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More "Navvy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a navvy, and His hands were coarse, and dirty too, His homely face was rough and tanned, His time of ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... got the best share of the brains. Beatrice would be proud of me if I took my degree. I must make something of this essay if I 'burn the midnight'. Miss Roscoe will expect me to turn up trumps. I'll toil like a navvy!" ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... taken for an escaped convict, and was kept in prison for several months. Then he was released, and turned his hand to all sorts of work. He kept accounts and taught children to read, and at one time he was even employed as a navvy in making an embankment. He was continually hoping to return to his own country. He had saved the necessary amount of money when he was attacked by yellow fever. Then, believing him to be dead, those about him divided his ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... prepared] preparedness, readiness, ripeness, mellowness; maturity; un impromptu fait a loisir[Fr]. [Preparer] preparer, trainer; pioneer, trailblazer; avant- courrier[Fr], avant-coureur[Fr]; voortrekker[Afrikaans]; sappers and miners, pavior[obs3], navvy[obs3]; packer, stevedore; warming pan. V. prepare; get ready, make ready; make preparations, settle preliminaries, get up, sound the note of preparation. set in order, put in order &c. (arrange) 60; forecast &c. (plan) 626 prepare the ground, plow the ground, dress the ground; till ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... recorded and quotable that come anywhere near it. We talk about the popular Press; but in truth there is no popular Press. It may be a good thing; but, anyhow, most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the Press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely interested; such as horse-racing. Sometimes the Press is about as popular as the Press Gang. We talk of Labour leaders in Parliament; but they would be highly unparliamentary if they talked ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... so tidy that there are white quartz stones arranged along each side of the yellow quartz ballast, and where there is sand ballast it is patted down as neatly as a pie crust. R. says it is difficult to prevent the native navvy making geometric designs ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... shelling and patrol encounters. On the 24th demonstrations were made against Beitunia to support the left of the 52nd Division's attack on El Jib, but the enemy was too strong to permit of the yeomanry proceeding more than two miles east of Foka. The roadmakers had done an enormous amount of navvy work on the track between Foka and Tahta. They had laboured without cessation, breaking up rock, levering out boulders with crowbars, and doing a sort of rough-and-ready levelling, and by the night of the 24th the track was reported ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... us, Reddy. Drag him out, and now we'll settle this navvy's job. It's one man less in the fo'c'sle mess, and dead men tell no tales; and now we'll have to do the work a bit short-handed; but we can clean it up between us now, and ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the drayman, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Mary Marshall's is a very sad case; she has seven children, not one of them old enough to work for himself; and she is dying, poor creature, of consumption. Her husband is a navvy, and he is at work at Lewes; I believe he is pretty steady, and sends the greater part of his wages to his wife, but there are too many mouths to feed to allow of comforts; his old blind mother ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and Young Bill were standing open-mouthed before the scouts' fire with the sleeping Raven at their feet. Smiley was a little twisted old fellow, but Young Bill was a gigantic navvy, powerful as a five-year-old bull. Their faces, too, were blacked in readiness for the night's work. Three minutes after Dick had crept away, they had slipped along the brook under the wood, turned a sharp corner, and come full upon the camp just as a bright ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain what a ward is. It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless man, if he be lucky, may casually rest his weary bones, and then work like a navvy next day to ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... close time, but uses illegal means to achieve his purpose, such as nets with meshes smaller than they should be, and the three-pronged spear. In the Tarn and other French rivers the fish have been destroyed in a woeful manner by poison and dynamite, but it is the rock-blaster and the navvy, not the regular poacher, who is chiefly to be blamed for this. Men who have the constant handling of dynamite, and who move from place to place, are rapidly destroying the life of the rivers and streams. Having noted a good pool, they return by night and drop into ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... bard who is careful at all about keeping his singing robes about him. He can doff them and work like a 'navvy' when he sees reason. He is very fond of coming out with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. He can rave upon occasion as well as another. Spontaneities of all kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... barely went to school—he frankly declares that his education only cost three-halfpence a week. He worked at his father's business at Chorley, and before he was twenty-one he was a stone-mason, bricklayer, millwright, carpenter, sawyer, and even a navvy, and all with a view of grounding himself in everything of a practical nature which would tend to make him an engineer—a profession on which his heart ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 70, and were a cheery crew, mainly from Wales. Their notions of military discipline were, as may be imagined, singular, and it is credibly reported that on one occasion, when General Fanshawe rebuked a navvy for not saluting him, the offender beckoned with his thumb towards a pal and exclaimed, ''Ere, Bill, come and 'ave a look ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stone sawer; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up faggots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days work occasionally, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... receives into his system every twenty-four hours, about 3 ounces of that which is essential to give him power to perform his functions of labour. In other words, he eats in that time but 3 ounces of the representative of meat. What would the railroad "Navvy" of England say—what the farm labourer—if either was doled out 3 ounces of beef or mutton per day to work upon? and if he seemed listless and unenergetic, was then taunted with the name of "indolent, reckless, good-for-naught." Still, ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... Nag's Head, where the blasphemy of the Divine name was a normal occurrence, Snarley, of whose displeasure everybody went in fear, would never allow the name of Christ to be so much as mentioned, not even argumentatively by Hankin; and once when a foul-mouthed navvy had used the name as part of some filthy oath, Snarley instantly challenged the man to fight, struck him a fearful blow between the eyes and pitched him headlong, with a shattered face, into the village street. But in the matter of contempt ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... life, and a great longing for death ...—he saw him in his school, a genial pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, coarse, vagabond, ragged, with hoarse voices, the ragamuffins with whom he squabbled, and sometimes fought like a navvy, one of whom once gave him a mighty thrashing ...—he saw him with his family, surrounded by his twenty-one children, of whom thirteen died before him, and one was an idiot, and the rest were good musicians who ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... constantly in mind that the war in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... absolutely silently, and I dared not meet his glance because I knew I should give myself away. The rascal has not been running his eye over young women all these years without being able to spot them in a moment, even in navvy's clothes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... ounces of that which is essential to give him power to perform his functions of labour. In other words, he eats in that time but 3 ounces of the representative of meat. What would the railroad "Navvy" of England say—what the farm labourer—if either was doled out 3 ounces of beef or mutton per day to work upon? and if he seemed listless and unenergetic, was then taunted with the name of "indolent, ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... and surly steel Tom; then Tom's fallowbootfellow piles pick By him and rips out rockfire homeforth—sturdy Dick; Tom Heart-at-ease, Tom Navvy: he is all for his meal Sure, 's bed now. Low be it: lustily he his low lot (feel That ne'er need hunger, Tom; Tom seldom sick, Seldomer heartsore; that treads through, prickproof, thick Thousands of thorns, thoughts) swings ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... carpenter, but at every carpenter's shop where he applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stone sawer; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up faggots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days work occasionally, by offering ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... awake; the streets were a-clatter with cabs; the pick of the navvy resounded; night loiterers were disappearing and giving place to hurrying early risers. In the resonant morning the young men walked together to the Corner. There they stopped to bid each other good-bye. John called a cab, and returned home in ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... had told us all their history. Not a possible drop of blood bluer than a navvy's could circulate in their veins, and yet their wrists were fine, their heads were small, and their general ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... them rich snobs!" said the laborers, grumbling; "all the laborers in town have to march out here so that he can pick himself the best. And he's beaten down the day's wages to fifty ore. He's been a navvy himself, too; but now he's a man who enjoys his hundred thousand a year. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... explained as ebbing energy. We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation or even a cottony milkiness may be preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material. The navvy waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood to lack the trained motive which makes a character fairly calculable in its actions; but by a roundabout course even a gentleman may make of himself a chancy ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... carpenter, who was standing close beside him now, quiet a bit after exerting himself like a navvy in helping to clear the wreck, "you forgets as how the poor dear thing never recovered that spring it ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... preparedness, readiness, ripeness, mellowness; maturity; un impromptu fait a loisir[Fr]. [Preparer] preparer, trainer; pioneer, trailblazer; avant- courrier[Fr], avant-coureur[Fr]; voortrekker[Afrikaans]; sappers and miners, pavior[obs3], navvy[obs3]; packer, stevedore; warming pan. V. prepare; get ready, make ready; make preparations, settle preliminaries, get up, sound the note of preparation. set in order, put in order &c. (arrange) 60; forecast &c. (plan) 626 prepare the ground, plow the ground, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... about absolutely silently, and I dared not meet his glance because I knew I should give myself away. The rascal has not been running his eye over young women all these years without being able to spot them in a moment, even in navvy's clothes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... There he was at first taken for an escaped convict, and was kept in prison for several months. Then he was released, and turned his hand to all sorts of work. He kept accounts and taught children to read, and at one time he was even employed as a navvy in making an embankment. He was continually hoping to return to his own country. He had saved the necessary amount of money when he was attacked by yellow fever. Then, believing him to be dead, those about him divided his clothes amongst themselves; so that when he at last recovered ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... embroidered, and his studs are the largest diamonds; not even financiers in England wear such important stones. He wears a low collar without a necktie, but ties a silk handkerchief round his neck like an English navvy; an Eton jacket, fitting very tightly, brown, black, or grey, with elaborate frogs and much braiding; the trousers, skin-tight above, loosen below, and show off the lower extremities when, like the heroes of feminine romance, the wearer has a fine leg. Indeed, it is a mode of dress ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... when the gong rang for supper. There were not more than a dozen men at mess. Most were of stolid English navvy type, dirty uncouth men whose gross irregular features told of low birth and evil life. The foreign element comprised an Irishman named Mike Hogan and the Frenchman whom the boys had met when they first came aboard. The crowd called him Dashalong. Upon inquiry, Leonard ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... when Bishop of Peterborough, encountered a drunken navvy one day as he was walking through the poorer quarters of that town. The navvy staggered out of a public-house, diffusing a powerful aroma of gin all round him; when he saw his Chief Pastor he raised his hand in a gesture of mock benediction and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Wesleyan chaplain with coat thrown off, and plying pick like one to the manner born. To that task he stuck till midnight, and oh, that I had been there to see! A chaplain thus turning himself into a navvy is probably no breach of the Geneva Convention, but all the same it is by no means an everyday occurrence; and those Boer prisoners would think none the worse of that Wesleyan predikant's prayers after watching the work, on their behalf, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... than any of the other amusements of the millionaire—worse than gambling, worse even than philanthropy. It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium greater than the greatest poet of England. It means losing every democratic sympathy. It means being unable to talk to a navvy about sport, or about beer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about patriotism, or about anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to talk about. It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do. It means pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy indecency. Its ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stonecutter; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up fagots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days' work occasionally by offering himself ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the winter. Very few in his place would have been as thoughtful as that; they would have got boots somehow in the end, but not beforehand. This life of animal labour does not grow the spirit of economy. Not only in farming, but in navvy work, in the rougher work of factories and mines, the same fact is evident. The man who labours with thew and sinew at horse labour—crane labour—not for himself, but for others, is not the man who saves. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... she spoken, when another sharp tap resounded still more clearly along the rail at her feet. She bent down her head once more, and laid her eager ear beside it in terrible suspense. A rough man's voice—a navvy's, no doubt, or a fireman's—came speeding along the metal; and ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... vanity are they, on account of their decorations. The members' wives and their friends are all taking part in the scene too, bringing voters along in their carriages, and shaking hands with everybody indiscriminately. I heard an old navvy protesting once that "Lady —— never troubled to shake 'ands with him any other time, but was generally that 'orty she'd step over you as soon ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... worn little creature; pale as death and in no condition for street singing, evidently, but plucky and borne along by the very zeal of the Crusaders. The other woman, who cannot sing, shakes the tambourine, a great, burly fellow, some rescued navvy, thuds at the drum, and her sweet, thin little voice rises, shrill, but wonderfully appealing, through ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Bedfords and the South Staffords worked in broad daylight with their bodies half exposed above the trenches, raising the parapet as the water rose. About 200 yards away the Germans were doing the same. Neither side interfered with the navvy-work of the other, and for the simplest of all reasons: both were engaged in fighting a common foe—the underground springs. When two parties are both in danger of being drowned they haven't time to fight. To speak of drowning is no hyperbole; the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... barriers of language and colour, understanding may be nearly impossible. How few educated people seem to understand the servant class in England, or the working men! Except for Mr. Bart Kennedy's A Man Adrift, I know of scarcely any book that shows a really sympathetic and living understanding of the navvy, the longshore sailor man, the rough chap of our own race. Caricatures, luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which the misconceptions of the author blend with the preconceptions of the reader and achieve success, are, of course, common enough. And then consider the sort of people who pronounce judgments ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... of the N.L.E.S.R.O. (Navvies' League for the Encouragement of Spectators at Roadmending Operations) in providing deck chairs upon the pavement at a penny an hour is universally appreciated, and it is now no uncommon thing to see a navvy taking a holiday and egging on his sturdy comrades to greater efforts from a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... the afternoon, I lunched there; and as I walked thence along the cliff, towards Raxton, I became more calm and collected. I determined not to go near the Hall, lest my movements should be watched by the servants. The old churchyard was full of workmen of the navvy kind, and I learned that for the safety of the public it had now become necessary to hurl down upon the sands some enormous masses of the cliff newly disintegrated by the land-springs. I descended the gangway at Flinty Point, and concealing my implements ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... blasphemy of the Divine name was a normal occurrence, Snarley, of whose displeasure everybody went in fear, would never allow the name of Christ to be so much as mentioned, not even argumentatively by Hankin; and once when a foul-mouthed navvy had used the name as part of some filthy oath, Snarley instantly challenged the man to fight, struck him a fearful blow between the eyes and pitched him headlong, with a shattered face, into the village street. But in the matter of contempt for the religious practice of his neighbours, his ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... who subsequently owned to being Frederick Conyngham. And the very manner in which this admission was made redounded in some degree to the honour of the young Englishman. Here, at least, was one who had no fear, and fearlessness appeals to the heart of every Briton from the peer to the navvy. ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable (for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an empty tumbler marked "L.S.W.R."—marked also, internally, with streaks of blue-grey sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the doctor, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... be so sensible of the indispensability of lookers-on, that they themselves have sat up in that capacity, and have been unable to subside into the acceptance of a proffered share in the job, for two or three days together. Sometimes, the 'navvy,' on tramp, with an extra pair of half-boots over his shoulder, a bag, a bottle, and a can, will take a similar part in a job of excavation, and will look at it without engaging in it, until all his money is gone. The current of my uncommercial ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... account, for there must certainly be lots to be done eventually, unless nine-tenths of the country are going to stand still and remain undeveloped; but this is not exactly what I expected. I thought that if a man represented himself as an engineer, and said that he would go and work as a navvy, fitter, or blacksmith, until the company found it would be better worth their while to employ him higher up the ladder, he was pretty certain of getting his request granted; but they say here that is not so, they are not particularly in want of gentlemen of any of the above ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... idleness, may be sitting an old countrywoman with steady eyes in a lean, dusty-black dress and an old poke-bonnet; by her side, some gin-faced creature of the town, all blousy and draggled; a hollow-eyed foreigner, far gone in consumption; a bronzed young navvy, asleep, with his muddy boots jutting straight out; a bearded, dreary being, chin on chest; and more consumptives, and more vagabonds, and more people dead-tired, speechless, and staring before them from that crescent-shaped ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his chair on the other ride of Hector] Never fear: there's no question of his becoming a navvy, Mrs Malone. [To Hector] There's really no difficulty about capital to start with. Treat me as a friend: draw ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... and soon chose two active subordinates. These were a navvy, named Burt, and Williams, a young Welshman, who had disappeared from home behind a cloud of forged cheques, and having changed his name had made a fresh start in life to the south of the equator. These three worked day and night buying ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.' So it is a good thing that the hands that laid the foundations so seldom are the hands that finish the work; for thereby there are more admitted into the social gladness of the completed results. The navvy that lifted the first spadeful of earth in excavating for the railway line, and the driver of the locomotive over the completed track, are partners in the success and in the joy. The forgotten bishop who, I know not how many centuries ago, laid the foundations ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... convent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds; and he summoned the French Government, despite his old quarrel with it, to kidnap and send back the woman over whom he had no legal rights, and certainly no moral ones, with the obstinacy and violence of a drunken navvy clamouring for the wife whom he has well-nigh done to death. Beyond the mere intemperance and the violence born of intemperance which made Charles Edward's name a byword and served the Hanoverian dynasty better than all the Duke ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... merely because I have the instincts of a gentleman, Sir Henry. Just simply remember that Nature does make mistakes sometimes; that she has been known to put a horse's head on a sheep's shoulders and to make a navvy's son look more royal than a prince. I am Cleek, the detective—simply Cleek. Let it ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... family, but I believe I've got the best share of the brains. Beatrice would be proud of me if I took my degree. I must make something of this essay if I 'burn the midnight'. Miss Roscoe will expect me to turn up trumps. I'll toil like a navvy!" ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
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