"Vagrancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... room where eight or ten tramps were undressing; some of them were old men, quite sodden and stupefied with a life of vagrancy and privation; others were of a dull or cunning middle-age, two or three were as young as Lemuel and his partner, and looked as if they might be poor fellows who had found themselves in a strange city without money or work. But it was against ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... way of thinking, very likely," said Theophilus; "but if it comes to statistics, I can bring counter-statements, numerous and dire, from scores of Southern papers, of vagrancy, laziness, improvidence, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... vagrant, stumping over Several verdant fields of clover! Subject of unnumbered knockings! Tattered' coat and ragged stockings, Slouching hat and roving eye, Tell of SETTLED vagrancy! Wretched wanderer, can it be The poor laws have leaguered thee? Hear'st thou, in thy thorny den, Tramp of rural policemen, Inly fancying, in thy rear Coats of blue and buttons clear, While to meet thee, in the van Stalks some vengeful alderman?— Each separate ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... tyranny—these, too, are English, sacredly English; and they leave upon the heart that has once expanded among them, an impress never to be effaced. Among national reformers, what a noble position would he occupy who should prevail upon our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with their fathers from generation to generation—as the dates and ages decipherable on our monuments will testify—would not annihilate them; ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... sufficient reason that society should take a man by the collar. "Where do you live? How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties awaited him. Iron and fire were in the code: the law practised the cauterization of vagrancy. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... stroll, saunter, tramp, jog trot, turn, stalk, perambulation; noctambulation[obs3], noctambulism; somnambulism; outing, ride, drive, airing, jaunt. equitation, horsemanship, riding, manege[Fr], ride and tie; basophobia[obs3]. roving, vagrancy, pererration|; marching and countermarching; nomadism; vagabondism, vagabondage; hoboism [U.S.]; gadding; flit, flitting, migration; emigration, immigration, demigration|, intermigration[obs3]; wanderlust. plan, itinerary, guide; handbook, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pushing himself about on a small cart, which moves upon wheels, and wearing an apron to conceal the deformity of his legs. His whole height, including his vehicle, does not exceed two feet. To avoid the penalties attached to begging and vagrancy, he carries a few pens stuck between his coat and waistcoat, and declares that the dealing in those articles is the only trade to which he has been brought up. It is not improbable, that by means of this, and other arts and mysteries which ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a dimon as big as ye'er fist, an' begun to dhrive down town behind a fast horse. No wan knowed what he done, but his wife said he was in th' r-rale estate business. D'ye mind, Jawn, that th' r-rale estate business includes near ivrything fr'm vagrancy to manslaughter? ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... The singular resemblance to a circus, already profanely suggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and vicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse poverty and brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary panorama of unlovely and unwholesome domestic details always before the eyes, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... where were his friends? The children who had romped with him, the rotund topers whom he had left cooling their hot noses in pewter pots at the tavern door, the dogs that used to bark a welcome, recognizing in him a kindred spirit of vagrancy: where ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... moment in silence. A cricket chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out, topaz points in ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... two, we shall have to be satisfied with 'a tent in the green wood, a home in the grove,' in other words, we shall have to 'camp out,' as the most renowned hunters and soldiers have frequently done before us. I'm sure there's no vagrancy in that." ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... must be a tough looking customer," grinned the boy, again climbing the fence and starting along the track. He fought shy of villages during daylight, fearing that he might be arrested for vagrancy and locked up. That ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... does not form a part of General Booth's original scheme. But the reason for this is patent. In England vagrancy is forbidden. There is a poor law in operation and there are work-houses provided by the State. In India there is nothing of the kind, save a law for the compulsory emigration of European vagrants, who are deported by Government ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... will be the least of what they'll try to do. They'll use slugging tactics, sure, if they get a chance, or railroad me to some Pen or other, if possible. My one best bet is to keep out of their way; and I figure I'm ten times safer on the open road, with a few dollars to stave off a vagrancy charge, and with two good fists and this stick to keep 'em at a distance, than I would be on the railroads or in ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... writings which, because they shrewdly and clearly pointed out certain ulcerous spots in the economic and social system, were denounced as "radical" by a Board of Trustees honestly devoted to Business Ideals. Having a small income of his own, the ex-Professor decided upon a life of investigatory vagrancy, with special reference to studies, at first hand, of the voluntarily unemployed. Not knowing what else to do with the only child of his marriage, he took the boy along. Contemptuous of, rather than embittered against, an academic system which had dispensed with ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ruralist. Hawthorne might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type, on the nature side; and Hawthorne was to the village what Thoreau ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... work; but he put it off as something to which his brain was unequal. Like slow drifting wisps of cloud, different phrases and incidents floated across his mind, shadows of things that had left a clear imprint upon his senses. With the odd vagrancy of an undirected mind, he found himself recalling a few of Hamlet's lines, and smiled wanly to think how, after all those years, the immortal Shakespeare could still give words to his own thoughts: 'This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... written in blood, another and less sanguinary penalty came into great favour. The deportation of criminals beyond the seas grew naturally out of the laws which prescribed banishment for certain offences. The Vagrancy Act of Elizabeth's reign contained in it the germ of transportation, by empowering justices in quarter sessions to banish offenders and order them to be conveyed into such parts beyond the seas as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... a discussion of the relative moralities of begging and stealing. But in this, I found, Mick was not vitally interested—both were too deeply immoral for him to touch. For Mick was a worker. He liked work. Vagrancy to him made no appeal. To "settle down" was his one definite desire. But jobs refused to hold him, and the road gripped him in spite of himself. So the problem presented itself to him in an abstract way only; to me there was a real—but ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... he was fierce and rebellious and down on the Juvenile Court records for truancy, petty trafficking in burned-out opium, vandalism, and gang vagrancy. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... leader; "it's a rule, sir. I wouldn't break through it. I act entirely upon principle! I can't encourage robbery and vagrancy. It's Quixotic." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... civilization was more soft and warm than theirs; perhaps (and upon the face this latter is the more likely explanation of the two) because, in a very exaltation of enlightenment, there were no laws against vagrancy. Anyhow, however one might account for their presence, there the tramps were. One saw the shabby, homeless waifs everywhere—in the highways, in the byways. You saw them slouching past the shady little common, with its smooth greensward, where ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... like a dead one? This isn't a bad habit after you get used to it... So far I've only made the county jails. Some day I suppose I'll graduate... But I'm pretty wise—vagrancy is about all they've ever ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... sky was of extraordinary depth and softness. I was reminded of Italy. As we sauntered about the long straggling village, a scene of indescribable contentment and repose met our eyes. We are in one of the poorest departments of France, but no signs of want or vagrancy are seen. The villagers, all neatly and suitably dressed, were getting in their hay or minding their flocks and herds, with that look of cheerful independence imparted by the responsibilities of property. Many greeted us in the friendliest manner, but as we could not understand ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and alley-gates, skulking near unguarded premises and studying shop-windows. They are all impostors or thieves. Not one of them is deserving of charity. He who gives to them wastes his money and encourages thieving and vagrancy. One half of the successful burglaries committed on dwelling-houses are in consequence of information gained by beggars. Servant-girls are lured away by old women who come in the guise of alms-seekers, and by well-feigned poverty and a seeming spirit of ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... reformed; that they were no longer abodes of piety, or beehives of industry, or nurseries of art, or retreats of learning; that their wealth was squandered; that they upheld the arm of a foreign power; that they shielded offenders against the laws; that they encouraged vagrancy and extortion; that, in short, they were nests ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his sensitive nature. An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him. His fear of the Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without money or friends, his ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... negro. Both in the civil and criminal code his treatment was different from that to which the white man was subjected. He was compelled to work under a series of labor laws applicable only to his own race. The laws of vagrancy were so changed as, in many of their provisions, to apply only to him, and under their operation all freedom of movement and transit was denied. The liberty to sell his time at a fair market rate was destroyed by the interposition of apprentice laws. Avenues of usefulness ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... von Marwitz and involving everyone around her. And now in a week's time he would be in Cornwall and seeing again the little Hans Andersen heroine. This was the thought that emerged from the sweet vagrancy of his mood; and, as it came, he was pierced suddenly with a strange rapture and fear that had in it the very essence of ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... The next morning she was taken up to the New Bailey. It was a clear case of disorderly vagrancy, and she was committed to prison for a month. How much might happen in ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Brown brought me ill-luck in my enterprise, thereby signifying the crosses and vexations of those who labour in the cheateries and overreachings which constitute the vocation of the world; so my meeting with the philosophical Cole, who has, both in vagrancy and rest, found cause to boast of happiness, authorities from his studies to favour his inclination to each, and reason to despise what he, with Sir ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Dick's feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or road- kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted with its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And he learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a Dutch farmer ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... said, in answer to my inquiry, "there is no real want here, and no vagrancy. Everybody has his bit of land, or can find work. I come from our vineyard on the hillside yonder, and am now returning home to supper in the village—our farmhouse is there". She was a widow, she added, and with her son did the work of their little farm, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the official eye learnt to look upon them with suspicion, and it was not long before they fell under condemnation as vagrants. In 1572 all but licensed companies were brought within the scope of the vagrancy laws. Those exempt were the few fortunate ones who had secured the patronage of a nobleman, and, greedy of monopoly, had pressed, successfully, for this prohibitory decree against their irregular rivals. From this date onwards ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... influences. Perhaps not more susceptible to one than to the other; and considering the malevolent, thievish scoundrels by whom they are continually beset, their record does not compare badly with that of others. Vagrancy is almost unknown amongst them, and if their vices are large their temptations are great; but, take them as a whole, they seldom premeditate evil. Their intentions are mostly on the side of right and goodness. ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... all through the United States, from California to Boston, and up and down, returning to the Pacific coast by way of Canada, where I got into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole tramping experience made me become a Socialist. Previously I had been impressed by the dignity of labour, and, without having read Carlyle or Kipling, I had formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... on the 4th of December, 1846; and as a proof of the efficiency of the industrial schools in checking juvenile vagrancy and delinquency, it may be noticed that nearly a week elapsed before a child was brought to the asylum. When a child is apprehended by the police for begging, or other misdemeanor, he is conveyed to this institution, and his case is investigated; for which purpose ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... boy of 16, a pitiable specimen, when under arrest for vagrancy told such a heartrending story of home conditions, with assertions against family morality, that the judge and others were moved to indignation and an investigation was started. The general feeling was that no one who was not insane could make such statements about their ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... city of light such as is Almaville this spirit obtains, it won't be long, they feel, before the Negro laborers of the South will be firmly in the grasp of a new form of slavery. They are also alarmed at the clamor of leading newspapers for a vagrancy law which will be invoked in times when the Negroes refrain from labor in the hope of advancing their pay. The presence in our ranks of the labor element representing the Negro masses will give striking evidence of the effect things are having upon all classes ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... "Or for vagrancy; or on suspicion of having robbed a bank in Texas, or murdered your great-grandmother in Tasmania. The point is, he'll keep you locked up till this trouble has ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Cromwell's day, the land had lain under the grip of ruthless laws. Of these the sternest were repealed as no longer necessary. The Treasons Act disappeared; so did the old Acts against the Lollards; so did the Act of the Six Articles. A curious attempt was made to deal with the problem of vagrancy, the outcome of prevalent economic conditions, which the penalties of flogging and hanging had failed to repress. The vagrant was to be brought before the magistrates, branded, and handed over to some honest person as ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... to the left, stumbling across a stone step and wooden sill into a narrow, lighted hall, and turning and entering an apartment here again at the right. The door is shut; the name is written down; the charge is made: Vagrancy, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... acknowledgment; and wandering minstrels, with guitar and voice; and a Highland bagpipe, squealing out a tangled skein of discord, together with a Highland maid, who dances a hornpipe; and Punch and Judy,—in a word, we have specimens of all manner of vagrancy that infests England. In these long days, and long and pleasant ones, the promenade is at its liveliest about nine o'clock, which is but just after sundown; and our little R——- finds it difficult to go to sleep amid so much music ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the affecting death of Ophelia,—who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers, quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... ill-fitting suit of civilian clothes, demented, broken, dazed. Of his wanderings, likewise, who shall tell the full truth? He visited a place called Blytheville and took the name of Blythe. He visited great cities, so he said. He was in the west. He was in jail for vagrancy. He watched some cows for a farmer. He remembered nothing of his past. He was sheltered by the Salvation Army somewhere. He was a wanderer ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... plan to keep the banker under their own eyes, with a view of extorting a reward from the missing man's family. The judge of the local court finally decided to send both men away for six months on a charge of vagrancy. ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... and battery, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, &c. The greatest number of arrests were in June, showing that during the hot weather, as is generally the case, more liquor was drank. The birth-place of the criminals, for two months, was ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... midst of the reflective hour that the elate triumph of success began to give place to the inevitable reaction. The partition which stands upon the narrow dividing line between vagrancy and crime is but a paper wall, and any hot-hearted insurrectionary may break through it at will. But to accept the conditions of vagrancy one must first embrace the loathsome thing itself. Griswold ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... angry tone answered. "The street is public. Ain't I got a right to go long it? What you pinchin' me for, anyhow? I ain't full and it ain't vagrancy to walk along the road to ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... the proper ethical pose of a Father Confessor. I have excommunicated you. The charge against you is that you take an audacious advantage of the confessional, not to bless me, but to rejoice in my romantic vagrancy. For a man giving himself airs in the "upper chamber," you have very human ways, and I begin to suspect you only keep your creed and ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the progeny of insane, epileptics, suicides, and criminals, so also among the children of drunkards, do we see cases of congenital idiocy and imbecility, of neurasthenia and inebriety, of psychical and somatic degeneracy, also of depraved morality, of vagrancy and crime. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... The law of vagrancy provided that all freedmen having no lawful employment or business, or who are found unlawfully assembling, and all white persons so assembling in company with freedmen, or "usually associating with freedmen, free negroes, or mulattoes, on terms of equality," are to ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... him, he would take his rest, wherever that happened, like some poor mendicant. He used to denounce, with his most fervent eloquence, that barbarous and brutal provision of the law of England which rendered sleeping in the open air an act of vagrancy, and so punishable, if the sleeper could not give a satisfactory account of himself—a thing which Papaverius never could give under any circumstances. After all, I fear this is an attempt to describe the indescribable. It was the commonest of sayings when any of his friends were ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... abolition of whipping as a punishment unfit for free people, and most States accepted this principle. Even in 1865, the general disposition was to make uniform laws for both races, except in regard to violation of contracts, immoral conduct, vagrancy, marriage, schools, and forms of punishment. In some of these matters the whites were to be more strictly ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... had the whole afternoon before them, and the sense of leisure and safety gave the last touch of lightness to her spirit. With so much time to talk, and no definite object to be led up to, she could taste the rare joys of mental vagrancy. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... and sometimes at considerable length, were the duty of providing seats for the poor in the churches at a small rental, the employment of children, education as a means of saving children from growing up to a life of vagrancy and pauperism, the wages of the poor and how they can be increased.[6] He was especially interested in the rescuing of children from ignorance and vice, and he strongly advocated the establishment of schools for the instruction of dull children and ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... cheerily beating up against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like some living thing fluttering and glowing and careering under their thrilling touch. And sometimes a fleet of sailing-yachts, more beautiful and swift than sea-gulls, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... their parents for adoptive homes, the tie of race is intensely strong, and they are remarkably affectionate to each other, sharing with each other food, clothing, and all that they possess. There are no paupers among them but the lunatics and the lepers, and vagrancy is unknown. Happily on these sunny shores no man or woman can be ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... lead to a warmer appreciation in Norwich of one of the greatest men who ever trod her streets. "The Romany Rye" has a thoroughly Borrovian ending, much in the manner of Sterne, as many of Borrow's passages are. His pilgrimage of tinkering and adventurous vagrancy between May and August, 1825, came to an end at Boston—"a large town, situate at the entrance of an extensive firth"—where a recruiting sergeant wished to enlist him for the service of the Honourable East India Company. But his references to Petulengro and Tawno Chikno disgusted the soldier, ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... the crumbs that fall from their tables, and sometimes they don't, because they are afraid he will take advantage of it to steal the spoons. Or else they take the lofty patriotic ground, and say that their principles forbid them to countenance vagrancy, and that Heaven helps those who help themselves. This is very consoling to Lazarus, and it always gives him pleasure to hear what good moral principles the Philistines—or Snobs—have got, even if he hasn't got any ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... the first of many excellent fights—these are but a few of the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid, when he ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the school which he built, and rough faces as ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... one of the strangest friendships, out of which developed the most delightful biography in all literature. Boswell's taste for literary adventures, and Johnson's literary vagrancy met in a companionship that found much satisfaction in the bohemianism of the inns and coffee houses of old London. Boswell thus describes the eccentric doctor's outlook on this mode ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... and clothing are attracting a certain element to the city which does not desire to labor, while some already here prefer to live on the generosity of others. Chief Dinan has determined that those who apply for relief and refuse work when it is offered them shall leave the city or be arrested for vagrancy. The police judges have suggested establishing a chain gang and putting all vagrants and petty offenders at work clearing up ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... or he or his wife must own forty acres of land or real estate or personal property assessed at not less than three hundred dollars. A long list of disqualifying crimes was added, including wife-beating and conviction for vagrancy. As if this were not enough, after 1903 an applicant for registration might be required to state where he had lived during the preceding five years, the name or names by which known, and the names of his employers. Refusal to answer was made a bar to ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... accident. The journalist has no time to make friends, and he lives in no place long enough to know it intimately; passing acquaintance and exterior aspects of things are his share of the world. And it was in quest of such vagrancy of ideas and affections ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... England, on the contrary, the stage was an outlet for irregular talent, impatient of steady labor or severe restrictions, and captivated by the freedom and diversity of a career which, beginning in vagrancy, might lead at a single bound to a brilliant and enviable position. Hence the biographies of English players, taken collectively, offer a vast store of amusing anecdotes, illustrative not only of the history of the stage, but of personal character and social manners. Yet books of this kind; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... is all, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil's machination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But it must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... A. Mallin went to the central police station Wednesday night and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said he had been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry he must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... made his way, too, to his ancestral home, which he had sold for next to nothing to a speculator and money-lender well known in those days. The money-lender was at home, and hearing of the presence in the neighbourhood of the former owner, now reduced to vagrancy, he gave orders not to admit him into the house, and even, in case of necessity, to drive him away. Misha announced that he would not for his part consent to enter the house, polluted by the presence ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... alluded to probably is 14 Elizabeth, c. 5. Other Acts of the same reign dealing with vagrancy and the first poor-law are 39 Elizabeth, c. 3, and 43 Elizabeth, c. 2 (A.D. 1601). In 1595 vagrancy had assumed such alarming proportions in London that a provost- marshal was appointed to give the wanderers the short shrift of martial law. The course of legislation ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... few questions. Who was going to take her? Who were her friends? She learned that she had none, that her father had been arrested for vagrancy, and would be sent ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... 1830, shortly after he came of age, he agreed for once with his father whose chronic vagrancy had reasserted itself. The whole family set out again on their wanderings and made their way in an oxcart to a new halting place on the Sangamon River in Illinois. There Abraham helped his father clear another piece of land for another illusive "start" in life. The following ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... and all their eyes were focussed upon three men approaching from up the trail. The trio were ordinary-looking creatures, ill-clad and even ragged. In a more stable community their apprehension by the village constable and arrest for vagrancy would have been immediate. "French Louis," the tenderfeet whispered and passed the word along. "Owns three Eldorado claims in a block," the man next to Frona confided to her. "Worth ten millions at the very least." French Louis, striding a little in advance of his companions, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... rectify. Meanwhile it is plain that the local peasant has become a mere dissolute, lazy drunkard. Give a muzhik enough to live upon for twelve months without working, and you will corrupt him for ever, so inured to rags and vagrancy will he grow. And what is the good of that piece of pasture there—of that piece on the further side of those huts? It is a mere flooded tract. Were it mine, I should put it under flax, and clear five thousand roubles, or else ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... times, thrust out houseless and hungry, to wander where he could, he led a life of such utter wretchedness, that at length he determined to steal for himself, and to go home no more. Then came years of struggling vagrancy—during which, Mr. Carlisle, the prison was his pleasantest home and only comfortable shelter; and whenever he was turned out of it he stood in London streets helpless and hopeless but to renew his old ways of thieving and starvation. Nobody had told him ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... was taken up for vagrancy in a great city. When brought before the court an austere judge said: ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... individual slavery had been frustrated by the Freedmen's Bureau and the Fifteenth Amendment. The disfranchisement of 1876 was followed by the widespread rise of "crime" peonage. Stringent laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and labor contracts were enacted and large discretion given judge and jury in cases of petty crime. As a result Negroes were systematically arrested on the slightest pretext and the labor of convicts leased to private parties. This "convict lease ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... hand in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in regular changes, without a moment's intermission. The task of recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... other purposes, it is obvious that it is right to do everything possible to get that land devoted to tillage, first, as national insurance for the reasons above stated, and, second, to support a larger population under healthy conditions. One of the great causes of discontent, of vagrancy, and of distress in the sixteenth century was certainly the conversion of large tracts which had formerly been arable into pasture land, because the land laid down as pasture would produce a larger profit to the ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... about to be taken up under the act for the suppression of vagrancy, we flew out of the house, sprang into a canoe before the door, and paddled with might and main over to the opposite side ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... smile of his singularly sensitive mouth and vagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with which his gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities en fete calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... ragged, barefooted, friendless, homeless, penniless; walked about the streets till afternoon, when he received a penny from a gentleman to buy a loaf; met, next day, some expert thieves in the Minories; went along with them, and continues in a course of vagrancy and crime." ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... bodies to the police-court, the police officer was sending 'Silly Zoska' back to her native village. A few months after leaving her child in Maciek's care she had been arrested; the reason was unknown to her. As a matter of fact she had been accused of begging, vagrancy, and attempted arson. After the discovery of each new crime, they had taken her from police- station to prison, from prison to infirmary, from infirmary to another prison, and so ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... unqualified praise stopped and the complaints began: the negroes would not work; they left their plantations and went wandering from place to place, stealing by the way; they preferred a life of idleness and vagrancy to that of honest and industrious labor; they either did not show any willingness to enter into contracts, or, if they did, showed a stronger disposition to break them than to keep them; they were becoming insubordinate and ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... culprit spend the night in limbo. The next morning Thoreau was released, the tax having been paid by some unknown person—Emerson, undoubtedly. This was a tame enough ending to what was rather an interesting affair—the hope of the best citizens being that Thoreau would get a goodly sentence for vagrancy. The townfolk looked upon Thoreau and Alcott with suspicious eyes. They both came in for much well-deserved censure, and Emerson did not go unsmirched, since he was guilty of harboring and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... to the cities, for there, also, the Plutocracy was in control. They had but one alternative,—to leave the soil and become vagrants, in brief, to starve. And even there they were frustrated, for stringent vagrancy laws were passed ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... lying excuses, and more mendacious promises. He is tempted to elude responsibility; to delay settlements; to prevaricate upon the terms; to resist equity, and devise specious fraud. When the eager creditor would restrain such vagrancy by law, the debtor then thinks himself released from moral obligation, and brought to a legal game, in which it is lawful for the best player to win. He disputes true accounts; he studies subterfuges; extorts provocatious delays; and harbors ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... SMYTH. Attracted national attention about ten years ago by walking some hunderds of miles from his home in the South to Harvard University. Arriving there, he was arrested on a charge of vagrancy. While in jail, he wrote a poem, "Harvard Square." The poem created a sentiment that led to his quick release. He is the ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... patent of vagrancy, and my license for picking and choosing, I choose out these three articles to toy with:—first, Bibliolatry; second, Development applied to the Bible and Christianity; third, Philology, as the particular resource against false ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Steele county, and is one of the most valuable of all the many establishments which the state has provided for the encouragement of good citizenship. There are eleven buildings, which comprise all the agencies that tend to make abandoned children useful citizens and rescue them from a life of vagrancy and crime. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcerate ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... fellowship between the Flibustiers and Buccaneers, for they were all outlaws, without a country, with few national predilections,—men who could not live at home except at the risk of apprehension for vagrancy or crime,—men who ran away in search of adventure when the public ear was ringing with the marvels and riches of the Indies, and when a multitude of sins could be covered by judicious preying. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Dutcher, is that you didn't get your name in the paper," called Tom denouncingly. "But you will, one of these days. It'll be in the police-court news, though. Sixty days for vagrancy!" ...
— The Grammar School Boys of Gridley - or, Dick & Co. Start Things Moving • H. Irving Hancock
... born in Ireland, at Pallas, in the county of Longford, in the early November of 1728. He lived for over forty-five years a life of poverty, of vagrancy, of squalor, of foolish dissipation, of grotesque vanity, of an {168} industry as amazing as his improvidence, of a native idleness that was successfully combated by a tireless industry, of an amazing simplicity that was only ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... engaged in 'killing time' you will find a man who is disobeying one of the most fundamental laws of civilization. A man who habitually devotes himself to 'killing time' is a dangerous citizen and the law against vagrancy is aimed against him." ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... gone. The silence was that of a common overwhelming disaster. No one spoke with his neighbor; no one observed the vagrant as he entered and made his way to a seat on one of the meanest benches, a little apart from the others. He had not sat there since the day of his indictment for vagrancy. The judge took his seat, and making a great effort to control himself, passed his eyes slowly over the court-room. All at once he caught sight of old King Solomon sitting against the wall in an obscure corner; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... trek, course, ambulation^, march, walk, promenade, constitutional, stroll, saunter, tramp, jog trot, turn, stalk, perambulation; noctambulation^, noctambulism; somnambulism; outing, ride, drive, airing, jaunt. equitation, horsemanship, riding, manege [Fr.], ride and tie; basophobia^. roving, vagrancy, pererration^; marching and countermarching; nomadism; vagabondism, vagabondage; hoboism [U.S.]; gadding; flit, flitting, migration; emigration, immigration, demigration^, intermigration^; wanderlust. plan, itinerary, guide; handbook, guidebook, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the window, the floor was lighted up, and there were shadows on it. A cricket was chirping. Through the wall Father Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once been housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now "the former Father Housekeeper"; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to me, brothers, that this is an idle old vagabond, who does no good to any one. We should be well advised, I think, to prosecute him for vagrancy. But that is not at this moment the matter in hand. Owing to the accident—scarcely fortunate—of this old man's passing with his lanthorn, it would certainly appear that citizens have been bitten by rodents. It is then, I fear, our duty to institute proceedings ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... steeds, notwithstanding their unpretentious housings, might still excite the cupidity of highway rogues. As it minimized their risk from this latter class, the young girl was content to wear the cap of the jestress, piquantly perched upon her dark curls, thereby suggesting an indefinable affinity with vagrancy and the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... told the story of sugar, but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these months of "luxurious vagrancy" he described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... was that, as he was passing his shilling army razor over his soapy chin, he saw a stockingless lad, in a purply coat and faded hunting-cap, making his way up to the house, at a pace that betokened more than ordinary vagrancy. It was the kennel, stable, and servants' hall courier of Nonsuch House, come to say that Sir Harry hunted ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... down to Rockhold to-morrow, and investigate this matter for myself. In my capacity of justice of the peace I shall issue a warrant to have that woman brought before me on a charge of vagrancy, and then I shall examine her on this point. But, Ryland, you are to be careful not to drop even ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... had gone immediately. I might have got him out of that woman's hands, and made his life happy for years. There was the sting, but the crime had been long before. You know the rest. I had no health to remain, no heart to come home; and then came vagrancy indeed. I drifted wherever restlessness or impulse took me, till all my working years were over, and till the day when the sight of your father's wedding-ring showed me that I should not break my mad word by accepting the only welcome that any ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this poor fellow says. If you insist—er—why, of course I've no other option but to send him down . . . you understand? I would not presume to dictate to you your duty. On the other hand . . . if you are not specially anxious to press a charge of vagrancy against this man I—er—am willing to give him a chance to obtain this work—that he insists he ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... years back heretics had been sent to the fire. Civil order was even more profound than religious order. The failure of the northern revolt proved the political tranquillity of the country. The social troubles from vagrancy and evictions were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favour which had met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate devotion. Of her faults indeed England beyond the ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... modelled upon Balzac and Voiture, are sometimes sorry reading. But both Wycherley and Cromwell were wits and men of education, and it is not difficult to pardon that morbid, over-active mind for occasional vagrancy in its efforts after some congenial escape from the Tory fox-hunters of Berkshire and the ribald drinking songs ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... take their women along or after settling in a place send to some trustworthy member and have their women brought on. Practically the only charge that the local authorities of New York can bring against these men is that of vagrancy and no magistrate will convict on a charge of vagrancy when the alleged vagrant can show the deeds to property worth $20,000 or $30,000. An incident of this kind actually happened in New York ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... [243] The number of undesirables was so great that it became necessary for the Insular Government to pass a Vagrant Act, under which the loafer could be arrested and disposed of. The Act declares vagrancy to be a misdemeanour, and provides penalties therefor; but it has always been interpreted in a generous spirit of pity for the delinquent, to whom the option of a free passage home or imprisonment was given, generally resulting in his quitting ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... population of the lower class, and their propensity to drink and petty offences. There are also certain "labour laws," applying to natives only, and particularly to those on agricultural locations, which are intended to check the disposition of Kafirs living on native reserves to become idle or to take to vagrancy. Doubtless there is a risk that people who have never acquired habits of steady industry—for the tribal Kafir leaves to his wives the cultivation of his plot of maize or sorghum—may relapse into a laziness hurtful to their own ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Mr. Shuffles went down the bay with his host in the yacht. On the way they passed the school ship Massachusetts, to which boys are sentenced by the courts for crime and vagrancy, and on board of which they are disciplined and educated. Mr. Lowington explained ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... what he taught and exemplified, an access unto the Father, an assurance of his forgiveness of us and of our reconciliation with him. We thus enter upon the experience of that true life which is "joy and peace in believing," and which remains indestructible through all the vanishing vagrancy of sin, misery, and the world. "This is eternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent:" that is, imperishable life is to be obtained by union with God in faith and love, through a hearty acceptance ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... slave still idled, or if he ran away and was caught again he was to be marked on the face with an "S" and to be adjudged a slave for life. If finally refractory he was to be sentenced as a felon. This terrible measure, intended partly to reduce lawless vagrancy, partly to supply cheap labor to employers, failed of its purpose and was repealed in two years. Its re-enactment was vainly urged by Cecil upon Parliament in 1559. As a substitute for it in this year the law was passed forbidding masters to receive ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Vagrant Act, 17 George II., c. 5., the heir and assigns of John Dutton, of Dutton, co. Chester, deceased, Esq., are exempt from the pains and penalties of vagrancy. Query—Who was the said John Dutton, and why was such a boon conferred on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... narrative lacks of this flavor of luxurious vagrancy must be supplied by the peculiar interest of a cruise which violated every tradition of the annals of yachting, and created precedents which in all human probability will never be followed so long as iron ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... environment. In Boston out of one thousand cases investigated twenty-five years ago (1890-91), twenty per cent was due to drink, a figure nearly twice as much as the average found in other large cities; nine per cent more was due to such misconduct as shiftlessness, crime, and vagrancy; while seventy per cent was owing to misfortune, including defective employment and sickness or death in the family. Five thousand families investigated at another time in New York City showed that physical disability was present in three out of four families, and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe |
