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More "Digging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through the railings, and saw some boys lying on the turf, with their rifles beside them. They did not move nor look up, but lay very still and quiet, with a strange, preoccupied expression on their faces. A little further on, other lads were digging up ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... off to, matey? With all your fine secrets? I'd like to know!" he said jokingly, digging Dollops in the ribs, and giving a loud guffaw. "Some girl, ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the final move of the main camp was made, and we established ourselves in the cirque at the head of the Muldrow Glacier, at an elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred feet, more than half-way up the mountain. After digging a level place in the glacier and setting up the tent, a wall of snow blocks was built all round it, and a little house of snow blocks, a regular Eskimo igloo, was built near by to serve as a cache. Some details of our camping may be of interest. The damp from the glacier ice had incommoded ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... suppose I can get papa to go," said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to Carlsbad with Burnamy—probably on the way from Cuxhaven. She looked up from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground. "You didn't meet him here ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... imagine that the debris was the measure of the music, while what it really was, was the measure of the waste of the strings, when they were made the instrument of the music. If a spade is used in digging, the spade wastes in proportion to every spadeful of earth it is made to lift. The more it digs, the more it wastes. If we could arrange that a stream of fine steel particles flowed into the spade, to replace the waste ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... 'Fairy Knowes' in the side of the hill near the turning of the road from Reay Wick to Safester, and found that these wonderful relics were merely natural formations. The workmen were soon convinced of this, and our digging had the effect of proving to them that the fairies had nothing to do with at least two of these hillocks." The same may surely be said of that favourite and important fairy haunt Tomnahurich, near Inverness, though Mr. MacRitchie seems to think that an investigation, ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... began to dig away at Mr. Woodchuck's hole. You see, Mr. Woodchuck was smaller than Tommy Fox, and since the underground tunnel that led to his home was only big enough to admit him, Tommy was obliged to make it larger. Though Mr. Woodchuck's hole was under a shady oak tree, Tommy found digging to be somewhat warm work, so he took off his neat, red coat and hung ...
— The Tale of Tommy Fox • Arthur Scott Bailey
... to be a party entrusted by the people. This third termer could have been of more value to the country had he lent his advice and honest opinion to his party and our president who eagerly sought his advice, for a man's honest advice is his ideas and convictions but with man's ideas it is like digging a pan of sand from a river from the gold regions, the sand must be sifted and filtered, there might be one or more grains of gold found in it. A man's ideas must pass through the brains of other men, to be sifted and filtered and ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... barns were burning, sad to relate, my husband just then came through the woods, and being spied by the barbarians, they gave chase and soon overtook him. Alas! for what a fate was he reserved! Digging a deep pit, they tied his arms to his side and put him into it and then rammed and beat the earth all around his body up to his neck, his head only appearing above ground. They then scalped him and kindled a ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Kop, at about 4,500 yards, mine being in the centre. I was in charge all day and fired shots at intervals. The wind was too high for balloon reconnoitring. My first shot, a shrapnel, at the left part of Spion Kop, disabled twenty of the enemy digging in the trenches, so we were afterwards told by native scouts; and we were praised by those looking on for our accurate firing. We had now our telescopic sights on the guns, and very good ones on the whole they were, although we ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... he nevertheless seemed to comprehend, for, brightening up immediately, he turned from her, came down the steps with tremulous haste, muttering to himself meanwhile, seized a spade that stood leaning against the steps, passed by the carriage without a glance, and began digging furiously at one side of the yard. The old woman watched him for a while, with a self-absorption that was entirely oblivious of the visitors, and then ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... solemnly. "It came down the valley like a wall. And my burros got away; but the Colonel, he found me—I was digging a hole in ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... quite right. And it happened that the chipmunk was out that night, digging up some nuts for his Christmas dinner, a little sad because he had no presents to give his children; and he found the three toys. He took them home to the little chipmunks, and they were tremendously pleased. That was only fair, because if it hadn't been for the ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... from that particular ancestor and he had been inordinately vain of his wife's hands. Mademoiselle had been ordered never to let the child "spread her hand by opening door knobs or touching the fire-stones—or—er— any clumsy thing—" and it was droll to see the little girl, digging in her bit of garden with those lovely hands incased in long flopping cotton gloves—not to forget the broad sunbonnet that shaded her earnest little face. In short, he was jealous of her complexion and her manners—But beyond that and the desire that ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... all that. They think of me now as one of themselves, and stay the night with me when they pass through Melihovo. Add to that, that we have bought ourselves a new comfortable covered carriage, have made a new road, so that now we don't drive through the village. We are digging a pond.... Anything else? In fact hitherto everything has been new and interesting, but how it will be later on, I don't know. There is snow already, it is cold, but I don't feel drawn to Moscow. So far I have not had any ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... took a solemn promise to keep it a secret. We all live close to the water; and having everything handy, we made up our minds we'd make a smugglers' cave. We got to work lively; and while some of the fellows were digging out the bank, others chopped down small trees and bushes, and made a covered archway to crawl under, so that the opening of the cave couldn't be seen. We pulled the young twigs and vines down over ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... shown something that he calls 'outlandish.' Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith's lunatic digging in Swaffer's kitchen garden. They had found out he could use ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... the lad soon discovered that gold-digging was hard work for brawny and seasoned men, and after a few feeble attempts in spots abandoned as worthless he gave up the effort, and again began to drift; and even in Pine-tree Gulch it was not difficult to get a living. At first he tried rocking cradles, but the ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... inquisitive that he soon became unpopular at the farm-house, and on several occasions all but had his neck wrung for wrongdoing. One day he picked the eldest brother's fiddle-strings in two; another time he was discovered digging holes in the newly baked loaves of bread that had been set in a window to cool; and, again, he stole hot potatoes out of a kettle on the kitchen stove. But whenever danger threatened, the little girl championed him valiantly. So time after time he escaped merited punishment, which was to ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... figures employed are taken from the yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture and are the estimated farm price on December 1 of each year. Can the commodities be sold for the December farm price? Will potatoes sold at the time of digging bring less than the December price? Will wheat or maize held until May bring a higher price? To what extent, by the judicious holding of products, can ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... a contest with Reedville, but Joe was not called on. Toe Barter, who had gained his nickname from the queer habit he had of digging a hole for his left foot, before delivering the ball, opened the contest, and did so well that he was kept in until the game was "in the refrigerator." Then Joe was given his chance, but there was little incentive to try, with the Cardinals so ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... digging their cooking trenches somewhat aside from the main camp, and making all necessary arrangements for bivouacking, Heideck had an opportunity of admiring the magnificence with which these Indian ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... Aram, who was the chief contriver and agent in the murder, moved his habitation to another part of the country. In the summer of the present year, Houseman being employed, among other labourers, in repairing the public highway, they, in digging for gravel by the road side, discovered the skeleton of a human creature, which the majority supposed to be the bones of Daniel Clarke. This opinion was no sooner broached, than Houseman, as it were by some supernatural impulse which he could not resist, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of an old flat park of ancient pasture as can be found in this country. The golf club have been allowed to do what they can to remedy this defect of Nature by converting the Old Park into a sand dune, and this they have done by digging holes and throwing up dozens, or scores, of bunkers. But the margins of the park are quite unspoilt, and the river-front is the wildest and the freest piece of Nature left near London. It is completely bounded by an ancient moat, beyond which lies the towing-path, ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... explored the mines of Golconda; but an Englishman of the name of Methold visited them as early as 1622, and found thirty thousand laborers working away for the rich Marcandar, who paid three hundred thousand pagodas annually to the king for the privilege of digging in a single mine. The first mine visited by Tavernier was that of Raolconda, a five-days' journey from Golconda. The manner of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... early the next morning, and the bondi, who had got all the tools for digging ready, went with Grettir to the howe. Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; Audun implored him not to go ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... his divine grace, he unreservedly from that moment devoted himself. At length, falling into a slumber, he was favored with a vision, which it was usual with him afterward to relate.. He seemed to himself to be digging a pit for the foundation of a house, and that, as often as he stopped for taking a little breath, which was four times, he was commanded each time to dig deeper, till at length he was told he might desist, the pit being deep enough to receive the intended foundation, on ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... earth; and some from fear of the Kshatriyas, began to give away their wealth unto (other) Brahmanas; while some amongst them duly gave unto the Kshatriyas whatever they wanted. It happened, however, that some Kshatriyas, in digging as they pleased at the house of particular Bhargava, came upon a large treasure. And the treasure was seen by all those bulls among Kshatriyas who had been there. Enraged at what they regarded as the deceitful behaviour of the Bhrigus, the Kshatriyas insulted the Brahmanas, though the latter ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... Mount St. Bernard, England, are bound by their rule to labor with their hands so many hours a day. No exception is made for the abbot himself; and when we visited the establishment a few years ago we had to wait some time for the abbot, who was digging in a distant field. Scholar and savant are not exempt any more than the humblest member of the brotherhood; and as it is a very learned order, and attracts many recent converts to Catholicism, it is not infrequently ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... the only works of Providence within us? What words suffice to praise or set them forth? Had we but understanding, should we ever cease hymning and blessing the Divine Power, both openly and in secret, and telling of His gracious gifts? Whether digging or ploughing or eating, should we not ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... we saw a man digging a grave, and, scrambling out of the hole, he let us into the churchyard, which was crowded full of monuments. There was a footpath through this crowded churchyard, sufficiently well worn to guide us to the grave of Burns, but a woman ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... that he got up and walked back to where the troopers were digging. He saw the body of a woman being lowered into a grave and the sight reminded him of what Slingerland had said. He saw the scout searching around and he went over ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... the left, the direction from which the voice came, and observed that it proceeded from a man who was digging potatoes. I answered him politely; when ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... ceased, and was followed by a louder and more mysterious noise. In that silent night it sounded like raking and digging. Three or four mysterious visitants seemed to be ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... them quickly. They were mild-looking men, quietly, almost somberly dressed. Something about their clothing jogged Dennison's memory unpleasantly, but he didn't have time to place the recollection. The automatic was digging ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... garden; and upon it was lying a piece of sheet copper, bearing this inscription: "August 27, 1800. Chr. Dixson—ship Elligood"; which solved the difficulty of the felled trees and the disappearance of captain Vancouver's bottle. On digging in this place I found that fresh water of a high colour, but well tasted, might be obtained; wood was abundant, and the depth of the entrance admitted of the ship being made fast to the shore; so that this was a situation ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... by way of encouraging the youngster, Finn would lower himself to the ground, head well out, and, covering his eyes and muzzle with his two fore legs, would allow Jan to plunge like a little battering-ram upon the top of his head, furiously digging into the wolfhound's wiry coat in futile pursuit of flesh-hold for his teeth, and still exhausting fifty per cent. of his energies in maintaining ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... filling it. Oak, beech, and chestnut, rotten and brown alike, mingled themselves in one fibrous mass. Manston descended into the midst of them, placed his sack on the ground, and raking the leaves aside into a large heap, began digging. Anne softly drew nearer, crept into a bush, and turning her head to survey the rest, missed the man who had dropped behind, and whom we have called the first watcher. Concluding that he, too, had hidden himself, she turned her attention to the second watcher, the other woman, who had ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... He accepted the position with definite ideas of reform; but he lacked skill in the adaptation of means to ends. He was determined to show no favoritism to wealth and social position, and he went perhaps too far in the opposite direction. One day when the workmen were digging the cellar of Gray's Hall, President Hill threw off his coat, seized a shovel, and used it vigorously for half an hour or more. This was intended as an example to teach the students the dignity of labor; but they did not understand it so. At the faculty ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... being mined. The men were well paid. Yet there was discontent. Agitators were at work among them, stirring up trouble, seeking to take their minds off their work and hurt the production of the copper that was needed to save the lives of men like those who were digging it out of the ground. They were thinkin', there, in yon days, that men could live for themselves and ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... and rather likes it for a change, and when he can partake of a dessert of honey or molasses his enjoyment knows no bounds. Frogs, fresh water clams, green corn, and a host of other delicacies come within the range of his diet, and he may sometimes be seen digging from the sand the eggs of the soft-shelled turtle, which he greedily sucks. We cordially recommend the coon as a pet. He becomes very docile, and is full of cunning ways, and if the young ones can be traced to their hiding-place in some hollow tree, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... anything that has taken place in critical study. On the other hand, the net result of such studies as archaeology has been the confirmation of much that was once disputed. Sir William Ramsay is authority for saying that the spade of the excavator is to-day digging the grave of many enemies of ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... funny for so early in the morning," said John shortly. "After you've broken your back digging for a couple of hours maybe you won't feel quite ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... de Warrenne—to whom the name "Trooper Matthewson" now seemed the only one he had ever had—the craved necessity of life and sanity was work, occupation, mental and physical labour. He would have blessed the man who sentenced him to commence the digging of a trench ten miles long and a yard deep for morning and evening labour, and to take over all the accounts of each squadron, for employment in the heat of the day. There was no man in the regiment so indefatigable, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... crowd of curious natives who had come out to watch us, and did not seem particularly friendly—as they were not at all sure that we were not Germans—to get all their friends together with pickaxes and shovels and start digging entrenchments where we showed them. It was Sunday afternoon, and all the miners were loafing about with nothing to do. The idea rapidly caught on, and soon they were hurrying off home for their tools, whilst we got hold of the best-dressed and most authoritative-looking ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... the sharks were so numerous that we dared not venture. However, we took it for granted, as we had found deep water in shore, that we should be sure to do so in the offing; and we now got our boat upon the rollers which we had made, by digging away the sand from beneath her, and a trench to the water's edge. We had been two months on the island when all ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... The digging took a long while, the frozen clods of earth fell with a scattering thud, the shadow of the hole deepened by imperceptible degrees. Once the labor stopped, the sack was lowered into the ragged grave; but the opening was too shallow, and the rise ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... American friend, Mr. A.M. Erskine, at my instigation made the journey, and according to him it would take a month to properly explore the locality. The man whom the Sultan of Kutei sent with him threw rice on the statues, and the accompanying Dayaks showed fear of them. By digging to a depth of about a metre and a half through the layer of guano, a pavement of hewn stone was found which rested on the floor of the cave. That the trip proved interesting is evident from the following description ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... ever see the Devil, With his little spade and shovel, Digging 'taties by the dozen With ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... very remarkable—almost the only statue he mentions at all. Ghiberti describes two or three antique statues with such enthusiasm that one concludes he was familiar with very few. In fact, before the great digging movement which enthralled the Renaissance, antique sculpture was rare. But little of Poggio's collection came from Rome: Even Lorenzo de' Medici got most of his from the provinces. A century later Sabba del Castiglione complains of having ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... heard the lion's terrific roars, and knew that the charge had come. An instant later the Hon. Morison broke upon his vision, racing like mad for safety. The man lay flat upon his pony's back hugging the animal's neck tightly with both arms and digging the spurs into his sides. An instant later the second ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and republic had sufficed to make Rome great; and in five centuries of imperial sway the people-king was to be devoured down to its last muscles. There was the immensity of the territory, the more distant provinces gradually pillaged and exhausted; there was the fisc consuming everything, digging the pit of fatal bankruptcy; and there was the degeneration of the people, poisoned by the scenes of the circus and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and clutching the foretop. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... anything about poor Edward [300] except to thank you most heartily for your disinterested kindness to him. I will not bother you about our journey, which was very pleasant and successful. You will see it all, including my proposals for renewed diamond digging, written in a book ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... about A-bal-ka's underground dwelling. The way he found out was this: Uncle Mark and Sam the hired man were digging stones on the hillside in the edge of the woods for the foundations of a new barn. While at this work, they uncovered the home of one of A-bal-ka's brothers. It was made up of a long, winding passageway, ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... the elder, the great naturalist, venturing too near the mountain to investigate the phenomenon, lost his life. [Footnote: In the year 1713, sixteen centuries after the destruction of the cities, the ruins were discovered by some persons engaged in digging a well, and since then extensive excavations have been made, which have uncovered a large part of Pompeii, and revealed to us the streets, homes, theatres, baths, shops, temples, and various monuments of the ancient city—all of which presents ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... others. Children are usually suckled for about two years, but are soon able, in a great measure, to procure their own food, especially shellfish, and when strong enough to use the stick employed in digging up roots, they are supposed to be able to shift ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... uncared-for childhood. He had been out in the world, and had found it even harder-hearted than his own home, which now he idealized in the first flush of returning to it. Again he saw himself, a blond-headed little fellow with stocking down at heel, climbing the steep staircase, or digging in the clay at the front gate with the air full of the breath of lilacs. That same penetrating perfume, blown through the open hall-door as he spoke, nearly brought the tears to his eyes. He had looked forward for ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so much that it was hard to use the small shovel, but the digging of foxholes had given him experience and the ground was still soft from the gravediggers' work. He stopped once, as the Moon came out briefly. Again, a sound in the darkness above left him hovering and sick in the hole. But it must have been only ...
— Dead Ringer • Lester del Rey
... time is left to me to write PROFESSIONALLY, seeing that I cannot keep awake after midnight and that I want to spend all my evening with my family; but this lack of time stimulates me and makes me find a true pleasure in digging away; it is like a forbidden fruit that I taste ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... do, an' you're all right enough. But me an' my mates is going to keep this field for white men—it ain't goin' to be no Chinaman's digging'. So ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... moments Cameron lay stupid with weariness and pain till his weariness overpowered his pain and he sank into sleep. He was recalled to consciousness by the sensation of something digging into his ribs. As he sat up half asleep a low "hist!" startled him wide awake. His heart leaped as he heard out of the darkness a whispered word, "Jerry here." Cameron rolled over and came close against the little half-breed, ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... away, and the present edifice was built. The bill of costs for clearing the ground is still extant in Fetter Lane. Twelve men, who were paid twopence a day wages, were employed on the work for twenty days. The cost of pulling down the old chapel was forty-six shillings and eight pence; that of digging foundations for the new chapel forty shillings. That chapel has suffered from wardens and lieutenants; yet the shell is of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... deepened a new method of excavation was employed. It has now reached a depth of an inch, only the extremity of the insect's body appearing, and the two hindermost legs clinging to surrounding earth for purchase. The deep digging is now accompanied by a continual buzzing noise, resembling that produced by a bluebottle fly held captive between one's fingers. At intervals of about ten or fifteen seconds the wasp would quickly back out of the burrow, bringing a load ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... of exorcisers distributed among several churches. Lastly, Louviers, as we shall presently see, put a little new life into this fading fashion by inventing midnight scenes, in which the demons who possessed the nuns began digging by the glimmer of torches, until they drew forth certain charms from the holes wherein ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... in life that the patient would never have left the table alive. Don't you see I've had to fight for my patient's very life,—or rather for his slim chance to live,—knowing all the while that I was probably digging my own grave. Easy enough to let Van Horn operate, in the beginning, and kill the patient and prove himself right,—if he would have done it. Easy enough to pull out of the case and let them have somebody who would operate on Van ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... that old black lazybones to come here with his spade this minute. I told him about digging in this mulch yesterday before the dahlias sprouted, and he hasn't done it. I'm not going to do it for him, like I put the fertilizer around the lilacs, just to save him from Goodloe. Tell him to come right here to me, ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... happening. He must enlarge his bit of trench, and be ready to meet the enemy when he himself is attacked. Therefore, if you ask a veteran of Mons about the battle, all he will be able to tell you as likely as not is, "Marching, and digging, and then ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... such communion, her spirit drank freely from the fountains of sublime knowledge; which, "like the purest waters of the earth, can be obtained only by digging deep,—but when they are found, they rise up ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... on his own Moslem over-cloak he threw that over her shoulders and, digging down into his bag for a spare head-dress, snatched her hat off and bound on the white kerchief in its place with the usual double, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... at the time, and the people were kept busy digging clams to sustain life in order to raise Indian corn enough to give them sufficient strength to pull clams enough the following winter to get them through till the next corn crop should give them strength to dig for clams again. ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... celebrated anatomist, says that there was to be seen at one time in the suburbs of Saint Germain the tomb of the giant Isoret, who was reputed to be 20 feet tall; and that in 1509, in digging ditches at Rouen, near the Dominicans, they found a stone tomb containing a monstrous skeleton, the skull of which would hold a bushel of corn; the shin-bone measured about 4 feet, which, taken as a guide, would make his height over 17 feet. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Sundays—they built it in about three months, and then all the winter they were planting big trees, and when spring came and everything began to be green there were already avenues to the new house, a gardener and two labourers in white aprons were digging near it, there was a little fountain, and a globe of looking-glass flashed so brilliantly that it was painful to look at. The house had already been named the ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... these sylvan occasions I awoke, not with a graceful start, like the story-book ladies, but with a grunt. Sis was digging me in the ribs with her toe. I looked up to see her standing over me, a foaming tumbler of something in her hand. I felt that it was eggy and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... far from the hotel for fear they'd get run over or arrested or fall into the new subway or something calamitous like that. Of course New York was looking as usual, the streets being full of tired voters tearing up the car-tracks and digging first-line ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... generations. It is constantly rubbed with lime, either to preserve it from decay or to keep it pure. No coffin is made use of; the body being simply wrapped in white cloth, particularly of the sort called hummums. In forming the grave (kubur), after digging to a convenient depth they make a cavity in the side, at bottom, of sufficient dimensions to contain the body, which is there deposited on its right side. By this mode the earth literally lies light upon it; and the cavity, after strewing flowers in it, they stop up by two ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... appears to have been fruitless, but the truth could wait even a hundred years; for, about thirty years ago some workmen, who were digging at a spot at the entrance to the village by the Royston road, actually dug up the brass label of the "Caxton letter-bag," and thus confirmed the suspicions of those who had fixed upon the village on the hill as the neighbourhood towards which the stolen mail-bag had ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... mysterious golden visitor" came to him, as a dividend from another's toil. Mr Rockefeller remembers with the greatest pleasure the lesson which he learned as a boy, "that he could get as much interest for $50, loaned at seven per cent, as he could earn by digging potatoes ten days." The lesson of Shylock is not profound, but its mastery saves a world of trouble. Combined with a light load of scruples, it will fill the largest coffers; and it has been sufficient to carry the millionaires of America to the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... outstanding episodes; the perilous corvee of bringing up fresh supplies of cartridges, the digging of an advance trench under fire, the pinioning of a comrade ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... charging madly at them yelling "Fag!" When somehow something gives and your feet drag. You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain And find ... you're digging tunnels through the hay In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day. Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb! You're back in the old sailor suit again. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... making of a tall fellow in thee! If ever thou art weary of making weapons and wouldst use them instead, seek out John Fulford, of the Badger troop, and thou shalt have a welcome. Our name is the Badger, because there's no troop like us for digging out mines beneath ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answered Tom, pleasantly, "that we shall want some wood near the cabin next winter, instead of digging it out of the snow, and I'm fixing a ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... Sentinels patrolled the beach; drums beat; soldiers marching and counter-marching; great cannons being drawn along the beach, hundreds of men pulling them by long ropes, or drawn by mule teams. Across the bay we could see on Sullivan's Island men and soldiers building and digging out foundations for forts. Morris' Island was lined from the lower point to the light house, with batteries of heavy guns. To the youthful eye of a Southerner, whose mind had been fired by Southern sentiment and literature of the day, by reading the stories ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... just a joke, William," says I. "Don't pay no attention to it. You see, Peanut's been over there again, digging up some ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... contain four crickets. That is the amount of food necessary for a larva during its evolution, and these insects are in fact large enough to supply a considerable amount of nourishment. When the Sphex interrupts digging operations it is to fly on a hunting expedition. It soon returns with a cricket it has seized, holding it by one antenna which it turns round in its jaws. It is a heavy burden for the slender Sphex to bear. Sometimes on foot, dragging its burden after it, sometimes ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... they receive so many things in exchange. The old men, however, do not laugh. They are unwilling that the state should be corrupted by the vicious customs of slaves and foreigners. Therefore they do business at the gates, and sell those whom they have taken in war or keep them for digging ditches and other hard work without the city, and for this reason they always send four bands of soldiers to take care of the fields, and with them there are the labourers. They go out of the four gates from which roads with walls on both sides of them ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... ropes with the clutch of death. Something cracked, something rapped smartly against a wall. He heard the pulley of the cradle hum on its rope. He heard the aeronauts shout. He felt a pair of knees digging into his back.... He was sweeping headlong through the air, falling through the air. All his strength was in his hands. He would have screamed but he had ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... dig a well in his court-yard deep enough to give a supply of water all the year round. In spite, however, of these magnificent promises, no one could get the reward; for the palace was on a lofty hill, and after digging a foot under ground there was a solid granite rock, ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... Phil," he answered, digging the tears out of his eyes with his knuckles. "Phil's all right," ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... though well aware that since the gold discovery California has given a hundredfold more than she has received. Her people were accustomed to take care of themselves, and managed on the whole to get along. A general conflagration was not a new thing. Four times during gold-digging days San Francisco was destroyed by fire, and each time new houses were going up before the ashes were cold. True, there was not so much to burn in those days, but it was all the people had; there was not so much to rebuild, and ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... thrown their cigarettes to the ground, scrambled to their feet. Johnny, sober-faced and round-eyed, was gazing intently up at the man; but Albert, feigning indifference, stood digging his toe into the ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... ringers' gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their top-most storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never intended to carry pyramids or spires. They overlook an immense distance in those flat, peat-digging, black and green regions, with rather cheerless rivers, and are the centre of an architectural region wider still—of a group to which Soissons, far beyond the woods of Compiegne, belongs, with St. Quentin, and, towards ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... he shows me some antique coins that he had found, and when my guide explains that I am an American schoolmaster, he manifests exceedingly his delight. He almost pulls me out into his little yard where he had been digging, and where he had unearthed an inscribed cylindrical block of marble about two feet in diameter and four feet in length. The lettering is in Greek. He thinks it must tell of hidden treasure. And so it does to me, but not of the kind for which he is looking. The inscription is partially ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... the greater part of all travelling is done and, in particular, that established routes of regular communication are maintained. To leave the trail after a day's journey, to wander miles into the hills, to herd the deer while they browse from slope to slope, digging the snow away in search of their provender, is wholly incompatible with any sustained or regular travel. The reindeer is a timid and almost defenceless creature. Wolves and lynxes prey upon him. One lynx is thought ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... said the general, with gracious tolerance. "It wasn't till I stopped the fool digging and hunting around for gold that I began to get ahead. I threw away the pick and shovel and opened a hotel." (There were two or three sleeping-rooms of a kind in that "hotel," but it was rather a saloon ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... see from the feet up. German armies had twice been almost at the gates of Paris. The first time they were driven back they dug themselves in. That was in 1915. The second time, in the spring of 1918, they were allowed no time for digging in. From the July days of 1918, when American soldiers at Chateau Thierry beat the best troops that ever were trained in Prussia, they were kept going. How industriously may be inferred from the story of the young corporal who was sitting on the roadside trying to tie the soles of his shoes ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... emptied it often upon the sofa, till she had done: when she was very well satisfied to find the number of measures amounted to so many as they did, and went to tell her husband, who had almost finished digging the hole. While Ali Baba was burying the gold, his wife, to shew her exactness and diligence to her sister-in-law, carried the measure back again, but without taking notice that a piece of gold had stuck to the bottom. "Sister," said she, giving it to her again, "you see that I ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore. And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging, dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... both from Canada and Europe live there at this day; but the Canadians make three-fourths at least. The Jesuits have the Cure there, with a fine habitation and a mill; in digging the foundation of which last, a quarry of orbicular flat stones was found, about two inches in diameter, of the shape of a buffoon's cap, with six sides, whose groove was set with small buttons of the size of the head of a minikin or small pin. Some of these ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... Trotter, digging his toes in the sand, "what a chump a man is when it comes to paddling his own canoe? I don't know. Of course, I'm not making a living here. I'm on the bum. But—well, I wish you could have seen that Timotea. Every man ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... those days." We continued silent, until at last our guide called "Stop!" so suddenly, as to make us start. "Do you see that bank just under the arch of the bridge we stand on? The hardest day's work I ever had was digging an old rat out of that bank. This is Sandy End; and that house opposite is Sandford ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... what he'd do. After showing me his muddy fingers, and crawling along and digging them as hard as he could into the soil to tear out the weeds, all at once he would kick his heels up in the air like a donkey. Then he would go on weeding again, look to see if I was watching him, and leave his basket and run down between two onion beds on all-fours like a dog, run ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... work, and armed with broom, dustpan, pail, and cleaning cloths, she ascends to the upper regions as soon as she has reduced the lower to their everyday nicety. The daily brushing up with broom or carpet sweeper removes the surface dirt, but sweeping day means a good "digging out." She commences operations by sweeping out the closet and wiping off the floor with a cloth wrung out of hot borax water. Then she brushes down, rolls or folds all curtains and draperies, and fastens them up as near the pole as possible, perhaps slipping a case ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... for the coffin, the latter usually made by some local carpenter, there were costs for notifying the countryside, costs for mourning bands, sitting up with the corpse, and the fee for the funeral sermon. If burial was in the churchyard, there was the cost of digging and filling the grave. The cost of a winding sheet of Holland (coarse unbleached linen), in 1652, was 100 pounds of tobacco. The cost of the funeral sermon in two instances in York County in 1667, was two pounds sterling each and in ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... of calm numbness of discouragement. "But that ain't anyways surprising. We don't hear much about anything on Hue and Cry till they come and tell us. Speaking for myself, I ain't so awful much fussed up. I've got a house-bo't to take my wife and young ones on, and we'll keep on digging clams for trawlers—sixty cents a bucket, shucked, and we can dig and shuck a bucket a day, all hands turning to. We won't starve. But I pity the poor critters that 'ain't got a house-bo't. Looks like they'd need ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... you often enough, is a great business, a vast industry, in these days. Someone said, and he was right, that they did not win victories any more—that they manufactured them, as all sorts of goods are manufactured. Digging, and building—that is the great work ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... in the foreground a slave is seen standing in a pit digging and throwing up shovelfuls of earth; on the opposite side of the pit stands MEDEA, before a black chest which is strangely decorated with gold; in this chest she keeps laying various utensils during the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... are you going to cut me? Look here, my dear fellow, you and Mr. Herrick must have some tea at my digging. It is a few steps farther. The mare looks hot. Why don't you put her up at 'The Plough' and let her have a feed and a rub down?" And as Cedric approved of this arrangement, Malcolm was obliged to acquiesce, though he was inwardly ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... moderation. When we read the cold, deliberate chapters of Ammon, Eichhorn, and Michaelis, we unconsciously identify ourselves with their generation, and exclaim, "Surely there will never be a step beyond this; the knife can have no edge for a deeper incision." As Neander toiled in his study, digging up the buried treasures of the past and enriching them with the John-like purity of his own heart in order that he might faithfully interpret the divine guidance of the church, he no doubt rejoiced in the conviction that the Rationalists had achieved ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... by so pestilential a manufactory, by the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world, I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely short of the evil. No man who has attended to the particulars ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had established the nature of the ground, and digging was begun on November 4th. That day Barbicane called his foremen ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... were given for combined portable threshing and finishing machines, and cream separators (hand and power). In 1892, at Warwick, the competitions related to ploughs—single furrow (a) for light land, (b) for strong land, (c) for press drill and broad-cast sowing; two-furrow; three-furrow; digging (a) for light land, (b) for heavy land; and one-way ploughs. In 1893, at Chester, self-binding harvesters and sheep-shearing machines (power) were the appliances respectively in competition. In 1894, at Cambridge, the awards were for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in the backyard was very poor, so Jack decided to cultivate only a strip twenty feet long and eight feet wide. He dug out all the soil to the depth of two feet. His father lent him the use of a horse and wagon, and gave him from the barns whatever fertilizer he needed. The digging was a long, tedious piece of work. It was hard, too; but the boy kept at it. Any piece of land can be used if a boy has a mind ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... muttered to himself, digging both spurs into his horse; "I'll not prove faithless to her first request—not if I know it. Good Lord! how ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... experience lay on the south side of the river, and the district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly English than ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... first—ev'rybody's that; Golfing was his hardest labor then; Now he's in the Service (where you don't grow fat), Digging, drilling, ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... this visit a meeting of those concerned took place at the beldame's house. She herself pointed to the place where she thought the vault lay, and with all due legal formality digging was commenced, and the place was found not far off. At first glance the vault seemed empty. In one corner, however, was found, covered lightly over with withered ferns, many bottles of wine and—a ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... you will relieve the earth of the bad. Suppose then that I lose my life in this way. You will die a good man, doing a noble act. For since he must certainly die, of necessity a man must be found doing something, either following the employment of a husbandman, or digging, or trading, or serving in a consulship, or suffering from indigestion or from diarrhoea. What then do you wish to be doing when you are found by death? I, for my part, would wish to be found doing something ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... Bud, genially enough, as he surveyed the newcomer, from the top of his broad-brimmed range hat to the pawing hoofs of his black steed, for the horse was impatiently digging ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... named, the apostles being first, and the prophets who were first in time being last in order of mention, confirms this explanation, for the two co-operating classes are named in the order in which they lie in the foundation. Digging down you come to the more recent first, to the earlier second, and deep and massive, beneath all, to the corner-stone on whom all rests, in whom all are united together. Following the Apostle's order we may note the process of building; beneath that, the foundation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... and sliding down the hill, digging their heels into the ground, clinging to rocks and trees to check their swift descent, laughing at their wild plunges and gyrations. At the house, when they had rested a while on the veranda, Marion dismissed Smythe as quickly as she could without abruptness; ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... were industriously digging dandelions on the side lawn. I inconsistently let the dear, cheery flowers grow and bloom their fill in the early season, when they lie close to the sward, but when they begin to stretch awkward, rubbery ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a silver mine, and some digging in it for treasure. If you will come, with a little pains you may richly provide ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was about as appropriately placed there as Arion would have been in a tin-shop, but he kept his humorous outlook on life, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... we had a little garden, father, with double daisies in, like Mrs. Winthrop's," said Eppie, when they were out in the lane; "only they say it 'ud take a deal of digging and bringing fresh soil—and you couldn't do that, could you, father? Anyhow, I shouldn't like you to do it, for it 'ud be too hard ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... following up some wild sheep, I came upon two bears very busily engaged in digging up the snow where an avalanche had fallen. Being hid from their sight, I determined to wait some little time to ascertain why they were digging. I accordingly placed myself behind a rock, and allowed ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... Heywood walked beside his son as he led the mare to the spot where Scudamore perforce awaited his return. They found him stretched on the roadside, plucking handfuls of grass, and digging up the turf with his fingers, thus, and thus alone, betraying that he suffered. Mr. Heywood at first refrained from any offer of hospitality, believing he would be more inclined to accept it after ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... Marco looked at the bull a few minutes with great interest, and then began to look about for a long stick, or a pole, to poke him a little, through the fence, to see if he could not make him roar, when, instead of a pole, his eye fell upon a boy, who was at work, digging in a corner of a ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... now cold, and we congregated about the fire; for there was no other comfortable room in the house. One afternoon, when I was digging in Aunt Mercy's geranium pots, and picking off the dead leaves, two deacons came to visit grand'ther, and, hovering over the fire with him, complained of the lukewarmness of the church brethren in regard to the spiritual condition of the Society. A shower of grace was needed; there ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... rattle of small arms quieted down; we heard that about 4,000 fighting men had been landed; we could see boat-loads making for the land; swarms trying to straighten themselves out along the shore; other groups digging and hacking down the brushwood. Even with our glasses they did not look much bigger than ants. God, one would think, cannot see them at all or He would put a stop to this sort of panorama altogether. And yet, it would be a pity if He missed it; for these fellows have been ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard, digging round her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had now no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate—it was with a feeling of pleasure that I opened and shut that ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... title-deeds to the whole expanse of salt-flats, which covered perhaps a score of acres. Having quietly made his position secure at Halifax, Dugald McIntyre came down on his fellow-villagers with a firm celerity, and the digging and the defiling of garments came suddenly to an end by Grand Pre Creek. Soon a line of new dike encompassed the flats, the spring tides swept no more across those sharp grasses which had bent beneath the unreturning feet of the Acadians, and the prudent Scot found himself ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... up, after a coal-strike. Throttle-Ha'penny put new life into him. During a coal-strike the miners themselves began digging in the fields, just near the houses, for the surface coal. They found a plentiful seam of drossy, yellowish coal behind the Methodist New Connection Chapel. The seam was opened in the side of a bank, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... grave eyes to take in Peter from his blond hair to his tan walking shoes, and with a respectful mien Peter prepared his wits for a sharp and digging cross-examination. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... high temperatures mean to us: no wonder we prefer the cold." Eventually, by removing a portion of one wall a long channel was dug nearly down to the sea, completely solving the problem. Additional precautions were taken by digging away the snow which surrounded the hut after each blizzard, sometimes entirely ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... needed the explanation. The story is this:—The laird riding past a high steep bank, stopped opposite a hole in it, and said, "Hairy, I saw a brock gang in there." "Did ye?" said Hairy; "wull ye hand my horse, sir?" "Certainly," said the laird, and away rushed Hairy for a spade. After digging for half-an-hour, he came back, quite done, to the laird, who had regarded him musingly. "I canna find him, sir," said Hairy. "'Deed," said the laird, very coolly, "I wad ha' wondered if ye had, for it's ten years sin' I saw him gang ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... had put up our tent, Philip went down the gully to study the art of gold digging. He watched the men at work; some were digging holes, some were dissolving clay in tubs of water by stirring it rapidly with spades, and a few were stooping at the edge of water-holes, washing off the sand mixed with the ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... lying down flat, but with his back towards us; and he has a dismal habit of groaning aloud, writhing his whole body, and digging his toes into the grass, when he cannot turn a ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... any, the smallest, portion of them without due investigation. This habit, persisted in, led to the discovery of the new planet (Georgium Sidus)." As well might one say that a skilled mining surveyor, digging for coal, came upon the seam by chance, as ascribe to chance the necessary result of such a careful ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... the men went on digging the well. It was so deep that they were hoisting the sand up in buckets. The men who hoisted were exposed, and one of them was wounded in the shoulder. He was Peter Bromley, who drove oxen for the Bloodgood wagon, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... hung several articles of feminine apparel to dry. Women were so scarce in California at that time that this was sufficient to arouse the whole camp. The "Boys" as we were called, were scattered along the Coyote digging for a distance of about four miles, and when anything unusual happened the words, 'Oh, Joe!' would be passed along the ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... madly at them yelling 'Fag!' When somehow something gives and your feet drag. You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain And find ... you're digging tunnels through the hay In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day. Oh springy hay, and lovely beams to climb! You're back in the old sailor suit again. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... "Ah, that I do: I mind digging out an old vixen up there, when 'er 'ad gone to earth, and the 'ounds with their tails up a-hollering like music. The Badminton was out that day. I were allus very fond o' thuck wood. My brother be squire's keeper there. Many ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... and a real regret passed over his careless face, "and it's a shame, for no one would have thought he owned a penny; he was just digging at the business all the time, like the rest ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... at once set to work digging holes and securely planting the beams already prepared in a semicircle a hundred feet across, behind the wall facing the battery. The beams when fixed projected eight feet above the ground, the spaces between ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... sole occupation it is to collect the tree-earth, and who become skilful in digging and removing the soil from underneath the roots, without in the slightest ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... he. "I saw the exact tree in my dream, but there are so many trees, here that I am confused. There is only one thing to do now. I must begin with the first tree and keep on digging until I come to the one with the treasure ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... move they make, the dead man lays there with his face to the sky, and the boys is so scared they could hardly dig. The master keeps telling them to hurry with the digging. ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... Iceland. Torfi hung the picture of Jon Sigurdsson on one wall, and on another his wife hung a calendar with a picture of a girl in a wide-brimmed hat. The neighbours were helpful to them in building their cabin, making ditches, and in other ways. All that summer Torfi stood up to his hips in mud digging ditches, and when the bottom was worn out of his shoes and the soles of his feet began to get sore from the shovel, he hit on a plan: he cut the bottom out of a tin can and stuck his toe into the cylinder. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... swelled with pride; for commendation from Uncle Andy was a scarce article. He too sat down on the fallen trunk and began digging at the bark with his ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... men, however, do not laugh. They are unwilling that the state should be corrupted by the vicious customs of slaves and foreigners. Therefore they do business at the gates, and sell those whom they have taken in war or keep them for digging ditches and other hard work without the city, and for this reason they always send four bands of soldiers to take care of the fields, and with them there are the labourers. They go out of the four gates from which roads with walls on both sides of them lead to the ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... And better for him to do something abroad than digging at home; and in the army he might get ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... to explore the country forty miles round, and endeavour to meet with somebody who would sell us a couple of horses, and two or three cows. Not a clearing or settlement did we find, however, and at last we returned discouraged, and again began digging. On the very first day after our return, as we were toiling away in the field, a trampling of horses was heard, and four men mounted, and followed by a couple of wolf-hounds, came cantering over the prairie. It struck us that this would be a famous chance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and exposing a large surface of black mud studded with the stumps of old trees, and the stream from the sulphur spring rippling along merrily in a channel it had cut for itself through the broken portion of the dam. While two men were set to digging a new channel for this stream, so as to lead it through the sluice-way, and leave the place where the work was to be done free from water, the others began to cut down half a dozen tall pines, and hew ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... shaft was pumped out, digging by hand was begun with a diameter of 12 feet. After descending 20 inches an 8x10 inch curb was laid, in order to consolidate the earth and prevent any movement of the tubbing. Then the excavating was continued to a depth of 311/2 inches, and with a diameter of 93/4 feet. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... on the bells of the church that was so conveniently near to Mr. Utterson's dwelling, and still he was digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield's tale went by before his mind in a scroll of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while following up some wild sheep, I came upon two bears very busily engaged in digging up the snow where an avalanche had fallen. Being hid from their sight, I determined to wait some little time to ascertain why they were digging. I accordingly placed myself behind a rock, and allowed them to work away. ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... of some 30,000 people, entirely made and sustained by the gold-digging industry. An immense amount of the precious metal has been taken here, and sufficient is being secured still to make it a paying concern, although the miners have to go to a considerable depth in ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... dismounted, and leading Rakush to a green spot near a limpid fountain or rivulet of spring water, allowed him to graze, and then went to sleep. Akwan Diw seeing from a distance that Rustem had fallen asleep, rushed towards him like a whirlwind, and rapidly digging up the ground on every side of him, took up the plot of ground and the champion together, placed them upon his head, and walked away with them. Rustem being awakened with the motion, he was thus addressed by ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... immediately to an investigation of the matter. Drawing the rammers from their guns they would insert them in the ground at every suspicious place where fresh dirt might be seen, and if they should strike anything hard with them, the process of digging would be the next thing on the programme, and behold! various things of consecutive kinds would appear, probably the whole contents of a smoke-house or dwelling. The soldier, making this discovery, would ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... more began to search through the entire world. Now these heroes saw a rift on the surface of the earth. And having reached this pit, the sons of Sagara began to excavate it. And with spades and pickaxes they went on digging the sea, making the utmost efforts. And that same abode of Varuna (namely the ocean), being thus, excavated by the united sons of Sagara and rent and cut on all sides round, was placed in a condition of the utmost distress. And the demons and snakes and Rakshasas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... cloth on regular looms which were made into dresses for the slaves. For various colors of cloth the thread was dyed. The dye was made by digging up red shank and wild indigo roots which were boiled. The substance obtained being some of the best dye to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... were under way, Colonel Sutter had begun the erection of a mill at Colonna on the American branch of the Sacramento River. In January one Marshall, who was engaged in digging a race-way for the mill for Colonel Sutter, found a metal which he had not seen before, and, on testing it in the fire, found that it was gold. The "finds" were sent to Sacramento and tested, with the result that they were declared to be pure gold. The mint at Philadelphia also declared the metal ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the island of Sor, near Senegal, have white flesh, and are well tasted, but do not burrow in the earth, so that we may suspect their digging themselves houses in this cold climate is an acquired art, as well as their note of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... have is the one, not who digs out the treasure for us, but who teaches and inspires us with our own hands to open the rocks and find the treasures for ourselves. The digging out of the iron will do us more good than even the iron itself ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... what new misfortune had tracked him down. His teeth were worn and yellow as Indian meal, and his rough, ill-shaven cheeks and pale eyes reminded the priest of the country in which Pat lived, and of the four acres of land at the end of the boreen that Pat was digging ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... Parrishioners, a catalogue of fees for burial under various conditions. Then follow The Parrishe's dutyes for the Bells (knells, peals, with small or large bells). Finally, The Clarke his dutyes for Parishioners (Bann-askings, weddings, churchings, grave digging, tolling the bells for funerals in various ways, and on specified occasions, etc.). All the above fees are doubled in case of non-parishioners. See also the Salehurst tariff of 1597, most comprehensive and minute also: Sussex Arch. Coll., xxv, 154-5. Also ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... corner of the inner quadrangle, and made for it, impelled by natural curiosity. He found Drysdale seated on the ground with several silver tankards by his side, employed to the best of his powers in digging a hole with one ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... sluggish figure and haggard face, and waited for him,—with a quick remembrance of long summer days, when he and George, boys together, had looked on this man as the wisest and strongest, sitting at his side digging worms or making yellow flies for him to fish in the Big Cacapon,—how they would have the delicate broiled trout for supper,—how Dode was a chubby little puss then, with white apron and big brown eyes, choosing to sit on his lap when they went to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... come to the end of the Roman time in England. It is but little that is known of those five hundred years; but some remains of them are still found. Often, when labourers are digging up the ground, to make foundations for houses or churches, they light on rusty money that once belonged to the Romans. Fragments of plates from which they ate, of goblets from which they drank, and of pavement on which ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... which, with the haste of one who fears that he may be prematurely interrupted, but otherwise, with all the reluctance which we may imagine, and which his streaming tears proclaimed, he addressed himself to the last labor in which he supposed himself to have any interest on this earth—that of digging a grave. Measuring a space adjusted to the proportions of his person, he inquired anxiously for any loose fragments of marble, such as might suffice to line it. He requested also to be furnished with wood and water, as the materials ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... pillow at all. When he lay on the ground with his cheek on the palm of his hand, he heard his child crying. He heard him crying down under the ground, they say. Having assembled all his relations, he spoke of digging into the ground. The relations collected horses to be given as pay; they collected goods and horses. Then came two old men who said they were sacred. They spoke of seeking for the child. An old man went to tell the father. He brought ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... attempt to reinstate the ceremonies of the Jewish Law in the capital of Palestine is known to every reader. The workmen employed in digging the foundation of the new Temple were terrified by flames of fire darting forth from the ground, and accompanied with the most frightful explosions. No inducement could prevail on them to persevere in labours which appeared to excite ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the spring a voice commanded him to halt. It was not an outside voice this time, but one within; and, although trembling, he froze closer to the ground, obeying instantly. Then the sound of a spade thrust into soil, raised and emptied, told of digging. Digging what? Graves? No, the German army, that great Imperial Machine, was being pounded too hard to bother with its dead! The German God could ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... occasionally I detected some of the round and contorted appearances which I have mentioned as being so conspicuous on the outside. I cannot speak with precision as to the length of the tubes, as the clay when examined had been broken up into large rough masses in digging for the foundations of houses. The largest noticed was about three inches long, and the general width one-eighth of an inch. They often run parallel to each other, but at unequal distances. I now have to notice what I consider ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... asset is the well-known aptitude shown by poodles for digging out truffles, an accomplishment of which I often read in my youth. If truffles, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... half-past eight. Mr. Hardy had requested that they should be specially instructed in the raising of vegetables, and in the planting and pruning of fruit-trees. The culture of flowers could be of no utility. The digging made the boys' backs ache at first, and blistered their hands, but they stuck to it manfully, and soon became accustomed to the work, returning to breakfast with glowing cheeks ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... weather as it comes, wet or dry, and fortune as it falls, good or bad; learning that a meal which is scanty fare for one becomes a banquet for two—provided the other is the right person; learning that there is some skill in everything, even in digging bait, and that what is called luck consists chiefly in having your tackle in good order; learning that a man can be just as happy in a log shanty as in a brownstone mansion, and that the very best pleasures are those ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... fighting for a sect, for a province, for a nationality, but no one for the nation; and all this while, close alongside, your great rival grew with giant's growth, looking far into the future before him, cutting his cloth with perspective ideas of what his limbs would attain to in after-time,' digging his canals and grading, his railroads, with one eye on the Atlantic and the other on the Pacific, spreading himself, monopolizing, annexing, outmanoeuvring and flanking those colonial bodies who sat in solemn state ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... seen all over the landscape, while we travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell us, and truly, that in winter and early spring we should be up to our knees in flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging is so common and unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach, in which I travelled from Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the high road for a Chinaman, who, with his pan and washer, was working up a hole which an American had abandoned, but where the minute and patient ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... sea being still very smooth, they entered it, though the passage was very dangerous, inasmuch as they had but two feet water, and the bottom full of stones, the coast appearing a flat sand for about a mile. As soon as they got on shore they fell to digging in the sand, but the water that came into their wells was so brackish that they could not drink it, though they were on the very point of choking for thirst. At last, in the hollows of the rocks, they met with considerable quantities of ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... revolutionists having gained the object of their ambition, might have been inclined to halt in their mad career; but, their party driving them onward, they proceeded to still more rigid and cruel measures. It is not too much to say that such men are digging a grave for the House of ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... see the devil, With his little spade and shovel, Digging praties in the garden With ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Abbott caught Mrs. Hunter digging in her private vegetable garden behind the palace, and wearing a garment that her second gardener's wife would have scorned, her unblemished face beaming under a battered straw hat. Both women had the humor to laugh, and their intimacy dated from that moment, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the Vagmati. A large channel, one of the branches of the Raputi, passes Bhimphedi; but in the dry season it contains no water, and the inhabitants receive a scanty supply from a small spring. Water, however, might probably be procured in abundance, by digging wells in the channel ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... however, with which Mrs. Teak regarded the efforts of her husband to put under cultivation land that had lain fallow for twenty years convinced both men that they were on a wrong scent. Mr. Teak, who did the digging, was the first to realize it, but his friend, pointing out the suspicions that might be engendered by a sudden cessation of labour, induced him ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... statue with a complete head as if that were very remarkable—almost the only statue he mentions at all. Ghiberti describes two or three antique statues with such enthusiasm that one concludes he was familiar with very few. In fact, before the great digging movement which enthralled the Renaissance, antique sculpture was rare. But little of Poggio's collection came from Rome: Even Lorenzo de' Medici got most of his from the provinces. A century later Sabba del Castiglione complains of having to buy a Donatello owing to the difficulty of ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... sleep!" she cried, giving him a thump at each word. "You've slept two hours. (Thump.) You sleep till you stupefy yourself (thump), and then you go and dig. What's the use of digging? (Thump.) Why don't you make some money? (Thump.) Talk and sleep! (Thump.) I hate it. (Thump.) You've rubbed the paint off the wainscot with your sleep, sleep, sleep (thump)—there's one of your hairs sticking to the paint where your head goes. (Thump.) Anything more hateful—sleep ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... to the newly-discovered California gold-fields, where he arrived in 1852, being at that time twenty-eight years old. After some experience in the mines, he decided that there were surer ways of getting gold than digging for it, and set up a mercantile business in San Francisco, which grew rapidly in importance and proved the foundation of a vast fortune. He was the first president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was in charge of its construction over the mountains, driving the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... realized I could not get the close insight I wished from that bush, as it was seventy-five yards from the garbage-pile. There was none nearer; so I did the only thing left to do: I went to the garbage-pile itself, and, digging a hole big enough to hide in, remained there all day long, with cabbage-stalks, old potato-peelings, tomato-cans, and carrion piled up in odorous heaps around me. Notwithstanding the opinions of countless flies, it was not an attractive place. Indeed, it was so unfragrant that ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... do please write, if only to tell me how you are getting on with Hamilton and Company. I only wish I were there to help you pull those fine old uncles of yours out of the hot water. I know you'll do it, though. And meanwhile I shall be digging away out here and thinking of ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that. And I will tell you why. When I was brought into the villa the first time, and you watched me, bidden behind the door, do you know what I was watching myself, while I appeared to be solely occupied digging out the caviare? The fresh print of boot-nails which left the carpet near the table, where someone had spilled beer (the beer was still running down the cloth). Someone had stepped in the beer. The boot-print was not clearly ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... hardly to be done without some flouting of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must be allowed the merit of keeping the world habitable for the refined eulogists of the blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkable originators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning for butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as well as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison with predecessors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether some rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... however, we see long and well-proven systems of education profaned by the ignorant hands of superficial reformers. We see the colleges themselves dragging on a precarious life, yet less revered than cherished by fostering sects, and more hooted at by the advocates of potato-digging and other practical pursuits, than defended by their legitimate protectors. It is not to be denied that there is a powerful element of Materialism among us, and that too often we neither appreciate nor respect the earnest, abstruse scholar. The progress of humanity must be shouted in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a place where the ground appeared to have been lately disturbed, and on digging there discovered a large store of bacon, ...
— Messenger No. 48 • James Otis
... that Cyprus exhibits an anomaly in the peculiarity of a small rainfall but great subterranean water-power; some stratum that is impervious retains the water at depths varying according to local conditions. The well-sinker commences by boring, or rather digging, a circular hole two feet six inches in diameter. The soil of Cyprus is so tenacious that the walls of the shaft require no artificial support; this much facilitates the work, and the labourer, armed with a very short-handled pick, patiently hacks his vertical way, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... were agreed as to the propriety of inflicting punishment on some unhappy men who were, at that moment, objects of almost universal hatred. Cromwell was no more; and those who had fled before him were forced to content themselves with the miserable satisfaction of digging up, hanging, quartering, and burning the remains of the greatest prince that has ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eight miles an hour and the steepest declivity was yet to come. Further, the dropping of the left-hand shafts jerked the van to the left, and Denry dropped the other pair only just in time to avoid the sudden uprooting of a lamp-post. The four points of the shafts digging and prodding into the surface of the road gave the pantechnicon something to think about for a few seconds. But unfortunately the precipitousness of the street encouraged its head-strong caprices, and a few seconds later all four shafts were broken, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... ahead in the increasingly thick white fog. All I could hear was the sound of pickaxes on the ground and the thud of falling clods. The enemy had, no doubt, decided not to attack again and were digging new trenches. They no longer uttered their contemptuous guttural cries of "Cavalry! Cavalry!" They had learnt to their cost that these French cavalrymen, at the sight of whom their own are so ready to turn back, could hold ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... charity, would send her to bed again, saying that after all her hard day's work she needed rest; not perceiving that the real rest she required was time for her soul to commune with God. Dominica, therefore, became very unhappy; and one day as she was digging in the garden she heard a mournful voice speak plainly and articulately by her side, saying, "Ah, My spouse! why hast thou left Me thus?" And it seemed to her that it was the voice of her Lord, who tenderly expostulated ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... man from Castle Shields, by name Adam Redpath, was going to his work (digging sheep-drains on the moor), when on the Foul Fords he met Henry Keane lying stone dead and with no mark of violence on his body. His hat, coat, waistcoat, shoes and stockings were lying at about 100 yards ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Linton's, he said—'I shall have that home. Not because I need it, but—' He turned abruptly to the fire, and continued, with what, for lack of a better word, I must call a smile—'I'll tell you what I did yesterday! I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there: when I saw her face again—it is hers yet!—he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change if the air blew on it, and so I ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... semi-circle of the Southern Alps stood out, for a hundred miles from north to south, in appalling white distinctness, and no one in the whole Colony had ever seen the splendid range thus free from fleck or flaw. We had done all we could within working distance, but what was, the use of digging in drifts thirty feet deep? Amidst, and almost above, the terrible anxiety about our own individual safety,—for the snow was over the roof of many of the station-houses,—came the pressing question, "Where are the sheep?" A profound ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... society. Jeff went about among them, and danced with the sisters and cousins of several men who seemed superior to the lost condition of their kinswomen; these were nice fellows enough, but doomed by their grinding, or digging, or their want of worldly wisdom, to a place among the jays, when they really had some qualifications for a nobler standing. He had a very good time, and he was enjoying himself in his devotion to a lively young brunette whom he was making laugh with his jokes about some of the others, when ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... swallows him, as I said, if he waits till we are ready for him. Everything depends on that—and on your silence. We must take time. It isn't only the digging of the hole. We need to fix up some counterpoise to make it shut after a body like a mouse-trap; we must do the thing thoroughly if we do it at all; and till it's done, not a word to a soul in the same hemisphere! In the end I suppose I shall have to tell Donkin, my cashier, ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... course of digging, he came upon a fine bit of root, quite dry and fit for fuel, which he set aside carefully-for the Rat is an economical creature—in order to take it home with him. So when the shower was over, he set off with the dry root in his mouth. As he went ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... It was good, healthy work, this digging, and hewing, and ploughing. It made the muscles on their arms stand out like whip cords; it bronzed their pale faces, and made their eyes bright, and gave them a good appetite for their bread and milk; and when they went to bed, they didn't stop to see ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... or rather mulberry tree, mania. Young mulberry trees rose to a dollar and a quarter each, though they can be multiplied almost without limit in a single year. As might have been expected, a re-action took place, many parties were ruined, and berry trees may now be had for the trouble of digging them up. ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... himself with some friends and leased for 99 years some of the best oil springs near Titusville, Pa. This lease cost the company $5,000, although only a few years before a cow had been considered a full equivalent in value for the same land. The original prospectors began operations by digging collecting ditches, and then pumping off the oil which gathered upon the surface of the water. But not long after this first crude attempt at oil gathering, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. was organized, with Prof. B. Silliman of Yale College as its president, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... shriek. She remained a moment rocking on her feet, then wheeled and stumbled toward the quilt-covered four-poster bed in one dark corner of the cabin. Into its feather billows she flung herself and lay with her fingernails digging into her temples and her body racked with the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... gaining the brow of the hill he leapt from the ground with a frantic cry and clasped his hands. I ran towards him—but I remember no more—though at times something crosses my mind, and I have wild visions of roofless walls, and a crowd of weeping women and silent men digging among ashes, and a beautiful body, all dropping wet, brought on a deal from the mill-dam, and of men, as it was carried by, seizing me by the arms and tying my hands,—and then I fancy myself in a house fastened to a chair;—and sometimes I think ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... wicked mortals on earth, this Australian coaching was the worst. They went through Wagga-Wagga and Murrumburra, and other places with similar names, till at last they were told that they had reached Nobble. Nobble they thought was the foulest place which they had ever seen. It was a gold-digging town, as such places are called, and had been built with great rapidity to supply the necessities of adjacent miners. It was constructed altogether of wood, but no two houses had been constructed alike. They generally had gable ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... 'Kiss thy perfumed garments' ... No; I'll hold them up. Oh—oh—" And as she spoke her crazy purpose drove her forward; she held back against it—but, like the pressure of a hand upon her shoulder, it pushed her on down the bank—slowly—slowly—her heels digging into the crumbling clay, her hands clutching now at a tuft of grass, now at a drooping branch; she was drawing quick breaths of terror, and talking, in little gasps, aloud: "He'll forget Edith. He'll have Jacky. He'll ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... have been cut off, like the fold of a Leicestershire grazing-ground, and made into an office in the centre of which was a square or two of glass that commanded a view of the whole warehouse. "Is Mr. Jorrocks in?" inquired the Yorkshireman of a porter, who was busy digging currants with a wooden spade. "Yes, sir, you'll find him in the counting-house," was the answer; but on looking in, though his hat and gloves were there, no Jorrocks was visible. At the farther end of the warehouse a man in his shirt-sleeves, with a white apron round his waist and a brown ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... that. They think of me now as one of themselves, and stay the night with me when they pass through Melihovo. Add to that, that we have bought ourselves a new comfortable covered carriage, have made a new road, so that now we don't drive through the village. We are digging a pond.... Anything else? In fact hitherto everything has been new and interesting, but how it will be later on, I don't know. There is snow already, it is cold, but I don't feel drawn to Moscow. So far I have not had any feeling ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... have any at all." He held out his free hand. "Come on, Geoff." And the boy, who had hesitated, digging one foot into the carpet, suddenly ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... brought to bear on Dead Man's Hill, paving the way for an infantry advance, which was to come a few hours later. It was risky business upon which the lads were bent, for the great shells struck on all sides of them, throwing huge masses of dirt in the air like giant fountains and digging immense excavations in the ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... ant-eater found fat termites so satisfying that it left all other things and devoted its life to the exploiting of anthills, and now it has no rival at that business, but it is fit for nothing else. Its awkward digging tools will not allow it to put the sole of its foot to the ground, so it has to double them under and hobble about like a Chinese lady. It has no teeth, and stupidity is the most prominent feature of its character. It has become that poor thing, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... the rocks and ravines and hills and holes they run like rabbits, or they hand their arms to some fleet-footed chap to hide, while they stay—aye, they do, they actually stand their ground till we come, and there they are working at a hedge or digging the ground, and looking as innocent and stupid as possible. They never saw anybody, and never heard any firing—or they thought it was the Colonel shooting a hare. We hardly know what to do in doubtful ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... in search of buffalo and were caught in a great storm of wind and hail. The cold was bitter and the wind cut to the bone. They were saved from freezing to death only by digging a rude shelter through the snow into the side of a hill, and there they crouched for two days with so little food left in their knapsacks, that without game, they would perish, in a week, of hunger, if the cold did not get the first chance. The most experienced hunters went forth, ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in digging a well on Hacker's creek, found a piece of timber which had been evidently cut off at one end, twelve or thirteen feet in the ground—marks of the axe were ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... bought a piece of waste land on the north side of this parish," said the farmer. "The ground had never been touched by a spade. Half of it was bog, the other half a mass of stones. It looked pretty bad. On that very land I worked like a slave, digging up stones until my back was ready to break. But I think I laboured even harder with the swamp, before I finally got it ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... ye will take it home unto you; but if ye will still continue in the ways of sin, without returning, know this, that ye are but multiplying those curses, platting many cords of your iniquities, to bind you in everlasting chains. Ye are but digging a pit for your souls, ye that sweat in your sins, and travel in them, and will not embrace this ransom offered. The key and lock of that pit is eternal despair. O consider how quickly your pleasures and gains will end, and spare some of your thoughts from present things, to give ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the New Zealander antiquarian, digging among the buried cities of Natal, will come upon the forgotten town of Ladysmith. And he will find a handful of Rip Van Winkle Boers with white beards down to their knees, behind quaint, antique guns shelling a cactus-grown ruin. Inside, sheltering in holes, ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... moved its head and looked at me, giving evidence that it was still alive. I accordingly returned to the hole and dug out my saddle, when, after great exertion, I managed to reach the horse and put it on. Then, digging round the poor beast's front feet, and patting it on the neck, I induced it to move forward a ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... vessels, belonging to Holland, had been frozen up in the neighbourhood of Amsterdam. Don Frederic on his arrival from Naarden, despatched a body of picked men over the ice to attack the imprisoned vessels. The crews had, however, fortified themselves by digging a wide trench around the whole fleet, which thus became from the moment an almost impregnable fortress. Out of this frozen citadel a strong band of well-armed and skilful musketeers sallied forth upon skates ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wild about, she was an audacious flirt, a girl up to anything; and in the morning, at low tide, she might be seen, with her legs and feet bare, among the children, of whom there were many on the sands, digging ditches, making ramparts, constructing towers and fortifications in wet sand, herself as much amused as if she had been one of the babies themselves. There was screaming and jumping, and rushing out of reach of the waves which came up ready to overthrow ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... she had inherited from that particular ancestor and he had been inordinately vain of his wife's hands. Mademoiselle had been ordered never to let the child "spread her hand by opening door knobs or touching the fire-stones—or—er— any clumsy thing—" and it was droll to see the little girl, digging in her bit of garden with those lovely hands incased in long flopping cotton gloves—not to forget the broad sunbonnet that shaded her earnest little face. In short, he was jealous of her complexion and her manners—But beyond ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... blacks, who understood Arabic, hearing me speak thus, came towards me, and said, "Brother, be not surprised to see us, we are inhabitants of this country, and came hither to-day to water our fields, by digging little canals from this river, which comes out of the neighbouring mountain. We observed something floating upon the water, went to see what it was, and, perceiving your raft, one of us swam into the river, and brought it thither, where we fastened ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... probable object, and increased his curiosity to know what they were doing. So he came forth from his concealment and went toward them. When he reached the spot, the mystery was suddenly dispelled by his finding out that they were digging worms for bait, to ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... as they skirted the Southern line, noticed no signs of further preparations by the Confederates. No men were throwing up earthworks or digging trenches. As well as they could surmise, the garrison, like the besieging army, was seeking shelter and rest, and from this fact the keen mind of Colonel Arthur Winchester divined that the defense ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 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 narrow is also more handy. All these implements Little John has prepared by the dim light of a horn lantern ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... steamboats, I ran into a narrow creek, with high, muddy banks, which were so steep and so slippery that my boat slid into the water as fast as I could haul her on to the shore. This difficulty was overcome by digging with my oar a bed for her to rest in, and she soon settled into the damp ooze, where she quietly ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... Christian thieves I am content to lose some of my crowns; That I may, walking in my gallery, See 'em go pinion'd along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practice first upon the Italian; There I enriched the priest with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in use, With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells; And after that was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. And after that was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... to take shares in a city next year, and watch the digging myself,' he said. 'It beats elephants to pieces. In this game you're digging up dead things and making them alive. Aren't you ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large rambling kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal incentives were made to me,—generally, I fear, in vain,—to get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hayfields on holidays I was often compelled to go,—not, I fear, with much profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering agony from ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... first place there is all the water about. Then, too, it would be easier to take this instrument into the regions where gold is usually discovered on land. You could prospect with it in almost the positive knowledge that you would locate a vein. Digging then would be easy." ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although the ways of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a trap. It was pent in at one end of a narrow little island. It had been no one's business to foresee that it must some day outgrow this space; now men were digging a score of tunnels to set it free, but they had not begun these until the pressure had become unendurable, and now it had reached its climax. In the financial district, land had been sold for as much as four dollars a square inch. Huge blocks of buildings ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... spoke to them. Willing hands started the wheels. The gallant little blacks, looking like a pair of ponies before the huge van, seemed to lie flat on their bellies as they strained forward, digging their sharp little hoofs into the hillside. The van gave an inch—two! A foot! Then urged by their master's voice, and for very pride of home and race and breed, the gallant blacks pulled for dear life, and in a quarter of an hour the van was at our door, and they ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... denied being anything so inhuman. The skull had rolled into a grave he had been digging by the side of the almost forgotten grave of the poor player; and, as the manager had bespoken one for the play, he had thought it no harm to furnish him this. But he would put it back carefully into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... he murmured. "If that old white-haired brother of mine digging about the roots of Greek and Sanscrit back in Harvard could only see all this, maybe he might understand why I choose to stay here with my college instead of tying up with a university back East. But, maybe not. We are only step-brothers. He is old enough to be my father, ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made, partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose of digging for money in one of the desolate sand-keys of the West Indies. It appears that some mesmerized "subject," in the course of one of those somnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "In digging deep, where monks do sleep, beneath yon cloister shrined, That coffin old, within the mould, it was my chance to find; The costly carvings of the lid I scraped full carefully, In hope to get at name or date, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
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