin must be exaggerated, and that any man who was at all athletic could easily hold his own among such a poor-looking lot. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... bloodiest of Kentucky feuds, that of the Martins and Tollivers. Craig was the leader of his side. Gaunt and wiry, he stood six feet in his boots. His long drooping mustache was a sandy color like his goatee. His eyes, a light blue, were shifty and piercing, eyes that had the look of a snake charming a bird. In appearance Craig was a typical desperado. He swaggered about with gun at belt, a whiskey bottle on ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... sharpened it to a real concern. If such love as the mother and the girl connoted forbade the conception that love expired with life, the torture of this other stunted soul seemed prophetic of what might be awaiting his own future, dwarfed by the shifty expedient he had adopted to check its development. If punishment counted for anything, he was, to be sure, receiving his full portion right here on earth. The realization of what he was leaving was ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... brooding mystery which compelled her to suffer them and forbade her to complain. What that was he could not conceive, what it could be he could not conceive: nor had he long to consider the question. He found the shifty eyes of his table-fellow fixed upon him, and, though the moment his own eyes met them they were averted, he fancied that they sped a glance of intelligence to the table behind him, and he hastened to curb, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... ought to mind that, though, if we are friendly about it. We certainly respect him compared with many men of his time—the shifty politicians, the vicious or weak leaders of thought, who went through life as softies, without rigid standards of conduct. He shines out by contrast, ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... presently made a bold and noisy entrance, and, when his face came into view, Bud sank back in his chair weakly, his own paling a trifle beneath the tan. For the man was Smithy Caldwell, a shifty-eyed crook from Chicago, one who had dogged him before, and whom he had never expected to see again. How the villain had tracked him to the Bar T ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... slaves in the West Indies, beginning in 1781, gave the growing anti-slavery sentiment an immense impetus. It also gave the slave owners pause. The cotton-gin had not yet been invented. Slavery was on a shifty economic basis in the South. Great Britain passed the first law to limit the slave trade in 1788; the United States outlawed the trade in 1794. In 1824 Great Britain declared the slave trade piracy. During these years, and during ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurial one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officious and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a reference ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Anything low, mean, deceitful, shifty, coarse, underhand, or gossipy was foreign to that heroic soul. Tom and I could not help growing up respectable characters, having such a mother and such a father, for the father, too, was one of nature's noblemen, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... his colleague, whose shifty eyes encountered his own. Thus eye to eye the two men at last ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... a bad record—you saw this in his small shifty black eyes, that evaded your own when you spoke to him, and were riveted upon you the moment your back was turned. He was older than the woman—possibly fifty years of age, when I first met him, and, though he lived in the open, there was ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... the romance of Pantagruel,—almost more than Pantagruel himself. It would be unpardonable to dismiss Rabelais without first making our readers know Panurge by, at least, a few traits of his character and conduct. Panurge was a shifty but unscrupulous adventurer, whom Pantagruel, pious prince as he was, coming upon him by chance, took and kept under his patronage. Panurge was an arch-imp of mischief,—mischief indulged in the form of obscene and malicious practical jokes. Rabelais describes his accomplishments in a long ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of about forty, with colorless brows and a mean, shifty eye. Formerly a cowboy, he had by the exercise of some natural ability acquired a good property—and a bad reputation. Just how or why he had prospered was a mystery which his ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... we had a few more of them. I like a well-conducted regiment, but these pasty-faced, shifty-eyed, mealy-mouthed young slouchers from the Depot worry me sometimes with their offensive virtue. They don't seem to have backbone enough to do anything but play cards and prowl round the married quarters. I believe I'd forgive that old villain on ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... short, thick-set young man, with a flabby, pallid face and shifty eyes. He had got his job on the new liner through a "pull" that he possessed through a distant relationship with Mr. Jukes. Jack had not met him before, and, since they had been on board, they had exchanged only a few words, ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... years following the Peace of Utrecht, peace was the chief aim of the ministers who directed the policy of the two great seaboard nations, France and England; but amid all the fluctuations of continental politics in a most unsettled period, abounding in petty wars and shifty treaties, the eye of England was steadily fixed on the maintenance of her sea power. In the Baltic, her fleets checked the attempts of Peter the Great upon Sweden, and so maintained a balance of power in that sea, from which ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... somewhat unsteady hand the young man raised a bumper to his lips, whilst eying Sir Michael with the shifty and inquiring ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... of the battered barque, upon which many a wet and weary steersman had stood, now fulfils placid duty as a front gate. No more to be trampled and stamped upon with shifty, sloppy feet—no more to be scrubbed and scored with sand and holystone; painted white, it creaks gratefully every time it swings—the symbol of security, the first outward and visible sign of home, the guardian of the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield |
