"Spade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from every friend, And said, "When of your sire bereft, The heritage our fathers left Guard well, nor sell a single field. A treasure in it is conceal'd: The place, precisely, I don't know, But industry will serve to show. The harvest past. Time's forelock take, And search with plough, and spade, and rake; Turn over every inch of sod, Nor leave unsearch'd a single clod." The father died. The Sons in vain— Turn'd o'er the soil, and o'er again; That year their acres bore More grain than e'er before. ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... They kept the Sabboth with suche a precisenesse, that thei would not that daie, ease nature of the belie burden. And when vpon other daies, nature forced theim to that easemente, thei caried with theim a litle spade of woode, wherewith in place most secreate, thei vsed to digge a litle pit, to laie their bealie in. And in the time of doyng, thei also vsed a very greate circumspection, that their clothes laie close to the grounde rounde aboute theim, for offending (saied thei) of the Maiestie of God. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... the poet's use of vulgar slang upbraid, But, when I'm speaking by the card, I call a spade a spade; And I, who have been touched of that same mania, myself, Am well aware that, when it comes to parting with his pelf, The curio collector is so blindly lost in sin That he doesn't spend his money—he simply blows ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... grassland, wide stretches of gently undulating country covered with thick rich grass; wave upon wave it rolled like a great ocean up to the ramparts of China. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but living green untouched by plough or spade, unbroken save where little lines of settlement stretched like clutching fingers into the sea of grass, the menacing advance of the Chinese, the tillers ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... rod, SUCH a trout-rod! A long bamboo with a piece of string tied to it! To fish for trout with a worm was contrary to every tradition in which I had been reared, but adaptability is a great thing, so with two turns of a spade I got enough worms for the afternoon, and started off. The Foret d'Aiguebelle is not a forest in our acceptation of the term, but an endless series of little bare rocky hills, dotted with pines, and fragrant with tufts of wild lavender, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... spade in his hand, and began to beat time with it; the two labourers seemed to know both words and music, though I did not; and so did Phillis: her rich voice followed her father's as he set the tune; and the men came in with more uncertainty, but still harmoniously. Phillis ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... eight feet over all, and weighing about ten pounds; three lances of the finest steel, with wooden handles, in all about eight feet long; a keg of drinking water and one of biscuits; a bucket and piggin for bailing, a small spade, knives, axes, and a shoulder bomb-gun. It can be understood easily that six men, maneuvering in so crowded a boat, with a huge whale flouncing about within a few feet, a line whizzing down the center, to be caught in which meant instant death, and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... a dandy place there. Had architects and landscape-gardeners prowling 'round for the last two weeks, and old man Fay won't allow one of them on the grounds. You'd die laughing to see him chasing them off with a spade or a rake or whatever he has in his hand. His property till July ninth, he says, and he wouldn't let so much as a crow fly over it if it belonged to Hadley B. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... was, Mr. Pitt alone could give vigour and solidity to any administration in the present state of affairs. Under him, his grace said, he was "willing to serve in any capacity, not merely as a general officer, but as a pioneer: under him he would take up a spade or a mattock." Such was the situation in which the ministers found themselves at the close of this session, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... stood to serve him, but not with the air of a serving-maid; on the contrary, though her face was bronzed by the winds, and her hands calloused by spade and hoe, there was little of the rustic in her action. Her blouse, cut sailor fashion at the throat, displayed a lovely neck (also burned by the sun), and she carried herself with the grace of an athlete. Her trust and ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... lynching the two strangers who were the principal promoters of disorder. Things were in this unsatisfactory condition when our evangelist, Elias B. Hopkins, came limping into the camp, travel-stained and footsore, with his spade strapped across his back, and his Bible in the pocket of his ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a grave for myself here, Timofei; and lie down here forever between my parents. For this is the only spot which is left to me in the world. Fetch the spade!" ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... legend, Yin Chiao fought on the side of the Yin against Wu Wang, and after many adventures was caught by Jan Teng between two mountains, which he pressed together, leaving only Yin Chiao's head exposed above the summits. The general Wu Chi promptly cut it off with a spade. Chiang Tz[u)]-ya subsequently canonized ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... knee, I held it between my hands, and when I let it go it fell heavily to the ground. I could not carry him home, and with bitter tears and a kind of dread I drew him aside a little way up the hill behind a rock. I went to my lodgings, returned towards dusk with a spade, dug his grave in a lonely spot near the bottom of a waterfall where he would never be disturbed, and there I buried him, reverently smoothing the turf over him. What a night that was for me! I was haunted incessantly by the ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... and de spade what Massa Will sis pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I had to ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... little town of Kanturk, and through the town of Mallow: Castle Richmond stands close upon its banks, within the barony of Desmond, and in that Kanturk region through which the Mallow and Killarney railway now passes, but which some thirteen years since knew nothing of the navvy's spade, or ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Along the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. At an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the children the pfennigs which had been ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... way to introduce the subject and unduly disclose her own state of ignorance. And a game of bridge, played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in a defensive spade. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... A. Because you don't mean it. I've had to fight for most of my happiness. I've never before found it ready at hand. I've always had to dig for it with a shovel and a spade and a pickax, and then blast. I had almost twenty years of that—from the time I was eighteen until I was thirty-eight. It taught me to take my happiness seriously and my troubles lightly." She shut her eyes for a moment, and her voice was very low and very deep and very vibrant. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... remarked, stopping before Shelton, and looking down, as if at last aware of him, "to those who talk of being justified through Art. I call a spade a spade." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... distant lands know naught, in truth, Of the frontier hardships, of the settler's needs. Can you not inform them in the plainest terms Of the falseness of the accusations made? Stay! myself will write them and boldly refute All their calumnies; set forth details in order, Calling 'spade a spade'—'twill ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... Madam," answered Hans, "and will very quickly have a spade in them: and ere I do aught else will I set the garden a-going, that Rachel and Charity can keep it in good order, with a ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... on the body, Mateo returned to the house for a spade with which to bury his son. He had gone but a few steps when he met Giuseppa, who, alarmed by ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... noon that day to change our mounts, we sighted to the northward some seven miles distant an outfit similar to our own. We were on the lookout for this cavalcade; they were supposed to be the "Spade" outfit, on their way to attend the round-up in the middle division, where our pasture lay. This year, as in years past, we had exchanged the courtesies of the range with them. Their men on our division were made welcome at ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... round the end of the building, and on turning the corner—she first—I felt her hold on me tighten for an instant, and the next step I, too, heard distant voices, and the blows of a spade upon the heavy soil, for the night ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... resumed my country occupations, as far as my strength would permit, and conceived a real grief at not being able to manage our garden without help; for I could not take five or six strokes with the spade without being out of breath and overcome with perspiration; when I stooped the beating redoubled, and the blood flew with such violence to my head, that I was instantly obliged to stand upright. Being therefore confined to less fatiguing employments, I busied myself about the dove —house, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... reclaiming the rich river valleys, and they drew their revenues chiefly from this land. They did not readily take to the cutting down of the forests and preparing the upland for growing crops; they were more at home with the dyking-spade than the axe. A description of their methods of dyking and constructing aboideaux, written in 1710, is interesting to those who are doing ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... preparing the soil for root growth is a spade or spading fork (Fig. 49). With this tool properly used we can prepare the soil for a crop better than with ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... communicated his fears to no one. Two or three hours before day, he became so sore and weary from work with the spade that he crawled into one of the half-wrecked wagons, and tried to go to sleep. But his nerves were drawn to too high a pitch. After a quarter of an hour's vain effort he got out of the wagon and stood by the wheel. The sky was still black, and the heavy clouds of fog and vapor rolled steadily ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... shummaker told me o' that rum rig; and his nevvey sa, that the beer-good was fystey; and that Nutty was so swelter'd, that she ha got a pain in spade-bones. The bladethacker wou'd ha gin har some doctor's gear in a beaker; but he sa she'll ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... ready to aid in this way, after vainly trying to handle a spade, a task rendered impossible by his wound. He was hard at work over his work, carrying basketful after basketful with one hand, when Captain Smithers came up, saw how he was striving, and stood looking ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... several workshops—ateliers—of prehistoric weapons near Sidi Mansur, which lies within half a mile of Gafsa, whence he has extracted—or rather retrieved, for the flints merely lie upon the ground—quantities of instruments of every shape; among them, some saws and a miniature spade. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... is a laborious task, for the galleries run to a great depth. Favier wields the pick and spade; I break the clods which he brings down and open the cells, whose contents—cocoons and remnants of provisions—I at once pour into a little screw of paper. Sometimes, when the larva is not developed, the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... but here and there slaves were working, spade in hand, singing in an undertone; others, to whom was granted a moment of rest, were sitting by ponds or in the shade of groves, in trembling light produced by sun-rays breaking in between leaves; others were watering roses or the pale lily-colored blossoms of the saffron. Acte and Lygia ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... that vile thing!" said her mother, "it is poisonous. The smell of it will make you sick. I do not see how it came here. John must bring his spade and take it up. We will have nothing in the garden but what is beautiful or sweet, and this ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... of the hill to begin to descend it, he saw in the clouded moonlight a deserted railroad tool-house by the track. In front of it lay a broken, rusty spade. He shouldered this and proceeded up the mountain. It was a long walk, and he had to stop more than once to rest, but he got to the top at last. There was a little clearing in the woods here, where some one had camped. The ruins of a ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... impoverished. I gave it a good top-dressing of barnyard manure in the autumn, and plowed it deeply; another top- dressing of fine yard manure and a deep forking in the early spring. Then, raking the surface smooth, I set a line along its length on one side. A man took a spade, sunk its length in the soil, and pushed it forward strongly. This action made an almost perpendicular wedge-shaped aperture just back of the spade. The asparagus plant, with its roots spread out fan-shape, was sunk in this opening to ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... suddenly remembered the prophecy of Ismenor, and held himself ready, his heart beating at the thought that in one of those trees he beheld Hermosa. Meanwhile the magician took a spade, and loosened the earth of the roots of the three trees so that they might fall all together. Directly the parrot observed them totter he spread his wings and flew right under the middle one, which was the most beautiful of ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... auctioneer disposed of the horses and cows and hay and machinery, waiting until he came to the household objects upon which they had set their eye. So they would invest in some stove-pipe, and a couple of ghastly chromos (for the sake of the frames), and some odds and ends of crockery, and a spade, and some old rope to make a swing for the baby. They would get these things for five or ten cents each, and get in addition all the excitements of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... BET? Well, I make no doubt that the world of idlers is sorely sick Of the moans and groans of the likes of us. When the whip, the needle, the spade, the pick, Are all on strike for a higher wage, 'tis a worry, of course, to the well-to-do, And a sleek Home-Sec, must "decline to pledge" support ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... and their opinion counted for much with Montcalm. De Levis, held back by the vacillating Vaudreuil, had not yet come from Montreal, and the swiftest of the Canadian paddlers was sent down Lake Ticonderoga in a canoe to hurry him on. Then the entire battalion of Berry went to work at once with spade and pick and ax to prepare a breastwork and abattis, stretching a line of defense in front of the fort, and not ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not make our fortune in Baltimore, and I never got my dog; so we came here to Tom Tiddler's ground, to pick up gold and silver. When we are fixed, and get a new tent, my father is going to give me a little spade and a cradle, to dig gold enough to buy a Newfoundland dog with, and then I shall borrow a saw and make a dog-house, like the one I had in Baltimore, out of that green chest. Charley Saunders lived in that next house in the picture, and he had a martin-box, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... is more tiring than spade work. But I'll guarantee that the man who does eight hours' brain work is not much more tired than the man who does eight hours' ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... when they were out of the thicket—pointing towards the house as he spoke; "go and fetch me a spade—a spade. But give me the bundle," he added, trying to reach it from the fork, where it hung ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... done which would admit of no delay. Further out in the Valley lay three dead men, and I felt I must get them out of sight before Moira awoke. Accordingly I scribbled a short note of explanation on a leaf torn from my pocket-book, placed it in a conspicuous position, and, taking with me the light spade we had brought with us, I slipped noiselessly out of the cave. I found the bodies of our two enemies without any trouble, but, to my great surprise, there was no trace of Cumshaw. He had disappeared as utterly as if the earth had opened up and swallowed him. True, there were broken ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... showed itself as the woman's devotion had shown itself—in the man's rough way. He threw down his spade with an oath. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... whom he then shot. To Sandeau and Gautier the novelist explained, with such eloquence and precision, his scheme for obtaining the interred wealth that they were wrought up to the point of declaring themselves ready to set out, armed with pick-axe and spade, and to put into action Edgar Allen Poe's yarn of the Gold Bug. When money was the theme, Balzac's tongue was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... wider, better feeding area for growing roots, permits greater water storage, forwards growth of trees and brings them into bearing earlier than trees set in spade-dug holes. Write for FREE BOOKLET about how to blast tree holes with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... flowers, growing among the tall sedges and "cat-tails" of the marshes, make the most insensate traveller exclaim at their amazing loveliness. To reach them one must don rubber boots and risk sudden seats in the slippery ooze; nevertheless, with spade in hand to give one support, it is well worth while to seek them out and dig up some roots to transplant to the garden. Here, strange to say, without salt soil or more water than the average garden receives from showers ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... time of June, Crowding years in one brief moon, When all things I heard or saw Me, their master, waited for. I was rich in flowers and trees, Humming birds and honeybees; For my sport the squirrel played, Plied the snouted mole his spade; For my taste the blackberry cone Purpled over hedge and stone; Laughed the brook for my delight Through the day and through the night, Whispering at the garden wall, Talked with me from fall to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... hope to go to bed on, and you may believe I rose bright and early in the morning, to run with my shingle-spade to the cemetery of all my dead pets. With an anxious heart, I removed the earth, and unfolded the plantain-leaf. Sure enough, there was my pet, "alive and kicking!" He hopped out on to a full-blown ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... every content of one mind to be communicated to another. But here again we must first reduce the exaggerated claims to the simpler reality. When Beulah makes card experiments, the whole words jack, queen, king, spade, club, heart, diamond, come to her mind, but when she makes word experiments, never under any circumstances does a real word come to her consciousness, but only single letters. Why is this? If king and queen can be transmitted from mind to mind, why not dog and cat? Yet when the mother thinks ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... brought the most unexpected beasts from every hole and crevice in the hut—brown rats, squirrels, a long black snake with spade-shaped head and diamond markings, little bush hares, a young buck, which came crashing through the forest and prinked timidly to the door ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... stream has made the glen, and the earth which runs down the stream was all once part of the hill on which you stand." I confess I was very much ashamed of myself when she said that. For that is the history of the whole mystery. Madam How is digging away with her soft spade, water. She has a harder spade, or rather plough, the strongest and most terrible of all ploughs; but that, I am glad to say, she has laid by in ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... lonely centuries, it seemed, as she prayed fervently for his reappearance. Presently, staggering beneath a burden of suggestive shape, Carter came out and took his way to the dense underbrush behind the cabin. He returned to the hut for a spade and pick and went back to the underbrush. His absence seemed interminable. Then, with blistered hands, he stepped out of ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... I have blocked up all the windows, and barricaded the door. We have lost only one of our number since we came—namely, Diggory, the market-gardener, from Glasgow, who went out one morning to botanize, and never came back. I am much surprised at his absconding, as he had nothing but a spade to go off with. Chippendale, the carpenter, was sent after him, but did not return; and Gregory, the smith, has been out after them these two days. I have just dispatched Mudge, the herdsman, to look for all three, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... their own fathers busy planting acorns. Each lord had on the velvet cloak in which he left his castle, but it was worn to rags with rough work in the forest. Their hair and beards had grown long; their hands were soiled with earth; each had an old wooden spade, and on all sides ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... burst of vengeful fury to be over—and he found it gone! He thought on the first survey that all was well; but on more closely examining the ground his heart misgave him, for it appeared to him as if the soil had been moved. With anxious haste he began to dig, and soon his spade struck the lid of one of the chests. For a moment he breathed again; but he was impelled to carry his search farther. He uncovered the chest and raised the lid—it was empty! In a wild fear and fury he dug again and again, and with the same ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... poems to the literature of the country, which have stamped him as being possessed of a more than ordinary share of the divine afflatus. Among them is "The Sexton's Spade," which has gained a world-wide celebrity. The writer has been connected with Mr. Burnett in the publication of two or three papers, which, somehow or other, never won their way into popular favor: either the public had ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... needn't wait another minute," cried the old sailor, who was nearly as excited as the boys. "Get your spade an' ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... political agitators, and with miserable traitors to the land of their birth and breeding, the poor emigrant starts from the interior, where his ideas have never expanded beyond the weaver's loom or factory labour, the plough or the spade, the hod, the plane, or the trowel, and hastens with his wife and ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... up a fence about my yard, and employed a man of whom I knew something,—that he was industrious, temperate, and that he had a wife and children to support,—a worthy man, a native New Englander. I engaged him, I say, to dig some post-holes. My employee bought a new spade and scoop on purpose, and came to my place at the appointed time, and began digging. While he was at work, two men came over from a drinking-saloon, to which my residence is nearer than I could desire. One of them ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hurry had never thought of bringing a spade with him, so he made up his mind to run home and fetch one; and that he might know the place again he took off one of his red garters, and tied ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... you, as the female dancer will come upon the stage, with a distaff, twirling it, or with a pail to draw water; or with a spade for digging. Your companion will come next perhaps driving a wheel-barrow, or with a sickle to mow corn, or with a pipe a-smoaking; and though the scene should be a saloon, no matter, it will come soon to be filled with rustics or sailors. Your ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... at the bottom of the garden, and found a spade and a box that was suitable. Then he came out to his neat, bare, wintry garden. The girls flew towards him, putting the elastic of their hats under their chins as they ran. The tree and the box lay on the frozen earth. The ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... up with the cutting-in spade, and as the fish hung still over the side, cut him open from neck to belly with a single movement. Another Chinaman stood by with a long-handled gaff, hooked out the purple-black liver, brought it over the side, and dropped it ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... the way of it: The rector had ordered Niels to dig up a bit of soil in the garden. After a time when he went out himself to look at the work, he found Niels leaning on his spade eating nuts. He had not even begun to dig. The rector scolded him, but the fellow answered that he had not taken service as a gardener. He received a good box on the ear for that. At this he threw away his spade and swore valiantly at his ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... suggests that the land along the Railway lines might well be utilised for the purpose of spade husbandry. There seems no reason why these extensive strips of often fertile soil should be left to go to waste, conveniently situated as they are on borders of the main arteries of commerce and in close vicinity ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... dam was most complete. The river rose so as to overflow the marshes, which enabled us to push all the vessels up the channel without the necessity of deepening it by spade labour. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... for fire sought, That we our roots and things seeth might if any home were brought. The rest the wood doth seeke, eke euery bush and tree For berries and such baggage like, which should seeme meate to bee. Our fingers serue in steed, both of pickaxe and spade, To dig and pull vp euery weed, that grew within the shade. Eke diged for rootes the ground, and searcht on euery brier For berries, which if we had found, then streight way to the fire: Where we rost some of those, the rest seeth in a pot, And of this banket nought we lose, nor fragment ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... you really think the rest of the world so stupid? Or it is that the fog of your island has got into your brains? You always talk about truth as if it were a patented British invention, yet no one is less willing to call a spade a spade. Look at Cairo, where you pretend to keep nothing but a consul-general, but where the ruler of the country can't turn over in bed without his permission. A consul-general! Look at your novels! Look at what you yourself are saying ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I only had a spade," said Daimur, as he fell to looking about for a sharp stick or anything which would dig up the earth. After quite a search he found, half buried in sand and dead leaves, an old spade with ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... the whole enterprise,—a truly dramatic climax. George Ripley went to New York to become literary editor of the Tribune, and was as distinguished there for the excellence of his reviews, and the elegance of his turnout in Central Park as he had been for the use of the spade and pitchfork at ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the ground (a process which the animal taught them by the same use of his claws); the shell of a river mussel as a scraper to finish wooden tools. "These people were hunters without dogs, fishers without hooks, and tillers without plow or spade. They show how much development life was capable of in the time before metals."[170] The palometa is a fish which weighs two or three pounds. It has fourteen teeth in each jaw so sharp that the Abipones shear sheep with the jaw.[171] Such cases might be pursued into great ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... board as a spade he scooped out a capful of coins—gold, American, English and French, which the Southerner had buried in ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... off; and Elshie, after looking at him with a scornful and indignant laugh, took spade and mattock, and occupied himself in digging a grave ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... for another trial of it—just one more. She had wonderful faith in the selection, had Mother. She pleaded until the fire burned low, then Dad rose and said: "Well, we'll try it once more with corn, and if nothing comes of it why then we MUST give it up." Then he took the spade and raked the fire together and covered it with ashes—we always covered the fire over before going to bed so as to keep it alight. Some mornings, though, it would be out, when one of us would have to go across to ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... unusually good design for one of these rings, which we copy, Fig. 182. It is entirely composed of mortuary emblems, on a ground of black enamel. Fig. 183 is an English memorial ring set with stones; on the circlet is engraved an elongated skeleton, with crossbones above the skull, and a spade and pick-axe at the feet; the ground is black enamel. It has been converted into a memorial by its original purchaser, who caused to be engraved withinside the hoop, "C.R., Jan. 30, 1649, Martyr." It is now in the Londesborough collection, from whence ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of timber and shingles. Voyagers tell me that during heavy gales of wind a terrible sea is set in motion upon this shoal sheet of water, making it dangerous to navigate. Bears are found in the fastnesses of the swamp. The Dismal Swamp Canal was dug in the old days of the wheelbarrow and spade. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... and low. There was no answer. He looked around him, trying to decide where he was and what to do. His eyes fell upon the two recently dug graves. Headboards stood at each of them. Both were covered. Near the mounds lay a spade. The earth ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... at stake, I can't hum and haw," said Madeleine, who could never keep her temper with Dove for long. "I call a spade a spade, and rejoice to do it. What I ask you to tell me is, whether I've been correctly informed or not. Have you, too, heard Louise Dufrayer's name coupled with that of a ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... lofty ledges of rock, an astounding instance of toil, hopefulness and patience. No matter the barrenness of the spot, no matter its isolation or the difficulty of approach, wherever root or seed will grow, there the French peasant owner plies hoe and spade, and gradually causes the wilderness ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Seeing the blood on the floor, they asked her if she had made way with the child. She said: "Do you take me for an old sow?" But, having their suspicions aroused, they traced the blood spots to the sand pit. Fetching a spade, they dug up the child, which was about one foot below the surface. On the access of air, following the removal of the sand and turf, the child began to cry, and was immediately taken up and carried to its mother, who washed it and laid it on her bed and soon gave it the breast. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... acre. I cut the sods as follows: Take a board eight to nine inches wide, four, five, or six feet long, and cut downward all around the board, then turn the board over and cut again alongside the edge of the board, and so on as many sods as needed. Then cut the turf with a sharp spade, all the same lengths. Begin on one end, and roll together. Eight inches by five feet is about as much as a man can handle conveniently. It is very easy to load them on a wagon, cart, or barrow, and they can be quickly laid. After laying a good piece, sprinkle a little ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... court-yard, a large and sharp chisel, which, most probably, the carpenters had used in the construction of the house, and forgotten. We put it carefully by, in order that we might fasten it to a pole, and use it in the moment of our flight as a spear. We found, also, a spade in the court, which we hid, that it too might serve as a weapon. Besides this, the sailors, on the night when we made the attempt, were to arm themselves with some long poles, which had been used ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... danger of which they foresaw, and there are few of their tombs which were not occupied by a succession of tenants between the date of their first making and the close of the Roman supremacy. When the modern explorer chances to discover a vault which has escaped the spade of the treasure-seeker, it is hardly ever the case that the bodies whose remains are unearthed prove to be those of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... girls, too, it is to be feared. At any rate, it was so with Mr Mason's gardener, at the time I speak of. He was peevish and fretful, and said some harsh things to Robert, because he accidentally destroyed a fine tulip with his spade. Robert cried, and said he did not mean to do it. Then the old man was sorry, but, probably feeling too proud to confess it, he was silent for a long time. By and by, however, he told Robert that his conscience troubled him on account of his speaking so unkindly, ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... tip of his little tongue showing between his white teeth, he would say, "Go on with your work, Nana, DARLING!"—And his mother's look never left him all the time. 'Once he had been digging with his little spade among the fine grey gravel silted up here and there among the hollows of the rocks. He had been digging with great energy, and for May the air was hot. Lizzie looked up and said to him, "Sandy, it's time for me to take you to bed"—that is, for his midday sleep. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade, And the breathless land is lying in a swoon, He leaves his work a moment, leaning lightly on his spade, And he hears the bell-bird chime the Austral noon. The parrakeets are silent in the gum-tree by the creek; The ferny grove is sunshine-steeped and still; But the dew will gem the myrtle in the twilight ere he seek His little lonely cabin on ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... a good opinion of my whist, though how I arrived at it I cannot explain. Henderson was my partner and he seemed to me to do the most odd things. For instance when I led a spade and he took the trick, instead of leading another spade he would begin some fresh suit, which made me wonder what in the world he was doing. And he did not seem to think his trumps half as valuable as I thought mine, but ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... against Britain and all things British. The sergeant, however, smiling complacently over his 6 ft. of brawn and his 44 in. chest, whisked him off with a dozen other of the boys to the depot at Fermoy, whence in a few weeks they were sent on, with the spade-work kinks taken out of their backs, to the first battalion of the Royal Mallows, at the top of the roster for ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the wet months, with their dire train of tropical diseases, were at hand. Therefore, though more might fall by the enemy's weapons in a direct attack, the ultimate loss would be less than by the protracted and sickly labors of the spade; while with San Juan subdued, the force could receive all the care possible in such a climate, and under the best conditions await the return of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... I hadn't understood this. I had also overlooked the item that he was a gentleman, and even then did not recognize it. But I kept these trifles to myself; and as he was evidently trying to bury the hatchet, I got out my spade as well. And for the rest of that evening we were as civil to one another as a couple of smugglers with one ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... knowledge and in teaching men-folk the ancient lore of my kin, the Dwarfs. I taught them how to plant and to sow, and to reap the yellow grain. I showed them where the precious metals of the earth lie hidden, and how to smelt iron from its ores,—how to shape the ploughshare and the spade, the spear and the battle-axe. I taught them how to tame the wild horses of the meadows, and how to train the yoke-beasts to the plough; how to build lordly dwellings and mighty strongholds, and how to sail in ships across old AEgir's watery kingdom. ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... been much of a person to have bad dreams or nightmares or things like that. But ever since that night in that schoolhouse, if I do have a nightmare, it takes the shape of that roll being called. Every word was like a spade grating and gritting in damp gravel when a grave is dug. It ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... guard the shore, he rode to the summit of the hill, where the men were hard at work, delving in silence with pick and spade. There were not sufficient implements for all, but when one was out of breath, another took his place, and before the first glimmer of dawn appeared, the trench had been ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the sweetness of those days! To be awakened by the valiant challenge of early-rising roosters; to hear the chuckle of dawn-light worm-hunting robins brought a return of boy-hood's exultation. Not only did my muscles harden to the spade and the hoe, my soul rejoiced in a new and delightful sense of establishment. I had returned to citizenship. I was a proprietor. The clock of the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of the cathedral, Catherine of Arragon, who died at Kimbolton Castle, in 1536; and Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed at Fotheringhay Castle fifty-one years afterwards. The accompanying engraving is a representation of the old sexton, with his spade, pickaxe, and other ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... wish them to have every chance there is." There spoke the fond mother-bird. The children! Are these young giants and giantesses our children? Seemingly but yesterday they were little tots pottering in the sand with spade and shovel, alternately angelic and demoniac, supplying annual testimony to the inability of green apples to oppress a hardy digestion, and free from every inkling of responsibility save a faint, intermittent respect for parental mandate. Now they tower ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... buried in them times; for av it was only a small farmer with a potato garden, my father would come down with the black cloak on him, and three yards of crape behind his hat, and set all the children crying and yelling for half a mile round; and then the way he'd walk before them with a spade on his shoulder, and sticking it down in the ground, clap his hat on the top of it, to make it look like a chief mourner. It ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Jean, holding his violin high above his head. "It is my only child; it will laugh or cry, and love and scold as I bid it, and make everybody else do the same when I touch its heart-strings." Jean had brought his violin under his arm, in place of a spade, to help build up the walls of the city. He had never heard of Amphion, with his lyre, building up the walls of Thebes; but Jean knew that in his violin lay a power of work by other hands, if he played while they labored. "It lightened toil, and made ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... be a yeoman, mither, to follow my father's trade, To bow my back in miry banks, at pleugh and hoe and spade. Stinting wife, and bairns, and kye, to fat some courtier lord,— Let them die o' rent wha like, mither, and I'll ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... labours, duties, sufferings, prayers, Compose the soul, and fit it for its cares; Their graves before them and their griefs behind, Have each a med'cine for the rustic mind; Nor has he care to whom his wealth shall go, Or who shall labour with his spade and hoe; But as he lends the strength that yet remains, And some dead neighbour on his bier sustains, (One with whom oft he whirl'd the bounding flail, Toss'd the broad coit, or took the inspiring ale,) "For me," (he meditates,) "shall ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... torn up. It had never been opened since the battles of 1914. The Germans had lived there and everything was in an awful condition. One wonders how they endured themselves. The Military detailed two men for two days to spade up and carry away the filth from the bedrooms, and it took two women an entire week all but one day, scrubbing all day long until their shoulders ached, to scrub the place clean. But they got it clean. They were the kind ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... the expense of making one spade, then when a spade, by virtue of a sudden demand, rises in value to one dollar and ten cents, the manufacturers get an extra profit of ten cents. This could not long remain so, because other capital would enter this industry, and so increase the supply that one spade would ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the grass waved softly in the courtyard below—the grass that was so soon to wither, uprooted by the spade; and all night long the Gadfly lay alone in the ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... which surround a pleasant country house named Boom Hall. Hard by is the well from which the besiegers drank. A little further off is the burial ground where they laid their slain, and where even in our own time the spade of the gardener has struck upon many sculls and thighbones at a short distance beneath the turf ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... me in mind that I wanted many things notwithstanding all that I had amassed together; and of these, ink was one; as also a spade, pickaxe, and shovel, to dig or remove the earth; needles, pins, and thread; as for linen, I soon learned to want that ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... no, I will make an honest woman of you, when all is done. Nay, none of your airs; no tricks upon travellers! I have you here as safe AS a horse in a pound; there is not a house nor a shed within a mile of us; and, if I miss the opportunity, call me spade. Faith, you are a delicate morsel, and there is ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing, Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows; In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground; Or thither, where, beneath the showery west, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, No slaves revere them and no wars invade. Yet frequent ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... wrapped up and carried forth the corpse, and chanting hymns of the Christian tradition, Antony grew sad, because he had no spade, wherewith to dig the ground; and thinking over many plans in his mind, said, "If I go back to the monastery, it is a three days' journey. If I stay here, I shall be of no more use. I will die, then, as it is fit; and, falling beside thy warrior, Christ, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... on the sod the story was written, all too plain. Two men, possibly three, had been murdered—cut to pieces and burned—not many hours before. There stood the bloody spade with which the bodies had been dismembered, and there lay an empty can whose oil had been poured upon the mingled camp utensils, tent, and wagon of the herders, in the attempt to incinerate the hacked and ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... King Argimenes, sitting upon the ground, bowed, ragged, and dirty, gnawing a bone. He has uncouth hair and a dishevelled beard. A battered spade lies near him. Two or three slaves sit at back of stage eating raw cabbage-leaves. The tear-song, the chaunt of the low-born, rises at intervals, monotonous and mournful, coming from ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... it was wrong in him to borrow trouble, when his child had such godfolk as the master and mistress of Falla. Yet his anxiety would not be stilled. Of a sudden he dropped his spade and started for the parsonage just as he was taking the short cut across the heights, and running at top speed all the way. When Eric of Falla drove into the stable-yard of the parsonage the first person that met his eyes was Jan ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... less make to me from now on? Then why do I scheme and slave? Pshaw! I've known the answer ever since I first turned the soil of this farm. The man who thinks about things knows there's nothing to life. It's all a grinding chase for the day when someone will pat my cheek with a spade." ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... the fact in your brag about the political graves. Only this isn't a spade; it's a steam shovel. Do I understand you are giving me this stuff ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... has often been made that the Union troops should have been intrenched at Shiloh. Up to that time the pick and spade had been but little resorted to at the West. I had, however, taken this subject under consideration soon after re-assuming command in the field, and, as already stated, my only military engineer reported unfavorably. Besides this, the troops with me, officers ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... little streams, and the few Belgian peasants left were trying to put it in shape for summer. A few were ploughing with horses, others laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow. Every tree in this country, where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled with white spots where branches had been trimmed away, and below the timber was piled— heavy logs for ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... same Gottfried Keller who calls Gotthelf "without exception the greatest epic genius that has lived in a long time, or perhaps will live for a long time to come," characterizes him thus as to his style: "With his strong, sharp spade he will dig out a large piece of soil, load it on his literary wheelbarrow, and to the accompaniment of strong language upset it before our feet; good garden soil, grass, flowers and weeds, manure and stones, precious gold coins and old shoes, fragments of crockery ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... of tools and implements for the homestead: an axe, adze, bill, awl, plane, saw, spokeshave, tie hook, auger, mattock, lever, share, coulter, goad-iron, scythe, sickle, weed-hook, spade, shovel, woad dibble, barrow, besom, beetle, rake, fork, ladder, horse comb, shears, fire tongs, weighing scales, and a long list of spinning implements necessary when farmers made their own clothes. The author wisely remarks that one ought to have coverings for ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... already shown, also came into her consciousness, but with less certainty of pleasing, wherefore she remembered them less, for it was always her habit to banish a disagreeable thought if she could. One day she went into the garden with her spade and an old tin biscuit-box. She put the box on the ground beside her, with the lid off, and began to dig. By-and-by the kitten came crooning and sidling up to her, and hopped into the box. Beth instantly put on the lid, and the kitten was a corpse which must be buried. She hurriedly ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... unworthy of a place on the table. Yet what the pile consisted of it would have been difficult to say, seeing that the dust on the same was so thick that any hand which touched it would have at once resembled a glove. Prominently protruding from the pile was the shaft of a wooden spade and the antiquated sole of a shoe. Never would one have supposed that a living creature had tenanted the room, were it not that the presence of such a creature was betrayed by the spectacle of an old nightcap resting on ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... osier in their shields they weave, And shape the casque, and in the mould prepare The brazen breastplate and the silver greave. Scorned lie the spade, the sickle and the share, Their fathers' falchions to the forge they bear. Now peals the clarion; through the host hath spread The watch-word. Helmets from the walls they tear, And yoke the steeds. In triple gold arrayed, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the spade or the shuttle, that plies Its own honest task in its own honest way, Serves heaven not less than a star in the skies— What more could the ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... then from my spade against iron; my mother screamed, and I dug with all my might for another hour, and then beheld a chest of heavy wood bound with iron ready to be heaved out of the hole; 'Now Lionel weigh it out—hard ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... prince and beggar, of a rich winding sheet and a shroudless burial, of a solitary grave and a family vault—were this all, then, indeed it would be true that death is a common leveler. Such paltry distinctions as those of wealth and poverty are soon leveled by the spade and mattock; the damp breath of the grave blots them out forever. But there are other distinctions which even the mace of death can not level or obliterate. Can it break down the distinction of virtue and vice? Can it confound the good with the bad? the noble with the base? all ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... party went out, and found Wat Greenwood waiting for them with a bundle of straw, a spade, and a little gunpowder. Maurice carried a basket containing all his preparations, on which Wat looked with supreme contempt, telling him that his puffs were too green to make a smeech. Maurice, not condescending to argue the point, ran ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brightened himself up: he wore whipcord leggings over his short legs, and a preacher's coat over his long trunk, a white and red patterned celluloid collar about his neck, and a bowler hat on the back of his head; and his side-whiskers were trimmed in the shape of a spade. He had joy of many widows and spinsters, to each of whom he said: "There's a grief-livener you are," and all of whom he gave over on hearing of the widow of Drefach. Her he married, and with the ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... strong scour with the ebb," he said, "and this here passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade." ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... things by their common names; you may be ambitious to show superiority over others and display your learning or, rather, your pedantry and lack of learning. For instance, you may not want to call a spade a spade. You may prefer to call it a spatulous device for abrading the surface of the soil. Better, however, to stick to the old familiar, simple name that your grandfather called it. It has stood the test of time, and old friends are ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... or another before he gets back," said Samson Dee, as he ceased digging, and rested one foot upon the top of his spade, watching his young master contemplatively as he went along the road for a short distance before leaping up the bank, and beginning to tramp among heath, brake, and furze, over ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... might be hidden beneath the tree, and that the dog had scented it, at last struck the old man. He ran back to the house, fetched his spade and began to dig the ground at that spot. What was his astonishment when, after digging for some time, he came upon a heap of old and valuable coins, and the deeper he dug the more gold coins did he find. So intent was the old man on his work that ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... when Vanderkemp closed his eyes on this world, a lad was working as an apprentice to a Scotch gardener, rising in the dense darkness of the cold winter's mornings at four o'clock, and warming his knuckles by knocking them against the handle of his spade. He was passing through a hard training, but this lad was being prepared to take up the work which Vanderkemp had so well begun, though in a somewhat different sphere, and to repair the loss which had been ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... remember'd, Marcus; she's gone, she's fled. Sirs, take you to your tools. You, cousins, shall Go sound the ocean and cast your nets; Happily you may catch her in the sea; Yet there's as little justice as at land.— No; Publius and Sempronius, you must do it; 'Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, And pierce the inmost centre of the earth: Then, when you come to Pluto's region, I pray you deliver him this petition; Tell him it is for justice and for aid, And that it comes from old Andronicus, Shaken ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... presently replaced it by a seat of solid gold: this the Ashanti again requisitioned, together with a large gold ornament in the shape of an elephant, said to have been dug from some ruins. The Amazon replied, with some detail and in the 'spade' language, that she and her brother should exchange sexes, and that she would fight a l'outrance; whereupon the Ashanti, with many compliments about her bravery, gave her twelve months to ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... called the attention of our readers to the subject of ploughing, but we feel we have not pressed upon them with the force it deserves, the necessity of what the Bible calls "breaking up the fallow ground." What the plough and spade do for the land we must have done for the minds of those who sit in Methodist pews. Unsaved men and women must be compelled to look the truth in the face. Farmers know that so long as the land is hard and cloddy, the seed ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... he sent a note to count D'Estaing, bearing a positive refusal to capitulate. All energies were now bent towards taking the town by regular approaches. Ground was broken on the morning of September 23rd, and night and day the besiegers plied the spade, and so vigorously was the work prosecuted, that in the course of twelve days fifty-three cannon and fourteen mortars were mounted. During these days two sorties were made. The morning of September 24th, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... animal smell hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... be manifold, and we must not allow the difference to breed a spirit of suspicion. Because my brother's gift is not mine I must not suspect his calling. To one man is given a trumpet, to another a lamp, and to another a spade. And they are all ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... discourse into print and heightened its effect by an editorial couched in the plainest terms. We were none of us in the humor to hear a spade called an agricultural implement just then, and Dabney knew it; particularly when the mill dividends and the cemetery ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... accomplished on earth. For love is, by nature, an obstacle race. Run on the flat, without any difficulties, it would lose its zest both for pursuer and pursued, and Judge Cupid would as well shut up court and become an advocate of race suicide. But as for that spade lead, Alderson—are ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... So Yan seized the spade and began to dig in the bushes not far from the teepee. Sam and Guy were gradually drawn in. They began gathering all the rubbish and threw it into the hole. As they tumbled in bones, tins and scraps of bread Yan said: ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... funeral was over. The soft, green turf had been broken, and the bright June flowers had fallen beneath the old sexton's spade as he dug the little grave where Willie Parkman was laid to rest. In the drunkard's home there was again darkness and a silence which would never be broken by the prattle of a childish voice. Sobered, repentant, and heartbroken, the wretched father laid his head in the lap of his faithful ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... be not afraid; Look labor boldly in the face; Take up the hammer or the spade, And blush not for your ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... was disappointed when he found that Robert's French began and ended with these useful words; but, at any rate, he saw that if the lady was mad she was not the only one, and he put on a big beavery hat, and got a candle and matches and a spade, and they all went up the hill to the wayside shrine ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... allowed Cialdini to fix his batteries on heights which commanded the top of the Gaeta hill. But to profit by this, the Piedmontese were obliged to make fourteen miles of roads by which to bring up their artillery. For a month, 10,000 out of the 20,000 besiegers were at work with the spade. The defending force amounted to 11,000 men, and was commanded by General Ritucci. From the first, it was certain that the obstinate stand made at Gaeta could only result in what Lord John Russell called a useless effusion of blood; nevertheless it seems to have been prompted ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... gravel over and to examine it. His search was rewarded by the discovery of several stones, which he conveyed home with him, and which proved, after being cleaned, to be gems of the first water. Elated at this success, he returned to the spot next day with a spade, and succeeded in obtaining many other specimens, and in convincing himself that the deposit stretched up and down for a long distance on both sides of the torrent. Having satisfied himself upon this point, our compatriot made his way to Tobolsk, where he exhibited ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... some rode on horseback or drove in a wagon, others went on foot all the way, carrying with them nothing but a spade ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... a characteristic persistent and perhaps ineradicable in the Teutonic mind from the days of Tacitus to our own time. The Romans had always asserted, and those nations to-day who are of their tradition still assert, that the spade is the indispensable weapon of the soldier. But the barbarians and those nations to-day who are of their tradition, while they have not been so foolish as to refuse the spade altogether, have always fortified reluctantly. You see these two characteristics ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... had placed the Stars and Stripes on the North Pole in 1909. It was a Norwegian who succeeded in reaching the South Pole in 1911. But the spade-work which contributed so largely to the final success had been done so enthusiastically by two Englishmen that the expeditions of Scott and Shackleton must find a place here before we conclude this Book of Discovery with Amundsen's final ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... Aylward. "Out he will go on the roadside, honor and all, if he does not find ten nobles by next Epiphany. But if I could win a ransom or be at the storming of a rich city, then indeed the old man would be proud of me. 'Thy sword must help my spade, Samkin,' said he as he kissed me goodby. Ah! it would indeed be a happy day for him and for all if I could ride back with a saddle-bag full of gold pieces, and please God, I shall dip my hand in somebody's pocket before I see Crooksbury ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at work at every cart; one of them, often a woman, standing on the rising pile, and beating it flat with a spade, while a cheerful clatter of voices ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... bucket I used for water for the horses and stood it over the fire; I ran to the creek with the big kerosene-tin bucket and got it full of cold water and stood it handy. I got the spade (we always carried one to dig wheels out of bogs in wet weather) and turned a corner of the tarpaulin back, dug a hole, and trod the tarpaulin down into the hole, to serve for a bath, in case of the worst. I had a tin of mustard, and ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... moment, he was under the clear blue night-heaven, with the keen frosty air blowing on his warm cheek, busy with a wheelbarrow and a spade, slicing and shovelling in the snow. He was building a hut of it, after the fashion of the Esquimaux hut, with a very thick circular wall, which began to lean towards its own centre as soon as it began to rise. This hut he had pitched at the foot ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... to pray, and the neighbors would dress them in their best Sunday suits of black, folding their hands very carefully across their breasts, then we would bury them deep, filling in the dirt and heaping it up, patting it all down very carefully with the back of a spade, and then go away and leave them ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... edgeways when 'e's thrustin' for your life, You must leave 'im very careful where 'e fell; An' may thank your stars an' gaiters if you didn't feel 'is knife That you ain't told off to bury 'im as well. Then the sweatin' Tommies wonder as they spade the beggars under Why lootin' should be entered as a crime; So if my song you'll 'ear, I will learn you plain an' clear 'Ow to pay yourself for fightin' ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... the first time, the spade was used by soldiers in the field. Hitherto the work had been considered derogatory to troops, and peasants and miners had been engaged for the work; but Prince Maurice had taught his soldiers that their duty was to work as well as fight, and they now ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."[57] ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... to stop, he decided, otherwise the same work would be repeated again and again. But he just watched for the next hour as Max kept returning to the far end of the bed and working his way up to the window, nodding mindlessly with each neat twist of his spade attachment. ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... its time, the way it always does when you are anxious to see it arrive, but it finally came. And David found himself with the spade held tightly under one arm, his jacket zipped up to his chin, gloves on, and scarf knotted, all ready ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter. Nature and the earth and ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... grew bitter at the thought. He ought to have hid the rooster. He ought to have got a spade and buried him. He was full of regrets, not for what he had done, but for what he had not done. He would stay here till dark. He would stay here all night. He never would go home any more. He would hide in the woods, and he and Frank ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... another kind was made in 1896. The owner of a garden near Queen Street, in the south-eastern part of the town, was digging up an apple tree when he came across a fine bed of gravel. Continuing the digging, in order to find the thickness of this deposit, his spade struck against a hard substance, which proved to be a lead coffin. After this had been examined by others invited to inspect it, without any satisfactory result, the present writer was requested to conduct further investigation. The coffin was found to be 5-ft. 2-in. in length, containing ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... doubt. All their lives had been spent close to the soil, and they were not to be deceived, when they came over the mountains in search of a land richer than any that they had tilled before. They had seen its blackness, and, plowing down with the spade, they had tested its depth. They knew that for ages and ages leaf and bough, falling upon it, had decayed there and increased its fertility, and so they awaited the ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... exactly what we had saved, and with the lantern in my hand I began my examination. Of our instruments none were saved but the compass and the chronometer; our stock of ropes and ladders was reduced to the bit of cord rolled round the stump of the mast! Not a spade, not a pickaxe, not a hammer was left us; and, irreparable disaster! we had only one ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... "They are property," claim the owners. Very well! As General Butler takes contraband horses used in transport of munitions of war, so he takes contraband black creatures who tote the powder to the carts and flagellate the steeds. As he takes a spade used in hostile earthworks, so he goes a little farther off and takes the black muscle that wields the spade. As he takes the rations of the foe, so he takes the sable Soyer whose skilful hand makes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various |
