"Spadeful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the music, while what it really was, was the measure of the waste of the strings, when they were made the instrument of the music. If a spade is used in digging, the spade wastes in proportion to every spadeful of earth it is made to lift. The more it digs, the more it wastes. If we could arrange that a stream of fine steel particles flowed into the spade, to replace the waste caused by each act of digging, we might perhaps come to think that these fine steel particles were the cause of the digging, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... buried alive in a sandhill, to stay the pestilence then raging in the district. The people gave them some bread and butter, to induce them to go into the living grave prepared for them; and when the first spadeful of sand was thrown into the hole, one of the children cried out, 'Mother, they are throwing sand on my bread and butter!' Comparing this with the treatment of witches, or women suspected of witchcraft, at the same epoch, it is not at all impossible ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... better to begin their work by covering the features with a cap or a broad-brimmed hat. It was difficult for the coarsest of them to fling a spadeful of dank clay directly upon the wide-open ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... one afternoon, into the great transactions of future times,—and recollected for what purposes this little plot, by a decree fast bound down in iron, had been destined,—she gave a nod to Nature:—'twas enough,—Nature threw half a spadeful of her kindliest compost upon it, with just so much clay in {77} it as to retain the forms of angles and indenting,—and so little of it too, as not to cling to the spade, and render works of so much ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... trees had to be felled Clive set tall arbor vitae and soft maples. He was an expensive young man where Athalie's pleasure was concerned; and as he worked there in the lovely May weather his interest and enthusiasm grew with every fresh fragrant spadeful of ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... brain, stomach; and we make 'em miserable. Liberty for everyone—that's my rule. Dirty children are healthy, happy children. If a bee stings you in England, you clap on fresh dirt to cure the pain. Here we cure all kinds of pain with dirt. If my child is ill I dig up a spadeful of fresh mould and rub it well—best remedy out. I'm not religious, but I remember one miracle. The Saviour spat on the ground and made mud with the spittle to anoint the eyes of the blind man. Made him see directly. What does ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... spadeful was dug out of the Floridian soil, and from that moment this useful tool did not stop idle a moment in the hands of the miner. The gangs relieved each other every ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne |
