"Pilfering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the wife of poaching Giles. There seemed to be a conspiracy in Giles' whole family to maintain themselves by tricks and pilfering. Regular labor and honest industry did not suit their idle habits. They had a sort of genius at finding out every unlawful means to support a vagabond life. Rachel travelled the country with a basket on her arm. She pretended to ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... being stolen from time to time, the soldiers maintained their watch over the garden, well knowing that their vigilance would be rewarded by a full share of the good things, while they would be the losers if the pilfering were ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... what when the weeds spring up together with the corn and choke it? or when they rob and ruthlessly devour the corn's proper sustenance, like unserviceable drones [17] that rob the working bees of honey, pilfering the good food which they have made and stored away with ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... daily toil, From choking weeds to rid the soil? Why wake you to the morning's care, Why with new arts correct the year, Why glows the peach with crimson hue, And why the plum's inviting blue; 20 Were they to feast his taste design'd, That vermin of voracious kind? Crush then the slow, the pilfering race; So purge thy garden from disgrace.' 'What arrogance!' the snail replied; 'How insolent is upstart pride! Hadst thou not thus with insult vain, Provoked my patience to complain, I had concealed ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... as unfit to drink. They hunted for springs in the mountains, and in the course of a few centuries so many aqueducts were built that Rome had theoretically a better supply of water than any modern city enjoys. Practically, however, the Romans suffered from a peculiar kind of water pilfering. Instead of 400,000,000 gallons daily which the springs furnished, the city received only 208,000,000 gallons. This immense loss, says a careful paper by the Austrian engineer, E. H. d'Avidor, arose partly through neglect of the necessary repairs in the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... of the establishment, it may be conjectured that but little prudence or economy was displayed by the domestics. Extravagance of every kind ran riot amongst them as wildly as with their master, and they scrupled not at all sorts of petty pilfering, where there were none to censure or restrain. Fox, it is true, had the right, and possessed the influence requisite to do so; but, for some evil design of his own, possibly that his private peccadilloes might escape unnoticed, he seemed tacitly to submit to such a state of things, and in some ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... against slavery was so strong that shortly after the close of the Revolution many persons had voluntarily emancipated their slaves. This had introduced a class of very dangerous people,—the free blacks,—who lived by pilfering, corrupted the slaves, and produced such pernicious consequences that the Legislature was obliged to prohibit their further emancipation by law. The important object now was to remove the free blacks, and provide a place to which the emancipated slaves might go; in which case, the legal obstacles ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... cackling of a hen, he started for the place; but found Kees had been before him, and nothing remained but the broken shell. Having caught him in his pilfering, his master gave him a severe beating; but he was soon at his old habit again, and the gentleman was obliged to train one of his dogs to run for the egg as soon as it was laid, before he ...
— Minnie's Pet Monkey • Madeline Leslie
... as sometimes happens, the butter is hung from the roof, they pile up some of the household furniture. One of the boys then mounts upon it, another climbs on his shoulders, and in this way gets the butter down.[16] As the pilfering increases, the married cowgirls learn that Krishna is the ringleader and contrive one day to catch him in the act. 'You little thief,' they say, 'At last we've caught you. So it's you who took our butter and curds. You won't escape us now.' And taking him by the hand they ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... thing, except due payment of the wages by supply-and-demand. Blank's workers are perpetually getting into mutiny, into broils and coils: every six months, we suppose, Blank has a strike; every one month, every day and every hour, they are fretting and obstructing the shortsighted Blank; pilfering from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting and committing for him. "I would not," says Friend Prudence, "exchange my workers for his with seven ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... company understand that for a consideration payable in cotton prints, tobacco, salt pork, and flour, he himself and his trusted braves would become escort to the train in order to protect its cattle from harm, and its wagons from the pilfering hands of his tribesmen. His offer was accepted, with the condition that he should not receive any of the promised goods until the last wagon was safe beyond his territory. This bargain was faithfully kept, and when we parted from the ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... church for a long time, but after Mr. Bennett's death that hope seemed to die, and those to whom a church home was more than a church, left us; those of that mind that didn't leave voluntarily were lured away by ministers who had a building. The amount of ecclesiastical pilfering that goes on in a small city like New Haven is surprising. Conversion is a lost art or a lost experience, and the average minister whose reputation and salary depend upon the number of people he can corral, usually has two fields of action: one is the Sunday School and the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... which late compassion moved, shall wound Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground. Though thou art tempted by the linkman's call, Yet trust him not along the lonely wall; In the midway he'll quench the flaming brand, And share the booty with the pilfering band. Still keep the public streets where oily rays, Shot from the crystal lamp, ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... about the sugar-estates, regardless of the serious injury which he caused to working buildings; and when he had gathered a sufficient pile, hidden safely away behind his neighbour's house, the new hut rose as if by magic. This continual pilfering, I was assured, was a serious tax on the cultivation of the estates around. But I was told, too, frankly enough, by the very gentleman who complained, that this habit was simply an heirloom from the bad days of slavery, when the pilfering of the slaves ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... others which had somehow gone to pieces when the rancher died or went to the penitentiary under the stigma of a long sentence as a cattle thief. There were many such, for the Sawtooth, powerful and stern against outlawry, tolerated no pilfering from their thousands. ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled: softly) I treated you white. I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station. Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering. There's a medium in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... keeping the family stores under the immediate care of the housekeeper. It is nothing to the discredit of servants that this is said. More people are honest through circumstances than is generally supposed. Many a servant is tempted into habits of pilfering by the free and unquestioned access she has to the family stores. I have before used the case of a man carrying on a business and having employes under him, to illustrate my subject. Suppose a merchant or a bank should allow all their clerks free access to the safe or till, they knowing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... had a vicious propensity, too, of pulling the caps from the heads of small boys and tossing them down areas; while Charley Bates exhibited some very loose notions concerning the rights of property, by pilfering divers apples and onions from the stalls at the kennel sides, and thrusting them into pockets which were so surprisingly capacious, that they seemed to undermine his whole suit of clothes in every direction. These things looked so bad, that Oliver was ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... I've caught you pilfering again. What will Mrs McNab say when she finds all her good fruit disappearing like this? You'll have to bribe me not to carry tales. Better turn me into ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... spread for me in every street, and thousands of waiters ready to fly at my bidding. When my servants have waited upon me I pay them, discharge them, and there's an end; I have no fears of their wronging or pilfering me when my back is turned. Upon the whole, said the old gentleman with a smile of infinite good humor, when I think upon the various risks I have run, and the manner in which I have escaped them; when I recollect all that I have suffered, and consider all that I at present enjoy, I cannot but ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... trophies of the first victory of the Jacobites. The Camerons were reputed to be as active and strong and as well skilled in the use of arms as any of the clans of Scotland, and as little addicted to pilfering as any Highlanders at that time could be; for Lochiel had taken infinite pains to make them honest, and had administered justice among them with no little severity. "He thought," says a writer of the time, "his authority ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... this odd subject in the first edition of his "British Topography," "An Academic" in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1772, insinuated that this charge of literary pilfering was only a jocular one; on which Gough, in his second edition, observed that this was not the case, and that "one might point out enough light-fingered antiquaries in the present age, to render such a charge extremely probable against ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... with the number of rooms. In these the students and tutors stored their liquors, sometimes in no inconsiderable quantities. Frequent entries are met with in the records of the Faculty, in which the students are charged with pilfering wine, brandy, or eatables ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... mules and horses, and loaded them down with food and valuables, then sent them to the nearby mountains and caves to hide until the soldiers were gone. Mr. Angel himself told me later that lots of the folks who came around pilfering after the war, warn't northerners at all, but men from just anywhere, who had fought in the war and came back home to find all they had was gone, and they had to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... not Badman's only fault. He took to pilfering and stealing. He robbed his neighbours' orchards. He picked up money if he found it lying about. Especially, Mr. Wiseman notes that he hated Sundays. 'Reading Scriptures, godly conferences, repeating of sermons ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... are getting old, my good Catherine; we have lived here twenty years, and we have been too honest to provide for our old days by pilfering—and truly, at our age, it would be hard to seek another place, which perhaps we should not find. What I regret is, that Mademoiselle Adrienne should not keep the land; it seems that she wished to sell it, against the will of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... trace the hare i' th' treacherous snow: Thy witty wiles to draw, and get The lark into the trammel net: Thou hast thy cockrood, and thy glade To take the precious pheasant made: Thy lime-twigs, snares, and pit-falls then To catch the pilfering birds, ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... confused intellect, in which Popery was mixed up with Jacobitism? The present writer remembers perfectly well, on reading some extracts from it at the time in a newspaper, on the top of a coach, exclaiming—"Why, the simpleton has been pilfering ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... both which occasions the temptation to steal from us was perhaps stronger than we can well imagine, and the opportunity of doing so by no means wanting), not a single instance occurred, to my knowledge, of their pilfering the most trifling article. It is pleasing to record a fact no less singular in itself than honourable ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... done the same, but the Yankee captain disliked the cut of his jib, swore he was a "Sidney bird," and would have nought to say to him. So Typee divided his advance of wages with the medical spectre—drank with him a parting bottle of wine, surreptitiously purchased from a pilfering member of Pomaree's household—and sailed on a whaling cruise to the coast of Japan. We look forward with confidence and interest to an account of what there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... to tell the dwarf's story, which amounted to this.—In his foolish curiosity, or as he partly confessed, with some thoughts of pilfering, Nectabanus had strayed into the tent of Conrade, which had been deserted by his attendants, some of whom had left the encampment to carry the news of his defeat to his brother, and others were availing themselves of the means which Saladin had supplied ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... middle-class reaction the communal lands were declared (August 24, 1794) the States domains, and, together with the lands confiscated from the nobility, were put up for sale, and pilfered by the bandes noires of the small bourgeoisie. True that a stop to this pilfering was put next year (law of 2 Prairial, An V), and the preceding law was abrogated; but then the village Communities were simply abolished, and cantonal councils were introduced instead. Only seven years later (9 Prairial, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... the way that the town is most thoroughly under martial law, the pilfering still goes on. The wreck is a gold mine for pilferers. A Hungarian woman fished out a trunk down in Cambria City yesterday, and on breaking it open found $7,500 in it. Another woman found a jewel box containing several rings ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... make. He felt that he was capable of sinking to even lower depths for the sake of good living, if there were no other way of enjoying the first and best of everything, of guzzling (vulgar but expressive word) nice little dishes carefully prepared. Pons lived like a bird, pilfering his meal, flying away when he had taken his fill, singing a few notes by way of return; he took a certain pleasure in the thought that he lived at the expense of society, which asked of him—what but the trifling toll of grimaces? Like all confirmed bachelors, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... generally came after spending the night in feasting and revelling, too drowsy to support a conversation, or intent only upon hearing some news, or on begging or purloining whatever might strike their fancy. Their pilfering habits made their visits not a little troublesome to the Brethren, but the latter did not wish to frighten them away; and were content for the present, that they came at all, especially as a few of them discovered a satisfaction in being present at the evening meetings, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... handsomely dressed, so that you take them to be persons of rank; as indeed may sometimes be the case: persons who by extravagance and excesses have reduced themselves to want, and find themselves obliged at last to have recourse to pilfering and thieving. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... at the tent by Mr. Peckover the gunner. Moannah likewise resided there as a guard over his countrymen; but though it appeared to be the wish of all the chiefs that we should remain unmolested it was not possible entirely to prevent them from pilfering. ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... misdemeanours he slunk through life in terror of that strength which never hesitates at violence. In his petty pilfering he died a hundred deaths for every trapped mink or otter he filched; he heard the game protector's tread as he slunk from the bagged trout brook or crawled away, belly dragging, and pockets full ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... application at several different offices for employment, without success. In a few days news came that he had been detected in pilfering goods from the house of his landlord. A warrant was immediately issued for him—he was seized, taken to the police office—convicted, and sentenced to six months' hard labor in the penitentiary. His name being published in the newspapers, in connection with those of other convicts—was immediately ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... charged upon these people, or a portion of them, and truth requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good deal of petty pilfering among them, although they are faithful to trusts. This is the natural growth of the old system, and is quite likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present disturbed and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the rigid virtues. But inferences from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... But harmless riflemen of rags and straw); Familiariz'd to these, they boldly rove, Nor heed such centinels that never move. Let then your birds lie prostrate on the earth, In dying posture, and with wings stretch'd forth; Shift them at eve or morn from place to place, And death shall terrify the pilfering race; In the mid air, while circling round and round, They call their lifeless comrades from the ground; With quick'ning wing, and notes of loud alarm, Warn the whole flock to shun the' ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Both cover their faces with mobs and all that, But the judge bids them, angrily, take off their hat. When uncover'd, a buzz of inquiry runs round, 'Pray what are their crimes?'... 'They've been pilfering found.' 'But, pray, who have they pilfer'd?'... 'A doctor, I hear.' 'What, yon solemn-faced, odd-looking man that stands near?' 'The same.'... 'What a pity! how does it surprise one, Two handsomer culprits I never set eyes on!' Then their friends all ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... truth, or manners; and it is no wonder, considering what her education hath been. Scolding and cursing are her common conversation. To sum up all; she is poor and beggarly, and gets a sorry maintenance by pilfering wherever she comes. As for this gentleman who is now so fond of her, she still beareth him an invincible hatred; revileth him to his face, and raileth at him in all companies. Her house is frequented by a company ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... tea that she had made; and when she had looked at his hand and bandaged it again, she told him all that had happened. How the Senegalese, whose brother Stanton had shot for pilfering, a month ago, had stabbed Stanton in the breast, and fifty others in blood-madness had rushed to finish his work. How Ahmara had run shrieking to the village, and the men, still in madness, had stolen the camels and gone off into the desert; not the murderers only, but their friends who saw that ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... proceeded to distinguish himself by forging opera-tickets, and even documents of various kinds, indiscriminate pilfering and swindling, interpreting visions, conjuring, and finally, it is declared, a touch of ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... to follow thy old trade of pilfering. I must unto my lady, and bear her this intelligence. Thus will I rouse the woman in her, and urge her to ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... silent, regarding him with a glance as brilliantly, deadly bright as a tarantula's. The cold, relentless hate of that glance chilled him. He forced himself to bow to her again, and to beat a dignified retreat, when his inclination was to take to his heels like a school-boy caught pilfering apples. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... perfect a community that the survivor always succeeded his dead partner to any property he may have had. They behave to each other with the greatest justness and openness of heart. It is a crime to keep anything hidden. On the other hand, the least pilfering is unpardonable, and punished by death. And indeed there can be no great temptation to steal when it is reckoned a point of honour never to refuse a neighbour what he wants; and when there is so little property of value it is impossible there should be many disputes over it. If any happened, the ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... greater number of years, suddenly, and without the smallest provocation, turned round and murdered them, or turned them out of their houses with hardly a rag upon them, destroyed their property, and walked over to the enemy." Hardly a man who speaks of them, that does not complain of their pilfering propensities; the farmers grievously ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... see." Mary looked as if she thought Charley would be able, with his single arm, to put to flight a whole host of blacks. Those we had seen, though ugly enough, were not very terrific-looking fellows. We heard, however, that away from Sydney, where the white settlers had found some blacks pilfering, and had shot them dead, the survivors had retaliated, and murdered two or three ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... is not the mean "penny wise and pound foolish" policy which some suppose it to be; it is the art of calculation joined to the habit of order, and the power of proportioning our wishes to the means of gratifying them. The little pilfering temper of a wife is despicable and odious to every man of sense; but there is a judicious, graceful species of economy, which has no connexion with an avaricious temper, and which, as it depends upon the understanding, can be expected only from cultivated minds. Women who have ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... to hold out for the remaining 35 runs. But the losers were Englishmen, and long odds brought out their good qualities. With solemn, almost ferocious, faces, the two last men in clung to their bats, and blocked, blocked, blocked, stealing now a bye, pilfering now a run out of the slips, and once or twice getting on the right side of a lob with a swipe that drew the hearts of ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... box on the ear which Alec Forbes had given him. The information had been yielded to the inquisition of the parent, who said with truth that he had never missed anything before; although I suspect that a course of petty and cautious pilfering had at length passed the narrow bounds within which it could be concealed from the lynx eyes inherited from the kingly general. Possibly a bilious attack, which confined the elder boy to the house for two or three days, may have had something ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... wires which contained the brass markers and after taking them off bent the wires back into their original form, with this difference, that they placed the end which is carried in the hand in the middle. This was the first instance I had experienced of their pilfering anything and I did not chuse to proceed to extremities. I gave the native a blanket and some biscuits and the mate gave ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... "office" in the Western meaning of the term there was none. The worthy Rad el Moussa transacted affairs on the floor of his general sitting-room, and stored his merchandise in the bed-chambers, or wherever it would be out of reach of pilfering fingers. But he received the little sailor with fine protestations of regard, and (after some giggles and shuffling as the women withdrew) inducted him to the dark interior of his house, and set before him delicious coffee ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... pauper in Exeter workhouse— every one knew that Mrs. Saunders' uncle on her mother's side drank himself to death—then there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs. Crick's! From the shrill triumph with which his name was dragged in, his crime must have been pilfering from a cathedral at least, but as both remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult to distinguish his infamy from the scandal which beclouded the memory of Mrs. Saunders' brother's wife's mother—who may have been a regicide, and was certainly ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... the small, brown fingers Gleaning them one by one, With the partridge drumming near her In the forest bare and dun, And the jet-black squirrel, winking His saucy, jealous eye At those tiny, pilfering fingers, From his sly ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... driving the shepherds, as well as the sheep, before him."—"Ay," said my lady, "but I can look round me, and have reason, perhaps, to think the invading lion has come off, little as he deserved it, better than the creeping fox, who, with all his cunning, sometimes suffers for his pilfering theft." ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the fight. Presently the French gave way, and with a cheer the English ran forward to claim the field, the ruder spirits among them at once beginning to plunder the wounded. A cry for quarter drew Fairfax with a bound to the place whence it came, and, dashing aside a pilfering soldier, he bent above a slight form that lay extended on the earth: the young officer whose strange conduct had so surprised him. In another moment he recognized his mother's ring on one of the slender hands. It was Gabrielle. Her father had perished ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... and which has enough of solitude and faded stateliness to be fearsome, or at the least eerie, to a solitary guest like myself, to whose imagination, in the long, dark nights, creeping Malays or pilfering Chinamen are far more likely to present themselves than the stiff beauties and formal splendors of the heyday of Dutch ascendancy. The Stadthaus, which stands on the slope of the hill, and is the most prominent building in Malacca, is now used as the Treasury, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... not this pilfering disposition be implanted in authors for wise purposes? may it not be the way in which Providence has taken care that the seeds of knowledge and wisdom shall be preserved from age to age, in spite of the inevitable ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Every fire which had happened for several years past, is there ascribed to the machinations of the Jesuits, who purposed, as Bedloe said, by such attempts, to find an opportunity for the general massacre of the Protestants; and, in the mean time, were well pleased to enrich themselves by pilfering ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... that ship. When we came on shore, the old pilot, who was now our friend, got us a lodging, and a warehouse for our goods, which, by the way, was much the same: it was a little house, or hut, with a large house joining to it, all built with canes, and palisadoed round with large canes, to keep out pilfering thieves, of which it seems there were not a few in the country. However, the magistrates allowed us all a little guard, and we had a soldier with a kind of halbert, or half-pike, who stood sentinel at our door, to whom we allowed a pint of rice, and a little piece of money, about ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... is no great loss without some small gain," said one man. "We are quit of Big Pete, that's certain, and it is a good riddance of bad rubbish. He was the worst man in this bailiwick, and I am thinking that more than one job of pilfering might safely be ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused Jasper's ready compassion and had secured Freya's sympathy! Who could ever have supposed such an end in store for the impossible, gentle Schultz, with his idiosyncrasy of naive pilfering, so absurdly straightforward that, even in the people who had suffered from it, it aroused nothing more than a sort of amused exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot evidently should have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means tragic existence as a mild-eyed, inoffensive beachcomber ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... every man who has a vote on this subject ought to read. Here we find the traders sometimes taking by force, from an Indian, the produce of a whole year's hunt, without making him any return, sometimes pilfering a portion while buying the remainder, and still oftener wresting from the poor wretches, while in a state of intoxication, a valuable property, for an inadequate remuneration. In one place, our author tells of an Indian woman, his ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description. Now, show me the distinction between such pilfering as this, and picking a man's pocket in the street: unless, indeed, it be, that the legislature has a regard for pocket-handkerchiefs, and leaves men's brains, except when they are knocked out by violence, to ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... face did not attract her. Just why she ran, she did not know. It was of no use to appeal to ole missus, who would not know whether she belonged to her or some one else. Miss Dory was her only hope. With promises of future good behavior and abstinence from pilfering and lying, and badness generally, she might enlist her sympathy and protection till Jake came home, when all would be right. So she sped on like a deer, glancing back occasionally to see the stranger following her with rapid strides which, however, did not ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... whenever most required. On the occasion of our leaving Gasko one of these was, as usual, absent without leave, and on his being discovered, the pack-saddle in which these long-suffering animals pass their existence had been removed. Giovanni, whose pilfering habits were only equalled by his disregard of truth, replaced the missing article in the simplest way, by doing unto others as they had done unto him, and appropriated the first saddle he came across. To allow the saddle to return to Gasko was ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... happy old age. Some remarkable cases of longevity in The Desert have been narrated by Captain Riley. Said says the people rob us desperately when they make our bread. We usually buy the wheat and have it ground and made into bread at the same time. I tell Said we must expect this sort of pilfering where there are so ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... assimilate with the thrifty Saxon, but prefer to be hangers-on at the castle of the Hungarian noble: they call themselves by his name, and profess to hold the same faith, be it Catholic or Protestant. Notwithstanding that, the gipsy has an incurable habit of pilfering here as elsewhere; yet they can be trusted as messengers and carriers—indeed I do not know what people would do without them, for they are as good as a general "parcels-delivery company" any day; and certainly they are ubiquitous, ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... that it is impossible, or rather, perhaps, for those very reasons it is impossible, for him ever to contemplate them in any condition but that of slavery. He thinks them very like the Irish, and instanced their subserviency, their flattering, their lying, and pilfering, as traits common to the character of both peoples. But I cannot persuade myself that in both cases, and certainly in that of the negroes, these qualities are not in great measure the result of their condition. He says ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... dug two wells to receive the water which was flowing over the beach, they had become very inquisitive, and made no hesitation in searching our pockets, and asking for everything they saw. One of the men, upon being detected in the act of pilfering a piece of white paper from Mr. Cunningham's specimen box, immediately dropped it, and drew back, much alarmed for fear of punishment, and also ashamed of having been discovered; but after a few angry looks ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... with an amused smile. "Well, it's only petty pilfering, after all. What's put salt ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... of work to do here, looking after all these scoundrels, having to keep my eyes open as much as possible in order to prevent wholesale robbery as far as I could, although it was utterly impossible to prevent petty pilfering of the ore on its way from the mine to Puerto Cabello, its general port for transhipment to Europe, to swell the treasure chest ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... blow for blow, with glowing enthusiasm: we see the genuine ore melted in the furnace of fervid feeling, and moulded into stately and ideal forms; and this is so far better than peeping into an old iron shop, or pilfering from a dealer in marine stores! There is one drawback, however, attending this mode of proceeding, which attaches generally, indeed, to all originality of composition; namely, that it has a tendency to a certain degree of monotony. He ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... expiated. The devil in that jar is dispossessed, and with Simon's last gasp has returned unto his own place. The murderer is dead, and has thereby laid the ghost of his mate in sin, the murdered victim; while that victim has long ago paid by blood for her many years of mean domestic pilfering. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... game of cards between Jonathan Wild, of pilfering propensities, and a professional gambler, says: "Such was the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out of the count's pockets, though he knew they were empty; nor could ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... took the Renummy. Let my pistols, cutlass, and pocket-compass be laid in the coffin along with me. Let me be carried to the grave by my own men, rigged in the black caps and white shirts which my barge's crew were wont to wear; and they must keep a good look out, that none of your pilfering rascallions may come and heave me up again, for the lucre of what they can get, until the carcase is belayed by a tombstone. As for the motto, or what you call it, I leave that to you and Mr. Jolter, who are scholars; but I do ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... refusal. I believe that not one of us had at this time the slightest suspicion of the good faith of the savages. They had uniformly behaved with the greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our work, offering us their commodities, frequently without price, and never, in any instance, pilfering a single article, although the high value they set upon the goods we had with us was evident by the extravagant demonstrations of joy always manifested upon our making them a present. The women especially were most obliging in every respect, and, upon the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is only wicked. She is a Gypsy, a sort of Vagabond, whose sole occupation is to run about the country telling lyes, and pilfering from those who come by their money honestly. Out upon such Vermin! If I were King of Spain, every one of them should be burnt alive who was found in my dominions ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... until they become contaminated by contact with whites, always are honest. It is the white man that teaches them to steal, either by actually pilfering from the ignorant savage, or by taking undue advantage of him in trade. Human nature is the same everywhere, and the Indian will, when he finds he is being taken advantage of and robbed, naturally resent it and try to "get even." Our things were left wholly unguarded, and were the object ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... are vicious and unmanageable. I think that I never saw vice and crime so legibly stamped upon the countenances of children as upon those in this school. The teachers find it extremely difficult to preserve discipline at all; and the pilfering habits of the pupils are almost incorrigible. They each receive a pint of excellent soup and an unlimited quantity of bread for dinner; but they ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... "good things" of life for their owners. They also tempt outsiders. Honey-pot owners fear pilfering by their servants; fear sponging by their relatives, friends, neighbors; fear robbers and kidnappers; fear migrating hordes on the lookout for plunder. Defense is a necessary aspect of each rich household, neighborhood, ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... have committed one sanguinary action or one ruinous and deliberate fraud. You have heard that I have lived by the plunder of the rich,—I do not deny the charge. From the grinding of the poor, the habitual overreaching, or the systematic pilfering of my neighbours, my conscience is as free as it is from the charge of cruelty and bloodshed. Those errors I leave to honest mediocrity or virtuous exertion! You may perhaps find, too, that my life has ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and nosegays before 'em; Both cover their faces with mobs and all that; 45 But the judge bids them, angrily, take off their hat. When uncover'd, a buzz of enquiry runs round, — 'Pray what are their crimes?' — 'They've been pilfering found.' 'But, pray, whom have they pilfer'd?' — 'A Doctor, I hear.' 'What, yon solemn-faced, odd-looking man that stands near!' 50 'The same.' — 'What a pity! how does it surprise one! Two handsomer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... been hurried—but intimate. A small bunch of six bananas was gone, and Hawkeye was munching them unconcernedly. It wasn't the first time the big, hulking, six-foot conductor had pilfered the boy's chest, not by many—and never paid for the pilfering. That was Hawkeye's idea of ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... mobilized without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere because he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at home everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets what it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible agents of the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that these obligations are being recorded: if, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... cannot resist pilfering. 'I must bear my testimony,' says Cook, 'that the people of this country, of all ranks, men and women, are the arrantest thieves upon the face of the earth; but,' he adds, 'we must not hastily conclude that theft is a testimony ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... cannot look so narrowly but some will steal more or less according to the nature or quality of the goods. Even if fortunate enough to escape being robbed by the slaves, it is impossible to prevent pilfering by the officers of the customs; for as they take the customs in kind, they oftentimes take the best, and do not rate each sort as they ought separately, so that the merchant is often, made to pay much more than he ought. After undergoing this search and deduction ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... with hay, he had pulled her ears and given her a sound rating. These thieving propensities made her perfect as a ne'er-do-well. However, in spite of himself, he could not help feeling a sort of admiration for these sensual, pilfering, greedy creatures, who preyed upon everything that lay about, feasting off the crumbs that fell ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... camp up the road, but a short distance from the Ruthven home. The coming of the soldiers filled the whole neighborhood with alarm, but it was soon evident that Colonel Stanton was a strict disciplinarian and did not countenance any pilfering, and then the inhabitants became more quiet. In the meanwhile the Confederate troops had departed for parts unknown. But another battle was ...
— Young Captain Jack - The Son of a Soldier • Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield
... moreover gain a stream of agreeable reflections throughout life, which will cost him nothing." He recommended fireproof brick houses, warm clothing, and abundant, varied food. Customary plenty in meat and vegetables, he said, would not only remove occasions for pilfering, but would give the master effective power to discourage it; for upon discovering the loss of any goods by theft he might put his whole force of slaves upon a limited diet for a time and thus suggest to the thief that on ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... your eyes, I thought by your look you had been a clever fellow, and upon the snaffling lay [Footnote: A cant term for robbery on the highway] at least; but, d—n your body and eyes, I find you are some sneaking budge [Footnote: Another cant term for pilfering] rascal." She then launched forth a volley of dreadful oaths, interlarded with some language not proper to be repeated here, and was going to lay hold on poor Booth, when a tall prisoner, who had been very earnestly eying Booth for some time, came up, and, taking ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... complaint. You charge on the authority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did not compose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublished manuscripts by an unnamed old 'German musician and thus dishonestly, by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the public themes and compositions which he could not himself have originated. Something like this has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whose personality and habits did not ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... flog the wind out o' thy worthless carcase. Hast any pilfering companions about thee? I do smell a savoury refection—victuals are cooking, or ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... men usually had a fight, after which they took a long sleep, and then had the dishes cleaned up and the silver things locked away before taking their departure from the cave for "a long, long time," by which, no doubt, she indicated the period spent on a pilfering expedition. But on this particular occasion, she added, while the naughty men were seated at the feast, one of their number from their ship came hastily in and said something, she could not tell what, which caused them at once to leap up and rush out of the ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... neighbors with arms, have they enterprise enough either to use them advantageously against the animals of the forest, or offensively against the tribes near them, who owe their safety more to the timidity than the forbearance of the Chinooks. We had heard instances of pilfering while we were among them, and therefore gave a general order excluding them from our encampment, so that whenever an Indian wished to visit us, he began by calling out 'No Chinook.' It is not improbable that this first impression may have left a prejudice against them, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... a pretty shade of plum. "Weener, youre a thief, a petty, cadging, sly, larcenous, pilfering, bloody thief. You take the Daily Intelligencer's honest dollars without a qualm, aye, with a smirk on your imbecile face, proposing with the cool impudence of the born embezzler to return no value for them. Weener, you forget yourself. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... in sprinkling the bees when the hive is first opened, the smell will be almost certain to entice marauders from other hives to attempt to take possession of treasures which do not belong to them, and when they once commence such a pilfering course of life, they will be very loth to lay it aside. When the honey harvest is abundant, (and this is the very time for forcing swarms,) bees, with proper precautions, are seldom inclined to rob. I have sometimes found it difficult to induce them to notice honey-combs which I wished ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... pleased with them. In general they appeared to be modest; although there was no want of those of a different stamp; and as we had yet some venereal complaints on board, I took all possible care to prevent the disorder being communicated to them. On most occasions they shewed a strong propensity to pilfering; in which they were full as expert ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... privateers, that I declare no one of the several prisoners I conversed with to have made any complaint of them; on the contrary, almost all acknowledged to have been treated with kindness whilst on board, and except sometimes a little pilfering by the sailors, to have lost nothing of what they had a right to keep by the received usages of war; the trunks of many were not searched, it being only required of the possessor to declare, that it was his private property and that no letters or journals were contained therein. When ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... then in heaven, but light below; For there the demon wandered to and fro, Tilting aloft upon a slender pole The orb of day—the pilfering old soul. ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... . I suffered then. Yes, I went down to the doors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that crude, corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content with stripping me of health and strength,—not satisfied with pilfering inventiveness and any strong hunger to create—why, that insatiable fever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken instrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I would give forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed. And I still ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... reeled off the Girl with her eye upon Billy Jackrabbit, who had quietly come in and was sneaking about in an endeavour to find something worth pilfering. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... out of you; but it would only be throwing good money away after bad. Get you gone to the ditch where you'll die! You guzzling, muzzling fool, to leave my house without a shilling after all your pilfering!" ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... in a voice unlike his own; for a horrified amazement was creeping upon him and supplanting the contemptuous anger which the discovery of this beautiful girl engaged in pilfering his poor belongings ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... necessary for a hurried journey.—Of course, so Madeleine wound up the story, she had never expected Heinz to behave like a normal mortal, and to take leave of his friends in the ordinary way, and she was also grateful to him for not pilfering her umbrella, which was silvertopped. All the same, there was something indecent about his behaviour. It showed how little he had, at heart, cared for any of them. Only a person who thoroughly despised others, would treat them in this ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless. There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing, and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... painful affair, Burr junior. I wanted to disbelieve in your guilt, I wanted to feel that there was no young gentleman in my establishment who could stoop to such a piece of base pilfering; but the truth is so circumstantially brought home through the despicable meanness of a boy of whose actions I feel the utmost abhorrence, that I am bound to say to you that there is nothing left but for you to own frankly that you have been led into temptation—to say ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... Pilfering sparrows, you have taught me, By this loss, a lesson true; When a bunch of grapes I gather, Just to keep ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... intrusted thee with the least dram of his saving grace, nor will he, because thou art a hypocrite: and as for what thou hast, thou hast stolen it, even every man of you from his neighbour; still pilfering out of their profession, even as Judas did out of the bag. Thou comest like a thief into thy profession, and like a thief thou shalt go out of the same. Jesus Christ hath not counted thee faithful to commit to thee any of his jewels to keep, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... rather troublesome; he had an inveterate habit of pilfering provisions at all times of the day. He set ridicule at utter defiance; and being without a particle of self-respect, he would never have given over his tricks, even if they had drawn upon him the scorn of the whole party. Now and then, indeed, something worse than laughter fell to his share; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a particle of judgment, though her taste is sweet. These hose, now, are a good, firm article; I chose them myself. Do be sure you get all your things from the wash. At those great hotels there's a deal of pilfering, and you ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... think that the child's concepts of property rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions. The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or less and that it is necessary ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... they would steal the necessary vegetables for to-night's supper. Now, while some boys may sometimes do such things, it is needless to add that no boy with a good home and a mother's training is likely to become engaged in such petty pilfering. I don't believe the boys for a moment credited the girls with any ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... seemed to be? Halbert and I had then spent our life peacefully in his native glen, undisturbed by the phantoms either of fear or of ambition. His greatest pride had then been to show the fairest herd in the Halidome; his greatest danger to repel some pilfering snatcher from the Border; and the utmost distance which would have divided us, would have been the chase of some outlying deer. But, alas! what avails the blood which Halbert has shed, and the dangers which he encounters, to support a name and rank, dear to him ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... don't say so? Another case of pilfering! this is getting serious: I will call Lawless—I say, Lawless!" "Well, what's the row?" was the reply. "Have the French landed? or is the kitchen chimney on fire? eh! What do I behold! Fairlegh, lightly and elegantly attired in nothing ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... pulled them all out and rearranged them in a different way. I found no time that afternoon even to do up my hair; I hurriedly tied it into a loose knot, and went and worried everybody, fussing about the store-room. The stores seemed short, and pilfering must have been going on of late, but I could not muster up the courage to take any particular person to task— for might not the thought have crossed somebody's mind: "Where were your eyes ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... certainly inevitable if it paid best under grass.[448] No one can expect the holders of land naturally best suited for grass to keep it under tillage for philanthropic purposes. A vast number of the commoners too were idle thriftless beings, whose rights on a few acres enabled them to live a life of pilfering and poaching; and it was a very good thing when such people were induced to lead a more regular and respectable existence. The great blot on the process was that it made the English labourer a landless man. Compensation was given him at the time of enclosure in the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... confidence to a certain degree. But we must expect to meet with others that are equally wild, and who will be very mischievous; attempting to drive off our cattle, and watching in ambush all round our caravan, ready for any pilfering that they can successfully accomplish; and then we shall discover that we are in their haunts without ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... this pilfering disposition which some of us have may be implanted in us for a good reason. Maybe through us pilferers or borrowers, Heaven takes care of the seeds of knowledge and wisdom from age to age. The worthwhile thoughts which some of our early members gave us may be purloined by me ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... gentleman; and to go without them, especially when he had once seen himself in the glass with one tied on in a splendid bow, appeared impossible. Even this paltry temptation, working upon his vanity, at length prevailed with a boy whose integrity had long been corrupted by the habits of petty pilfering and daily falsehood. It was agreed that, the first time his mistress sent him out on a message, he should carry the key of the house door to his cousin's, and deliver it into the hands of one of the gang, who were there in waiting for it. Such ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... trace the hare in the treacherous snow; Thy witty wiles to draw, and get The lark into the trammel net; Thou hast thy cockrood, and thy glade To take the precious pheasant made; Thy lime-twigs, snares, and pitfalls, then, To catch the pilfering birds, not men. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... contained. Calculating one hundred and forty pagazis at 25 doti each, I supposed I had enough, yet, though I had been trying to teach the young Hindi that the Musungu was not a fool, nor blind to his pilfering tricks, though the 3,500 doti were all spent; though I had only obtained one hundred and thirty pagazis at 25 doti each, which in the aggregate amounted to 3,200 doti: Soor Hadji Palloo's bill was $1,400 cash extra. His plea ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... gather poison in your mouth for me. A high-born woman may handle what she fancies Without being ear-pruned like a pilfering beggar. Look to your ears if you touch ought of mine: Ay, you shall join the mumping sisterhood And tramp and learn your ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... ill. Nanon was, in fact, one of the family; she laughed when Grandet laughed, felt gloomy or chilly, warmed herself, and toiled as he did. What pleasant compensations there were in such equality! Never did the master have occasion to find fault with the servant for pilfering the grapes, nor for the plums and nectarines eaten under the trees. "Come, fall-to, Nanon!" he would say in years when the branches bent under the fruit and the farmers were obliged to ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... had taken the articles. The fact that they were being issued without any return being made, did not interest them. They passed cheerfully over the fact that the articles had been stolen, and were indignant, not because I had accused a Japanese general of pilfering, but because I had accused the wrong general. The letter was so insolent that I went to the General Staff Office and explained that the officer who wrote it, must withdraw it, and apologize for it. Both ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... future ages; Through many a labor'd tome, Rankly embalm'd in thy too natural pages. Faith, friend De Foe, thou art quite at home! Not one of thy great offspring thou dost lack, From pirate Singleton to pilfering Jack. Here Flandrian Moll her brazen incest brags; Vice-stript Roxana, penitent in rags, There points to Amy, treading equal chimes, The faithful ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... inaccessible desert—quitting the tilt-yard, where I was ever ready among my compeers to splinter a lance, either for the love of honour, or for the honour of love, in order to couch my knightly spear against base and pilfering besognios and marauders—exchanging the lighted halls, wherein I used nimbly to pace the swift coranto, or to move with a loftier grace in the stately galliard, for this rugged and decayed dungeon of rusty-coloured stone—quitting the gay theatre, for the solitary ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... meet all its contingencies, and, since the great uprising, with no anticipation of easy work. The North was hurried into a war for which it had no preparation, to which it had never looked as a serious probability, and for which it had been stripped in a great measure, through the pilfering policy of the South, of the ordinary means at its command. A peaceable and highly civilized people, among whom actual war upon its own soil had been unknown for nearly fifty years, and among whom the spirit of war, always so rife at the South, was opposed and neutralized ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and brought up his Wife; The GROUSE travell'd south, from his Lairdship in Fife; The BUNTING forsook her soft nest in the reeds, [p 7] And the WIDOW-BIRD came, though she still wore her weeds. Sir John HERON, of the Lakes, strutted in a grand pas, But no card had been sent to the pilfering DAW, As the Peacock kept up his progenitor's quarrel, Which AEsop relates, about cast-off apparel; For Birds are like Men in their contests together, And, in questions of right, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... hair-dresser, another an ex-chair-bearer; all of them a vile lot, chosen by the government for its agents, and, under new titles, resuming their old positions. At the head of the armed force is Gen. Bonnard, who is accompanied by a prostitute and who passes his time in orgies, pilfering wherever he can, and so shameless in his thievery as to be condemned, six months later, to three months in irons.[5136] On arriving at Blois, he organizes "a paid guard, composed of all the most abject Jacobins."—Elsewhere, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mostly: pilfering, fraud, theft, occasionally arson or manslaughter. One man, however, was arraigned for murder with highway robbery, and a woman for the most ignoble traffic, which evil ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of a corn-chandler near the corn-market of this capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789. Having committed some pilfering, he was turned out of the parental dwelling, and therefore lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin Club. In 1792, he entered, as a soldier, in a regiment of the army marching against the county of Nice; and, in 1793, he served before Toulon, where he became acquainted with Bonaparte, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... with readiness be checked by a display of superior means of annoyance. Is it conceivable, that the unworthy desire to possess these lances as curiosities, could actuate the persons concerned to such a piece of pilfering? We have repeatedly seen that our people had not been scrupulous in allegiance to the commandment—thou shalt not ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... go no farther, not merely because I have no liking for my theme, but because I am pilfering. All these arguments—the very words themselves—I have stolen from an American writer, who, in Horace Greeley fashion, is addressing his countrymen on the subject of negro equality. He not alone professes to show the humanity of the project, but its policy—its even necessity. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... his task, "in order that he might confess, and receive the holy communion at the coming Easter, without scruples of conscience." He likewise begged the Prince of Parma to obtain for him absolution from his Holiness for this crime of pilfering—the more so "as he was about to keep company for some time with heretics and atheists, and in some sort to conform ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... interest at the beginning of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero. In him avarice and usury were joined to the most implicit honesty in regard to the interests of the church; he would punish relentlessly the smallest pilfering in the sacristy, and he made up his accounts for the Chapter with a minuteness that annoyed the Obrero. To every one his own, the church was poor and it would be a sin worthy of hell to deprive her of a single farthing; he, as a good servant of God was ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and to set this by, turn a deaf ear upon the siren present, and condescend once more, naked, into the ring with fortune—Macaire, how few would do it! But you, Macaire, you are compacted of more subtile clay. No cheap immediate pilfering: no retail trade of petty larceny; but swoop at the heart of the position, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... another these hungry mouths must have been a considerable drain on Silver Tongue's resources; and though they feebly responded to his bounty—one by driving a natty cart and delivering hot morning rolls, and another by pilfering firewood for the furnace—the account (if one had been made) was far from even. But to any objection to this Quixotic generosity Silver Tongue had a reply ever ready on his lips. "I lofe dem like my fader," he would say in his deep, fluty voice, and the conversation was seldom ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... movement, that they delight in pilfering, in outwitting each other and their higher brethren—men; that they glory in tearing and destroying the works of art by which they are surrounded in a domestic state; that they lay the most artful plans to effect their purposes, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... unavailing regret, the anguish of compromise with conscience, the remorse of a bad deed done in a moment of excitement. Ah, the humiliation of detection, the degradation of being caught, caught like a schoolboy pilfering his fellows' desks, and, worse than all, worse than all, the consciousness of lost self-respect, the knowledge of a prestige vanishing, a dignity impaired, knowledge that the grip which held a multitude in check was trembling, that control was wavering, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... he was coming out of a bag of cherrystones, where he had been pilfering as usual, the boy to whom it belonged chanced to see him. "Ah, ha! my little Tommy," said the boy, "so I have caught you stealing my cherrystones at last, and you shall be rewarded for your thievish tricks." On saying this, he drew the string tight around ...
— The History of Tom Thumb, and Others • Anonymous
... in genuine disgust. He had all the contempt for a petty-larceny thief that the skilled safe-breaker has for the common purse-snatcher. The line between pilfering and legitimate stealing was very clear in his mind. He ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... [A clever pilfering servant.] Upon my departure from Daraga I took with me a lively little boy, who had a taste for the calling of a naturalist. In Libmanan he was suddenly lost, and with him, at the same time, a bundle of keys; and we looked for him in vain. The fact was, as I afterwards came to learn, that ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... mild in the extreme— it has none of the painful, restless vivacity of its kindred, the Cebi, and no trace of the surly, untameable temper of its still nearer relatives, the Mycetes, or howling monkeys. It is, however, an arrant thief, and shows considerable cunning in pilfering small articles of clothing, which it conceals in its sleeping place. The natives of the Upper Amazons procure the Coaita, when full grown, by shooting it with the blowpipe and poisoned darts, and restoring life by putting a little salt ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... problem opened with the morning. For the first time, my officers and men found themselves in possession of an enemy's abode; and though there was but little temptation to plunder, I knew that I must here begin to draw the line. I had long since resolved to prohibit absolutely all indiscriminate pilfering and wanton outrage, and to allow nothing to be taken or destroyed but by proper authority. The men, to my great satisfaction, entered into this view at once, and so did (perhaps a shade less readily, in some cases) the officers. The greatest trouble ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... homes, the razing of villages, mere pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that bill which France expects to present some day. The old chateaux that were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... well grown, well dressed, well read, We might have been two horny-handed boors— Lean, clumsy, ignorant, and ragged boors— Planning for moonlight nights a poaching scheme, Or soiling our dull souls and consciences With plans for pilfering a cottage roost. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... the wonder would be, not that the stranger was robbed of any part of his riches, but that any part was left for a second depredator.[AJ] Such, on sober reflection, is the judgment I have formed concerning the pilfering disposition of the Mandingo negroes ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... and all would not allow him to proceed. 'Though I be young in years and though my frame be delicate,' the wee rat expostulated, 'my devices are unlimited, my talk is glib and my designs deep and farseeing; and I feel convinced that, on this errand, I shall be more ingenious in pilfering than any of them.' 'How could you be more ingenious than they?' the whole company of rats asked. 'I won't,' explained the young rat, 'follow their example, and go straight to work and steal, but by simply shaking my body, and transforming myself, I shall metamorphose ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... utilitarians from necessity, plant potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, beans, strawberries, and the like. The feeling of ownership being strongly developed in the children in seeing the results of their own labor, the crops are respected by the neighbors and pilfering rarely occurs, except perhaps in a case of ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... her head. "Oily Dave may be, for pilfering seems to be second nature with him. But Stee Jenkin is made of better stuff, and I believe he is really grateful because we saved him that night. Then remember how kind he and his wife were to us when Father was so ill. Oh, I've got a better opinion of Stee than ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... he said, "were cut before you found your man. We have a much more important case for you than some petty pilfering Controller. We are after much more ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... was; but a single look with the glass showed that it was a bear. This was an old enemy of the bee-hunter, who often encountered the animal, endeavoring to get at the honey, and he had on divers occasions been obliged to deal with these plunderers, before he could succeed in his own plans of pilfering. The bear now seen continued in sight but an instant; the height to which he had clambered being so great, most probably, as to weary him with the effort, and to compel him to fall back again. All this was favorable ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... place on board of each prow one or two men of confidence, to see that the goods are safely delivered on board of the ship, to prevent pilfering, which is often practiced by those who conduct ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr. |
