"Digger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out in strong contrast against these recollections. It was only natural that one of the young chorus ladies with whom I had to practise daily should know how to attract my attentions. Therese Ringelmann, the daughter of a grave-digger, thanks to her beautiful soprano voice, led me to believe that I could make a great singer of her. After I told her of this ambitious scheme, she paid much attention to her appearance, and dressed elegantly for the rehearsals, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the forehead, and taking down one of them, said, 'This was Brother Desiderio Berro, who died at forty—one of my best friends. I begged ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned as "the kettle-drum." The noble boy in the ancestral boots was inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... an access both of alarm and courage, whirled the bar about his head and shouted "Scat!" The uncanny guards of the treasure disappeared instanter, and at the same moment the digger found himself up to his middle in icy water that had poured into the hole as ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... temper, pure and simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own Banshees because the likes of me—once content when the pale shadow of Pegasus passed her by—is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from Yonkers to the Square and admire the scenery all the way. But this isn't ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... appeal to you because ... you have been the party heretofore to extend the suffrage. It was the Democratic party that fought most valiantly for the removal of the 'property qualification' from all white men and thereby placed the poorest ditch digger on a political level with the proudest millionaire.... And now you have an opportunity to confer a similar boon on the women of the country and thus ... perpetuate your political power for ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... the case it is on your part, not mine," retorted the mechanic, with more feeling. "I am not a digger of gold out of the earth, nor a coiner of money. I must be paid for my work before I can pay the bills I owe. It was not enough that I told you of the failure of my customers ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... lover, is lashed in act v. sc. I, in disfigured verses of a song sung by the grave-digger, which dates about from the year 1557, and at Shakspere's time probably was very popular. In the original, where the image of death is meant to be represented, an old man looks back in repentance, and with great aversion, upon his youthful days when he ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... Plenty Ranges, there were soon no less than two hundred persons scouring those hills, though for a long time without success. The first useful discovery in Victoria seems to have been made on 1st July, by a Californian digger named Esmond, who, like Hargraves, had entered on the search with a practical knowledge of the work. His experience had taught him the general characteristics of a country in which gold is likely to be found, and he selected Clunes as a favourable spot. He found the quartz rock ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... questions. I supposed that they were the local police, who had been stirred up by Scotland Yard, and had traced me as far as this one-horse siding. Sitting well back in the shadow I watched them carefully. One of them had a book, and took down notes. The old potato-digger seemed to have turned peevish, but the child who had collected my ticket was talking volubly. All the party looked out across the moor where the white road departed. I hoped they were going to take up my ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... his admiring associates,—stole up from behind and asked, "What is this?" Gustavo, suspecting nothing, went on with his sketch, and answered in a natural tone, "This is Ophelia, plucking the leaves from her garland. That old codger is a grave-digger. Over there..." At this, noticing that every one had risen, and that universal silence reigned, Becquer slowly turned his head. "Here is one too many," said the Director, and the artist was dismissed that ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... are about 200 of us—and there are about 30,000 following, strung out all the way from here to the Rocky Mountains, I guess. That's a tough trail, across the desert from Fort Hall; but we made it, though the Digger Injuns 'most got our scalps, once. Part of the crowd's coming in by way of Oregon; and that's a harder trail still, we hear. Some of our own company, branched off, other side of the Sierra, for the Carson River, but we struck up the Truckee ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... At work in a deep wet hole, he had recklessly omitted to slab the walls of a drive; uprights and tailors yielded under the lateral pressure, and the rotten earth collapsed, bringing down the roof in its train. The digger fell forward on his face, his ribs jammed across his pick, his arms pinned to his sides, nose and mouth pressed into the sticky mud as into a mask; and over his defenceless body, with a roar that burst his ear-drums, broke stupendous ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... eager craving in the breast of poor, envious, self-asserting human nature. In one of those ornamental initial-letters above mentioned, the date of which was some years prior to the execution of Holbein's Dance, Death appears as a grave-digger, and lifts on his spade, out of the grave which he is making, two skulls, one crowned, the other covered with a peasant's hat. He grins with savage glee at seeing these remnants of the two extremes of society side by side; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... given to him. In the book of beetles there are shown to him the party-colored and the gray, so-called "sad," grave-digger (necrophorus). The latter now becomes prominent in his plays. "Why is he called the sad?" I asked the child yesterday. Ah! because he has no children, he answered, sorrowfully. Probably he has at some time overheard this sentence, which has no meaning for him, from a grown person. Adult ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... bald somnambulist as missing from his flat We take soundings for the digger with a prop. By the day the board is gratis, by the week it's half of that; For the ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... teaching. Oh! there are many Christians who find the best time of the day is the time when they can get with their Bibles, and who love nothing so much as to get a new thought; and as a diamond digger rejoices when he has found a diamond, or a gold digger when he has found a nugget, they delight when they get from the Bible some new thought, and they feed upon it. Yet with all that interest in God's ...
— 'Jesus Himself' • Andrew Murray
... of the North American continent (concerning whose civilisation more will be said in the account of their divine myths) occupy every stage of culture, from the truly bestial condition in which some of the Digger Indians at present exist, living on insects and unacquainted even with the use of the bow, to the civilisation which the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... old brutal Haole drinking with him, one that had been a boatswain of a whaler, a runaway, a digger in gold mines, a convict in prisons. He had a low mind and a foul mouth; he loved to drink and to see others drunken; and he pressed the glass upon Keawe. Soon there was no more money ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The "Digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... winter of 1856, the outlook of the present writer, known somewhere as Samuel Absalom, became exceedingly troubled, and indeed scarcely respectable. As gold-digger in California, Fortune had looked upon him unkindly, and he was grown to be one of the indifferent, ragged children of the earth. Those who came behind him might read as they ran, stamped on canvas once white, "Stockton Mills. Self-Rising Flour!"—the well-known label in California, at that day, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the cliff is of interest to the archaeologist and the seeker after curious junk, so these things that men have piled about Religion are of interest. But the observer, in admiration of the ivy, is in danger of ignoring the stern reality of the fortress. The curious digger in the pile of trash, if his interest be great, heeds not the grandeur of the cliff that towers above ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... and B are rival diggers of rectangular tanks: the amount of work done is evidently measured by the number of cubical feet dug out. Let A dig a tank 10 feet long, 10 wide, 2 deep: let B dig one 6 feet long, 5 wide, 10 deep. The cubical contents are 200, 300; i.e. B is best digger in the ratio of 3 to 2. Now try marking for length, width, and depth, separately; giving a maximum mark of 10 to the best in each contest, and then ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... Digger, n. a gold-miner. The earliest mines were alluvial. Of course the word is used elsewhere, but in Australia it has this ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... is about the size of a rat, but has a short tail and relatively immense forepaws and claws. It is indeed wonderfully developed as a digger. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... uneasily if the stiffness of his expression was not a thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he had, until now, worn with ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... roll, and just at that moment the old grave-digger came up with his little yellow velvet vest and his gray cotton cap. He looked behind the ranks where I was talking with Zebede, who turned round and saw him and grew quite pale, they looked at each other for an instant, then I took his gun and the old man embraced ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable, married, hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad door in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper, and listen round until the bad girl had sung the "Bonnie Hills of Scotland" two or three times. Then he'd go and get drunk, and stay drunk two or three days at a time. And his ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... many misdeeds on his conscience, but his conduct towards the Badger is peculiarly indelicate. The Fox is a skilful digger, and when he cannot avoid it, he can hollow out a house with several rooms. The dwelling has numerous openings, both as a measure of prudence and of hygiene, for this arrangement enables the air to be renewed. He prepares several chambers side by side; one of which he uses for observation ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... "Ah! a 'Stralian digger, by the beard of him, and his red jersey," whispered Jan, as he bent tenderly over the poor fellow, and put his head on one side to listen to his breathing. "Beautiful he sleeps, to be sure!" said Jan: "and a tidy-looking ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... then, as his wife was amongst strangers, and would be very lonesome if he quitted her. Mr. Stowel was, like Mr. Lawrence, obliged to return without any remuneration, and with less money than he came. I mention these two freaks of Joe Smith, as they explain the money-digger's system of fraud. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... breath came and went in sobs. Now they were neck and neck again. Then it was over, the little brown mare swept by, and Ralston's rope, cutting the air, dropped about the neck of the insignificant, white "digger" that ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... increasing unanimity at home, by equalising rights and privileges, what is the ignorant, arrogant, and wicked system which has been pursued? Such a career of madness and of folly was, I believe, never run in so short a period. The vigour of the ministry is like the vigour of a grave- digger—the tomb becomes more ready and more wide for every effort which they make. There is nothing which it is worth while either to take or to retain, and a constant train of ruinous expeditions have been kept up. Every Englishman felt ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... as he saw what the builders of his house had done. They had made everything exactly to suit him. He knew that he could have done no better himself; in fact he knew that he couldn't have done nearly so well. For he was no digger. But he told himself that there was no reason why he should feel sad about that, so long as others were kind enough to dig a fine home and leave it for ...
— The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse • Arthur Scott Bailey
... domine was the voorleezer or chorister, who was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm"; turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking the papers in the end of a cleft stick and holding it ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... occasion for that," Frank went on. "You can tell him that you have come across that nugget in the claim," and Frank tossed into the hole a nugget for which he had half an hour before given a digger ten ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... diggings near the Avoca River the lizard's future master had, as was the digger's custom, come out of his hole, or shaft, at eleven o'clock for a short half-hour's rest between breakfast and the midday meal. He threw himself down in a half-sitting posture, and was dreamily smoking his pipe when from beneath ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... head that made 'The Philosophical Dictionary' and the head that made 'The Social Contract,' When that was done, when the sack was shaken, when Voltaire and Rousseau had been emptied into that hole, a digger seized a spade, threw into the opening the heap of earth, and filled up the grave. The others stamped with their feet upon the ground, so as to remove from it the appearance of having been freshly disturbed. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... found the head and hoofs of my favorite horse, "Digger," a fine little sorrel pony, and knew that he had served them for dinner. We followed their trail far into Old Mexico, but did not overtake them. We had been accustomed to say "it was Geronimo's band," whenever any depredation was ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... had been until he conceived the odd notion that perhaps it contained a secret drawer. This would have been resented by most brothers, but Tommy's chagrin was nothing compared to the exhilaration with which he perceived that he might be about to discover something new about woman. He was like the digger whose hand is on the point of closing on a ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... new gold rush. To begin with, you must imagine yourself setting off for the field, with your trusty mate marching step by step beside you, pick and shovel on your shoulders, and both resolved to make your fortunes in the twinkling of an eye. When you get there, there's the digger crowd, composed of every nationality. There's the warden and his staff, the police officers, the shanty keepers, the ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... who live by their brains, than among artisans and subduers of the soil. This is an error. Tobacco is less a fosterer of thought than a solace of mental vacuity. The thinker smokes in the intervals of work, impatient of ennui as well as of lassitude, and the ploughman, the digger, the blacksmith or the teamster, lights his cutty for the same reason. No true worker, be he digger, or divine, blends real work with either smoking or drinking. Whenever you see a fellow drink or smoke during work, spot him for a gone ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... It hasn't fat enough to slide in, much less to swim. It's my belief that the pig as owned it was fed on mahogany-sawdust and steel filin's. There, ait it, an' howld yer tongue. It's good enough for a goold-digger, anyhow." ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... followed by a sepulchral laugh which grated on her nerves. "Upon my word, dear," she said to Harlan, "I don't know how we're going to stand having that woman in the house. She makes me feel as if I were an undertaker, a grave digger, and a cemetery, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... the red men and the white men. It could be planted without clearing or ploughing the soil. It was only necessary to girdle the trees with a stone hatchet, so as to destroy their leaves and let in the sunshine. A few scratches and digs were made in the ground with a stone digger, and the seed once dropped in took care of itself. The ears could hang for weeks after ripening, and could be picked off without meddling with the stalk; there was no need of threshing and winnowing. None of the Old World cereals can be cultivated ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... have an endurable room with furniture hardly endurable, for it is hard to find, in this hotel at least, a table or a bureau that can stand on its four proper legs, rocking and tetering like a gold-digger's washing-pan, unless the lame leg is propped up with an old shoe, or a stray newspaper fifty times folded, or a magazine of due thickness (I am using 'Harper's Magazine' at this moment, which is somewhat a desecration, as ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... glanced at her. "It's nothing. I was just thinking. Remember the night you fell in front of my table in the hotel? And I thought it was accidental—you scheming gold-digger!" ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... placed with the grave-digger's wife, and from thence she went to the count's splendid country-seat, where she lived in handsome rooms, and was dressed in silks and fineries; not a breath of wind was to blow on her; no one dared to say a rough word to her, nothing was to be done to annoy her; for she nursed the count's ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... made preparations for his defence, and laid the suburb towards Halle in ashes. But the ill condition of the fortifications made resistance vain, and on the second day the gates were opened. Tilly had fixed his head quarters in the house of a grave-digger, the only one still standing in the suburb of Halle: here he signed the capitulation, and here, too, he arranged his attack on the King of Sweden. Tilly grew pale at the representation of the death's head and cross bones, with ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Our digger of Greek roots from Cambridge was puzzled. He could not repeat the story of Cadmus to this druid of the forest or make a learned talk on arbitrary signs. He answered happily, however, ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... conditions become favorable enough; famines recurrently sweep many from the earth. Again, they degenerate when they are forced to live a life that it is possible to live but only in a miserable way. Some of the lowest tribes of men, like the South African Bushmen, or the Digger Indians, have been forced by stronger tribes to withdraw into the desert and to exist upon a lower plane of life. The physique of such peoples betrays the hardships which they have suffered. Men also flee from an unfavorable environment, thus escaping ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... ants, they are very fastidious about removing their dead companions. I buried one about half an inch beneath the soil. Very soon several congregated about the spot and commenced digging with their fore feet, after the manner of digger-wasps, throwing the earth backward. They soon unearthed and pulled the body out, when one seized and tried to remove it, climbing up the side of the jar, and falling back until I relieved her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... middle- class, the labouring-man. Of these were the landpoor peer, with his sense of responsibility cultivated by daily life and duty in his county, on the one hand; the professional man of all professions, the little merchant, the sailor, the clerk and artisan, the digger and delver, on the other; and, in between, those people in the shires who had not yet come to be material and gross, who had old-fashioned ideas of the duty of the citizen and the Christian. In the day of darkness these ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... covered with a thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an overgrown grave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of the last mattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as grave-digger to the vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn, leaving a message that early next morning he would again call for the person whose double occupation connected him at once with the house of mourning and ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... dashed in the early morning across the plains, wormed its way ingeniously through gaps in the foothills, and slowed to a walk as it felt the grades of the first long low slopes. The air was warm with the sun imprisoned in the pockets of the hills. High chaparral, scrub oaks, and scattered, unkempt digger pines threw their thicket up to the very right of way. It was in general dense, almost impenetrable, yet it had a way of breaking unexpectedly into spacious parks, into broad natural pastures, into bold, rocky points prophetic ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... her, or die himself of grief. Die of grief!" continued he, after a pause, completely buried in his sad and bitter thoughts—"it is not so easy to die of grief. The sad heart is tenacious of life, and sorrow is but a slow grave-digger. I have heard that one could die of joy, and it seemed to me just now, when Elise rewarded me with a kiss, that I could understand this. If she only loved me, it were a blessing of God to die, conscious ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... at least,' returns Texas, still morbid an' f'rocious, 'that you or any other fortune teller might better have been born a Digger Injun to live on lizards, sage bresh an' grasshoppers than come messin' 'round in my mar'tal affairs with a view to reebuildin' 'em up. My hopes in that behalf is rooined; an' whoever ondertakes their rehabil'tation'll do it in the smoke. What I'm out after now is the ca'm onbroken misery of ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... not slept long before the sweet voice of the Sergeant informed that "No. I Section had clicked for another blinking digging party," I smiled to myself with deep satisfaction. I had been promoted from a mere digger to a member of the Suicide Club, and was exempt from all fatigues. Then came an awful shock. The Sergeant looked over ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... to git from them," rejoined one of the hunters, with a significant look. "Digger plew good as any other; worth jest ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... myself, 'is it not enough that I have been the cause of her death, must I be her executioner too? must I be the grave-digger to my own child? must I be the ill-fated he who is to stretch her cold limbs in the grave, and send my own life's blood back again to its mother earth? Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... time, sir. I'm a steamboat mate, not a grave digger or a coroner's assistant, or an undertaker, an' I can't stand to handle this ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... "I'm a digger of graves," he mused, half to himself and half to his old wife watching him from the other side of the hearthstone. "I spend a good quarter of my time in the churchyard; but when I saw those six little mounds, and read the inscriptions over them, I couldn't help feeling queer. ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... to say more to the grave-digger; but Aunt Lavvy frowned and shook her head at her, and they went on to where a path of coarse grass divided the pauper burying ground from the rest. They were now quite horribly near the funeral. And going down the grass path ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... sceptical. He and another rustic functionary, of whom we shall speak presently, the grave-digger, are always the esprits forts of the place. They are so much in the habit of talking of ghosts, and are so well acquainted with all the tricks of which these evil spirits are capable, that they scarcely fear them at all. It is especially in the night that all these worthies, grave-diggers, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... at the door of Johnny Chuck and called softly, and Johnny Chuck awoke from his long sleep and yawned and began to think about getting up. She knocked at the door of Digger the Badger, and Digger awoke. She tickled the nose of Striped Chipmunk, who was about half awake, and Striped Chipmunk sneezed and then he hopped out of bed and hurried up to his doorway to shout good morning after her, as she hurried ...
— The Adventures of Johnny Chuck • Thornton W. Burgess
... inculcated that imperishable essence of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than be the founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse, that robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the dissecting-knife,—in a being that escapes the grave-digger. Burn your book! Accept This ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life—love of Jefferson Doman, who had once been of some service to him, and love of whisky, which certainly had not. He had been among the first in the rush to Hurdy-Gurdy, but had not prospered, and had sunk by degrees to the position of grave digger. This was not a vocation, but Barney in a desultory way turned his trembling hand to it whenever some local misunderstanding at the card table and his own partial recovery from a prolonged debauch occurred coincidently in point of time. One day Mr. Doman received, at Red Dog, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... cave or vault finished; when on a sudden (it seems I had made it too large) a great quantity of earth fell down from the top and one side: so much, that, in short, it frightened me, and not without reason too; for if I had been under it, I should never have wanted a grave-digger. Upon this disaster, I had a great deal of work to do over again, for I had the loose earth to carry out; and, which was of more importance, I had the ceiling to prop up, so that I might be sure no more ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... was setting, woke in perfect peace. My proposition had been accepted, and wonderful grace, which had given what I had not dared to ask, assurance of present acceptance. I should have all the work and privation for which I had bargained—should be a thistle-digger in the vineyard; should be set to tasks from which other laborers shrank, but in no trial could I ever be alone, and should at last hear ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... fissure. He had sent hurriedly for Tom Bent—that clever young engineer at the wheat ranch, who was always studying up these things with his inventions—and that was his opinion. No, Tom was not a well-digger, but it was generally known that he had "located" one or two, and had long ago advised the tapping of that flow by a second boring, in case of just such an emergency. He was coming again to-morrow. By the way, he had asked how the young lady visitor was, and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... absolute own: It's the place where a digger can bury a bone. Then he tests his pin-teeth on a pansy or rose, Spreading ruin and petals wherever he goes; And his mistress declares, when he's nibbled for hours, That nothing is sweeter Than Peter the eater, ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... three cuttings, say a week apart, will be better. Root pruning, where it can be practiced to advantage, will be found more effective still. I have never known newly transplanted stocks or those which had the tree digger run under them, to bleed freely when grafted, and we have sometimes gotten a good stand of grafts on such stocks, but such stocks may not always have sufficient sap for the best results in grafting, if they have been recently transplanted or root pruned. Fall ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... born in Donegal in 1890. He was the son of poverty-stricken peasants and, between the ages of 12 and 19, he worked as farm-servant, drainer, potato-digger, and navvy, becoming one of the thousands of stray "tramp-laborers" who cross each summer from Ireland to Scotland to help gather in the crops. Out of his bitter experiences and the evils of modern industrial life, he wrote several vivid novels (The ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... have made mention of that wife of a counselor of Cologne,[564] who having been interred with a valuable ring on her finger, in 1571, the grave-digger opened the grave the succeeding night to steal the ring. But the good lady caught hold of him, and forced him to take her out of the coffin. He, however, disengaged himself from her hands, and fled. The resuscitated lady went and rapped at the door of her house. At first they thought ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... little fires at intervals along the new-stamped earth and set light to those. We did not bury them very deep, because a bayonet is a fool of a weapon with which to excavate a grave and a Syrian no expert digger in any case; so when the fires were burned out we piled rocks on the grave to ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... a grave-digger," says Abba Shaul, as the Rabbis relate, "chased a roe which had entered the shinbone of a dead man; and though I ran three miles after it, I could not overtake it, nor reach the end of the bone. When I returned, I was told that it was a bone of Og, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... or borrow a hand-operated fence post auger and bore a 3-foot-deep hole. It can be even more educational to buy a short section of ordinary water pipe to extend the auger's reach another 2 or 3 feet down. In soil free of stones, using an auger is more instructive than using a conventional posthole digger or shoveling out a small pit, because where soil is loose, the hole deepens rapidly. Where any layer is even slightly compacted, one turns and turns the bit without much effect. Augers also lift the materials more or less as they are stratified. If your soil ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the great laws of natural unity. Most of the human race is still ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... Gold-digger's Oven.—The figure represents a section of the oven. A hole or deep notch is dug into the side of a bank, and two flat stones are slid horizontally, like shelves, into grooves made in the sides of the hole, as shown in the figure; where it will ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... who expressed much surprize at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage. To which Jones answered, "That it was one of the most famous burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... nephew of ours said he wanted to be a ditch-digger. Asked why, he said: "So I can wear dirty clothes, smoke a pipe, and spit tobacco juice in the street." The little fellow is really endowed with an inheritance of great natural refinement and a splendid intellect. As he grows older, his ideals will ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... neighbors. In the middle of the enclosure is a stone pedestal supporting a great wooden cross. Storms have bent the strip of tin on which were the I. N. R. I., and the rain has washed off the letters. At the foot of the cross is a confused heap of bones and skulls thrown out by the grave-digger. Everywhere grow in all their vigor the bitter-sweet and rose-bay. Some tiny flowerets, too, tint the ground—blossoms which, like the mounded bones, are known to their Creator only. They are like little pale smiles, and their odor scents of the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... his trade of digger in all the quarries that Rio de Janeiro possessed. He was a sort of Hercules with huge limbs, but otherwise stupid as a post. His companions had nicknamed him Hardhead because of his obstinate character. Once an idea had penetrated his skull it would stick ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... was overjoyed at her unexpected good luck in meeting with this returned digger, whom she had known very well at Bendigo under another name, and where he passed himself off as the husband of another woman. She perceived that now he had found his wife in Adelaide, doing very well in business, he would rather that she heard nothing of his own little infidelities, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the bal-shem for amulets and talismans. On every door could be read the inscription, "Not at home." But the cholera would not be put off by so flimsy a device and entered unbidden. Even the death of a grave-digger did not stay the dread disease, although it had been prophesied that such an event would end the trouble. The cabalistic books were ransacked for charms and mystic signs with which to resist the power of the conqueror, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... which one undoubtedly belongs to the same monument as the Palermo fragment, while the others may represent parts of one or more duplicate copies of that famous text. One of the four Cairo fragments(1) was found by a digger for sebakh at Mitrahineh (Memphis); the other three, which were purchased from a dealer, are said to have come from Minieh, while the fifth fragment, at University College, is also said to have come from Upper Egypt,(2) though it was purchased by ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... been gradually dismembered: Coulonge Cottage, at the outlet of the Gomin Road, [272] is built on Holland farm. A successful gold digger by the name of Sinjohn purchased in the year 1862 a large tract of the farm fronting the St. Louis road with Thornhill as its north eastern and Mr. Stuart's new road as its south-western boundary. His cottage is shaded by the Thornhill ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... not give money of the Sabbatical year to a well-digger, nor to a bath-keeper, nor to a barber, nor to a skipper, but one may give it to a well-digger for drink, and to all persons one ...
— Hebrew Literature
... him, the whilom digger of graves, who had so puzzled Commander Nesbitt on the first day of his joining, by giving his profession so peculiar a designation, had come on board without any sort of an ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... she went with the rush to Gulgong (about the last of the great alluvial or 'poor-man's' goldfields) and came back to Pipeclay when the Log Paddock goldfield 'broke out', adjacent to the old fields, and so helped prove the truth of the old digger's saying, that no matter how thoroughly ground has been worked, there is always room ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... a gold frame announced that Mr. Leathersham was descended from the Gold Digger Indians, a noble ancestry indeed; and it was no secret that his wife had played in "The Gold-diggers," during its ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... at the manner in which the story was told. Teezle told a story about the Indians and Tories "that cut up such didoes in the revolution down there in the Diliway." Colwell repeated the story of Milo Dale, the money-digger. ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... wreak his dislike of you in unfair "fatigues," and keep you at the detested job of coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a "canter past the beak"[21] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the "digger,"[22] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps just spell and cypher, is a monarch to be approached in respectful ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... people together, The young men and the sires, The digger in the harvest-field, Hireling, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... old digger in men's flesh, Doctors are ever itching to be priests, Meddling in conduct, natures, life's privacies. We have been coupled now for twenty years, And she has never turned from me an hour— She knows a woman's duty and a queen's: ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... ride on that back seat to Gumbolt to-night, or I'll ride in Jim Digger's hearse. I am layin' for him anyhow." The ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... have expected very much of. There was hard things said of him, but he could allers strike a blow for a friend, or hold his own with the next man, let him be who he might. You see, there were a good many of us in camp, and we had fair enough luck; for the men over at Digger's Run had struck a good vein, so money was plenty and changed hands fast enough. We'd all hung together in our camp until Clint Bowers got into trouble. None of the rest of us wanted to get mixed up ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... to move off again—"Thank you, Mr. Dale. Good night, Mr. Dale.... You've done us proper, sir.... Just what I wanted.... Good night, ma'am;"—but the foot-people lingered. The red-coated earth-digger, Veale, and one or two others, had got around Mr. Allen and ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... especially as the grave-digger was laid up in his bed, from long working in a damp soil and sitting down to take his dinner on cold tombstones, and I was consequently under obligation to go alone, for it was too late to hope to get any other companion. However, I wasn't unprepared for it; as ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... boys," he would say to his often reckless comrades, "you may hang around the fire if you will. It may do for you, if you like it. But I do not wish to have a Digger Indian slip an arrow into me ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... Bates, a giant digger and a bully, was the first man in the line, the first to get his little share of the fortunes in gold passing out of the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... mediator between the production and consumption of leather; or the cloth merchant, who cuts the material from the piece, an assistant preparatory to the tailor. The labor of commerce is especially like that of the fisherman or the turf digger, because they produce only in so far as they transfer goods from inaccessible to accessible places. See, however, Rau, Lehrbuch, I, 103. See the demonstration of the productive power of commerce in general, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... coffin was uncovered the inspector said to the grave-digger: "Open it." They obeyed, as if it were the most ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... luminous grace and splendor of a Matilija poppy, which, rooted between two boulders, swayed gently in the white moonlight above a figure of dread. The figure, naked from the waist up, huddled upon the hard-baked mud, digging madly at the earth. A sharp exclamation broke from Average Jones. The digger half-rose, turned, collapsed to his knees, and pointed with bleeding fingers to his open mouth, in which the tongue showed black ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Porter Barber | Chinaman Coffeeman | Founder Porkshop-keeper | Grave-digger Cartwright | Tradesman Tinker, a brasier | Stockingmender ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... came up and dismounted the position was most cleverly concealed by a higher hill in front and the heavy woods which served as a screen for the artillery. I noticed many holes where the French shells had burst, and the valley to the north looked as if some one had been experimenting with a well digger. One 21-centimeter shell had cut a swath about 100 yards long out of the woods on the hill where we dismounted. The trees were twisted from their stumps as if a small cyclone had passed, and one could realize the damage the shells could do merely by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... dig in here will think she's a patient—unless the digger knows that this room is supposed to be occupied by one Steve Cornell, obviously male. Now, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... bosom, There is food for all in the land's great store; Enough is provided if rightly divided; Let each man take what he needs—no more. Shame on the miser with unused riches, Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard, Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches, And steals the bread from the ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dontcherknow," should war be precipitated by her burning all our coast cities without provocation; but as Chimmie Fadden would say, "Dat cuts no ice." They are but a few thousand in number, and in the whole caboodle there's not a chappie who would fight should a Digger Indian fill his ear with a bushel of buffalo chips, squirt tobacco juice on his twousahs and throw alkali dust in his optics. Lawd Chelmsford has suffered himself to be deceived by the bloodless hermaphrodites employed on such papers ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... wish to encourage it in every way. It points toward a degree of enlightenment which will be in strong contrast with the darker and more ignorant epochs of time, when the practice of medicine was united with the profession of the barber, the well-digger, the farrier, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... are of yesterday. Even the Calaveras man is no exception, since his skull and his polished conical pestle, the latter made of stone more recent than the auriferous gravels, show him to have been of Digger Indian type. In Utah begin the ruins of the Pueblo culture. These cover Arizona and New Mexico, with extensions into Colorado on the north and Mexico on the south. The reports of work done in this province for several years past form a library of text and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of his strength, can he know what it is to rest in love in the arms of a woman. Ask that woman whom you made, who is also my wife, whether she would have me as I was in the days when I followed the ways of Adam, and was a digger and a drudge? ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the west rose hills, whose ruggedness was softened by distance to outlines of harmonious grandeur. Scattered over the valley between them, the stately "digger," or nut-pines, grew at near intervals, singly or in groups of three or five, harmonizing by their pale gray-green with the other half-tints of earth, air, and sky. Following the course of the dried up river was a line, more ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the back-ache and general unpleasantness incident to digging is avoided, or greatly mitigated, by having the potatoes large and sound, turning out a peck to the hill, especially if the digger is the owner ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... plainly, nothing but an adventurer. Having tried more than twenty avocations, ending up with that of a gold-digger, he found himself at last at the end of his resources, and decided, in truly American fashion, that he would now make his fortune. He thereupon announced that he was in close communication with Moses, and that he had in his possession the two mosaic talismans, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... forget the past! However, I cannot let them lie here to rot." On counting the number of bodies he had hauled out of the water, he found that there were no less than five. The task was abhorrent to his nature. "I little thought that I should ever become a grave-digger!" he exclaimed, bitterly. "However, it must be done; I couldn't rest at night if I knew they were there. I only hope that the sea has washed away the remainder, that I shall not have to bury the whole of my crew; perhaps by that time I shall become accustomed to it, only every day ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... combined the light duties of grave-digger and clerk to the parish of Farlingford in Suffolk with a small but steady business in fish of his own drying, nets of his own netting, and pork slain and dressed by his ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... needn't have been frightened at the diggers. As far as we saw they were the sensiblest lot of working men we ever laid eyes on; not at all inclined to make a row for nothing—quite the other way. But the shutting off of public-houses led to sly grog tents, where they made the digger pay a pound a bottle for his grog, and didn't keep ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... gold-digger, sometimes a dock laborer, sometimes a soldier, sometimes a sailor, but whatever he is ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... in a tunnel near me, but in which I was not interested, the log slipped down after the digger had got out beyond it. He immediately began digging for the surface, for life, and was fortunately able to break through before he suffocated. He got his head above the ground, and then fainted. The guard outside saw him, pulled him out of the hole, and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... some folks thought 'twas softenin' o' th' brain; but my 'pinion is he never had any brains to get soft. Still he were a good digger, but the man we got ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... spell was broken by something shrilling in his brain, sending little chills racing up and down his spine. Digger! A small, oddly canine-like creature with telepathic powers, a space-dweller which men found when first they came to the asteroids. The relationship between spacehounds and men was much the same ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... submit to crushing losses with cheerfulness, tempered, of course, by humility in those cases where he recognises the operation of an overhanging curse; he will subscribe to any good or bad cause with a liberality excelled only by the digger; he will pay gambling debts with the easy, careless grace which makes every P. of W. so popular in English sporting circles—in a word, the smallest of his many sins is parsimony. But the penal suggestiveness of trespass— penalty ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... woolsack to enact the part of shepherd—Corydon, suppose, or Alphesibeus—to this goodly set of lambs! How he must have admired the hero of the "Odyssey," who in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it no such easy matter to deal with the English suitors, who were not the feeble voluptuaries of the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to be ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the person with whom she was confronted was transfigured by a disguise which varied from the one in which she had previously met him, with all the wide difference between a Baptist parson and an earth-soiled, uncouthly-dressed digger of gutters! Anna E. Surratt, Emma Offutt, Anna Ward, Elize Holohan, Honora Fitzpatrick, and a servant, attest to all the visual incapacity of Mrs. Surratt, and the annoyance she experienced therefrom ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... great deal of schemes for "improving the condition of the working-man." In the United States the farther down we go in the grade of labor, the greater is the advantage which the laborer has over the higher classes. A hod-carrier or digger here can, by one day's labor, command many times more days' labor of a carpenter, surveyor, bookkeeper, or doctor than an unskilled laborer in Europe could command by one day's labor. The same is true, in a less ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... "You have trained yourself to remember faces, Mallow. Your researches—scientific researches, my dear Professor—have led you into quarters which I have never explored. I must identify this venturesome little gold digger without delay, for Buddy yearns to make her all his; matrimony is becoming the one object of ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... light twinkled out of the darkness, and a low murmur ran round the decks—a murmur without words, since it came from men whose only fashion of meeting any emotion is with a joke; and even for a "digger" there is no joke ready on the lips, but only a catch at the heart, at the first ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... with all it offers has proved a dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,—on the whole, I say, a dead failure,—they talk as if they knew from their own will all about that of a Digger Indian! We are more apt to go by observation of the facts in the case. We are constantly seeing weakness where you see depravity. I don't say we're right; I only tell what you must often find to be the fact, right or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago—so long, that the story must be a true one, because our great-grandfathers implicitly believed it—there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub. It by no means follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by the emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy man; your ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... (sayes Carneades) that there is great Difference betwixt the being able to make Experiments, and the being able to give a Philosophical Account of them. And I will not now add, that many a Mine-digger may meet, whilst he follows his work, with a Gemm or a Mineral which he knowes not what to make of, till he shews it a Jeweller or a Mineralist to be inform'd what it is. But that which I would rather have here observ'd, is, That the Chymists I am now in debate ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... oh, not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favoured by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without fear of being troubled by the passers-by, I could consult the Ammophila and the Sphex (two species of Digger-or Hunting-wasps.—Translator's Note.) and engage in that difficult conversation whose questions and answers have experiment for their language; here, without distant expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... world; that if I succeeded I should come back to bring her plenty and happiness, but if I failed I should never look upon her face again. I kissed her hand and the baby once, and slipped out of the room. Three nights after I was out at sea, bound for Melbourne, a steerage passenger with a digger's tools for my baggage, and seven shillings in my pocket. After three and a half years of hard and bitter struggles on the goldfields, at last I struck it rich, realised twenty thousand pounds, and a fortnight later I took my passage for ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... many different quarters. I have extracted her from old nests of the Mason-bee of the Pebbles, from the galleries dug in a roadside bank by the Colletes (A short-tongued Burrowing-bee known also as the Melitta.—Translator's Note.) and lastly from the cavities made by some digger or other in the decayed trunk of ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... night were settling down over the wooded hills and rocky gulches about Fong Wu's, and there was little but his music to break the silence. Long since, the chickens had sleepily sought perches in the hen yard, with its high wall of rooty stumps and shakes, and on the branches of the Digger pine that towered beside it. Up the dry creek bed, a mile away, twinkled the lights of Whiskeytown; but no sounds from the homes of the white people came down to the lonely Chinese. If his clear treble was interrupted, it was by the cracking of a dry branch as a cottontail sped past on its ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... bantering, Among his colleagues, A parcel of Teagues, Whom he brings in among us And bribes with mundungus. [He little believes How they laugh in their sleeves.] Hail, fellow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man; Who makes the best figure, The Dean or the digger; And which is the best At cracking a jest. [Now see how he sits Perplexing his wits In search of a motto To fix on his grotto.] How proudly he talks Of zigzags and walks, And all the day raves Of cradles and caves; And boasts of his feats, His grottos and seats; Shows all his gewgaws, And ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Moist climate, coral reefs, sharks, Port Blair, convict-barracks, Rutland Island, cottonwoods—Ah, here we are. 'The aborigines of the Andaman Islands may perhaps claim the distinction of being the smallest race upon this earth, though some anthropologists prefer the Bushmen of Africa, the Digger Indians of America, and the Terra del Fuegians. The average height is rather below four feet, although many full-grown adults may be found who are very much smaller than this. They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... undergo, as traffic progresses, many improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one, filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle bridge plan ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Then it is that the poet or painter shows his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to his principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt: while the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, and the doggerel nonsense of the Cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... heard nor saw any thing but sobbing and crying from morning to the setting of the sun. The principal males in the town likewise came to pay their last respects to their mistress, as well as her grave-digger, who prostrated himself on the ground before her. Notwithstanding the representations and remonstrances of the priest, and the prayers of the venerable victim to her gods, for fortitude to undergo the dreadful ordeal, her resolution forsook her more than ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... resident of the Indian Territories, was supposed to be familiar. Indeed, the next week's INTELLIGENCER contained some vile doggerel supposed to be an answer to Mrs. Tretherick's poem, ostensibly written by the wife of a Digger Indian chief, accompanied by a glowing eulogium signed ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... stream-gold. Evidently the proportion of "tailings" must carefully be laid down before companies are justified in undertaking the expensive operation of quartz-crushing. Hence M. Tiburce Morisot, a practical digger from South Africa, introduced at Cairo by his compatriot, M. Marie, to my friend M. Yacoub Artin Bey, found a fair opportunity of proposing to his Highness the Khediv (October, 1878) a third Expedition in search ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Nor an electric flying beast; Ain't got no rich relation A-waitin' me back East; So I'll sell my chaps and saddle, My spurs can lay and rust; For there's now and then a digger That a buster cannot ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... [Jap.], cannonball, the Wabash cannonball, lightning express; luggage van; mail, mail car, mail van. shovel, spool, spatula, ladle, hod, hoe; spade, spaddle[obs3], loy[obs3]; spud; pitchfork; post hole digger. [powered construction vehicles] tractor, steamshovel, backhoe, fork lift, earth mover, dump truck, bulldozer, grader, caterpillar, trench digger, steamroller; pile driver; crane, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... daughters and a son, who was the heir to the throne. One day the king said to the prince: "My son, I have decided to marry your three sisters to the first persons who pass our palace at noon." At that time there first passed a swine-herd, then a huntsman, and finally a grave-digger. The king had them all three summoned to his presence, and told the swine-herd that he wished to give him his oldest daughter for a wife, the second to the huntsman, and the third to the grave-digger. Those poor creatures thought ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... Long Jim from his seat behind the counter, Mahony dispatched him to Rotten Gully, with an injunction not to show himself till he had found a digger of the name of Turnham. And having watched Jim set out, at a snail's pace and murmuring to himself, Mahony went into the store, and measured and cut off material for the new flag, from two ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... a digger named Jack L'Estrange, a great friend of the Bensons, was reading an article from the Bulletin to her father, and Kitty, as she was then called, was whiling away the time by pulling his moustache, an occupation ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... thought well of belles-lettres and for a time toyed with an ambition to enrich English literature with contributions of his own. During this period he contributed to the "Lit" a sonnet called "The Clam-Digger" which began:— ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... much startled at our appearance, but we soon established an acquaintance; and finding that they had some roots, I promised to send some men with goods to trade with them. They had the usual very large heads, remarkable among the Digger tribe, with matted hair, and were almost entirely naked: looking very poor and miserable, as if their lives had been spent in the rushes where they were, beyond which they seemed to have very little knowledge of any ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the gold digger consists in finding out earlier than his rivals what large affairs are in contemplation by the government; and in this art Timar was a past master. If he took up any speculation, a whole swarm of speculators threw themselves upon it, for they knew money was to be had there ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... and holds the stage till he smells the red fire for the vision; then he staggers down stage, strikes an attitude; the others do likewise; picture of 'Little Eva,' curtain. Talk about doubling 'Marcellus,' 'Polonius,' 'Osric,' and the 'First Grave Digger'! Why, that's nothing to these 'Uncle Tom' productions. But hold on, where did I get ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... nineteenth century the knights of the shuttle—intellectual, disputatious, and lyrical—looked down with infinite contempt on the ignorant and boorish slaves of the pick. Poetry has, in consequence, little to say about the digger for coal. The song of "The Collier Laddie," attributed to Burns, is one of the very few pleasant pieces of verse associated ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes |
