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More "Pickpocket" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on the new settlement, the others being high priced. As Lowndes says, "A work of no authority, but frequently printed." Barrington, the pickpocket, whose name it bears, had nothing to do with it. It was pirated from Phillip, Collins, etc. It went through various editions and enlargements to 1810 or later. After 1795 the name was altered to 'Voyage to New ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... too much pickpocket, too much dirt. Bottom always drop out of bucket shop at last. I understand, end in police court and severe magistrate, or perhaps even 'Gentlemen of ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... indifferent; I look upon a woman now as literature, no more. It has come to the end. Well, and what then? Everything comes to an end. When first I entered on this stage I had a feeling as if I had lost something; as if I had been favoured by the caresses of a pickpocket. Then I set to and felt myself about, to see if I could bear myself after this; if I could endure myself as I was now. Oh well, yes, why not? Not the same as before, of course, but it all passed off so noiselessly, ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... entirely logical for The Eel to steal the wallet—he is a pickpocket. Second, that the theft of the wallet is not of trivial importance to Goldie's destiny and to his—they are "broke" and they must get away; the money solves all their problems. And third, note that while The ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... himself, but lay among the chips and fragments of decayed wood, like a part of themselves. Indeed, it took a sharp eye to distinguish him. Not till I had pulled him forth by one wing, rather rudely, did he abandon his trick of simulated sleep or death. Then, like a detected pickpocket, he was suddenly transformed into another creature. His eyes flew wide open, his talons clutched my finger, his ears were depressed, and every motion and look said, "Hands off, at your peril." Finding this game did not work, he soon began to "play possum" again. I put a cover over my study wood-box ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... in here raising the mischief, and tearing his hair and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pickpocket. He says that every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an hour I get imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that comes along. And he says that that distressing item of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... compared with which the life of a beggar, of a pickpocket, of a pimp, is honourable, did Barere now descend. It was his constant practice, as often as he enrolled himself in a new party, to pay his footing with the heads of old friends. He was at first a Royalist; ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ceiling. "Wally," he said, "I was relaxing in the car with Sergeant Holliday driving. We passed a certain area on Michigan near Randolph and I caught the strong mental impression of someone who—in this day and age, mind you—had had the temerity to pickpocket a wallet containing twenty-seven dollars. The sum of twenty-seven dollars was connected with the fact that the rewards made the risk worth taking; there were distinct impressions of playing that twenty-seven bucks across the board on three very especial nags at the Derby. The impression ...
— The Big Fix • George Oliver Smith
... big, open-faced, silver watch which was connected to his vest in pickpocket-proof fashion with a braided leather thong. When it told him nine thirty had arrived, he got up, his telescope in his hand, and ambled heavily down the corridor. He poked his head in at an open door, and called, amiably, "Kin anybody tell me ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... cruel brightness of the eyes of a bird of prey. "Red is your taste in your old age is it?" she said to the portrait. "Red hair, and a scrofulous complexion, and a padded figure, a ballet-girl's walk, and a pickpocket's light fingers. Miss Gwilt! Miss, with those eyes, and that walk!" She turned her head suddenly on the pillow, and burst into a harsh, jeering laugh. "Miss!" she repeated over and over again, with the venomously pointed emphasis of the most merciless of all human forms of contempt—the contempt ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... as a pickpocket and housebreaker in London. He was Captain Roberts's lieutenant, and was afterwards given command of a prize, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... against the people; who is for the boodle politician and against the happiness of the many; who is for the white exploiter and against the simple colored man; who is for the rich profiteer and against the petty burglar and pickpocket. ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... gone out. As to M. Saint Pavin, I found him at the office of his paper, 'The Financial Pilot.' He is a coarse and vulgar personage, and received me like a pickpocket. I had ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... Connie, too, was known by several people, and although in her old clothes, and with her hair fastened round her head, she did not look nearly so striking as when Mammy Warren had used her as a decoy-duck in order to pursue her pickpocket propensities, yet still her little face was altogether on a different plane from the ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... of a twinkle in 'em. Always does. I know some like the wide-set, stary kind that go with an open-faced smile and a loud haw-haw; but for me the quiet chuckle and the twinklin' eye! Still, he hadn't proved yet that he wa'n't a pickpocket or a wife beater; so I just nods non-committal over my shoulder and resumes my usual ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... I came round to the opening, and stooping, peered cautiously inside. There, sure enough, was my pickpocket gazing intently into the open purse, and chuckling as he gazed. Then he slipped it into his pocket, and out he came—where I immediately pinned him ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... given you any cause of offence, Jack, why don't you pitch into him?" suggested a half-drunken fellow who bore the enviable reputation of being a most expert pickpocket. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... the King beat but two men, and they both well deserved it. The first was a valet, who would not let him enter the garden during one of his own fetes. The other was a pickpocket, whom the King saw emptying the pocket of M. de Villars. Louis XIV., who was on horseback, rode towards the thief and struck him with his cane; the rascal cried out, "Murder! I shall be killed!" which made us all laugh, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... waste"—here Morris groaned, but asked no questions—"besides," and her voice became earnest, "I will not have him talking to you like that. The fact that one man is the father of another man doesn't give him the right to abuse him like a pickpocket. Also, if you are so good that you put up with it, I have myself to consider—that is, if we are all to live as a happy family. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... his late teens was Curlie. Slender, dark, with coal-black eyes, with curls of the same hue clinging tightly to his well-shaped head, he had the strong profile and the smooth tapering fingers that might belong to an artist, a pickpocket ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... upon as a successful businessman any more than a pirate is a successful trader; success must clearly imply obedience to the rules of the game. Taking all that one can grab without punishment is a reversion to barbarism; the unscrupulous magnate is morally no better than a pickpocket. And these men are, in general, responsive to public opinion; it has effected rapid improvement in some points in the past few years. Just so soon as the community conscience is aroused to the point of a general condemnation ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... of pickpockets. No smoking.' They quote her in the lifts on the Tube. But then I'm not a pickpocket, and you are smoking. Besides, your picture knows mine very well. They've seen quite a lot of each ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... exaggerated for the purposes of a debating argument; but in his long essay on the subject he gives a far more reasonable statement of the case. He does not treat the doctor as a murderer, or a pickpocket, or a human vulture, or even a cold-blooded cynic; he explains what is likely to happen to the ordinary, moderately decent, normal man, without any special moral or intellectual equipment, who becomes a doctor. "As to the honour and conscience of doctors, they have ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... departed to Langbridge Farm, and Miss Currie had peeped round the corner of the house, to see how it was faring with the balloonist. She found her worst fears confirmed; her father was standing under the pear tree and abusing the poor man like a pickpocket. The girl, realising how futile it would be for her to put in an appearance and add to the already deafening hurly-burly, quietly secreted herself in a lilac-bush, and listened to what was going on. She began to laugh as the ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... quick in her motions," suggested Jack, "and from what we know of the man she was with, she may have been just such a character herself, and have learned deftness of fingers from him. He was evidently a pickpocket, and perhaps she had practiced the trade herself. That is the only explanation I ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... mounted on wild-looking horses, came dashing down the road in the direction of the meadow, in the midst of which they presently showed themselves, their horses clearing the deep ditches with wonderful alacrity. 'That's Gypsy Will and his gang,' lisped a Hebrew pickpocket; 'we shall have another fight.' The word Gypsy was always sufficient to excite my curiosity, and I looked attentively ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... philosopher; but in one thing thou hast blundered: the gods created thee a pickpocket, and thou hast become a demon. That is ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... wanted a witness, and he could not find any man just then who could sign his name. He was one of the Lord Mayor's men, but notwithstanding by this time had become a pretty smart hand. He had been a pickpocket or something of that sort it the streets of London, and always spoke of himself as being a gentleman, and was fond of ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... indifferent person for an umpire. For instance, the stealing of pocket-handkerchiefs or snuff-boxes may or may not be vicious; but if we, who have not the wit, or will not take the trouble to decide the question ourselves, want to hear the real rights of the matter, we should not, surely, apply to a pickpocket to know what he thought on the point. It might naturally be presumed that he would be rather a prejudiced person—particularly as his reasoning, if successful, might get him OUT OF GAOL. This is a homely ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hesitation he dived through the opening and met the fiend as he was rising to his feet. Together they rolled among the wreckage. While no match for his antagonist in size, the pickpocket was tough and wiry and apparently uninjured. He fought viciously, with the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... a graphic picture of a justice, which must be received, perhaps, with some reservation;—"I was walking with Barrington, the most accomplished pickpocket: he was arm-in-arm with Richard Atkins, Esq. I wished to have some conversation with them. A bottle of rum was produced, and some pleasant conversation about Ireland passed. At length I wished to retire, and Mr. A. said he never allowed any ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... with the indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject. I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... "I worked in a beauty parlor for a little as a hairdresser and manicure. I'm out for the money, Hiram. I'm not a pickpocket yet, but that's because I don't know how to be one. But if you've got any loose change in your pockets watch out. I'm out for the coin. But here comes Al. He brought me down. He's going to set me up ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can't possibly mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the Professor, who had once belabored me in his feeble way, but one can generally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the older man. "A theoretical socialist always seemed to me about like a theoretical pickpocket—neither of them stands to do much harm. For example, here you are, one of the richest young fellows of my acquaintance, living along very contentedly where every tenet you profess to hold is daily outraged. You're not giving away your money. You take a healthy interest in a ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... having been assured to the contrary—having asked the price of the Damascus cream, which was "only three-and-sixpence," (stamp included)—he purchased and paid for it with a rueful air, and took his departure. He sneaked homeward along the streets with the air of a pickpocket, fearful that every one he met was an officer who had his eye on him. He was not, in fact, very far off the mark; for many a person smiled, and stared, and turned round to look at him ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... from laughing at the pirate chief going on in this way about being taken in. As he whispered to Tom, when he had the chance, it reminded him of the pickpocket who had stolen a watch, complaining of being hardly used because the article turned ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... held the paper up to the light, regardless of the fact that the policeman was watching his proceedings with the interest naturally due from a man of his profession to a suspicious-looking character who was probably a convicted pickpocket. The first sentence once more told him the worst. There was no doubt at all about it. The three guineas in his pocket were the price ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... place," said his companion, with the air of one who presents his credentials, "I want you to understand that I am a crook. Out West I am known as Rowdy the Dude. Pickpocket, supper man, second-story man, yeggman, boxman, all-round burglar, cardsharp and slickest con man west of the Twenty-third Street ferry landing—that's my history. That's to show I'm on the square—with you. My ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... seemed to think any the less of them for so doing. They raised points that made the refinements of the ancient schoolmen seem blunt in comparison. No respecters of persons, they harried the rich and taunted the powerful, and would have as soon jailed a bishop or a judge as a pickpocket if he deserved it. Between them they knew more kinds of law than most of their professional brethren, and as Mr. Tutt was a bookworm and a seeker after legal and other lore their dusty old library was full of hidden treasures, which on frequent occasions were unearthed to entertain ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... that Department soon began to be familiar with his presence, and he was generally ushered into them by its janitors much as a pickpocket might be shown into a police-office; the principal difference being that the object of the latter class of public business is to keep the pickpocket, while the Circumlocution object was to get rid of Clennam. However, he was resolved to stick to the Great Department; and so the work ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... felt some one feeling, as she supposed, for her pocket-book, and she started to run, yelling, "pickpocket," and left the burning polonaise in Mr. Field's hands. He blushed, and was about to explain to his lady friends how the best of us are liable to have our motives misconstrued, when somebody threw a box of four dozen of those large firecrackers right at his feet, ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... be complete in its guiltiness. For Heaven's sake, Mrs Bompas, let that glove alone: you look like a pickpocket. ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... by, and seemed to be watching us narrowly. I felt almost sure that he suspected something was wrong; but probably he had got a habit of scrutinising everything which approached him, as a London pickpocket does when he knows that the police are aware of his course of life. As we dropped past the brig's quarter, I got a better view of his countenance, and I felt sure that I had seen it before. It was that of a man I supposed to have been hidden long ago, with all his ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... hut is yours, that's another matter," I said. "But I don't intend like a pickpocket to take it ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... he, grinding his teeth, "got out of his window—and three policemen in his garden. He must have bribed a pickpocket—low knave that he is. But ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Gibelin beamed. 'The old school has its good points, after all'" "'I know why you are thinking about that prison'" "She was just bending over it when Coquenil entered" "'Did you write this?'" "And when he could think no longer, he listened to the pickpocket" "'They all swore black and blue that Addison told the truth'" "A door was opened suddenly and he was pushed into a room" "'Stand still, I won't hurt you'" "'There!' he said with a hideous grin, and he handed Tignol the tooth" "'My dog, ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... crocodiles in sundry watering-pots, and other crawling things in unexpected places. You never quite know where the next surprise is coming from. I always feel doubtful about his pockets. I shouldn't recommend a pickpocket to try them, unless he really doesn't mind running against a casual rattlesnake. Tyrrell is the sort of man who is quite likely to produce something from his cap and say: "By-the-bye, this is a promising youngster—death adder, you know. And here," taking something ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Emerson did not fail to have his share of disasters. He wrote from Albany, in 1865, to Mr. Fields: —An unlucky accident drives me here to make a draft on you for fifty dollars, which I hope will not annoy you. The truth is that I lost my wallet—I fear to some pickpocket—in Fairhaven, Vermont, night before last (some $70 or $80 in it), and had to borrow money of a Samaritan lady to come here. I pray you do not whisper it to the swallows for fear it should go to ——, and he should print it in "Fraser." I am ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... say I've changed my mind and have decided that I ain't going to marry. Takes me really for a man, she does. Must be a fool, she must. And she ain't asked for money, ain't that funny? If she writes back she'll abuse me like a pickpocket, anyway. Won't he be mad when he ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... point of disputing the hypothesis, but prudently checked myself. Suddenly he removed my hat and put his broad, hard palm upon my organs with an impudent dexterity which made me doubt whether he had not been a pickpocket ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... don't care, But you do not believe me" (here the nose went still higher): "I suppose if you dared you would call me a liar. Our engagement is ended, sir—yes, on the spot; You're a brute, and a monster, and—I don't know what." I mildly suggested the words Hottentot, Pickpocket, and cannibal, Tartar, and thief, As gentle expletives which might give relief: But this only proved as a spark to the powder, And the storm I had raised came faster and louder; It blew, and it rained, thundered, lightened, and hailed Interjections, verbs, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... realised. Madame Milovidov did not interrupt Aratov; she did not understand very well what this unknown visitor was saying to her, and merely opened her eyes rather wide and rolled them upon him, thinking, however, that he had a quiet respectable air, was well dressed ... and not a pickpocket ... hadn't ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... pickpocket are a light tread, a delicate sense of touch, combined with firm nerves. These boys may be known by their shoes in the street; they generally wear pumps, or shoes of a very light make, having long quarters. There is about their countenance an affected determination of purpose, and they walk ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... Bamberger," said the director, approaching, "not that way. 'A pickpocket—well?' so. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and the company included "a silly fop and a worshipful justice, a griping rook and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer and an errant pickpocket, a reverend non-conformist and a canting mountebank, all blended together to compose an oglio of impertinence." There is a delightful sketch of one named "Captain All-man-sir," as big a boaster as Falstaff, and a more delicately ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... a little work of my own," I answered, after greeting. If I felt much like a disconcerted pickpocket I was careful to conceal the circumstance, and spoke with easy indifference. "You have come back before I expected ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... in him an appetite for worse. It was the street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... another is that pickpocket My Diocleides. He bought t'other day Six fleeces at seven drachms, his last exploit. What were they? scraps of worn-out pedlar's-bags, Sheer trash.—But put your cloak and mantle on; And we'll to Ptolemy's, the sumptuous ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... a most accomplished, prepossessing villain, my dear Q.M. Your upper class villains are always prepossessing. Manners are as necessary to them as a small hand to a pickpocket." ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... at once proceed to the next magistrate and denounce the criminal, I can only throw myself for excuse on the illustrious example of George the Fourth, head of Church and State, who once in society saw a pickpocket remove from a gentleman's fob his gold watch, winking at the king as he did so. "Of course I couldn't say anything," remarked the good-natured monarch, "for the rascal took me ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... once said to my father: "It is in our very blood. It may be only a pin, but I cannot help taking it, although I am quite ready to give it back to its owner." The pickpocket Bor... confessed that at the age of twelve he had begun to steal in the streets and at school, to the extent of taking things from under his schoolfellows' pillows, and that it was impossible for him to resist stealing, even when his pockets were full. If he ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... appearance, we began to watch him. We have got no evidence against him yet; but yesterday I pointed him out to a New York policeman, who happened to be here, and he says he knows him well. It seems he is a regular pickpocket by profession, and has served a term at Blackwell's Island. [1] He was liberated last month, and came on here to follow the business where he isn't known. But we keep a sharp eye on him, and as we have noticed that your son is quite intimate with him, I thought it my duty to inform you of it. ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... slanders upon himself, the great Mully Ully Gue. And the fifty would soon be five hundred if any notice were taken of them. They call mankind to witness that science will not defend itself, though publicly attacked in terms which might sting a pickpocket into standing up for his character: science, in return, allows mankind to witness or not, at pleasure, that it does not defend itself, and yet receives no injury from centuries of assault. Demonstrative reason never ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... a hardened little sinner! I abused her like a pickpocket, and called her an ungrateful serpent! Bring some sackcloth and ashes, somebody, quickly! I shall go in mourning for ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to think over was how to stay in the "bucket-shop" business, but wash myself of its odium. Bucket-shop! What snobbery! Yet it's human nature, too. The wholesale merchant looks down on the retailer, the big retailer on the little; the burglar despises the pickpocket; the financier, the small promoter; the man who works with his brain, the man who works with his hands. A silly lot we are—silly to look down, sillier to feel badly when we're looked ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... I can judge of London,' said Miss Browning, sententiously continuing her tirade against the place, 'it's no better than a pickpocket and a robber dressed up in the spoils of honest folk. I should like to know where my Lord Hollingford was bred, and Mr. Roger Hamley. Your good husband lent me that report of the meeting, Mrs Gibson, where so much was said ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Horncastle, who occupied a bed in the next dormitory to that where Jack and I slept, had missed his collar-stud, which he described as "red coral," and complaining thereof to Mrs Nash, had been told by that lady that Smith and Batchelor had brought a young pickpocket into the house with them last night, and that being so, she was only surprised Mr Horncastle had not lost all the jewellery he possessed. Whereat, of course, Mr Horncastle was in a mighty state of wrath, and quite ready for poor Jack ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the world as a commercial pickpocket, as a looter of the public domain—after Congress has appropriated your fabulous coal claims—will you nail up the door of this little ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... out of here, this moment; and let me have no more of your prating. Now then, be gone out of my house, you sworn pickpocket, you veritable ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere
... The Pied Bull Inn, at Islington, was the first house in England where tobacco was smoked, while Moll Cut-Purse, a noted pickpocket who flourished in the time of Charles II., is said to have been the first Englishwoman ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... character of Court art. How different from true politics. For, comparing the talents of two professions that are very different, I cannot but think, that in the present sense of the word Politician, a common sharper or pickpocket, has every quality that can be required in the other, and accordingly I have personally known more than half a dozen in their hour esteemed equally to excell ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... the same time, secret association, than the one whose constitution and by-laws we now present to the reader. Composed of men of all classes and grades in society, from the priest at the altar, the judge on the bench, the lawyer at the bar, down to the most common felon and street thief or pickpocket, all bound together by a solemn oath, they laboured for the general cause of secret plunder, to the enriching of themselves at the expense of the mass. But having previously shown how I procured my information regarding these desperadoes, I shall ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... clothes at the swords' point when compared with the lawyer who despoils thee of thy whole estate with the stroke of a quill, and against whom thou canst claim no recompense or remedy? What is a pickpocket who steals a five- pound in comparison to a dice-sharper who robs thee of a hundred pounds in the third part of a night? And what the swindler that deceives thee in a worthless old hack compared with the apothecary who swindles thee of thy money ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... unfortunate youths, notwithstanding that they had themselves proved unworthy of its benefits. He therefore came, determined to suffer whatever might be inflicted upon him, rather than go back to his wicked courses. We learned that he had been for several years a pickpocket, residing in a low lodging-house at 1s. 9d. a week; sometimes well off, sometimes otherwise, but always harassed by the terrors of punishment. According to his account of the boys who live in this manner, there are some who enjoy its ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... not know how, under such a home government, I ever became a decent fellow. I do not know why I am not now a pirate, a freebooter, a pickpocket, or a nuisance to myself and the world in some other capacity. I have come to believe since that my inherited good qualities saved me under such an utter neglect of all home influences. It is a marvel ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... have been a strange sight that of Terry sitting on his dilapidated bed in the Rogues' Gallery, with his eternal cigarette in his mouth, talking to Marie and perhaps to some prostitute or pickpocket! We begin already to see the result on Marie's education: that will appear complex and manifold, but it is likely that on many a half-formed creature who afterward passed out of Terry's life, his words yet made an impression which perhaps ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... exclaimed Captain Mitchell, staring like an owl in the darkness. "What is there in common between me and old Viola? More likely because the old chap has no watch and chain for the pickpocket to steal. And I tell you what, Dr. Monygham," he went on with rising choler, "he will find it more difficult than he thinks to get rid of me. He will burn his fingers over that job yet, I can tell you. To begin with, I won't go without my watch, and as ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... they th-v-ng all day long? Merciful heaven! what property can stand against such a depredation? The kangaroos—your aborigines—do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short forepuds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... in Bunyan's time, hanging to the girdle, or slung over the shoulder, as they now are in some parts of Germany. A pickpocket ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... away down the passage. Clubfoot laughed noisily, but I reflected mournfully that in my present sorry plight, unwashed and unshaven, in filthy clothes, haled along like a common pickpocket, even my own mother ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... your wish that we should be friendly, I spoke courteously to him, but he looked at me as if I were a dog. He might as well have struck me. I saw that my friends were greatly surprised, but of course I could not explain there, and yet it's not pleasant to be treated like a pickpocket, with no redress. I defy him," continued Hunting, assuming the tone and manner of one greatly wronged, "to prove anything worse against me than that I compelled him and his partners to pay money to which I had ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... this execution vastly as a spectator. He was, I think, capable of a greater degree of depravity than any of his accomplices. Atzerott might have made a sneak thief, Booth a forger, but Harold was not far from a professional pickpocket. He was keen-eyed, insolent, idle, and, by a small experience in Houston street, would have been qualified for a first-class "knuck." He had not, like the rest, any political suggestion for the murder of the heads ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Physics naturscienco, fiziko. Physiognomy fizionomio. Physiology fiziologio. Piano fortepiano. Piaster piastro. Pick (choose) elekti. Pick (implement) pikfosilo. Pickaxe pikfosilo. Picket (military) pikedo. Pickle (to salt) pekli. Pickle (liquid) peklakvo. Pickpocket fripono. Picnic kampfesteno. Picquet (cards) pikedo. Pictorial ilustrita. Picture pentrajxo. Picturesque pentrinda. Pie pastecxo. Piebald multkolora. Piece (to patch) fliki. Piece ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... onto the window-sill, while the other stayed outside the door. Those below in the yard saw the man crouching on the sill, and then there was a sudden smash of glass, and with a cry he fell in a heap on the stones at their feet. Then in the moonlight they saw the white face of the pickpocket peeping over the sill, and while some stayed in the yard, others ran into the house and helped the other man to break the door in. It was difficult to obtain an entrance even then, for it was barred with heavy furniture, but they got in at last, and ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... newspapers, which are a sort of safety-valve to let off all the bad feelings and malignant passions floating through the country, without any dread of the horsewhip. Hence it is the commonest thing in the world to hear one editor abusing, like a pickpocket, an opposition brother; calling him a reptile—a crawling thing—a calumniator—a hired vendor of lies; and his paper a smut-machine—a vile engine of corruption, as base and degraded as the proprietor, &c. Of this description ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the first time, I heard of the life you are leading. Is this how you repay me for all the trouble I took to have you well educated, and to make you an honest man? Here I find you living in luxury and extravagance—and how? On stolen money—money as much stolen as if you were a pickpocket or a burglar! A pleasant thing for me to have all my friends talking about Charles Daffy, the bookmaker and the moneylender! What right have you to dishonour your father in this way? I ask, what ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... was hot quarters for Cripps that morning, and once or twice he struck completely, and putting himself on his dignity, declared "he wasn't a-going to be questioned and brow-beated as if he was a common pickpocket!" which objection Mr Loman quietly silenced by saying "Very well," and turning to go, a movement which so terrified the worthy publican that he caved in at once, and submitted to ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... rustler, cattle rustler, sandbagger, sea king, skin [Slang], sneak thief, spieler^, strong-arm man [U.S.]. highwayman, Dick Turpin, Claude Duval, Macheath, footpad, sturdy beggar. cut purse, pick purse; pickpocket, light-fingered gentry; sharper; card sharper, skittle sharper; thimblerigger; rook [Slang], Greek, blackleg, leg, welsher [Slang]; defaulter; Autolycus^, Jeremy Diddler^, Robert Macaire, artful dodger, trickster; swell mob [Slang], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... generally called "Master Bates," one of Fagin's "pupils," training to be a pickpocket. He is always laughing uproariously, and is almost equal in artifice and adroitness to "The Artful Dodger" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... doesn't matter, he's a bad, spiteful bird. He is like a pickpocket in his ways. He doesn't like man to be happy. When Christ was crucified it was the sparrow brought nails to the ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... what my father'd say, if he knew I'd been in the same class as a pickpocket," said the daughter of a minister from Brisbane. "I guess he wouldn't have let me stop ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... be exact it is a low haunt. I always go there and have a cup of coffee in a glass when I am wondering what to do next and feeling it is about time something was happening. One of my acquaintances came and sat down at my table. To confess the truth he has once been a pickpocket, the sort of professional who followed the trade in the old dull days of peace for the excitement it furnished. He has since served in the Foreign Legion, and says that now he cannot bring himself ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... Louis Burjois, and dis is de brudder of dat gal wot you see walkin' over dere. She is an innercent gal, which dat feller is a-tollin' of her off. He's a pickpocket, and I'm one wot kin swear to it. We want him arrested an' jugged. We'll see to ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... Hind laigs at res'." The Wildcat subsided to the floor. "Fingehs, lemme see kin you play de pickpocket jazz. Shoots five dollahs. Wham! Ah reads a feeble five. Five stay alive. Five Ah craves. Lady Luck, boon me. P'odigal five, come home whah de fat calf waits. Bam! Th'ee an' a deuce. Ah lets it lay. Shoots ten dollahs. Shower ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... first refused; but she knelt down by my side, and instead of praying to the saint prayed to me; and, being thus treated as a canonized personage, I thought it incumbent on me to be gracious to the extent of half a paul. My wife, some time ago, came in contact with a pickpocket at the entrance of a church; and, failing in his enterprise upon her purse, he passed in, dipped his thieving fingers in the holy water, and paid his devotions at a shrine. Missing the purse, he said his prayers, in ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... immediately, because on his gracious Majesty's accession Doctor Crusius gave his boys a holiday? He and I, and Hetty, and Theo (Miss Theo was strong enough to walk many a delightful mile now), heard the Heralds proclaim his new Majesty before Savile House in Leicester Fields, and a pickpocket got the watch and chain of a gentleman hard by us, and was caught and carried to Bridewell, all on account of his Majesty's accession. Had the king not died, the gentleman would not have been in the crowd; the chain would not have been seized; the thief would ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the idea struck me to drop a few into Fred's overcoat pockets. Without discovery I put what I washed into one, and was about slipping my porte-monnaie into the other, when my hand was caught with such a grip that I screamed right out. At the same time Fred exclaimed, 'Here is a pickpocket!' And of course there was a policeman there, as none was needed. I was too frightened to speak for an instant. At length I found voice enough to say to the officer, who was making his way toward me, 'The gentleman will find he is ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... Botany Bay, the account of a whole nation exerting itself to floor the government-house. Yet time shall come, when some Botany Bay Tacitus shall record the crimes of an emperor lineally descended from a London pickpocket."[63] ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... at Doc's "conscience." Yet, to my notion, they, who started high and from whatever sophistry of motive trailed down into the mire, are lower far than they who began deep in the mire and have been struggling bravely toward the surface. I know a man who was born in the slums, was a pickpocket at eight years of age, was a boss at forty-five, administering justice according to his lights. I know a man who was born what he calls a gentleman and who, at forty-five, sold himself for the "honors" of a high office. And once, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... brutal manner of his ancestors. He preys upon inferior intelligence, upon weakness of character, upon the greed and upon the gambling instinct of mankind. In the grandest scale he is called a financier; in the meanest, a pickpocket. This predatory spirit is at once so ancient and so general, that the reader, who is, of course, wholly innocent of such reprehensible tendencies, must nevertheless make an effort to understand the delights of robbery considered as ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... pockets of the coat like an amateur pickpocket, and found some letters. He gazed at them askance, turning them over and over, wondering if he ought to peep at their contents. Then he put them back, and went into the smoking-room, where, finding himself alone, he turned up his vest as if it had been worn by somebody ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... additional safeguard," he had assured her. "It corresponds to the method of a notorious Paris assassin who was very generally regarded by the police as a cunning pickpocket. Kazmah's business of 'dreamreading' does not actually come within the Act. He is clever enough for that. Remember, he does not profess to tell fortunes. It also enables him to balk ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... royalist; she once took two hundred gold jacobuses from the Parliamentary General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath. She is the chief character in Middleton's play of the "Roaring Girl"; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse, pickpocket, highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves' fence, she died in peace at the age of seventy. To return to the inns, Fyner Morrison, a traveler in 1617, sustains all that Harrison says ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of doing business, so general as to attract attention. If you do not take a hack at the impertinent solicitation of the driver, he will unquestionably curse you." "The telegraph operator grabs your message and eyes you as if you were a pickpocket." Now, Mr. PUNCHINELLO does not offer himself as an apologist for the abusive and obstreperous hackman, but he wishes to say that in the course of his active and eventful career he has had various ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... That doctrine suits 'em best; just like a cowardly pickpocket, or a bloody highwayman, knock a man down first, and then tell him ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... brother officer in France as that of a man who gave a good price for jewels without asking too many questions. But the diamond merchant had not lived up to his reputation. He had refused to look at the diamond. He had been horribly rude, treating him as though he was a pickpocket, and had practically ordered him out of his office. In fact, his whole attitude was so suspicious that Nepcote decided it would be better to leave his gambling debts owing than run the risk of trying to raise money on a married woman's jewels. He returned to the ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... license to prove it, and of course she realized her breach of promise suit and claim for a million dollars' worth of heart balm would be laughed out of court if she had the crust to present it. So she did the next best thing. She abused me like a pickpocket and ended up by getting hysterical when I told her how I'd swindled her. When she got through crying I lectured her on the error of her ways and suggested that inasmuch as she had had one divorce already, another wouldn't be much of a strain ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... abuse me like a pickpocket, and I should return it, and then there would be a scolding match. I always have kept out of her way, and I think I had better ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Board of Assessors comes with poor grace from those whose endeavors for the common good are confined to academic essays on good government. It savors too much of the adroit pickpocket, who, finding himself hard pressed, joins in the chase, shouting as lustily as any of the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Hefflefinger slipped over the cross rails on which he had been lying, hung for an instant by his hands, and then dropped into the centre of the fighting mob on the floor. He was out of it in an instant with the agility of a pickpocket, was across the room and at Hade's throat like a dog. The murderer, for the moment, was the calmer man ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... ye Havana cigarette smokers! and when next you indulge in a whiff from your favourite luxury, remember that a pickpocket has had his hand ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... what the profession is always observing. No sooner do they return from one circuit than they start off on another. Are you aware, Mr. Bumpkin, that we pay a judge five thousand a-year to try a pickpocket?" ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... man who indirectly buys the seat, and hear his record of dull misery if he is inclined to be confidential. He does not like to leave Parliament, and yet he knows he is merely a mark for the licensed pickpocket; he is not regarded as a politician—he is a donor of sundry subscriptions, and nothing more. The men in manufacturing centres will return a poor politician and pay his expenses; but the people in some quiet towns ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... regiment for a year, for when it was sent back to England the Colonel in command of it obtained young Haggart's discharge. These dates coincide with Borrow's presence in Edinburgh. Haggart's history for the next five or six years was in truth merely that of a wandering pickpocket, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in England, and finally he became a notorious burglar. Incidentally he refers to a girl with whom he was in love. Her name was Mary Hill She belonged to Ecclefechan, which Haggart more than ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... six valuable gold watches, three in the various pockets of his waist-coat, one in his ticket-pocket, one in his breast-pocket, and one small one set in a leather strap and fastened round his left wrist. The obvious explanation that the man was a pickpocket, and that this was his plunder, was discounted by the fact that all six were of American make and of a type which is rare in England. Three of them bore the mark of the Rochester Watchmaking Company; one was ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... connected. He was likewise aware that he was not altogether deficient in courage and in propriety of behaviour. He knew that his appearance was not particularly against him; his face not being like that of a convicted pickpocket, nor his gait resembling that of a fox who has lost his tail; yet he never believed himself adapted for the appointment, being aware that he had no aptitude for the doing of dirty work, if called to do it, nor pliancy which would enable him to submit ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... but thefts and robbery are seldom heard of. The rich returns of honest labor render harmless temptations which would prove an overmatch for the average virtue of New England. The cut-purse and pickpocket in California find their occupation useless, and become chevaliers of industry, in a better sense than the term has ever before admitted of. It will appear natural," says our author, "that California should be the most democratic country in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... is Louis Burjois, and dis is de brudder of dat gal wot you see walkin' over dere. She is an innercent gal, which dat feller is a-tollin' of her off. He's a pickpocket, and I'm one wot kin swear to it. We want him arrested an' jugged. We'll see to ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... What are you thinking of? There is no time! She has lost two years, as it is. You don't seem to remember, Michael, that I am as good a pickpocket as there is in Europe. That child is almost too old to begin to learn the art. The other one, Rika, is just about right; and she has such fine, delicate, little fingers. Well, this one has good hands too. But you know well that they are clumsy after they reach five. Do you remember ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... new-fangled and unnecessary love he will give up his old father and mother, best and dearest of friends, or enslave them to the fancies of the hour! Truly a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother! When there is no more to be got out of them, he turns burglar or pickpocket, or robs a temple. Love overmasters the thoughts of his youth, and he becomes in sober reality the monster that he was sometimes in sleep. He waxes strong in all violence and lawlessness; and is ready for any deed of daring that will supply the wants of his rabble-rout. In a well-ordered ...
— The Republic • Plato
... which he said wanted a witness, and he could not find any man just then who could sign his name. He was one of the Lord Mayor's men, but notwithstanding by this time had become a pretty smart hand. He had been a pickpocket or something of that sort it the streets of London, and always spoke of himself as being a gentleman, and was fond of using ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... To the magic word "reporter," accompanied by the flourish of a pencil and a roll of paper, the three policemen smiled obsequiously, and unbarred the way. Seeing how well this plan worked, two gentlemen of inelegant leisure, and at least one pickpocket, provided themselves with rolls of paper and pencils, and, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... "I thought you got away. Never saw any more of you after you jumped through the French window. Never had time. The last thing I remember is her Ladyship screaming like a mad cockatoo, yes, and abusing me as though I were a pickpocket, with the drawing-room all on fire. Then something happened, and down I went among the broken china and hit my head against the leg of a table. Next came a kind of whirling blackness and I ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... the whole gang. Can't you see how they're counting on it? It's in their faces, in their ways! This Earl—don't you see he's counting on living on you? Do you think the son would get that settlement? Why, a Terre Hut pickpocket could get it away from him—let alone his old man! What do you think would ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... "A swell pickpocket, I'll lay my life," commented Collins, as he squared himself for an encounter and made ready to leap on the man when he came within gripping distance. "Here! get out of the way, madmazelly. Business before pleasure. And, besides, you're like to get bowled over ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... sing my song about it, if I sound a note once or twice you have never heard, oh, thank Heaven, and turn away! With us, I trust, it will be but a minor chord. So every stroller there recognized the world he lives in, and the child, the mother, the cabby, gambler, pickpocket, doctor, parson, each carries off his or her own bundle ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... a rebellion against what I say, if you find everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can't possibly mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way. But one ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... understood the mystery of the handkerchiefs, the watches, the purses and the curious game he had learned at Fagin's. He knew then that the Artful Dodger was a pickpocket. He was so frightened that for a minute he lost his wits and ran off as ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... "wrongs." But has she not got him? What more can she want except his purse? And, that too, she is now taking. In the indulgence of an agreeable self-conceit which supplies for him the want of imagination he sees Ireland to-day as a species of "sturdy beggar," half mendicant, half pickpocket—making off with the proceeds of his hard day's work. The past slips from him as a dream. Has he not for years now, well, for thirty years certainly, a generation, a life time, done all in his power to meet the demands of this incessant country that more in sorrow than in anger he will ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... surrendered the posts on the Great Lakes, and the debts due to British subjects were paid. Many people were very angry with Jay and with Washington for making this treaty. Stuffed figures of Jay were hanged, and Washington was attacked in the papers as if he had been "a common pickpocket"—to ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... evidently very quick in her motions," suggested Jack, "and from what we know of the man she was with, she may have been just such a character herself, and have learned deftness of fingers from him. He was evidently a pickpocket, and perhaps she had practiced the trade herself. That is the only ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... hesitated, and there was an extraordinary play of emotion in his features; he looked ferociously at the pickpocket, and, more than once, somewhat suspiciously at myself; at last his countenance cleared, and, with a good grace, he said, "Well, you have done me a great service, and you have my consent to let him go; but the rascal shall not escape with impunity," he exclaimed ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... FORK. A pickpocket. Let us fork him; let us pick his pocket.—'The newest and most dexterous way, which is, to thrust the fingers strait, stiff, open, and very quick, into the pocket, and so closing them, hook what can be held between them.' N.B. This was taken from a book written many years ago: doubtless ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the worst places on this side of the river," the sergeant added, "The landlord's a returned convict. Sly as he is we shall have him again yet, for receiving stolen goods. There's every sort of thief among his lodgers, from a pickpocket to a housebreaker. It's my duty to continue the inquiry, sir; but a gentleman like you will be better, I should say, out of such ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... "Don't you know Artful Dick Cronk?" he demanded. "Why, Jacky, he's the slickest dip—that's short for pickpocket—in the United States. He's the king of all the glue- fingers, that boy is. My eye, 'ow he can do wot he does, I can't for the life of me see." He then went into a long dissertation on the astonishing ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Knowing how great was your wish that we should be friendly, I spoke courteously to him, but he looked at me as if I were a dog. He might as well have struck me. I saw that my friends were greatly surprised, but of course I could not explain there, and yet it's not pleasant to be treated like a pickpocket, with no redress. I defy him," continued Hunting, assuming the tone and manner of one greatly wronged, "to prove anything worse against me than that I compelled him and his partners to pay money to which I had a legal right, and which I could have ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... much pickpocket, too much dirt. Bottom always drop out of bucket shop at last. I understand, end in police court and severe magistrate, or perhaps even ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... rid myself of her some way. But I didn't find out what she was until this evening, when I returned Keok's music machine to their cabin. I've been trying to make up my mind what to do ever since. If she was only making her get-away from the States, a pickpocket, a coiner, somebody's bunco pigeon chased by the police—almost anything—we could forgive her. Even if she'd shot up somebody—" He made a gesture of despair. "But she didn't. She's worse ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... too prone to prey upon his fellows, though hardly in the brutal manner of his ancestors. He preys upon inferior intelligence, upon weakness of character, upon the greed and upon the gambling instinct of mankind. In the grandest scale he is called a financier; in the meanest, a pickpocket. This predatory spirit is at once so ancient and so general, that the reader, who is, of course, wholly innocent of such reprehensible tendencies, must nevertheless make an effort to understand the delights of robbery considered as a fine art. Some cynics there are who ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... admit that the class represented by Eschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in place in Mr Redford's office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further, it is not true that the Censorship, though it certainly suppresses Ibsen and Tolstoy, and would suppress Shakespear but for the absurd rule that a play once licensed is ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Thanks, thanks—not of words, but of actions. Worship is a life, not a ceremony. He who would honour the Supreme, let him cheerfully succumb to the destiny which the Supreme has allotted, and, like the shell or the flower—('Or the pickpocket,' added Mackaye, almost audibly)—become the happy puppet of the universal impulse. He who would honour Christ, let him become a Christ himself! Theodore of Mopsuestia—born, alas! before his time—a prophet for whom as yet no audience stood ready in the amphitheatre of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... said to my father: "It is in our very blood. It may be only a pin, but I cannot help taking it, although I am quite ready to give it back to its owner." The pickpocket Bor... confessed that at the age of twelve he had begun to steal in the streets and at school, to the extent of taking things from under his schoolfellows' pillows, and that it was impossible for ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... refuse of the players— Stale topics against Magistrates and Mayors— City and Country both thy worth attest. Bid him leave off his shallow Eton wit, More fit to sooth the superficial ear Of drunken PITT, and that pickpocket Peer, When at their sottish orgies they did sit, Hatching mad counsels from inflated vein, Till England, and the nations, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... does. I know some like the wide-set, stary kind that go with an open-faced smile and a loud haw-haw; but for me the quiet chuckle and the twinklin' eye! Still, he hadn't proved yet that he wa'n't a pickpocket or a wife beater; so I just nods non-committal over my shoulder and resumes my usual ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... feels them all safely tucked away in her feathers. In the morning she is walking about disconsolately, attended by only two or three of all that pretty brood. What has happened? Where are they gone? That pickpocket, Sir Mephitis, could solve the mystery. Quietly has he approached, under cover of darkness, and, one by one, relieved her of her precious charge. Look closely, and you will see their little yellow legs and beaks, or part ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and that we were resolved to stick to our Prize unless we got Ransom, which they presently agreed to. At eight o'clock the next morning we stood into the Port, close to the Town, and spied a Boat coming off, which proved to be the Deputy Governor, a Spanish Don with as many names as an English pickpocket has Aliases, and one Mr. Harbottle, that was English Vice-Consul. They brought us Wine, Figs, Grapes, Hogs, and other Necessaries, as Ransom in Kind for the Bark; and accordingly we restored her, as also the Prisoners, with as ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... how, under such a home government, I ever became a decent fellow. I do not know why I am not now a pirate, a freebooter, a pickpocket, or a nuisance to myself and the world in some other capacity. I have come to believe since that my inherited good qualities saved me under such an utter neglect of all home influences. It is a marvel to me that I was not ruined before I was twenty-one; ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... in all that he saw, with his eyes greedily fixed on the stall, Lubin did not notice a lean, small figure, which, softly as a serpent on the grass, had stolen up to his side. This was no other than Procrastination, a pickpocket well known to the police, who had often been caught in the very act of robbing her Majesty's subjects of Time, had been tried and sent to prison, but on getting out had always returned to his bad occupation again. The poet Young ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... stuck together like hot pitch and oakum. One day we were sittin' out in the front yard of his house—it's mine, now—watchin' a hoptoad catch flies. You've seen a toad catch flies, haven't you, Mr. Fosdick? Mr. Toad sits there, lookin' half asleep and as pious and demure as a pickpocket at camp-meetin', until a fly comes along and gets too near. Then, Zip! out shoots about six inches of toad tongue and that fly's been asked in to dinner. Well, granddad and I sat lookin' at our particular toad when along came a bumble-bee and lighted on a honeysuckle blossom right in front of the ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... was giving the penny to the keeper, the strange man edged among the lookers-on, apparently watching the bear's antics, till he was just behind the pickpocket's accomplice. Watching his time, he seized the boy from ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... this one, but then I'll say I've changed my mind and have decided that I ain't going to marry. Takes me really for a man, she does. Must be a fool, she must. And she ain't asked for money, ain't that funny? If she writes back she'll abuse me like a pickpocket, anyway. Won't he be mad ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... tone. The most important of his secular undertaking was Guillim's far-famed 'Display of Heraldrie,' a folio issued in 1610. In 1612 Hall printed an account of the conviction and execution of a noted pickpocket, John Selman, who had been arrested while professionally engaged in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall. On the title-page Hall gave his own name by his initials only. The book was described in bold type as 'printed by W. H.' and as on sale at the shop of Thomas ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... of the combat, three men, mounted on wild-looking horses, came dashing down the road in the direction of the meadow, in the midst of which they presently showed themselves, their horses clearing the deep ditches with wonderful alacrity. 'That's Gypsy Will and his gang,' lisped a Hebrew pickpocket; 'we shall have another fight.' The word Gypsy was always sufficient to excite my curiosity, and I looked attentively at ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... me like a pickpocket, and I should return it, and then there would be a scolding match. I always have kept out of her way, and I think I had better ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... over the side. He caught sight of us as we pulled by, and seemed to be watching us narrowly. I felt almost sure that he suspected something was wrong; but probably he had got a habit of scrutinising everything which approached him, as a London pickpocket does when he knows that the police are aware of his course of life. As we dropped past the brig's quarter, I got a better view of his countenance, and I felt sure that I had seen it before. It was that of a man I supposed to have been hidden long ago, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... Physiognomy fizionomio. Physiology fiziologio. Piano fortepiano. Piaster piastro. Pick (choose) elekti. Pick (implement) pikfosilo. Pickaxe pikfosilo. Picket (military) pikedo. Pickle (to salt) pekli. Pickle (liquid) peklakvo. Pickpocket fripono. Picnic kampfesteno. Picquet (cards) pikedo. Pictorial ilustrita. Picture pentrajxo. Picturesque pentrinda. Pie pastecxo. Piebald multkolora. Piece (to patch) fliki. Piece ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... she retorted. "I worked in a beauty parlor for a little as a hairdresser and manicure. I'm out for the money, Hiram. I'm not a pickpocket yet, but that's because I don't know how to be one. But if you've got any loose change in your pockets watch out. I'm out for the coin. But here comes Al. He brought me down. He's going to ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... credit statements which, to put the case gently, are not exactly probable, and on the acceptance or rejection of which his whole view of life may depend, without asking for as much "legal" proof as would send an alleged pickpocket to goal, or as would suffice to prove the validity ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... his incarceration, terrified by his murderous experience of the last night at the cafe, red-eyed and restless, the dive-keeper was pacing up and down his cell. A pickpocket whom he knew and who, through his own political pull was serving a term as a trusty, brought the information to him scrawled on a bit of cigarette paper which, with a little warning whistle, he dropped through the bars of the ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... mountain sides came falling around them. Francesco, the driver, on foot, urged the tired horses onward with blows and the most powerful language he could bring to bear; he accused the off-horse of being a pickpocket and an arciprete, and a robber of a small family, of which Francesco assured him he knew he was the father. Then the mare Filomena came in for her share of vilifications, being called a 'giovinastra (naughty girl), a vecchierellaccia (vile old hag), a—' Here the rain, pebbles, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was some talkin' goin' on, just the same. The minister, he hinted that he had some doubts about them dissipated gunners; and the gunners cal'lated they never see a parson yet wouldn't bear watchin'. As for me, I felt like a pickpocket, and, judgin' from Jonadab's ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... over this, ye Havana cigarette smokers! and when next you indulge in a whiff from your favourite luxury, remember that a pickpocket has had his hand on ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... passing his hand up and down my back; then came a question about caning at school, whether certain parts of me were not sore, leading to an investigating touch. I put his hand aside shyly, but did not resent the action. Presently he was for exploring my trousers pockets and I began to think him a pickpocket; repulsed in that direction, he returned, to rubbing my back. The sensation was pleasant. I now took him for a pimp who wished to take me to a prostitute, and as at that time I had begun to realize that such pleasures were not to my taste I was glad to find myself at my destination, and said good-bye ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... most of the talking when we were all gathered together. Yank and I did the listening and Talbot the interpellating. Johnny swarmed all over himself like a pickpocket, and showed us everything he had in the way of history, manners, training, family, pride, naivete, expectations and hopes. He prided himself on being a calm, phlegmatic individual, unemotional and ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... you not only don't care, But you do not believe me" (here the nose went still higher). "I suppose, if you dared, you would call me a liar. Our engagement is ended, sir—yes, on the spot; You're a brute, and a monster, and—I don't know what." I mildly suggested the words Hottentot, Pickpocket, and cannibal, Tartar, and thief, As gentle expletives which might give relief; But this only proved as a spark to the powder, And the storm I had raised came faster and louder; It blew and it rained, thundered, lightened and hailed Interjections, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... explained how a pickpocket had undertaken to relieve her of her wallet, and would have succeeded but ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Hungerford-Stairs, the place destined for our landing; where we were entertained with a sight very common, it seems, in this country: this was the ducking of a pickpocket. When we were first told this, we imagined it might be the execution of some legal sentence: but we were informed, that his executioners had ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... review our experience with the usurer. As an outcast he offers his support to other outcasts, and is in turn supported by them. The pawnbroker and the pickpocket are closely allied: without the pawnshop, pocketpicking would offer but a precarious living; without the picking of pockets, many pawnshops would find it impossible to meet expenses. The salary loan shark often works hand in glove with the professional ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... "There is a coarse, rude, uncivil way of doing business, so general as to attract attention. If you do not take a hack at the impertinent solicitation of the driver, he will unquestionably curse you." "The telegraph operator grabs your message and eyes you as if you were a pickpocket." Now, Mr. PUNCHINELLO does not offer himself as an apologist for the abusive and obstreperous hackman, but he wishes to say that in the course of his active and eventful career he has had various conferences with those servants ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... most energetic sons, who went to the rich cotton country, wavered in her loyalty to the younger States of the West. John Randolph ridiculed in merciless fashion the "sharp-witted" Westerners, whom he would avoid in the highway as "one would a pickpocket"; and in both the Carolinas there was a fear and a dread of the growing West, whose ideals were too Jeffersonian and whose power waxed greater with the passing years. Yet Calhoun, Hayne, and other able Southerners remained true ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... blind and dead, but she'll write a letter to the Queen! but who is soothed with a drink of water - in another cell, a quiet woman with a child at her breast, for begging - in another, her husband in a smock-frock, with a basket of watercresses - in another, a pickpocket - in another, a meek tremulous old pauper man who has been out for a holiday 'and has took but a little drop, but it has overcome him after so many months in the house' - and that's all as yet. Presently, a sensation at the Station House door. Mr. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... who began using hard words? You came here and made me out a pickpocket, just because I use a few tasty little posters which sell my goods, and all the while you're trying on the sly to take a poor old man's daughter away from him. ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... it was pretty clearly understood that Murphy had been in pursuit of the pickpocket, and Tom ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... command of it obtained young Haggart's discharge. These dates coincide with Borrow's presence in Edinburgh. Haggart's history for the next five or six years was in truth merely that of a wandering pickpocket, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in England, and finally he became a notorious burglar. Incidentally he refers to a girl with whom he was in love. Her name was Mary Hill She belonged to Ecclefechan, which Haggart more than once visited. He must therefore have known Carlyle, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... instant's hesitation he dived through the opening and met the fiend as he was rising to his feet. Together they rolled among the wreckage. While no match for his antagonist in size, the pickpocket was tough and wiry and apparently uninjured. He fought viciously, ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... over the room like a scudding cloud across a meadow, and when the sheriff stood again to set his censorious eye upon someone responsible, the last ripple was on the farther rows. Nobody can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. Nobody can turn with watchful eye upon it and tell in what face the ribald gleam first breaks. It is as impossible as the identification of the first stalk shaken when a breeze ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... news was bruited afar, wherever men read and write and invest money on the planet, and it appealed to every city editor and scandal-monger. Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of "The Scarlet Letter," a pickpocket. Well, what next! ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the likeness with the hard and cruel brightness of the eyes of a bird of prey. "Red is your taste in your old age is it?" she said to the portrait. "Red hair, and a scrofulous complexion, and a padded figure, a ballet-girl's walk, and a pickpocket's light fingers. Miss Gwilt! Miss, with those eyes, and that walk!" She turned her head suddenly on the pillow, and burst into a harsh, jeering laugh. "Miss!" she repeated over and over again, with the venomously ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... go; ordered her to go; he seized her by the shoulder, shook her, and abused her like a pickpocket. She would not stir. He abandoned the effort, sat down, and knitted his brow again in profound and painful thought, working out his plan. Now and again his eyes flashed, once or twice they twinkled. Victoire watched his face with just the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... him? Poor devil! why, you never can remember after you're drunk what you've been doing the night before. Some time it'll be the death of you. You abused him like a pickpocket,—the sergeant of the guard and ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... sir! I'd scorn to take a cent from that old man to use for my benefit! I would not touch his diamonds if they lay here at my feet! But if I can make him suffer anything like as my poor father suffered through him, then I am ready to turn robber—yes, pickpocket, if ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... Tunisian flag among a number of small flags with which she was decorated. De Gery was greatly excited, thinking for a moment that he was pursued and that on going ashore he might have a scuffle with the Italian police like a common pickpocket. But no, the yacht was lying quietly at anchor, her crew were scrubbing the deck and repainting the red mermaid that formed her figurehead as if some personage of importance were expected on board. Paul had no curiosity to ascertain who that personage might be; he simply rode across the marble ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Dexterously as a pickpocket Craig reached into the man's coat, pulled out a packet of papers, and gazed eagerly at one after another. From among them he unfolded one written in French to Madame Marie de Nevers some ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... losing a lot of money, which is mere waste"—here Morris groaned, but asked no questions—"besides," and her voice became earnest, "I will not have him talking to you like that. The fact that one man is the father of another man doesn't give him the right to abuse him like a pickpocket. Also, if you are so good that you put up with it, I have myself to consider—that is, if we are all to live as a ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... called "Master Bates," one of Fagin's "pupils," training to be a pickpocket. He is always laughing uproariously, and is almost equal in artifice and adroitness to "The Artful Dodger" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... because physiognomy is false, but the thief's face true. Of a promiscuous crowd, taken almost anywhere, the pickpocket in it is the smartest man present, in all probability. According to Ecclesiasticus, it is "the heart of man that changeth his countenance"; and it does seem that it is to his education, and not to his heart, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... from your door you jostle, it may be, the murderer and highwayman on the street; you enter a car, and the driver's breath is perhaps reeking from his last night's debauch; you sit, possibly, between the pickpocket on one side and the patient yet uncured from some epidemic on the other. You pass to your business through a street full of roughs, and in your own store are men wishing you to die that they may take your place, seeking every opportunity to overreach you; and then wonder if I smile when ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... vocation—a vocation compared with which the life of a beggar, of a pickpocket, of a pimp, is honorable—did Barere now descend. It was his constant practice, as often as he enrolled himself in a new party, to pay his footing with the heads of old friends. He was at first a Royalist; and he made atonement by watering the tree of liberty with the blood of Louis. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... omnibus or rail-car. He converses fluently, and is evidently a man of intelligence and reading. He attracts your attention by his "fair pretences." Arriving at your journey's end, you miss your watch and your pocket-book. Your fellow passenger proves to be the thief. Everybody calls him a "pickpocket," and not withstanding his "fair pretences," not a person in the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... said Bruce. "You are a liar, a forger, a thief, a dirty pickpocket, a coward, a seller of secrets to Foreign Powers," and, ere the astounded soldier could speak, John Bruce sprang at him and tried to knock him out. "Take that you greasy cad—and fight me if you dare," he shouted as ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... purse-proud prelate and against the people; who is for the boodle politician and against the happiness of the many; who is for the white exploiter and against the simple colored man; who is for the rich profiteer and against the petty burglar and pickpocket. ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... followed his host into the jollified apartment. He did not overlook the swift glide of Shine's hand into each of his overcoat pockets in the brief interval. Here was a skilful "dip"—Shirley, however, had taken care that the pickpocket would find nothing to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... editor has been in here raising the mischief, and tearing his hair and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pickpocket. He says that every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an hour I get imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that comes along. And he says that that distressing item of Mr. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... an author should also fit the public-speaker: "His eye is like a suction pump, absorbing everything; like a pickpocket's hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He is constantly collecting material, gathering-up glances, gestures, intentions, everything that goes on in his presence—the slightest look, the least act, the merest trifle." De Maupassant ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the cross rails on which he had been lying, hung for an instant by his hands, and then dropped into the centre of the fighting mob on the floor. He was out of it in an instant with the agility of a pickpocket, was across the room and at Hade's throat like a dog. The murderer, for the moment, was the calmer man ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... intelligence without conduct, cleverness without goodness, are powers in their way, but they may be powers only for mischief. We may be instructed or amused by them; but it is sometimes as difficult to admire them as it would be to admire the dexterity of a pickpocket or the horsemanship ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... attitude, "every infernal thing that can happen to a man happened to me yesterday. It wasn't enough that you robbed me and tried to murder me—yes, you did, sir!—but when I was in the city I was robbed in the subway by a pickpocket. A thief took my bill-book containing invaluable data I had just received from my agent in China giving me a clue to porcelains, sir, such as you never dreamed of! Some more of your work—Don't you contradict me! ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... the hard pan of humiliation. I went my way, idly strolling about, mingling affably with all orders, for my watch was at home. Vacuus viator cantabit. As I stood by a fence, I heard a gentlemanly-looking young man, who was evidently a superior pickpocket, or "a regular fly gonoff," say ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... not return to New Zealand, and nothing more was heard of him. On December 5th, 1828, "The Australian," which 'was published in Sydney, stated that a man named Rutherford, who had been tattooed by the Maoris, and naturalized by them, was then in London, practising the trade of a pickpocket, in the character of a New Zealand chief, but that was before he supplied his story for ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... would appear to be autobiographical up to the period of Borrow's coming to London. After this he begins to indulge somewhat in the dramatic. The meeting with the pickpocket as a thimble-rigger at Greenwich might pass muster were it not for the rencontre with the apple-woman's son near Salisbury. The Dingle episode may be accepted, for Mr John Sampson has verified even the famous thunder-storm by means of the local ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Autolycus. Here again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into one bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sung by "a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense" could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned men were unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... would do credit to a President of the Speculative Society. In certain positions, eloquence is not only thrown away, but is felt to be rank impertinence. No need of rhetorical artifice to persuade the mob to the pumping of a pickpocket, or, in case of a general row, to the assault of an intoxicated policeman. Such things come quite naturally to their hands without exhortation, and it is dangerous to interfere with instinct. The Homeric heroes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... slipped the paper and the two letters into the vast pocket of his huge frock-coat with a dexterity and a rapidity which would have excited the envy of an accomplished pickpocket. It was high time; for the women who were bending over the bed of the young girl were exhibiting signs of intense excitement. One of them said she was sure the body had trembled under her hand, and the others insisted ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... tons of coin to be melted down by its intensity. Henceforth, they said, universal benevolence, uncoined and exhaustless, was to be the golden currency of the world. At this intelligence the bankers and speculators in the stocks grew pale, and a pickpocket, who had reaped a rich harvest among the crowd, fell down in a deadly fainting fit. A few men of business burned their day-books and ledgers, the notes and obligations of their creditors, and all other evidences of debts due to themselves; while perhaps a somewhat larger number satisfied their ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... [U.S.], jackleg [U.S.], kidnaper, rustler, cattle rustler, sandbagger, sea king, skin [Slang], sneak thief, spieler^, strong-arm man [U.S.]. highwayman, Dick Turpin, Claude Duval, Macheath, footpad, sturdy beggar. cut purse, pick purse; pickpocket, light-fingered gentry; sharper; card sharper, skittle sharper; thimblerigger; rook [Slang], Greek, blackleg, leg, welsher [Slang]; defaulter; Autolycus^, Jeremy Diddler^, Robert Macaire, artful dodger, trickster; swell mob [Slang], chevalier d'industrie [Fr.]; shoplifter. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was raised, Miss Harding," he went on. "Not that that's any excuse for the thing I did; but it does make it seem a wonder that I ever could have made a start even at being decent. I never was well acquainted with any human being that wasn't a thief, or a pickpocket, or a murderer—and they were all beasts, each in his own particular way, only they weren't as decent ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The little grey-faced pickpocket—caught at his trade at the Dallas Fair, told me how easy it was to add an under-bit to an over-bit to the ears of the two hogs stolen, "Sure that sneakin' niggah pahson did it," he averred—but all the while he likewise averred that he hadn't picked the pocket of the man from ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... two black-legs, but they would hear of nothing less than two guineas a head, which wouldn't do, you know. Here comes another of your passengers—a great foreign nobleman, they say—Baron something—though he looks as much like a foreign pickpocket as anything else." ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... handkerchief and a cigar-case, which he had stowed away in an inner pocket, and Mr. Christy had been relieved of one of his mamei seeds by some "lepero" who probably took it for a snuff-box. His feelings must have been like those of the English pickpocket in Paris, when he robbed the Frenchman of the article he had pocketed with so much care, and found it was a lump of sugar. And so relieved of further care for our worldly goods, we went through with the work of seeing monuments, till we were tired and disgusted ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... and finely dressed, ma'am," was the woman's careful answer, "but I don't make friends with strange nurses and I don't think much of hers. She's a young dawdler who sits novel reading and if Master Donal were a young pickpocket with the measles, the child would be playing with him just the same as far as I can see. The young woman sits under a tree and reads and the pretty little thing may do what she likes. I keep my eye on them, however, and they're in no mischief. Master Donal ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... any man or woman to assert that such reportorial work is done from necessity. The blackmailer and the pickpocket have as much right to the plea, as the newspaper masked-assassin, with the concealed ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of royalty have no high opinion of souls or principles. Think of these taxes on exports needed by neighbors. The minds that invented them had the genius of a pickpocket." ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... in and out like a madman; and sits up all night, writing his nonsense. And she'll go down twice and three times a night in the cold, poor dear, to see if he's fallen asleep; and gets abused like a pickpocket for her pains (which was an exaggeration); and lies in bed all the morning, looking at the flies, and calls after her if his shoes want tying, or his finger aches; as helpless as the babe unborn; and will never do nothing useful himself, not even to hang a picture or move a chair, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... him was a knot of lads drinking, swearing, and playing at dice as eagerly and as skilfully as any of the older hands. Near to these hopeful youths sat a fence, or receiver, bargaining with a clouter, or pickpocket, for a suit,—or, to speak in more intelligible language, a watch and seals, two cloaks, commonly called watch-cases, and a wedge-lobb, otherwise known as a silver snuff-box. Next to the receiver was a gang of housebreakers, laughing over their exploits, and planning fresh depredations; and ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... "A dip—pickpocket—and his girl, or gun-moll, as they call them," translated Kennedy. "One of their number has evidently been picked up by a detective and he looks to them for a ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... Greenfield angrily. "Ain't you ever had any imagination? Did I want to shoot you down like a common ordinary pickpocket after taking you three times around the world? That was no ending! God, what a chase ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... the other. Then they gets up and shakes theirselves till the bus jerks them back again, and there they are, a more 'opeless 'eap than ever. If I 'ad my way I'd make every bus carry a female searcher as could over'aul 'em one at a time, and take the money from 'em. Talk about the poor pickpocket. What I say is, that a man as finds his way into a woman's pocket—well, ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... dulness of a college and the labour of learned professions were so distasteful to me, he had no desire to dictate to my choice, but that as he did not wish one who was, however remotely, of his blood, and bore the name of Haughton, to turn shoeblack or pickpocket—Vance—Vance!" ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an additional safeguard," he had assured her. "It corresponds to the method of a notorious Paris assassin who was very generally regarded by the police as a cunning pickpocket. Kazmah's business of 'dreamreading' does not actually come within the Act. He is clever enough for that. Remember, he does not profess to tell fortunes. It also enables ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... the story—what is? Is a reasonable being to be seriously asked to credit statements, which, to put the case gently, are not exactly probable, and on the acceptance or rejection of which his whole view of life may depend, without asking for as much "legal" proof as would send an alleged pickpocket to gaol, or as would suffice to prove the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... literature, no more. It has come to the end. Well, and what then? Everything comes to an end. When first I entered on this stage I had a feeling as if I had lost something; as if I had been favoured by the caresses of a pickpocket. Then I set to and felt myself about, to see if I could bear myself after this; if I could endure myself as I was now. Oh well, yes, why not? Not the same as before, of course, but it all passed off so noiselessly, ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... cause a Limburger cheese factory to remain undiscovered during a hot summer. The game we're after is right here in New York and Brooklyn and the Harlem reading-rooms. They're the people that the street-car fenders and the Answers to Correspondents columns and the pickpocket notices are made for. We want our ads. in the biggest city dailies, top of column, next to editorials on radium and pictures of ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... To dream of a pickpocket, foretells some enemy will succeed in harassing and causing you loss. For a young woman to have her pocket picked, denotes she will be the object of some person's envy and spite, and may lose the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... when he, with the coffee and cigarettes, took the knife in his hand, he placed a veil over the point. He began, laughingly, with the picture of a pickpocket he had helped to catch in London. London was greatly inhabited by pickpockets, according to Antonio's declaration. Yet, he continued, it was nothing in comparison to Paris. Paris was the rendezvous, the world's home, for the criminals, adventurers, and rascals if ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... spoils. It should be something handsome, for I have the vanity to believe that no one would come and disturb a fellow of my calibre for any insignificant piece of business. But after all I am weary of playing the thief and pickpocket—it is beneath me—and I mean to devote all my energies in future to the noble art of assassination; it is more worthy of my undisputed prowess. I would rather be a grand, man-slaying lion than any meaner beast of prey. If this is a question ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... done worse than this. You have stopped, as far as it was in your power, the current of human progress. You have suppressed man's noblest. right—the right of expressing his opinions to the world; you are no better than the pickpocket who appropriates your handkerchief. You have taken our freedom of thought by the throat, and said, "It is in my way, I will strangle it." Wherefore have you acted thus? To shut the mouths of those who contradict you, is to admit that you are not so very sure of being in the right. ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... being asked, how he got through all his business as a chancellor, answered—"Just as a pickpocket gets through a horse-pond. He must get through." Dunning, when a similar question was put to him, answered in much the same spirit, though in a more professional style. "I divide my business into three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... most pompous, the silliest and most vapid, the greatest criminal, tyrant, booby, Bluebeard, Catherine Hayes, George Barnwell, among us, we need never despair. I have read of the passion of a transported pickpocket for a female convict (each of them being advanced in age, repulsive in person, ignorant, quarrelsome, and given to drink), that was as magnificent as the loves of Cleopatra and Antony, or Lancelot ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... establishment of the penal colony. It was opened by permission of the governor: all the actors were convicts who won the privilege by good behavior, and the price of admission was one shilling, payable in silver, flour, meat or wine. The prologue, written by a cidevant pickpocket of London, illustrates the character of the times in those early days of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... Wit was coming down the Haymarket, just as the masquerade was breaking up, the noise of a pickpocket was announced, upon which Buffoonery fell upon Wit, and mangled him most piteously. Invention stood Wit's friend, and help-ed him to make his escape to those Sciences. Now it happened that night, Lady ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... had just gone out. As to M. Saint Pavin, I found him at the office of his paper, 'The Financial Pilot.' He is a coarse and vulgar personage, and received me like a pickpocket. I had even ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... Ully Gue. And the fifty would soon be five hundred if any notice were taken of them. They call mankind to witness that science will not defend itself, though publicly attacked in terms which might sting a pickpocket into standing up for his character: science, in return, allows mankind to witness or not, at pleasure, that it does not defend itself, and yet receives no injury from centuries of assault. Demonstrative reason never raises the cry of Church in Danger! and it cannot have any Dictionary ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... ungainly form and coarse flower of the prickly pear. Passing the rifle pits and picket station, we soon turn off from the Shell road, and pass through what was formerly a handsome forest of pines, but which now has been cleared by the soldier's axe, and rejoices in the title of 'pickpocket tract.' Few of the plantations lie on the main road, and many of them, like the one we are now seeking, are approached only by going over several cross roads and by lanes. Our last turn takes us into a handsome ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pirate is a successful trader; success must clearly imply obedience to the rules of the game. Taking all that one can grab without punishment is a reversion to barbarism; the unscrupulous magnate is morally no better than a pickpocket. And these men are, in general, responsive to public opinion; it has effected rapid improvement in some points in the past few years. Just so soon as the community conscience is aroused to the point of a general ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... was entirely logical for The Eel to steal the wallet—he is a pickpocket. Second, that the theft of the wallet is not of trivial importance to Goldie's destiny and to his—they are "broke" and they must get away; the money solves all their problems. And third, note that ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... to eat, and I was so angry with the indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject. I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, I ignored the lover's ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... then sat down beside the cot. Slowly and carefully, like some pickpocket, she inserted her fingers under the pillow. Amid a tenseness that affected even the actors working with her, Alice took out the papers, inch by inch, and began ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... imagining himself to be swimming the Hellespont, he threw wide his arms as though breasting the waves. Unfortunately, his hand struck the pocket of a passer-by and knocked out a purse. The outer deed was that of a pickpocket and could have sent the youth to jail. The inner motive was that of an imaginative youth deeply impressed by the story he was translating from the Greek, and that inner motive made the owner of ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Stonehenge? Do you think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of filigree work? or that Michael Angelo would have spent his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out? Or, of modern handicraftsmen, do you think a burglar, or a brute, or a pickpocket could have carved it? Could Bill Sykes have done it? or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and tool? You will find in the end, that no man could have done it but exactly the man who did it; and by looking close at it, you may, if you know your letters, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... said Snorky, who from time to time had been feeling with his fingers to assure himself that no pickpocket had ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... a sort of safety-valve to let off all the bad feelings and malignant passions floating through the country, without any dread of the horsewhip. Hence it is the commonest thing in the world to hear one editor abusing, like a pickpocket, an opposition brother; calling him a reptile—a crawling thing—a calumniator—a hired vendor of lies; and his paper a smut-machine—a vile engine of corruption, as base and degraded as the proprietor, &c. Of this description was the paper I now held in my hand, which ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... moment he came aboard—d'ye remember—that night in Bombay? Been bullying all that softy crowd—cheeked the old man—we had to go fooling all over a half-drowned ship to save him. Dam' nigh a mutiny all for him—and now the mate abused me like a pickpocket for forgetting to dab a lump of grease on them planks. So I did, but you ought to have known better, too, than to leave a nail sticking ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... assumed as non-moral or purely immoral. There is no person, however morally degraded he may be, but reveals some good nature in his whole course of life. It is our daily experience that we find a faithful friend in the person even of a pickpocket, a loving father even in a burglar, and a kind neighbour even in a murderer. Faith, sympathy, friendship, love, loyalty, and generosity dwell not merely in palaces and churches, but also in brothels and gaols. On the other hand, abhorrent vices and bloody crimes often ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... should have her pocket picked! A pickpocket, she reflected, might, in the hastiness which must always characterise his operations, mistake the little leather case for a purse, and then—how should she ever get the precious miniature back again? "Not that he would want to keep it," she said to herself, ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... no churches, no newspapers or books, a place in which no one could read; a place in which every man, woman and child regarded the Government of the country, in which they had not the least share, as their natural enemy and oppressor. Among them lurked the housebreaker, the highway robber, and the pickpocket. Along the riverside, where many thousands of working men lived—at St. Katherine's, Wapping, Shadwell, and Ratcliff—all the people together, high and low, were in league with the men who loaded and unloaded the ships in the river and robbed them all day long. What ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... for ignorance where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker. There are evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or so simple-minded, that they would be prepared to exact that no pickpocket should be prosecuted if he was able to declare on oath that he had no "knowledge" that the purse he had taken belonged to the person ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... named 'rent' given to landlords for permission to live upon and use God's free gift to man is as much the fruit of robbery, the spoil of plunder, as is the result of a burglar's night's marauding, a common pickpocket's day's 'takings.'"[312] Capital is in the same position as land, for ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... swarming with their children. The men are thieves, begging-letter writers, pickpockets, bookmakers' touts, totters (rag and bone men), and trouncers (men paid by costermongers to shout their wares), and bullies. The women add to their common degradation—which may be imagined—the art of the pickpocket, the beggar, the ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... deny. What I did was done in the interests of the Society. My reward for my long services is that I am haled here like a pickpocket. It is the second time; it will be the last. I have done, now, with the labor of my life. You can reap the fruits of it. Do with ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... a Christian European. Felix received the strange announcement without the faintest shock of surprise or disgust. He would gladly have shaken hands then and there with M. Jules Peyron, indeed, had he introduced himself in even less equivocal language as a forger, a pickpocket, or ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... said, "so you may think; but, being a bit of a criminologist, I have arranged that as a little trap. It is my belief that the pickpocket, foiled in one particular, never attempts to rob his victim in any other way. Now this chain cost me precisely ninepence. It is weighted at each end with a piece of lead, which gives an appearance of genuineness to the watch-pocket. I am heavily armed, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... and a staunch royalist; she once took two hundred gold jacobuses from the Parliamentary General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath. She is the chief character in Middleton's play of the "Roaring Girl"; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse, pickpocket, highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves' fence, she died in peace at the age of seventy. To return to the inns, Fyner Morrison, a traveler in 1617, sustains all that Harrison says of the inns as the best and cheapest in the world, where the guest shall have his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... soon began to be familiar with his presence, and he was generally ushered into them by its janitors much as a pickpocket might be shown into a police-office; the principal difference being that the object of the latter class of public business is to keep the pickpocket, while the Circumlocution object was to get rid of Clennam. However, he was resolved to stick to the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... pickpockets. No smoking.' They quote her in the lifts on the Tube. But then I'm not a pickpocket, and you are smoking. Besides, your picture knows mine very well. They've seen quite a lot ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... held her breath while she looked him over. Was he a pickpocket? He didn't appear like one, but you can never be sure of the people you meet on the train. Grandma remembered with a sigh of thankfulness that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... necessary to study physiognomy since leaving England, and was horrified by the appearance of my next neighbour. His forehead was low, his deep-set and restless eyes significant of cunning, and I at once set him down as a swindler or a pickpocket. My conviction of the truth of my inference was so strong that I removed my purse—in which, however, acting by advice, I never carried more than five dollars—from my pocket, leaving in it only my handkerchief and the checks for my baggage, knowing that I could not possibly keep awake ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... was crushed up close to Sister Mary. She sat with her back partly to him, and discoursed with eagerness to her companion. The sailor knew many tricks of sleight-of-hand—he was, in short, a kind of Jack-of-all-trades, and the laudable profession of the professional pickpocket was by no means beneath his notice. He managed to help himself to Sister Mary's purse without her being at all aware of the fact. Her hands were clasped in her muff, which, though unprofessional, the cold night necessitated her wearing. She paid her tram ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male—as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and the subway's foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came out with new dances. And the railroads came out ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... as I can judge of London,' said Miss Browning, sententiously continuing her tirade against the place, 'it's no better than a pickpocket and a robber dressed up in the spoils of honest folk. I should like to know where my Lord Hollingford was bred, and Mr. Roger Hamley. Your good husband lent me that report of the meeting, Mrs Gibson, where so much was said about them both, and he was as proud of their praises as if ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... never saw a more good-humored crowd. If I encountered one policeman that night that was all I did see; and the police reports next morning, in a city of a million inhabitants let loose in the streets on a public holiday, reported the arrest of five drunk men and one pickpocket! ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... called the 'flash', or 'kiddy' language. In some of our early courts of justice an interpreter was frequently necessary to translate the deposition of the witness and the defence of the prisoner. This language has many dialects. The sly dexterity of the pickpocket, the brutal ferocity of the footpad, the more elevated career of the highwayman and the deadly purpose of the midnight ruffian is each strictly appropriate in the terms which distinguish and characterize it. I have ever been of ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... argument: "I agree with my brother J——, for the reasons given by my brother M——." A prisoner once was given a practical specimen of his lordship's wit, and must have been rather distressed by it. He was passing sentence upon a pickpocket, and ordering a punishment common at that time. "You will be whipped from North Gate to South Gate," said the judge. "Bad luck to you, you old blackguard," said the prisoner. "—And back again," said the Chief Baron, as ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... language as long as he abstained from personalities. "It was extremely personal,—all that you said about the purchase of livings," said Morton. "How was I to know that?" rejoined the Senator. "When in private society I inveigh against pickpockets I cannot imagine, sir, that there should be a pickpocket in the company." As the Senator said this he was grieving in his heart at the trouble he had occasioned, and was almost repenting the duties he had imposed on himself; but, yet, his voice was bellicose and antagonistic. The conversation ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... taking yourself off and of living like a decent creature. I have done everything you could expect, and more. But I will not be mixed up with you and the gang you choose to make your friends; and I will not lift a finger to save your friend the pickpocket from the punishment ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
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