"Shifty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... history, 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 ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... halted before this group, and two brawny braves pushed the hunter forward. Simon Girty's face betrayed satisfaction; Elliott's shifty eyes snapped, and the dark, repulsive face of the other Girty exhibited an exultant joy. These desperadoes had feared ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... in expression of passionate fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's besetting sin of laxity, his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he had set himself—and yet which he had hardly set himself—to run. And if these ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a thief, Uncle John. I guess Horrocks, in spite of his shifty black eyes, isn't the man for the business. He might track the slimmest neche that ever crossed the back of a choyeuse. Lablache is the man Retief has to fear. That uncrowned monarch of Foss River is subtle, and subtlety alone ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... disreputable and lawless nest of river-side alleys was called Alsatia, from its resemblance to the seat of the war then raging on the frontiers of France, in the dominions of King James's son-in-law, the Prince Palatine. Its roystering bullies and shifty money-lenders are admirably sketched by Shadwell in his Squire of Alsatia, an excellent comedy freely used by Sir Walter Scott in his "Fortunes of Nigel," who has laid several of his strongest scenes in this once scampish region. That great scholar Selden lived in Whitefriars with the Countess ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... that draw any assault and battery motions? It don't. All the result is to narrow them shifty eyes of his and steady 'em down until he's lookin' me ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... Bertonio, "they to this day relate many fables and follies." Vocabulario de la Lengua Aymara, s.v. Another name he bore in Aymara was Ecaco, which in that language means, as a common noun, an ingenious, shifty man of many plans (Bertonio, Vocabulario, s.v.). "Thunnupa," as Bertonio spells it, does not lend itself to any obvious etymology in Aymara, which is further evidence that the name was introduced from the Qquichua. This is by no means a singular example of the identity of religious ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... Urartu, Assyria did not immediately regain possession of north Syria. The shifty Mati-ilu either cherished the hope that Sharduris would recover strength and again invade north Syria, or that he might himself establish an empire in that region. Tiglath-pileser had therefore to march westward again. For three years he conducted vigorous campaigns in "the western land", ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... man in blue trousers belted with a piece of ordinary rope, plus a thick-set ruffianly personage the most prominent part of whose accoutrements were a pair of hideous whiskers. I leaped to my feet and made for the door, thrilled in spite of myself. By the, in this case, shifty blue eyes, the pallid hair, the well-knit form of the rope's owner I knew instantly a Hollander. By the coarse brutal features half-hidden in the piratical whiskers, as well as by the heavy mean wandering eyes. I recognised with equal speed a Belgian. ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... cried out again before his spirit passed: "Have I followed the sea for thirty years to die in the dark at last? Curse on her work that has nipped me here with a shifty trick unkind— I have gotten my death where I got my bread, but I dare not face it blind. Curse on the fog! Is there never a wind of all the winds I knew To clear the smother from off my chest, and let me look at the blue?" The good fog heard—like a splitten ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... repels. You have been drinking in its beauty and its fascination. Suddenly something sordid, ugly, disgusting, breaks the spell. On the Promenade des Anglais sewage greets the eye as well as the nose. Not vicious women and poor little dolls alone, but cruel and weak faces, shifty and vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of well-tailored men—you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen at the tables, in near-by Monte Carlo, and the utter depravity of your race frightens you. Except clothes and jewels and the ability to get a check cashed, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... given Lord Rotherwood and Lady Merrifield seats near the judge, where Miss Mohun was already installed. Alfred Flinders was already at the bar, and for the first time Lady Merrifield saw his somewhat handsome but shifty-looking face and red beard, as the counsel for the prosecution was giving a detailed account of his embarrassed finances, and of his having obtained from the inexperienced kindness of a young lady, a mere child in age, who called him uncle, though without blood relationship, ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... think of all this, of the spiritual evolution of her nursling, of his identity with the vicious, shifty, idle youth whose uncanny gift of design seemed to have been completely lost after his stay in South Africa? David Vavasour Williams had left home to the relief of his father and the whole village, if even to the half-pitying regret of his old nurse, in 1896. He had spent ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... 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 ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... West's shifty gaze slid over him. The proposal of a hunt suited him. He must have a supply of food to carry him to Lookout. Whaley was a good shot and an expert trailer. If there were caribou or moose in the vicinity, he was likely to make a kill. In any event there would be hundreds of white rabbits scurrying ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... herself, to draw in—for as she still lingered and chatted with him she more and more felt that she was face to face with a resourceful and strong-willed opponent. She noticed, through all the outward Celtic gentleness, the grim and passionate mouth, the keenness of the shifty yet penetrating hazel-gray eyes, the touch of almost bull-dog tenaciousness about the loose-jointed, high-shouldered figure, and, above all, the audacity of the careless Irish-American smile. That smile, she felt, trailed like a flippant and fluttering tail to the kite of his racial solemnity ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... with reddish hair. He had sech shifty eyes I couldn't help but think that maybe he had stolen them things jest to raise some ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... 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
... or would have been handsome were it not for the crafty and shifty expression of his eyes and the otherwise insincerity that was manifest in his face. Among his companions of the underworld he was known far ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... to believe in a real destiny,—a real God. A carpenter can see that nails are never driven for nothing. It is the sham work, perhaps, of our day, that shakes faith in purpose and unity; a scrambling, shifty living of men's own, that makes to their sight a chance huddle and phantasm ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... sovereign. And he whom the Pope addressed, with the dignity of the Apostolic See in its reverence for the power which is a delegation of God, as Roman emperor and Christian prince, was in his private life scandalous, in all his public rule shifty and tyrannical, and in belief, if he had any, an Eutychean heretic. It may be added, as a fact of history, that the emperor went before the divine judgment sooner than the Pope; that during the seven years which intervened between the letter and his death he utterly disregarded ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... promising to be like her mother, the Countess, had a tongue 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, and ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... leaning over the rail watching the brown shores that imprisoned her sister: four men who had apparently already made friends came along and sat down by Marcella, exchanging plans. One of them was horribly pock-marked; a younger man with red hair, queer shifty eyes and a habit of gesticulating a great deal when he talked was apparently going out with him. As the mudflats of the Thames glided by dreamily Marcella found their conversation slipping into her consciousness. The man with ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... an uncommonly pasty complexion. A little forked beard, flecked with grey, lengthened his face, which was surmounted by a bald, pallid forehead, beneath which gleamed a pair of small, prominent, restless, shifty eyes. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... was a smooth-tongued, tall, lean individual with shifty eyes, and a flow of talk of the coffeeshop variety. At the end of his first sentence any fool would have known that he had been put up to quiz Abdul Ali, in order that Abdul Ali might have an excuse to justify himself. He attacked him very mildly, with much careful hedging and apologetic ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... the smooth, elusive vultures lurking in the shadow of the temple of justice, or perching upon it, Nicholas Frye, or "Old Nick," as many called him, was the most cunning. Nor did his looks belie the comparison, for he had deep-set, shifty, yellow-gray eyes, a hooked nose, and his thin locks, dyed jet black, formed a ring about his bald poll. He walked with a stoop, as if scanning the ground for evidence or clues, and to add to his marked individuality, when he talked he rubbed his hands together as ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... the Grand Hotel, took the gilt off the gingerbread of such queenings, to a marked extent, making them look make-shifty, lamentably second-rate and cheap. Hence Henrietta's fretfulness in part. For with the exception of Lady Hermione Twells—widow of a once Colonial Governor—and the Honourable Mrs. Callowgas nee de Brett, relict of a former Bishop of Harchester, they were but scratch pack these ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... sailor's first ideas proved to be right, and not only did the wind veer round, but it increased in force and became so contrary and shifty that during the night it began to blow a perfect hurricane, and gave Captain Chubb a good opportunity of proving that ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... 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
... They evolved "the mystic quaternion"—the wild and cruel North Wind—the lazy South, the lover—the East Wind, the morning bringer—and the West, Mudjekeewis, the father of them all. Outside the quaternion were the dancing Pauppukkeewis, the Whirlwind, and the fierce and shifty hero, Monobozho, the North-West Wind. The spirit of these legends, if not their accurate detail, can be ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Gangster with the shifty eyes, listen to the sighing Of the hymn tune that you heard at your mother's knee; Listen to the restless ghost of the used-to-be, Listen to a wistful ghost's ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... its Roman original, to the three gallants of the distant time, rather than to those native French [49] heroes—Montmorenci, Saint-Andre, Guise—too close to them to seem really heroic. Mark Antony, knight of Venus, of Cleopatra; shifty Lepidus; bloody, yellow-haired Augustus, so worldly and so fine; you might find their mimic semblance, more easily than any suggestion of that threadbare triad of French adventurers, in the unfolding manhood ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... considering keek" was in his eyes; they were far away, and saw the distant village in process of erection; busy with its chances and occasions. Then an uneasy thought seemed to strike him and recall him to the man by his side. He stole a shifty glance at the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... country. You want hundreds of strains. You want to mingle the bloods. ... I don't believe there's a pure-blooded Irishman in Ireland or out of it.... Oh, the Welsh! Oh, the awful Welsh! Inbreeding in a nation is the very devil ... and it makes 'em so damned uncivil. Oh, a shifty, whining ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... sheltered from the cold wind and not too much overlooked. Wishart shifted the boards from about his shoulders, and, following her, laid them against the wall at the side of the basement-steps, and sat down heavily beside her. He was a sickly-looking man, sandy-haired, with a depressed and shifty expression of face—not vicious, but weak and vacillating. Baubie seemed to have the upper hand altogether: every gesture showed it. She opened the paper that was wrapped about her fragment of rank yellow cheese, laid it down on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... such 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
... puzzled, and was 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 ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... minutes more 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
... busy about some hidden task. Men they were, yet hardly men they seemed, but rather unknown denizens of rock, or wave, or underworld; now red-bodied against the gleam, now ethereally black as are shadows, and whimsical and shifty, yet always full of meaning that could not be divined. They bent, they crouched. They seemed to die down like a wave that is, then is not. Then rising they towered, lifting brawny arms towards the stars. Silence seemed to flow from them, to exude from their labors. And ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... better to be 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 ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... not so long as you would imagine to look at the Pot Hunter. As time went on the marking of the pot came out on him very plainly. He acquired the shifty, sidelong gait of the meaner sort of predatory creatures. His clothes, his beard, his very features have much the appearance that his house has, as if the owner of it were distant on another occupation, and the camise has regained a considerable portion of his ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... whispered to her that it was time to begin. The house was full. There was not room for another soul. Margaret explained that Fiddling Boss had not yet arrived, and caught a glimpse of the cunning designs of Forsythe in the shifty turning away of his eyes as he answered that they could not wait all night for him; that if he wanted to get into it he ought to have come early. But even as she turned away she saw the little, bobbing, eager faces of Pop and ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... half like leaving 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 ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... in material garments like his, in spreading folds of awe-inspiring black; I wrapped myself in his immaterial cloak, his dignity and goodness. I faced Rufus Blight and he quailed before a presence so imposing, and when I spoke in a voice vibrating truth my eloquence smothered his feeble, shifty protests. Always I asserted my right to Penelope and led her from her prison. And always, it seemed, with that victory I cast off my Pound-like sanctity and became as other men. With it the great task of my ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... might have caught a glimpse of Iris's pink muslin skirt disappearing behind a clump of rhododendrons, were not his shifty eyes screwed up in calculation—or perchance, the gods blinded him in behalf of one who was named ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... 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. He may have thought ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... 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 ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... cross the boundary, cut off at least one asylum.[409] Our country 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 docket, has ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 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 tell ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... poled the Fraser on those very tempestuous waters that took such toll of life in '62. Others have been my hosts. I have gone up and down the Arrow Lakes in a steamer as a guest of the man who came through the worst experiences of the Overlanders. Chance conversations are shifty guides on dates and place-names. For these, regarding the Overlanders, I have relied on ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... the optic nerves. The eyes of boys who use cigarettes to excess grow dull and weak, and every feature shows the mark of the insidious poison. The face is pallid and haggard, the cheeks hollow, the skin drawn, there is a loss of frankness of expression, the eyes are shifty, the movements nervous and uncertain, and all this is but preliminary to the ultimate degradation and loss of self-respect which follow the victim of the cigarette habit, through years ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... as gentle as the dawn but as staunch as the oak. She has knowledge and wisdom, and, better still, she has understanding; she needs no diagram. Her gaze penetrates the very heart of a situation but is never less than kindly, and her eyes are never shifty. Her aplomb, her pose, and her poise belong to her quite as evidently as her hands. She is genuine and altogether free from affectation. Her presence stimulates without intoxicating, and she accepts the respect of people with the same naturalness ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... more of the English bulldog tenacity in a cause which he considered just and of vital importance to the country. Slow to form antipathies, he was immovable in them once formed, and as constant in his confidences once he found them merited. To his intense conservatism and antagonism to shifty politics was probably due the unvarying opposition of the "Times" to Home Rule and all other attempts at infringement of the British Constitution, but so far as my own experience goes he never attempted ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... cocked hat on his head. This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally had to shake his head violently to get rid of it. The man would be disguised perhaps as a peasant... a beggar.... Perhaps he would be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick—a shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... says Gudmund; "dark brown is his hair, and pale is his face; tall of growth and sturdy. So quick and shifty in his manliness that I would rather have his following than that of ten other men; but ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... was 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
... a sudden movement and a man stood just inside the office door, a heavy revolver in his right hand, its muzzle menacing Hollis. The man was tall and angular, apparently about thirty years old, with thin, cruel lips and insolent, shifty eyes. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... was a very powerfully built fellow, who seemed, from his attire, to follow the profession of a sailor. Tom Frost was sobbing bitterly. One of Robert Ashford's hands was bandaged up. As he was placed in the dock he cast furtive glances round with his shifty eyes, and as they fell upon Cyril an expression of deadly hate came over his face. The men of the watch who had captured them first gave their evidence as to finding them in the act of robbery, and testified ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... arms, then suddenly grinned and, taking a tablet of black tobacco out of his pocket, bit a piece off with a funny show of ferocity. Another new hand—a man with shifty eyes and a yellow hatchet face, who had been listening open-mouthed in the shadow of the midship locker—observed in a squeaky voice:—"Well, it's a 'omeward trip, anyhow. Bad or good, I can do it on my 'ed—s'long ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... were present 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 apostles and admirers. And so their gaze would wander back ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... necessary writing which comes to every storekeeper at the close of the day, and she was just wondering when Miles was coming to lock the door and fold the shutter over the one small window, when she heard a slouching step outside, and, glancing up, saw Oily Dave entering at the door. He looked more shifty and slippery than usual, but his manner was bland, even deferential, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... you the Ruthful union show * My lords! Shall e'er I win the wish of me or no? A visit-boon by you will shifty Time vouchsafe? * And seize your image eye-lids which so hungry grow? With you were Union to be sold, I fain would buy; * But ah, I see such grace doth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... Iona library possessed—what Queen Mary had among the sixteen Greek volumes[11] in her library—a copy of Herodotus; but we are particularly anxious to ascertain if the story told by Herodotus of Rhampsinitus, and the robbery of his royal treasury by that "Shifty Lad" "the Master Thief,"[12] was in vogue as a popular tale among the Scottish Gaels or Britons in the oldest times? The tale is prevalent in different guises from India to Scotland and Scandinavia among the Aryans, or alleged ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to himself that this man, with his shifty looks and suspicious appearance, would be about the last man ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... first song, during the second glanced cautiously at the green apparition before him. He was vexed with her for having retained a debutante figure. He comfortably classed all singers—especially operatic singers—as "fat Dutchwomen" or "shifty Sadies," and Kitty would not fit into his clever generalization. She displayed, under his nose, the only kind of figure he considered worth looking at—that of a very young girl, supple and sinuous and quicksilverish; thin, eager shoulders, polished white arms that ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... day, eight years ago, in a lumber camp to the north when a shivering, meager, shifty-eyed youngster had come among them asking for work. They had taken pity on him, those big lumberjacks, put him up, given him money, kept him at the ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit up his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter lack of any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... our distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought him to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... bravado in his advance now. If he had possessed an over-growing confidence, Gargantua's attack had set it back, and he stole like a shifty fox through the night. Driven into his brain was the knowledge that all things were not afraid of him, for even the snapping beaks and floating gray shapes to which he had paid but little attention had now become a deadly menace. His egoism had suffered a jolt, a healthful reaction from its ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 man's personality, ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... Clara and I, like old friends. Her intelligence is not large, but clear and discerning between bad and good, ugly and what she considers beautiful; consequently her judgment is not shifty, but calm and serene. She has that kind of spiritual healthiness often met with in Germans. Coming across them now and then I observe that the type I belong to is very rare among them. The Germans and the English are generally ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... man sitting still in a Siberian cart within a few hundred yards, apparently waiting for me to descend. I gave myself up for lost, but, nevertheless, made my way down to him. He was a young man with an uncertain face and weak, shifty eyes. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... the minute the General was ready, and he walked down through the temporary camp to where the wagon stood among scores of others, while the sergeant and four men stood by with Anson, who looked shifty and uncomfortable, wincing suddenly as he caught sight of West and Ingleborough, and then gazing sharply about at the mounted Lancers on duty as patrols, for the prisoners were many, and there had been several ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... wars among his sons, opened his principality again to the encroachment of foes on all sides, and removed one danger from Powys. Powys, however, was being steadily squeezed by the pressure of Gwynedd on one side, and the growing power of Mortimer on the other, and its princes resorted to a shifty diplomacy and a general adherence—open or secret as circumstances dictated—to the English Crown, till they sank at length into the position of petty ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... was commonplace, inconsecutive, shifty, and vague, and it was two hours before anything came within shot: all this time not a soul suspected the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... think of that?" demanded Haynes to himself. "Turned down for that fellow Prescott—-that shifty dodger and cheap bootlick! And I shook hands with you yesterday, Prescott! I never will again! Confound you, you turned out in togs at this late hour, just to put me ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... which was under corporate control was often able to make or destroy a man's legislative and political career, and the weak and the vain and the men with shifty consciences, that the people in their fatuous indifference elect to make their laws, seldom fail to succumb to this ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... through its abnegation, to 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 ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... imparting all that he knew. Similarly the gypsies, who alone travel the Race-plain in these days, and mostly by night, were believed to know him well; but they, too, kept their lore within the limits of their own shifty realm. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 outfit Bud ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... of Florio's intimacy and sympathy with Chapman and his friends. In later years, Chapman, Jonson, and Marston, however, seem to have recognised in Florio an unstable ally, and tacitly to have regarded him as a selfish and shifty opportunist. Florio appears to have used his intimacy with Southampton, and his knowledge of that nobleman's relations with Shakespeare and the "dark lady" in 1593 to 1594, to the poet's disadvantage, by imparting intelligence of the ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... grating 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 sacred rights of private property, the embodiment of the exclusive. Better ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... don't shout all over the place what your business is with him," ordered the previous speaker sulkily. Lute Blackwell, a squat heavily muscled man of forty, had the manner of a bully. Unless his shifty eyes lied he was both ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... in a scientific discussion with an engineer who was on his 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 rest, a large list of tourists ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... the ministers who directed the policy of the two great seaboard nations, France and England; but amid all the fluctuations of continental politics in a most unsettled period, abounding in petty wars and shifty treaties, the eye of England was steadily fixed on the maintenance of her sea power. In the Baltic, her fleets checked the attempts of Peter the Great upon Sweden, and so maintained a balance of power in that sea, from which she drew ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... occurred to him, but was speedily dismissed with unconquerable repugnance. The very fact that this man compelled his daughter to take such a course made Graydon wish never to speak to him again. "No," he muttered; "the girl must yield to me, and cut loose from all her father's shifty ways and associations." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... take him home with me in the holidays. Well, I hadn't been able to go to the kennels for several days, and when at last I managed to run down there Blake told me that Terry was dead and buried. He looked so shifty when he said it that I had my suspicions at once. I don't believe Terry died at all; I'm sure Blake sold him to somebody else, who has taken ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... for a moment, and reappeared followed by a soldierly-looking young man in dark blue uniform of decidedly Russian appearance, and an olive-skinned, black-bearded civilian, with shifty eyes and nervous manner. They both bowed low before Brand, who drew himself up to his full height ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... that we Welshmen should feel bitter against England, because, in this last war, Edward won and Llywelyn fell. It is easy to say that Edward was cruel and faithless, and it is easy to say that Llywelyn was shifty and obstinate; but it is quite clear that each of them thought that he was right. Edward thought that Britain ought to be united: Llywelyn thought Wales ought to be free. Now, happily, we have the union ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... 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
... poacher's eyes there crept his habitual shifty smile. "You'll have a lot to tell 'em down there, Mr. Walter, without ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... from the anchored vessel. By and by the parade began, led by Captain Stevenson. It was a straggling military formation that toiled up-hill through the sand toward Portsmouth Square. These men were from the byways and hedges of life. Some of them had shifty eyes and some bold, predatory glances which forebode nothing good for San Francisco's peace. Adventurers for the most part, lured to this new land, some by the wander spirit, others by a wish to free themselves from the restraints ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... 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 ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... 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 upon ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... the same thing in less time. Well, Clinton Browne strongly suggested that sort of athlete. Add to this a regularly formed, clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful face, with a pair of wonderfully piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black eyes, and one need not marvel that men as well as women stared at him. I have spoken of his gaze as "somewhat shifty," yet am not altogether sure that in that term I accurately describe it. ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the bravery of true champions of the pit, stood for a little while and stared at this shifty foe. He must have decided that he was dealing with a poltroon with whom science and prudence were not needed. He stuck out his neck and ran at Long-legs, evidently expecting that Long-legs would turn and flee in a panic. Long-legs jumped ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... very well, and now at dawn felt drowsy, but the voices would not let him sleep. He rose, dressed, and went out in the stable-yard. There he found Doctor Gordon, Aaron, and a strange man, small, and red-haired, and thin-faced, with shifty eyes, holding by the bridle a ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... instantly asleep, embracing the canvas bag in both arms. Every man in the crew was in a somewhat similar condition, saving Hovey, with his gray-blue, steady eyes, and Cochrane, with his glittering, shifty black. These two watched the rest descend toward swinish unconsciousness; they saw, and waited coolly, and now and then glanced at each other ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... spoke, for he was 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 ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... aptitudes for various sorts of work, with which their names are strongly associated: the Dominican for pulpit eloquence, the Capuchin for rough-and-ready street-preaching, the Benedictine for literary work, the Sulpitian for the training of priests, and the ubiquitous Jesuit for shifty general utility with a specialty of school-keeping. These and a multitude of other orders, male and female, have been effectively and usefully employed in the arduous labor Romanam condere gentem. But it would seem that the superior stability of the present enterprise of planting Catholicism in ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... his double I fully intend to befool the fellow. And I say, considering I have taken on his looks and dress, it is appropriate for me to ape his ways and general conduct, too. I must be a sly rapscallion, then, shifty as the deuce, yes, and drive him away from the door with his own weapon, roguery. (looking at Sosia who is gaping at the stars) What's he at, though? Staring at the sky! I must keep an ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... of all the household did not leave Westover out. Buttons appeared on garments long used to shifty contrivances for getting on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper limits; his overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves put back with their finger-tips drawn close as the petals of a flower which had decided to shut ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... during the night that was now well upon them. And the idea of letting them remain there by the fire without being put under bonds, never occurred to the boy. He knew neither of them could be trusted further than they could be seen; that was stamped on their ugly faces, and the shifty look ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... Putois, and had tried hard to put his hand on that bird. The 'Journal of Saint-Omer' devoted an article to the three melons of Madame Cornouiller, and published a portrait of Putois from descriptions furnished by the town. 'He has,' said the paper, 'a low forehead, squinting eyes, a shifty glance, crow's-feet, sharp cheek-bones, red and shining. No rims to the ears. Thin, somewhat bent, feeble in appearance, in reality he is unusually strong. He easily bends a five-franc piece between the first finger and ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... necessitated by the restrictive laws, a reproach which stung Mr. Calhoun and his followers more than anything else. He then took up the embargo policy and tore it to pieces,—no very difficult undertaking, but well performed. The shifty and shifting policy of the government was especially distasteful to Mr. Webster, with his lofty conception of consistent and steady statesmanship, a point which is well brought out ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Dick and Alan possessed a shadowy sort of similarity. In most respects they were as different in appearance as they were in personality. Dick's hair was brown and straight; Alan's, black and wavy. Dick's eyes were steady gray-blue; Alan's, shifty gray-green. Yet the resemblance was there, elusive, though it was. Perhaps it lay in the curve of the sensitive nostrils, perhaps in the firm contour of chin, perhaps in the arch of the brow. Perhaps it was nothing so tangible, just a fleeting trick of expression. Tony did not know, but she ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... liar!" said the Governor. "I tell you I have played out the hand, and that you are a loser." He whipped off his wig and his glasses as he spoke, and there was a high, bald forehead, and a pair of shifty blue eyes with the red rims of ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of relief when the time came to put the shifty carpenter on the stand. But just as he was to be called, McFay drew aside the friend of the Marquis whom he had so ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... him, sitting in the far end of the hardware shop. Mason never sat in the saloons, for the barkeepers would not have him there. He did not loom large, for he always tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, and his glance was shifty. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... with his fist clenched like a mace. The voice of prudence kept on giving him orders. "Hard!... No consideration!... This female is shifty." And he struck as though his enemy were a man, without hesitation, without pity, concentrating all his soul in ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Meeker face to face, but I doubted not that I should be able to pick him out. I was right. I knew him the moment I saw him. He was tall and broad of shoulder, long of arm, shifty of eye, and his square jaw was covered with a stubby red beard. His color heightened as we walked into the office and cut off the two doors ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... himself in the capacity of a bold and shifty mariner who has been ordered to take a ship filled with precious cargo across a stormy and rock-strewn ocean to a distant port. Quicksands abound, cross currents continually threaten to carry the ship from her course, the wind shifts ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... had days ago begun to cultivate the acquaintance of one of the baggage men. This man at once attracted me by his shifty eyes and unhealthy red complexion. It hag often been a Secret Service precept with me: "Give me a hard drinker or a man who is fast and I'll land him nine times out of ten." Well, the baggage master ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... 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. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... called, and a young man of about his own age entered. Without being in the least ill-looking, there was something repellent about the new comer. His eyes were shifty and too close together to be trustworthy. Otherwise no fault could be found ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... not to forgive is in truth far worse than for a son to need forgiveness; and such a father will of course go from bad to worse as well as the son, except he repent. The shifty, ungenerous spirit of compromise awoke in Raymount. He would be very good, very gentle, very kind to every one else in the house! He would, like Ahab, walk softly; he was not ready to walk uprightly: his forgiveness he would postpone! He knew his feelings ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... indefinitely 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 reveal a preponderance of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson |
