"Ditcher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'great work?' an Epic Poem, I suppose, or some such pyramid. I'll try no such thing; I hate tasks. And then 'seven or eight years!' God send us all well this day three months, let alone years. If one's years can't be better employed than in sweating poesy, a man had better be a ditcher. And works, too!—is Childe Harold nothing? You have so many 'divine poems,' is it nothing to have written a human one? without any of your worn-out machinery. Why, man, I could have spun the thoughts of the four Cantos of that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... with a poor man, the impeachment might be allowed, to thy shame, that thou so ill hast known how to requite a good man and true that is thy servant; but poverty, though it take away all else, deprives no man of gentilesse. Many kings, many great princes, were once poor, and many a ditcher or herdsman has been and is very wealthy. As for thy last perpended doubt, to wit, how thou shouldst deal with me, banish it utterly from thy thoughts. If in thy extreme old age thou art minded to manifest a harshness unwonted in thy youth, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... light to the heads and heat to the hearts of millions of our race. The greatest and best men of the age have not disdained to belong to the brotherhood; and thus the hovel holds what must not be missing in the hall—the furniture of the cot is the same as that of the palace—and duke and ditcher read their ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... When alone she seemed preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of speech and gesture—not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring for him. He seemed, from first to last, insensible of her caresses and attentions, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beginning of the Restoration. Unable to read or write, deaf and decrepit, Gondrin forlornly left Paris which had treated him inhospitably, and returned to the village in Dauphine, where the mayor, Dr. Benassis, gave him work as a ditcher and continued to aid him in 1829. [The ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... pitcher drop in the well. Well, I knowed that pitcher had to be got out, so I straddled down and fished it up. Master was mad, 'cause I staid so long, so I up and tells him. He fairly jumped and said "Did you go down that well? Why didn't you come and tell me and I would made Irish Mike, the ditcher, go down. If you had drowned I'd lost $800. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... reasons, going incog. With this idea of him, his undisguised disinclination for work became venial; and entertaining such views of extending their business, they counted more upon his ultimate value to them as a man of science than as a mere ditcher. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... minds with regard to margins. A friend writes: "Your amusing anecdotes have brought to my memory several biblioclasts whom I have known. One roughly cut the margins off his books with a knife, hacking away very much like a hedger and ditcher. Large paper volumes were his especial delight, as they gave more paper. The slips thus obtained were used for index-making! Another, with the bump of order unnaturally developed, had his folios and quartos all reduced, in binding, to one size, so that they ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... the antiquary and numismatist. The matchless collection of gold ornaments contained in the Museum of the Irish Academy has been almost entirely discovered in the course of common agricultural operations. The pickaxe of the ditcher, and of the canal and railway navvies, have often also, by their accidental strokes, uncovered rich antiquarian treasures. The remarkable massive silver chain, ninety-three ounces in weight, which we have in our Museum, was found about two feet below ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... bracing air of the world would have dissipated these vapors which have gathered over his soul. In very truth, I half wish that he could now be stripped of his all, and compelled to become hedger and ditcher. It would almost be a kindness to ruin him by engaging him in some of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied Wyman's tenement—Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... to protect American iron-masters by prohibiting the introduction of foreign iron, but why don't they protect American laborers by forbidding foreign workmen to land on our shores? I demand protection for the native ditcher. Forbid the Irishmen to land here and to lower the price of labor by competing with our own ditch-diggers. Put a stop to the influx of German tailors and bootmakers, who prevent native artists from earning the wages that would otherwise be theirs. Protect our authors by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... as well have been straining his lungs within the parlor. At a pause of his strenuous performance, Scott took occasion to explain that John of Skye was a recent acquisition to the rising hamlet of Abbotstown; that the man was a capital hedger and ditcher, and only figured with the pipe and philabeg on high occasions in the after-part of the day; "but indeed," he added, laughing, "I fear John will soon be discovering that the hook and mattock are unfavorable to his chanter hand." When the cloth was drawn, and the never-failing ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart |
