He, too, could have told a tale not without its strong features of a shiftless set, constantly borrowing, constantly squandering, constantly provoking the thrifty to accumulate unguarded properties.

This class was originally formed of men and women who had been indentured white servants, and was increased by such shiftless people as now and then found their way to the colony, but could not win estates or obtain social recognition.

"I tell you, Elder, I wish they was all as careful as you be, but they're falling into shiftless ways.

perdulariote, m., shiftless fellow.

Some of these succumbed outright; others unfortunately survived, and clung with feeble and vicious helplessness to the skirts of their manlier fellows; and from them have descended the shiftless squatters, the "mean whites," the listless, uncouth men who half-till their patches of poor soil, and still cumber the earth in out-of-the-way nooks from the crannies of the Alleghanies to the canyons of the southern Rocky Mountains.

It is not in truth a chapel at all, but a consecrated chamber in a very small, very lowly cottage, which stands, or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing only the careless, shiftless culture of nature.

While Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt.

She said that any one that would look twice at a lazy, shiftless fiddler with probably not a dollar laid by for a rainy day, when all the while there was just waiting to be picked an estimable gentleman of independent fortune and stable position like Mr. Easterbrookwell, she had her opinion of her; that's all.

"Well, I do declare," thought he to himself, "I'm afraid they're dreadful shiftless folks, to send that girl way up here, all alone by herself; and how's such a child's that goin' to decide anything, I should like to know?" He read again the letter Reuben had written.

Don't ever mention gold-mines or shiftless husbands," etc., etc.

" "And after what shiftless idiocy will you be chasing now, to neglect your work?

Ellen and I," he went on, his excitement showing only in his lapses into dialect, "we hain't worked all our lives so that our children'll be shiftless idlers, settin' 'round, polishin' their fingernails, and thinkin' up foolishness and breedin' fools.

"Agin, I remark, if it wasent for woman in her onadulterated state, before she had been made a tarnal fool of by these ere despoilers of man's happiness, MASKALINE WIMMEN, man would be a poor shiftless koot.

The shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, lived in laziness and filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements were as unattractive as those of an Indian wigwam.

Having a shiftless neighbor whose yard produced a bountiful crop of the article, I was easily able to secure an abundant supply for my experiments.

I don't know whether they have oil in them or notthe shiftless niggers that come around to take care of this buildingno dependence to be put in them.

This was washing day, and those shiftless ones within would overlook half the linen unless she was on the spot to watch and direct.

No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance.

Unable to grapple with the wild life into which they found themselves plunged, they sank into shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing industry and capacity to succeed.

Some, as of old, would take boats and float down the Ohio; others would go on to Wheeling, be ferried across the river, and push into Ohio or Indiana or Illinois, there to "take up" a quarter section (160 acres) of government land, or buy or rent a "clearing" from some shiftless settler of an earlier day.

"Tomorrow morning," he promised hoarsely, "I'll beat you to death with the stump of my left arm, you miserable, cold-blooded, lazy, shiftless slacker.

On the border, as elsewhere, but with the different qualities in even bolder contrast, there was much both of good and bad, of shiftless viciousness and resolute honesty.

" "Yes, Manuel, but such shiftless wandering, into uncomfortable places that nobody ever heard of, would have that appearance.

I tell you we'se wurms, child; miserable, shiftless wurms, a' crawlin' down in this walley of humiliation, with our faces ter the dust.

Agriculture has wonderfully improved; and wherever an indigo factory has been built, progress has taken the place of stagnation, industry and thrift that of listless indolence and shiftless apathy.