"Mattock" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
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... of Asters are wanted for a flower show make the ground as wet as mud. Then lift each plant with a spade or mattock slowly and skillfully. The roots, dirt and all, will come up in a solid mass. Pot at once, before any of the earth is shaken off. They will not wither in the least if kept out of direct sunshine for a few days. If enormous blooms are wanted, disbud, leaving but ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
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... for the Italians have a touch of sentiment, and their feelings are easily excited into sympathy. Byron was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a dull, hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered.... After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
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... the future soldiers exercised themselves on the parade-ground, the Campus Martius, on the other side of the Tiber. There the young man marched, ran, leaped under the weight of his arms, fenced with his sword, hurled the javelin, wielded the mattock, and then, covered with dust and with perspiration, swam across the Tiber. Often the older men, sometimes even the generals, mingled with the young men, for the Roman never ceased to exercise. Even in the campaign the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
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... that burn, Give hail and glory to your King's return! For Agamemnon cometh! A great light Cometh to men and gods out of the night. Grand greeting give him—aye, it need be grand— Who, God's avenging mattock in his hand, Hath wrecked Troy's towers and digged her soil beneath, Till her gods' houses, they are things of death; Her altars waste, and blasted every seed Whence life might rise! So perfect is his deed, So dire the yoke on Ilion he hath ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
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... various churchyards of the town. There were those who had seen him thus employed (that form seeming still to carry something of real sun-gold upon it) peering into the darkness, while his tears fell sometimes among the grim relics his mattock ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
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... This only would I have thee clearly note: That so my conscience have no plea against me; Do fortune as she list, I stand prepar'd. Not new or strange such earnest to mine ear. Speed fortune then her wheel, as likes her best, The clown his mattock; ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
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... landsman in a storm; to his Father, as an infant in the dark. For guilt, he had a Saviour, and he thought of him in penitence; for trouble, a Guardian, and he looked to him in peace; and as for toil, back-breaking toil, there was another Master whom he served with spade, and mattock, and a thankful heart, while he only seemed to be working for ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
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... dare not put his vote into the ballot-box for somebody, because he fears one of his customers at the south will hear of it. Parson Munson dare not speak what he thinks in a New England village, because Mrs. Bruce and Deacon Donaldson have yearly interests in slaves at the south; and old Mattock, the boot-maker, thinks it aint right for niggers to be in church with white folks, and declares, if they do go, they should sit away back in one corner, up stairs. He thinks about the combination that brings wealth, old age, and the grave, into one vortex,—feels ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
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... Naseby, I had spade and mattock taken to a hill near half a mile across from the "Blockhead Obelisk," and pitted with several hollows, overgrown with rank Vegetation, which Tradition had always pointed to as the Graves of the Slain. One of these I had opened; ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
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... At night-time a relative sits inside the house watching a burning lamp, while some friends go outside the village and make a miniature hut with sticks and grass and set fire to it. They then call out to the dead man, 'Come, your house is being burnt,' and walk home striking a mattock and sickle together. On coming to the house they kick down the matting which covers the doorway; the man inside says, 'Who are you?' and they answer, 'It is we.' They watch the lamp and when the flame wavers they believe it to show that the spirit of the deceased has ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
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... "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" We found our four friends in a space of the churchyard from which the tombstones had been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
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... The spade and mattock, however, have subserved, and will subserve, other important archaeological purposes besides the opening of ancient cemeteries. They will probably enable us yet to solve to some extent the vexed question of the true character of our so-called "Druidical circles" and "Druidical ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
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... said, served the mysterious twain for a seat. Between them stood a bottle and a glass, evidences that whatever might be the ulterior object of their stealthy communion, the immediate comfort of the creature had not been altogether overlooked. At the feet of one of the personages were laid a mattock, a horn lantern—from which the candle had been removed—, a crowbar, and a bunch of keys. Near to these implements of a vocation which the reader will readily surmise, rested a strange superannuated terrier with a wiry back and frosted muzzle; a head minus an ear, and a leg wanting a paw. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
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... 30 that he must have had assistance in the labor. But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
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... the mountains, and that highway's fashioner, Forsooth, was a fearful craftsman, and his hands the waters were, And the heaped-up ice was his mattock, and the fire-blast was his man, And never a whit he heeded though his walls were waste and wan, And the guest-halls of that wayside great heaps of the ashes spent. But, each as a man alone, through the sun-bright day they went, And they rode till the moon rose upward, and the stars ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
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... for planting, a few plants are dug up, set in a pail with thin mud at the bottom and carried to the place of planting. The most economical method of planting is for one man to make the holes with a mattock. These holes are made about a foot in diameter, by scraping off the sod with the mattock and then digging a little hole in the dirt underneath. A second man follows with a pail of plants and sets a single plant in this hole with his hands, see Fig. ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
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... perpetual fall of frost doth rob From mortal kind. And what is left to till, Even that the force of nature would o'errun With brambles, did not human force oppose,— Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave The soil in twain ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
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... a gang of men set to, to break and make this fallow with the mattock, it is transparent that their business is to separate the quitch grass from the soil and keep ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
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... therefore, it was past a doubt; so, getting up early the third morning, he repaired, alone, with a mattock in his hand, to the mill, and began to undermine that part of the wall to which the vision directed. The first omen of success that he met with, was a broken ring; digging still deeper, he turned up a house-tile, quite ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
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... holy grain sound and heavy, when first you begin ploughing, when you hold in your hand the end of the plough-tail and bring down your stick on the backs of the oxen as they draw on the pole-bar by the yoke-straps. Let a slave follow a little behind with a mattock and make trouble for the birds by hiding the seed; for good management is the best for mortal men as bad management is the worst. In this way your corn-ears will bow to the ground with fullness if the Olympian himself gives ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
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... not alarmed, for he had dealt with rattlers before. With one blow of the mattock, which he always carried for digging, the head of the big snake was crushed and its poisoned fangs ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
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... with a mattock, and tucked up with a spade; said of one that is dead and buried. You will go up a ladder to bed, i.e. you will be hanged. In many country places, persons hanged are made to mount up a ladder, which is afterwards turned round or taken away, whence ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
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... of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not 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 the armies for which we have occasion; since ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
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... with success; and that he knew but one 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 ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
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... cities of Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, in which city it was consumed by fire during the year 1828. Mr. Barlow built another miniature engine for Mr. Rockhill who used it for exhibition. I wish it distinctly remembered so as not to confuse dates, that the first mattock struck and the first stone laid on the Lexington and Louisville Rail Road were done in Lexington June 3rd, 1831, the citizens, the Free Masons and the Military assisting in the ceremonies which took place at the corner of Water and Upper Streets, not ten feet from the present storage ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
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... this here aggregation has got everything else skinned to a hard-boiled finish. Most of them are indoor men, ink-slingers and calico snippers; haven't done a day's hard work in their lives, and don't know a pick from a mattock. They've got a notion they've just got to get up there and pick big nuggets out of the water like cherries out of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
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... their craft; two or three public notaries with penhorn and pencase complete, a huntsman with his horn, and in Newland Church one of the free miners of the Forest of Dean, cap and leather breeches tied below the knee, wooden mine-hod over shoulder, a small mattock in his right hand, and a candlestick between his teeth. This kind of historical evidence will help us with Thomas Paycocke. His family brasses were set in the north aisle of the parish church of St Peter Ad Vincula. Several of them have disappeared in the course of the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
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... dawn, with a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and in his ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
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... paralyzed. A sense of the general embarrassment was my first impression, and I was absolutely struck dumb. But this was soon shaken off. My next was a sense of the particular burlesque of my situation; I burst out into laughter, in which the whole house joined; and throwing down my mattock, rushed off the stage. My theatrical dream was broken ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
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... to heave up the stone, and then Dousterswivel with a mattock and shovel proceeded to dig. He had not thrown out many spadefuls, when something was heard to ring on the ground with the sound of falling metal. Then the treasure-seeker, snatching up the object which his mattock had thrown out, exclaimed: "On mine dear word, mine patrons, this ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
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... religious zeal of the Puritans, Ethelmar's heart was disturbed, as is recorded by a writer of the period, who says that "when the steps of the altar were levelling with the rest of the ground one of the workmen accidentally struck his mattock on this stone and broke it; underneath which was an urn wherein the heart of this Ethelmar was, being enclosed in a golden cup, which thing ... being conveyed to the ears of the committee-men they took the cup ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
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... sharing in the division of the harvest. The basis of the life was agricultural. Our Saxon ancestors in Germany did not subsist exclusively by hunting or fishing, although these pursuits were not neglected. They were as skilful with the plough and mattock as they were in steering a boat or hunting a deer or pursuing a whale. They were coarse in their pleasures, but religious in their turn of mind; Pagans, indeed, but worshipping the powers of Nature with poetic ardor. They were born warriors, and their passion for ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
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... 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
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... scarce. It was difficult to find an immediate remedy. The usual one of imports was entirely cut off. In this emergency, to feed the very people to whom we had given refuge, we were obliged to yield to the plough and the mattock our pleasure-grounds and parks. Live stock diminished sensibly in the country, from the effects of the great demand in the market. Even the poor deer, our antlered proteges, were obliged to fall for the sake of worthier pensioners. The ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
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... Decadence of arts, of learning and laws, of society itself, was implied in the fact. The more intrepid intelligence, the more versatile energy, amid which we live, have achieved the success of combining the two: so that while it is true now, as of old, that "no mattock plunges a golden edge into the ground, and no nail drives a silver point into the plank," it is also true that, under the stimulus of the larger expenditure which the added supplies of gold make possible, the duller metal has taken a fineness, a brightness ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
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... milker, who wanted to take only the coarsest stuff off the top, as it were the cream from the milk. It was nice and warm outside, said Uli, and the stock wouldn't get cold; they would work thoroughly this time. And indeed it was necessary, for there was old stuff left that almost required the mattock before they could get to the stone floor of the stable. But there was no time left to dig out between the stones. They had to dip out the manure-pit, for the liquid was rising and almost reached the back of the stable; and only with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
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... 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 ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
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... cut during the excavations—sometimes segmental, sometimes pointed, and often of a considerable height and width—could never have stood in any other kind of earth without strong and numerous supports. And yet M. Place tells us that these very galleries, exactly in the condition in which the mattock left them, "provided lodging for the labourers engaged and their families, and ever since they have served as a refuge for the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages. Workmen and peasants have taken shelter under vaults similar to those of the ancient Assyrians. Sometimes we cut through the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
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... California—between the rains, the heat of the year, everything crisp and brown and brittle. This threatened the whole valley and water shed. The Gateses turned out, and all their neighbours, with hoe, mattock, axe, and sacking, trying to beat, cut, or scrape a "break" wide enough to check the flames. It was cruel work. The sun blazed overhead and the earth underfoot. The air quivered as from a furnace. Men gasped at it with straining lungs. The sweat pouring from their bodies combined with ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
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... yards of his arch enemy, the huntsman. The thick breath of the hounds make hot the air within his hole. The sound of their voices is close upon his ears. His breast is nearly bursting with the violence of that effort which at last has brought him to his retreat. And then pickaxe and mattock are plied above his head, and nearer and more near to him press his foes,—his double foes, human and canine,—till at last a huge hand grasps him, and he is dragged forth among his enemies. Almost as soon as his eyes have seen the light the eager noses of a dozen hounds have ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
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... had been retracing accurately and in detail a small scene of the previous morning, at the moment quite without significance for him. Limping back from his cliff-patch with a basket of potatoes in one hand and with the other using the shaft of his mattock (or "visgy" in Polpier language) for a walking-staff, as he passed the watch-house he had been vaguely surprised to find coastguardsman Varco on the look-out there with his ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
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... herself that the work was to be done; so she dragged the body away thence, and across the brook, and a little way into the meadow, and then she went back and fetched mattock and spade from the outhouse, where she knew they lay, and so fell to digging a grave for the corpse of her dead terror. But howso hard she might toil, she was not through with the work ere night began to fall on ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
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... A large, covered basket was partially loaded with the contents—heavy as lead—and, between them, they bore it out into the storm and darkness again, and I heard the sound of the spade and mattock at work ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
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... of the Peloponnesus, and he did begin the task. Men shrank from it, however, because, when the first workers touched the earth, blood spouted from it, groans and bellowings were heard, and many phantoms appeared. Nero himself thereupon grasped a mattock and by throwing up some of the soil fairly compelled the rest to imitate him. For this work he sent for a large number of men from other nations ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
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... one side, however, stood a man who was not so busy. To put it plainly, he was loafing, with the handle of his improvised mattock supporting his weight. Clearly the two up in the air were ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
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... o'clock in the afternoon. The steady sound of the mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common bustling world that lay close around the curious isolation of ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
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... structure. In short, I worked hard every day upon my building for a month, in which time I had cut all my timber into their proper lengths for my outworks and covering, but was at a great stand how to fix my side-posts, having no spade or mattock, and the ground almost as hard as flint, for to be sure it had never been stirred since the creation. I then thought I had the worst part of my job to get over; however, I went on, and having contrived, in most of my upright side-quarters, to take the tops of trees, and leave on the lower ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
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... 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 doomed his ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
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... that the slave class was other than a small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children and wife ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
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... harm to plant them now, though it might not do any good either; and he mustn't be surprised to find occasional chunks of earth still frozen. She would be over in a little while to show him about it. Let him get his pick-mattock, spade, and rake ready, up by the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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... the trees were silent. Not a bird sang, not a squirrel, mouse, or weasel showed itself, not a belated moth flew athwart my path. But as I went I kept watch over myself, nor dared let my eyes rest on any forest-shape. All the time I seemed to hear faint sounds of mattock and spade and hurtling bones: any moment my eyes might open on things I would not see! Daylight prudence muttered that perhaps, to appear, ten thousand phantoms awaited ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
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... wheelbarrow full of clover; a peasant, his hay-laden cart, and his cart-horses; a man and his pigs; a shepherd, his flock and dog; lastly, cabbages belonging to an old woman who cuts him in two with her mattock just as he tries to eat her. Out of him jump unhurt every thing and every one he has swallowed. In a story from the south of Siberia (Gubernatis' Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 140) the hero vanquishes a demon, who tells him that in his stomach he will find a ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
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... With its quaint tracery, gilded here and there With sunlight glancing through the o'er-arching lime, Far flinging its cool shadow, flickering light— Our greyhair'd sexton, with his hard grey face, (A living tombstone!) resting on his mattock By the low portal; and just over right, His back against the lime-tree, his thin hands Lock'd in each other—hanging down before him As with their own dead weight—a tall slim youth With hollow hectic cheek, and pale parch'd lip, And labouring breath, and eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
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... the time was standing by. At length, in order to enforce what he said about the insufficiency of the work, Remus leaped over a portion of it, saying, "This is the way the enemy will leap over your wall." Hereupon Romulus seized a mattock from the hands of one of the laborers, and struck his brother down to the ground with it, saying, "And this is the way that we will kill them if they do." Remus was killed by ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
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... sounds, as of men digging in the earth. It was faint, and some distance beyond us in the heart of the beech woods, but as we traveled the sound increased and I could distinguish the strokes of the mattock, and the thrust of the shovel and the clatter of the earth on ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
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... space immeasurably short, but which to me was protracted almost beyond endurance, we reached the spot. I halloed to the sexton, who was now employed upon another grave, to follow me. I myself seized a mattock, and in obedience to my incoherent and agonised commands, he worked as he had never worked before. The crumbling mould flew swiftly to the upper soil—deeper and deeper, every moment, grew the narrow grave—at last I sobbed, "Thank God—thank God," as I saw the face of the coffin ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
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... the tail, and swung it about to assure himself of the fact. Perceiving no symptoms of life, he then threw it over his shoulder, intending to make a cap of the skin, and ornament his cottage wall with the brush. While the fox hung over one shoulder, his mattock balanced it on the other. The point of the instrument, as he walked along, every now and then struck against the ribs of the fox, which, not so dead as the man supposed, objected to this proceeding, though he did not mind being carried along with his head downward. Losing patience, he gave ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
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... previously visited by man was the English chickweed; and this I traced to a mound that marked the grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with the plant, doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the spade or mattock with which the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
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... The peaceful mattock, ploughshare, spade, Sickle, and pruning-hook he made, Eschewing martial labours. Thus bees will rather honey bring, Than hurtfully employ their sting ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
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... bronze rang terribly as he fled from beneath the onset, and behind him the River rushed on with a mighty roar. As when a field-waterer from a dark spring leadeth water along a bed through crops and garden grounds, a mattock in his hands, casting forth hindrances from the ditch, and as it floweth all pebbles are swept down, and swiftly gliding it murmureth down a sloping place, and outrunneth him that is its guide:—thus ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
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... you: if only that my conscience chide me not, for Fortune, as she will, I am ready. Such earnest is not strange unto my ears; therefore let Fortune turn her wheel as pleases her, and the churl his mattock."[2] ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
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... descended into the valley on the other side. Hearing a clinking sound some distance from the road, as of metal striking stone, Hradzka stole cautiously through the woods until he came within sight of a man who was digging with a mattock, uprooting small bushes of a particular sort, with rough gray bark and three-pointed leaves. When he had dug one up, he would cut off the roots and then slice away the root-bark with a knife, putting it into a sack. Hradzka's ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
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... for days below the paddock How the wilderness would yield To the spade, and pick, and mattock, While we toiled to win the field. Bronzed hands we used to sully Till they were of darkest hue, 'Burning off' down in the gully At the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
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... the scrub that covered it was not of large growth, while the soil is exceptionally loose and rich, consisting of black mould largely intermixed with shells. This space we cleared and fenced in. Then we went to work with spade and pickaxe and mattock. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
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... the outrage from the city-walls, wept passionately and were all impatient to go out and fight, their fury being increased tenfold. T'ien Tan knew then that his soldiers were ready for any enterprise. But instead of a sword, he himself too a mattock in his hands, and ordered others to be distributed amongst his best warriors, while the ranks were filled up with their wives and concubines. He then served out all the remaining rations and bade his ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
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... mattock and his spade, and filled a grave prepared by other hands. At his feet lies a lovely daughter, snatched suddenly away, ere the bloom of youth had passed, and almost without a moment's warning, leaving ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
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... hairif^, hariff, flax comb, hackle, hatchel^, heckle. wedge; knife edge, cutting edge; blade, edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury^, lancet; plowshare, coulter, colter^; hatchet, ax, pickax, mattock, pick, adze, gill; billhook, cleaver, cutter; scythe, sickle; scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c (arms) 727; bodkin &c (perforator) 262; belduque^, bowie knife^, paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
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... sighed and looked, he was ware of two coming towards him with pick and mattock on their shoulders. Swiftly they came, and soon they were at his side, fawning on him, and speaking in soft, wheedling voices. Their faces were eager and servile, their eyes bright ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
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... the dead man's bed, The sexton, hoary-headed chronicle! Of hard, unmeaning face, down which ne'er stole A gentle tear; with mattock in his hand, Digs thro' whole rows of kindred and acquaintance By far his juniors! Scarce a skull's cast up But well he knew its owner, and can tell Some passage of his life. 1651 BLAIR: The ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
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... over to the blacksmith's to strike till his axe was done. The iron was heated, and my neighbor fell to work, and was striking there nearly all day; when the blacksmith concluded that the iron wouldn't make an axe, but 'twould make a fine mattock. ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
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... creature, so he brought it home, and laid it upon the hearth near the fire; but it had not lain there long, before (being revived with the heat) it began to erect itself, and fly at his wife and children. The Countryman, hearing an outcry, and perceiving what the matter was, caught up a mattock, and soon dispatched him, upbraiding him at the same time in these words: "Is this, vile wretch, the reward you make to him ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
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... the Cat family is the power of sheathing their talons. Claws to a cat are of as great importance to him in the securing of his prey as are his teeth. The badger is a digger, Hodge, who carries his mattock on his shoulder; but the feline is the free-lance whose sword must be kept keen in its scabbard, so by a peculiar arrangement of muscles the points of the claws are kept off the ground, while the animal treads noiselessly ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
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... with the comely names, Mattock and scythe and spade, Couth and bitter as flames, Clean, and bowed in the blade,— A man and his tools make a ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
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... rings, sword-hilts, watches, buckles, snuff-boxes, and the like. Lord! thought I, that this island were of good honest mother earth instead of ice, that we might bury the pirate's booty if we could not save the ship, and make a princely mine of its grave, ready for the mattock should we ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
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... the laborers were to turn the first sod. The calculations of the astrologers were, however, anticipated by a raven, who perched on one of the ropes and set the bells jingling, upon which every mattock was struck into the earth, and the trenches were opened. It was an unlucky hour; the planet Mars (El-Kahir) was in the ascendant; but it could not be undone, and the place was accordingly named after the hostile ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
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... our notions of what is just or reasonable. So far from its being a superfluous superstition, it is seen to be just what is demanded at once by reason and morality, and a belief in it to be not an intellectual assent, but a partial harmonizing of the whole moral ideal.—W. H. Mattock, "Is Life Worth ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
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... attached; under the cart, harnessed to the axle, two dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart the man pushed. It contained a disorderly freight: a large feather-bed, a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
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... earth could man want more? asked Paragot. The old rep suite, the table with the American cloth, the coloured prints in gilt frames including the portrait of Garibaldi, the cheap deal bookcases holding Paragot's tattered classics, gave the place an air of familiar homeliness. A mattock, a gun and a cradle ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
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... is very white, fair, and well-tasted, and grows three times in five months. In May, they sow; in July, they reap: in June, they sow; in August, they reap: in July, they sow; in September, they reap. They cast the corn into the ground, breaking a little of the soft turf with a wooden mattock. Ourselves proved the soil, and put some of our peas into the ground, and in ten days they were fourteen inches high. They have also beans, very fair, of divers colors, and wonderful plenty; some growing naturally and some in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
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... day by day making the crooked straight and the rough places plain.[226] He rejoiced as a giant to run everywhere.[227] You might call him a consuming fire burning the briers of crimes.[228] You might call him an axe or a mattock casting down[229] evil plantings.[230] He extirpated barbaric rites, he planted those of the Church. All out-worn superstitions (for not a few of them were discovered) he abolished, and, wheresoever he found it, every sort of malign ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
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... once: I button my clothes tightly, so as to afford the Bees the least possible opportunity, and I enter the heart of the swarm. A few blows of the mattock, which arouse a far from reassuring crescendo in the humming of the Anthophorae, soon place me in possession of a lump of earth; and I beat a hasty retreat, greatly astonished to find myself still safe and sound and unpursued. But the lump of earth which I have removed is from a part too ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
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... the glooming light Of middle night, So cold and white, Worn Sorrow sits by the moaning wave; Beside her are laid, Her mattock and spade, For she hath half delved her own deep grave. Alone she is there: The white clouds drizzle: her hair falls loose; Her shoulders are bare; Her tears are mixed with the ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
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... the folks, to whom he visits paid, Was neighbour Peter, one who used the spade; A villager that God, in lieu of lands, Had furnished only with a pair of hands, To dig and delve, and by the mattock gain Enough his wife and children to maintain. Still youthful charms you in his spouse might trace; The weather injured solely had her face, But not the features which were perfect yet: Some wish perhaps more blooming belles to get; The rustick truly me ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
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... in the centre of the peaceful vegetation, like a newly raised altar to an unknown deity. The only suggestion of martial surveillance was an Indian soldier, whose musket, reposing on the ground near Mrs. Markham, he had exchanged for the rude mattock with which he was ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
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... feet, whose name was Mrs. Mattock, directing her peculiar sweet-sour smile at the distinguished lady with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
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... Westminster. Finding on enumeration that they have, with a with-two- hands-and-one-tongue-to be-applauded liberality, contracted for more gunpowder than they want, they have parted with the surplus to the mattock-carrying and hustings-hammering high-bailiff of Westminster, who has, with his own shovel, dug a large hole in the front of the parish-church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, that, upon the least symptom of ill-breeding in the mob at the general election, the whole ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
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... and hedges of the lawn shut it in. As the avenue was the only approach accessible to cavalry, and as this was the force which would probably be used for a coup-de-main, if it were to be attempted at all, I set all hands to work to secure it. Wild as the night was, my men wielded the spade and mattock with good will; and we had completed a trench of some feet deep and wide, half across the road, when I caught the trampling of cavalry at a distance. My chagrin was irrepressible; the enemy would be upon us before we had got through our work, and we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
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... relieving a sentry from his post. It conveys the idea of the hour having come when the slave who has been on the watch through all the long, weary night, or toiling through all the hot, dusty day, may extinguish his lantern, or fling down his mattock, and go home to his little hut. 'Lord! Thou dost dismiss me now, and I take the dismission as the end of the long watch, as the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
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... endangers his life and fortune. No snakes lurk in the underbrush. No clouds of dust blind his eyes. No sultry summer suns make him gasp for breath, and no intense cold freezes his face or feet. He can work if he wishes as many days as there are in the year, and know that every stroke of his axe or mattock is a part of his capital safely invested that will pay back an annual dividend for a lifetime. No soil will respond to his energy more ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
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... pleura, like a crow's bill. patch. The arteries, like a watch-coat. The tympanums, like a whirli- The midriff, like a montero-cap. gig. The liver, like a double-tongued The rocky bones, like a goose- mattock. wing. The veins, like a sash-window. The nape of the neck, like a paper The spleen, like a catcall. lantern. The guts, like a trammel. The nerves, like a pipkin. The gall, like a cooper's adze. The uvula, like a sackbut. The entrails, like a gauntlet. The palate, like a mitten. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
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... detached bodies of cavalry for the solid phalanx in which Barbiano had moved his troops; and Sforza Attendolo, who adhered to the old method. Sforza got his name from his great physical strength. He was a peasant of the village of Cotignola, who, being invited to quit the mattock for a sword, threw his pickax into an oak, and cried, 'If it stays there, it is a sign that I shall make my fortune.' The ax stuck in the tree, and Sforza went forth to found a line of dukes.[2] After the death of Barbiano in 1409, Sforza and Braccio separated and formed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
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... boy fought the battle of life with ax, hoe, maul, adz, shovel, pick, mattock, drawshave, rake and pitchfork. Wool was carded and spun and woven by hand. The grist was carried to the mill on horseback, or if the roads were bad, on the farmer's back. All this pioneer experience came to James J. Hill as a necessary part of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
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... "unless"—and again he looked piteously at Dr. Rochecliffe, who saw no time was to be lost in appeasing the ranger's terrors, as his ministry was most needful in the present circumstances.—"Get spade and mattock," he whispered to him, "and a dark lantern, and meet me ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
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... summer-day I chanced to see This old man doing all he could About the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock totter'd in his hand; So vain was his endeavour That at the root of the old tree He ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
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... This is never used as bread, but commonly preserved as a sweetmeat. The rudest, and probably the earliest practised mode of cultivating rice, consists in taking from forest lands a fugitive crop, after burning the trees, grass, and underwood. The ground is turned up with the mattock, and the seed planted by dibbling between the stumps of trees. The period of sowing is the commencement of the rains, and of reaping that of the dry season. The rice is of course of that description which does ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
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... questionable whether they would have resisted an immediate assault with any vigour, took heart and threw up defences. A young officer of engineers, named Todtleben, conceived the idea of vast erections of earthworks, and the Russians were set to defend the place with pick and mattock more strenuously than by artillery or musketry. The result was a protracted defence. The Russians plied the spade and shovel with astonishing vigour and perseverance, and Todtleben proved himself ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
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... true glory of the Cistercian lay in his outdoor work, and so ever and anon there passed through the cloister some sunburned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of corn-land reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
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... against the clergy, if we did not think of our own reputation. For the soldier whose campaigns are over venerates his shield and arms, and grateful Corydon shows regard for his decaying team, harrow, flail and mattock, and every manual artificer for the instruments of his craft; it is only the ungrateful cleric who despises and neglects those things which have ever been the foundation of ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
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... in the same way with the former, being beheaded and afterwards cut in pieces, for stealing a woman long since from Firando and selling her at Nangasaki. When any are to be executed, they are led out of town in the following manner: First there go two men, one having a mattock and the other a shovel, to dig the grave, if that be allowed to the criminal. Then a third person carrying a small table or board, on which is written the crime of the party, which is afterwards affixed to a post on the grave in which he is buried. Next comes the party to be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
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... spot of the present 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! ...
— 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.
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... garden gate of Tamiya his eye caught the factitious sotoba standing white in the fitful moonlight. He stood stock still; then clapped his hands in mad joy and decision. Hastening to his home he sought out an old battered mattock and a rusty spade. Soon he was back at the garden gate. A blow and the bar fell. Goemon passed within. "She lies but four shaku deep. The task is quickly performed. None pass here at this hour." The dirt flew under his nervous arms. Soon he had the box out on the ground ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
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... quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle, and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
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... omen than these were abroad, straggling groups, and sometimes entire companies of soldiers, on their way from one part of the duchy to another; while in the fields, women, prematurely old with labor, were wielding the hoe and the mattock, and the younger and stronger of their sex were swinging the scythe. In all the villages through which we passed, in the very smallest, troops were posted, and men in military uniform were standing at the doors, or looking from the windows of every ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
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... you think. You advise me rightly, not permitting me to get up a lawsuit, but as soon as possible to set fire to the house of the prating fellows. Come hither, come hither, Xanthias! Come forth with a ladder and with a mattock and then mount upon the thinking-shop and dig down the roof, if you love your master, until you ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
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... ubiquitously pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as claustral ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
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... indicates soft sandy ground): these, with the escorting or covering battalions, Twelve Parties they also, on both sides of the River, are to be in their several stations at the fixed moments; man, musket, mattock, strictly exact. They are to advance at Midnight; the covering battalions so many yards ahead: no speaking is permissible, nor the least tobacco-smoking; no drum to be allowed for fear of accident; no firing, unless you are fired on. The covering battalions are all to "lie ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
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... hand ax and the pick mattock in organizations equipped with the intrenching tool is authorized for the purpose of driving shelter tent pins. The use of the bayonet for this ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
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... bell, merry as a —tables, coldly furnish forth the Married, I did not think to live till I were Marrying ancient people Mars, an eye like Martyrs, blood of the Mary hath chosen that good part Mast, nail to the Mattock and the grave May, chills the lap of Maze, a mighty Meaner beauties of the night Medes and Persians, law of the Medicine, miserable have no other Meditation, fancy free Melancholy, green and yellow —, most musical Melodies, ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
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... a ridge the huge corpse of Vertumnus is being devoured by red dogs. The rustic gods depart weeping, Sartor, Sarrator, Vervactor, Eollina, Vallona, and Hostilenus—all covered with little hooded cloaks, and each bearing a mattock, a fork, a ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
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... Biblical narrative sets forth, "there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel; for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords and spears; but all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock".[420] "We are inclined", says Professor Macalister, "to picture the West as a thing of yesterday, new fangled with its inventions and its progressive civilization, and the East as an embodiment of hoary and unchanging traditions. But when West first met East ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
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... black-eyed babes; the fly-swarmed sweetmeat shops, The weaver at his loom, the cotton-bow Twangling, the millstones grinding meal, the dogs Prowling for orts, the skilful armourer With tong and hammer linking shirts of mail, The blacksmith with a mattock and a spear Reddening together in his coals, the school Where round their Guru, in a grave half-moon, The Sakya children sang the mantra through, And learned the greater and the lesser gods; The dyers ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
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... curtains that circumscribe the Bed of Death have other emblems carved upon them too; there is a double frieze of oak above the pillars, and on it appears the skull and crossbones, the spade and mattock, the fragments of pitiful anatomy that marked the ghastly trade of sexton in the sixteenth century. In the covered galleries, as they were originally, the richer burgesses were buried, though not one of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the poor proletariat, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
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... he rode off; and Elshie, after looking at him with a scornful and indignant laugh, took spade and mattock, and occupied himself in digging a grave ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
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... old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
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... weather-beaten timbers shrunken and warped by the sun's immoderate heats, but to me she had become as it were a sign and symbol of freedom. She lay upon her starboard beam half full of sand, and it now became my object to turn her that I might come at this under side, wherefore I fell to work with mattock and spade to free her of the sand wherein (as I say) she lay half-buried. This done I hove and strained until the sweat poured from me yet found it impossible to move her, strive how I would. Hereupon, and after some painful thought, I took to digging away ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
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... fort in Mag Breg, at the place where the Mattock falls into the Boyne, about three miles ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
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... superstitious of Connecticut and Long Island, it was owing to these bloody charms that honest money-diggers have ever experienced so much difficulty in removing these buried treasures. Often, indeed, have the lids of the iron chests rung beneath the mattock of the stealthy midnight searcher for gold; but the flashes of sulphurous fires, blue and red, and the saucer eyes and chattering teeth of legions of demons have uniformly interposed to frighten the delvers from their posts, and preserve ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
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... now should anyone break open our gilded tomb, he will find Melicent to be no more admirable than Demetrios. One skull is like another, and is as lightly split with a mattock. You will be as ugly as I, and nobody will be thinking of your eyes and hair. Hail, rain and dew will drench us both impartially when I lie at your side, as I intend to do, for a hundred years and yet another ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
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... poor minstrel: "You would say that the sound of his bow would burst the arteries, and that his voice was more discordant than the lamentations of a man for the death of his father;" and of another bad singer: "No one with a mattock can so effectually scrape clay from the face of a hard stone as his discordant ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
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... inauguration of the mound took place on the ninth of October 1836. To the sound of martial music, drums and cannon, the first layers of earth were deposited, men, women and children taking part in the proceedings. A year later no less than ten thousand French friends of Poland with mattock and spade added several feet to Kosciusko's mountain. But the celebration got noised abroad. Afraid of anti-Russian manifestations the government of Louis Philippe prohibited any further Polish fetes. Thus it came about that, as I have said, the most interesting monument ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
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... A crow was given)—Ver. 1009. "Upupa." He puns upon the twofold meaning of this word, which signified either "a mattock" or a bird called a "hoopoe," according to the context. To preserve the spirit of the pun, a somewhat different translation has ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
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... The mattock, the coffin, and the melancholy grave admonish us of our mortality, and that, sooner or later, these frail bodies must moulder in their ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
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... are churches, demolished by war; and already men are coming with mattock and masonry to raise the walls again. The ray of his outstretched arm shines in space, and his ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
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... His last interview within its walls could still make him wince when he recalled it, word by scalding word. No, there was no place for a Rennie—and a Rebel Rennie to make matters blacker—under the righteous roof of Alexander Mattock! ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
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... eels. The clerk having made answer that he had heard the eels of Sowley well spoken of, the friar sucked in his lips and hurried forward. Close at his heels came three laborers walking abreast, with spade and mattock over their shoulders. They sang some rude chorus right tunefully as they walked, but their English was so coarse and rough that to the ears of a cloister-bred man it sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue. One of them carried a young bittern which they had caught upon the moor, and they offered ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
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... been, Simon Ford was proud of belonging to this ancient family of Scotch miners. He had worked diligently in the same place where his ancestors had wielded the pick, the crowbar, and the mattock. At thirty he was overman of the Dochart pit, the most important in the Aberfoyle colliery. He was devoted to his trade. During long years he zealously performed his duty. His only grief had been to perceive the bed becoming impoverished, ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
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... Cogswell, Lawrence Embree, Thomas Burling, Willett Leaman, Jno. Lawrence, Jacob Leaman, White Mattock, Mathew Clarkson, Nathaniel Lawrence, Jno. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
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... bishop's tomb in St. Praxed's one Pan is carved, and Moses with the tables; upon the gravestone of an Albanian chief they scratch his rifle and his horse; and over the slave's low mound in Angola plantations his basket and mattock are laid, lest he should miss them. So various are the devices contrived for the solace of mankind, or for his instruction. But one by one, like the dead themselves, those devices have passed and passed away, leaving mankind unwitting ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
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... sullenly, and slowly scratched his head. Pressley, unlashing a mattock and shovel from his pack, ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
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... and gasped, apparently unable to speak; he looked to Vanderhoek, and pointed to an instrument in the shape of a mattock—shaking his hand, and muttering indistinctly, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
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... remember'd, Marcus; she's gone, she's fled. Sirs, take you to your tools. You, cousins, shall Go sound 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 in ungrateful Rome.— Ah, Rome!—Well, ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
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... the sheep-dog, in his short way; "your wife's bad enough, I'll warrant me; and a drop of water with the dew in it is the thing to do her good. Be off with you! The farmer is coming to lay the spring dry this morning. I left him sharpening his mattock when I set out. You'll be too late, if you don't mind!" and with that the sheep-dog ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
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... log-cabin for a barn—William Turnbull, observing these short-cuts, approved of their purpose, but not of their method. He went through the woods once or twice on odd days after his hay was in, and did a little grading with a mattock. Here and there he made steps out of flat stones. He told his wife he thought it would be some handier for her, and she told him—they were both from Connecticut—that it was quite some handier, and that it was real thoughtful ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
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... resting in the garden after a very long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young man in a white tunic, with bare feet and legs. On his head was a wide hat of rough straw, and across his shoulder a mattock. His face and form could only be described in the famous words, "Beauty that shocks you." Why his beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of any sensibility, I cannot say. Thinking he ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
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... found through all the land of Israel," says the chapter, "for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews (i.e. the Israelites) make them swords or spears. But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his ax, and his mattock." Saul was raised up to throw off this heavy yoke, and to destroy the cruel oppressors of his people. He "chose him three thousand men, and with a third of them Jonathan, his son, smote the garrison of the Philistines ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
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... heat) it began to erect itself, and fly at his wife and children, filling the whole cottage with dreadful hissings. The Countryman heard an outcry, and perceiving what the matter was, catched up a mattock and soon dispatched him; upbraiding him at the same time in these words:—"Is this, vile wretch, the reward you make to him that saved your life? Die as you deserve; but a single death is too good ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
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... Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
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... raises a most interesting sociological question. Ruskin probably would have been in favor of it. He described as the very last act of modern barbarism for the woman to be made "to shriek for a hold of the mattock herself." It was argued in Connecticut that the employment of married women injured the health of the children, which is perfectly true. Indeed, the death-rate in England is very largely determined by the fact whether their mothers are employed in mills or not. It was also argued ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
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... that at once," she said quickly; "I have but just dug it with a mattock I was so lucky as to find by a stopped earth on the bank yonder. The rest I will gladly acquaint you with by and by. But first let us ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
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... date. When the saint came to Cornwall (always supposing that he was not born here), he is reputed to have landed in the Gannel, and to have built his cell on a strip of land that the local chieftain gave him. While whittling the handle of his mattock he noticed that a wood-pigeon picked up the shavings in its mouth and carried them to a certain spot. He took this as a sign that he was to build his church there, and this, says tradition, is the present site of Crantock ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
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... grain, vegetables and fruits. Mountains and hills are terraced and tilled far up their slopes. Meadows are conspicuously absent, as are also fallow fields. Land is too valuable to lie idle. Labor is chiefly manual and is shared by the women and children; mattock and hoe are more common than the plow.[982] Such elaborate cultivation and such pressure of population eventuate in small holdings. In Japan one hectar (2 1-2 acres) is ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
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... mattock," said the Doctor, cautiously uncovering the light. But though Bartholomew tugged with great energy, the Doctor helping, it was to little purpose, for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
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... distance, the besiegers slowly worked their way towards the Tongres gate, while at the same time the more ostensible operations were in the opposite direction. The besieged had their miners also, for the peasants in the city had been used to work with mattock and pickaxe. The women, too, enrolled themselves into companies, chose their officers—or "mine-mistresses," as they were called—and did good service daily in the caverns of the earth. Thus a whole army of gnomes were noiselessly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
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... send little boys and little girls, girls that yet know nothing of women's affairs and have not yet had relations with men. We put the medicine in the horns of oxen, and these children go to all the fords, to all the entrances of the country. A little girl turns up the soil with her mattock, the others dip a branch in the horn and sprinkle the inside of the hole saying, 'Rain! rain!' So we remove the misfortune which the women have brought on the roads; the rain will be able to come. The ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
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... line to mark the trench, and stretch it on the sward!" The trench is marked, the tools are brought, we utter not a word, But stack our guns, then fall to work with mattock and with spade, A thousand men with sinewy arms, and not a sound is made; So still were we, the stars beneath, that scarce a whisper fell; We heard the red-coat's musket click, and heard him cry, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
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... thatch, which nearly reached the ground, covered with a thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an overgrown grave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of the last mattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as grave-digger to the vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn, leaving a message that early next morning he would again call for the person whose double occupation connected him at once with the house of mourning ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
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... contained tools, weapons, instruments, clothes, books; and this is the exact list of them as stated in Gideon Spilett's note-book: —Tools:—3 knives with several blades, 2 woodmen's axes, 2 carpenter's hatchets, 3 planes, 2 adzes, 1 twibil or mattock, 6 chisels, 2 files, 3 hammers, 3 gimlets, 2 augers, 10 bags of nails and screws, 3 saws of different sizes, 2 boxes ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
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... mortal strife, both were surprised to observe that a grave was dug close by the foot of the rock with great neatness and regularity, the green turf being laid down upon the one side, and the earth thrown out in a heap upon the other. A mattock and shovel lay by ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
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... days. John could spare no time for holiday-making. He had entered on his duties as master of Hall, and set with vigour about improving his inheritance. His first step was to clear the long cliff-garden, which had been allowed to drop out of cultivation from the day when he had cast down his mattock there and run away to sea. It was a mere wilderness now. But he fell to ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
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... victim of delusion. I had become fully resolved either to kill one of the two men within me for the benefit of the other, or else to kill both, for so terrible an existence could not last long and be endured. The Abbe Serapion provided himself with a mattock, a lever, and a lantern, and at midnight we wended our way to the cemetery of ———, the location and place of which were perfectly familiar to him. After having directed the rays of the dark lantern ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
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... Vere agreed. "The matter seems a difficult one, and yet it is of the greatest importance to hinder communications with the Spaniards. Tonight all the soldiers who can be spared, aided by all the citizens able to use mattock and pick, are to set to work to begin to raise a half moon round the windmill behind the point they are attacking, so as to have a second line to fall back upon when the wall gives way, which it will do ere long, ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
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... physical superiority, though great for special purposes, was not such absolutely. For the more general uses of the legionary soldier, for marching, for castrametation, and the daily labours of the spade or mattock, a lighter build was better. As to single combats, it was one effect from the Roman (as from every good) discipline—that it diminished the openings for such showy but perilous modes ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
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