|
|
|
More "Spade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... legend, Yin Chiao fought on the side of the Yin against Wu Wang, and after many adventures was caught by Jan Teng between two mountains, which he pressed together, leaving only Yin Chiao's head exposed above the summits. The general Wu Chi promptly cut it off with a spade. Chiang Tz[u)]-ya ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings. The matter was left to the local magistrates ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... dark as a cave, Or a vault in the nave When the iron door Is closed, and the floor Of the church relaid With trowel and spade. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... Scraggsy," he announced cheerfully when the gun was finally assembled on the carriage, "get a sizeable timber an' spike it to the centre o' the deck. I'll run the trail spade up against that cleat an' that'll keep the recoil from lettin' the gun go backward, clean through the opposite rail and overboard. Gimme a coupler gallons o' distillate and some waste, somebody. This cosmoline's got to come out o' the tube an' out o' ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... began in the streets. Leaving, he went with his dark-skinned Eastern musicians to the provinces. And the government trembled. Peasants threw aside spade, forgot vodka and rushed to his free concerts, given in canvas-covered booths; and the impetus communicated to this huge, weltering mass of slaving humanity, broke wave-like upon the remotest borders of the empire. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... did his best by leaping into the ditch, taking the spade, and showing the superior security of the angle of inclination traced by the King, but all in vain; both Trenton and Kitson silently but obstinately scouted the notion that any king should know more about ditches ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... miles from either end, the two holes came together exactly, within a limit of error of less than six inches, and made one continuous tunnel twelve miles long. Now, this was not all accomplished by the practical men who knew how to handle a spade in digging a ditch. The work was controlled by science, and it was known in advance what the results would be. I do not mean that it was known how hard the digging would be, nor how much trouble would be caused by caving or by water; but it was known that if the practical work ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... New Orleans Delta, "between the overseer of Mr. A. Collins (a planter in our vicinity) and one of the negroes. It seems the overseer wished to chastise the negro for some offence, and the negro resisted and struck the overseer with a spade. The overseer grappled with him, and called some of the negroes to his assistance; but, perceiving that the negroes were not willing to assist him, he drew his knife, and stabbed the negro to the heart. A coroner's inquest has been held, ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... General's bed-room. He had heard an angry altercation carried on between General Darrington and some one, and supposed he was scolding one of the servants. He went to a shed in the barn yard to get a spade he needed, and when he came back he saw the prisoner walk down the steps, and thought it singular a stranger should leave the house that way. Wondered whom she could be, and wondered also that the General had quarrelled with such a splendid looking lady. Next ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... passed away, and Fink and Karl were still absent. One sunny day, Lenore was busy enlarging her plantation, where about fifty young firs and birches already made some show. In her straw hat, a small spade in her hand, she seemed so lovely to Anton as he was hurrying by that he could not resist standing still to ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... plain. In all ages men delight to acquire property by expedients other than that of honest labour. In the period of private war the most obvious alternative to working is fighting, or hiring servants to fight; the sword is mightier than the spade. If we add that an expedition into a foreign country offers the additional advantages of escape from your exacting creditors, and your still more exacting king, we have something very like the economics of the Invasion of Anywhere ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... coined the word when he could not find it, transposed phrases, inverted sentences, and never called a spade an agricultural implement. Not content with this, he put the spade on exhibition and this often at unnecessary times, and occasionally prefaced the word with an adjective. Had he been let alone he would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of the avenue, and round the corner of it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud to his ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... explanation. The story is this:—The laird riding past a high steep bank, stopped opposite a hole in it, and said, "Hairy, I saw a brock gang in there." "Did ye?" said Hairy; "wull ye hand my horse, sir?" "Certainly," said the laird, and away rushed Hairy for a spade. After digging for half-an-hour, he came back, quite done, to the laird, who had regarded him musingly. "I canna find him, sir," said Hairy. "'Deed," said the laird, very coolly, "I wad ha' wondered if ye had, for it's ten years sin' I ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... well on the beach at Nome, saw in the sands thrown up that alluring yellow glint which has led so many men to fortune and so many to death. The story of his find came to the ears of an old prospector from Idaho, who, too ill to go inland, was stranded in the military station of Nome. Spade and pan were at once put to work and in twenty days the fortunate invalid found ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... almost unknown—the people are on farms—the style of living is less costly by half, but greatly superior in quality and comfort—according to the census, there is but little crime—almost all have homes—the amount of agricultural labor does not fluctuate—the farms are not cultivated by the spade and hoe, but are large enough to justify a system of enlarged agricultural operations by the aid of horse power. The result is that more is saved, and the proceeds more equally distributed between capital and labor, or the rich and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... groaned Cleena, with a comical grimace. "Pose! Sure, it's I minds the time when the master caught me diggin' petaties an' kept me standin', with me foot on me spade, an' me spade in the ground, an' me body this shape," bending forward, "till I got such a crick in me back I couldn't walk upright, for better 'n a week. Posin', indeed! Well, he might. He looks ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... a fertile soile (because the generall curse is so) till your Trees grow great, will be noysome, and deforme your allies, walkes, beds, and squares, your vnder Gardners must labour to keepe all cleanly & handsome from them and all other filth with a Spade, weeding kniues, rake with iron teeth: a skrapple of ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... more tiring than spade work. But I'll guarantee that the man who does eight hours' brain work is not much more tired than the man who does ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... flushed and angry faces at the table, and withal a measure of awe. They were a little frightened at this smooth-faced young fellow, and the swing and smash of his words, and his dreadful trait of calling a spade a spade. Mr. Calvin ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... non-celibate clergy, and an intermingled aristocracy? Your endeavours, my good young man, will lessen like those of the man who employed a spade to uproot a rock. It wants blasting. Your married clergy and merchandized aristocracy are coils: they are the ivy about your social tree: you would resemble Laocoon in the throes, if one could imagine you anything ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... breathes, With verdant carvings, flowery wreathes Of never-wasting bloom; In strong relief his goodly base All instruments of labour grace, The trowel, spade, and loom. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... yet has loved a maid, But they were sure to part, sir; Nor never lacked a paltry spade But that he drew ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... struck a spade deeper than he knew into his first countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples about the means of obtaining information which might have embarrassed a ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... clergyman disappeared to the vestry; a young florid man, with pale hair, tightened his leather belt, turned up his sleeves, watched a grand pair of biceps roll up as he crooked his elbows, then, taking a spade, set to work upon the wet mound he had dug from the earth the day before to clear those few square feet of space below. As he worked, he whistled, for his occupation held no more significance to him ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the spade or the shuttle, that plies Its own honest task in its own honest way, Serves heaven not less than a star in the skies— What more could the Pleiades do ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... be a yeoman, mither, to follow my father's trade, To bow my back in miry banks, at pleugh and hoe and spade. Stinting wife, and bairns, and kye, to fat some courtier lord,— Let them die o' rent wha like, mither, and I'll die ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... man MEANING, AS YOU WILL EASILY SUPPOSE, MR. PITT who could give them strength and solidity; that, under this person, he should be willing to serve in any capacity, not only as a General Officer, but as a pioneer; and would take up a spade and a mattock." When he quitted the seals, they were offered first to Lord Egmont, then to Lord Hardwicke; who both declined them, probably for the same reasons that made the Duke of Grafton resign them; but after their going a-begging for some time, the Duke of———-begged them, and has them ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... guard what it builds with laws and with that sword which is behind all laws. Non-resistance is for the non-constructive man, for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint in the dust; the builder and maker with the first stroke of his foundation spade uses force and opens ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... its own spade, and took it in turns to carry the Lamb. He was the baby, and they called him that because 'Baa' was the first thing he ever said. They called Anthea 'Panther', which seems silly when you read it, but when you say it it sounds ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... his lips—never, at all events, when I saw him, which was often; for every day as I strolled past his domain he would be on the outside of his hedge, or just coming out of his gate, invariably with something in his hand—a spade, a fork, or stick of wood, or an old empty fruit-basket. Although thus having the appearance of being very much occupied, he would always stop for a few minutes' talk with me; and by-and-by I began to suspect that he was a very social ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... smash their entrenchments in no time, and effectually cover an advance across the bridge or one of the drifts. When I was in the army it was always said that the next war would be fought with the spade as much as with the rifle, but so far we have seen nothing whatever of the spade, except just by the guns. We were also taught that strong positions held by steady troops armed with magazine guns and supported by good artillery were absolutely impregnable ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... Ho! dwellers in the vales! Ho! ye who by the chafing tide Have roughened in the gales! Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot, Lay by the bloodless spade; Let desk, and case, and counter rot, And burn ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... ugly face off these 'ere works," said the foreman; "take it 'ome and bury it in the back-yard. Anybody'll be glad to lend you a spade." ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... irrigation. The idea pleased mightily, and to work we went instanter. Even the chief's own doctor is at it, and works like a good fellow, laughing heartily at the cunning of the 'foreigner' who can make rain so. We have only one spade, and this is without a handle; and yet by means of sticks sharpened to a point we have performed all the digging of a pretty long canal. The earth was lifted out in 'gowpens' and carried to the huge dam we have ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... shout heard through parlor and hall. But they only leave a few dark freckles on the garden beds. Alas, yes! There is no light without its shadow, no joy without its sorrow tagging after. It isn't all marbles and play in the gladsome springtide. Bub has not only to spade up the garden—there is some sense in that—but he has to dig up the flower beds, and help his mother set out ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... to ingenuity, talent, and manliness, the whole world swings open. Carnegie's Thirty Partners, most of whom have come from the working-ranks, demonstrate that a man can rise from the pick, the spade, the foreman's duties, to the control of great ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Dwarfs. I taught them how to plant and to sow, and to reap the yellow grain. I showed them where the precious metals of the earth lie hidden, and how to smelt iron from its ores,—how to shape the ploughshare and the spade, the spear and the battle-axe. I taught them how to tame the wild horses of the meadows, and how to train the yoke-beasts to the plough; how to build lordly dwellings and mighty strongholds, and how to sail in ships across old AEgir's watery kingdom. But they gave ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... this till noon; he trimming, lifting and placing the logs—and elephants have never swung teak more splendidly—while I, with our jointed camp spade, filled in the sand. The use of an axe could not possibly betray our position as Efaw Kotee had been betrayed, because the breeze continued from him to us, and also for the equally good reason that the bite of an axe in soggy palmetto does not sound with anything like ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... cheaper. Potatoes, for example, do not at present, through the greater part of the kingdom, cost half the price which they used to do thirty or forty years ago. The same thing may be said of turnips, carrots, cabbages; things which were formerly never raised but by the spade, but which are now commonly raised by the plough. All sort of garden stuff, too, has become cheaper. The greater part of the apples, and even of the onions, consumed in Great Britain, were, in the last century, imported from Flanders. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... soul, and fit it for its cares; Their graves before them and their griefs behind, Have each a med'cine for the rustic mind; Nor has he care to whom his wealth shall go, Or who shall labour with his spade and hoe; But as he lends the strength that yet remains, And some dead neighbour on his bier sustains, (One with whom oft he whirl'd the bounding flail, Toss'd the broad coit, or took the inspiring ale,) "For me," (he meditates,) "shall soon be done This friendly ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... work would be repeated again and again. But he just watched for the next hour as Max kept returning to the far end of the bed and working his way up to the window, nodding mindlessly with each neat twist of his spade attachment. ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... us cross, as well as being impelled by prying curiosity to see how many kerans he gets for his trouble. The first stream is found to be arm-pit deep, with a fairly strong current. My sturdy Khorassani crosses over first, to try the bottom, feeling his way with a long-handled spade; he then returns and carries the bicycle across on his head, afterward carrying me across astride his shoulders, landing me safely with nothing worse ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... life, You must leave 'im very careful where 'e fell; An' may thank your stars an' gaiters if you didn't feel 'is knife That you ain't told off to bury 'im as well. Then the sweatin' Tommies wonder as they spade the beggars under Why lootin' should be entered as a crime; So if my song you'll 'ear, I will learn you plain an' clear 'Ow to pay yourself for fightin' overtime. (Chorus) With ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... soldiers, while King Frederick declared that he was ready to die in his capital like a bird in its nest. Every soul in the city burned with patriotism, and nobles, burghers, and laborers alike manned the walls, while even women could be seen wielding spade and axe in the repair of the neglected defences. When the siege began the citizens made several successful sallies against their foes and hope arose ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... manner as she led him to where her father was; perhaps she was rather tired after the varied emotions she had experienced; perhaps she was still anxious. He was not anxious. It was in a glad way that he addressed the old gentleman who stood there with a spade ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... is my task. I was thoughtlessly cruel. Neither can we remain here, only long enough to bury those bodies. It would be inhuman not to do that. Sam, there is an old spade leaning against the cabin ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... high road- Yet the Deil hae General Wade For learnin's the shauchle instead o' the step Wi' the weary wark o' his spade, Till the Jew an' the Sassenach lord it noo Owre the hills whaur the ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... in some form unknown to her narrow experience), and lighted short pipes, and breached the brig upon the putrescent monster, and grappled to it, and then the skipper jumped on it, a basket slung to his back, and a rope fast under his shoulders in case of accident, and drove his spade in behind the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Mrs. Crimm, serving them punctiliously with all that was included in the evening's refreshments. When there was nothing more that he could do I saw him sitting between Gracie Hurd the little shirtwaist girl, and Marion Spade, a waitress at one of the up-town restaurants, eating his supper as they ate theirs, and they were finding him apparently ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... not listening; he had fallen into a brown study, turning the piece of metal in his skilful, wonted, knotty fingers, with their spade tips. ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... cargo of wooden-ware, a shop full of knick-knacks, an age of inventions. Boys need not be kept back to the hand-craft of the knife. For in-doors there are the type case and printing press, the paint box, the tool box, the lathe; and for out doors, the trowel, the spade, the grafting knife. It matters not how many of the minor arts the youth acquires. The more the merrier. Let each one gain the most he can in all such ways; for arts like these bring no harm in their train; quite otherwise, they lure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... I mind me, such impressions made; P'r'aps you never heard of Ginger Hicks, Him what done in uncle with a spade Down in Canning Town in ninety-six? Ginger was a wrong 'un from the fust; As a child ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... of poor, ignorant savages. It is an ugly word, isn't it? But why dissimulate? At least, we can call a spade a spade. These men are human beings. Their right to life and happiness is as good as yours or mine, and their souls ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... little bit more of what you mean? I know you are speaking as my friend, and, believe me, I am not ungrateful. I am sure there is a definite story against me. I wish you would call a spade a ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... himself with another scrutiny, the red-headed man resumed his work. 'We want to put this horse up here,' said Mr. Pickwick; 'I suppose we can, can't we?' 'Want to put that ere horse up, do ee?' repeated the red-headed man, leaning on his spade. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... his time at the muskeg, encouraging the men who searched it and often assisting in the work. The whole morass was being systematically turned over with the spade, but no further discoveries had been made. In addition to this, Jernyngham rode to and fro about the prairie, talking to the farmers whom he met on the trail or found at work in the fields. They ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... parapet it was turned sharp to left and right, forming a capital T with the cross-piece running roughly along the line of trench and parapet. Here there was need of the utmost deliberation and caution. A pick could not be used, and even a spade had to be handled gently, in case the sounds of working should reach the Germans overhead. In some places the Subaltern could actually hear the movements and footsteps of the enemy ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... the wolf's clothing of war, save for the comparatively innocent diversion of a militia training. Not that my flock are backward to undergo the hardships of defensive warfare. They serve cheerfully in the great army which fights even unto death pro aris et focis, accoutred with the spade, the axe, the plane, the sledge, the spelling-book, and other such effectual weapons against want and ignorance and unthrift. I have taught them (under God) to esteem our human institutions as but tents of a night, to be stricken whenever Truth ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... over the dry-farm. There are several kinds of disk harrows used by dry-farmers. The full disk is, everything considered, the most useful. The cutaway harrow is often used in cultivating old alfalfa land; the spade disk harrow has a very limited application in dry-farming; and the orchard disk harrow is simply a modlfication of the full disk harrow whereby the farmer is able to travel between the rows of trees and so to cultivate the soil under ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... He had been president of the State Agricultural Society, and was eminent, not only for his knowledge of his subject, but for his power of making it interesting. Men came away from Mr. Gould's lectures filled with intense desire to get hold of a spade or hoe and to begin turning ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to—themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... with a grin. Fortunately the professor did not hear him; but the boys could hardly keep from laughing outright as they set to work with the spade. A few minutes of brisk digging set the professor at liberty and he was able to stand upright and triumphantly exhibit a small black rock which looked in no way remarkable, but which, it was evident, ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... meetin' up, don't it now? Likewise it's always to m' benefit, too. Only this time I've got me somethin' to trade. You keep on goin' down this trail, compadre, an' maybe you'll wind up with a spade pattin' you down ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... green, round-crowned, narrow-brimmed hunting hats and green boots up to just below their knees. Each carried a heavy shafted hunting spear, tipped with a huge triangular gleaming head, pointed like a needle, edged like a razor, broad as a spade at ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... tree, in order to build himself a dwelling; a third is hoeing in his field of Indian corn. Here comes a huntsman out of the woods, dragging a bear which he has shot, and shouting to the neighbors to lend him a hand. There goes a man to the sea-shore, with a spade and a bucket, to dig a mess of clams, which were a principal article of food with the first settlers. Scattered here and there are two or three dusky figures, clad in mantles of fur, with ornaments of bone hanging from their ears, and the feathers of wild birds in their coal black hair. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... [is heard calling, almost out of breath]. I wanted to catch you before you went down. [Enters.] There was nobody else at home to bring the spade, so I ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... of the mountain-side! Ho, dwellers in the vales! Ho, ye who by the chafing tide Have roughened in the gales! Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot, Lay by the bloodless spade: Let desk and case and counter rot, And ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... billowy swellings, like the backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow colouring of the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by little gather a feeble soil over the iron substance; then, supporting the narrow slip of clinging ground with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that seem always to have chosen ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... mine, and after the death of my aunt he became a Carthusian monk. As I write these lines, ill and aged as he is, and bent with pain, I know he is digging his own grave, weak with the weight of the spade, imploring God to take him, and thinking sometimes of me, of his little Bohemian. Ah, the dear, good man, it is to him that I owe all that is best in me. I love him devotedly and have the greatest respect for him. How many times ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Especially if those who are not known, For Cuckolds too the Title wou'd but own, And such as are not summon'd would appear, In those Accoutrements we ought to wear, Which are our Horns, a Pick Axe and a Spade, That Paths may for our Wives be ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... "in a cardboard case, with some inanity about 'digging for fortune with a royal spade' emblazoned on the cover. The moment I saw it in the shop I said to myself 'Froplinsons' and to the attendant 'How much?' When he said 'Ninepence,' I gave him their address, jabbed our card in, paid tenpence or elevenpence to cover the postage, and thanked ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... it no longer. He found his hostess digging around the roots of some rosebushes in her small garden. Curtly she declined his offer to take the spade. For a minute he watched her uneasily before he blurted ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... menageries. The bill of the kiwi, which has the nostrils close to the tip, is even more sensitive than that of the woodcock and is employed in very similar fashion. At Regent's Park the keeper supplies the bird with fresh worms so long as the ground is soft enough for spade-work. They are left in a pan, and the kiwi eats them during the night. In winter, however, when worms are not only hard to come by in sufficient quantity but also frost-bitten and in poor condition, an efficient substitute is found in shredded fillet steak, which, whether it accepts it for worms ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... development of the extremities and of the features of the face,—the bony as well as the soft parts. In a well-marked case the hands and feet are greatly enlarged, but not otherwise deformed, and the normal functions are not disturbed. The hypertrophy involves all the tissues, giving a curious spade-like appearance to the hands. The feet are similarly enlarged, although the big toe may be relatively much larger. The nails also become broad and large. The face increases in volume and becomes elongated, in consequence of the hypertrophy of the superior ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the night of the 7th a strange, murmurous clangor arose from the British camp, and was borne on the moist air to the lines of their slumbering foes. The blows of pickaxe and spade as the ground was thrown up into batteries by gangs of workmen, the rumble of the artillery as it was placed in position, the measured tread of the battalions as they shifted their places or marched ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... father bought a large building-lot and erected a neat and commodious house, which remained in the possession of the family until sold by Mrs. Cunningham after the death of her husband. The lot was soon converted into a garden by its owner who tilled it with the spade and allowed no plough to be used in his little Eden. It was characteristic of his generous spirit, too, that none of the surplus product was ever sold, but was freely given to less favored neighbors. Happy years were spent by Mr. Cunningham in his shop, in his ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... the genealogical trees which she already knew by heart. Beside her, astride a chair, sat Julien, smoking a pipe and occasionally spitting on the ground as he watched the growth of the colored certificate of his nobility. Soon old Simon on his way to the kitchen garden stopped, with his spade on his shoulder, to look at the painting, and the news of Bataille's arrival having reached the two farms the farmers' wives came hurrying up also. Standing on either side of the baroness, they went into ecstasies over the drawing and kept repeating: ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... continued long after the first struggle. M'Taggart, who had his prejudices, but who had unusually good opportunities for observation, thought that a tenth of the poorer Irish settlers died during their first two years in the country. He found them clumsy at their work, accustomed to the spade and shovel, not to the axe, and maiming themselves most fearfully, or even killing themselves, in their {22} experiments in clearing the ground.[16] Of all who came, the immigration agents thought the Lowland Scots and the Ulster Irishmen the best, and while the ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... be too careful, boys," said Mr Rogers, picking up the flat spade-shaped head, and opening the jaws with ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... extensive preparations, and it was not till winter that he drew his army round the walls of Numantia, defended by only eight thousand citizens. Scipio even declined a battle, and fought with mattock and spade. A double wall of circumvallation, surmounted with towers, was built around the city, and closed the access to it by the Douro, by which the besieged relied upon for provisions. The city sustained a memorable siege of nearly a year, and was only reduced by famine. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... in his way). Well, Mum, we 'ave 'ad the 'andle of his spade, and the brim of his garden 'at, but they wore out last year and 'ad to be thrown away—things won't last for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... In the middle (which was now visible, as the "creature" had just transferred the last potato to his own plate, stabbing it with his knife for that purpose) was a quaint representation of a mournful-looking couple, clad in singularly ill-fitting aprons of fig-leaves. The man was digging with a spade, while the woman sat at a spinning-wheel placed dangerously near the edge of the deep ditch which her husband had already dug. Round the edge ran an inscription, which, after some study, Hilda made out to ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... spade guinea—a pocket piece I've carried for years. You've heard, no doubt, of vital things turning upon the tossing of a coin. Well, if you see me toss this coin to-morrow, something of that sort will occur. It will be tossed up in the midst of a riddle, Major; when it comes ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... holding his violin high above his head. "It is my only child; it will laugh or cry, and love and scold as I bid it, and make everybody else do the same when I touch its heart-strings." Jean had brought his violin under his arm, in place of a spade, to help build up the walls of the city. He had never heard of Amphion, with his lyre, building up the walls of Thebes; but Jean knew that in his violin lay a power of work by other hands, if he played while they labored. "It lightened toil, and made work go merrily as the bells ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... when ripe, he kept to sow again, and from this very small beginning, in the course of a few seasons, he had a great quantity of grain, both for food and for sowing. But this meant every year much hard work, for he had no plow nor harrow, and all the ground had to be dug with a clumsy spade, made from a very hard, heavy wood that grew ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... into a torrent of imprecations. "Where have they buried her? Take me to the place!" I cried, as I flung a piece of gold to the woman. She grasped it eagerly. "Bring a spade, and come quick, for God's ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... devotion to Dexter showed itself as the woman's devotion had shown itself—in the man's rough way. He threw down his spade with ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... flout it on that account. You should not blame a bream because it is not a barbel, or a chub for not being a trout, yet the angler grumbles if he catches the humbler fish when aiming at the noble; we are all agreed that the gardener was not justified in "larning" with a spade the squalid batrachians to be toads; even musical comedies ought not to be criticized with spade strokes, although in connection with them it is a pity that a spade so rarely has been called by its proper name. Moreover, one may have an entirely unreasonable prejudice against ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... all was din and confusion around the incipient fort, when the startled Frenchmen saw the neighboring height of St. John's swarming with naked warriors. Laudonniere set his men in array, and for a season, pick and spade were dropped for arquebuse and pike. The savage chief descended to the camp. The artist Le Moyne, who saw him, drew his likeness from memory, a tall, athletic figure, tattooed in token of his rank, plumed, bedecked with strings ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... yellow ray directly at the crack in the nursery shutter. The ray was sharp: it smote full on Archie's eyelids, as he lay asleep, surrounded by "Robinson Crusoe," two red apples, a piece of gingerbread, and a spade, all of which he had taken to bed with him. When he felt the prick of the sun-ray he opened his eyes wide. "Why, morning's come!" he said, and without more ado raised himself ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... February at nearest. We live here the usual quiet country life: and now that the snow is so deep we are rather at a loss for exercise. It is very hard work toiling along the roads, and besides so blinding to the eyes. I take a spade, and scuppet {44} away the snow from the footpaths. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... once a like pleasure in raking over an Indian shell-heap with Wyman. The quiet, amused amazement of the native who plied the spade for us was an odd contrast to Wyman's mood of deep interest and serious occupation. He had a boy's pleasure in the quest, and again displayed for me the most ready learning as to everything involved in the search. Bits of bones were named as I would name the letters of the alphabet: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... he was digging for roots, his poor sustenance, his spade struck against something heavy, which proved to be gold, a great heap which some miser had probably buried in a time of alarm, thinking to have come again, and taken it from its prison, but died before the opportunity had arrived, without making any man privy to the concealment; so it lay, doing ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... crutch, took hold of her head in the way that is unmistakable, and faced her at the barricade. As he did so a countryman sprang up at his right hand and struck furiously at him with a heavy potato spade. The blow was aimed at Dinny Johnny, but the moment was miscalculated, and it fell on "Matchbox" instead. The sharp blade gashed her hind quarter, but with a spring like a frightened deer she rose ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... do with it? Let mariners learn astronomy; merchants, factors study arithmetic; surveyors get them geometry; spectacle-makers optics; land-leapers geography; town-clerks rhetoric, what should he do with a spade, that hath no ground to dig; or they with learning, that have no use of it? thus they reason, and are not ashamed to let mariners, apprentices, and the basest servants, be better qualified than themselves. In ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."[57] ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the exception of a few ears of barley gleaned in the women's aprons.' In the following year the plague reappeared; the insects came again, covering the ground so thickly that they 'might be shovelled with a spade.' The stock of seed-grain was now almost exhausted, and the colonists resolved to send an expedition to the Mississippi for a fresh supply. Two hundred {140} and fifty bushels of grain were secured at Lord Selkirk's expense, ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... the passageways and haunted the cabins. Marsha's snake was back. There was Lazar's dragon, which seemed to grow larger every day. There was also a basilisk, a pterodactyl, a vampire bat with a five-foot wingspread, an old-fashioned red spade-tailed demon ...
— Subjectivity • Norman Spinrad
... parades, and hunting the bear and buffalo. The estate you have inherited is not binding on you. You can realise it, and begin by taking over two or three hundred picked Irish and English—have both races capable of handling spade and musket; purchasing some thousands of acres to establish a legal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inured to danger that nothing could terrify them, and they seemed to court death instead of shunning it on all occasions. Some of them being employed to level some works from which the enemy had been driven near the monastery of St Francis, and being more handy at the sword than the spade, drew upon themselves a large party of the enemy of whom they slew above 200, yet not without some loss on their side. About this time Farete Khan, one of the Nizams generals, made some overtures towards peace, but without any apparent authority from his sovereign, who caused him to be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... fired at them. They ran up the slope to the crest of the bluff, leaped over a fresh earthwork, and fell among a crowd of soldiers in blue. Dick quickly raised himself to his feet, and saw soldiers about him, many of them wounded, all of them weary and drawn. Others were hard at work with pick and spade, and from a distant point of the earthwork came the sharp report of ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... service. On the day it had been signed, Walter Colton, alcalde of Monterey, wrote thus of it in his diary: "It is thoroughly democratic; its basis, political and social equality, is the creed of the thousands who run the plow, wield the plane, the hammer, the trowel, the spade." Still it had its faults, the greatest of which was the power given the legislature over public moneys and lands, as well as the chance it allowed for dishonesty ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... a man's digging spuds in that field with a long spade, and supposing he flings up the two halves of that skull, what'll be said then in the papers and ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... for, where high wages are given, hard work is required; those must also be disappointed who expect to live in style from off the produce of a small Canadian farm, and those whose imaginary dignity revolts from plough, and spade, and hoe, and those who invest borrowed capital in farming operations. The fields of the slothful in Canada bring forth thorns and thistles, as his fields brought them forth in England. Idleness is absolute ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... You see how admirably they are tilled, and how much they get off them. They are always working in them in their spare hours; and when a man wants a mug of beer, instead of going off to the village and the public-house, he puts down his spade or his hoe, comes to the club- house and gets it, and goes back to his work. When he has done work, he likes to have his beer at the club, still, and to sit and look at his little crops ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... ridiculous in the eyes of worldly people, said the far from unworldly poet. True, she was the daughter of an earl, and he the son of a farmer; and those who called the land their own looked down upon those who tilled it! But a banker, or a brewer, or the son of a contractor who had wielded the spade, might marry an earl's daughter: why should not the son of a farmer—not to say one who, according to the lady's mother, himself belonged to an aristocracy? The farmer's son indeed was poor, and who would look at a poor banker, or a poor brewer, more than a poor farmer! it was all money! But was ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... thinking to meet his man, paidling Jock—but Jock had sleepit in, and wasna there. Weel, to the wast corner ower yonder he gaed, and throwing his coat ower a headstane, and his hat on the tap o't, he dug away with his spade, casting out the mools, and the coffin handles, and the green banes and sic like, till he stoppit a wee to take breath.—What! are ye whistling to yoursell?" quoth Isaac to me, "and no hearing what's ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... covered her brother, and had directed a space left for that purpose. Now the marble was removed, and the coffins of Jane and Enoch Grey rested side by side. The voice of the minister ceased, and only little Stanley's sobs broke that mournful silence which always ensues while spade or trowel does its sad work. Then the sculptured slab was replaced, and brother and sister were left to that blessed repose which is granted only to the faithful when ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... out as far as the fish will carry it, and is then passed in a small boat, which is towing at the stern. Two men jump into this, and pull in upon the line until the fish is brought in alongside; it is then killed with a whale-lance or a whale-spade, which is stuck ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... waiting for the first burst of vengeful fury to be over—and he found it gone! He thought on the first survey that all was well; but on more closely examining the ground his heart misgave him, for it appeared to him as if the soil had been moved. With anxious haste he began to dig, and soon his spade struck the lid of one of the chests. For a moment he breathed again; but he was impelled to carry his search farther. He uncovered the chest and raised the lid—it was empty! In a wild fear and fury he dug again and again, and with the same result. Every chest ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... cannot find it there. It is observable that this proverbial kind of expression, for freedom of words and sentiments, has been adopted into almost every language, though the image conveying it is different. Thus the Greeks call a fig a fig, etc. We say, an honest man calls a spade a spade; and the French call "un chat un chat." Boileau says, "J'appelle un chat un chat, et ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... the best methods of further attempts on that spade-work, when, late that evening, he received a note from Queenie Crood. It ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... preparing a piece of good ground in an open situation in a quite ordinary manner with one deep digging in winter, adding at the time some six inches or so of fat stable manure, and leaving it thus until the time arrives for sowing the seed. Then it will be well to level down and point in, half a spade deep, a thin coat of decayed manure to make a ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... minute," cried the old sailor, who was nearly as excited as the boys. "Get your spade an' we'll start ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... an elder mon, That held the Spade its Ace— "God save the lad! Whence comes the licht ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Grand-duke and leave Guerazzi, though He took that tax from Florence. "Much in vain He takes it from the market-carts, we trow, While urgent that no market-men remain, But all march off and leave the spade and plough, To die among the Lombards. Was it thus The dear paternal Duke did? Live the Duke!" At which the joy-bells multitudinous, Swept by an opposite wind, as loudly shook. Call back the mild archbishop to his house, To bless the people with his frightened look,— ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... fellow as he was coming from the carriage-house with a hoe and a spade in his hands. He was on his way to the garden in a very straightforward manner, but the boys made him understand that to bury treasure it was necessary to be particularly secret, and after some ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... have no choice. Do you want to lie rotting in the debtor's jail and beat hemp till you are bailed by the last trumpet? Would you toil with pick-axe and spade for a morsel of dry bread? or earn a pitiful alms by singing doleful ditties under people's windows? Or will you be sworn at the drumhead—and then comes the question, whether anybody would trust your hang-dog visages—and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the less consequence, as these gentlemen descend to tell us how we are to separate the "spiritual" gold which faintly streaks the huge mass of impure ore of fable, legend, and mysticism. Each man, it seems has his own particular spade and mattock in his "spiritual faculty"; so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir. You will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the internal oracle, listen to its responses exclusively? ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... is allowed to run out as far as the fish will carry it, and is then passed in a small boat, which is towing at the stern. Two men jump into this, and pull in upon the line until the fish is brought in alongside; it is then killed with a whale-lance or a whale-spade, which is stuck ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... meadow which then surrounded the apse of the church of the Capuchins. There he found Philippe and his seconds, with Benjamin, waiting for him. Potel and Mignonnet paced off twenty-four feet; at each extremity, the two attendants drew a line on the earth with a spade: the combatants were not allowed to retreat beyond that line, on pain of being thought cowardly. Each was to stand at his own line, and advance as he pleased when the seconds ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... I began on Monday. I kept away all day, all the evening, and all the next day. Tuesday evening, just before dark, I took the path across the field. The two girls were at work making a flower-garden. "Pink and Blue" had a spade, and was actually spading up the ground. I caught it from her hand so quickly that she looked up almost frightened. Her face was flushed with exercise; but her blue eyes looked tired. How I reproached myself for not coming sooner! At dark, I went in with them. We took our accustomed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... the foot of a tree in the twilight, listening to a quarrel between a mole and a squirrel, in which the mole told the squirrel that the tail was the best of him, and the squirrel called the mole Spade-fists, when, the darkness having deepened around her, she became aware of something shining in her face, and looking round, saw that the door of the cottage was open, and the red light of the fire flowing ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... for some time, I rose from my seat, and desired Caleb to follow me. We proceeded to an outer shed where farmers' tools used to be kept. I supplied him and myself with a spade, and requested him to lead me to the spot ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the answer ever since I first turned the soil of this farm. The man who thinks about things knows there's nothing to life. It's all a grinding chase for the day when someone will pat my cheek with a spade." ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... is to be feared. At any rate, it was so with Mr Mason's gardener, at the time I speak of. He was peevish and fretful, and said some harsh things to Robert, because he accidentally destroyed a fine tulip with his spade. Robert cried, and said he did not mean to do it. Then the old man was sorry, but, probably feeling too proud to confess it, he was silent for a long time. By and by, however, he told Robert that his conscience troubled ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... what will probably first occur to those who would invent employments for children. We have never yet mentioned a garden; we have never mentioned those great delights to children, a spade, a hoe, a rake, and a wheelbarrow. We hold all these in proper respect; but we did not sooner mention them, because, if introduced too early, they are useless. We must not expect, that a boy six or seven years old, can find, for any length of time, sufficient daily occupation in ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... waited till the grave was filled and the turf laid down, a trying quarter of an hour. Ah me! the thud of the spade on your mother's grave! None gave any sign of what he felt save Drumsheugh, whose sordid slough had slipped off from a tender heart, and Chalmers, who went behind a tombstone and sobbed aloud. Not even Posty asked the ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... their hearts unto wisdom. It was now, too, that the dark procession used to creep more frequently up the winding path to the Rehoboth grave-yard, and the heavy soil open oftener beneath old Joseph's spade, and the voice of the minister in deeper and more measured tones repeat the words, 'We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.' It was now also that the feeble and the aged shunned the darkening shadows of the streets, and crept and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... wrangling would have continued it is impossible to say, for at that moment the gentleman returned with a trowel, spade, and basket, and proceeded to remove her from her native soil. In justice to her, it must be confessed that, when the moment came to part for ever from all her old friends, and the surroundings ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... under greene, Eftsoones* he gins to fashion forth a place, 650 And, squaring it in compasse well beseene**, There plotteth out a tombe by measured space: His yron-headed spade tho making cleene, To dig up sods out of the flowrie grasse, His worke he shortly to good purpose brought, 655 Like as he had conceiv'd it in his thought. [* Eftsoones, immediately.] [** Well ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... rite. March cast his eyes below, and through the transparent medium of the clear water, which was almost as pure as air, he saw what Hetty was accustomed to call "mother's grave." It was a low, straggling mound of earth, fashioned by no spade, out of a corner of which gleamed a bit of the white cloth that formed the shroud of the dead. The body had been lowered to the bottom, and Hutter brought earth from the shore and let it fall upon it, until all was concealed. In this ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... explained to us, gently but firmly, that if we wouldn't meddle after the manner of women, but would leave his job in his own hands, it would be better for us, and for the garden. We meekly acquiescing, he called in helpers and with a wave of his hand set hoe and ax and spade to work. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... and the girl, oblivious to everything else, discussed rawhide riatas as compared with the regular three-strand stock rope, or lariat,—center-fire, three quarter, and double rigs, swell forks and old Visalia trees, spade bits and "U" curbs,—neither willing, even lightly, to admit the other's ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... that vile thing!" said her mother, "it is poisonous. The smell of it will make you sick. I do not see how it came here. John must bring his spade and take it up. We will have nothing in the garden but what is beautiful or ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... in very cold countries, and they are rarely found in cultivated land, as they prefer burrowing in loose, sandy soil, where their little homes are not in danger of being disturbed by the gardener's spade. A remarkable tiger-beetle is the gold-cross of India, which has a deep velvety black body, and a golden mark on its wings in shape like a St. Andrew's cross. The prevailing colors of the tiger-beetle are black, green, and blue; but there is a little ...
— Harper's Young People, July 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with a comical grimace. "Pose! Sure, it's I minds the time when the master caught me diggin' petaties an' kept me standin', with me foot on me spade, an' me spade in the ground, an' me body this shape," bending forward, "till I got such a crick in me back I couldn't walk upright, for better 'n a week. Posin', indeed! Well, he might. He ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... part of their time in having their black hair crimped; they gave ridiculous sums to have it anointed with the most delicate perfumes; and it was difficult to imagine how effectively their carefully kept hands could draw a sword, and, if necessary, handle the hatchet or spade. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... did a little excavation on his own on the flat place at the very top of the hill—a place in which there were what looked like rough foundations. He used to take with him a local labourer to do some of the spade-work. One day they dug up a Quern. The labourer asked what it was. The clergyman explained that it was a form of hand-mill used in the olden days for grinding corn. In reply he was met with one of the most amazing remarks ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... pleased mightily, and to work we went instanter. Even the chief's own doctor is at it, and works like a good fellow, laughing heartily at the cunning of the 'foreigner' who can make rain so. We have only one spade, and this is without a handle; and yet by means of sticks sharpened to a point we have performed all the digging of a pretty long canal. The earth was lifted out in 'gowpens' and carried to the huge dam ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... studied closely, Dennis looked in vain for any sign of a definite objective. There was no sandbagged parapet, nothing but a confused mass of holes and heaps scattered broadcast over the landscape—the result of the terrific spade-work of the guns—which had to be crossed before the village was reached. The village, too, of which he caught a glimpse, was only a pulverised mass of debris, with here and there the angle of a shattered house or the ribs of a roof to mark what ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... blacks shrink back and are sore afraid At the furrows five that rib the glade, And the voodoo work of the master's spade. ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... extent, but to the delight of the adventurers, from the midst of the cocoanut grove that crowned the islet there flowed a tiny stream of clear water. This was indeed a godsend, as they did not know how long they might have to remain there. With a spade, which formed part of the dirigible's outfit—"I suppose they figured on shoveling out the treasure," laughed Harry—a small basin was soon dug out for the water to settle in and make a sort of small well, from which ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... some horrific Gorgon's mammoth skull, Thrown up by Titan spade, From out those caves Where saurians with mastodons had played, Before the sea had made their homes their graves, And scared their ghosts with screech of sea-born ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... you put the spade, and haven't you another lantern? You needn't be afraid, there's absolutely no one here, and they wouldn't hear at Skvoreshniki now if we fired a cannon here. This is the place, here this ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... permanent quarters in an old mansion near Bruneck, called Mayr-am-Hof. Here William was able to indulge in his favourite occupation of gardening. He dug indefatigably in a field allotment with his English spade, a unique instrument in that land of clumsy husbandry, and was amazed at the growth of the New Zealand spinach, the widespread rhubarb, the exuberant tomatoes, and towering spikes of Indian corn. Thanks to the four great doctors before mentioned, he remained hale ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... they used their "curtlaxes" (cutlasses) to dig the frozen ground to get at the Indians' corn, "having forgotten to bring spade or mattock." "Daggers" are mentioned as used in their celebrated duel by Dotey and Leister, servants of Stephen Hopkins. Bradford narrates that on one of their exploring tours on the Cape the length of guard duty performed at night by each "relief" was determined by the inches ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... have to go back to the fifteenth century, to the Fall of Constantinople, to the Revival of Learning, ere we can find a fitting parallel to match the importance of this recent find. Not since the spade of the excavator uncovered from its shroud of earth the flawless beauty of the Olympian Hermes has such a delightful acquisition been made to our knowledge of Greek literature. The name of Professor Lachsyrma has long been one to conjure with, and all of us ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... March, with brows full sternly bent, And armed strongly, rode upon a Ram, The same which over Hellespontus swam; Yet in his hand a spade he also bent, And in a bag all sorts of seeds ysame,[97] Which on the earth ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... articles of the poorest households,—for old iron, brass, and lead, or any metal under any shape it might lurk in. The Auvergnat would give, for instance, a brown earthenware saucepan worth two sous for a pound of lead, two pounds of iron, a broken spade or hoe or a cracked kettle; and being invariably the judge of his own ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... various poems to the literature of the country, which have stamped him as being possessed of a more than ordinary share of the divine afflatus. Among them is "The Sexton's Spade," which has gained a world-wide celebrity. The writer has been connected with Mr. Burnett in the publication of two or three papers, which, somehow or other, never won their way into popular favor: either the public had very bad taste, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... a little bit more of what you mean? I know you are speaking as my friend, and, believe me, I am not ungrateful. I am sure there is a definite story against me. I wish you would call a spade a ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... and hope of placing on your brow the tiara of St. Peter? That, indeed, is a career, Henri; one presses onward toward it, struggles for it, lives in it. But as for you! it is the miner's pick, the trappist's spade, the gravedigger's tomb, that you desire; utter abandonment of life, of pleasure, of hope; and all that—I blush with shame for you, a man—all that, I say, because you love a woman who loves you not. You do foul injustice to your race, Henri, ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... to obliterate them than if they had been pictures on a church wall by Michael Angelo. One sketch, however, and that the best one, affected him differently. It represented a ragged man partly supporting himself on a spade and bending his lean body over a hole in the earth, with one hand extended to grasp something that he had found. But close behind him, with a fiendish laugh on his features, appeared a figure with horns, a tufted tail and a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... enterprise was impracticable; that Oswego should be strengthened, more vessels built, and preparation made to renew the attempt as soon as spring opened.[326] All thoughts of active operations were now suspended, and during what was left of the season the troops exchanged the musket for the spade, saw, and axe. At the end of October, leaving seven hundred men at Oswego, Shirley returned to Albany, and narrowly escaped drowning on the way, while passing a rapid in a whale-boat, to try the fitness of that species of craft ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches, the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axe we go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the inner dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and bright as when we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath, which the hand soon exposes, is just ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... end of the path, however, when the father began to change his attitude; he stood up, dropped his "dibbler," scraped his foot on his spade, and, grumbling to himself, went after her. She did not see or hear ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... You Cosens shall goe sound the Ocean: And cast your nets, haply you may find her in the Sea, Yet ther's as little iustice as at Land: No Publius and Sempronius, you must doe it, 'Tis you must dig with Mattocke, and with Spade, And pierce the inmost Center of the earth: Then when you come to Plutoes Region, I pray you deliuer him this petition, Tell him it is for iustice, and for aide, And that it comes from old Andronicus, Shaken with sorrowes in vngratefull Rome. Ah Rome! Well, well, I made thee miserable, What time ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of hair had not the President enjoined silence. Popanilla was informed that the last Emigration-squadron was about to sail in a few minutes; and that, although the number was completed, his broad shoulders and powerful frame had gained him a place. He was presented with a spade, a blanket, and a hard biscuit, and in a quarter of an hour was quitting the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... seized with such a dimness in his eyes, that he could not see a yard before him. In Achaia, he attempted to make a cut through the Isthmus;[154] and, having made a speech encouraging his pretorians to set about the work, on a signal given by sound of trumpet, he first broke ground with a spade, and carried off a basketful of earth upon his shoulders. He made preparations for an expedition to the Pass of the Caspian mountains, forming a new legion out of his late levies in Italy, of men all six feet high, which he called the phalanx of Alexander the Great. These ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... instance, the plow and the gun are machines, the spade and the blow-pipe are tools. A hammer may be considered as a hard, insensible fist; the bellows as a pair of very strong and durable lungs. Tongs take the place of fingers, just as a spoon does of the empty hand, and the knife ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... tent. Then the intruder raised his arm. Jacob, concealed by a fold of the tent, could just make out that the man's hand grasped some weapon. The next instant there was a plunge downward of the hand, and a suppressed exclamation of surprise. But Jacob waited to see and hear no more. Catching up a spade, which he knew was close by, he aimed a furious blow at the intended assassin. He did not, however, fully reach his mark—the blow fell partly short, yet not altogether; there was a cry of pain and terror, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... seemed to possess no particular attraction for its owner. Instead of entering the house at once he fetched a spade from a little shed and began to work in the garden. For about a quarter of an hour he dug on uninterrupted. At length, however, a window opened, and a female ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... he questioned a third time when he drank from the streamlet and sought its source, finding it at last in the enchanted walnut. Axe and spade and walnut each gladly welcomed him, you remember, saying, "It's long I've been looking for you, my lad!" for the new world is ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... vertebral communications, "Poor thing! You were the victim of a Catastrophe. You were also the victim of the bottle. The 'Rye' was too heavy for you, and should have been drawn milder." This said, I turned sadly away to find a burial spade, and it then occurred to me that this little incident was kindly meant to confirm my view that cats are susceptible, even to a fatal extent, of spiritual impressions—especially when conveyed by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... Call up my Men, the Coachman, Groom, and Butler, the Footmen, Cook, and Gardiner; bid 'em all rise and arm, with long Staff, Spade and Pitchfork, and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... the first aorist and the rolling of steel rails, but there is arising an angry protest against the conditions of a life which make one free of the serene heights of thought and give him range of all intellectual countries, and keep another at the spade and the loom, year after year, that he may earn food for the day and lodging for the night. In our day the demand here hinted at has taken more definite form and determinate aim, and goes on, visible to all men, to unsettle society and change social and political relations. The great ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the waist. The upper part is slipping from his shoulders, leaving the torso bare. The beauty of the form reminds us of a Greek statue. On the ground beside him are some garden tools, a hoe and a spade, and beyond these lies a straw hat. These things explain why Mary, blinded and confused with weeping, supposed that it was the gardener who ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Homer was scanned with a patience unknown to college students and the classic myths were refined in the alembics of master minds. Yet there were some who cared for truth more than for racial glory and among them was Dr. Schlieman. Armed with a spade he went to the classic lands and brought to light a real Troy; at Tiryns and Mycenae he laid to view the palaces and tombs and treasures of Homeric kings. His message back to scholars who waited tensely for his verdict was, "It looks to me like the civilization of an African ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... "Sammy has stuck by me through thick and thin. I don't believe I could have made out without him. As a mine boss, store keeper, deputy sheriff, and Indian fighter, we swear by him out our way. There is a fellow, gentlemen, who calls a spade a spade, and oftener than not a ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... the arm of toil? If man minded himself alone, he would fling down the spade and axe, and rush to the desert; or roam through the world as a wilderness, and make that world a desert. His home, which he sees not, perhaps, but once or twice in a day, is the invisible bond of the world. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... shall thus give to the English reader: "You provide the noblest materials for building, when a pickaxe and a spade are only necessary: and build houses of five hundred by a hundred feet, forgetting that of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... upon the bank of the pond, he had the cruelty to behold the motion of the infant, yet warm in her womb. This done, he concealed the body, as it may readily be supposed, among the bushes that usually encompass a pond, and the next night when it grew dusk, fetching a hay spade from a rick that stood in the close, he made a hole by the side of the pond, and there slightly buried the woman in her clothes. Having thus despatched two at once, and thinking himself secure, because unseen, he ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... wherefore I sent the maid to him in the afternoon. Meanwhile we ourselves went up the Streckelberg, where I cut a young fir-tree with my pocket knife, which I had saved from the enemy, and shaped it like a spade, so that I might be better able to dig deep therewith. First, however, we looked about us well on the mountain, and seeing nobody, my daughter walked on to the place, which she straightway found again. Great God! what a ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... The clematis, mingling its foliage secretly with its host, comes down with the stream tangles to the village fences, skips over to corners of little used pasture lands and the plantations that spring up about waste water pools; but never ventures a footing in the trail of spade or plough; will not be persuaded to grow in any garden plot. On the other hand, the horehound, the common European species imported with the colonies, hankers after hedgerows and snug little borders. It is more widely distributed than ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... 6d., will be miserably disappointed, for, where high wages are given, hard work is required; those must also be disappointed who expect to live in style from off the produce of a small Canadian farm, and those whose imaginary dignity revolts from plough, and spade, and hoe, and those who invest borrowed capital in farming operations. The fields of the slothful in Canada bring forth thorns and thistles, as his fields brought them forth in England. Idleness is absolute ruin, and drunkenness carries with it worse evils ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... had just thrown up on the bank the last spade full of earth that had been dug out, when we heard a loud shout. We got up on the top of the cave, and saw that Jack had brought back a tribe at his heels. The large cart, drawn by the cow and the ass, came on at a slow pace, ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson Told in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... where the portrait hung. There was nothing very startling about the picture. It showed just a very ordinary face with straight closed lips, of a man seated in an embossed chair, with the familiar white cap, cassock, and embroidered stole with spade-ends. ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... plow the field nor sow, Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart, Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe, To keep the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... lightly into the yard, pushed open the gate of the split-board garden fence, walked along the edge to the corner and selected a spade from the tools that ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... the spot, and I noticed that a space, about fifteen feet square, in the centre of the room, and directly in front of the sentinel, had been recently dug up with a spade. While in all other places the ground was trodden to the hardness and color of granite, this spot seemed to be soft, and had the reddish-yellow hue of the "sacred soil." Another sentry was pacing to and fro on its other side, so that the place was completely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... and its possessors. On glancing around he would perceive the heraldic honours of a most noble and ancient family now extinct—the paltry remains of the splendid helmet, which had decked, perhaps, the proud hero of feudal power, thrown into a degrading hole with the sexton's spade, and the sacred rostrum where the eloquence of the second Rabelais has astonished the village auditors, and perhaps led them to doubt that such intellect was mutable, now filled by another! Our curiosity was attracted, on leaving the church, to Shandy Hall, once the residence of Sterne, situated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... of ground which had been dug up to be newly turfed, and which I had chosen on that account, as the traces of my spade were less likely to attract attention. The men who laid down the grass must have thought me mad. I called to them continually to expedite their work, ran out and worked beside them, trod down the earth with my feet, and hurried them with frantic eagerness. They had finished their ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... ray directly at the crack in the nursery shutter. The ray was sharp: it smote full on Archie's eyelids, as he lay asleep, surrounded by "Robinson Crusoe," two red apples, a piece of gingerbread, and a spade, all of which he had taken to bed with him. When he felt the prick of the sun-ray he opened his eyes wide. "Why, morning's come!" he said, and without more ado raised himself ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... would try my fortune yonder. I stood condemned to waste my youth in idle parades, and hunting the bear and buffalo. The estate you have inherited is not binding on you. You can realise it, and begin by taking over two or three hundred picked Irish and English—have both races capable of handling spade and musket; purchasing some thousands of acres to establish ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... these 'ere works," said the foreman; "take it 'ome and bury it in the back-yard. Anybody'll be glad to lend you a spade." ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... French airs when played. Merchants of New York and other seaports worked voluntarily on the neglected coast-defences. A song was put to the air of True Hearts of Oak in order to "cheer those unused to spade and barrow, who might tire of working on the several forts." ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... man die at his post!" and there halted on our houses and halls Death from their rifle-bullets, and death from their cannon- balls; Death in our innermost chamber, and death at our slight barricade; Death while we stood with the musket, and death while we stooped to the spade; Death to the dying, and wounds to the wounded, for often there fell, Striking the hospital wall, crashing thro' it, their shot and their shell; Death—for their spies were among us, their marksmen were told of our best, So that the brute bullet broke thro' the brain that would ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... preparation for a new lawn in the fall. Spade the land to the depth of two feet, or, better still, run a plow through it, if the size of the place warrants. Work in plenty of well-rotted manure, and during the winter the frost and snow will greatly improve conditions, killing the weeds, ...
— Making a Lawn • Luke Joseph Doogue
... communicated, like that of electricity, through the country to a distance of hundreds of miles. Canals, railroads, and all public works, have been discontinued, and the Irish emigrant leans against his shanty, with his spade idle in his hand, and starves, as his thoughts wander back to ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... hoe. You got seed. You designed a garden, though on a very unfavourable site. It was God who touched your heart. Then the workmen came. Your work was among thorns, and you suffered, but so did Jesus the Son of God work among thorns and suffer. So you then got a spade and turned over the ground and put in the seed. God was with you, and now you have come back to see what God has done. You are pleased to see that the plants have come up a little. Yes, the good seed has grown, and this, sir, is the result of your work. God put all ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... when I think of that dear baby gone so far,"—the tears welled up in Mary's eyes—"and there'll be no rompseying with her to-night before she goes to bed—well, I can't 'elp it. I may be silly, but I can't 'elp it, though there, she's happy enough, I daresay, with her little bucket and spade and all, and she won't miss us 'alf as much as we'll ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... with forest, To save his soul, a Monk intent, In fasting, prayer and labours sorest His days and nights, secluded, spent; A grave already to receive him He fashion'd, stooping, with his spade, And speedy, speedy death to give him, Was all that of the ...
— The Talisman • George Borrow
... upheavals meant in the history of Hebrew literature and culture can only approximately be gauged. One thing is certain: they all and one dealt the death-blow to the old Hebraic culture. When the excavator sinks his spade beneath the ground of a sleepy Palestinian village, he lays bare to view from under the overlaid strata, Roman and Greek and Jewish and Israelitish, the Canaanite foundation with its mighty walls and marvellous tunnels, its stelae and statuettes, its entombed infants sacrificed to the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... nature of ghosts by drawing his spectre in shaky lines, as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or "Ka" is not the "soul," ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... it alone—engaged in bestowing upon the Mayor of an adjoining town the solemn offices of Christian burial, my mother and the younger children, holding a candle each, while George Henry and I labored with a spade and pick, my sister Mary Maria uttered a shriek and covered her eyes with her hands. We were all dreadfully startled and the Mayor's obsequies were instantly suspended, while with pale faces and in trembling ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Zachariah, uncovering a heap of mould with his spade. "Two brain-pans bleached loike snow, an the third wi' more hewr on it than ey ha' o' my own sconce. Fro' its size an shape ey should tak it to be a female. Ey ha' laid these three skulls aside fo' ye. Whot dun yo mean to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... in his labors and lean on his spade, while thoughts of the old days of wild adventure passed through his mind in rapid succession; and then the big man would shake his red head with a puzzled air ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... his arrears of rent to the sacrist of Waverley," said Aylward. "Out he will go on the roadside, honor and all, if he does not find ten nobles by next Epiphany. But if I could win a ransom or be at the storming of a rich city, then indeed the old man would be proud of me. 'Thy sword must help my spade, Samkin,' said he as he kissed me goodby. Ah! it would indeed be a happy day for him and for all if I could ride back with a saddle-bag full of gold pieces, and please God, I shall dip my hand in somebody's pocket before I see ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... things, singing 'Oh, da, da', louder and louder in proportion as the mistress went farther away. Jendrek began pushing Magda about, pulling the dog's tail and whistling penetratingly; finally he ran out with a spade into the orchard. Slimak sat by the stove. He was a man of medium height with a broad chest and powerful shoulders. He had a calm face, short moustache, and thick straight hair falling abundantly over his forehead and on to his neck. A red-glass stud set in ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... very probable that Reuben's opinion was the right one. The seamen dug and dug more frantically and eagerly as the prospect of finding the gold became less and less. Reuben's spade at length ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... deserves a much greater degree of attention than we believe it has yet received, in that it shows to what a considerable extent waste lands may, without any very heavy expenditure of money, be brought into profitable cultivation, and at the same time, under a well-regulated system of spade husbandry, yield abundant employment to agricultural labourers and their families. The following is the substance of the document referred to:—His lordship, who has large estates in Dorsetshire, found that a tract of land, called Shepherd's Corner, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... brown soil observable not far away marked Sullenbode's grave. He had interred her by the light of the moon, with a long, flat stone for a spade. A little lower down, the white steam of a hot spring was curling about in the twilight. From where he sat he was unable to see the pool into which the spring ultimately flowed, but it was in that pool that ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... were slouching and sullen, and they moved about their duties with gloomy brows. Even the gardener and his two stout boys struck sadly away with mattock and spade as if digging graves. No chirp of bird, no baying of a friendly dog, no burst of childish merriment broke the droning silence. And this was the home to which a father had ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... it again. And put that spade in Mr. Goodloe's car, for I'm going to bring in some honeysuckle roots and a laurel sprout or two to try out in the garden," father commanded, as I took my coat and hat from the chair where I had thrown them the afternoon before, and went out to the very unministerial-looking ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... victual. General Neuburg [Neipperg] halted here at Mollwitz, with the whole Army; before the Village, in mind to quarter. And quarter was settled, so that a BAUER [Plough-Farmer] got four to five companies to lodge, and a GARTNER [Spade-Farmer] two or three hundred cavalry..The houses were full of Officers, the GARTE [Garths] and the Fields full of horsemen and baggage; and all round, you saw nothing but fires burning; the ZAUNE [wooden railings] were instantly torn down for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is reputed to be filled by a vampire. They open this grave, and find therein a corpse as fat and handsome as if he were a man happily and quietly sleeping. They cut the throat of this corpse with the stroke of a spade, and there flows forth the finest vermilion blood in a great quantity. One might swear that it was a healthy living man whose throat they were cutting. That done, they fill up the grave, and we may reckon ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... and fasting occupied the sage; Though on mankind he shut his door, No vows of poverty he swore: The wight was wealthy. But by some treacherous friend, or fair, betrayed, He lived with plants, and communed with his spade. ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... have named them all, and labeled the various plats with pieces of paper, fastened in cleft sticks. A gardener's house, made of blocks, ornaments one corner, and near it are his tools,—watering-pot, hoe, rake, spade, etc., all ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... O'Meara. "Let's make sure that we have found something before we cause any alarm to be given. Get some small boards; we do not want a spade." ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... it. His search was rewarded by the discovery of several stones, which he conveyed home with him, and which proved, after being cleaned, to be gems of the first water. Elated at this success, he returned to the spot next day with a spade, and succeeded in obtaining many other specimens, and in convincing himself that the deposit stretched up and down for a long distance on both sides of the torrent. Having satisfied himself upon this point, our compatriot made ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to—themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... And the same old story of bloodshed and barbarity went on. In those days a king was king in name only. He was really but the chief of a band of plunderers, who dug wealth from the world with the sword instead of the spade, threw it away in wild orgies, and then hounded him into leading ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and without feet adapted for climbing live in trees; so also do monkeys with and without flexible tails, squirrels, sloths, pumas, &c. Mole-crickets dig with a well-pronounced spade upon their fore-feet, while the burying-beetle does the same thing though it has no special apparatus whatever. The mole conveys its winter provender in pockets, an inch wide, long and half an inch wide ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Thyone, and tears of emotion wet her aged eyes, which easily overflowed; but when Hermon tried to give expression to his fervent gratitude in words, Erasistratus interrupted him, exclaiming, as he grasped his comrade's hand, "It honours the general in his purple robe, when he uses the spade ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... do it; knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn, as far below him, is not fit for the spade and mattock: nor will he serve a poor man for so small a hire, and in so low a diet as he can afford to give him.' To this he answered, 'This sort of men ought to be particularly cherished, for in them consists the force of ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... thought for the wickedness of this life, no more than a sucking infant! He could tell you every crop to put in your ground from this to the day of judgment, and I don't think he'd know which end of the spade ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close over them. And this they could not bear. Therefore the priest laid the cloth upon him, and sent for a spade, and they ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... pounded in lonely centuries, it seemed, as she prayed fervently for his reappearance. Presently, staggering beneath a burden of suggestive shape, Carter came out and took his way to the dense underbrush behind the cabin. He returned to the hut for a spade and pick and went back to the underbrush. His absence seemed interminable. Then, with blistered hands, he stepped out of the thicket ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... and as Bill grew old, It came into his head to go poking for gold; So away he went with a spade in his fist, To hunt for a nugget among the schist. One day as a gully he chanced to cross, He came on the bones of his poor old horse; The hobbles being jammed in a root below Had occasioned the death of ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... dairies and other alterations been made suitable for the tenants. From facts collected on the spot we have come to the conclusion that on the small holdings a good tenant makes an average profit of about L. 4 an acre, but on an allotment cultivated by means of the spade it would probably be at the rate of over L. 6 an acre. Lord Carrington was also successful in establishing small holdings on the Humberston estate in North Lincolnshire and on his Buckinghamshire estate, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... unaccountable way he needed her protection, and together they waited for the approaching rider. The man's horse splashed noisily into the creek, lowered his head to drink, but the rider jerked viciously on the reins so that the cruel spade bit pinked the foam at the animal's lips. Spurring the horse up the bank, he stopped before them, grinning. "'Lo Cinnabar! 'Lo, Jennie! Heard you'd located on Red Sand, an' thought I'd run over an' look you up—bein' ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... name of Rasputin had only been breathed in whispers, and his cult was referred to vaguely as something mysterious connected with the occult. But in that speech, to which I sat and listened, Miliukoff hit straight from the shoulder, and called a spade a spade. One of his phrases was, "Russia can never win so long as this convicted criminal and seducer of women is allowed to work his amazing power upon the rulers of the Empire. Remove him!" he went on. "Let him be placed safely within the walls of Peter and Paul, together ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... Sackett's Harbour, the great American naval depot on Lake Ontario, and hastened back with a strong body of re-enforcements. The gallant Colonel Vincent, commandant at Fort George, bated not a jot of heart or hope,—although he was able to muster only some 1,400 troops. Yet these, with spade and mattock, toiled day after day to strengthen its ramparts and ravelins, and to throw up new earthworks and batteries. One fatal want, however, was felt. The stock of ammunition was low, and as Chauncey, with his fleet, had the mastery of the lake, it could not be replenished from the ample ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... the dignified countenance and spade-shaped beard, had faintly and helplessly echoed that snicker, and ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... said the widow, thoughtfully, "is to get rid of the body. I'll bury him in the garden, I think. There's a very good bit of ground behind those potatoes. You'll find the spade in ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... St. Gregoire. That is not its real name; because the one thing you must not do in war-time is to call a thing by its real name. To take a hackneyed example, you do not call a spade a spade: you refer to it, officially, as Shovels, General Service, One. This helps to deceive, and ultimately to surprise, the enemy; and as we all know by this time, surprise is the essence of successful warfare. On the same principle, if your troops are ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... our aid! Flaught and flail, Fire and hail: Winds arise, and tempests brattle, And, if you will, the thunders rattle. Come away, Elfin grey, Much to do ere break of day! Come with spade, and sieve, and shovel; Come with roar, and rout, and revel; Come with crow, and come with crane, Strength of steed, and weight of wain. Crash of rock, and roar of river, And, if you will, with thunders shiver! Come away, Elfin grey; Much to do ere ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the hermit was digging the ground in front of his hut. Seeing the King, he greeted him and went on digging. The hermit was frail and weak, and each time he stuck his spade into the ground and turned a little ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... back by the vacillating Vaudreuil, had not yet come from Montreal, and the swiftest of the Canadian paddlers was sent down Lake Ticonderoga in a canoe to hurry him on. Then the entire battalion of Berry went to work at once with spade and pick and ax to prepare a breastwork and abattis, stretching a line of defense in front of the fort, and not using ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... have been gey hard on me, wee lad. The grape and spade would be clumsy to my hands, there being no life to them after the swinging spars. And my fingers, used to splicing rope, would not have the touch for milking a cow. And I'd feel lost, wee fellow, some day and me plowing a field, to see a fine ship on the waters, out of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... casual and fluctuating nature of ghosts by drawing his spectre in shaky lines, as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... of John Quincy Forrest doing any manual labor with an axe or spade. During our short acquaintance that had been put to the test too often to admit of question; but I encouraged him to fly right at the bank, assuring him that in case his tools became heated, there was always water at hand to cool them. The wrangler had rustled ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... the soil which we turn with our spade, and stamp with our shoes, covers millions upon millions of years. It is the ashes of the mountains, the leavings of untold generations of animal and vegetable life. It came out of the sea, it drifted from the heavens; it flowed out from ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... necessary in order to get at the full value of reserves." Our infantry is now accustomed to the rapid and thorough "organization" of the defensive. In August it neither liked nor had the habit of using the spade. Today those who see our trenches are astounded. They are veritable improvised fortresses, proof against the 77-millimeter gun and often against artillery of higher calibre. During the last five ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Abijah understood him. When his father had gone, he went into the meadow, and dug a deep pit, beside which he placed the sods at first removed by the spade. He then carefully loaded his rifle and called to the old gray. The poor animal, who was accustomed to obey the voice of every member of the family, feebly neighed and tottered to the brink of the pit. The young man threw a handkerchief over ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... bullocks that draw it, and is fastened to the yoke. A harrow, consisting of a wooden board about six feet long by two wide, is also used, being dragged over the ploughed land attached to the yoke by iron chains. If found not sufficiently heavy, the driver stands upon it. A spade or shovel, exactly like its English counterpart, and a reaping-hook, or sickle, having its cutting edge furnished with minute teeth, complete the list of a Baluchi's ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... had neither axe nor saw, nor knife nor spade. How could he do it? He had nothing but his hands. He tried to pull it out by the roots, but in ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... makes everything wrong," said the young girl, attacking with a little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice. And then she returned to her idea of a moment before: "You must promise to tell me—to warn me in some way—whenever I strike a false note. You must give a little cough, ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... said Abel to Hester a few days later, planting his spade on the ground, and slowly scraping off upon it the clay from his nailed boots, "as that Muster Vernon gave 'em a dusting in the school-yard as they won't forget in a hurry. He said he could not speak out before ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... say'st:[10] And the more pity that great folks should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even christian.[11] Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... homes to return to at night, they had characters, perhaps. Most of them were big strong fellows like himself. Why should he not become one of them? He fancied he could wheel a barrow, and ply a crowbar, and dig with a spade, as well as any of them; he was not afraid of hard work any more than they were, and the wages that kept a roof over their heads would surely keep ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... had used in the construction of the house, and forgotten. We put it carefully by, in order that we might fasten it to a pole, and use it in the moment of our flight as a spear. We found, also, a spade in the court, which we hid, that it too might serve as a weapon. Besides this, the sailors, on the night when we made the attempt, were to arm themselves with some long poles, which had been ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... gardens, and groves. I can see steps and galleries cut in the face of the cliff, and caves and caverns, natural and artificial: for one can cut this tufa with a knife; and it would hardly seem preposterous to attempt to dig out a cool, roomy mansion in this rocky front with a spade. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... altogether unprecedented extension of historical knowledge. Early in the 'forties the Frenchman Botta, quickly followed by Sir Henry Layard, began making excavations on the site of ancient Nineveh, the name and fame of which were a tradition having scarcely more than mythical status. The spade of the discoverer soon showed that all the fabled glories of the ancient Assyrian capital were founded on realities, and evidence was afforded of a state of civilization and culture such as few men supposed to have existed on the earth before the Golden Age of Greece. Not merely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... have noticed this. Nearly all our little controversies begin in one way. Somebody says, 'I call a spade a spade and BONAR LAW (or LLOYD GEORGE) a lying, treacherous scoundrel.' I propose that we form ourselves into the Society for Not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... said; 'I have dug too often in this graveyard for any to wonder if they see me with a spade.' ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... the marble was removed, and the coffins of Jane and Enoch Grey rested side by side. The voice of the minister ceased, and only little Stanley's sobs broke that mournful silence which always ensues while spade or trowel does its sad work. Then the sculptured slab was replaced, and brother and sister were left to that blessed repose which is granted only to the faithful when "He giveth ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the battle would ever become an easy one. The powers of evil against which we fight are second only in strength to those of righteousness and light. In conflict between these powers there will always be the sacrifices of war to reckon upon, the spade work, the tunnelling, the weariness; surprises of the enemy, rushed advances, sick and wounded to care for, and captured territory to be occupied, organized, and governed, before the ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... dirt like giant fingers, turning out the potatoes which are tossed between the rows of dirt so men, who follow, may pick them up. But we'll dig ours by hand. And in digging potatoes you must be careful not to stick your fork, spade or whatever you use, into the potato tubers, and ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... We are set in motion. In front of the tool-depot there is a halt and trampling. To each is given a spade or pickax. An N.C.O. presents the handles in the gloom: "You, a spade; there, hop it! You a spade, too; you a pick. Allons, hurry ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... poor, ignorant savages. It is an ugly word, isn't it? But why dissimulate? At least, we can call a spade a spade. These men are human beings. Their right to life and happiness is as good as yours or mine, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... his god does not want him to work and he will be punished if he does, it is especially necessary to touch his religious nature first. When he accepts the Christian's God, then he will be ready to go to work for himself. The taking up of the hoe and the spade is his first confession of faith. What has already been accomplished through the new laws giving him his civil rights, puts an added responsibility upon the church. It is the Indian's last chance. Our further neglect is his certain death. Shall we leave him with his "Land and Law" without ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... an exception to most rules that you have got in your note-book, Mr. Stackpole," said the younger man. "But there is no guessing about the garden, for I have with my own eyes seen these gentle hands at one end of a spade, and her foot at the other a sight that, I declare, I don't know whether I was most filled with astonishment ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... sun was hot, So Lu-cy took her pail and spade, And went to find a nice dry spot Where wells and cas-tles ...
— The Infant's Delight: Poetry • Anonymous
... I noticed the plants were blooming and it occurred to me that there must be artichokes on the roots. I got my spade and began to dig. I could not find a single artichoke. I took my spade back home and decided within myself that both parties were mistaken when they claimed to have grown so many hundreds of bushels to the acre. After a few days I went to my lower ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... and adventurers. Abraham Yachiny, the illustrious preacher, an early believer, was inspired to have a tomb opened in the ancient "house of life." He asked the sceptical Rabbis to dig up the earth. They found it exceedingly hard to the spade, but, persevering, presently came upon an earthen pot and therein a parchment which ran thus: "I, Abraham, was shut up for forty years in a cave. I wondered that the time of miracles did not arrive. Then a voice ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... example, you, as the female dancer will come upon the stage, with a distaff, twirling it, or with a pail to draw water; or with a spade for digging. Your companion will come next perhaps driving a wheel-barrow, or with a sickle to mow corn, or with a pipe a-smoaking; and though the scene should be a saloon, no matter, it will come soon to be filled ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... Elizabeth Stanton would be tied down with babies and household cares, Susan saw a bleak lonely road ahead for the woman's rights movement. She did so want her best speakers and most valuable workers to remain single until the spade work for woman's rights was done. Almost in a panic at the prospect of being left to carry on the Saratoga convention alone, Susan wrote Lucy irritable letters instead of praising her for drawing up a marriage contract and keeping her own name. Later, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... men and women who died, they two alone had burying. For I digged a hole with the stable-spade under the front lilac; and I wound them in the sheets, foot and form and head; and, not without throes and qualms, I ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... inclined to demur. A few deft and pointed questions, very clear, such as might naturally occur to Hillyard or Luttrell, or Sir Chichester himself might come in usefully to put the polish, as it were, on Millie's spade work. Harry Luttrell ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little fiddle. There is no greater mistake. It is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, till he ends a Neron malgre lui-meme, fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning. And perhaps this is the secret of Raleigh's failure. He is a fanatic, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... being calculated to decide the great question, and all the principal geologists were on the spot several hours before operations commenced, for the purpose of inspecting the surface of the ground before it was disturbed by the spade and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of German archaeologists has revealed what town-planning meant in a small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period. No other even approximately complete example has been as yet uncovered on any other site. But spade-work at the neighbouring and more famous city of Miletus has uncovered similar street-planning there. In one quarter, the only one yet fully excavated, the streets crossed at right angles and enclosed regular blocks of dwelling-houses ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... and through the town of Mallow: Castle Richmond stands close upon its banks, within the barony of Desmond, and in that Kanturk region through which the Mallow and Killarney railway now passes, but which some thirteen years since knew nothing of the navvy's spade, or ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... road of Ireland Toil and sacrifices of those who have preceded us Tranquil insolence Under the name of religion (so many crimes) Unproductive consumption was alarmingly increasing Upon their knees, served the queen with wine Use of the spade Utter want of adaptation of his means to his ends Utter disproportions between the king's means and aims Valour on the one side and discretion on the other Walk up and down the earth and destroy his fellow-creatures We have the reputation of being a good housewife ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... siege, for the first time, the spade was used by soldiers in the field. Hitherto the work had been considered derogatory to troops, and peasants and miners had been engaged for the work; but Prince Maurice had taught his soldiers that their duty was to ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... his spade into the earth, turned down his sleeves, and rested—a fair-skinned, bronzed, wholesome object, good to look at—while Austin stumped away. In less than five minutes the two youths started off together, tramping through the long, lush meadow-grass ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... it there. It is observable that this proverbial kind of expression, for freedom of words and sentiments, has been adopted into almost every language, though the image conveying it is different. Thus the Greeks call a fig a fig, etc. We say, an honest man calls a spade a spade; and the French call "un chat un chat." Boileau says, "J'appelle un chat un chat, et ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... wait another minute," cried the old sailor, who was nearly as excited as the boys. "Get your spade an' we'll start ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of men at work there," he said. "I can hear muffled sounds like digging, and once or twice a sharp click, as if a spade struck a stone. I am very much afraid they are throwing up a battery there. I was in hopes they would have begun in the open, because we could have commanded the approaches; but if they begin among the trees, they can come in and out without our seeing them, and bring up their guns by the ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... obliquely, fled from it, and it, flowing from behind, followed with a mighty noise. As when a ditch-worker leads a stream of water from a black-flowing fountain through plantations and gardens, holding a spade in his hands, and throwing out the obstructions from the channel; all the pebbles beneath are agitated as it flows along, and, rapidly descending, it murmurs down a sloping declivity, and outstrips ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... hands—hands that had never done anything more toilsome than to lift a bridle rein or to clutch the handle of a gun. He was the horseman in all his training, and though he owned hundreds of acres of land, he had never so much as held a plow or plied a spade. His manner was that of the cow-boss, the lord of great herds, the claimant of empires of government grass-land. Poor as his house looked, he was in reality rich. Narrow-minded in respect to his own interests, he was well in advance of ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... plans which they had all studied closely, Dennis looked in vain for any sign of a definite objective. There was no sandbagged parapet, nothing but a confused mass of holes and heaps scattered broadcast over the landscape—the result of the terrific spade-work of the guns—which had to be crossed before the village was reached. The village, too, of which he caught a glimpse, was only a pulverised mass of debris, with here and there the angle of a shattered house or the ribs of ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... desires they will never realize, dissatisfaction of the lot from which they will never rise! Allons! one is viewing the dark side of the question. It is all the fault of that confounded Riccabocca, who has already caused Lenny Fairfield to lean gloomily on his spade, and, after looking round and seeing no one near him, groan ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Gray was ready to aid in this way, after vainly trying to handle a spade, a task rendered impossible by his wound. He was hard at work over his work, carrying basketful after basketful with one hand, when Captain Smithers came up, saw how he was striving, and stood looking on ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... spring morning, and daylight just coming in, whan he cam to the yett yonder, thinking to meet his man, paidling Jock—but Jock had sleepit in, and wasna there. Weel, to the wast corner ower yonder he gaed, and throwing his coat ower a headstane, and his hat on the tap o't, he dug away with his spade, casting out the mools, and the coffin handles, and the green banes and sic like, till he stoppit a wee to take breath.—What! are ye whistling to yoursell?" quoth Isaac to me, "and no ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... out all my store of tools, and gave every man a digging-spade, a shovel, and a rake, for we had no barrows or ploughs; and to every separate place a pickaxe, a crow, a broad axe, and a saw; always appointing, that as often as any were broken or worn out, they should be supplied without grudging out of the general ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... the Saint Ne'er once turned faint, And his halo shone with redoubled light. 'Hallo, I fear You're trespassing here!' Said St Cuthman, 'To me it is perfectly clear, If you talk of the devil, he's sure to appear!' 'With my spade and my pick I am come,' said old Nick, 'To prove you've no power o'er a demon like me. I'll show you my power— Ere the first morning hour Thro' the Downs, over Poynings, shall roll in the sea.' 'I'll give you long odds,' ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Riccabocca) was admiring the picture-book, and Riccabocca with austere gravity dandled the doll. Then Riccabocca assured her that she could be of great use to him in the garden; and Violante instantly put into movement her spade, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... buried within the walls of the cathedral, Catherine of Arragon, who died at Kimbolton Castle, in 1536; and Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed at Fotheringhay Castle fifty-one years afterwards. The accompanying engraving is a representation of the old sexton, with his spade, pickaxe, and ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... farmer! In the shade He works his crops by letters-patent now: Steam drives the reaper (which is union-made), As in the spring it pushed the auto-plough; A patent milker manages each cow; Electric currents guide the garden spade, And cattle, poultry, pigs through "process" wade To quick perfection—Science shows them how. But while machinery plants and reaps, he rests Upon his porch, and listens to the quail That pipe far off in yonder ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... After which all went away; the children were shut out of the churchyard; the old clergyman disappeared to the vestry; a young florid man, with pale hair, tightened his leather belt, turned up his sleeves, watched a grand pair of biceps roll up as he crooked his elbows, then, taking a spade, set to work upon the wet mound he had dug from the earth the day before to clear those few square feet of space below. As he worked, he whistled, for his occupation held no more significance to him than ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... vegetable products, receiving assiduous attention, will afford ample manual occupation, and chaste supplies for the bodily needs. It is intended to adorn the pastures with orchards, and to supersede the labor of cattle by the spade ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... near Edgeworth Town, we saw many well-known faces at the cabin doors looking out to welcome us. One man, who was digging in his field by the roadside, when he looked up as our horses passed, and saw my father, let fall his spade and clasped his hands; his face, as the morning sun shone upon it, was the strongest picture of joy I ever saw. The village was a melancholy spectacle; windows shattered and doors broken. But though the mischief done was great, there had been little pillage. Within our gates we found all ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... the work done, and used his tongue pretty freely; still he was a man who would speak the truth, and treated his men as well as he dared to do under the brutal regime ruling in Chatham. He speedily told me off to a barrow and spade, and I was fully enlisted as barrow-and-spade ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... hopes that at a particular spot we should succeed by digging, more especially as on scraping away a little of the surface gravel with our hands, there were sufficient indications to induce us to set Morgan to work with a spade, who in less than an hour dug a hole from which we were enabled to supply both our own wants and those of our animals; and as there was good grass in the creek, we tethered them out in comfort. This discovery ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... drop you in jail if you talk like that!" he chided, his red face growing redder, his fingers nervously feeling the buttons on his picturesque silk waistcoat. "There's conspiracy in Ireland, and you never truly know if the man that serves you at your table, or brings you your horse, or puts a spade into your ground, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is in thee a Nature but infected, A poore vnmanly Melancholly sprung From change of future. Why this Spade? this place? This Slaue-like Habit, and these lookes of Care? Thy Flatterers yet weare Silke, drinke Wine, lye soft, Hugge their diseas'd Perfumes, and haue forgot That euer Timon was. Shame not these Woods, By putting on the cunning of a Carper. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of not more than two score years, returns from his day's labour a while after I had arrived. And as he stands in the door, his pick-axe and spade on his shoulder, his sister runs to meet him, and whispers somewhat about the stranger. Sitting on the threshold, he takes off his spats of cloth and his clouted shoes, while she gets the pitcher of water. After having ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... which is a toole wherewith labourers stubbe rootes out of decayed woode-land grounds, onely this shall be somewhat broader and thinner, somewhat in fashion (though twice so bigge) vnto a Coopers Addes, with a shaft at least foure foote long: some onely for this purpose vse a fine paring spade, which is euery way as good, and as profitable, the fashion of which ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... object, we immediately mounted our horses, Uncle Denis and the Dominie each carrying a spade, and the two men a pickaxe a-piece, while Boxer and Toby followed at our heels. As we galloped over the ground, we were not long in reaching the scene of the massacre. Dio, who had the sharpest eyes amongst us, was stationed to keep a look-out, while we, ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... many-coloured flowers on the surface of the grave move like a fluttering garment. She sank, and the figure threw his dark cloak round her. It became night—the night of death. She sank deeper than the sexton's spade could reach. The churchyard lay like ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... shot and shot till our rifles burned us. Still they swarmed on towards us. We took careful aim all the while. "Ah, good, did you see that?" I turned to my friend and as I did so heard a terrible dull sound like a spade striking upon newly turned earth. His head was fallen forward. I spoke, I called him by name. He was moaning a little. Then I turned to my work again. They are advancing quickly now. Ah! how cool I was. I shot ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... warming himself by the stove might be the man they were after. But the gamekeeper's wife was quick to see his peril. She was baking bread and had just put the loaves into the oven with a long-handled spade. "Here, you lummox!" she cried, and whacked him soundly over the back with it, "what are ye standing there gaping at? Did ye never see folks afore? Get back to your work in the barn." And Gustav, taking the hint, slunk out of ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... the son of a parson, he pursues his reaction against conventional cant beyond the bounds of legitimate paradox, replacing the narrow by the narrower. Nietzsche was necessary; some one had to call a spade a spade. The great forces of modern thought, which have been gathering for centuries, had to find shameless expression; and Nietzsche's scorn for those who have tried to patch up hollow truces with bygone beliefs, and dress up new heresies in old Sunday clothes, is amply ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... collection no doubt found eager customers. Another paper tells us that "Herman Zedwitz, teacher of the violin, announces to the public that he has just returned from Europe and will give a concert in the assembly rooms at the 'Sign of the Golden Spade.'" Later, in 1774, this same man evidently found that the public did not appreciate him musically, for the intervals were so long between lessons and engagements for his violin that he was forced to take up the occupation of a chimney sweep. From accounts ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... all know each other, Pardeau. Call a spade a spade. Wyckoff was a reactionary scoundrel whom you did away with for ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... conversation had been going on Temple indicated the spot which he thought suitable, and, with a spade which he carried, had commenced excavating a hole ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... house that the neighbors stood aghast. Some of the older ones shook their heads and wondered what old Colonel Selden Phelps would say if he could say anything. And the spirit of progress and improvement reached even to the grounds. Zenas Third toiled with spade and pruning-knife and bundles of shrubs and plants came from Boston and were set out with lavish prodigality. In the matter of alterations to the house Eve was consulted on every possible occasion, while garden improvements were placed entirely ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... is well under way, they prepare to go in search of the cabbage. They bring a hand-barrow, on which the paien is placed, armed with a spade, a rope, and a great basket. Four strong men carry him on their shoulders. His wife follows him on foot, the ancients come in a group behind, with grave and pensive mien; then the wedding-party falls in two by two, keeping time to the music. The pistol-shots begin again, the dogs howl louder ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... of the situation, yet still keeping a wary eye about to guard against any treachery, the plainsman, discovering a spade in the nearest wagon, hastily dug a hole in the sand, wrapped the dead bodies in blankets, and deposited them therein, piling above the mound the charred remains of boxes as some slight protection against prowling ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... heard by letter that a party of Americans had made a great discovery of gold among some rocks in a creek of the Sacramento, and that they had found, sticking fast in a crevice close by, a small spade marked with the name of Bill Williams, which the poor fellow had cut on the handle, as I well remembered, in one of his many idle hours. This explained to me Bill's long absence when he went to look for the Indians, his after-anxiety, and where he had been in the delirium of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... de spade what Massa Will sis pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... and compelled the garrison to shelter themselves behind an inner rampart, constructed during the winter in anticipation of this extremity:—"So that, in effect," says Rycaut, "this most impregnable fort of the world was forced and taken by the spade and shovel, and by a crew of unarmed labourers, who understood nothing more than the plough and harrow." The promised succours, however, were now at hand. On the 22d of June, a French fleet appeared ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... chillen; you know, he got a year' staht o' all de res', you know. Yes, seh. Dey got 'bout hund'ed fifty peop' yond' by Gran' Point', and sim like dey mos' all name Roussel. Sim dat way to me. An' ev'y las' one got a lil fahm so lil you can't plow her; got dig her up wid a spade. Yes, seh, same like you diggin' ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... of the house the tilled ground, either ploughed or dug with the spade, came up to the very windows. There was hardly even a particle of grass to be seen. A short way down the hill there were rows of olive trees, standing in prim order and at regular distances, from which hung the vines that made the coopering of the ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... announced cheerfully when the gun was finally assembled on the carriage, "get a sizeable timber an' spike it to the centre o' the deck. I'll run the trail spade up against that cleat an' that'll keep the recoil from lettin' the gun go backward, clean through the opposite rail and overboard. Gimme a coupler gallons o' distillate and some waste, somebody. This cosmoline's got to come ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... must apply to Mrs. Brent, {2} For she, as priestess, knows the rites Wherein the God of Earth delights. First, nine ways looking, let her stand With an old poker in her hand; Let her describe a circle round In Saunder's {3} cellar on the ground A spade let prudent Archy {4} hold, And with discretion dig the mould; Let Stella look with watchful eye, ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the spade. And this made ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... traitors. As time goes on, a new thing opens to the view: a short week ago it seemed but a molehill: now it has risen to the height of a man, and hourly increases in size. Two weeks, and now its summit is far above the reach of spade or shovel throw, and crowned by a platform firmly knit and held together by well-spliced timbers. As to its object we are somewhat dubious, but think it the beginning of an earthwork fortress, built high in order that guns may ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the sweat of our brow as an example and encouragement for them to labour; and promising them the produce of their own industry, we find that they take great delight in their gardens. Necessity may compel the adult Indian to take up the spade and submit to manual labour, but a child brought up in the love of cultivating a garden will be naturally led to the culture of the field as a means of subsistence: and educated in the principles of Christianity, he will ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... sheltering me were already partly fallen; and I was thus not only perilously exposed myself, but enabled to command some part of the garden walks and (under an evergreen arch) the front lawn and windows of the cottage. For long nothing stirred except my friend with the spade; then I heard the opening of a sash; and presently after saw Miss Flora appear in a morning wrapper and come strolling hitherward between the borders, pausing and visiting her flowers—herself as fair. THERE was a friend; HERE, immediately ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a few hurried preparations, they stole forth with bright, expectant faces, bearing a broken spade and a rusty implement that had done many a day's service when Raff was a hale ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... to pay a visit to blind Susan, went away at once into the garden, where she found Stephens the gardener leaning on his spade and rake, and gazing down in dismay at the ...
— Carry's Rose - or, the Magic of Kindness. A Tale for the Young • Mrs. George Cupples
... him a sign from the top of the tower that if he wished to have his clothes again he must fetch them; the vampire began to ascend the steeple, but the Hungarian threw him down backwards from the ladder, and cut his head off with a spade. Such was the end of ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... 1828 by Charles Carroll, the patriot who had staked his broad lands of Carrollton in 1776 against the maintenance of feudalism in this country. "I consider this," said Carroll, after his slender and aristocratic hand had relinquished the spade, "among the most important acts of my life—second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence." Railroads, excepting coal-mine trams, were as yet untried; Stephenson had not yet exhibited the Rocket; for travel and transportation the locomotive was unknown, and the Baltimoreans conceived ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... tranquillity that he showed his true capacity. He employed the natives as labourers in making roads, useful both for war and peace. They found wages better than warfare. As navvies, they were paid half a crown a day, and were reported to do more work as spade-men than an equal number of soldiers would. At no time did the Maoris seem to make such material progress as during the twelve peaceful ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... responsible for the greater prevalence of slavery ancient and modern in southerly latitudes; or when he follows Cairnes in asserting that upon the American slave plantations "the only form of culture practised was spade culture, merely agglomerating upon a single area of land a number of isolated laborers"; or when he contends that either slavery or serfdom since based on force and fraud "destroys the possibility of fiduciary credit by cancelling the conditions [of trust and confidence] which alone can foster ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... he set to climb the rock, while the others laughed and made fun of him. But he did not care a bit for that; up he climbed, and when he got near the top, what do you think he saw? Why, a spade that stood ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... younger, the bailiff, whether certain trees ought or ought not to be taken down; they were arguing the matter as if it concerned their own property. I then saw how much the countess was beloved. I spoke of it to a poor laborer, who, with one foot on his spade and an elbow on its handle, stood listening to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... a chiaroscuro kind of gloom, there were again noises of wings rustling and of water lapping and the old stricture of the throat. Across the table, a Paisley cover between them, Mr. John Burkhardt, his short spade of beard already down over his shirt-front, arm hanging lax over his chair-side and newspaper fallen, sat forward in a hunched attitude of sleep, whistling noises coming occasionally through his breathing. A china clock, the centerpiece of the mantel, ticked ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... colored friends taught me the fear of God. The first time I ever attended church, I rode behind on horseback, and sat with them in the gallery. I imbibed some of their superstitions. They consider it bad to allow a sharp tool, as a spade, hoe or ax, to be taken through the house; to throw salt in the fire, for you would have to pick it out after death. They would kill a hen if she crowed; looked for a death, if a dog howled; or, if one broke a looking-glass, it meant trouble of some kind for seven years. They believed ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... murderous rampage, when least expected, to pillage and burn the houses and then massacre the inhabitants. In those days it was impossible to labor singly in the fields. The tillers of the soil were obliged to work in groups, with a gun in one hand, and a scythe or spade in the other, often at the peril of their lives. These intrepid French Catholics had left peaceful, happy homes, and the blessings of a Christian government, for no other purpose than to convert wild Indians, who were absolutely under the dominion of the devil, and to spread ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... "Oh, I quite forgot! Of course, the shed door is shut! Father has put his tools there, his spade ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... America, a labor-saving machine, a cargo of wooden-ware, a shop full of knick-knacks, an age of inventions. Boys need not be kept back to the hand-craft of the knife. For in-doors there are the type case and printing press, the paint box, the tool box, the lathe; and for out doors, the trowel, the spade, the grafting knife. It matters not how many of the minor arts the youth acquires. The more the merrier. Let each one gain the most he can in all such ways; for arts like these bring no harm in their train; quite otherwise, they lure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... to bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper. In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a visitor ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... protrudes like a balloon, with a hernia, often, at the navel. The extremities are short, bowed, cold, and livid, covered with rolls of the infiltrated skin, rolls which cannot be smoothed out. Hands and feet are broad, pudgy, and floppy, the fingers stiff, square and spade-like, the toes spread apart, like a duck's, by the solid skin. Above the collar bones there are frequently great pads of fat which sometimes ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... It would seem to be a fixed law of nature, that the progress of society adds almost nothing to the application of machinery to agriculture, but indefinitely to its importance in manufactures. Observe an old man digging his garden with a spade—that is the most productive species of cultivation; it is the last stage of agricultural progress to return to it. No steam engines or steam ploughs will ever rival it. But what is the old weaver toiling with his hands, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the shummaker told me o' that rum rig; and his nevvey sa, that the beer-good was fystey; and that Nutty was so swelter'd, that she ha got a pain in spade-bones. The bladethacker wou'd ha gin har some doctor's gear in a beaker; but he sa ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... outline his dispositions were as follows. The bed of the river, which lies nearly east and west, is from fifty to one hundred yards wide and about thirty deep, in soil that lends itself easily to the spade. On both sides, for a mile above and below Wolveskraal Drift, the edges of the banks were trenched, and at either end of these trenches traverses, thrown forward at right angles, served to strengthen against enfilading attack. North of the river, some cannon were placed in advanced ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... shed at the bottom of the garden, and found a spade and a box that was suitable. Then he came out to his neat, bare, wintry garden. The girls flew towards him, putting the elastic of their hats under their chins as they ran. The tree and the box lay on the frozen earth. The air ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... high reputation," I answered quietly, though I had an instinctive feeling that my father would make sport of this assertion. But experience had taught me that with him it was best to call a spade a spade. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... introduce the subject and unduly disclose her own state of ignorance. And a game of bridge, played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in a defensive spade. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... the heart Of guests with wine, when they must needs depart: And reverence most the priests of sacred song: So, when hell hides you, shall your names live long; Not doomed to wail on Acheron's sunless sands, Like some poor hind, the inward of whose hands The spade hath gnarled and knotted, born to groan, Poor sire's poor offspring, ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... range; with varied skill Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing, Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows; In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground; Or thither, where, beneath the showery west, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, No slaves revere them and no wars invade. Yet frequent now at midnight's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Mary, what on earth is the matter with you?" he said, throwing down his spade, and taking her ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... its sides are just trees and bushes such as grow right here in our yard. Then there are large rocks, some of them the size of this house, and springs of water where many animals and birds may drink. And in some places there are large flower-gardens, where the flowers grow without the use of the spade or the hoe. I would certainly like to take you to see the mountain, Edwin, if it were not so far away, but it would take us too long to go and come, for it is very much farther ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... of doubt, Sim walked into the courtyard of the homestead. He had not been seen since the day of the parson's visit, but, without giving sign of any consciousness that he had been away, he now took up a spade and began to remove a drift of sleet that had fallen during the previous night. Rotha's eyes brightened, and she hastened to the door and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... between men, but there is one side of human nature that is the same; it is that we call the heart—that which loves, that which fears, that which suffers, that which is the same in the poorest laborer that ever handled the spade as in the greatest scholar that ever graced a university. If we can get the rubbish from the heart, the good news of God sounds the ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... o'clock and go at six? why, about this much, ma'am," said the gardener, marking off a piece of the border with his spade. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... settles, press it down with a spade next the box, and add more litter upon the top, which should be done every other day, observing that when you increase one lining to have the dung in readiness for the next; each lining not being calculated to last more than a month or five ...
— The art of promoting the growth of the cucumber and melon • Thomas Watkins
... prompt, so silent in action, so punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the grass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade. (To call that spade a spade ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... across the valley to the cabin. Miller pointed out the spot where the stolen treasure was cached. With an old axe as a spade Dave dug away the dirt till he came to a bit of sacking. Crawford scooped out the loose earth with his gauntlet and dragged out a gunnysack. Inside it were a number of canvas bags showing the broken wax seals of the express ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people, not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simply as a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, kind to the parish children, and reverent of the spade with which Wilkinson had tilled his lands: and I am by no means sure that his influence on the stronger minds of his time was anywise hastened or extended by the spirit of tunefulness under whose guidance he discovered ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... experience. More probably, however, the wind and clouds, the weather, the soil, crops and taxes, his family and food and how to provide for them, are the main thoughts that occupy his mind. Before he will strike mattock or spade in the soil, lay axe to a tree, collect or burn underbrush, he will select a stone, a slab of rock or a stick of wood, set it upon hill side or mud field-boundary, and to this he will bow, prostrate himself ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... this connection much praise was accorded to the King as one of the chief factors in its evolution. Mr. W. R. Cremer, M.P., the well-known Radical, made the following comment in the Daily News as to this victory for Arbitration: "It has been the privilege and joy of others to do the spade work in this beneficent movement, but to King Edward the opportunity was, at the psychological moment, presented to complete the work of thirty years. How well and how nobly His Majesty performed his part the history of the past ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... followed. There Bopp developed the study of comparative grammar on the basis of the Sanskrit. There Dietz founded Romance philology. Ritschl turned his students to the study of Latin inscriptions to reconstruct the past. Lepsius began the study of Egyptology with a spade. Niebuhr's Roman History (1811) was the institution's first fruit, and his successor, Ranke, showed his students how to study history from the sources. Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Lotze made over philosophy. Fechner and Wundt began there ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... boys set to work among the ruins, looking into every hole and corner they could think of and locate. They pulled away heavy boards and logs, and Joe even got a spade and dug up the ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... the required implement, conducted his visitor a little before sunset to the spot, just outside the village, and left him there armed with his rifle, a revolver, and a long knife or kriss, besides the spade. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... Irish: 1. In the quantity of stall-fed stock which is kept, and by which a supply of manure is regularly secured; 2. In the strict attention paid to the collection of manure, which is skilfully husbanded; 3. By the adoption of rotations of crop. We found no plough, horse, or cart—only a spade, fork, wheelbarrow, and handbarrow. The farmer had no assistance besides that of his family. The whole land is trenched very deep with the spade. The stock consisted of a couple of cows, a calf or two, one or two pigs; ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding-sheet; When I my grave have made, Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay. True ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... a little street with the remains of an old temple, now stood a convent; a grave was dug in the garden, for a young nun had died, and she was to be lowered in the earth at this early hour of the morning. The spade struck against a stone which appeared of a dazzling whiteness—the white marble came forth—it rounded into a shoulder;—they used the spade with care, and a female head became visible—butterfly wings. They raised from the grave, ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... Funston who ordered that the old men and the weaklings should take this work in hand. They did it willingly enough, but had they refused the troops on guard would have forced them. It was ruled that every man physically capable of handling a spade or a pick should dig for an hour. When the first shallow graves were ready the men, under the direction of the troops, lowered the bodies several in a grave, and a strange ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... known to pass in leaving the water to feed on the herbage of the neighbouring plain. These pits have to be dug in the rainy season, when the ground is soft; for during the dry months the earth becomes so hard as to resist the poor implement used by the natives in place of a spade. The pit is concealed with much care, and as months may pass without a hippopotamus straying into the trap, it may be imagined how strong an effort of perseverance and patience is required in capturing one of ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... such strength combined with the utmost gentleness, and an uncommon regularity of nature. Occasionally he returns for a day or two to resume his place among scholars and idle people, as, for instance, the present week, when he has thrown aside his spade and hoe to attend the Commencement at Cambridge. He is a rare man,—a perfect original, yet without any one salient point; a character to be felt and understood, but almost impossible to describe: for, should you seize upon any characteristic, it would inevitably ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... turf with the other leg until the worms crawled out of their burrows, when they were instantly devoured. Nevertheless, worms do not invariably leave their burrows when the ground is made to tremble, as I know by having beaten it with a spade, but perhaps ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... it, T. A. Because you don't mean it. I've had to fight for most of my happiness. I've never before found it ready at hand. I've always had to dig for it with a shovel and a spade and a pickax, and then blast. I had almost twenty years of that—from the time I was eighteen until I was thirty-eight. It taught me to take my happiness seriously and my troubles lightly." She shut her eyes for a moment, and her voice was very low and very deep and ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... others, crowding forward to look closer. Tom set down the lantern and picked up a broken spade. There was a cavity in the wall of this pocket-like passage. With a flourish Tom dug the broken blade of the spade into the ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... now since I, as a young man, bought a piece of waste land on the north side of this parish," said the farmer. "The ground had never been touched by a spade. Half of it was bog, the other half a mass of stones. It looked pretty bad. On that very land I worked like a slave, digging up stones until my back was ready to break. But I think I laboured even harder with the swamp, before I ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... of immediate danger. The citizens formed themselves into military companies, and worked day and night throwing up redoubts and rifle pits about the city. Men unaccustomed to manual labor vigorously plied the pick and the spade, and kept up their unwonted toil with an earnestness worthy of veteran soldiers. To add to this confusion and alarm, the trains of Milroy's division that had escaped capture were rattling through the streets in search of a resting place. Throughout ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... at home would think very poorly of our Canadian possessions, especially when I add that our whole stock of farming implements consists of two reaping-hooks, several axes, a spade, and a couple of hoes. Add to these a queer sort of harrow that is made in the shape of a triangle for the better passing between the stumps: this is a rude machine compared with the nicely painted instruments of the sort I have been accustomed to see ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... her laid to rest, within That deep grave newly made; Wol th' sexton let a tear drop fall, On th' handle ov his spade. ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... blue beads. Behind the two, and half hidden by trees, was a little monastery. It had been burned down a long while before by sacrilegious men of the Queen's party, but had been roofed anew with rushes by the boy, that the old man might find shelter in his last days. He had not set his spade, however, into the garden about it, and the lilies and the roses of the monks had spread out until their confused luxuriancy met and mingled with the narrowing circle of the fern. Beyond the lilies and the roses the ferns were so deep that a child walking ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... Johnny drove his left spur into the little mare's panting side, let go the crutch, took hold of her head in the way that is unmistakable, and faced her at the barricade. As he did so a countryman sprang up at his right hand and struck furiously at him with a heavy potato spade. The blow was aimed at Dinny Johnny, but the moment was miscalculated, and it fell on "Matchbox" instead. The sharp blade gashed her hind quarter, but with a spring like a frightened deer she rose to the jump. For one supreme moment Dinny Johnny thought she had cleared it, but ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... superintending the building was given to one Celer, who was told by Romulus to let no one pass over the furrow of the plow. Remus, ignorant of this, began to scoff at the lowly beginning, and was immediately struck down by Celer with a spade. Romulus bore the death of his brother "like a Roman," with great fortitude, and, swallowing down his rising tears, exclaimed: "So let it happen to all ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... for discharging sewage. There were no railroads, telegraphs or telephones. Letter postage to New York from Boston was twenty-five cents. None of the modern agricultural machinery then existed, not even good modern plows. Crops were planted by hand and cultivated with the hoe and spade. Vegetables were dug with the hoe, and hay and grain cut with the sickle or scythe. There were no ice-houses. The use of ice for keeping provisions or ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... daylight just coming in, whan he cam to the yett yonder, thinking to meet his man, paidling Jock—but Jock had sleepit in, and wasna there. Weel, to the wast corner ower yonder he gaed, and throwing his coat ower a headstane, and his hat on the tap o't, he dug away with his spade, casting out the mools, and the coffin handles, and the green banes and sic like, till he stoppit a wee to take breath.—What! are ye whistling to yoursell?" quoth Isaac to me, "and ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... and if a man doesn't work when a woman puts him at it he isn't worth the powder—I won't waste time even in original remarks. I'll promise you there will be double the number of trees out by night. Let me take your father's spade and show you how I can dig. Is this the place? If I don't catch up with Hiram, you may send the tramp back to the city." And before she could remonstrate, his coat was off and ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... boy, be not afraid; Look labor boldly in the face; Take up the hammer or the spade, And blush ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You had rather sing than work, I believe."—Upon Hamlet's taking up the skull, he cried out, "Well! it is strange to see how fearless some men are: I never could bring ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... covered up the Dead Is himself laid in the same bed Time with his crooked scythe hath made Him lay his mattock down and spade May he and we all rise ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... discovered a European camp, one mile north on west side of flat. At, or near this camp, traces of horses, camels, and whites were found. Hair, apparently belonging to Mr. Wills, Charles Gray, Yr. Burke, or King, was picked from the surface of a grave dug by a spade, and from the skull of a European buried by the natives. Other less important traces-such as a pannikin, oil can, saddle stuffing, &c., have been found. Beware of the natives, on whom we have had to fire. We do not intend to return to Adelaide, but proceed ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and out of it the rector of Middleton called a spade a spade with purely British bluntness, and though his parish was only a small one he was the most popular man in it—a fact which surely ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... namely, that "two months in the field are necessary in order to get at the full value of reserves." Our infantry is now accustomed to the rapid and thorough "organization" of the defensive. In August it neither liked nor had the habit of using the spade. Today those who see our trenches are astounded. They are veritable improvised fortresses, proof against the 77-millimeter gun and often against artillery of higher calibre. During the last five months not a single encounter can be ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the big table. Carnehan continued: The country isnt half worked out because they that governs it wont let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you cant lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that without all the Government sayingLeave it alone and let us govern. Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isnt crowded and can come to his own. ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... was ready to aid in this way, after vainly trying to handle a spade, a task rendered impossible by his wound. He was hard at work over his work, carrying basketful after basketful with one hand, when Captain Smithers came up, saw how he was striving, and stood looking ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... by a devil, is absorbed by a nobleman, and turns unheeding from a poor suppliant. But Death, with glass and spade, is waiting at ...
— The Dance of Death • Hans Holbein
... a young man flooring the barley. As he turned and re-turned it with his spade he wept so copiously above it that he was frequently obliged to pause and wipe away his tears with his arm, for he could no longer see the barley he was spreading. When the maltster had interrupted himself thus for ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... at all for mincing words with his important confreres, when it came to vital issues. He preferred, in his grandiloquent way, to call a spade a spade. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... domo, for such he was, and indisputably the second officer of state in the barony (nay, as chief minister of the interior, superior even to Bailie Macwheeble in his own department of the kitchen and cellar)—the major domo laid down his spade, slipped on his coat in haste, and with a wrathful look at Edward's guide, probably excited by his having introduced a stranger while he was engaged in this laborious, and, as he might suppose it, degrading office, requested ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... plains of Piedmont or Lombardy. The little patch of Wheat is so carefully reaped that scarcely a grain is left, and children bear the sheaves on their backs to the allotted shelter, while mothers and maidens are digging up the soil with the spade, and often pulling up the stubble with their hands, preparatory to another crop. Switzerland could not afford to be a Kingdom,—the expense of a Court and Royal Family would famish half her people. Yet everywhere are the signs of frugal thrift and homely ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... syfe and de spade what Massa Will sis 'pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I had to gib ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... seeth might if any home were brought. The rest the wood doth seeke, eke euery bush and tree For berries and such baggage like, which should seeme meate to bee. Our fingers serue in steed, both of pickaxe and spade, To dig and pull vp euery weed, that grew within the shade. Eke diged for rootes the ground, and searcht on euery brier For berries, which if we had found, then streight way to the fire: Where we rost some of ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... several occasions in the cups of two persons, both of whom read their tea-leaves regularly. This symbol, as will be seen in the dictionary which follows, stands for "labour trouble and strikes." A spade was also in evidence at intervals, a further sign of "trouble and unrest." So that it was through no fault of the tea-leaves if some of us were not in the superior position of knowing all about the strike before it ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... form of unbelief to which, on the principle of calling a spade a spade, I have taken the liberty of giving the name of Scientific Atheism, manifests itself now-a-days rather by ignoration than by formal denial of God. This, however, is not a new feature in any atheism really worthy of being styled scientific. Even as Mr. Darwin verbally recognises ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... way of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein; to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no distinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; to prove one's entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical apostrophe;—this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable branch of industry, but the word "hatter" cannot be used seriously in emotional verse; not to understand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Nature; when we meet She does not prattle of her posies, Dull facts of what begonias eat, The dietetic fads of roses, And how she strove with spade and spud. Or nipped the green fly on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."[57] ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... realized that it was impossible to prevent the animal from burrowing out of sight. One expedient remained. The pony, had a long and bushy tail. He doubled the end of this, and securely fastened the rein to it. Then he hastened to his camp for the purpose of fetching a spade and calling people to ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... the floor of the house was broken up, and the stone paving was piled in corners, and a pick or two lay on them with a spade and crowbar. ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... making the best of everything, and keeping a good face to the foe. The language and tone are perhaps rather lower than in some other collections, but it must be remembered that these are the tales of 'hempen homespuns', of Norse yeomen, of Norske Bonder, who call a spade a spade, and who burn tallow, not wax; and yet in no collection of tales is the general tone so chaste, are the great principles of morality better worked out, and right and wrong kept so steadily in sight. The general view of human nature ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... Chagford Church tower, and the notes came drowsily through morning mists. Then quick steps followed on the last stroke of the hour and Will stood by Billy's side in Monks Barton farmyard. The old man raised his eyes from contemplation of a spade and barrow, bid Blanchard "Good morning" with simulated heartiness, and led the way to work, while Will followed, bringing the tools. They passed into a shrubbery of syringa bushes twenty yards distant, and the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... infernally nawsty. It sees evil in everything because its point of view is that of the pimp. Its mind is a foul sewer whose exhalations coat even the Rose of Sharon with slime. A writer may no longer call a spade a spade; he must cautiously refer to it as an agricultural implement lest he shock the supersensitiveness of hedonists and call down upon his head the Anathema Maranatha of men infinitely worse than Oscar Wilde. What the Mirror means by "Cambronne's surrender" I cannot imagine, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... from the trench, casting down his spade and dashing the soil from his hands, rejoicing that his task was over for that day; but his eyes fell upon the mournful group ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... of finding gold, or the passage to India, or both, than of anything else. Smith knew that in this world, new or old, men get what they work for, and in the long run no more than that; and he made his gentlemen colonists take off their coats and blister their gentlemanly hands with the use of the spade and the ax. It is said that they excelled as woodcutters, after due instruction; and they were undoubtedly in all respects improved by this first lesson in Americanism. The American ax and its wielders have become famous since that day; ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... promptness of disgust of one thrown off a horse or tripped by a wire. When told to move from one part of the trench to another where there was desperate need, a word was sufficient. They understood what was wanted of them, these veterans. They went. They seized every lull to drop the rifle for the spade and repair the breaches. When they were not shooting they were digging. The officers had only to keep reminding them not to expose themselves in the breaches. For in the thick of it, and the thicker the more so, they must try to keep some dirt between all of their bodies ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... men who were arrayed in the fields of Baylen, and upon the mountains of the North; the peasants of Asturias, and the students of Salamanca; and many a solitary and untold-of hand, which, quitting for a moment the plough or the spade, has discharged a more pressing debt to the country by levelling with the dust at least one insolent and murderous Invader;—these have attested the efficacy of the passions which we have been contemplating—that the will of good men is not a vain impulse, heroic desires a delusive prop;—have ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Billy." Then, breaking off with the unexpected garrulity of children, she continued: "I am getting quite strong now; I was down on the beach this morning, and watched the little boys and girls building mounds. When I am quite well, uncle, won't you buy me a spade and bucket, and mayn't I ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... point of fact, I hadn't understood this. I had also overlooked the item that he was a gentleman, and even then did not recognize it. But I kept these trifles to myself; and as he was evidently trying to bury the hatchet, I got out my spade as well. And for the rest of that evening we were as civil to one another as a couple of smugglers with ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... Germans. He dreamt of swift armoured aeroplanes swooping down upon the flying airship, and sending it reeling earthward, the men screaming. He imagined a shattered Zeppelin staggering earthward in the fields behind the Dower House, and how he would himself run out with a spade and smite the Germans down. "Quarter indeed! Kamerad! ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... her form against the door and held it as hard as if a giant were outside trying to force it in. Bert felt around the empty shed and picked up the handle of a broken spade. With this in hand he stalked over to the one little window which was opposite ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... Pittsburgh Mission at Atoka was closed, Mrs. O. D. Spade, one of the teachers, took Lucretia C. Brown, a pupil of eight years, to her home at Bellefontaine, Ohio, and enabled her to graduate from the Grammar and High schools of that city in 1910. In 1912, after rendering one year of earnest ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... the king sent for me as we wrought at the fort, and both he and I were horny handed and clay stained from the work. I came with spade in hand, and he leaned on a pick. Whereat ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... the side of the Yin against Wu Wang, and after many adventures was caught by Jan Teng between two mountains, which he pressed together, leaving only Yin Chiao's head exposed above the summits. The general Wu Chi promptly cut it off with a spade. Chiang Tz[u)]-ya subsequently canonized ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the waters of the canal and thrown a dyke across it, led his entire force up to the glacis of the fortifications, dug some trenches, and brought up a line of battering-rams. He would soon have effected a breach, but the Egyptians understood how to use the spade as well as the lance, and while the outer wall was crumbling, they improvised behind it a second wall, crowned with wooden turrets. Nectanebo, who had come up with thirty thousand native, five thousand Greek troops, and half the Libyan contingent, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... dollar covers the expense of making one spade, then when a spade, by virtue of a sudden demand, rises in value to one dollar and ten cents, the manufacturers get an extra profit of ten cents. This could not long remain so, because other capital ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... soul was stirred to its yellowest depths. For there was in Boston an association known as the American Society for the Investigation of Ancient Beliefs, which was a rival of the Royal Society in its good work of laying bare with pick and spade the buried mysteries along the Nile. And this rivalry, which was strong between the societies and bitter between their presidents, became acute in the persons of their secretaries, both of whom were women. Madame Gianclis, who served ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... feverish brain To bring aid to the gasping heart! To sustain its quick throbs, to suppress its fierce sobs, As it must with its idols part: While the ruthless spade in the grave it has made Hurries ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of man, following close upon the plow and the spade and often becoming quite tame and domestic. It feeds for a month or two on strawberries and cherries, but generally on worms and insects picked out of the ground. It destroys the larvae of many insects in the soil and is a positive blessing to man, designed by ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... lie, because it is customary to do so. He will also flog him for not telling a lie if the boy tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because it is customary to do so. He will give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable of ethical judgment ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... wounded to Sackett's Harbour, the great American naval depot on Lake Ontario, and hastened back with a strong body of re-enforcements. The gallant Colonel Vincent, commandant at Fort George, bated not a jot of heart or hope,—although he was able to muster only some 1,400 troops. Yet these, with spade and mattock, toiled day after day to strengthen its ramparts and ravelins, and to throw up new earthworks and batteries. One fatal want, however, was felt. The stock of ammunition was low, and as Chauncey, with his fleet, had the mastery of the lake, it could not be replenished from the ample supply ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... bedding, clothing, table, chairs, dishes, candles, a little cooking-stove with a blazing fire, all the common quota of cooking utensils, and meat, meal, and groceries; a plow, rake, axe, hoe, shovel, spade, hammer, and nails. We ask few questions. They ask none. The whistle of the "Troop" is as welcome to their ears as the ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... clearly in three main lines: it is mechanical, psychical and social. Our power to make and use things is essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature, using the larger brain power through a wide variety of changing weapons. This is one of our main and vital distinctions. Ancient animal races are traced and known by mere bones ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... changed to the opposite. Chimneys, at that period, were to be found only upon the houses of extensive and wealthy farmers, the only substitute for them being a simple hole in the roof over the fireplace. The small farmer in question cultivated his acres with a spade: and after sowing his grain he harrowed it in with a large thorn bush, which he himself, or one of his sons, dragged over it with a heavy stone on the top to keep it close to the surface. When Barney ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... in the bending of the small spade; the thick portion retains its crystallized nature, while the thin part has been changed by the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... things. In front of their cottage grew an under-sized ash; and on summer afternoons she would bring out a chair on the grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain Hagberd, in his canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He dug every day in his front plot. He turned it over and over several times every year, but was not going to plant anything "just ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... much of his time at the muskeg, encouraging the men who searched it and often assisting in the work. The whole morass was being systematically turned over with the spade, but no further discoveries had been made. In addition to this, Jernyngham rode to and fro about the prairie, talking to the farmers whom he met on the trail or found at work in the fields. They were all ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... with spade and fiddle, Delved by day and sang by night, With a hand that never wearied, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... up the beds and get rid of the weeds, and then perhaps for this summer only we might take refuge in geraniums and begonias. Just for one summer, till something else will grow." She sighed, and set to work with her spade, giving it a push into the ground with her foot in professional style, and pausing to gasp and straighten her back between every second or third attempt. Astonishing what hard work it was, and how hot one got all of a sudden! Peggy gathered the weeds together, moralised darkly on their number, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... German archaeologists has revealed what town-planning meant in a small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period. No other even approximately complete example has been as yet uncovered on any other site. But spade-work at the neighbouring and more famous city of Miletus has uncovered similar street-planning there. In one quarter, the only one yet fully excavated, the streets crossed at right angles and enclosed regular blocks of dwelling-houses measuring 32 x 60 yds. (according to the excavators) but sub-divided ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... borne from his home, among weeping throngs, and gently carried to the green fields, and laid peacefully beneath the turf and the flowers. No priest stood to pronounce a burial-service. It was an ocean grave. The mists alone shrouded the burial-place. No spade prepared the grave, nor sexton filled up the hollowed earth. Down, down they sank, and the quick returning waters smoothed out every ripple, and left the sea as if it had not been. H. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... call a spade a spade is to give a man his real character. The phrase is old and still ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the long hair firm on it; which, on being cleaned, is neither black nor fair, but a darkish dusk, the most common of any other colour. Soon afterwards we found the skull, but it was not complete. A spade had damaged it, and one of the temple quarters was wanting. I am no phrenologist, not knowing one organ from another, but I thought the skull of that wretched man no study. If it was particular for anything, it ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... that the guardians had so wasted their goods, that their inheritance lay desolate. The brother was in despair, but young Richard comforted him, bade him trust in God, and himself laying aside the studies he delighted in, look up the spade and axe, and worked unceasingly till the affairs of the homestead were in a flourishing state. Then, when prosperity dawned on the elder brother, the younger obtained his wish, and went to study at Oxford, where he was so poor that he and two other scholars had but one gown between ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was not listening; he had fallen into a brown study, turning the piece of metal in his skilful, wonted, knotty fingers, with their spade tips. ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... of dignity and no brains pretty bad—and he sort of come back by teaching me his game in the long dull hours when we had nothing to do but serve the public. The thing gets a hold on you, somehow. Let's see—now the spade—now the heart." ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... been worth with only our original six hundred in it. It was the difference between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it. We would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade one little day on our property ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... son of a parson, he pursues his reaction against conventional cant beyond the bounds of legitimate paradox, replacing the narrow by the narrower. Nietzsche was necessary; some one had to call a spade a spade. The great forces of modern thought, which have been gathering for centuries, had to find shameless expression; and Nietzsche's scorn for those who have tried to patch up hollow truces with bygone beliefs, and dress up new ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... surrounded the monastery, was cut down in the revolution. In the gateway of the outer court is a statue of Saint Bernard, which has been mutilated by the republicans: he is holding in one hand a church, and in the other a spade—the emblems of devotion and labour. This gateway leads into a court, which opens into a second enclosure, and around that are the granaries, stables, bakehouse, and other offices necessary to the abbey, which have ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... the reception of well-rotted manure, to be quickly used, and the other for the reception of all weeds, leaves, and rubbish, which will make manure, and which should be mixed up from time to time with the spade. These pits should be used alternately. As soon as one has its contents well rotted, it should be emptied from time to time on the land, while the other pit should be used to hold the fresh matter newly collected. By the time this is full, the other will be empty, and then that may be used as ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... figure, booted and greatcoated, emerging from a tavern or from a law office such as Rand's. A sledge passed, laden with pine and hickory, drawn by mules with jangling bells; and a handful of boys loosed from school threw down their bags of books and fell to snowballing. A negro shuffled by with a spade on his ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... some scores of graves, Who'll turn the mould for thine? And when this spade thy bed hath made, Who'll lift a spade ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... breakfasting alone in a closet of his own, which was called his dressing-room, but in which he kept no appurtenances for dressing, but in lieu of them a large collection of old spuds and sticks and horse's-bits. There was a broken spade here, and a hoe or two; and a small table in the corner was covered with the debris of tradesmen's bills from Penrith, and dirty scraps which he was wont to call his farm accounts.—"Grandpapa," said Alice, rushing ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... know not, for there was no mark as of spade or pick-axe; nor was the earth broken, nor had waggon passed thereon. We were sore dismayed when the watchman showed the thing to us; for the body we could not see. Buried indeed it was not, but rather covered with dust. Nor was there any sign as of wild beast or of dog that had torn it. ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... out that day it is impossible to guess. There are at least fifty accounts of their apparition. There was one victim, a grocer, who discovered one of these monsters in a sugar-cask and very rashly attacked it with a spade as it rose. He struck it to the ground for a moment, and it stung him through the boot as he struck at it again and cut its body in half. He was ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... Red-Cap, I tell thee, says we can never get the treasure. By this good spade, and a willing arm to wit, the gold is mine ere two hours ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... near to the royal palace. And whereas that some of those who bear this auld and honourable name may take scorn that it ariseth from the tilling of the ground, quhilk men account a slavish occupation, yet we ought to honour the pleugh and spade, seeing we all derive our being from our father Adam, whose lot it became to cultivate the earth, in respect of his fall ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... and a night population—the clown and his tillage in the light, the smuggler and his trade in the dark; yet the same peasant frequently exhibiting a versatility for which John Bull seldom gets credit.—The man of the plough-tail and the spade, drudging and dull through one half of his being; the same man, after an hour or two of sleep, springing from his bed at midnight, handling the sail and helm, baffling his Majesty's cruisers at sea, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... dark and gloomy night A form in phosphorescent white, A genuine hair-raising sight, Would wander through the town. And as it slowly roamed around, With a spade it dug each foot of ground; So the folks about Said there was no doubt 'Twas the ghost of ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... another lungful of midnight fog and broke into the stretch. "Heah's de answeh, graved on de gol' tablets an' dug up in de midnight moon wid a luck spade. Gran' oaks f'm li'l acorns grow. Heah in San F'mcisco wid de aid of you all we starts de new movement towards de Canaan land. Fust off, us o'ganizes de Temple o' Luck. Den de fust annex is de Swamick Chu'ch, based on de mystic teachin' of Swami de Indian Budda. Nex' do' ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... speeches would be worth reading and worth answering, instead of the melancholy marionettes whom the wire-pullers of the Tariff Reform League are accustomed to exhibit on provincial platforms. But I hope you will not let these pretexts or complaints move you or prevent you from calling a spade a spade, a tax a tax, a protective tariff a gigantic dodge to cheat the poor, or the Liberal Unionist party the most illiberal ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate: Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... General Neuburg [Neipperg] halted here at Mollwitz, with the whole Army; before the Village, in mind to quarter. And quarter was settled, so that a BAUER [Plough-Farmer] got four to five companies to lodge, and a GARTNER [Spade-Farmer] two or three hundred cavalry..The houses were full of Officers, the GARTE [Garths] and the Fields full of horsemen and baggage; and all round, you saw nothing but fires burning; the ZAUNE [wooden railings] were instantly torn down for firewood; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... plum-trees must be root-pruned and headed-in, or they will be unfruitful and unhealthy. Root-pruning should be done in August, in the following manner. In case of a tree ten feet high, take a sharp spade, and in a circle around the tree, two feet from the trunk (making the circle four feet in diameter), cut off all the roots within reach. In smaller trees, make the circle smaller, and in larger ones, larger. At the same time, shorten in the current year's growth, by cutting off one half the length ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... was most complete. The river rose so as to overflow the marshes, which enabled us to push all the vessels up the channel without the necessity of deepening it by spade labour. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... the cathedral, Catherine of Arragon, who died at Kimbolton Castle, in 1536; and Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed at Fotheringhay Castle fifty-one years afterwards. The accompanying engraving is a representation of the old sexton, with his spade, pickaxe, and other ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... Ukerewe dog is a fine animal, and quite different from any on the mainland. There are very few canoes about here, and those are of miserable construction, and only fitted for the purpose they turn them to—catching fish close to the shore. The paddle the fishermen use is a sort of mongrel between a spade and a shovel. The fact of there being no boats of any size here, must be attributed to the want of material for constructing them. On the route from Kaze there are no trees of any girth, save the calabash, the wood of which is too soft for ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... white feet. One eye was blue, and the other one the nicest, softest, kindest brown! He was just that kind of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde horse, too! He was fitted out with a new saddle, a gaudy Navajo saddle blanket, and a bridle with silver inlaid fittings. The spade bit was necessary. I found that ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... surveys, erection of sea- walls in the Atlantic states—"everything on the margin of the ocean, but nothing for domestic trade; nothing for the great interior of the country." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 1035.] "Not one stone," he said, "had yet been broken, not one spade of earth removed, in any Western State." He boldly claimed that the right to regulate commerce granted as fully the power to construct roads and canals for the benefit of circulation and trade in the interior as it did the power to promote coastwise traffic. ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... to be expecting a load of household furniture. He thought it was all right, if everybody that was moving got a load of goods. Well, after we got moved Pa said we must make a garden, and we said we would go out and spade up the ground and sow peas, and radishes, and beets. There was some neighbors lived in the next house to our new one, that was all wimmen, and Pa don't like to have them think he had to work, so he said it would be ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... toward her; he did not believe he had done this yet. He looked about him. The party, excepting himself and Mr. Du Brant, were on the front lawn; he would join them and satirize the gloomy Austrian. If Olive could be made to laugh at him it would be like preparing a garden-bed with spade and ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... kind of fish we have caught today," said the Green Fisherman. He put a hand as big as a spade into the net and pulled out a handful ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... stockings, turned up their trousers, and made sand castles. "Look, nurse," bawled Burton to his wife, "see what Cammy and I have done!" "If you please, nursey," whined Cameron, "Dick's snatched away my spade." At that moment Lord Aberdeen, President of the Royal Geographical Society, and a party of grave antiquaries and geographers, mostly run to nose, spectacles, and forehead, arrived on the scene; with the result of infinite laughter, in which Burton and Cameron joined heartily; and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... discoveries that have been made of vaults which must have conducted the waters to this spot. The meadows and little hills all around are covered with remains of this once important place of amusement; and the labourer is for ever turning up, with his spade or plough, coins and capitals and broken pillars and pavement, belonging to ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... great estates from his ancestors, or whether he make honourably great wealth and station for himself; whether he spend his life quietly and honestly in the country farm or in the village shop, or whether he simply earn his bread from week to week by plough and spade. Blessed is he, and blessed are his children after him. For he is a son of Abraham; and of him God hath said, as of Abraham, 'I know him that he will command his children and household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment, that the Lord may bring ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... of police with fixed bayonets. We dined in the police station veranda, and as the launch had been obliged to drop down the river because the water was falling, we went to Sempang in a native boat, paddled by four Malays with paddles like oval-ended spades with spade handles, a guard of honor of policemen going down with us. There we took leave of our most kind and worthy host, who, with tears in his kind eyes, immediately turned up the river to dwell alone in his bungalow with his bull-dog, his revolver, and his rifle, a self-exiled ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... believe Queen Victoria ever planted that in the world, do you, Hosy. She'd look pretty, a fleshy old lady like her, puffin' away diggin' holes with a spade, now would she!" ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... said, with an emphatic nod. "I called Jason to bring a spade; but I could scarcely wait, and I found myself clawing like—like one of the dogs, my dear. Jason came and we had that box up and I opened it. And what do ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... she would leave even her dinner half eaten, and bolt down her master's bomb-proof. On one occasion I remember being amused at seeing a nigger, working on the opposite side of the road, hold up a spade over his head like an umbrella as the missile came flashing by, while a fellow-workman crawled under a large tarpaulin that was stretched on the ground. These natives always displayed the most astonishing sang-froid. One day we saw a funny scene on the occasion of a Kaffir ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... and readers with what he knew about "Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the "Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some general ideas about farming which he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... into an oar or a cricket bat and you are a hero; put your muscle into a spade and ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... ancient tabernacle which had never been opened in the memory of living men, or the fathers of living men. In that inner shrine was the image of the Pitying Mother, found ages ago in the soil of L'Impruneta, uttering a cry as the spade struck it. Hitherto the unseen Image had hardly ever been carried to the Duomo without having rich gifts borne before it. There was no reciting the list of precious offerings made by emulous men and communities, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... been a lonely life all winter since the capture of his harem, and of this old Turkeytrack was fully aware. The old cook's chum had a nice little brown mare which he judged would serve his ends, and taking a pair of the strongest hobbles, a spade, a spare lasso, and a stout post he mounted the mare and rode away to ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... stern Oppression, hand in hand With Pride, stalk'd proudly through the land; When weeping Justice was misled From her fair course, and Mercy dead: 120 Such were the men, in virtue strong, Who dared not see their country's wrong, Who left the mattock and the spade, And, in the robes of War array'd, In their rough arms, departing, took Their helpless babes, and with a look Stern and determined, swore to see Those babes no more, or see them free: Such were the men whom tyrant Pride Could never fasten to his side 130 By threats or bribes; who, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... must speak of the one memorial which is usually looked at first, the famous picture of Old Scarlett, on the wall of the western transept. He is represented with a spade, pickaxe, keys, and a whip in his leathern girdle; at his feet is a skull. At the top of the picture are the arms of the cathedral. Beneath the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... hundreds. We subdivided these into messes of twenty-five, and began devising means for shelter. Nothing showed the inborn capacity of the Northern soldier to take care of himself better than the way in which we accomplished this with the rude materials at our command. No ax, spade nor mattock was allowed us by the Rebels, who treated us in regard to these the same as in respect to culinary vessels. The only tools were a few pocket-knives, and perhaps half-a-dozen hatchets which some infantrymen-principally members of the Third Michigan—were ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... ordinary business man in his working clothes, Furbush was obviously a man of temperament. Tall and lean, he had allowed his beard to grow into something of patriarchal proportions, or, more exactly, into one of those healthy spade-like growths which the French know so well how to develop. That it was a rich red only added to its distinction, and to his. He was noted for being a hard worker and a wit, but feeling about him was sharply divided. One could not be neutral; either one hailed him as a prophet and seer, or one ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... must be willing to do any task that is assigned to him, without complaint. It does not matter if he has never handled a spade in his life, he must dig if required to, and dig to the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 36, July 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... dinner, sister Evelyn?" I asked, gravely and literally. "I want to go and see about my mole, now—my poor mole that Hodges wounded with his spade this morning. It suffers so dreadfully!"—clasping my hands in a tragic manner, not unusual with me ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... replied Zachariah, uncovering a heap of mould with his spade. "Two brain-pans bleached loike snow, an the third wi' more hewr on it than ey ha' o' my own sconce. Fro' its size an shape ey should tak it to be a female. Ey ha' laid these three skulls aside fo' ye. Whot dun yo mean ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... just victim of his royal rage. 60 Ev'n mighty Pam, that Kings and Queens o'erthrew And mow'd down armies in the fights of Lu, Sad chance of war! now destitute of aid, Falls undistinguish'd by the victor spade! ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... has iron prongs which dig under the dirt like giant fingers, turning out the potatoes which are tossed between the rows of dirt so men, who follow, may pick them up. But we'll dig ours by hand. And in digging potatoes you must be careful not to stick your fork, spade or whatever you use, into the potato tubers, ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... fatuous spinster, but this time, in the part of Miss Myrtle, she had her chance, and seized it bravely. When that typical British boarder, Mr. John Preston, M. P. (interpreted with great relish and vigour by Mr. HUBERT HARBEN), remarked, "I call a spade a spade," she replied, "And I suppose you would call a dinner-napkin a serviette"—one of the pleasantest remarks in a play where the good things said were many ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... near Nature's heart to appeal to Mrs. Senter, and too clever for my good sister Emily, who will read no author, willingly, unless he calls a spade a pearl-headed hatpin. But Ellaline, strange to say, has been allowed to read him. Evidently French schools are not what they once were; and she and I particularly wanted to go through Dorchester (his Casterbridge) ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... made the oven as hot as could be, and took Esben out of his prison in order to roast him. She brought the oven spade, and told Esben to seat himself on it, so that she could shoot him into the oven. Esben accordingly took his seat on it, but when she had got him to the mouth of the oven he spread his legs out wide, so that she could ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... from the upper portion of Kythrea, where we had proposed to camp, and the route was partly across country, to avoid layers of natural rock which in successive ridges made it impossible for the vans to keep the track. Several deep watercourses intervened, which required the spade and pickaxe, and it was quite dark when we were obliged to halt ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... additional charm of novelty. A succession of walnut, apricot, mulberry, and apple trees shaded our path, which lay through extensive orchards, carpeted with beautiful turf. The vines clung to the sycamore trees; and where the spade had been at work, corn and artificial grasses grew in abundance. Our next halting place was Sarbagh, where we arrived on the 15th, after marching through a pleasant and fruitful valley, flanked by parallel belts of mountain land, the agreeable verdure relieving ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... world we live in! How good, and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whole party ascended to the battery. There lay the spade and the sack of earth. The tool with which the work had been done was still in the mouth of the second cannon and, on pulling it out, the powder cartridge came with it. Then Leigh led them to the next gun, and a man who had ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... acknowledge my special debt to Mr. Elton's 'Origins of English History'; and yet more to Mr. Haverfield's invaluable publications in the 'Antiquary' and elsewhere, without which to keep abreast of the incessant development of my subject by the antiquarian spade-work now going on all over the land would ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... strength to do this; and it is very striking to find such strength combined with the utmost gentleness, and an uncommon regularity of nature. Occasionally he returns for a day or two to resume his place among scholars and idle people, as, for instance, the present week, when he has thrown aside his spade and hoe to attend the Commencement at Cambridge. He is a rare man,—a perfect original, yet without any one salient point; a character to be felt and understood, but almost impossible to describe: for, should you seize upon any ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... they went with right good will, With spade and shovel and pike and bill; And from evening's close till the dawn of day They worked like miners all ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... realize, dissatisfaction of the lot from which they will never rise! Allons! one is viewing the dark side of the question. It is all the fault of that confounded Riccabocca, who has already caused Lenny Fairfield to lean gloomily on his spade, and, after looking round and seeing no one near ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... day than at home for 1s. 6d., will be miserably disappointed, for, where high wages are given, hard work is required; those must also be disappointed who expect to live in style from off the produce of a small Canadian farm, and those whose imaginary dignity revolts from plough, and spade, and hoe, and those who invest borrowed capital in farming operations. The fields of the slothful in Canada bring forth thorns and thistles, as his fields brought them forth in England. Idleness is absolute ruin, and drunkenness carries ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... strange, sweet hope to them, that came in that wild sermon of a bishop-silenced young heretic. They thought about it a good deal, and began, some of them whose terms were to expire with life, to dig down into the rust and mire with the spade of conscience for the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... may still be found bearing its mark in contracted legs and arms: one man having Tim Halisy, his mark; another, Paddy Murphy, his mark, indelibly inscribed on his body. They had little or no agriculture—no wheeled cart, and scarcely even a spade. A crop of oats was a curiosity; and when there was such a thing, the only mode of conveying it to market was on a horse's back. Their agricultural operations were confined to feeding cattle, and they depended on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... glance on the body, Mateo returned to the house for a spade with which to bury his son. He had gone but a few steps when he met Giuseppa, who, alarmed by the shot, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... give some inkling of the spot where he had hidden money not his own. But he purposely multiplied our chances of failure. Joan, I've got to get a spade and dig ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... nearly upset the little girl's balance. "Go boldly back to the house; don't be afraid of any one; don't speak to any one unless it happens to be Mrs. Haddo. Be sure you are polite to her, for she is a lady. Go up to the Vivian attic and bring down the clumps of heather, and the little spade we brought with us in the very bottom ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... down the axe; fling by the spade; Leave in its track the toiling plow; The rifle and the bayonet-blade For arms like yours were fitter now; And let the hands that ply the pen Quit the light task, and learn to wield The horseman's crooked brand, and rein The charger on ...
— Reminiscences of a Rebel • Wayland Fuller Dunaway
... course the satiric aim is different in the two poems. Butler ridiculed the Puritans and upheld the Royalists, while Trumbull discharged his venomed shafts at the adherents of the king. In M'Fingal, a Tory bent on destroying a liberty pole drew his sword on a Whig, who had no arms except a spade. The Whig, however, employed his weapon with such good effect ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the shore, he rode to the summit of the hill, where the men were hard at work, delving in silence with pick and spade. There were not sufficient implements for all, but when one was out of breath, another took his place, and before the first glimmer of dawn appeared, the trench had ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... parade, go get your spade, Fall in, the shovel and pick brigade, There's a carry fatigue, for half a league, And work to do with the spade. Through the dust and ruins of Ypres town The seventeen-inch still battering down, Spewing death with its fiery breath, On the red, ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... together. How many are there who have but the dimmest possible conception of what the Church is and of what membership in the Church really signifies and involves? There is much work to be done here—spade work we might almost call it—for the ground has hardly yet been broken amongst us. May we venture a suggestion that, among things inherited from an earlier day, the word "societies" as signifying churches should be dropped in favour of the ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... trial of it—just one more. She had wonderful faith in the selection, had Mother. She pleaded until the fire burned low, then Dad rose and said: "Well, we'll try it once more with corn, and if nothing comes of it why then we MUST give it up." Then he took the spade and raked the fire together and covered it with ashes—we always covered the fire over before going to bed so as to keep it alight. Some mornings, though, it would be out, when one of us would have to go across to Anderson's and borrow a fire-stick. Any of us but Joe—he ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some "talk fit for a charnel,"[35] something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's law, who has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... already called the attention of our readers to the subject of ploughing, but we feel we have not pressed upon them with the force it deserves, the necessity of what the Bible calls "breaking up the fallow ground." What the plough and spade do for the land we must have done for the minds of those who sit in Methodist pews. Unsaved men and women must be compelled to look the truth in the face. Farmers know that so long as the land is hard and cloddy, the seed ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... believe it has yet received, in that it shows to what a considerable extent waste lands may, without any very heavy expenditure of money, be brought into profitable cultivation, and at the same time, under a well-regulated system of spade husbandry, yield abundant employment to agricultural labourers and their families. The following is the substance of the document referred to:—His lordship, who has large estates in Dorsetshire, found that a tract of land, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... making good the passage of the stream. A mile west of Fredericksburg, however, extending from Beck's Island to the heights beyond the Massaponax Creek, runs a long low ridge, broken by ravines and partially covered with timber, which with some slight aid from axe and spade could be rendered an exceedingly strong position. Longstreet, who occupied this ridge, had been ordered to intrench himself; gun-pits had been dug on the bare crest, named Marye's Hill, which immediately faces Fredericksburg; a few shelter-trenches had been thrown up, natural defences improved, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... gentleman ought to work or pay other men for doing it, and many farmers were grown weary of manners without discourse to them, and all cried out to one another how unfair it was that owning such a fertile valley young men would not spade or plough by reason of noble lineage—then the young Doones growing up took things they would not ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... stand it no longer. He found his hostess digging around the roots of some rosebushes in her small garden. Curtly she declined his offer to take the spade. For a minute he watched her uneasily before he blurted out his ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... gun and proceeded to rake the gravel over and to examine it. His search was rewarded by the discovery of several stones, which he conveyed home with him, and which proved, after being cleaned, to be gems of the first water. Elated at this success, he returned to the spot next day with a spade, and succeeded in obtaining many other specimens, and in convincing himself that the deposit stretched up and down for a long distance on both sides of the torrent. Having satisfied himself upon this point, our compatriot made his way to ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the corner had some time been a man. There was still enough manhood left to feel her eyes and to shrink as an earthworm from the spade. He had crawled close to the baseboard of the room. An old man's ashen beard straggled through the brown claws wrapped about the face. As the dust of the threshing floor to the summer grain, so was his likeness to one ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... action, so punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the grass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade. (To call that spade ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... intervals disturbed the silence of the night. Solemnly, sadly, now, the burial-parties labored. The soil was comparatively soft in the neighboring ravine,—much more so than higher up the slopes where the two crack shots had fallen earlier in the afternoon,—and here, with picket-pins and a spade or two which happened to be with the pack-train, a trench was scooped out, into which the poor remains were lowered and then covered with stones, dragged from the depths of the neighboring coulee. It took some hours to finish the sad duty, and meanwhile sharp-eyed ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... bulbs with a lady who was not bulbous. The day before I shot pigeons for a lark. And I am boastful! fair boastful, my Lady! My secretary and my confidential clerk and my many dark-hued messengers are solemnly impressed with my prowess with gun and spade. The truth shall not be heard in the land. I am my own talebearer and my own censor. I know more about agriculture than the Secretary of Agriculture, and I know more of Labor than the Secretary of the same. And for this, this glorious bursting into fruitfulness at so advanced an age— you ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Bill, with a wave of his hand. "You ain't too young to die, even ef you is too ole to learn. Only I trust an' prays dat you won't be blamin' nobody but yo'se'f 'bout this time day after to-mor' evenin' w'en de sexton of Mount Zion Cullud Cemetery starts pattin' you in de face wid a spade." ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... share of such making, in the present case, was of the humblest it is true, mere spade labour and hod-bearing—namely, writing from Charles Verity's dictation, verifying names and dates, checking references and quotations. Still each arresting phrase, each felicitous expression, the dramatic ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the novelist explained, with such eloquence and precision, his scheme for obtaining the interred wealth that they were wrought up to the point of declaring themselves ready to set out, armed with pick-axe and spade, and to put into action Edgar Allen Poe's yarn of the Gold Bug. When money was the theme, Balzac's tongue was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... teeth, which served For pickaxe and for spade, She gnawed right through the gothic door, And ...
— The Mouse and the Christmas Cake • Anonymous
... and men departed than Cluny ran upstairs, and removing two of the tiles, whispered to Archie that all was clear. The hole was soon enlarged, and Archie re-entering, the pair descended to the woodshed which adjoined the kitchen, and there, with a spade and mattock which Cluny had purchased on the preceding day, they set to work to dig a grave. In two hours it was completed. The body of John Martin was lowered into it, the earth replaced and trodden down hard, and the wood again ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... head and shoulders down and between your legs; or, with your heels together, swinging your hands down till the fingers touch the ground; or by the different exercises that either bend your back, or hold it stiff and erect. Swinging from a bar, rowing, digging with a spade, chopping or sawing wood, dancing, rope-skipping, ball-playing, hop-scotch, and wrestling, all develop these muscles finely and are good for both ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... Crouch has been installed in his stead. Joe has finished his time, both with the colours and in the reserve; but he is the soldier still—smart, clean, and never needing to have an order repeated twice. He often unconsciously falls back into former habits, and comes marching up the path with his spade at the "slope" or his hoe at the "trail," whistling softly the old quick-step, which once drew our hero to "go with the ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... McKay families had re-established themselves on their farms, rebuilt their houses and planted their fields, and splendid crops of all kinds were now flourishing, ready for spade and sickle. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... held it there, and seemed puzzled as to what to do with it, where to put it. In short, this weapon had of a sudden become a strange thing to him. He looked at it in a kind of stupefaction, as if he had been endowed with a trident, a sceptre, or a spade. ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... court-yard, a large and sharp chisel, which, most probably, the carpenters had used in the construction of the house, and forgotten. We put it carefully by, in order that we might fasten it to a pole, and use it in the moment of our flight as a spear. We found, also, a spade in the court, which we hid, that it too might serve as a weapon. Besides this, the sailors, on the night when we made the attempt, were to arm themselves with some long poles, which had been used ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... half forms a mouth, and each half grows into a replica of the original. We have here one of the earliest examples of differentiation. That injured multicellular organisms should be able by regrowth to repair their loss in an analogous phenomenon; thus an earth-worm cut by a spade does not necessarily suffer loss, but the head part grows a tail and the decapitated portion produces a head; sponges, which do not normally propagate by division, may be cut in pieces and bedded out successfully; the arms of a star-fish, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Shovel and spade, trowel and hoe, Carefully dig up the quick-yielding ground; Make we a bed, softly lay low Each little root with the earth spread around; Snug as a nest, the soil round them pressed, This is the home that the ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... deck this last deal," he said coolly. He held a palm up at their surprised mutter. "Tex's fifth card was stacked to be a heart, gamblers. You saw him get a spade and take the pot. I won't sit at the same table with a guy that can do that. Telekinesis has ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... the purchase of seed and garden utensils. Not a day passed that I did not come home with my pockets stuffed with, choice seeds, roots, etc..; and the variety of my garden utensils was unequalled. There was not a pruning hook, of any pattern, not a hoe, rake, or spade, great or small, that I did not have specimens of; and flower seeds and bulbs were also forthcoming in liberal proportions. In fact, I had opened an account at a thriving seed store; for, when a man is driving business on a large scale, it is not always convenient to hand out the ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... English disciples that there were no patriarchs and no Patriarchal Age? And yet, the critics notwithstanding, the Patriarchal Age has actually existed. While criticism, so-called, has been busy in demolishing the records of the Pentateuch, archaeology, by the spade of the excavator and the patient skill of the decipherer, has been equally busy in restoring their credit. And the monuments of the past are a more solid argument than the guesses and prepossessions of the modern theorist. ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... as yours," Snaffle observed admiringly. "The way you filled that spade flush on that last hand was a miracle. It is just that sort of luck that runs State street ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... end of the garden there is a small plot of ground, so damp that nothing will grow there, and consequently is almost unfrequented; but for all that it is thither that you must follow me. We will each take spade and pick-axe, and in a very brief period we can hollow out a receptacle for the body of the one who falls. When this work is completed, we will take to our swords and fight to the death, and the one who can keep his feet shall finish his fallen adversary, drag his body to the hole, ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... employed the natives as labourers in making roads, useful both for war and peace. They found wages better than warfare. As navvies, they were paid half a crown a day, and were reported to do more work as spade-men than an equal number of soldiers would. At no time did the Maoris seem to make such material progress as during the twelve ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... being unless a human being has injured them. The worst of it is they do not discriminate between one human being and another, and the bee that floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to have been exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five miles away who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passion for reprisals. That or something like it is, probably, the explanation of the stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect that is said never to touch you if you leave it alone. As a matter of fact, when a bee loses its head, it does ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... provided the required implement, conducted his visitor a little before sunset to the spot, just outside the village, and left him there armed with his rifle, a revolver, and a long knife or kriss, besides the spade. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... the upper portion of the ice had been slightly softened, so that this last work did not entail much labour for pick-axe or spade. The course ran obliquely round the west side of the berg, so that the incline should not be too great at any point. With cables properly fixed, the launch, it seemed, might be effected without any mishap. I rather feared lest the melting of the ice should ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... support of Astor's claim. The hard-working farmers listened with mystification and consternation. They could not make out how land which they or their fathers had paid for, and which they had tilled and improved, could belong to an absentee who had never turned a spade on it, had never seen it, all simply because he had the advantage of a legal technicality and a document emblazoned with a seal ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... with the utmost gentleness, and an uncommon regularity of nature. Occasionally he returns for a day or two to resume his place among scholars and idle people, as, for instance, the present week, when he has thrown aside his spade and hoe to attend the Commencement at Cambridge. He is a rare man,—a perfect original, yet without any one salient point; a character to be felt and understood, but almost impossible to describe: for, should you seize upon any characteristic, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... sailed the stormy breakers, crossed the sand To build the city on a granite slab. They tamed the wilderness, a sturdy clan! Retracing paths recall the glory made, Lays bare the secrets of the field and lab. Such tours give hope for future life and plan. Brave men have set the torch with ax and spade. ...
— Some Broken Twigs • Clara M. Beede
... been thinking of it, I'm sure Frank meant neither BLAGUE nor irreverence. He is in earnest. I never knew him tell a lie; and since he was six years old he has known how to call a spade a spade." ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the face of the sheer rocks and up them and over into the wild-wood; and the sound of it went on the light west-wind along the lips of the Dale toward the mountain wastes. And many a goodman, when he heard the voice of the horn in the bright spring morning, left spade or axe or plough-stilts, or the foddering of the ewes and their younglings, and turned back home to fetch his sword and helm and hasten to the Thing, though he knew not why it was summoned: and women wending over the meadows, who had ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... cultivated near the ancient towns, because it causes fever; and thus it is that, as I have already stated, the present places of the same name are often miles distant from the former locality. No sooner does the plough or the spade turn up an ancient site than those who work there are attacked with illness. And thus the cities of the old world, and their houses and habitations, are deserted and lost in the forest. If the hunters, about to pitch their camp for the night, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... farmers and gintlemen about him, of higher terms; so that he was seldom with one masther more nor a year at the very most. He could handle a flail with e'er a man that ever stepped in black leather; and at spade-work there wasn't his aquil. Indeed, he had a brain for everything: he could thatch better nor many that arned their bread by it; could make a slide-car, straddle, or any other rough carpenter work, that it ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... which are like the Irishman's coat, consisting principally of holes. A wooden box, somewhere, contains such of the clothes of the family as are not in wear. There is really hardly anything I can think of to add to this catalogue, except the agricultural implements, which consist of a wooden spade, a hoe, some sharp stakes to make the drills with, and the machete—which is an iron bill-hook, and serves for pruning, woodcutting, and now and then for less peaceful purposes. Sometimes one sees ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Mascot) (No. 8) is usually the youngest girl. She keeps fires well fed, the rations dry and the garbage burned. She carries a spade, pick ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... interest, as being calculated to decide the great question, and all the principal geologists were on the spot several hours before operations commenced, for the purpose of inspecting the surface of the ground before it was disturbed by the spade and pickaxe of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... saw his mistake, for, while Thialfi attacked Mokerkialfi with a spade, Thor came with a rush upon the scene and flung his hammer full at his opponent's head. Hrungnir, to ward off the blow, interposed his stone club, which was shivered into pieces that flew all over ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... and Plantain hug the soil so closely that the mower slips over them without coming in contact with their crowns, and so they live on, and on, and spread by a multiplication of their roots until they often gain entire possession of the soil, in spots. When this happens, the best thing to do is to spade up the patch, and rake every weed-root out of it, and then reseed it. If this is done early in spring the newly-seeded place will not be ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... communism, those who dig are apt to dig their feet. It is easier to call a spade a spade than to use one. Men may be born free and equal, but if they are, they do not show it. From his first breath man is oppressed by the conditions of his existence, and life is a struggle with environment. Freedom and liberty are terms of relative not absolute value. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... troop swept past the graveyard half a mile east of the town,—the first frame church of the parish had stood there,—old Pierre Seguin was already out with his pick and spade, digging Amedee's grave. He knelt and uncovered as the bishop passed. The boys with one accord looked away from old Pierre to the red church on the hill, with the gold cross flaming on ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... and in clearing away the deep dust from what seemed to be the bottom of the step, which was perhaps four feet in height, by accident thrust my amateur spade somewhat strongly against its base where it rested upon ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the ocean and cast your nets; Happily you may catch her in the sea; Yet there's as little justice as at land.— No; Publius and Sempronius, you must do it; 'Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, And pierce the inmost centre of the earth: Then, when you come to Pluto's region, I pray you deliver him this petition; Tell him it is for justice and for aid, And that it comes from old Andronicus, Shaken with sorrows ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... a yeoman, mither, to follow my father's trade, To bow my back in miry banks, at pleugh and hoe and spade. Stinting wife, and bairns, and kye, to fat some courtier lord,— Let them die o' rent wha like, mither, and I'll ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... spread consternation throughout the Commune of Gaillon, Department of Seine-et-Marne. A son has killed his father with blows from a spade in order to rob ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Wilbert was on his way to a ravine which lay back of the big chestnut-tree. He carried a spade, and began to dig where the grass was greenest, and slime was gathered upon the stones. At a depth of two feet he saw the hole fill with water, which speedily became clear, as he sat down to rest, and soon trickled down ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of the dam was most complete. The river rose so as to overflow the marshes, which enabled us to push all the vessels up the channel without the necessity of deepening it by spade labour. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... a kind of shovel called spade, denotes that you will have work to complete, which will give ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... write to him. Perhaps you wouldn't mind giving over for a day or two." Grimes yielded at once, and took his spade and measurements away, although Mr. Puddleham fretted a good deal. Mr. Puddleham had been much elated by the prospect of his new Bethel, and had, it must be confessed, received into his mind an idea that it would be a good thing to quarrel with the Vicar under the auspices of the landlord. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... took a spade and went out into the garden, where the Talisman had told him not to go. He dug and dug under the cherry-tree, and by-and-by his spade struck something hard. It was a vessel of brass, and it was full of silver money. Upon the lid of the vessel were these words, engraved in the handwriting of the ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... scarf or a hat, but even this tiny income was beginning to be menaced. The Deacon positively suffered as he looked at that odd corner of earth, not any bigger than his barn floor, and saw what his girls had done with no tools but a spade and a hoe and no help but their own hands. He had no leisure (so he growled) to cultivate and fertilize ground for small fruits, and no money to pay a man to do it, yet here was food grown under his very eye, and it did not belong to him! The girls worked in their garden ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... soldiers as the world has not yet seen. Marching? I saw them striding steadily forward with the thermometer at eighty-five in the shade, with needle-gun, heavy knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, huge great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack, and lots of odds and ends dangling about them, with perhaps a loaf or two under one arm. Sunstroke? No. Why? Sobriety. No ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... the end of the path, however, when the father began to change his attitude; he stood up, dropped his "dibbler," scraped his foot on his spade, and, grumbling to himself, went after her. She did not see or hear ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... happy as when mamma (as she called Mrs. Riccabocca) was admiring the picture-book, and Riccabocca with austere gravity dandled the doll. Then Riccabocca assured her that she could be of great use to him in the garden; and Violante instantly put into movement her spade, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... hesitation in house-breaking. In a shed at the back she found a broken spade which formed a sufficiently strong and sharp lever for her purpose. She pried open a shutter and climbed in. She found only such furniture as was necessary for a temporary abode. A small iron stove, a few utensils of tin, a huge sack which had been used for a ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... opinion was, Mr. Pitt alone could give vigour and solidity to any administration in the present state of affairs. Under him, his grace said, he was "willing to serve in any capacity, not merely as a general officer, but as a pioneer: under him he would take up a spade or a mattock." Such was the situation in which the ministers found themselves at the close of this session, which was prorogued ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... its rarity, in the mental symptoms, in the headache, and the generally painful condition complained of. In some of the cases examined by Dercum he found that the thyroid was indurated and infiltrated by calcareous deposits. The disease is not myxedema because there is no peculiar physiognomy, no spade-like hands nor infiltrated skin, no alteration of the speech, etc. Dercum considers it a connective-tissue dystrophy—a fatty metamorphosis of various stages, possibly a neuritis. The first of Dercum's ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... child," said the field-mouse. "Under this hedge you will grow in peace. Neither scythe nor spade ever comes here. But you won't be seen, and you won't see the world like your ...
— Laugh and Play - A Collection of Original stories • Various
... a rabble seize 55 In lax luxurious days, like these; THE PEOPLE'S MAJESTY, forsooth, Must fix our rights, define our truth; Weavers{7} become our Lords of Trade, And every clown throw by his spade, 60 T' instruct our ministers of state, And foreign commerce regulate: Ev'n bony Scotland with her dirk, Nay, her starv'd presbyterian kirk{8}, With ignorant effrontery prays 65 Britain to dim the western rays, Which while they on our island fall Give ...
— No Abolition of Slavery - Or the Universal Empire of Love, A poem • James Boswell
... said, without effect. At last he had a severe fever; and when he fancied himself dying, had a vision. He saw a grating in the floor, close by his bed, and through it the torments of the lost. Two souls he remembered specially; one 'like a singed hog,' the other 'all over black like a charcoal spade.' He looked in fear, and heard a voice cry, 'Behold your sins.' He prayed; promised, if he recovered, to try and do better: and felt ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... senses had become marvellously acute; they could hear and judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away—could hear the very beating of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with them, and touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was as free and confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish individual differences as readily as a dog can, and they went about the tending of llamas, who lived among the rocks above and came ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... hard and have still got nothing. We will not work for them anymore; come, let us undo the work we did to-day, you cut down the embankments you repaired, and I will uproot the seedlings which I planted." So they went out into the night to do this. But whenever Dharmu raised his spade a voice called out "Hold, hold!" And whenever his wife put out her hand to pull up the rice a voice called out "Hold, hold!" Then they said "Who are you who stop us?" And the voice answered "You have done evil and offended Karam Gosain by scalding him; ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... not the President enjoined silence. Popanilla was informed that the last Emigration-squadron was about to sail in a few minutes; and that, although the number was completed, his broad shoulders and powerful frame had gained him a place. He was presented with a spade, a blanket, and a hard biscuit, and in a quarter of an hour was quitting the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... constructed for the purpose, and the colonists formed themselves into gangs, labouring in common, and transporting so many loads of sand to each levee, as the banks were called, though not raised as on the Mississippi, and distributing it bountifully over the surface. The spade was employed to mix the two ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... employed a man of whom I knew something,—that he was industrious, temperate, and that he had a wife and children to support,—a worthy man, a native New Englander. I engaged him, I say, to dig some post-holes. My employee bought a new spade and scoop on purpose, and came to my place at the appointed time, and began digging. While he was at work, two men came over from a drinking-saloon, to which my residence is nearer than I could desire. One of them I had known as Mike Fagan, the other as Hans Schleimer. They looked at Hiram, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... resolution would have been a great deal more enlightening to the average Easterner if the ministerial association had plainly called a spade a spade. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Pecksniff, after a stormy domestic scene within, goes as it were accidentally to the door to admit the rich kinsman he wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. Pecksniff, gently warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade, and opened the street door, as if he thought he had, from his vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain." The visitor had thundered at the door while outcries of family strife had been rising in the house. "'It is ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Harry," he exclaimed. And seizing a spade he began to hurl the sand out furiously. "There's a something down here, that's certain," he panted out between the spadefuls, "but what it is goodness knows. All I can say is that ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... heads of trifling, From your vile streets, so foul and stifling, They sweep the dirt—no useless trade! But when, their robes with ordure staining, Altar and sacrifice disdaining, Did e'er your priests ply broom and spade? 'Twas not for life's base agitation That we were born—for gain nor care— No—we were born for inspiration, For love, for music, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Dyke House. "Sister," said the saint, "I love you well. This night, for the grace of God, keep lights burning at the convent windows from midnight to day-break, and let masses be said by the holy sisterhood." At sundown came the devil with pickaxe and spade, mattock: and shovel, and set to work in right good earnest to dig a dyke which should let the waters of the seas into the downs. "Fire and brim-stone!"—he exclaimed, as a sound of voices rose and fell in sacred song—"Fire and brim-stone! What's ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... upon. Something that would serve for a spade was seized by one of the men, and in a few minutes a hole had been dug in the comparatively light ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... to run out as far as the fish will carry it, and is then passed in a small boat, which is towing at the stern. Two men jump into this, and pull in upon the line until the fish is brought in alongside; it is then killed with a whale-lance or a whale-spade, which is ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... the use of the hoe and spade shall be as much as possible adopted; and where the number of men who can be employed in agriculture is sufficient to raise food for the settlement with these implements, the use of the plough shall be given up; and no working cattle are to ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... All of a sudden, the dog stopped short, and began to bark, "Bow, wow, wow!" wagging his tail violently. The old people thought that there must be something nice to eat under the ground, so they brought a spade and began digging, when, lo and behold! the place was full of gold pieces and silver, and all sorts of precious things, which had been buried there. So they gathered the treasure together, and, after giving alms to the poor, bought themselves ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... to dig out the grave again, and let her get to the coffins," said the man with the spade. "She ought to be took home, by the look o' her. She is hardly responsible, poor thing, seemingly. Can't dig 'em up again now, ma'am. Do ye go home with your husband, and take it quiet, and thank God that there'll be another soon ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... out en de cow gone,' sezee. But Brer Wolf he wern't de man fer ter give it up dat away, en he got 'im a spade, en a pick-axe, en a shovel, en he dig en dig fer dat cow twel diggin' wuz pas' all endu'unce, en ole Brer Rabbit he sot up dar in his front po'ch en smoke his seegyar. Eve'y time ole Brer Wolf stuck de pick-axe in de clay, Brer Rabbit, ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... tried to warn me to be on the look-out, pointing over and over again to the spade-headed little serpents we saw now and then ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... and every negro with his spade and axe, can do the work of a soldier. You can destroy the enemy by retarding ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... on the people: they would have again Their good Grand-duke and leave Guerazzi, though He took that tax from Florence. "Much in vain He takes it from the market-carts, we trow, While urgent that no market-men remain, But all march off and leave the spade and plough, To die among the Lombards. Was it thus The dear paternal Duke did? Live the Duke!" At which the joy-bells multitudinous, Swept by an opposite wind, as loudly shook. Call back the mild archbishop to his house, To bless the people with ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... been signed, Walter Colton, alcalde of Monterey, wrote thus of it in his diary: "It is thoroughly democratic; its basis, political and social equality, is the creed of the thousands who run the plow, wield the plane, the hammer, the trowel, the spade." Still it had its faults, the greatest of which was the power given the legislature over public moneys and lands, as well as the chance it allowed for dishonesty ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... stone caught my gaze, and I saw that the two men yet stood motionless, but across the sunlit patch which had crept nearer the centre where the hollowed bowl was, a great adder, greater than any I had ever seen, thick and spade-headed, had coiled itself in shining folds peaceably and seeming not to heed the men. Only its head was raised a little, and it swayed as in time to the chant of the priest, while the long forked tongue flickered ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... accomplished. The peasant suffers to-day not only in having to pay rent to the landlord; he is oppressed on all hands by existing conditions. He is exploited by the tradesman, who makes him pay half a crown for a spade which, measured by the labour spent on it, is not worth more than sixpence. He is taxed by the State, which cannot do without its formidable hierarchy of officials, and finds it necessary to maintain an expensive army, because the traders of all nations ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... to shoot off their own fire-crackers and torpedoes and nigger-chasers, rather than to listen to those of Wilbur Smythe. Still farther off could be heard the voice of a lone lemonade vender as he advertised ice-cold lemonade, made in the shade, with a brand-new spade, by an old maid, as a guaranty that it was the blamedest, coldest lemonade ever sold. And under the shadiest trees a few incorrigible Marthas were spreading the snowy tablecloths on which would soon be placed the bountiful repasts stored in ponderous ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... and from this very small beginning, in the course of a few seasons, he had a great quantity of grain, both for food and for sowing. But this meant every year much hard work, for he had no plow nor harrow, and all the ground had to be dug with a clumsy spade, made from a very hard, heavy wood ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... have been difficult to say, seeing that the dust on the same was so thick that any hand which touched it would have at once resembled a glove. Prominently protruding from the pile was the shaft of a wooden spade and the antiquated sole of a shoe. Never would one have supposed that a living creature had tenanted the room, were it not that the presence of such a creature was betrayed by the spectacle of an old nightcap resting ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of the huntsman's horn, except perhaps that of the hunted fox or stag. The love of hunting seems ingrained in every Englishman, and whenever the horsemen appear in sight, or the "music" of the hounds is heard in the distance, the spade is laid aside, the ploughman leaves his team, the coachman his stables, the gardener his greenhouses, books are closed, and every one rushes away to see the sport. The squire, the farmers, and every one who by hook or ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... vision of myself, spade in hand, testing this statement; but he allowed no time for such diversions of thought. The goodness of Chiswick and the importance of praising it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... Mr. Samuel Aiston conveyed a few needful things; the gentle and docile pony trotted on until I reached the level top of the carriage-road, and then we stopped. I dismounted and opened the gate and bid my squires to follow, and, in front of the old flag tower, I cut with a spade three square feet of green sod into a barrier for my feet, in the once happy nursery—the mother's joyful upstairs parlour—the only room now standing, and quite roofless. I found not a voice to cheer me, nothing but naked plasterless walls; a hearth with ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... its value, has not been weakened in itself, by anything that has taken place in critical study. On the other hand, the net result of such studies as archaeology has been the confirmation of much that was once disputed. Sir William Ramsay is authority for saying that the spade of the excavator is to-day digging the grave of many enemies of ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... bad chap"—he had given Frawde a recommendation to read in the Bodder—"and I am going there too," said the serious student, "as soon as I can find out where it is: but nobody seems to know. After all, lots of chaps go abroad after their degraggers: why shouldn't I have a spade and dig in Egypt or Mesopotamia or somewhere, same as ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... ("Sea gate"), were supported by one central as well as by angular bastions; the northern face had a cant of 32 degrees east (mag.); and the northwestern tower was distant from the sea seventy-two me'tres, whereas the south-western numbered only sixty. The spade showed a substratum of thick old wall, untrimmed granite, and other hard materials. Further down were various shells, especially bnitiers ( Tridacna gigantea) the harp (here called "Sirinbz"), and the pearl-oyster; sheep-bones and palm charcoal; pottery admirably "cooked," ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... could breathe, and although unable to rise, I could move. Then I heard cries, and I replied; but my strength was gone, and I think no one heard me. Then I prayed, and then, I think, I slept, but am not sure. At last I heard a spade striking the earth above me. Soon an opening was made, and I was dragged rudely out. The rest ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... theology was hateful: an insult to man and a blasphemy against God—if such a being exists; but they did not beat about the bush, and if they thought you were booked for hell, as was most likely, they took care to let you know it. They called a spade a spade, not a common implement of agricultural industry. They were steeped in Bible English, and did not scruple to use its striking substantives and adjectives. When they pronounced "hell" they aspirated the "h" and gave the full weight of the two "l's." "Damn" and "damnation" ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... children now appeared, running around the brow of the hill, the boy calling in great excitement: "Aunt Annie, oh! Aunt Annie, we've found a squirrel-hole. We chased him into it. Can't Susie sit by the hole and keep him in, while I go for a spade to ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... stream or river or lake, there was a struggle for drinking and a strife for the watering of horses and beasts of burden, so that sometimes men and mules were trampled down and hurt, and some were killed; but it mattered little in so great a host, and a spade's depth of earth was ample burial for a man, and if a priest could be found to bless his body on the spot where he lay it was enough, since he had died on the road to Jerusalem; but the jackals and ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... So in Maj. Nik. xxi. a man who proposes to excavate comes Kuddalapitakam adaya, "With spade ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of it: The rector had ordered Niels to dig up a bit of soil in the garden. After a time when he went out himself to look at the work, he found Niels leaning on his spade eating nuts. He had not even begun to dig. The rector scolded him, but the fellow answered that he had not taken service as a gardener. He received a good box on the ear for that. At this he threw away his spade and swore valiantly at his master. The old ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... waiting until he came to the household objects upon which they had set their eye. So they would invest in some stove-pipe, and a couple of ghastly chromos (for the sake of the frames), and some odds and ends of crockery, and a spade, and some old rope to make a swing for the baby. They would get these things for five or ten cents each, and get in addition all the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... tell a lie, or say "gosh" or "darn." He was plucky and persevering, but he was cold and hard, without a human fiber or a drop of red blood in his make-up. Even as a boy he bragged that he had no enthusiasms, that he believed in common sense, that he called a spade a spade, and would not use two words where one would do. His intelligence was above the average, but he was so anxious to be thought a person of rare sagacity and smartness, unswayed by emotion, that nothing was too heartless for him to do if it seemed in line with his assumed ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... said the Man Next Door, leaning on his spade. It was Saturday afternoon and the next-door garden was one of the green ones. There were small grubby daffodils in it, and dirty-faced little primroses, and an arbor beside the water-butt, bare at this time of the ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... might. I am a gardener. I dig the ground, and plant things that are to live and grow. My works don't all moulder away, and rot in the earth. You see that spade ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... resting on the desk was very eloquent: horny, scarred and knotted at every joint, with broken, twisted nails, and nearly closed, as though fitted to the handle of an axe or a spade. Ross was an educated man (he had a regular library of books at home), and perhaps that's why ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... but if he had not already become accustomed to affronts and ill-shapen visages, he might have been awed into silence. He merely paused, with his right foot on the shoulder of the spade share, and peered at the stranger. To the best of his knowledge, he had never seen him before. On a former time, however, he had chanced to see his own face in a mirror and, odd as it may seem, he now remarked ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... was very much pleased that after breakfast he took a spade and joined Mr. Richmond in his work. Matilda never forgot that day. The snow continued to fall; flickering irregularly through the pine leaves and leaving a goodly portion of its stores gathered on the branches ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... such impressions made; P'r'aps you never heard of Ginger Hicks, Him what done in uncle with a spade Down in Canning Town in ninety-six? Ginger was a wrong 'un from the fust; As a child he ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... thus give to the English reader: "You provide the noblest materials for building, when a pickaxe and a spade are only necessary: and build houses of five hundred by a hundred feet, forgetting ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... so far as I am aware in Worcestershire, one of the harmless snappers up of unconsidered trifles is the truffle-hunter. At Alton, in Hampshire, one of these men appeared in summer; he carried an implement like a short-handled thistle spud, but with a much longer blade, similar to that of a small spade but narrower; he was accompanied by a frisky little Frenchified dog, unlike any dog one commonly sees, and very alert. The hunting ground was beneath the overhanging branches of beech-trees, growing on a chalky soil; the man encouraged the dog by voice ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... crowd of pleasure seekers, took off their shoes and stockings, turned up their trousers, and made sand castles. "Look, nurse," bawled Burton to his wife, "see what Cammy and I have done!" "If you please, nursey," whined Cameron, "Dick's snatched away my spade." At that moment Lord Aberdeen, President of the Royal Geographical Society, and a party of grave antiquaries and geographers, mostly run to nose, spectacles, and forehead, arrived on the scene; with the result of infinite ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... a great flock of geese? They were in broken ranks, not more than fifty feet above the ground, and evidently tired and looking for a feeding place. The sight was too much for the hunting instinct of the Indians, and so every axe, hoe, and spade was instantly dropped, and away they rushed for their guns. The missionary did not see one of them ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... repeating itself! The Queen of Hearts, you remember—and the Knave of—Spades, wasn't it? I wish it were diamonds instead: but maybe his spade will dig up a few sparklers in the end. I've got a splendid plan brewing. But that isn't what I want to talk about just now. In fact, I don't want to talk about it—yet! You're not going to admit that you see the results of my cleverness, or that you'd ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to the house an' git a spade," Tom said finally. "It'll take one ter dig a hole big enough ter ever persuade one er these dogs ter put his nose in that den. Hit ain't more'n a mile ter the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... the wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade, And the breathless land is lying in a swoon, He leaves his work a moment, leaning lightly on his spade, And he hears the bell-bird chime the Austral noon. The parrakeets are silent in the gum-tree by the creek; The ferny grove is sunshine-steeped and still; But the dew will gem the myrtle in the twilight ere he seek His little lonely cabin ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... where high wages are given, hard work is required; those must also be disappointed who expect to live in style from off the produce of a small Canadian farm, and those whose imaginary dignity revolts from plough, and spade, and hoe, and those who invest borrowed capital in farming operations. The fields of the slothful in Canada bring forth thorns and thistles, as his fields brought them forth in England. Idleness is absolute ruin, and drunkenness carries with ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... intrinsic and the true) She nor in camps or courts resides, Nor in the humble cottage hides; Yet found alike in every sphere; Who finds content, will find her there. O'erspent with toil, beneath the shade, A peasant rested on his spade. 60 'Good gods!' he cries, ''tis hard to bear This load of life from year to year. Soon as the morning streaks the skies, Industrious labour bids me rise; With sweat I earn my homely fare, And every ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... in which I stood, was littered and piled up with hard masses of earth which had been thrown out of the hole; and on the rough floor of the latter I stepped on the spade which had done the work. It nearly turned my ankle as I jumped on to it, but I hardly felt the pain. Torch and lantern showed clearly that the crevice in the wall was not a natural crack, but a man-made opening. It was as if a slab of rock ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the rest of the party were busily employed, I alone accompanied Kallolo. We each carried a spade, with some rope and pieces ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... archaeologists has revealed what town-planning meant in a small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period. No other even approximately complete example has been as yet uncovered on any other site. But spade-work at the neighbouring and more famous city of Miletus has uncovered similar street-planning there. In one quarter, the only one yet fully excavated, the streets crossed at right angles and enclosed regular blocks of dwelling-houses measuring ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... physicians mend or end us, Secundum artem: but although we sneer In health—when ill, we call them to attend us, Without the least propensity to jeer; While that "hiatus maxime deflendus" To be filled up by spade or mattock's near, Instead of gliding graciously down Lethe, We tease mild Baillie,[545] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... with the cutting-in spade, and as the fish hung still over the side, cut him open from neck to belly with a single movement. Another Chinaman stood by with a long-handled gaff, hooked out the purple-black liver, brought it over ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... owt about un, sir?" inquired that hardy individual, pausing to spit on the handle of his spade. ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
