|
|
|
More "Spade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... designs against my life, however calmed or baffled for the moment. Within a few days of the above events, when Natives in large numbers were assembled at my house, a man furiously rushed on me with his ax; but a Kaserumini Chief snatched a spade with which I had been working, and dexterously defended me from instant death. Life in such circumstances led me to cling very near to the Lord Jesus; I knew not, for one brief hour, when or how attack might be made; and yet, with my ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... much, Martin Pinzon?" Danny's companion at the long board-table asked. He was an evil-looking old man with a patch over one eye and a small white spade-shaped beard and ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder
... was dotted with pegs of wood and little unhewn slabs of slate, like an abandoned quoit ground. At the farthest corner of this space he stopped before a mound near to the wall. It was the new-made grave. The scars of the turf were still unhealed, and the glist of the spade was on the grass. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... 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. His speech was a ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... working in the garden (in the cultivation of which he spent most of his leisure hours), when the general outcry from the poultry reached his ears; and, too well acquainted with the cause of their disquiet, he threw down his spade, and ran to the scene of action; and arrived just time enough to save the plumage of a hapless peacock from being entirely ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... Brussels, both in French and Austrian Flanders, is admirable. No fallows are any where to be seen, and in their place, green crops, of which beans, peas, carrots, &c. form the principal part. These green crops are kept very clean, and all worked by the spade or hoe, which furnishes employment to the immense population which is diffused over the country. Crops of rye, which, when we passed them in the middle of June, were in full ear, are every where very common; indeed, rye bread seems to be ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... we can exhaust them with our machines or divert them from their course. Here we have not to work at an artesian well, narrow and dark, where all the boring implements have to work in the dark. No; we can work under the open sky, with spade and pickaxe, and, by the help of blasting, our work ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... another twenty-two miles. This first day's march constituted a very strong test of endurance in consequence of our comparative softness and lack of training, especially as, in addition to his heavy rifle, bayonet, ammunition, and spade, each soldier was burdened with a knapsack containing emergency provisions in the form of tinned meats, coffee extract, sugar, salt, rice, and biscuits, together with various tin cooking and eating utensils; furthermore a second pair of shoes, extra blouse, changes of underwear, etc. On ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... the dancer when the latter spoke so that she did not notice that the man had moved stealthily towards her. Before she could struggle or cry out, a hand as big as a spade was clapped over her mouth, she was seized in an iron grip and half-dragged, half-carried out of the taproom through the small door ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... prone to spread and become a nuisance unless watched. Hence such plants should be placed where they will not have their roots cut by tools used close to them. When they seem to be extending, their borders should be trimmed with a sharp spade pushed vertically full depth into the soil and all the earth beyond the clump thus restricted should be shaken out with a garden fork and the cut pieces of mint removed. Further, the forked-over ground should be ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... speak to some of his men, whilst I walked about the edge of the bank. From a distant part of the moor, the bray of a jackass came faint upon the sleepy wind. "Yer tho', Jone," said one of the men, resting upon his spade; "another cally-weighver gone!" " Ay," replied Jone, "th' owd lad's deawn't his cut. He'll want no more tickets, yon mon!" The country folk of Lancashire say that a weaver dies every time a jackass brays. Jackson came up from the cutting, and we walked back ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... ourselves, we knew not whom we must trust. After this our travelling party broke up. My companions from the ship and I were to work together. We fixed on a spot, and erected our rude hut; then we bought a rocker and shovel, pick-axe and spade, with two tin pans, and set to work. I dug out the earth, another carried it, and a third washed it in the rocker. Our success was tolerable; but it was many days before we got enough to pay for the articles we had purchased, and our provisions. In the meantime, what ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... "since I've 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
... 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
... better feast," wished Timon "I wash off the flatteries with which you plastered me and sprinkle you with your villainy." With these words he threw the water into his guests' faces, and then he pelted them with the dishes. Having thus ended the banquet, he went into an outhouse, seized a spade, and quitted ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And the strange thing that I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers and plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. For near a fortnight I did not go beyond the verandah; then I found my rush of work run out, and went ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when the green gits back in the trees, And the sun comes out and stays, And yer boots pulls on with a good tight squeeze, And you think of yer barefoot days; When you ort to work and you want to not, And you and yer wife agrees It's time to spade up the garden lot, When the green gits back in the trees— Well! work is the least o' my idees When the green, you know, gits back in ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... to that; I cannot stoop to try it— To take the spade in hand, and ply it. The narrow being suits ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... 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 ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... 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 early ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... men drew closer together, and stood staring silently at this ominous dead body. It lay in a clear space among the trees. Near by was a spade after the Chinese pattern, and further off lay a scattered heap of stones, close ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... 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 ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... 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 man to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... 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, ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... be the "Inca city" which Lopez Torres had reported. Among the ruins we picked up several fragments of Inca pottery. There was nothing Incaic about the buildings. One was rectangular and one was spade-shaped, but all the rest were round. The buildings varied in diameter from fifteen to twenty feet. Each had but a single opening. The walls had tumbled down, but gave no evidence of careful construction. Not far away, in woods which had not yet been cleared ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... the part of the people. Theatre crowds demanded encores of the President's March and hissed 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
... in the achievements of different individuals at first remained very great. The skilful hunter gets a far richer booty than the less skilful one; the strong and nimble agriculturist achieves with the spade a manifold greater result than the weak and the slow. The invention of the plough very materially reduces this difference, and—so far as the difference depends upon physical capacity—the invention of the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... with the dogs racing in front, to choose his bedroom, and came across his host unwillingly busy with hoe and spade in the potato patch. His whole aspect betokened such undisguised sufferance that Graeme could not repress ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... that stood without. But even the reckless courage of maternity was unavailing. Soon the noise of blows and of falling earth was heard, as the passage was gradually opened by brawny farm labourers, working with spade and pick, and assisted in their task by the eager huntsman, who ever and anon thrust a long bramble-spray into the tunnel and thus ascertained the direction ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... in his spade. "It will never be much bigger than a stinging nettle," thought he, "for the roots of the oak have sucked every atom of heart out of this." His black ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... stood Kaeloikamalama with the digging spade called Kapahaelihonua, The Knife-that-cuts-the-earth, twenty fathoms its length, four men to span it. Thought the lizard, "A slaughterer this." There was Kaeloikamalama swinging the digging ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... manner if not with my argument, they yielded to my importunity and allowed me to pass down. The stroke of the spade and the harsh voice of the man directing the work greeted my disquieted ears. With a bound I cleared the last half-dozen steps and, alighting on the cellar bottom, was soon able, in spite of the semi-darkness, to look about me and get ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... 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
... ancient and honorable spade, which, for small garden plots, borders, beds, etc., must still be relied upon for the initial operation in gardening—breaking up the soil. There are several types, but any will answer the purpose. In buying a spade look out for two things: see ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... 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
... but truth-telling spade, and without consulting the critic, dug up some coins in the island of Cyprus itself, and on the coins were stamped both the image and the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... 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 • D. M. Moir
... home an' your own contree! Strike for your native lan'! Kip workin' away wit' de spade an' hoe, Den jump w'en you hear de bugle blow, For danger 's aroun', above, below, But de bugle will tell if ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... there, like a moving dot, a ploughman turned a belated furrow; or a sweating ditcher leaned upon his reluctant spade and longed for night; or a shepherd, quite as silly as his sheep, gawked up the morning hills. But not a ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... plan, which has sometimes given most excellent results, is to cut back spring set plants which have ripened some fruit but which are not completely exhausted, to mere stubs, and spade up the ground about them so as to cut most of the roots, water thoroughly and cover the ground with a mulch of straw. Most of the plants so treated will start a new and vigorous growth and give ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... 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 beneath me, an unknown quantity—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... creatures; that is to say, that the agriculture, the pasturage, the fisheries, and every species of honest industry about the country, cannot employ the one moiety of the population, let them work as lazily as they like, and they do work as if a pleugh or a spade burnt their fingers. Aweel, sir, this moiety of unemployed ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... there was very little, Lady Ker went to bed. But Randal and Jean slipped out into the moonlight. They took a sack with them, and Randal carried a pickaxe and a spade. They walked quickly to the three great stones, and waited for a while to hear if all was quiet. Then Jean threw a white cloak round her, and stole about the edges of the camp and the wood. She knew that if any wandering man came by, he would not stay long ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... brought into existence in only one way—that is, by consuming less than is produced. If one has a dollar one can spend it either for an article of consumption, say confectionery, or for an article of production, say a spade. He who buys a spade becomes a capitalist to the amount of a dollar—that is, he becomes the owner of tools. The process is precisely the same whether the amount in question is a dollar or a million dollars. [Footnote: T.N. Carver, "How to ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... cultivated as in times of terror and mourning; because, during the latter, the lands enjoyed the franchises so long wanted. Hands never failed; for, when the men marched to the armies, women supplied their place; and no one was ashamed to handle the spade or ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... we were about one hundred and ninety miles from Hazleton, and that this must certainly be the divide between the Skeena and the Stikeen. The Manchester boys reported finding some very good pieces of quartz on the hills, and they were all out with spade and pick prospecting, though it seemed to me they showed but very little enthusiasm ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... dogs, cats and birds would die of old age, or from an accident, she would replace them without tears and without regret; with a little spade she would bury the dead animal in a strip of ground, throwing a few shovelfuls of earth over it and stamping it down with her feet in an ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... cheer. The men fell to work with renewed vigor. Presently Gallagher's spade hit something solid. A little scraping showed the top ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... rioting 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 ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... found, among the grass in the 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
... assent and satisfaction at the close of this brief address, and one of the young men, with grave—almost mysterious—looks, took up a small spade and went towards that part of the wall where Ravonino sat. The latter rose to let the young men get at a particular spot, which was marked on the wall with a small—almost imperceptible— red square. Here, after turning up a few spadefuls of earth, ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 bore ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... stronger; he could walk with a stick, and was going back to school next half. I felt a very unreasonable vexation because they seemed quite cheerful. But as I was leaving the garden to go over the fields, Baby Cecil came running after me, with his wooden spade in one hand and a plant of chick weed in the other, crying: "Charlie, dear! Come and tell Baby Cecil a story." I kissed him, and tied his hat on, which had come off ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... morning came he said to me, "There are in this room a spade, a sieve, and a leather bag; bring them out." I said to myself, God knows what labour he will make me undergo because he has made me eat of his bread; having no help for it, I took up those articles ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... again. The spring is the best time to do this work, although if the fall be dry, it will answer nearly as well to do it at that time. The dryer the ground in preparing it for the seed, and for the sowing of the same, the better. In preparing a small plot of ground for a lawn, the spade, hand-rake, and small roller may be used in ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... uncle of 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 ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... that 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 ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... he had made this observation, he exclaimed, "I hae fund something now that stands again' the spade, as if it ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... improving his mind by study in his leisure hours. Among the acquaintances he then made was an enthusiastic projector of the name of Hall, who had taken out one patent for making hemp from bean-stalks, and contemplated taking out another for effecting spade tillage by steam. The young engineer was invited to make the requisite model, which he did, and it cost him both time and money, which the out-at-elbows projector was unable to repay; and all that came of the project was the exhibition of the model at the Society of Arts and before ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Northmour. "And the bargain? D-n it, you're not a fool, young woman; I may call a spade a spade with you. How about the bargain? You know as well as I do what your father's life depends upon. I have only to put my hands under my coat-tails and walk away, and his throat would he ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... issued shares to pay for the rolling plant and the rails. We got together rather a handsome sum in this way from various good-natured friends, and after the expiration of some weeks could show them a rather long embankment. Then we got tired of spade work, and the enterprise languished. Finally the works came to a standstill, and I believe we spent the shareholders' money on something else, for assuredly they never saw it again. After beginning so hopefully in the art of getting up bubble companies, it is perhaps to be regretted ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... 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 ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... close of a summer evening, that the ground was broken by the gentlemen of the shamrock, within sight of the shanties decorated with the honorable order of the thistle. A lovely evening in the month of June! Not with spumy cannon and prickly bayonets, but with peaceful spade and mattock, advanced the sons of St. Patrick towards the children of a sister isle. Then did Roderick Dhu step forth from his shanty, and inquire, in choice Gaelic, if a person named Brian Borheime was in the ranks of the approaching forces. Then then did Brian ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... plans, you see," he said, bustling his newspaper aside for me. "It is no discredit to your intelligence, Mr. Blakeley, but you lack the professional eye, the analytical mind. You legal gentlemen call a spade a spade, although it may ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to the house where she lived, who loved him so dearly, and that he showed little return for her love by being so despairing at what had happened. The Prince replied: "I am not grieved at having exchanged the royal palace for this hovel; splendid banquets for a crust of bread; a sceptre for a spade; not at seeing myself, who have terrified armies, now frightened by this hideous scarecrow; for I should deem all my disasters good fortune to be with you and to gaze upon you with these eyes. But what pains me to the heart is that I have to dig till my hands are covered with hard ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... might be hidden beneath the tree, and that the dog had scented it, at last struck the old man. He ran back to the house, fetched his spade and began to dig the ground at that spot. What was his astonishment when, after digging for some time, he came upon a heap of old and valuable coins, and the deeper he dug the more gold coins did he find. So intent was the old man on his work that he never saw the cross face of ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... 1896. The owner of a garden near Queen Street, in the south-eastern part of the town, was digging up an apple tree when he came across a fine bed of gravel. Continuing the digging, in order to find the thickness of this deposit, his spade struck against a hard substance, which proved to be a lead coffin. After this had been examined by others invited to inspect it, without any satisfactory result, the present writer was requested to conduct further ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... tell. A Miller there had dwelt for many a day; As any peacock he was proud and gay. He could pipe well, and fish, mend nets, to boot, Turn cups with a lathe, and wrestle well, and shoot. A Norman dirk, as brown as is a spade, Hung by his belt, and eke a trenchant blade. A jolly dagger bare he in his pouch: There was no man, for peril, durst him touch. A Sheffield clasp-knife lay within his hose. Round was his face, and broad and flat his nose. High ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... 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, ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... joyous understanding. Here was a fellow-soul, "funny" like herself, Beryl described her; Beryl, for whom black was always and invariably black, and a spade a spade. ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... to do that without scamping it; but an Irishman will work as if he'd die the moment he stopped. That man Matthew Haffigan and his brother Andy made a farm out of a patch of stones on the hillside—cleared it and dug it with their own naked hands and bought their first spade out of their first crop of potatoes. Talk of making two blades of wheat grow where one grew before! those two men made a whole field of wheat grow where not even a furze bush had ever got its head ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... which the coins had been found by Sir Arthur and the German, was once more forced aside, and the earth gave easy way to the spade. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... yesterday—going out with him to fish for barbel, and joining him over-night to go in search of bait. I found him crouched by his fire, eating potatoes out of the same plate with his dog. This frugal meal over, he took up a small lantern, a large box, and a long spade, and beckoned ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... 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
... off in three boats to round the island and wait for us, and Clyde and I took the fourth boat, and stowed the canvas bags, and went ashore, running up a little reedy inlet to the end. We buried them in the exact middle of a small triangle of three trees. Then we rowed out, and I threw the spade in the water, and when we rounded the island, taking a last look at the Hebe Maitland, she was dipping considerable, as could be seen from the hang of her lanterns. Clyde changed to another boat and put Sadler, Craney, Irish, Abe Dalrimple, ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... scholars. The interpretation of the ancient scripts has reached a technical mastery unknown to the pioneers, and the genius of Brugsch unlocked the door to demotic, which Champollion had never thoroughly mastered. But the triumphs of philology have been surpassed by the conquests of the spade. The closest friend of Mariette's later years was Maspero, who succeeded him as Director of Antiquities, and whose most sensational find was the tombs of the Kings near Thebes. Equally eminent as excavator, philologist, and historian, Maspero was the first to popularize ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... old Romans used, admire their well-turned arches, and see the paint and plaster upon the walls of their apartments. The "Old Wall," so long a sphinx by the roadside, suggesting enigmas to passers-by, has found an interpreter in revelations which the spade and pickaxe have made within its shadow. From the time when its walls first fell down, it has furnished plunder to the country round. The old monks, finding it easier to take down its stones than to quarry now ones, built ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... with the air of famished wolves. The violent shock has been 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 his ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... 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 ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... banked the frame, spanking the fertilizer down hard with the back of his spade. He sloped it up some four inches along the ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... all the necessities that were desirable, yet still I found several things wanting. My ink was daily wasting; I wanted needles, pins, and thread to mend or keep my clothes together; and particularly a spade, pickax, or shovel, to remove the earth. It was a year before I finished my little bulwark; and having some intervals of relaxation, after my daily wandering abroad for provision, I drew up this ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... 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 warmth and splendour ...
— No Abolition of Slavery - Or the Universal Empire of Love, A poem • James Boswell
... er day. Ah wuz bred and born right down dar er-round Caledonia. Ah wuz a big gull durin de time uv de centennial snow. Dis snow wuz called dat cause hit wuz de bigges snow dat evah been. Hit wuz ovah yo haid. We had tuh spade our way evah whah we went. Tuh de wood gitting place, tuh de sping, tuh de hoss lot, and evah whah. De anow wuz warm an soft. We piled up so much snow till hit took hit er half er year tuh melt. Dat snow stayed ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... 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, well; I made thee miserable What ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Montreal, received constant stimulus from the alarms of attack, and, above all, from a groundless report that ten thousand "Bostonnais" had sailed for Quebec. The sessions of the council were suspended, and the councillors seized pick and spade. The old defences of the place were reconstructed on a new plan, made by the great engineer Vauban. The settlers were mustered together from a distance of twenty leagues, and compelled to labor, with little or no pay, till a line of solid earthworks enclosed Quebec from Cape ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... Cornish town was overwhelmed by a terrible uprising of wind and sea. The waves broke angrily over the haunts of man's degradation, followed by driving sands that blotted them out for ever. But perhaps it may not be for ever. Some day the fickle sand may desert that which it once buried, or the spade may lay bare relics that shall prove the tradition's truth. The lost church of St. Piran has been found; it may be so with the lost Langarrow. Already many human remains have been found among the sand-heaps that extend intermittently from here to Perranporth, and traces of "kitchen-middens" which ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... treble voice, and a little curly-headed apparition came running out of the bedroom, flourishing a wooden spade. ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... spade And said he'd dig himself a well; And then Charles took a piece of tin, And I was digging with ...
— Under the Tree • Elizabeth Madox Roberts
... another. I was walking by the river, after breakfast. And I saw, under a willow, a fisherman asleep. It was noon. A spade, as if expressly put there for me, was standing ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... tall sedges and "cat-tails" of the marshes, make the most insensate traveler exclaim at their amazing loveliness. To reach them one must don rubber boots and risk sudden seats in the slippery ooze; nevertheless, with spade in hand to give one support, it is well worthwhile to seek them out and dig up some roots to transplant to the garden. Here, strange to say, without salt soil or more water than the average garden receives from showers and hose, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... impulse, takes a decorative or applied form. All the beginnings of art grew up in this way. In primitive peoples it is the first expression of emotional life, which comes after the material need is satisfied. The savage makes his spade or fish spear from the necessity of physical preservation. Thus from the joy of living he applies to it his feeling ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... earnestly I went to work With spade and rake and hoe; I planted every seed I had, And wondered if ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... course you may think not, and you may not be content to call things by their common names; you may be ambitious to show superiority over others and display your learning or, rather, your pedantry and lack of learning. For instance, you may not want to call a spade a spade. You may prefer to call it a spatulous device for abrading the surface of the soil. Better, however, to stick to the old familiar, simple name that your grandfather called it. It has stood the test of time, and old friends ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... beguile: The upper part thereof was whey; 245 The nether, orange mix'd with grey. This hairy meteor did denounce The fall of scepters and of crowns; With grisly type did represent Declining age of government; 250 And tell with hieroglyphick spade, Its own grave and the state's were made. Like SAMPSON'S heart-breakers, it grew In time to make a nation rue; Tho' it contributed its own fall, 255 To wait upon the publick downfal, It was monastick, and did grow In holy orders by strict ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... had had a shovel or a spade, he could have worked to better advantage, but as it was he was forced to content himself with a large shell which he picked ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... considering its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey; and ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deposits. With the exception of an 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 Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Salinas was viceroy of Mexico; and the operations were commenced with great pomp, the viceroy assisting in person, mass being said on a portable altar, and fifteen hundred workmen assembled, while the marquis himself began the excavation by giving the first stroke with a spade. From 1607 to 1830, eight millions of dollars were expended, and yet this great work was not brought to a conclusion. However, the limits of the two lakes of Zumpango and San Cristobal, to the north of the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... heights which commanded the top of the Gaeta hill. But to profit by this, the Piedmontese were obliged to make fourteen miles of roads by which to bring up their artillery. For a month, 10,000 out of the 20,000 besiegers were at work with the spade. The defending force amounted to 11,000 men, and was commanded by General Ritucci. From the first, it was certain that the obstinate stand made at Gaeta could only result in what Lord John Russell called ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... boyhood's time of June, Crowding years in one brief moon, When all things I heard or saw, Me, their master, waited for. I was rich in flowers and trees, Humming-birds and honey-bees; For my sport the squirrel played, Plied the snouted mole his spade; For my taste the blackberry cone Purpled over hedge and stone; Laughed the brook for my delight Through the day and through the night, Whispering at the garden wall, Talked with me from fall to fall; Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond Mine the walnut slopes ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... fall to work at once, and when we get back to the palace, I will tell you my story and how I became an eunuch.' So they set down the lantern and dug a hole between four tombs, the length and breadth of the chest, Kafour plying the spade and Sewab clearing away the earth by basketsful, till they had reached a depth of half a fathom, when they laid the chest in the hole and threw back the earth over it: then went out and shutting the door, disappeared from Ghanim's sight. When he was sure that ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... launched a long 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
... 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
... leap and leap in air, Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly And roll back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you. And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs To look again, and still your spade kept lifting. Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why, But I went near to see with my own eyes. You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... of English poetry"; his "high, astounding terms" took the world of his day by storm, his gift to English literature was the gift of sublime beauty, of imagination, and passion. Lyly could lay claim to none of these, but his contribution was perhaps of more importance still. He did the spade-work, and did it once and for all. With his knowledge of the Classics and of previous English experiments he wrote plays that, compared with what had gone before, were models of plot construction, of the development of action, and even of characterization. Moreover ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... it should be, a peaceful spot. It was not always so. There was a time when its inhabitants had to toil, so to speak, with the spade in one hand, and the musket in the other. It lies in a hollow of the great rolling plains, and was founded, like many of the eastern towns, in the memorable "1820," when the "British settlers" came out, and a new era ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 boat-building. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... little but his white clerical choker and a sort of undivided skirt. A few white families have gone to the same place, and I helped some of them to construct their new homes in the rocks amidst great merriment. The boys were as delighted as children with a spade and bucket by the sea, and many an impregnable redoubt was thrown up with a dozen stones. What those homes will be like at the end of a week I don't know. A picnic where love is may be endurable for one afternoon, ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... schivar non parar, non ritirarsi, Voglion costor, ne qui destrezza ha parte; Non danno i colpi or finti, or pieni, or scarsi! Toglie l'ira a il furor l'uso de l'arte. Odi le spade orribilmente utarsi A mezzo il ferro; il pie d'orma non parte, Sempre a il pie fermo, a la man sempre in moto; Ne scende taglio in ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... 'crops, gardens, and every green herb in the settlement had perished, with 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, and brought back on flatboats to ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... torrents have greatly subsided, the Mansa, or chief man of the town, appoints a day to begin sanoo koo, "gold washing;" and the women are sure to have themselves in readiness by the time appointed. A hoe, or spade, for digging up the sand, two or three calabashes for washing it in, and a few quills for containing the gold dust, are all the implements necessary for the purpose. On the morning of their departure, a bullock is killed for the first day's entertainment, and a number of prayers ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... 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
... 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
... handicraft trade; but he now applied for harrow-work, and the surgeon seconded his application. This change of occupation, which was destined in some respects to be beneficial, proved at the outset most unfortunate. The outdoor toil was mostly spade and barrow labor on the moor, on which the convicts worked in gangs—each gang under supervision of two warders, armed with sword and musket. The first face that Richard's eyes lit on, when he found himself in the open, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... seen the thin streams that silently, but steadily and in ever-increasing volume, were working their way through the embankment near its base. In the inky blackness of the night they were unheeded; and while spade and pick were plied with unflagging zeal to strengthen the higher portions, these insidious foes were equally busy ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... traffic of a whole city! Hello there, Molly! Got my coat and mittens ready? Well, you don't look as if the storm had kept you awake much. Give the father a kiss, lass, to sort of sweeten his breakfast. Are the Jays awake? Hunt them up a spade or a shovel and set them digging their neighbors out. And, Mary wife, if I were you I'd keep a pot of coffee on the range all day. There's maybe a poor teamster or huckster passing who'll be the better for a warm cup of drink, and the coffee'll keep ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... species. It could boast of a temperature ever equable, and a soil which every plant had long enriched to thrive therein in the silence of its vigour. Its vegetation was mighty, magnificent, luxuriantly untended, full of erratic growths decked with monstrous blossoming, unknown to the spade and watering-pot of gardeners. Nature left to herself, free to grow as she listed, in the depths of that solitude protected by natural shelters, threw restraint aside more heartily at each return of spring, indulged in mighty gambols, delighted in offering ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... a South American fresh from the Republic of Moccador, with a spade designed to dig up a long-buried treasure could have robbed Mawkum of his habitual caution of always guarding plans and estimates from outsiders—a custom which was really one of the fundamental laws of the office. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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 ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... needn't have been so ready. Have you told the sexton to get a new spade? But you may let him in. And ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... 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 again To everlasting ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... society. We have managed to keep this society alive for fifteen years and, though I don't say it in any spirit of boasting, it has not been an easy thing to do. It has required a good deal of pretty hard spade work by the committee. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I suppose you didn't come here to listen to me and perhaps I have said enough about our difficulties and troubles. So without more ado (this is always a favourite ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... his fears to no one. Two or three hours before day, he became so sore and weary from work with the spade that he crawled into one of the half-wrecked wagons, and tried to go to sleep. But his nerves were drawn to too high a pitch. After a quarter of an hour's vain effort he got out of the wagon and stood by the wheel. The sky was still black, and the heavy clouds of fog and ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cried Swankie, who was gradually getting into better humour, "haud the light, and gie me the spade." ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 state the place had remained until the movement of the waters ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the night of Eva Wilkinson's disappearance, and afterwards Sir Michael journeyed down with us to Whiteladies. The local police were already scouring the country, and under intelligent supervision had accomplished a great deal of the spade work. I may just state the facts as far as ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... in 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 ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... ordered a gardener to be ready to attend her, and the next morning early led him to the tree which the bird had told her of, and bade him dig at its foot. When the gardener came to a certain depth, he found some resistance to the spade, and presently discovered a gold box about a foot square, which he shewed the princess. "This," said she, "is what I brought you for; take care not to injure ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... will have a difficulty in understanding that the trouble was all about affairs purely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities of place and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in the dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap. The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but to the discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle of Don Ruy Gomez de Silva in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... speaking, to call a spade a spade is to give a man his real character. The phrase is ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... backward flight than to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central researches. It "says" more things to you than you can repeat to see the past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same—in kind—as what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn't here, however, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on the Corso, but in a little ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... had gathered a few sheaves of prime ones, when we discovered a broad stone that showed good indications, but we couldn't raise it. The whole upper part of the mountain seemed to be built mostly upon this one stone. There was nothing to be done but mole it—dig under, you know; so taking the spade I soon widened the hole the creatures had got in at, until it would admit my body. Crawling in, I found a kind of cell in the solid rock, stowed nearly full of beautiful serpents, some of them as long as a man. You would have revelled in those worms! They were neatly disposed ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... 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, led by Jack ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson Told in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... along the trench to have word with Captain Fellowes, who was wounded rather badly. I made busy with the men about me, making them stand where they could see best with least risk of exposure and ordering spade work here and there. It is a strange thing, sahib, but I have never seen it otherwise, that spade work—which is surely the most important thing—is the last thing troopers will attend to unless compelled. ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... bait," said Mary, "I wonder if the two of you could make it convanient to spade an onion bed. If I had it spaded I ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... or 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 ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... mind that I wanted many things notwithstanding all that I had amassed together; and of these, ink was one; as also a spade, pickaxe, and shovel, to dig or remove the earth; needles, pins, and thread; as for linen, I soon learned to want that without ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... conceal'd. The rebel Knave, who dares his prince engage, Proves the 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
... needn't 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
... disposed of the horses and cows and hay and machinery, 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 ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... labor. The last bit of bread serves the man himself in a less important way than does the first, inasmuch as it gratifies a want that is less intense; and the last implement of a given kind—the last hatchet or spade or arrow—helps him less in his productive operations than did the first one. On the one hand, we have the law of the diminishing utility of successive units of consumers' goods, and on the other hand, we have a parallel law of the diminishing productivity of successive increments ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... nothing had happened to disturb or change their mode of life, when, one summer's night in June, they were in their little garden, resting from the labours of the day. The widow's work was yet upon her knee, and strewn upon the ground about her; and Barnaby stood leaning on his spade, gazing at the brightness in the west, and ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and furnished comfortably, and the surroundings were fast being improved under the guiding hand of the "boss," who worked with his men as one of themselves, and easy-going fox-hunting squire as he was in the old country a couple of years since, he could handle an axe, spade, or shovel with the best ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... 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 ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... they owned their own homes and the plots of ground they gardened, and I do contend that the watering-can and the spade and the pruning knife are a means of grace. Very many of them made twelve shillings a day, which is three dollars in our good Canadian money, and some of the highest paid made twice as much. And there ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... 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 ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... greatly in strength, varying from merely ten or a dozen men to three or four thousand, and indeed each band varied continually. The men, when not required, would scatter to their homes, cultivate their little patches of ground, and throw down the spade and take up the rifle again when they heard of a convoy to cut off, or an invading column to beat back. The bands, too, would vary in proportion to the renown of their chiefs. An energetic man, who, at the head of a handful, had performed ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... all 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
... of Teller's Point" held nightly councils here, the ghosts of departed Indians, whose last resting place on this Point was disturbed by the white man's plough and spade, but their clay has long since been burned into bricks and their shades have scattered in all directions; some of them no doubt looking down on us ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... 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 ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... a few hours. In the meantime, there is another matter that must be attended to. Do you know whether there is a spade ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... with numerous small shallow lakelets, they came to a watercourse whereon they found signs of a grave, and they picked up a battered pint-pot. Next morning, feeling sure that the ground had been disturbed with a spade, they opened what proved to be a grave, and in it found the body of a European, the skull marked, so McKinlay states, with two sabre cuts. He noted down the description of the body, the locality, and its surroundings; and in view of these ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... 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 cited in which our infantry ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... saw the varied colours of the flowers on the grave, and the covering of earth was gradually withdrawn like a floating drapery; and she sank down, and the apparition covered her with a black cloak; night closed around her, the night of death, and she sank deeper than the sexton's spade can penetrate; and the churchyard was as a roof over ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... Committee of the Unionist Associations of Ireland was therefore formed in the same year, the organisations represented on it being the two already named and the Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union. The latter, which in earlier years had done excellent spade-work under the fostering zeal of Lord Ranfurly and Mr. William Robert Young, was before 1911 amalgamated with the Unionist Council, so that all rivalry and overlapping was thenceforward eliminated from the organisation of Unionism in Ulster. The Council in the North and the Irish Unionist Alliance ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... discovered before now, if Wordsworth had 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 ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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
... others of their bones; They neither care to see their heads, Nor yet to hear their groans. 16. Now all these things are but the shade And badges of his coat;[3] The glass that runs, the scythe and spade, Though weapons more remote: 17. Yet such as make poor mortals shrink And fear, when they are told, These things are signs that they must drink With death; O then how cold. 18. It strikes them to the heart! how do They study it to shun! Indeed who can bear up, and who Can from ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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' ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... the aromatics Which cense this arch; and here and there, And further off, and everywhere Throughout that brave mosaic yard, Those picks or diamonds in the card, With pips of hearts, of club, and spade, Are here most neatly interlaid. Many a counter, many a die, Half-rotten and without an eye, Lies hereabout; and for to pave The excellency of this cave, Squirrels' and children's teeth, late shed, Are neatly here inchequered With brownest ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Trophy—the Shepherds' Trophy which had won through the hardships of a hundred years—was almost gone. It seemed to quiver as the blow fell. But the cruel steel missed, and the axe-head sank into the wood, clean and deep, like a spade ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... Marshall, as the old man, carrying a basket in one hand and a spade in the other, was trudging steadily by. His blue overalls and jumper were threadbare under the soft brown they had achieved through his strenuous kneeling and the general intimacy of weeds and sod. He had a curious neutrality of expression—perhaps an indifference to what his blue ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... dominating personally—without standing out fully and clearly in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was a taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his eye was dreaded by the weaker as fire is feared by a burnt child. Dissembling enough, he was not sufficiently oily ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... him to 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 ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing 140 Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile[48] which still its ruins shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallow'd ground! 145 Or thither,[49] 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... a wise 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
... prefer it. Any fool could call a spade a spade. The natural ambition would be to find something more flowery ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... under the slab that 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 "He ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... 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 Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... them, and after her death they had been left to run wild. Since the baby King Amor had been brought to the mountain top the Ancient One and his servitor had made them bloom again. As soon as he was old enough to hold a small spade Amor had worked in the beds. All things grew for him as if his touch were a spell; birds and bees and butterflies flocked round him as he labored. He knew what the bees hummed and where they flew to load themselves with honey; ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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
... We do but dally on the beach, Writing our little thoughts full large, While Ocean with imperious speech Derides us trifling by the marge. Nay, we are children, who all day Beside the unknown waters play, And dig with small toy-spade the sand, Thinking our trenches wondrous deep, Till twilight falls, and hand-in-hand Nurse takes us home, well tired, to sleep; Sleep, and forget our toys, and be Lulled by ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... in those days as clever with the spade as we afterwards became. This is clearly shown in ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... eating a melon, The Chickahominy by, He stuck in his spade, then a long while delayed, And cried 'What a brave ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... saw nothing like it anywhere else. I asked my uncle about it, and he explained that it was indeed after an old fashion, but that he had himself made the wilderness, mostly with his own hands, when he was young. This surprised me, for I had never seen him touch a spade, and hardly ever saw him in the garden: when I did, I always felt as if something was going to happen. He said he had in it tried to copy the wilderness laid out by lord St. Alban's in his essays. I found the volume, and soon came upon the essay, On Gardens. The passage ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... had no doubt dragged there for her. Trust both her and Turkey, the cow should not have a mouthful without leave of my father. Elsie was as usual busy with her knitting. And now I caught sight of Turkey, running from a neighbouring cottage with a spade over his shoulder. Elsie had been ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... Tom got a spade from the pack horse, and Frank got a bar. They attacked the edge of the bank where, half way down, there was a little slope to the wall. The gravelly soil yielded rather easily to their digging, and they soon had the beginning ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... are grown to the height of eight or ten feet, they bend them down, and interlace them one with another. I do not see any of these, however, which are become old. Probably, therefore, they soon die. The women here smite on the anvil, and work with the maul and spade. The people of this country are ill dressed in comparison with those of France, and there are more spots of uncultivated ground. The plough here is made with a single handle, which is a beam twelve feet long, six inches in diameter below, and tapered to about two inches ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... country occupations, as far as my strength would permit, and conceived a real grief at not being able to manage our garden without help; for I could not take five or six strokes with the spade without being out of breath and overcome with perspiration; when I stooped the beating redoubled, and the blood flew with such violence to my head, that I was instantly obliged to stand upright. Being therefore confined to less fatiguing ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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, well; I made thee miserable What ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... eggs. From these emerged the twin brothers, Apocatequil and Piguerao. The former was the more powerful. By touching the corpse of his mother he brought her to life, he drove off and slew the Guachemines, and, directed by Ataguju, released the race of Indians from the soil by turning it up with a spade of gold. For this reason they adored him as their maker. He it was, they thought, who produced the thunder and the lightning by hurling stones with his sling; and the thunderbolts that fall, said they, are his children. Few villages were willing to be without one or more of ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... occupations. Maclean sidled to the door across the grating and closed it in the twinkling of an eye. The engineer, who was reading a newspaper, heard the noise and looked up. Sievers struck him with the hammer and flew at one of the cleaners. Maclean rushed at the other with his spade. It was all over in a moment, and without any noise that the thudding of the donkey-engine did not drown. Maclean changed coats and caps with the insensible Russian engineer, while Sievers called the Saigon's men from below. ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... 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 than at home, for the practice ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... our quarry, Glendinning," said Claverhouse, drawing rein as they approached a small cottage, near to which a man was seen at work with a spade. ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... was born yellow, a frank yellow of the barbaric type that despises neutral tints. By the Daily Telegraph things were called by their uneuphemistic names. A spade was a spade, and mud was mud, and nothing was sacred from its sewer rats. The highest paid official on its staff was a criminal lawyer celebrated in the libel courts. Everybody cursed it and everybody read it. After a season, having thus firmly established itself in the enmities of the ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... snow came down, storm breeding storm, And on the decks were laid: Till the weary sailor, sick at heart, Sank down beside his spade. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... came upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the sexton's spade that ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... The large boiler should render it necessary to be used not more than once in four days or a week. The food should be stirred for two hours, then transferred to flat coolers, until sufficiently gelatinous to be cut with a kind of spade. By the admixture of some portion of soups it may be brought to any thickness requisite. The flesh to be mixed with it should be cut very small, that the greedy hounds may not be able to obtain more than their share. Four bushels and a half of genuine old oatmeal should be boiled with a hundred ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... almost without another word. Winterborne's mind ran on his contemplated evening-party, his abstraction being such that he hardly was conscious of Marty's presence beside him. From the nature of their employment, in which he handled the spade and she merely held the tree, it followed that he got good exercise and she got none. But she was an heroic girl, and though her out-stretched hand was chill as a stone, and her cheeks blue, and her cold worse than ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... iron alone. See what has been done with it in the last fifty years. See what you are able to do with it here in Tennessee. From it are made things dainty and things dangerous, carriages and cannon, spatula and spade, sword and pen, wheel, axle and rail, as well as screw, file, and saw. It is bound around the hull of ships and lifted into tower and steeple. It is drawn into wire, coiled into springs, woven into gauze, twisted into rope, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... he took up the spade he chanced to look down at his new clothes. He had spoiled one nice suit already and had promised his mother he would be more careful of ...
— Jimmy, Lucy, and All • Sophie May
... are all that matter, and that since one year is often like another, and life merely a matter of occasional mountain peaks in flat country, the outstanding events alone need be chronicled with any excuse. But who knows the essential, since biographists must perforce omit the spade work of life on character, the gradual attrition or upbuilding of principles under experience, and the strain and stress, that, sooner or later, bear fruit in action? Even autobiography, as all other history, needs must be incomplete, since no man himself exactly appreciated the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... rose up 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 we ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted nevermore to ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... marriage. "It is no good mincing matters now-a-days," Mrs. Carbuncle would have said, had any friend pointed out to her that she was taking strong measures in the exaction of toll. "People have come to understand that a spade is a spade, and L10, L10," she would have said. Had Mrs. Hanbury Smith not noticed the application, there might, perhaps, have been an end of it, but she was silly enough to send over from Paris a little trumpery bit of finery, bought in the Palais ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... of ourselves, both mistaken. Unless we keep a sharp look-out, we may here get into a snarl from which extrication is slow work. Neither is it possible to counteract an unpleasant brain-impression by something pleasant but false. We must call a spade a spade, but not consider it a component part of the man who handles it, nor yet associate the man with the spade, or the spade with the man. When we drop it, so long as we drop it for what it is worth, ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... fight deserving the name of battle, that has been fought on English ground. The impression left on the simple inhabitants of the neighbourhood was deep and lasting. That impression, indeed, has been frequently renewed. For even in our own time the plough and the spade have not seldom turned up ghastly memorials of the slaughter, skulls, and thigh bones, and strange weapons made out of implements of husbandry. Old peasants related very recently that, in their childhood, they were ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... presented to their gaze by "Big Jim". On the latter gentleman's impassive face there appeared a slight flicker of triumph—a faint flicker, no more to be observed than the expression called there by the draft of little casino to a four-card spade flush. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... 12 people. Then came the cook's room on one side, with a narrow passageway on the other, into a small room in the front end of the car. This car was sixty feet in length and would make you think you were in a palace hotel on wheels. Hank Small, who had hands as big as a garden spade, was the engineer, with engine No. 96, which was always expected to pull the pay car. Then there was a man by the name of Olmsby who was one of the check clerks, young and very fine looking. Then there was another man in the ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... often been made that the Union troops should have been intrenched at Shiloh. Up to that time the pick and spade had been but little resorted to at the West. I had, however, taken this subject under consideration soon after re-assuming command in the field, and, as already stated, my only military engineer reported unfavorably. Besides ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... my essential function to begin at the bottom and record the first signs of grace, rather than to limit myself to the top and write critically about work which will endure with or without criticism. If American critics would devote their attention for ten years to this spade work, they might not win so much honor, but we should find the atmosphere clearer at the end of that period for the true ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 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 ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... other article. Having found it, he emerged from the inner door, crossed the brewhouse, and went into the yard. Directly he stepped out she could see his outline by the light of the clouded and weakly moon. The sack was slung at his back, and in his hand he carried a spade. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... this dished up with a sauce of humor often too racy and piquant for our delicate twentieth-century palate, which has acquired a refined taste for suggestive innuendo, but never relishes calling a spade by ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome Earth-hunger—old as the primal Eden, where man's life began—is stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial avarice; the wealth of the country runs into the swamp of speculation; the scripture ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... uneasy. He was not accustomed to hearing things like this. Where he lived people called a spade a spade. He pricked up his ears and made a wry face. "It is the way he has been trained that makes him talk like that," he thought; "it is the result of constantly sitting on gold-embroidered chairs and seeing nothing about ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, and gets coated with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. His nodule is broken open with a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue lias clay, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Primus, he wouldn't stick in a spade, unless they'd pay him aforehand. Ye see, Primus was up to 'em; he knowed about Gidger, and there wa'n't none on 'em that was particular good pay; and so they all jest hed to rake and scrape, and pay him down the twenty dollars among 'em; and they 'greed for the fust full moon, at twelve' ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... truth, personal malice, a wish to curry favor with the Astronomer Royal, or mere toadyism. The only accusation which has truth in it is, that I have made myself a "public scavenger of science": the assertion, which is the {363} most false of all is, that the results of my broom and spade are "shot right in between the columns of" the Athenaeum. I declare I never in my life inserted a word between the columns of the Athenaeum: I feel huffed and miffed at the very supposition. I have ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... telling a 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 ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... all the ground; and in order to economize the soil for this purpose, lived in excavations under ground and abstained from the use of bricks.[975] To-day, terraced slopes, irrigation, hand-made soils, hoe and spade tillage, rotation of crops, and a rich variety of field and garden products characterize the economic history of most Mediterranean islands, whether Elba, the Lipari, Ponza, Procida, Capri, Ischia, Pantellaria, Lampedusa,[976] or the Aegean ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 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 ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... a spade And pick and made A hole, and there the chap was laid. "He asked for bread," 'Twas neatly said: "He'll get ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... garden near Queen Street, in the south-eastern part of the town, was digging up an apple tree when he came across a fine bed of gravel. Continuing the digging, in order to find the thickness of this deposit, his spade struck against a hard substance, which proved to be a lead coffin. After this had been examined by others invited to inspect it, without any satisfactory result, the present writer was requested to conduct further investigation. The coffin was found to be 5-ft. 2-in. in length, containing the skeleton, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... on the hair, which was burnt up in a moment. In despair I threw myself on the ground, and instantly sank in it as far as my waist. I struggled to get out, but only fell in further; so I ran to the house, seized a spade, dug myself out, and took home the holy water. On the way I noticed that the ripe fields were full of reapers, and suddenly the air became so frightfully hot that the men dropped down in a faint. Then I called to them, ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... 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 day renews my care.' ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... different every day. Magda busied herself washing up the dinner 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 brass shone ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... 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
... 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 for ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... 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 so under the splenetic humor of some despotic sergeant serve your time ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... faith in Don Carlos, rallied round Cabrera, now saw themselves abandoned by their worshipped leader, and turned hopelessly enough homewards. Thus gradually the country relapsed into quiet, and empty garners compelled many to lay aside the bayonet and take up the spade who, having tasted the thrill of battle, had no longer any taste for the ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 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 ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... master. It was not in him, as Thomas Fuller calls it, "that inward sense of the soul, its most boundless and restless faculty; for while the understanding and the will are kept as it were in libera custodia to their objects of verum et bonum, it is free from all engagements—digs without spade, flies without wings, builds without charges, in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world by a kind of omnipotency, creating and annihilating things in an instant—restless, ever working, never wearied." We may say, indeed, that men of his temperament are not generally ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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 ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... this landing, and behind it were some twelve negroes digging with spades. The leader of them was an old man sixty years of age. He raised himself to an upright position as we landed, and put his hands up to his eyes. Then he dropped his spade and sprang forward. 'Bress de Lord,' he said, 'dere is de great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He's bin in my heart fo' long yeahs, an' he's cum at las' to free his chillun from deir bondage! Glory, Hallelujah!' And he fell upon his knees before the President and ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... 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 in drying ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... which opened the glass door leading out from the 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 morning when he ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... another twenty minutes to get into anything like clear country. At length, on the edge of a steep depression that widened and shallowed as it neared the valley, I got a fair look up the slope. So far I had met nothing to account for the lights—nothing at all, in fact, but the broken spade-handles, old boots, empty meat-cans, and other refuse of the miners' camps; but every now and then I would catch a glimpse of the hillside high overhead: and always those lights were flashing there, though in varying numbers. Now, ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... melancholy news, that we grow old. Autumnal Lyce carries in her face Memento mori to each public place. O how your beating breast a mistress warms, Who looks through spectacles to see your charms! While rival undertakers hover round, And with his spade the sexton marks the ground, Intent not on her own, but others' doom, She plans new conquests, and defrauds the tomb. In vain the cock has summon'd sprites away, She walks at noon, and blasts the bloom ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... the world was woxe Of man, of hors, of Schep, of Oxe, 10 And that men knewen the moneie. Tho wente pes out of the weie And werre cam on every side, Which alle love leide aside And of comun his propre made, So that in stede of schovele and spade The scharpe swerd was take on honde; And in this wise it cam to londe, Wherof men maden dyches depe And hyhe walles forto kepe 20 The gold which Avarice encloseth. Bot al to lytel him supposeth, Thogh he mihte al the world ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... exhaust them with our machines or divert them from their course. Here we have not to work at an artesian well, narrow and dark, where all the boring implements have to work in the dark. No; we can work under the open sky, with spade and pickaxe, and, by the help of blasting, our work ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... been excavated. In two of them roofing tile and bricks were found. An iron spade, probably used in preparing the clay for brickmaking, was found in one of the kilns. The oldest kiln unearthed is believed to have been in use as early as 1625. Many brickmakers emigrated ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... youthful planter, however; and, while the older sister was bustling about the hot kitchen, the curly, brown head was bobbing energetically back and forth in the front yard, where she and Cherry were digging a trench as fast as they could turn the sod with an old broken spade and a discarded fire-shovel; while Allee followed in their wake, dropping the seed into the freshly-turned earth ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... thinking over 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
... had as Governor were spectacular and exhilarating; but they did not fill all the hours of his working days. A tremendous amount of spade work was actually accomplished. For example, he brought about the reenactment of the Civil Service Law, which under his predecessor had been repealed, and put through a mass of labor legislation for the betterment of conditions under which the workers carried on their daily lives. This legislation ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... 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 would enter this industry, and so increase the supply ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... then Jack overtook them, eaught the horse by the bridle, and stopped him; and the blood which the cruel bit had brought when the spade cut deep, stained Jack's white clothes red ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... scurried away, but soon returned, one after another, each with a pickaxe on his shoulder and a spade in his hand. As soon as they were gathered, the captain led them in a straight line to another part of the hill. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... assisted by various turnpike acts, has widened the upper part and filled up the lower, yet they were all visible in the days of our fathers, and are traceable even in ours. Some of these, no doubt, were formed by the spade, to soften the fatigue of climbing the hill, but many were owing to the pure efforts of time, the horse, and the showers. As inland trade was small, prior to the fifteenth century, the use of the wagon, that great destroyer of the road, was but little ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... looked so determinedly grim that I could almost see her with a spade in her hand. I laughed aloud at the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... substitute into scrapes he will find it hard to get out of—and this makes the difference between a peasant and a prince. One is no better off than the other. Good heavens! what stupid things these court lords are doing which we do not dream of with our lanterns and staff in hand, or when at the spade. We think they lead the lives of angels, without sin or care. Pretty piece of business! Within a quarter of an hour I have heard of more rascally tricks than I ever played in my whole life. And—" but his reverie was ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... 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, near Aylesbury. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... his reverie by receiving a heavy blow on the shoulder and hearing a rough voice exclaim: "Now then, wake up; don't stand there dreaming all day. What are you thinking about? Here, catch hold of this spade and pickaxe; that's your share. Ha, ha! it's a good idea and an excellent joke to make you rascals carry the tools with which we are going to make you work when you reach the mines. That's it; now ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with "the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Robin Redbreast jumped upon a spade, Pussy-Cat jumped after him, and then he was afraid. Little Robin chirped and sung, and what did Pussy say? Pussy-Cat said Mew, mew, mew—and ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... although he felt that the blue eyes with a look of insistent admiration were steadfastly upon his face. The country through which the car was now passing was of a strange, convulsive character. It was torn alike by nature and by man. Storms and winds had battered at the clayey soil, spade and shovel had upturned it. It was honey-combed and upheaved. There were roughly shelving hills overhung with coarse dry grass like an old man's beard, there were ragged chasms and gulfs, and all in raw reds and ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... out into the gardens and found Mr. Quirk, spade in hand, busily instructing a raw recruit how ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... ourselves,—the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After all, it is likely that the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you can,—but the moon will still lead the tides, and the winds will form ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... interesting things in the Leeuwarden museum, which is opposite the Chancellerie, are the Hindeloopen rooms which I have described in the last chapter; but to the antiquary it offers great entertainment. Among ancient relics which the spade has revealed are some very early Frisian tobacco pipes. Among the pictures, for the most part very poor, is a dashing Carolus Duran and a ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... 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
... ancient paths and reached the orchard on the slope; and as soon as Madame Bavoil caught sight of them she grounded arms, so to speak, setting her foot in gardener fashion on the spade she had stuck ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... 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
... the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... 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
... if I might venture to offer an opinion with respect to the merit of the Chinese as agriculturists, I should not hesitate to say that, let as much ground be given to one of their peasants as he and his family can work with the spade, and he will turn that piece of ground to more advantage, and produce from it more sustenance for the use of man, than any European whatsoever would be able to do; but, let fifty or one hundred acres of the best land in China be given to a farmer, at a mean rent, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of my whist, though how I arrived at it I cannot explain. Henderson was my partner and he seemed to me to do the most odd things. For instance when I led a spade and he took the trick, instead of leading another spade he would begin some fresh suit, which made me wonder what in the world he was doing. And he did not seem to think his trumps half as valuable as I thought mine, but just led them whenever he felt inclined. When Nina, Foster and I played whist ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... beaten down or swept away. All seeds which had sunk naturally below the surface were laid bare. Hundreds of sprouting horse chestnuts, of sprouting acorns beneath the trees, thousands of grains of fallen wheat and barley, of beans, and other seeds of the farm were uncovered as if by a spade. ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... so as that the former may incline downwards, the roots of the one layer covering the tops or heads of the other, until the whole is completed. The pits are then to be closely covered up with the earth into a sort of ridge, and beaten quite smooth with the back of the spade, in order that the rain-water may be fully thrown off. Fine cauliflowers have been thus stored and kept for the occasional supply of the table until the middle of the following January. For storing and preserving different kinds of roots for common summer use, until ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... ourselves. It is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun through the zodiac. Practically, that is. And what we have to do is not, I think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade husbandry, and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this new synthetic life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for the mass of men and women, a thing developing and ascending. That's where your Hostels come in, Lady Harman; ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... miles of Kottiar, near the bay of Trincomalie, and again at a tank between Ellendetorre and Arnitivoe, on the bank of the Vergel river. The clay was firm, but moist, and as the men flung out lumps of it with a spade, it fell to pieces, disclosing fish from nine to twelve inches long, which were full grown and healthy, and jumped on the bank when exposed to the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... statues. Speak at once—and all! For whom? Our sovereign Lady by King Harry's will; The Queen of England—or the Kentish Squire? I know you loyal. Speak! in the name of God! The Queen of England or the rabble of Kent? The reeking dungfork master of the mace! Your havings wasted by the scythe and spade— Your rights and charters hobnail'd into slush— Your houses ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... indica. Macaranga tanarius. Euphorbia eremophilla (caustic bush). Dodonaea viscosa (hop-bush). Passiflora foetida (stinking passion fruit). Ipomea pes caprae (goat-footed convolvulus). Ionidium suffruticosum, Form A. Ionidium suffruticosum, Form B (spade-flower). Blainvillea latifolia. Gnaphalium luteo-album (flannel-leaf or cud-weed). Vernonia cinerea (erect, fluffy-seeded weed). Remirea maritima (spiky sand-binder). Cyperus decompositus (giant sedge). Erigeron linifolius (cobbler's pegs or rag-weed). ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... 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 all been ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... him push the setting-peg in at one side of his ready earth, stride across, and push it in the other side, pulling the line taut and clear upon the clods intervening. Then with a sharp cutting noise the bright spade came towards her, cutting a grip ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... enact the role of King Edward III saying goodbye to that girl of his, Fair Rosamund, at some sort of pageant in aid of the Distressed Daughters of the Clergy. It involved some rather warmish medieval dialogue, I recall, racy of the days when they called a spade a spade, and by the time the whistle blew, I'll bet no Daughter of the Clergy was half as distressed as I was. Not ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... was 'spading,' which meant slewing the boat close in, as the whale was about to sound, and cutting the tendons of its tremendous death-dealing tail by a slicing blow from the two-handed razor-edged 'spade.' Perhaps the most wonderful of all exceptional escapes was that of a boat which was towed by one whale right over the back of another. And perhaps the most exciting finish to any international race was the one in which the Yankee, who came up second, got 'first iron' by 'pitchpoling' ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... Warrible's daughters—dressing them in fancy rags, and filling the garden they played in with flowers from our conservatory, and giving the cottage French windows and a trellis-work veranda. He stands leaning on a spade, with silver buckles in his shoes, and the children are playing La Grace with the hoops, covered with pink ribands. I called it 'The Poor Man's Joy;' and Lord Moon has begged me to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... 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
... Labourer will perhaps not be very wrong if they fix on this sandy valley as the Surrey which Bettesworth knew best. Than the Memoirs, I think, no more discerning study of an old labourer's fight to keep on his own legs, out of the workhouse, earning his own money with his spade and hoe, belongs to ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sounds well. It is so with men and women too often; and with boys and girls, too, it 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 him on account of his speaking so unkindly, ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... an' your own contree! Strike for your native lan'! Kip workin' away wit' de spade an' hoe, Den jump w'en you hear de bugle blow, For danger 's aroun', above, below, But de bugle will tell if ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see. "Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a divine ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... nearer your heart? There is a wide difference 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 ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the opposite sides, working toward each other, making a tunnel about eight feet in diameter. The earth though originally soft soil had become so hard that it was necessary to use a pick axe to loosen it for the spade. A number of skeletons were found on the south side, but all I should say within ten feet from the original surface of the mound. As we penetrated the interior fewer remains were continually found. The earth gave many indications ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... bound the free And holyday-rejoicing spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity Of business, in the green fields, and the town— To plough, loom, anvil, spade—and oh! most sad, To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood? Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel— For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel— In that red realm from ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the only difficulty was in the disposal of the bodies. I thought of laying them on the curb-stone in different passages; but I was afraid the police might not see that they were waits, in which case I might be put to inconvenience. So I took a spade and dug two (or three) large holes in the quadrangle of the inn. Then I carried the bodies to the place in my rug, one at a time, shoved them in, and covered them up. A close observer might have noticed in that part of the ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... you are!" says Mr. Kelly. "Who could suppose you jealous of Bella Fitzgerald? 'Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,' and I shouldn't think the fair Bella would have much motion if put in comparison with you. She always calls 'a spade a spade, and Branson's Essence of Coffee,' etc. In fact, she ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... my secret," she declared and began to pull the grass by the roots. The next day she returned with spade and rake, and her mysterious package. It was to be a buried treasure, for here she opened her bundle and planted in various holes the kernels of yellow Indian corn which Samuel ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... was taken, and they passed through the old quarry and down the track to the sheds. There they found a pick and spade. With those in their possession, they hastened to the black glade in which lay ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... then. They had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of discovering What was really occurring in the world and How it ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... come back to Florence.' As I read in the 'Life of San Gualberto,' laid on the table for the edification of strangers, the brothers attain to sanctification, among other means, by cleaning out pigsties with their bare hands, without spade or shovel; but that is uncleanliness enough—they wouldn't touch the little finger of a woman. Angry I was, I do assure you. I should have liked to stay there, in spite of the bread. We should have been only a little thinner at the end. And the scenery—oh, how magnificent! ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... last item in one year (1846), although most lighter crimes were disposed of in a summary way, rose to L6,000. The execution of public works by the crown had been the sole vindication of these charges. From this arrangement Lord Stanley departed, and in peremptory terms prohibited a spade to be moved but on payment from the colonial treasury. Thus at a season of commercial stagnation the benefit of convict labor was withdrawn, while the charges for police and gaols rose to one-third of the entire ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... 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 the women folk, but ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Mrs. Wilson who were in the shrubbery below. Every now and then a glint of light revealed their faces unmistakably. They were talking together in low tones, unfortunately too low for their conversation to be overheard. Scott held a spade in his hand, and was stooping to watch Mrs. Wilson, who, kneeling on the grass, was fumbling ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... are shovels and then, there are shovels. Most gardeners know the difference between a spade and a shovel. They would not try to pick up and toss material with a spade designed only to work straight down and loosen soil. However, did you know that there are design differences in the shape of blade and angle of ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... sheets steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle went out, and the brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door, saw the two dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that long (about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a spade. Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I suppose my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at this stage of it, that the power of listening stagnated within me for some quarter ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... "Call a spade a spade, Captain. You mean he got red-mad and raked them all, fore and aft. They deserved it too—a pack of incapables. But what would you expect of a committee of men? That building committee held twenty-seven ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... genius into office! make a genius a bishop! or a lord chancellor!—the world would be turned topsy-turvy! You see that you are quite astonished that a genius can be even a county magistrate, and know the difference between a spade and a poker! In fact, a genius is supposed to be the most ignorant, impracticable, good-for-nothing, do-nothing sort of thing that ever walked upon two legs. Well, when I began life I took excellent care that nobody should take me for a genius; ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... dig ever so much better than you. Look here. I've got a spade of my own, and I'll show you how to dig ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the criminal's reward. He is taken out beyond the lines to a spot where the sun shines in all its unprotected fierceness. He is led to an ant-hill full of busy, wicked, little crawlers; the top of the ant-hill is cut off with a spade, leaving a honeycombed surface for the sleepy one to stand upon (not much fear of him sleeping whilst he is there). He is ordered to mount the hill and stand with feet close together. His rifle is placed in his hands, the butt resting between his toes, the muzzle clasped ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... went on shore to get a few plants but, no principal chief being among the people, he was insulted, and a spade taken from him. A boat's grapnel was likewise stolen from the watering party. Tepa recovered the spade for us, but the crowd of natives was become so great, by the number of canoes that had arrived from different islands, that it was impossible to do anything ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... of his long, eventful life did Davis evince such clearness of vision and quick decision, under trying conditions. Lee had failed in Western Virginia and McClellan had out-generaled him, the yellow journals had declared. They called Lee "Old Spade." So intense was the opposition to Lee that Davis had sent him to erect the coast defenses of South Carolina. The Governor of the State protested against the appointment of so incompetent a man to this important work. Davis sent the Governor an ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... as the best war soldiers of the lot. The Russians were intensely like the preconceived idea one is inclined to form of Russians. Solid, deep-chested, heavy and hardy, they gave one the idea of big, heavy farm labourers with a rifle instead of a spade upon their shoulders. They never moved with anything like the quickness which characterised the Japanese, yet they plodded on with a dour stubbornness which gave the impression that if their movements were not quick, they represented a weighty momentum difficult ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... render it necessary to be used not more than once in four days or a week. The food should be stirred for two hours, then transferred to flat coolers, until sufficiently gelatinous to be cut with a kind of spade. By the admixture of some portion of soups it may be brought to any thickness requisite. The flesh to be mixed with it should be cut very small, that the greedy hounds may not be able to obtain more than their share. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... Redmayne tangle, Mark. If you had, the clue to this labyrinth might be in your hands to-day. The more I hear and the more I think, the more firmly am I convinced that the truth we are out to find can only be discovered by a deal of hard digging in past times. There is a lot of spade work demanded and you, or I, may have to return to England to do it—unless we can get the information without the labour. But I've no reason to count on any ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... be almost part of his flesh. But his real favorite was an oak tree, nearly twenty years of age and already sturdy, which stood in the centre of the lawn, where he had planted it with Marianne, who had held the slender sapling in position while he plied his spade on the day when they had founded their domain of Chantebled. And near this oak, which thus belonged to their robust family, there was a basin of living water, fed by the captured springs of the plateau—water whose crystalline song made the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... in this town? Well, they founded the University, named the streets, planted the elms and built the Capitol. Since then they've been snowed under by the Germans and the Norwegians, a lot of beer drinkers and fish eaters. Nobody calls a spade a spade, these days. They rant and spout socialism. The old blood's gone. The old, stern, puritanical crowd can't ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... strength, varying from merely ten or a dozen men to three or four thousand, and indeed each band varied continually. The men, when not required, would scatter to their homes, cultivate their little patches of ground, and throw down the spade and take up the rifle again when they heard of a convoy to cut off, or an invading column to beat back. The bands, too, would vary in proportion to the renown of their chiefs. An energetic man, who, at the head of a handful, had performed some ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... could do it, child, if you want a bit o' garden: these long evenings, I could work at taking in a little bit o' the waste, just enough for a root or two o' flowers for you; and again, i' the morning, I could have a turn wi' the spade before I sat down to the loom. Why didn't you tell me before as you wanted a ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... real excitement of the day was when the workmen had departed, and Mr. Ranny came out with his machine laden with priceless treasures from the ten-cent store, or later when Quin Graham dashed up the lane with anything from a garden-spade to a bird-house in his hands, and with an enthusiasm and energy in his soul that communicated themselves to all concerned. Then everybody would talk at once, and everybody insist upon showing everybody else what had been done since morning, and there ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... applied for harrow-work, and the surgeon seconded his application. This change of occupation, which was destined in some respects to be beneficial, proved at the outset most unfortunate. The outdoor toil was mostly spade and barrow labor on the moor, on which the convicts worked in gangs—each gang under supervision of two warders, armed with sword and musket. The first face that Richard's eyes lit on, when he found himself in the open, with the free air of heaven blowing on him, and already, as it seemed, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... my return journey. I was walking back along the shore, when I saw the fat kid meditatively smacking a jelly-fish with a spade. The girl wasn't with him. In fact, there didn't seem to be any one in sight. I was just going to pass on when I got the brain-wave. I thought the whole thing out in a flash, don't you know. From what I had seen of the two, the girl was evidently fond of this kid, and, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 in drying ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... their own fruit to buy a pair of shoes or gloves, a 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
... thing!" Altamont raged. "'Wielding a gold-plated spade handled with oak from an original rafter of the Congressional Library, at three-fifteen one afternoon last week—' One afternoon last week!" He cursed luridly. "Why couldn't that blasted magazine say what afternoon? I've gone over a lot of twentieth century copies ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... 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 abroad ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... however, he 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 the earth, supplying all the flint stones thereafter to be found, and one ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... but is the recognition of evil in life. It is not very pleasant, nor is it reassuring, but it is part of the artist, rooted deep in his Spanish soul along with the harsh irony and a cruel spirit of mockery. He refuses to follow the ideals of other men, and he paints a spade a spade; at least the orchestration, if brutal, is not lascivious. A cold, impartial eye observes and registers the corruption of cities small and great and the infinitely worse immoralities of the open country. Sometimes Zuloaga's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... knapsacks were on, Ready took the axe and gun, and asked William if he thought he could carry a small spade on his shoulder, which they had brought on shore along with the shovels. William replied that he could; and the dogs, who appeared to know they were going, were all ready standing by them. Then, just as the sun rose, they turned into the cocoa-nut grove, and were soon out ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... loudly and with much gesticulation, apostrophising himself, scolding himself, uttering little cries of triumph or self-encouragement. He did not allow Lecoq to have a moment's rest. He wanted this or that or the other thing. He demanded paper and a pencil. Then he wanted a spade; and finally he cried out for plaster of Paris, some water and a ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... with political agitators, and with miserable traitors to the land of their birth and breeding, the poor emigrant starts from the interior, where his ideas have never expanded beyond the weaver's loom or factory labour, the plough or the spade, the hod, the plane, or the trowel, and hastens with his wife and children ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... a wider, better feeding area for growing roots, permits greater water storage, forwards growth of trees and brings them into bearing earlier than trees set in spade-dug holes. Write for FREE BOOKLET about how to blast tree holes with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... the old man, carrying a basket in one hand and a spade in the other, was trudging steadily by. His blue overalls and jumper were threadbare under the soft brown they had achieved through his strenuous kneeling and the general intimacy of weeds and sod. He had a curious neutrality of expression—perhaps an ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... buried word By the delving spade is found, Sleeping in the quiet ground. Now the call of life is heard: Rise again, and like a bird, Fly abroad on wings of gladness Through the darkness and the sadness, Of the toiling age, and sing Sweeter than the voice of Spring, Till the hearts of men are stirred ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... said. I am a plain-spoken man, and to me a spade is a spade and not an instrument for upturning ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... I will make an honest woman of you, when all is done. Nay, none of your airs; no tricks upon travellers! I have you here as safe AS a horse in a pound; there is not a house nor a shed within a mile of us; and, if I miss the opportunity, call me spade. Faith, you are a delicate morsel, and there is no ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... willow crown'd, Sheathed in their silken bowers:— E'en so the promise of her life appears Through those white childhood-years; —Whether in seaside happiness, and air Rosing the fair cheek,—sand, and spade, and shell,— Or race with sister-feet, that flash'd and fell Printing the beach, while the gay comrade-wind Play'd in the soft light hair:— Or if with sunbeam-smile and kind Small hand at cottage-door Her simple alms she tender'd to the poor: Love's healthy happy heart in all her steps was seen, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... mean the 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 day renews my ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Hamlet and Horatio. Clowne A picke-axe and a spade, A spade for and a winding sheete, Most fit it is, for t'will be made, he throwes vp a shouel. For such a ghest most meete. Ham. Hath this fellow any feeling of himselfe, That is thus merry in making of a graue? See how the slaue joles their heads against the earth. Hor. My lord, Custome ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare
... from the mounds under which they were buried to the light of day and the heart of a great modern city. I never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and the tablets in which the history of Nebuchadnezzar was recorded spread before me. The Empire of the Spade in the world of history was founded at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently at work at the present day. I feel very grateful that many of its revelations have been made since I have ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... those foreign countries with which such a minister would have to deal, that his name would be, and has been, a sort of pantomime proverb like Panama or the South Sea Bubble. Foreigners were not threatened with fine and imprisonment for calling a spade a spade and a speculation a speculation; foreigners were not punished with a perfectly lawless law of libel for saying about public men what those very men had afterwards to admit in public. Foreigners were lookers-on who were really allowed to see most of the game, when ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... again directly." He then went down into the cutting to speak to some of his men, whilst I walked about the edge of the bank. From a distant part of the moor, the bray of a jackass came faint upon the sleepy wind. "Yer tho', Jone," said one of the men, resting upon his spade; "another cally-weighver gone!" " Ay," replied Jone, "th' owd lad's deawn't his cut. He'll want no more tickets, yon mon!" The country folk of Lancashire say that a weaver dies every time a jackass brays. ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... and Bulgarian Generals in the war of 1913, 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 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... mare was taking me to the station one heavy, cloud-smeared day, I passed a dull-looking villa that the groom, or instinct, told me was Judkin's home. From beyond a hedge of ragged elder-bushes could be heard the thud, thud of a spade, with an occasional clink and pause, as if some one had picked out a stone and thrown it to a distance, and I knew that HE was doing nameless things to the roots of a pear tree. Near by him, I felt sure, would be lying a large and late vegetable marrow, and its largeness and lateness ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... was never less clouded. In spite of two glasses of ginger beer, my hand is like a spade—I mean a rock. Insert a fly in your eye, and ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... of seed in each bed; but the children 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 made in ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the island and needed no urging to begin work on the project. With true outing instinct they had come prepared for just such an emergency as this. They had brought with them a tent large enough for four and a complete set of camp tools, including spade, shovel, axe, pickaxe, hatchet, ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... 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
... lined up in a row about ten feet from the wall. Then by a refinement of cruelty, spades were brought forward, and the condemned men were bidden to dig their own graves. The guards passed along the line, placing a spade in the hand of each and telling them roughly what they were to do. They came to Tom and saw that his hands were bound. There was hesitation and a moment's colloquy between two of the guards, and then one of them drew his knife ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... his army from the vicinity of the city, and leaving behind him only certain corps of observation, Cyrus marched away up the course of the Euphrates for a certain distance, and there proceeded to make a vigorous use of the spade. His soldiers could now appreciate the value of the experience which they had gained by dispersing the Gyndes, and perceive that the summer and autumn of the preceding year had not been wasted. They ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... 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! Take ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... this way, and nothing had happened to disturb or change their mode of life, when, one summer's night in June, they were in their little garden, resting from the labours of the day. The widow's work was yet upon her knee, and strewn upon the ground about her; and Barnaby stood leaning on his spade, gazing at the brightness in the west, and singing softly ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... some wicked wag should pass his jest, 'Tis sheer ill-nature—don't the world know best? Genius must guide when wits admire the rhyme, And CAPEL LOFFT [122] declares 'tis quite sublime. Hear, then, ye happy sons of needless trade! Swains! quit the plough, resign the useless spade! Lo! BURNS and BLOOMFIELD, nay, a greater far, GIFFORD was born beneath an adverse star, Forsook the labours of a servile state, Stemmed the rude storm, and triumphed over Fate: 780 Then why no more? if Phoebus smiled on you, BLOOMFIELD! why not on brother Nathan too? [123] ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... grass land about to be brought into cultivation; and tholluff breagh, or red land, land which has been recently turned. To redden land is still used to express either to plough land, or, more generally, to turn land with the spade. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... grounds, the splendor and richness of the museums and conservatories with which the people will finally crown their own self-respect and decorate their own majesty. But we did not expect to see this sure prophecy turning itself into history in our day. We thought the people were too busy with the spade and the quill to care for any other sceptres at present. But it is now plain that they have been dreaming princely dreams and thinking royal thoughts all the while, and are now ready to put them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... hard bread on other people's floors. And why? Because the Vulture's profligate son couldn't succeed in ruinin' one of my daughters; and because her brother 'Tom tould him that if ever he catched him comin' about the place again, or annoyin' his sisther, he'd split him with a spade. Afther that, they were both very friendly—father and son—and when I brought my half-year's rent—'never mind now,' said they, 'bring it home, Andy; maybe you may want it for something else that 'ud be useful to ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... 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 spoke volumes ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... had to go down to the marsh and dig a ditch, to drain a piece of the land. Johannes got a spade and went with him. He worked with such a will that Lars Peter had some difficulty in keeping up with him. "'Tis easy to see you're young," said he, "the way you ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the heart of the earth has thus come rushing up among her children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses, then straightway into it rush her children to see what they can find there. With pickaxe and spade and crowbar, with boring chisel and blasting powder, they force their way back: is it to search for what toys they may have left in their long-forgotten nurseries? Hence the mountains that lift their ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... we've finished tea, I think, grandfather,' I answered. 'I wonder what sort of a spade ...
— Saved at Sea - A Lighthouse Story • Mrs. O.F. Walton
... was dug on a slant, for greater ease in removing the material. Here the two beavers toiled side by side, working independently. With their teeth they cut the tough sod as cleanly as a digger's spade could do it. With their fore paws they scraped up the soil—which was soft and easily worked—into sticky lumps, which they could hug under their chins and carry up the slope to be dumped upon the grass at the side. Every minute one or the other would stop, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... 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 has no chance to get the nourishment ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... noticed. In fact, his father and he, now without a shilling, took refuge in a distant cabin, where, by the sweat of his parent's brow, as a labourer in the fields, the ill-fated hero of this story was scantily fed and clothed, until maturer years enabled him to relieve the old man's hand of the spade and sickle, and in turn labour for their ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... division line between them. Mulberries were occupying the ground before the freshly cut trenches we saw were dug, and all the surface between the rows had been evenly overlaid with the fresh earth removed with the spade, the soil lying in blocks essentially unbroken. In Fig. 43 may be seen the mulberry crop on a similarly treated surface, between Canton and Samshui, with the earth removed from the trenches laid evenly over the entire surface between and around the plants, as it came ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... 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 ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... them both away, and was never so 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, hoe, and wheelbarrow. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... I resumed my country occupations, as far as my strength would permit, and conceived a real grief at not being able to manage our garden without help; for I could not take five or six strokes with the spade without being out of breath and overcome with perspiration; when I stooped the beating redoubled, and the blood flew with such violence to my head, that I was instantly obliged to stand upright. Being therefore confined to less fatiguing employments, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... French, valets or varlets) are four valiant captains—Ogier and Lancelot, the companions of Charlemagne, Hector de Gallard, and Lahire, the generals of Charles VII. The remainder of the pack equally presents a sort of martial allegory; the heart is bravery; the spade (espad, 'sword') and the diamond (carreau, that is, a square or shield) are the arms of war; the club (in French trefle, 'trefoil') is the emblem of provisions; and the ace (in French as, from the Latin aes, 'coin') is the emblem of money—the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... harvest is over, and the streams and torrents have greatly subsided, the Mansa, or chief man of the town, appoints a day to begin sanoo koo, "gold washing;" and the women are sure to have themselves in readiness by the time appointed. A hoe, or spade, for digging up the sand, two or three calabashes for washing it in, and a few quills for containing the gold dust, are all the implements necessary for the purpose. On the morning of their departure, a bullock is killed for the first day's entertainment, and a number of prayers ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... found 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
... auld 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 ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... John Moylan, James Sheridan, and Constable Cox were shot dead; when James Miller, Michael Ball, Peter Greany, and Bridget McCullagh were murdered—the last a poor widow, who was beaten to death with a spade; when Ryan Foley was brutally murdered; when Michael Baylan was murdered; when Viscount Mountmorres was murdered, and the dead body left on the road, the neighbouring farmers being afraid to give the poor corpse the shelter of a barn; when a car-driver ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... us every where," said an old man, with a spade in his hand, and dressed like a lay-brother, of whose presence, in the vehemence of his exclamation, the Abbot had not been aware—"Gaze not on me with such wonder!—I am he who was the Abbot Boniface at Kennaquhair, who was the gardener Blinkhoolie at Lochleven, hunted ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... existences, a day and a night one—a day 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 making a melee with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the work was done for a long time to come; every family had its great portraits, and would want him no more yet awhile; and Conrad saw, that if he could not turn his hand to something else, and in place of pencils and brushes, work with last, spade, needle, or quill, make shoes, coats, till the ground, or cast up accounts, he should shortly be hardly put to it to keep himself going. He had made and saved a pretty tolerable little purse during his short season of patronage, and determined to turn that to account ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... river lurking 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, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... which the Spaniards had to pass could be laid under water. Believing it yet possible to enlist the ocean in his defence, Louis, having partially reduced his soldiers to obedience, ordered a strong detachment upon this important service. Seizing a spade, he commenced the work himself, and then returned to set his army in battle array. Two or three tide gates had been opened, two or three bridges had been demolished, when Alva, riding in advance of his army, appeared within a mile or two of Jemmingen. It was then eight o'clock in the morning. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... gouges, of sweeps varying from one almost flat (No. 1) to a distinct hollow in No. 3. These tools are made in two forms, straight-sided and "spade"-shaped; an illustration of the spade form is given on the second page of tools. In purchasing his set of tools the student should order Nos. 1, 2, 3, 10, 11 in this form. They will be found to have many advantages, as they conceal less of the wood behind ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... shed she secured an ax and a spade, as well as a basket. In spite of her condition of mind she knew exactly what she wanted to do—and she did it. Had she thought out her intention for months she could have gone about the matter no more directly and practically. Yet, had ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... who wear left in the cannoes and Launch which was 2 in the cannoes, and 3 in the launch) marched for the towne of Quoquembo. 35 of our party as they wear Marching mett about 150 Spaniards, most on horseback; thay had not all gunns, some launces, other Spade's; more of our Party comeing upp, seeing the foloorne so much Ingaged, thay wounded one or 2 of their horses, with some of the Spaniards, which made them to retreat to a greate hill, about 5 mile from the towne. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... men had been ploughmen, others shepherds, but every one of them was an artisan more or less, and it is just such men that do well—men who know a good deal about country life, and can deftly use the spade, the hoe, the rake, the fork, as well as the hammer, the axe, the saw, and the plane. Thanks to the way dear father had brought us up, my brothers and I were handy with all sorts of tools, and we were rather proud than ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... not used to that; I cannot stoop to try it— To take the spade in hand, and ply it. The narrow being suits ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... 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
... Ratsey said; 'I have dug too often in this graveyard for any to wonder if they see me with a spade.' ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... 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 ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... 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' the breech mechanism ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... mantle of white. It was like an Eastern city now under an Eastern moonlight, and he was listening to the shouts and laughter of people snowballing in the streets when he heard a laboured step on the stair behind him. It was Brother Paul coming up with a spade to shovel away the snow. His features were pinched and contracted, and his young face was ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... we think 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, about 200 acres in ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... boyish garb for boyish task, Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask The tale ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... dig 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 ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... mode of speech which he had used in his early years. There was, consequently, a great daub painted up on sundry walls, on which a navvy, with a pimply, bloated face, was to be seen standing on a railway bank, leaning on a spade holding a bottle in one hand, while he invited a comrade to drink. "Come, Jack, shall us have a drop of some'at short?" were the words coming out of the navvy's mouth; and under this ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... by, stirred to sudden fury by this disdain, raised the spade with which he had been working, and struck Remus a blow that laid him dead upon the ground. Then, fearing vengeance for his hasty act, he rushed away with such speed that his name has since been a synonyme for ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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 a ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 ...
— The art of promoting the growth of the cucumber and melon • Thomas Watkins
... shall read these lines, who knows in his conscience that his churchyard-walks are grown up with weeds, and the graves covered with nettles, upon sight hereof let him summon his man-servant, or get a labourer if he have no man-servant. Let him provide a reaping-hook and a large new spade. These implements will suffice in the meantime. Proceed to the churchyard: do not get disheartened at its neglected look, and turn away. Begin at the entrance-gate. Let all the nettles and long grass for six feet on. either side of the path be carefully cut down ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... might have been undertaken but, unfortunately, I had little leisure at the time, and was without the assistance of any educated person who might have helped me in the work. As, however, the "spade-work" in this particular field of experiment seems now to have been accomplished, many additional and interesting details might result—given ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... swear That none but Cuckolds in the Nation were; 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
... 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
... not now make a well of your thimble, nor a spade of your scissors," answered her brother; "she has become tiresome; she no longer frisks around me when I return home; she has no longer any droll fancies which once amused me so much; she is now a genuine doll; I really believe that this minikin ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... oriflamme. Nor the red tear nor the reflected tower Abides; but yet these eloquent grooves remain, Worn in the sandstone parapet hour by hour By labouring bargemen where they shifted ropes. E'en so shall man turn back from violent hopes To Adam's cheer, and toil with spade again. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... were last heard of in the tenth century, when they were burnt at Rome and Byzantium. We shall 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 ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... your home an' your own contree! Strike for your native lan'! Kip workin' away wit' de spade an' hoe, Den jump w'en you hear de bugle blow, For danger 's aroun', above, below, But de bugle will tell if it ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... producing scions who will uphold for them future generations of selfishness and arrogance. One sees the same sort of procreative tendency in certain of our hardiest and coarsest weeds. Sometimes a gardener comes along, with hoe, spade, and a strong uprooting animus. In human life that kind of gardener goes by the ugly name of Revolution. But we are dealing with neither parables nor allegories. Those are for the modish clergymen of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... enough to see that you had better act on my assurance for a time, and test it? In my opinion, so far from agreeing with you that you should be free to turn yourself into a colonist and work in your shirt-sleeves with spade and hatchet—in my opinion you have no right whatever to expatriate yourself until you have honestly endeavored to turn to account the education you have received here. I say nothing of the grief to your mother ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was horrible! The storm drove the snow and rain into the face of the solitary man and whipped the black hair around his temples; but he paid no attention to this—he dug into the hard, rocky soil with pickaxe and spade. ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... affection due to his friendly nature, and to the kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full "beard as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in Homeric curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch tweeds which had not yet displaced the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 the sand, undermining ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... sometimes given most excellent results, is to cut back spring set plants which have ripened some fruit but which are not completely exhausted, to mere stubs, and spade up the ground about them so as to cut most of the roots, water thoroughly and cover the ground with a mulch of straw. Most of the plants so treated will start a new and vigorous growth and give ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... as to snakes and snake bites may not be out of place here. To distinguish the only venomous snake found in the British Isles is an easy matter, if you have the opportunity of examination. In the first place, the viper appears to have a more spade-like and flatter head than the common snake, and has a black cross from near the neck running up to the centre of the head, where it terminates in a black, oval-shaped spot. But the greatest distinction, perhaps, is that a decided pattern runs down the centre ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... data and facts for the elucidation of past times might be expected—viz. researches beneath the surface of the earth, and researches among older works and manuscripts. By the former he meant the careful and systematised examinations in which the spade and pickaxe are so important, and have done such service in late years, and from which Sir James expected much more; and by the latter the exploring and turning to account the many stores of written records of early times ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... bravado, but of daring skill. Perhaps the most wonderful regular feat of all was 'spading,' which meant slewing the boat close in, as the whale was about to sound, and cutting the tendons of its tremendous death-dealing tail by a slicing blow from the two-handed razor-edged 'spade.' Perhaps the most wonderful of all exceptional escapes was that of a boat which was towed by one whale right over the back of another. And perhaps the most exciting finish to any international race was the one in which the Yankee, who came up second, got 'first iron' by 'pitchpoling' ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... world, the same enlivening sounds also awoke the spirit of childhood. Early associations had merely lain dormant for a season, but those connected with the bright musket and sabre were stronger than those of the spade and figure-maker's mould. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... dress and wondering what a sailor could want with post-chaises at that hour, they demurred, but the money quickly persuaded them. They told me also that a gentleman had changed horses there about half an hour before and gone towards the Lizard, after borrowing a pickaxe and spade. Half an hour: should I ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and goot Mr. Oldenbuck, and young Mr. Lofel, who is a very goot young gentleman also, I will show you dat it is possible, a vary possible, to discover de spring, of water, and de little fountain hidden in de ground, without any mattock, or spade, or dig ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... you ever see the devil, With his little spade and shovel, Digging praties in the garden With his ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... it seemed impossible to sit still long enough to reach the city, you are twisting about and shuffling your feet, looking far oftener at the river woods than at your letters, and as for myself, it seems as if I must go over yonder and seize Bertel's spade and show him how to dig those seed beds more rapidly, so that I can begin to plant and kneel down and get close to the ground. Yesterday when the boys came in with very earthy faces, and I questioned them, I found that they ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... thou deemed by housewife fat A comely, careful, mousing cat, Whose dish is, for the public good, Replenished oft with savory food, Nor, when thy span of life is past, Be thou to pond or dung-hill cast, But, gently borne on goodman's spade, Beneath the decent sod be laid; And children show with glistening eyes The place where poor old ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... her, as if to embrace her, when we both shrieked aloud, and turned to fly; and Matthew Standfast, coming suddenly between us with a spade uplifted in his hand, bade the miserable man keep his distance, and asked what he wanted. ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... manifold, and we must not allow the difference to breed a spirit of suspicion. Because my brother's gift is not mine I must not suspect his calling. To one man is given a trumpet, to another a lamp, and to another a spade. And they are all ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... dew on her sandal shoes and the lap of her morning gown appropriately heaped with flowers—with tulips, scarlet, yellow, and striped. And confronting her, with his back towards me and a remembered patch between the armholes of his stable-waistcoat, Robie the gardener rested both hands on his spade and expostulated. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. "Go on! Tell me what you know; and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... men 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] ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shimmering ghosts that flit around, While spade and mattock death-fields glean, Open with words from the unseen The mysteries ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... 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 best of ...
— 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
... saw their own fathers busy planting acorns. Each lord had on the velvet cloak in which he left his castle, but it was worn to rags with rough work in the forest. Their hair and beards had grown long; their hands were soiled with earth; each had an old wooden spade, and on all ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... plow the field nor sow, Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart, Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe, To keep ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... 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 ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... Alexander Monro (afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Dumbarton's regiment) and I were walking in a place called Ullapool, in Loch Broom, on a little plain at the foot of a rugged hill. There was a servant walking with a spade in the walk before us; his back was to us, and his face to the hill. Before we came to him he let the spade fall, and looked toward the hill. He took notice of us as we passed near by him, which made me look ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... much tact as a rhinoceros, and possesses the aesthetic perceptions of a coal shoveler. I'm just waiting for these simple truths to dawn upon the intellects of our august Board. I understand that cadaverous-looking man with the wall eyes and the spade-shaped, beard, who walks about as though he cherished a grudge against the human race, and rejoices in the euphonious name of Darius Dutton, is responsible for this crime against Overton. He recommended her appointment to the Board. It seems that he is Miss ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... must have wondered at some time why the clubs and spades on cards are so called. The latter figure, it is true, bears some resemblance to a spade, but no giant of fiction is depicted with a club with a triple head. The explanation is that we have adopted the French pattern, carreau (see p. 161), diamond, c[oe]ur, heart, pique, pike, spear-head, trefle, trefoil, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... who did ever the Earths Centre pierce, And felt or sand or gravell with his spade At such a depth? what Histories rehearse That ever wight did dare for to invade Her bowels but one mile in dampish shade? Yet I'll be bold to say that few or none But deem this globe even to the bottome made Of solid earth, and that ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... narrow spade of specially stout make; the blade is hollow and resembles an exaggerated gouge, and the advantage is that in digging out a rabbit the tool is very apt to catch under a root, when an ordinary spade may bend and become useless. The 'navigator' will stand anything, and being ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... 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 it could be dipped out for ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... gay-hearted Irishman, went shoulder to shoulder in defence of their adopted country. The man of money, the man of law, the merchant, the artist, and the artisan swelled the lines hastening to the scene of action, armed either with musket, pick, or spade. Added to these was seen Dickson's long and dusky brigade of colored men, cheerfully wending their way to labor on the fortifications, evidently holding it their especial right to put whatever impediments ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • 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 heaven. With ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... gardens surrounding the palace at Versailles were gay with bloom and heavy with scents as rare as was the morning. King Louis Sixteenth of France looked from a window out over the terraces in their vari-coloured beauty, and saw among the blossoms, a little figure busy with spade and rake, and although the King's heart was heavy with sorrow because of the death of his elder son, the Dauphin, as the eldest son of the King of France, and heir to the throne, was always called, yet he was filled too with pride as he looked out at the little ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... before he reached the fringe of forest. A few paces farther and he found the spring and outcrop. To avert his partners' suspicions he had not brought his own implements, but had borrowed a pan, spade, and pick from a neighbor's claim before setting out. The spot was apparently in the same condition as when he left it, and with a beating heart he at once set to work, an easy task with his new implements. He nervously watched the water overflow ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... fire the chimney must be cleared. Among the furniture in the arms-room were a number of spade-headed spears; the spade as wide as the length of a man's thumb, and about a foot long, mounted on light thin wood. Armed with one of these weapons, the like of which is to be met with among certain ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... counted for much with Montcalm. De Levis, held 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 ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ourselves to dig a subterranean chamber for that purpose among the woods of the Hill, accessible, like the mysterious vaults of our story-books, by a trap-door. The proposal was favourably received; and, selecting a solitary spot among the trees as a proper site, and procuring spade and mattock, we ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... 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 best of ...
— 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
... besieged garrison, a mark for wandering predatory bands composed of budmashes outlaws, escaped convicts, deserters, and huge mobs drawn from that enormous body of men who live on the margin of respectability, peaceful cultivator today, bloodthirsty dacoit to-morrow, wielders of the spade and mattock or of the lathi and tulwar[63] according to season, circumstance, and the power of the Government; recruits for a mighty army, given the leader and the opportunity—the hour ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... night he died: we knew it as soon as we were up in the morning. Then, after breakfast, during which we had been very solemn and quiet, our schoolmaster said: "We must bury him today—at twelve o'clock, when I am free, will be the best time; the boys can come with me, and old John can bring his spade." This announcement greatly excited us, for we had never seen a dog buried, and had never even heard of such a thing having ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Scarecrow stood perfectly still beside the bean pole—thinking. Then he got a spade from the shed and began clearing away the cornstalks and dried leaves from around the base of the pole. It was slow work, for his fingers were clumsy, but he persevered. Then a ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... And on the bottom step of the Green Stairs, his arm around Captain Kidd, the boy sat watching them, looking from one to the other as long as they were in sight. The heart of him was pounding deliciously to the music of such phrases as, "Fathoms deep, lonely beach, spade and pickaxe, skull and crossbones, bags of golden doubloons and chests of ducats ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... number,—one for meal and the smaller one for flesh. The large boiler should render it necessary to be used not more than once in four days or a week. The food should be stirred for two hours, then transferred to flat coolers, until sufficiently gelatinous to be cut with a kind of spade. By the admixture of some portion of soups it may be brought to any thickness requisite. The flesh to be mixed with it should be cut very small, that the greedy hounds may not be able to obtain more than their share. Four bushels and a half of genuine ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... nor fear of death. The mad bull with the spade stands near by. Look into this strange cup of figures and graves. Some recent death and gloom has somehow filled your mind with renewed horror. You have also felt that you are about to die. Not a comfortable thought, madam, to be ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... of maintaining a layer of loose soil 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 ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... pigeons fly across the valley and all Sleepy Hollow was wide awake in an instant. The pigeon season had arrived. Every gun and net was forthwith in requisition. The flail was thrown down on the barn floor; the spade rusted in the garden; the plough stood idle in the furrow; every one was to the hillside and stubble-field at daybreak to shoot or entrap the pigeons in their ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... to Brussels, both in French and Austrian Flanders, is admirable. No fallows are any where to be seen, and in their place, green crops, of which beans, peas, carrots, &c. form the principal part. These green crops are kept very clean, and all worked by the spade or hoe, which furnishes employment to the immense population which is diffused over the country. Crops of rye, which, when we passed them in the middle of June, were in full ear, are every where very common; indeed, rye bread seems to be the staple food of the peasantry. ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... and swiftest of the fowls of air. Like her he sprang, and dreadful on his chest Clang'd his bright armor. Then, with course oblique He fled his fierce pursuer, but the flood, 305 Fly where he might, came thundering in his rear. As when the peasant with his spade a rill Conducts from some pure fountain through his grove Or garden, clearing the obstructed course, The pebbles, as it runs, all ring beneath, 310 And, as the slope still deepens, swifter still It runs, and, murmuring, outstrips ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... up Harold made a severe strategical error. Bill had never hesitated, by the light of an ancient idiom, to call a spade a spade. Also he always had good reasons before he took back his words. "I said," he repeated clearly, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... smell hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry he found sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... scrub with native huts within 150 to 200 yards of them. On further examination we found the dung of camels and horse or horses, evidently tied up a long time ago. Between that and the grave we found another grave, evidently dug with a spade or shovel, and a lot of human hair of two colours, that had become decomposed, on the skin of the skull, and fallen off in flakes—some of which I have also taken. I fancy they must all have been murdered ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... baby in the cradle, took off his coat, grasped a spade in his shaking hand, and hobbled across the patch of open ground to a spot as far distant as possible both from the cottage and from the borders of the wood; the maddened wind was wailing itself away in the distance, and happily for a few minutes there was a lull in the air. ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... the defences made by Lyttelton, and tightened their hold upon the hill. One futile night attack caused them for an instant to change the spade for the rifle. When in the morning it was found that the Boers had, as they naturally would, brought up their outlying guns, the tired soldiers did not regret their labours of the night. It was again demonstrated how ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... canoe there were other objects of interest. There were blankets and buffalo robes; there was a small canvas tent folded up; there were bags of provisions, and some cooking utensils; there was a spade and an axe; there were rifles—three of them—and a double-barrelled shot-gun; besides a fish-net, and many other articles, the necessary equipments for such ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... price. And I'll give you the sweetest job an Indian ever had since the North-West Rebellion. All you need do is surround that mess of huts down there, make a noise like an apple pie, and shoot everything that comes out to take a bite—that is, after the trestle's done. If you can handle a spade and crowbar, and live on dessicated sawdust and tinned whale, you can take the shooting job on instanter. There's a good two weeks' work for you afterwards. Only start on Koppy. Eh, how's it look ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... as the rest of the party were busily employed, I alone accompanied Kallolo. We each carried a spade, with some ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... and his friends, the Roman principle was followed, at least in part. The wagons were drawn up in a great circle in an open space, where they could not be reached by a rifle shot from the trees, and then more than two hundred men, using pick and spade, speedily threw up an earthwork three feet high that inclosed the wagons. Henry Ware regarded ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... stake, I can't hum and haw," said Madeleine, who could never keep her temper with Dove for long. "I call a spade a spade, and rejoice to do it. What I ask you to tell me is, whether I've been correctly informed or not. Have you, too, heard Louise Dufrayer's name coupled with that of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... use of vulgar slang upbraid, But, when I'm speaking by the card, I call a spade a spade; And I, who have been touched of that same mania, myself, Am well aware that, when it comes to parting with his pelf, The curio collector is so blindly lost in sin That he doesn't spend his money—he ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... about enough and even ample. I started a hot answer to this letter, saying that if darling Clyde was digging his grave with his teeth it was her own fault because she was providing the spade and the burial plot, and the quickest way to thin her darling down would be for her to quit work. But shucks! Why insult the poor thing? I got back my composure and wrote her a nice letter of sympathy in her hour of great trouble. I didn't say at ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... cried out on the street, "Lo! the man that was in hell." With the very first class of poets, artificial objects become natural, the "rod" becomes a "serpent;" with Pope, natural objects become artificial, the "serpent" becomes a "rod." Wordsworth makes a spade poetical; Pope would have made Skiddaw little better than ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the side during the early part of that day, I saw a very large shark come rolling up in this way close to Tom Lokins's legs. Tom made a cut at him with his blubber-spade, but the shark rolled off in time to escape the blow. And after all it would not have done him much damage, for it is not easy to frighten or take the life out ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... is, Mr. Auctioneer," he announced, standing up. "Call a spade a spade and have done ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... autumn. The peasants who, having lost faith in Don Carlos, rallied round Cabrera, now saw themselves abandoned by their worshipped leader, and turned hopelessly enough homewards. Thus gradually the country relapsed into quiet, and empty garners compelled many to lay aside the bayonet and take up the spade who, having tasted the thrill of battle, had no longer any taste for the ways ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... turnings past, Stopp'd in an open field at last, Where late the hind had sow'd his grain, And made the whole a level plain. The spectre pointed to the spot, Where he had hid the golden pot: "Deep in the earth," says he, "'tis laid." But John, alas! had got no spade; And, as the night was pretty dark, He felt around him for a mark, That he might know again the place, Soon as Aurora shew'd her face. In vain he stoop'd and felt around, No stick or stone was to be found; But nature now, before oppress'd, By change of posture ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... 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
... was instantly acted upon. Something that would serve as a spade was seized by one of the men, and in a few minutes a hole had been dug in the comparatively light soil ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... Hal of their affairs? He perceived that it was only by turning his back and running that he would escape from his adventure with any portion of his self-possession. Truly, this fair-seeming and wonderful civilisation was like the floor of a charnel-house or a field of battle; anywhere one drove a spade beneath its surface, he uncovered horrors, sights for the eyes and stenches for the nostrils that ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... a fool, and said the best thing he could do was to get buried out of the way, because I knew that most of them work by the rules of contrary; but it was all to no purpose. By this time all his relations had collected round the door. His father had a kind of wooden spade to dig the grave with, his mother a new suit of tapa [bark-cloth], his sister some vermilion and a whale's tooth, as an introduction to the great god of Rage-Rage. He arose, took up his bed and walked, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... enter the earth to pupate, and on the fifteenth of October, 1906, only the day before I began this chapter, the Deacon, in digging worms for a fishing trip to the river, found a pupa case a yard from the tomato vines, and six inches below the surface. He came to my desk, carrying on a spade a ball of damp earth larger than a quart bowl. With all care we broke this as nearly in halves as possible and found in the centre a firm, oval hole, the size and shape of a hen's egg, and in the opening a fine ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... charges for fertilizer, seeds and labor are met, any vegetables that may result actually cost far more than if bought in the retail market. To this the pro-gardenites retort that the charges for seeds and fertilizer are small and that a certain amount of struggle with spade and hoe is good for a man who has spent all day in a stuffy office. Let him do his own spading, cultivating, and planting. A half hour or so every evening will keep the garden free of weeds and, in due time, vegetables fresh from the garden will result. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... while, and then whistled, soft and low. There was no answer. He looked around him, trying to decide where he was and what to do. His eyes fell upon the two recently dug graves. Headboards stood at each of them. Both were covered. Near the mounds lay a spade. The earth clinging to ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... 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
... 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
... animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But, being human creatures, it is good for us; nay, we are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in proportion to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... thank me, ma'am; thank the act of parleyment! Rum, fourpence; two penny pieces and a Willi'm-and-Mary tizzy makes a shilling; and a spade half-guinea is eleven and six (re-enter MRS. DRAKE with supper, pipe, etc.); and a blessed majesty George the First crown-piece makes sixteen and six; and two shilling bits is eighteen and six; and a new half-crown ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... not one of trained soldiers. The veteran sergeant had already called his attention to what he deemed grave omissions. In the three weeks that they had been lying there they had thrown up no earthworks. Not a spade had touched the earth. Nor was there any other defense of any kind. The high forest circled close about them, dense now with foliage and underbrush, hiding even at a distance of a few hundred yards anything that might lie within. The cavalry in these three weeks had made one ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 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 ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 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 ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... you are not sure that your dog has been stolen," he said. "You had best wait a while. Hero may have wandered off and may come home safely. I'd not ask any favors of America's enemies," he concluded, picking up his spade and turning ...
— A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia • Alice Turner Curtis
... 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 ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... diligently (as soone as he hath Winter-rigged his land) take a carefull view how his lands lie, which way the descent goes from whence annoyance or water may possibly come, and so consequently from those obseruations, with a Spade or strong Plough, of extraordinary greatnesse, draw certaine deepe furrowes from descent vnto descent, by which meanes all the water may be conuayed from his lands, eyther into some common Sewer, Lake, Brooke, or other ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... eminence, and the park-wall interposed; but a little way down was a stile affording access to the road, and by this we approached the iron gate of the churchyard. I saw the church door open; the sexton was replacing his pick, shovel, and spade, with which he had just been digging a grave in the churchyard, in their little repository under the stone stair of the tower. He was a polite, shrewd little hunchback, who was very happy to show me over the church. Among the monuments was one that interested ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... I thought I'd go down to the creek and try my luck—it was a perfect day for fishing, still and grey. So I dug some worms—and broke my spade in doing ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... old man a little story: "Some children by the roadside attacked a strange boy for the sake of some broken potsherds which they were collecting. But when they had got a great heap together the roadman came along, and with his spade threw the pieces into the gutter. The children raised a great cry. But the man saw that there was blood on some of the fragments, and asked: 'Where did you get these from?' Whereupon the children grew pale with terror, and the man took them off ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... the north are no less than sixty feet deep and to storm them would be a sheer impossibility. What makes this splendid monument so interesting is the assertion made by nearly all authorities on the subject that these enormous works must have been excavated without spade or tool other than the puny implement called a "celt." Probably wall and ditch were elaborated and improved by the Romans, and while in their occupation the name of the hill became Dunium. Blocks of stone from Purbeck, used at certain points of ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... this sandy valley as the Surrey which Bettesworth knew best. Than the Memoirs, I think, no more discerning study of an old labourer's fight to keep on his own legs, out of the workhouse, earning his own money with his spade and hoe, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... startling. I turned crimson with mortification. The professor was very decent about it; he called me by name at once. Then he looked at his spade. It was clear he considered me a nuisance and wished to ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new, but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found—or thought—it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Caribs difficult to procure.[4] The supply of laborers was failing just at the period when the colonists began to see that the gold of Hayti was scattered broadcast through her fertile soil, which became transmuted into crops at the touch of the spade and hoe. Plantations of cacao, ginger, cotton, indigo, and tobacco were established; and in 1506 the sugar-cane, which was not indigenous, as some have affirmed, was introduced from the Canaries. Vellosa, a physician in the town of San Domingo, was the first to cultivate it on a large ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... like them, but by leading out their river for 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 built in ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... portion of the inheritance which, in common with my brother men, I have received from the genius of my ancestors. I have two workmen in my field; the one directs the handle of a plough, the other that of a spade. The result of their day's labor is very different, but the price is the same, because the remuneration is proportioned, not to the usefulness of the result, but to the effort, the [time, and] ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... 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
... the men 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 be employed in operations which can be effected by men ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... perhaps that Trent fought the hardest battle of his life. The start was made with only a dozen Kru boys, Trent himself, stripped to the shirt, labouring amongst them spade in hand. In a week the fishing boats were deserted, every one was working on the road. The labour was immense, but the wages were magnificent. Real progress was made and the boy's calculations were faultless. Trent used the ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... used to come and watch them now and then as the work progressed. She had a way of walking round and round the house, looking up at it pridefully and poking at plaster and paint with her umbrella or fingertip. One day she brought with her a man with a spade. He spaded up a neat square of ground at the side of the cottage and a long ridge near the fence that separated her yard from that of the very young couple next door. The ridge spelled sweet peas and nasturtiums to our ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... the world's going, and what's comin' afther her, hasn't a 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
... 'fraid are some of dead men's beds, And others of their bones; They neither care to see their heads, Nor yet to hear their groans. 16. Now all these things are but the shade And badges of his coat;[3] The glass that runs, the scythe and spade, Though weapons more remote: 17. Yet such as make poor mortals shrink And fear, when they are told, These things are signs that they must drink With death; O then how cold. 18. It strikes them to the heart! how do ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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 ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... can dig 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 ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... 13th October, many Indians came off to the ships in their canoes, most of which carried forty or even fifty men, and some were so small as only to hold one. Their oars were formed like a bakers peel, with which they rowed, or paddled rather, as if digging with a spade. Though easily overset, the Indians were excellent swimmers, and easily turned their canoes up, again, after which they laded the water out with calabashes, which they carried with them for that purpose. They brought much cotton on board to barter with the Spaniards, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... him o'er the seas, To the drear antipodes; There he saw a felon band, Chains on neck, and spade in hand, Orators, all sworn to die In "Old Ireland's" cause—or fly! Now, divorced from pike and pen, Digging ditch, and draining fen, Sky their ceiling, sand their bed, Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed. "Operatives!" he harangued; "Ere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... themselves and live on rough food, and when disabled could be converted into food. They thus played a very important part in the pioneer life. There were no improved farm implements in those days: the plough, the spade, the hoe, the fork, the sickle, the hook, the cradle, and the rake—implements that had been the husbandman's equipment for centuries—completed the list. With these the farmer cultivated his lands and gathered his crops. ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... 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 ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... Chowles, springing back, and snatching up a spade, "or I will dash out your brains. Are you mad?" he ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... pointed for the nearest landing. There was a small house on this landing, and behind it were some twelve negroes digging with spades. The leader of them was an old man sixty years of age. He raised himself to an upright position as we landed, and put his hands up to his eyes. Then he dropped his spade and sprang forward. 'Bress de Lord,' he said, 'dere is de great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He's bin in my heart fo' long yeahs, an' he's cum at las' to free his chillun from deir bondage! Glory, Hallelujah!' And ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... of floods and deposits. With the exception of an 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 ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... these things because it will show that the Little Lady had fallen into good hands. My father and mother did all they could to help them, and certainly their labours were lightened after our arrival. The very first morning my father was up by daylight, with spade in hand, digging in the garden, while my mother helped Miss Anna Maria in the kitchen. Indeed, my father was not a man to eat the bread of ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... number will be given 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... May, and the sun had passed the noon line in a bright sky, causing the shadow of Peter Taylor to fall east of north and infusing his substance with the delightful languor called Spring Fever. Leaning upon an idle spade, Peter watched the lazy motions of a negro slave whom he had directed to trim a level lawn ornamented with flowerbeds. The English origin of the overseer was revealed by his looks ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... went down into the cutting to speak to some of his men, whilst I walked about the edge of the bank. From a distant part of the moor, the bray of a jackass came faint upon the sleepy wind. "Yer tho', Jone," said one of the men, resting upon his spade; "another cally-weighver gone!" " Ay," replied Jone, "th' owd lad's deawn't his cut. He'll want no more tickets, yon mon!" The country folk of Lancashire say that a weaver dies every time a jackass brays. Jackson ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... 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 saw him ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... I touched the autumn of the mind; And now the careful spade to labor comes, Smoothing the earth torn by the waves and wind, Full of great holes, like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Jack Cockrell roved far enough to find on the knoll a small pit freshly dug, with a spade and pick beside it. Like excited children, his two comrades ran to inspect the hole which Blackbeard's seamen had dug ready for the treasure chest. Then they scattered to explore the knoll in search of signs to indicate where previous hoards might have been buried. Trimble ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... began to dig and dug about a minit and then he stoped and went in the house to change his shues, and then he come out and took of his coat and then he dug a nother minit and then he went to the fence and talked with Sam Dire and then he took of his vest and took up his spade and then he said i was doing splendid and he wanted to see Wats a minit and he went over to see Beanys father jest as i said he wood and dident come back. well i dug until mother called me in to go to bed and i got about a pan full of wirms. tonite ...
— 'Sequil' - Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First • Henry A. Shute
... springs they will not matter much; we can exhaust them with our machines or divert them from their course. Here we have not to work at an artesian well, narrow and dark, where all the boring implements have to work in the dark. No; we can work under the open sky, with spade and pickaxe, and, by the help of blasting, our work ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... wolf, dear father, That lies with his paw on the floor, Let us heat the spade in the embers And drive him away ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... And dropping his spade, the old gentleman scrambled towards the little girl as quickly as his rusty joints would let him,—while Pansie, as apprehensive and quick of motion as a fawn, started up with a shriek of mirth and fear to escape him. It so happened that the ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thereby adds a poetic and a picturesque attraction to their features. There are also certain flowers that cannot be cultivated in the garden, as if they were designed for the exclusive adornment of those secluded arbors which the spade and the plough have never profaned. Here flowers grow which are too holy for culture, and birds sing whose voices were never heard in the cage of the voluptuary, and whose tones inspire us with a sense of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... whether or not he thus sacrificed his neighbour below him. Next I was conducted to Gold Point, which was just developing its quality in the "blue clay," which had been struck at no great depth below the surface. I was let down into a big hole, the early parent of shaft-sinking, given a spade, and directed to apply it to a place where a digger's quick eye had detected one speck of gold. There was probably, he said, a string of gold behind it. And so it proved, for out of about a pound weight of matrix which I removed on the ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I can read with pleasure and edification Peter Bell, and the whole series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and the address to Mr. Wilkinson's spade, and even the Thanksgiving Ode;—everything of Wordsworth, I think, except Vaudracour and Julia. It is not for nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so truly worthy of homage; that one ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... capable of improvement, and that more use of these natural interests may with advantage be made in class time as well? Not that work of any kind can be all pleasure or always outwardly interesting; there is plenty of hard spade-work needed in any study seriously followed, in class or out. But if in education keenness is the first essential and personality the final aim, interest and freedom must have a larger place than is usually allowed them in the class-room if the real education is not to ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... 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 ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... 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 within its cheeks; the field-mouse does so without the help of any such contrivance. ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... 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 he ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... consultations and measurements were going on, Placide's eye was caught by the motion of a young fawn in the high grass of a lawny slope, on one side of the valley. He snatched the loaded rifle which one of the soldiers had exchanged for a spade and fired. The passion for sport was instantly roused by the act. Kids were seen here and there on the rocks. Marks were not wanting: and first Vincent, and then one and another, followed Placide's example; and there were several shots at the same instant, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Allen says, "I am satisfied from experience and observation in the use of guano, for the past twelve years, that the best method, decidedly, of applying it to crops in our dry climate, is to plow or spade it into the ground; and autumn is the best time for doing this, as it gives time for the pungent salts contained in the guano, to get thoroughly mixed with the soil before spring planting. Do not fear to loose the guano by plowing it in as deep as you please—it will not run away, ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... And, again, when he was a little older, living at Rosenheim, I.W., there was surely the future defender of Mafeking in the little chap in brown Holland on the sands of Bonchurch digging scientific trenches with wooden spade, and demonstrating to his governess the impregnability of his sand fortress. With his sister and brother, little Ste was once out with this governess on a country ramble near Tunbridge Wells, when the governess discovered that she had walked farther than she intended ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... the knapsacks were on, Ready took the axe and gun, and asked William if he thought he could carry a small spade on his shoulder, which they had brought on shore along with the shovels. William replied that he could; and the dogs, who appeared to know they were going, were all ready standing by them. Then, just as the sun rose, they turned into the cocoa-nut grove, and were ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... 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 ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... industry. They were likewise acquainted with the use of manure, called vunalti in their language; but, from the great fertility of the soil, little attention was paid to that subject. They used a kind of spade or breast-plough of hard wood for turning the soil, which was pushed forwards by their breasts. At present the native Chilese use a very simple plough, called chetague, made of the branch of a tree crooked at one end, having a wooden share ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... old garden. She told me she could hardly wait to begin on it," and Josephine waved her hand at a distant figure with a spade in its hand. The spade was promptly cast aside and the worker came running around the house to meet the arriving car. "Isn't she looking splendidly?" Sally's friend murmured in her brother's ear, as the figure came near enough for a pair of very blooming cheeks to show clearly ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... bounty of God to the creature that truly and persistently wills and endeavours to please Him, so great are the rewards of that creature for its tiny work that it is as though a child should scratch bare ground with its little spade and reap a harvest of sweet flowers as magic gifts. In this way it is that we find actually fulfilled in ourselves the lovely words of the prophet, "the desert shall blossom like ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... free-lances 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 replied to me: 'A son shall be born in the year of the world 5386 and be called ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... following. The rector, as an archaeologist, 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 ever made to an antiquarian. "Oh, a little hand- ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... cry from Westminster to Woolwich, and in spite of indefatigable spade-work on his part, it was well on in the third week in May before he so much as caught a ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... bear than that to which, even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most difficult ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... the man who was looking for sand-eels. The fisherman was digging in the gravel with a spade, and now and then a few of the little fishes were dislodged from their hiding place. They wriggled in such a lively fashion that Frank was greatly amused, and forgot, for a time, all about his first desire of a ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... infernal thing!" Altamont raged. "'Wielding a gold-plated spade handled with oak from an original rafter of the Congressional Library, at three-fifteen one afternoon last week—' One afternoon last week!" He cursed luridly. "Why couldn't that blasted magazine say what afternoon? I've gone over a lot of twentieth century copies of that magazine; that ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... and most of the people in the village were thinking of going to bed, when Abner said to Mary, "Let us each take a spade, and I will carry a pail, and we will go out upon the beach for a walk. If any one should see us, they would think that we were going to ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... wanting me 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
... papa and the Misses Warrible—Sir Stephen Warrible's daughters—dressing them in fancy rags, and filling the garden they played in with flowers from our conservatory, and giving the cottage French windows and a trellis-work veranda. He stands leaning on a spade, with silver buckles in his shoes, and the children are playing La Grace with the hoops, covered with pink ribands. I called it 'The Poor Man's Joy;' and Lord Moon has begged me to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... 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, ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... multitudes of 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, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... saw you from that very window there, Making the gravel leap and leap in air, Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly And roll back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you. And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs To look again, and still your spade kept lifting. Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why, But I went near to see with my own eyes. You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... he had dared, but his sense of social inferiority was too much for him. What was he, a humble little tradesman, to set himself against eleven men, headed by a wealthy contractor who wore three spade guineas on ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... small, 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 its flare. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... their leading spade It meant a certain win! But no! By Pembroke's mighty shade The thirteenth trump you went and played And let their ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... and de spade what Massa Will sis pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... 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 ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... 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
... and birds would die of old age, or from an accident, she would replace them without tears and without regret; with a little spade she would bury the dead animal in a strip of ground, throwing a few shovelfuls of earth over it and stamping it down with her feet in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... think of Nijni Novgorod And Jews who never rest; And womenfolk with spade and hod Who slave in Buda-Pest; Of squat and sturdy Japanese Who pound the paddy soil, And as I loaf and smoke at ease They toil ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... we 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 portrait ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... for your home an' your own contree! Strike for your native lan'! Kip workin' away wit' de spade an' hoe, Den jump w'en you hear de bugle blow, For danger 's aroun', above, below, But de bugle will tell if it 's tam ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... handy men who apply themselves to every service in warfare, as to the manner born, whenever the occasion requires—cheerfully bent their ardent energies to spade work, which was probably a new task even for that many handed corps. Thereafter they wired themselves in their trenches ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... do after 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
... season in London: but I don't see any likelihood of my coming till 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 ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... part of the people. Theatre crowds demanded encores of the President's March and hissed 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 ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... time, and what happened to it before I found it lying draggled and dead at the bottom of the Ha-ha, with the top of a kettle still fastened to its scraggy tail, I never knew, and it cost me bitter tears to guess. It cost me some hard work, too, to dig the grave, for my spade ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... 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 spirits ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... of the way, and must hearken in every direction until you hear it again. Keeping with the sound, and careful not to retrace your steps, you will soon hear it louder, and the growing sound will lead you to where it is loudest: that is the spot you seek. There dig with the spade I will give you, and dig until you come to moisture: in it lay the hand, cover it to the level of the desert, and come home.—But give good heed, and carry the hand with care. Never lay it down, in what place of seeming ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... with two white men and a native. Passing through a belt of country with numerous small shallow lakelets, they came to a watercourse whereon they found signs of a grave, and they picked up a battered pint-pot. Next morning, feeling sure that the ground had been disturbed with a spade, they opened what proved to be a grave, and in it found the body of a European, the skull marked, so McKinlay states, with two sabre cuts. He noted down the description of the body, the locality, and its surroundings; and in view of these particulars, it ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... business very well, but will suit the country best, where they have not so many dram-shops as we have in Boston. He has worked at the printing business fifteen or sixteen years; can handle axe, saw, spade, hoe, or other instrument of husbandry, as well as most men, and values himself, and is valued by others, ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... 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 love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... other was filled with oddments, such as files, gimlets, ragstone, steel, weighing machine, awls, tomahawks, American axes, shoeing tools, and a number of things "that they could not do without," but perhaps the most important loss was that of the spade, to which they had many times been indebted for water. Up to this time, that is to the 37th camp, the number of the camp had always been cut in the wood of a tree at each, with a mallet and chissel, these having gone with the mule's pack the numbers were from this point cut with a ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... 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 ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... labours, duties, sufferings, prayers, Compose the 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,) ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But, being human creatures, it is good for us; nay, we are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... a gardener to be ready to attend her, and the next morning early led him to the tree which the bird had told her of, and bade him dig at its foot. When the gardener came to a certain depth, he found some resistance to the spade, and presently discovered a gold box about a foot square, which he shewed the princess. "This," said she, "is what I brought you for; take care not to injure it ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... harpoons, wood and iron, measuring about eight feet over all, and weighing about ten pounds; three lances of the finest steel, with wooden handles, in all about eight feet long; a keg of drinking water and one of biscuits; a bucket and piggin for bailing, a small spade, knives, axes, and a shoulder bomb-gun. It can be understood easily that six men, maneuvering in so crowded a boat, with a huge whale flouncing about within a few feet, a line whizzing down the center, to be caught in which ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... the ladies, while the men will receive plain cards upon each one of which is written a month of the year. If there be more than twenty-four guests there are many other available days, as Arbor Day, represented by a tree; a hatchet for Washington's Birthday; a flag for Flag Day; a saw, trowel or spade for Labor Day, and a ballot box for Election Day. If it be necessary to use these extra days the plain cards must be numbered to designate the different days of the same month. For instance, the card that corresponds with St. Valentine's Day will be February No. 1, while the bearer ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... straps, stuffed and properly sewn. Three other boys can agree to furnish the home plate, and to bring to the ground implements for marking and laying out, viz.: a tape line two hundred feet long, a supply of cord, a sharp spade, a sledge hammer to drive stakes, a small hammer to drive in staples, some lime to mark out the lines, and a pail to wet it in. A tennis marker will save much work. The best ball to purchase is the regular "league" ball. These balls are the most uniform ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... he found that Robert's French began and ended with these useful words; but, at any rate, he saw that if the lady was mad she was not the only one, and he put on a big beavery hat, and got a candle and matches and a spade, and they all went up the hill to the wayside shrine of ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... 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 ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... Yawning and stretching at ease, he then became aware of a friar, with a brown shaven head and fine black beard, who was digging near by. This man, whose eyes had been upon him, waiting for recognition, immediately stopped his toil, struck his spade into the ground, and came towards ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... comfortable, I have blocked up all the windows, and barricaded the door. We have lost only one of our number since we came—namely, Diggory, the market-gardener, from Glasgow, who went out one morning to botanize, and never came back. I am much surprised at his absconding, as he had nothing but a spade to go off with. Chippendale, the carpenter, was sent after him, but did not return; and Gregory, the smith, has been out after them these two days. I have just dispatched Mudge, the herdsman, to look for all three, and hope he will soon give a good account of them, as they are the most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... to say," he remarked, stopping before Shelton, and looking down, as if at last aware of him, "to those who talk of being justified through Art. I call a spade a spade." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... often appropriated to the other, that there seems to be something in common in the meaning of the terms—but it is not so, they are mere cases of Concurrence, but of almost indissoluble Concurrence. For instance, a man might examine a "spade" in all its parts and might even make one after a model, and not even know what "dig" means. The mention of "dig" is as likely to make us think of pickaxe as of spade. "Spade" does not mean "dig," nor does "dig" mean spade. ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... carried by the basketful to narrow, lofty ledges of rock, an astounding instance of toil, hopefulness and patience. No matter the barrenness of the spot, no matter its isolation or the difficulty of approach, wherever root or seed will grow, there the French peasant owner plies hoe and spade, and gradually causes the wilderness to blossom ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... half the trees in the forest. Bouchier and his fellows must be bewitched. Harkye, knaves: get together a dozen of the best woodmen and yeomen in the castle—instantly, as you value your lives; bid them bring axe and saw, pick and spade. D'ye mark me? ha! Stay, I have not done. I must have fagots and straw, for I will burn this tree to the ground—burn it to a char. Summon the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk—the rascal archer I dubbed the Duke of Shoreditch and his mates—the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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 Tobolsk, where he exhibited ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... six 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
... 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 ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... brings Soft rills of water from the bubbling springs, And calls the floods from high, to bless his bowers, And feed with pregnant streams the plants and flowers: Soon as he clears whate'er their passage stay'd, And marks the future current with his spade, Swift o'er the rolling pebbles, down the hills, Louder and louder purl the falling rills; Before him scattering, they prevent his pains, And shine in mazy ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... June, 1879, about two weeks after what has been related, May senior left the house immediately after breakfast, taking a spade. He said he was going to make an excavation at a certain spring in a wood about a mile away, so that the cattle could obtain water. John remained in the house for some hours, variously occupied in shaving himself, ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... earth and to make a brief address. The speech-making was easy; but when the digging was to be done he encountered some unexpected obstacle and the soil did not yield to his repeated efforts. Not to be defeated, however, he stripped off his coat, went to work in earnest with the spade and raised the earth successfully. Naturally such readiness was hailed with loud applause and pleased the great crowd who saw it. But in Mr. Adams's career it was an exceptional occurrence that enabled him to conciliate a momentary ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... street. Here a footpath was shovelled in the snow, on either side of the sleigh road. The sun was throwing down the graceful lines of elm twigs on path and snowdrift. The snow lawns in front of the village houses were pure and bright; little children played in them with tiny sledge and snow spade, often under the watchful eye of a mother who sat sewing behind the window pane. Now and then sleighs passed on the central road with ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... folks went out to work in their garden, the dog went with them, and began playing about. 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 rice-fields and corn-fields, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... 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. ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... ideas 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 where Mr. Hadwin ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... she is 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 ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... fellow-citizens. From morning till night he was to be seen going round and round the fortifications, showing were points might be strengthened with advantage, and to encourage the labourers, often himself taking a spade or pick in hand. Where fresh batteries had to be thrown up, the work was one which greatly taxed the strength of the citizens, but they all knew that their lives depended on their repairing and strengthening their defences before their foes should again attack them. ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... think that even a 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 ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... 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 shoulder, singing as ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... operations 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 be employed in operations which can be effected ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... musk-flies are th' aromatics Which 'cense this arch; and here and there And farther off, and everywhere Throughout that brave mosaic yard, Those picks or diamonds in the card With peeps of hearts, of club, and spade Are here most neatly inter-laid Many a counter, many a die, Half-rotten and without an eye Lies hereabouts; and, for to pave The excellency of this cave, Squirrels' and children's teeth late shed Are ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... 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
... enchantments like them, but by leading out their river for 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 built in karosses (skin cloaks), tortoise-shells, or wooden bowls. We ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... something might be hidden beneath the tree, and that the dog had scented it, at last struck the old man. He ran back to the house, fetched his spade and began to dig the ground at that spot. What was his astonishment when, after digging for some time, he came upon a heap of old and valuable coins, and the deeper he dug the more gold coins did he find. So intent was the old man on his work that he never saw the cross face of his neighbor ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... Majesty recently gave Mr. Wyon sittings; the reverse bears an allegorical design—Britannia seated and holding the scroll of confederation, with figures representing the four provinces grouped around her. Ontario holds the sheaf and sickle; Quebec, the paddle; Nova Scotia, the mining spade; and New Brunswick the forest axe. Britannia carries her trident and the lion crouches by her side. The following inscription runs round a raised border: "Juventas et Patrius Vigor Canada Instaurata 1867." The relief on this side is extremely bold, and the composition, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... trend of his affairs, he was in a mood to scoff at any religious allusion. Reverence, with him, was entirely a matter of urgent physical need. He had called to his Maker but twice in his life: once, when an ugly-tempered peon threatened him with a spade; again, when, falling from his swiftly moving flat-car, he felt the heavy wheels grinding him, ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... as soon as we were up in the morning. Then, after breakfast, during which we had been very solemn and quiet, our schoolmaster said: "We must bury him today—at twelve o'clock, when I am free, will be the best time; the boys can come with me, and old John can bring his spade." This announcement greatly excited us, for we had never seen a dog buried, and had never even heard of such a thing having ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... read on to the end; and then in the hush that followed the mate stooped, and, with deep lines hardening rigidly, picked up a spade. There was no mistaking his purpose; but as he straightened himself the Dandy's hand was on the spade and the Maluka was speaking. "Perhaps you'll be good enough to drive the missus back to the house ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... labor," he adds: "If I were in a court of justice, or injustice, under oath, I should not like to say that, either in the wooing days of spring, or under the suns of the summer solstice, you had been, either with hoe, rake, or miniature spade, of the least use in the garden." Perhaps our fair cousins on the other side of the Atlantic do not grub so energetically as we do. Certainly, with us it is very common for the ladies of the family to be the practical gardeners, ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a signal of three smacks of a whip called them to work, when each betook himself with his spade to the plantation, where they worked almost naked in the heat of the sun. Their food was bruised or boiled maize, or bread made of cassava root, their clothing a single piece of linen. Upon the commission of the most trivial offence, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... never out of 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 ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... remembred Marcus. She's gone, she's fled, sirs take you to your tooles, 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 ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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 away at once into the middle of her subject, "you ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... dar," insisted Aunt Hominy, "in dat ole obergrown churchyard, whar de hymns ob God used to be raised befo' de debbil got it. He says to Meshach: 'I make you de sexton hyar. Go git de spade out yonder, whar de dead-house used to be, an' dig among de graves under de myrtle-vines, an' fin' my hat. As long as ye keep de Lord an' de singin' away from dis yer big forsaken church, you may keep dat ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 not yet heard of the battle in the wood, hearkened ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... 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' the ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 their milk and butter for paying their rent, and purchasing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... 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 wall—go ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... young Derwent introduced some excitement into my dull life. On one occasion when we were walking in the grounds, he suddenly snatched up a spade from a grass-plot, and rushed at an inoffensive under-gardener. The man ran screaming for his life, with my patient cursing at his very heels, and me within a few paces of him. When I at last laid my hand on his collar, he threw down his weapon and burst into ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... rubber, three pair of compasses, seven paper-knives, ten knives, thirteen odd gloves, fifteen pencils, pens beyond reckoning, a purse, a key, half a poem on the Siege of Granada, three parts of an essay upon Spade Husbandry, the dramatis personae of a tragedy on Queen Brunehault, scores of old letters, and the dust of three ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the Freemen's lands. At certain points there are boundry holes dug, these holes they re-dig and hold a boy (one of the Freemen's sons) up by his heels with his head in the hole, and strike him (on the part prepared by nature for that purpose), with the spade. This is done at each hole. A different boy was whipped at every hole so that several could remember where the holes were dug, especially the hole at which each individual had suffered, and the memory of the hole was impressed on mind and body, and ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... finished before night, and in condition to receive all the shot of Tilly's great battery, and effectually covered his bridge. While this was doing the king on his side lays over his bridge. Both sides wrought hard all day and night, as if the spade, not the sword, had been to decide the controversy, and that he had got the victory whose trenches and batteries were first ready. In the meanwhile the cannon and musket bullets flew like hail, and made the service so hot that both sides had enough to do to make their ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... spur to effort. He is not a wise teacher who makes things too easy. It is good that there should be difficulties; for difficulties are like the veins of quartz in the soil, which may turn the edge of the ploughshare or the spade, but prophesy that there is gold there for the man who comes with fitting tools. Wherever, in the broad land of God's word to us, there lie dark places, there are assurances of future illumination. God's hiding ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... first invented work—and bound the free And holyday-rejoicing spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity Of business, in the green fields, and the town— To plough, loom, anvil, spade—and oh! most sad, To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood? Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel— For wrath divine ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... went downwards, and from appearances had great 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 was the more fortunate, as Flood ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... coffee, and his tapioca; and how's he ever to have any appetite, always a sitting about, heaped up together over his books, with his ribs growing into his backbone?—If he'd only go and take his walk, or get a spade and dig in the garden, or anything but them everlasting papers, which I hates the sight ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... caught the spade from his father's hands, and at no great distance began to dig another pit. His father asked why he dug ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... 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
... moments funny beyond words especially when Mr. Beaumont's English fails to cope with the situation and he will try to discuss the points where the Countess has failed. He says, "Did you not see he put his king on your spade ace-spot?" and, "Madame, you played the third of spades." And when we count honors, Beaumont will cover the table with his great elbows and enumerate his: "I had the ass, the knight, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... name of James. He wanted 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 man to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... belt of country with numerous small shallow lakelets, they came to a watercourse whereon they found signs of a grave, and they picked up a battered pint-pot. Next morning, feeling sure that the ground had been disturbed with a spade, they opened what proved to be a grave, and in it found the body of a European, the skull marked, so McKinlay states, with two sabre cuts. He noted down the description of the body, the locality, and its surroundings; and in view ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... declared that they had seen a ghastly resemblance of the murderess, robed in her winding-sheet, with the black mark of the rope round her swollen neck, standing on stormy nights upon her husband's grave, and digging there with a spade in hideous imitation of the actions of the men who had disinterred the corpse for medical examination. This was fearful enough—nobody dared go near the place after nightfall. But soon, another circumstance was talked of, in ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... evenings he shelled corn by drawing the ears across a spade resting on a wash tub, and we children built houses of the cobs, while mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an afternoon were still recognized social functions and the spread quilt on its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on our way to ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... reverie by receiving a heavy blow on the shoulder and hearing a rough voice exclaim: "Now then, wake up; don't stand there dreaming all day. What are you thinking about? Here, catch hold of this spade and pickaxe; that's your share. Ha, ha! it's a good idea and an excellent joke to make you rascals carry the tools with which we are going to make you work when you reach the mines. That's it; now get into your place, and look sharp; we shall be on the march ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Captain Percy Scott at this time came in for a great share of attention. The feature of the invention is a spade which holds the gun in position, while the recoil is absorbed by the compression of oil and springs. Great strain is thus placed on the spade, and consequently its success depends largely on the character of the soil and the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... mustard and cress. One of us plants, and the other waters, but Jack likes the watering-pot; And then when my turn comes to water he says it's too hot! We sometimes quarrel about the garden, and once Jack hit me with the spade; So we settled to divide it in two by a path up the middle, and that's made. We want some yellow sand now to make the walk pretty, but there's none about here, So we mean to get some in the old carpet-bag, ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... articles intended in normal ages to be transported by two mules, but under the influence of advanced civilisation strapped on the back of one man, in addition to a rifle, half a dozen Mills' bombs, a Lewis-gun, spade or shovel, sheet of corrugated iron, or any other article that can be somewhere hung ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... 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
... native wealth of the country,—its virgin soil, its mineral riches. So rapid has been the development that the maps of 1864 are obsolete in 1866. Civilization at a stride has moved a thousand miles, and taken possession of the home of the buffalo. Miners with pick and spade are tramping over the Rocky Mountains, exploring every ravine, digging canals, building mills, and rearing their log cabins. The merchant, the farmer, and the mechanic follow them. The long solitude of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let them discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed, call a spade a spade, give us facts, and honor ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... was scarcely a cart on the estate; all the carriage was done on the backs of ponies. The cultivation of the interior was generally executed with a rude kind of spade, and there was not a gig in the county. In 1845 there were one thousand one hundred and thirty carts owned on the estate, and seven hundred and ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... instant, in execution so 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 ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... every day. Magda busied herself washing up the dinner 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 ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb, And weave your winding sheet, till fair England be ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... the thought. He ought to have hid the rooster. He ought to have got a spade and buried him. He was full of regrets, not for what he had done, but for what he had not done. He would stay here till dark. He would stay here all night. He never would go home any more. He would hide ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... 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 ring of some virile word, the broad onward sweep of stately prose in narrative ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... strongest places of the country, and had forbidden them to carry any instrument of iron, or at all to make use of any iron in any case whatsoever. And on account of this prohibition it was that the husbandmen, if they had occasion to sharpen any of their tools, whether it were the coulter or the spade, or any instrument of husbandry, they came to the Philistines to do it. Now as soon as the Philistines heard of this slaughter of their garrison, they were in a rage about it, and, looking on this contempt as a terrible affront offered them, they ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... he likes with his spade, he soils his clothes with dust, nobody takes him to task if he gets baked in the sun or ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... the nursery, and are given much the same care recommended for cuttings. They may be set in trenches made with plow or spade; or they may be planted in very shallow trenches with a dibble. After planting, the grafts are covered with an inch or two of soil, thus forming a wide ridge in the nursery row with the union of the grafts at the original level of the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... innovation of the prince, and the one which required the most energy to enforce, was the use of the spade. His soldiers were jeered at by the enemy as mere boors and day labourers who were dishonouring themselves and their profession by the use of that implement instead of the sword. Such a novelty was a shock to all the military ideas of the age, and it was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... know not, for there was no mark as of spade or pick-axe; nor was the earth broken, nor had wagon 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 ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... 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 and shells, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... reached Moscow rioting 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. The church became alarmed. Anti-Christ had been predicted for centuries, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the French began to reap the harvest of their folly. Conquest, gold, military occupation,—such had been their aims. Not a rood of ground had been stirred with the spade. Their stores were consumed; the expected supplies had not come. The Indians, too, were hostile. Satouriona hated them as allies of his enemies; and his tribesmen, robbed and maltreated by the lawless soldiers, exulted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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 the third occasion, Martin Pippin concluded that ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... arbor. It seems absolutely impossible to get anything sent up to us from Apia. Lists and notes go flying, but, except from Krause the butcher, with no results. It seems an odd thing that there should not be a spade or a rake for sale in a town where there would be no difficulty in finding the best quality of champagne, to say nothing of all the materials for mixed drinks. We have almost starved for want of provisions until yesterday, when Ben killed ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... useless; but earth-forts, and especially field-works, will hereafter play an important part in war, because they enable a minor force to hold a superior one in check for a time, and time is a most valuable element in all wars. It was one of Prof. Mahan's maxims that the spade was as useful in war as the musket, and to this I will add the axe. The habit of intrenching certainly does have the effect of making new troops timid. When a line of battle is once covered by a good parapet, made by the engineers ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... month of July I stopped on a march by a threshing-floor where they were measuring grain. When the shares had been divided, the one who had cultivated the land received a single tumolo (less than a half bushel). The peasant, leaning on his spade, looked at his share as if stunned. His wife and their five children were standing by. From the painful toil of a year this was what was left to him with which to feed his family. The tears rolled silently ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... and sow the seeds of keener remorse? No matter how painful it may be, break with sin at once. Severe operations are often necessary, for the skilful surgeon knows that the disease cannot be cured by surface applications. The farmer takes his hoe and his spade and his axe, and he cuts away the obnoxious growths, and burns the roots out ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... feeling quite jovial and free towards him; and Uncle Josh started up and let his spade fall ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... understand, that enveloped them both. They too felt that they did not belong to the London world any more. Crockham had changed their blood: the sense of the snakes that lived and slept even in their own garden, in the sun, so that he, going forward with the spade, would see a curious coiled brownish pile on the black soil, which suddenly would start up, hiss, and dazzle rapidly away, hissing. One day Winifred heard the strangest scream from the flower-bed under the low window of the living room: ah, the strangest scream, like ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... themselves up in wild disorder, though nothing was broken—not even the pot of guava-jelly. They included a superannuated watch in a loose silver case, a medal (in bronze) struck to commemorate Lord Howe's famous victory of the First of June, two pieces-of-eight and a spade guinea (much clipped); a small china mug painted with libellous portraits of King George III. and his consort; a printed pamphlet on Admiral Byng; two strings of shells; a mourning-ring with a lock of hair set between two pearls ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... been paid for for twenty years were, after the lapse of that time, again made use of, according to the rule and custom of the Church. It was thus no unusual thing to find coffins while a new grave was being dug, which fell to pieces under the spade. The bodies had been packed closely, and often several had been ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... it does, youngster. Seems easy to take a spade and dig all day, but you try, and I'm sorry for your ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... 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 in Miss ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the way. I thought I would meet you at the deepo to surprise you. But I had to bank my house; I wuzn't goin' to leave it to no underlin' and have my stuff freeze. But when I hern that Josiah wuz comin' I jest dropped my spade—I had jest got done—ketched up my book and threw my things into my grip, my trunk wuz all packed, and here I am, safe and sound, though the cars broke down once and we wuz belated. We have just traipsed along a day or two behind you all the way from Chicago, ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... far enough to find on the knoll a small pit freshly dug, with a spade and pick beside it. Like excited children, his two comrades ran to inspect the hole which Blackbeard's seamen had dug ready for the treasure chest. Then they scattered to explore the knoll in search of signs to indicate where previous hoards ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... know, by experience, that preparatory labour is indispensable, in order to render present labour productive." The good Mathurin was not content with making these reflections. He resolved to work by the day, and to save something from his wages to buy a spade and a sack of corn; without which things, he must give up his fine agricultural projects. He acted so well, was so active and steady, that he soon saw himself in possession of the wished-for sack of corn. ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... his grasp on her as he felt the tension slacken, and presently she stood free, still dazed and bewildered. Christopher picked up a spade and whistled. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... 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 ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Mute leading for a third time, I could have sworn there would be no corpse in that snow-covered grave. For was it not written in my inner consciousness that destiny had appointed me to the wild, free life of the north? So I was not surprised when Paul Larocque's spade struck sharply on a box. Indians sleep their last sleep in the skins of the chase. Nor was I in the least amazed when that same spade pried up the lid of cached provisions instead of a coffin. Then I had ocular proof of what I knew before, that Louis in word and conduct—but chiefly in ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... 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 of a heroic ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... newly arrived in our city digs downward with his spade, but his imagination works upward into the realm of the invisible. He endures the ditch and the spade through foresight of the day when his playmate will come over the sea; when together they will own a little house, and ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... John Barker had an unshaved beard, a scowling eye, and a red face; his dress consisted of a blue woollen shirt, coarse blue trousers grimed in mud, and a low-crowned black hat; on his shoulder he carried a spade and pickaxe. As he walked along he was joined by others of an equally unprepossessing appearance, and found many more already assembled at the scene of their ...
— Adventures of a Sixpence in Guernsey by A Native • Anonymous
... said, smiling. 'Spade-husbandry alone is very poor earth-scratching; and I don't really know whether, between that and my gun, we could have ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very punctwell in paying for Jack's schooling, as I often heard ould Terry M'Phaudeen say, who told me the story. Jack, indeed, grew up a fine slip; and for hurling, foot-ball playing, and lepping, hadn't his likes in the five quarters of the parish. It's he that knew how to handle a spade and a raping-hook, and what was betther nor all that, he was kind and tindher to his poor ould mother, and would let her want for nothing. Before he'd go to his day's work in the morning, he'd be sure to bring home from the clear-spring well that ran out of the other side of the rock, a pitcher ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... 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 ...
— Subjectivity • Norman Spinrad
... industry in his manhood as his father did a quarter of a century before. Take the first, in which he compares slothfulness to rust, which will consume iron tools or machinery faster than their constant use will. As the use of a hoe or a spade keeps it polished, so the habitual exercise of the powers of human nature preserves them in a good condition. A key that is cast aside soon rusts, and is spoiled, but "the used key is always bright." It is more fit for use because ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... 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 himself ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... lessons of the Somme Battle costing many lives had brought about the necessity for the institution of moppers up. The rear waves were also to act as carrying parties. One man had to carry a coil of wire, another a spade, another a screw picket, and so on. The reason for this was, that when the enemy trenches had been captured, the enemy might cut off all supplies by means of an intense barrage on no man's land, and it was necessary for the attacking troops to have sufficient material ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... 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 ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... don't let us deceive ourselves, the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After all, the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you can,—but the moon will still lead the tides, and the winds will ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... defence of their adopted country. The man of money, the man of law, the merchant, the artist, and the artisan swelled the lines hastening to the scene of action, armed either with musket, pick, or spade. Added to these was seen Dickson's long and dusky brigade of colored men, cheerfully wending their way to labor on the fortifications, evidently holding it their especial right to put whatever impediments ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... bed in the garden had been dug and prepared, the spade was found thrust two feet deep into the ground, without any trace being seen of him who had thus stuck it in; but they observed that on the spade was a riband, and by the spade were two pieces of two soles, which the girl had locked up ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... the clay in other parts, and the bark of some of the trees is in perfect preservation. The condition of the wood is very curious. It is like very hard cheese, so that you can readily cut slices with a spade, and yet where more of the trunk has been preserved some parts are very hard. The trees are, I fancy, Beech and Oak. Could you identify slices if I were to send ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... went to work With spade and rake and hoe; I planted every seed I had, And wondered if ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... as it was daylight, Granny Fox slipped out to watch for Farmer Brown's boy, for she felt sure that he would come back to the house they had left, and sure enough he did. He brought a spade and dug the house open, and all the time old Granny Fox was watching him from behind a fence corner and laughing to think that she had been smart enough to move in ...
— Old Granny Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... Vieuxbois, among high art and painted glass, spade farms, and model smell-traps, rubricalities and sanitary reforms, and all other inventions, possible and impossible, for "stretching the old formula to meet the new fact," as your ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... down the stream was all once part of the hill on which you stand." I confess I was very much ashamed of myself when she said that. For that is the history of the whole mystery. Madam How is digging away with her soft spade, water. She has a harder spade, or rather plough, the strongest and most terrible of all ploughs; but that, I am glad to say, she has laid by in ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... gusto;[2] and all this dished up with a sauce of humor often too racy and piquant for our delicate twentieth-century palate, which has acquired a refined taste for suggestive innuendo, but never relishes calling a spade by its own name. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... there stood Kaeloikamalama with the digging spade called Kapahaelihonua, The Knife-that-cuts-the-earth, twenty fathoms its length, four men to span it. Thought the lizard, "A slaughterer this." There was Kaeloikamalama swinging the digging spade ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Glancing about him, he saw a small broken branch lying on the ground at no great distance; and securing it he cut away with his knife the sides of the larger end so as to produce a flat surface, making of the branch a very narrow-bladed wooden spade, in fact. Reaching as far forward as he could, he plunged the blade of his extemporised spade into the sandy bottom of the pool, pressing it gently down into the sand until he could get it no deeper, when ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... equals, they can also yield to them with their inferiors; and it is this yielding to our tempers which enables them to master us. But under institutions where all are equal, where no one admits the superiority of another, even if he really be so, where the man with the spade in his hand will beard the millionaire, and where you are compelled to submit to the caprice and insolence of a domestic, or lose his services, it is evident that every man must from boyhood have learnt ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the sward lies flat and square as in a garden, levelled, and in summer fringed with clusters of the nettle that grows over the ruins of man with a haste that seems to mock the brevity of his interests, and the husbandman and the forester for generations have put no spade to its soil. A cill or cell we call it in the language; and the saying goes among the people of the neighbourhood that on the eve of Saint Patrick bells ring in this glade in the forest, sweet, soft, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... horse," began Olly; "and my big ball, and my whistle, and my wheelbarrow, and my spade, and all my books, and the ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the spade just where I could find it. I'd got everything planned and right. I 'ired a little trap in Colchester, and pretended I wanted to go to Ipswich and stop the night, and come back next day, and the chap ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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 out ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... he lef' heap-sight 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
... whom he then shot. To Sandeau and Gautier 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 • Frederick Lawton
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
