"Digger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pledging to Gustavus his friendship, and in this pleasing hope of the future he saw much to redeem what he regretted of the past. Still, however, the wild flare of the pine-torch over the lone grave of his adversary, and the horrid answer of the grave-digger, that he was but "finishing his work," would recur to his memory and awake an ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the great laws of natural unity. Most of ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... gilded, rubb'd and polish'd: But read 'em, and you wish abolish'd The privilege to make or sell 'em. You read them, and the man is quite Another man: no more polite— No more "the man about the town," But metamorphosed to a clown— Milker of goats, a hedger, digger, So thoroughly is changed his figure, So quite unlike himself. 'Tis odd, Most strange, the man for wit so noted, Whose repartees so much were quoted, Is changed into a very clod! And stranger still—he never seems Quite to himself to be himself, As when of poetry he dreams, And writes and writes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... noble nor hierarch, not even the Pope himself, satisfied an eager craving in the breast of poor, envious, self-asserting human nature. In one of those ornamental initial-letters above mentioned, the date of which was some years prior to the execution of Holbein's Dance, Death appears as a grave-digger, and lifts on his spade, out of the grave which he is making, two skulls, one crowned, the other covered with a peasant's hat. He grins with savage glee at seeing these remnants of the two extremes of society side by side; and underneath them, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... old abbey town, down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago—so long, that the story must be a true one, because our great-grandfathers implicitly believed it—there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub. It by no means follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by the emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy man; your undertakers ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... digger of graves," he mused, half to himself and half to his old wife watching him from the other side of the hearthstone. "I spend a good quarter of my time in the churchyard; but when I saw those six little mounds, and read the inscriptions over them, I couldn't help feeling queer. Think ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... us that Mr. HENRY WHITE, a grave-digger of Hellingly, has just dug his thousandth grave. Congratulations to our contemporary upon being the first to spread ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... runs off the track, or the measles set in. A wise physician once said to me: "I observe that every one wishes to go to heaven, but I observe that most people are willing to take a great deal of very disagreeable medicine first." The lives that one least envies—as of the Digger Indian or the outcast boy in the city—are yet sweet to the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The flashing ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... important as the domine was the voorleezer or chorister, who was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm"; turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking the ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... and happiness, but if I failed I should never look upon her face again. I kissed her hand and the baby once, and slipped out of the room. Three nights after I was out at sea, bound for Melbourne, a steerage passenger with a digger's tools for my baggage, and seven shillings in my pocket. After three and a half years of hard and bitter struggles on the goldfields, at last I struck it rich, realised twenty thousand pounds, and a fortnight later I took my passage for England. All this time I had never communicated ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... In the west the sun dropped slowly beneath the horizon, leaving a wonderful golden light behind. The waiting horses, too well trained to move from their places, shifted uneasily amid much creaking of harness. Within the grave the digger's head sunk lower and lower, while the mound by the side grew higher and higher. The cold increased. Across the prairie, a multitude of black specks advanced, grew large, whizzed overhead, then retreated, their wings cutting the keen ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... under the weight of argument; I am not a man who denies the necessity of parliamentary reform, at the time that he approves of its expediency, by reviling his own constituents, the parish clerk, the sexton, and the grave-digger; and if there be any man who can apply what I am not, to himself, I leave him to think of it in the committee, and contemplate upon it when he ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... cross. Storms have bent the strip of tin on which were the I. N. R. I., and the rain has washed off the letters. At the foot of the cross is a confused heap of bones and skulls thrown out by the grave-digger. Everywhere grow in all their vigor the bitter-sweet and rose-bay. Some tiny flowerets, too, tint the ground—blossoms which, like the mounded bones, are known to their Creator only. They are like little pale smiles, and their odor scents of the tomb. Grass and climbing plants ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... and finally arrived at the diggings where his uncle was engaged in mining. In those early days of California mine digging the miners were generally a very rough class of men. So it happened that soon after Ned's arrival a great gruff "digger" offered to treat Ned to a drink of liquor, and became very angry because he ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... it would take Grunty Pig to uproot the old apple tree? Although Jolly Robin thought and thought, he could think of no one whom he might ask. To be sure, there was Tommy Fox, who was known to be an able digger. But Jolly Robin didn't trust him. Tommy Fox was tricky. And there was Billy Woodchuck, who came from a famous family of burrowers. But everybody knew that old dog Spot had chased him into his hole that very afternoon, and was ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time i have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... found again at the lower level, or in some lateral fissure. He had sent hurriedly for Tom Bent—that clever young engineer at the wheat ranch, who was always studying up these things with his inventions—and that was his opinion. No, Tom was not a well-digger, but it was generally known that he had "located" one or two, and had long ago advised the tapping of that flow by a second boring, in case of just such an emergency. He was coming again to-morrow. By the way, he had asked how the young lady visitor was, and hoped she had not ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... especially had no trouble in getting on to a good show. I was the youngest of the party, and consequently the most inexperienced, but my mates good-naturedly overlooked my shortcomings as a prospector and digger, especially as I had constituted myself the "tucker" provider when our usual rations of salt beef ran out. I had brought with me a Winchester rifle, a shot gun and plenty of ammunition for both, and plenty of fishing tackle. So, at such times, instead ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... heard his remarks ran and told the chief the strange words, "that he was a very sick man." On hearing this, Lono raised up his oo (digger) and said, "Here I am, without any sign of disease, and yet I am sick." And as he brought down his oo with considerable force, it struck his foot and pierced it through, causing the blood to flow freely, so that he fell and fainted away. At this, one of the men seized ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... the long main street of tents, where the shafts are often uncomfortably close to the road, the tradesmen are doing a roaring business. Stalwart men, with stout appetites, are laying in their stores of grocery, buying pounds of flour, sugar, and butter—meat and bread in great quantities. The digger thrusts his parcels indiscriminately into the breast of his dirty jumper, a thick shirt; and away he goes, stuffed with groceries, and perhaps a leg of mutton over his shoulder. In the evening some four thousand camp fires in the valleys, along the gullies, and up the sides of the hills, cast ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... holes for these would begin on the first of Magh. The preparations for festivity are ever interesting to young folk. But this digging had a special attraction for me. Though I had watched it done year after year—and seen the hole grow bigger and bigger till the digger had completely disappeared inside, and yet nothing extraordinary, nothing worthy of the quest of prince or knight, had ever appeared—yet every time I had the feeling that the lid being lifted off a chest of mystery. I felt that a little bit more digging would do it. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... face, as he lay asleep as Rip, and when Lady Macbeth said, 'Out damned spot,' Pa woke up and felt the gob of watermelon on his face and he thought he had been murdered, and Ma came in on a hop, skip and jump as 'Parthenia,' and threw her arms around a deacon who was going to play the grave digger, and began to call him pet names, and Pa was mad, and the choir singers they began to sing, 'In the North Sea lived a whale,' and then they quit acting. You'd a dide to see Hamlet. The piece of watermelon went down his neck, and Lady ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... our bald somnambulist as missing from his flat We take soundings for the digger with a prop. By the day the board is gratis, by the week it's half of that; For the ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... the inspector said to the grave-digger: "Open it." They obeyed, as if it were the most natural ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... the town the grave-diggers met him: they shone their torch on his face, and, recognising Zarathustra, they sorely derided him. "Zarathustra is carrying away the dead dog: a fine thing that Zarathustra hath turned a grave-digger! For our hands are too cleanly for that roast. Will Zarathustra steal the bite from the devil? Well then, good luck to the repast! If only the devil is not a better thief than Zarathustra!—he will steal them both, he will eat them both!" And they laughed among themselves, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... couldn't help liking the chap," would shout Lingard when telling the story; and looking around at the eyes that glittered at him through the smoke of cheroots, this Brixham trawler-boy, afterward a youth in colliers, deep-water man, gold-digger, owner and commander of "the finest brig afloat," knew that by his listeners—seamen, traders, adventurers like himself—this was accepted not as the expression of a feeling, but as the highest commendation he could give his ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... by a higher hill in front and the heavy woods which served as a screen for the artillery. I noticed many holes where the French shells had burst, and the valley to the north looked as if some one had been experimenting with a well digger. One 21-centimeter shell had cut a swath about 100 yards long out of the woods on the hill where we dismounted. The trees were twisted from their stumps as if a small cyclone had passed, and one could realize the damage the shells could do merely by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... wounded vanity and resentment of contempt. It was egotism masquerading as altruism. It was a dancing bear lumbering at the heels of insanity. Of all the passions it was the most hypocritical—a snare-setter, a digger of pitfalls, an enemy disguised as one's dearest friend. He thanked God there was no hint of love in his new-found friendship. Like an outcast fleeing from a storm, he had blundered against the door of this woman's charity, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... "The Child shelling Peas," "The Walk to School amid Rain and Sleet," are all charming idyls of every-day life. With yet greater skill and deeper pathos does the peasant Millet tell the story of his neighbors. The washerwomen, as the sun sets upon their labors, and they go wearily homeward; the digger, at his lonely task, who can pause but an instant to wipe the sweat from his brow; the sewing-women bending over their work, while every nerve and muscle are strained by the unremitting toil; the girl tending her geese; the woman her cows:—such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... garbage is a traditional form of sheet composting practiced by row-cropping gardeners usually in mild climates where the soil does not freeze in winter. Some people use a post hole digger to make a neat six-to eight-inch diameter hole about eighteen inches deep between well-spaced growing rows of plants. When the hole has been filled to within two or three inches of the surface, it is topped off with soil. Rarely will animals molest buried garbage, it is safe from flies and yet enough ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... rhizomes. It means that only the parent, which is presumably not immortal, is aberrant. The offspring is no different from the weed householders have been cursing ever since the Mission Fathers enslaved the Digger Indians." ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... gravely examining it, "but I kin mend it as good as new. I reckon you allow I can't sew," she continued, "but I do heaps of mendin', as the digger squaw and Chinamen we have here do only the coarser work. I'll send it back to you, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... abundance of stream-gold. Evidently the proportion of "tailings" must carefully be laid down before companies are justified in undertaking the expensive operation of quartz-crushing. Hence M. Tiburce Morisot, a practical digger from South Africa, introduced at Cairo by his compatriot, M. Marie, to my friend M. Yacoub Artin Bey, found a fair opportunity of proposing to his Highness the Khediv (October, 1878) a third Expedition in search of sand-gold. The Viceroy, however, true to his undertaking, refused ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... the attention of Partridge, who exprest much surprize at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage. To which Jones answered, "That it was one of the most famous burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You had rather ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... is bad for the master must be equally bad for the man. So if a Doctor is excluded, a Chemist, an Undertaker, and a Grave-digger would also be kept away. A Lawyer would carry with him Judges, Magistrates, Clerks, and Law Stationers. The Clergy would represent everyone connected with a church, from an Archbishop to a Bell-ringer. Then, if we are to take away the Professions, Commerce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... based on singularly mobile pivots, while the pupils resemble the bubble of a spirit-level. Not only is the range of vision a complete circle, but the crab seems able to concentrate its gaze upon any two given points instantly and automatically. To spite all its skill as a digger, to set at naught its superb visual alertness, the sand crab has a special enemy in the bird policeman which patrols the beach. Vigilant and obnoxiously interfering, the policeman has a long and curiously curved ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Ballarat. I had given the thing a trial. For the most odious weeks I had been a licensed digger on Black Hill Flats; and I had actually failed to make running expenses. That, however, will surprise you the less when I pause to declare that I have paid as much as four shillings and sixpence for half a loaf of execrable bread; that my mate and ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... distorted values, didn't I? That was temper, pure and simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own Banshees because the likes of me—once content when the pale shadow of Pegasus passed her by—is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from Yonkers to the Square and admire the scenery all the way. But this isn't what I intended ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... "tipple," where the coal that came out of the mine was weighed and recorded. Every digger, as he came from the cage, made for this spot. There was a bulletin-board, and on it his number, and the record of the weights of the cars he had sent out that day. And every man, no matter how ignorant, had learned enough English to read ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... began to move off again—"Thank you, Mr. Dale. Good night, Mr. Dale.... You've done us proper, sir.... Just what I wanted.... Good night, ma'am;"—but the foot-people lingered. The red-coated earth-digger, Veale, and one or two others, had got around Mr. Allen and were ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... it was one of his, I took it to mean that he had been the digger for the occasion. So we followed through a little rustic gate—Hamlet Hopkins and Horatio Hosley—into a fenced lot comprising about two acres of level ground, laid out in the smallest graves I had ever seen. Most of ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favoured by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without fear of being troubled by the passers-by, I could consult the Ammophila and the Sphex (two species of Digger-or Hunting-wasps.—Translator's Note.) and engage in that difficult conversation whose questions and answers have experiment for their language; here, without distant expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could contrive my plans of attack, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of furniture she needs tae furnish a hoose, and sell a' thing else tae pay the wricht (undertaker) an' bedrel (grave-digger). If the new doctor be a young laddie and no verra rich, ye micht let him hae the buiks an' instruments; it 'ill ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... breath came and went in sobs. Now they were neck and neck again. Then it was over, the little brown mare swept by, and Ralston's rope, cutting the air, dropped about the neck of the insignificant, white "digger" that had ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... latter, and while under a false accusation of theft foolishly leaves England for America. He works his passage before the mast, joins a small band of hunters, crosses a tract of country infested with Indians to the Californian gold diggings, and is successful both as digger ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... the garden his absolute own: It's the place where a digger can bury a bone. Then he tests his pin-teeth on a pansy or rose, Spreading ruin and petals wherever he goes; And his mistress declares, when he's nibbled for hours, That nothing is sweeter Than Peter the eater, The resolute ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... "Ah! a 'Stralian digger, by the beard of him, and his red jersey," whispered Jan, as he bent tenderly over the poor fellow, and put his head on one side to listen to his breathing. "Beautiful he sleeps, to be sure!" said Jan: "and a tidy-looking chap, too. 'Tis a pity to wake ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... done quickly enough indeed. Ben Weatherstaff went his way forgetting rheumatics. Dickon took his spade and dug the hole deeper and wider than a new digger with thin white hands could make it. Mary slipped out to run and bring back a watering-can. When Dickon had deepened the hole Colin went on turning the soft earth over and over. He looked up at the sky, flushed and glowing with the strangely new ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... considered merely with a view to history,) will furnish us with frequent instances of violent contentions concerning wells; the exclusive property of which appears to have been established in the first digger or occupant, even in places where the ground and herbage remained yet in common. Thus, we find Abraham, who was but a sojourner, asserting his right to a well in the country of Abimelech, and exacting ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... theatrical company cracking jokes among themselves, drinking brandy and soda at extortionate prices, and staring hard at Lady Bridget. Colin pointed out to her a lucky digger and his family—two daughters in blue serge trimmed with gold braid, and a fat red-faced Mamma, very fine in a feathered hat, black brocade, a diamond brooch, and with many rings and jangling bangles. There were some battered, bearded bushmen who ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... the act of driving his digger into the ground and looked carefully at his visitor, who, sitting his big buckskin with easy assurance, looked steadily back. For several seconds they appraised one another. Roger grew warm with the anger natural to a man who has been faced on his own land; the stranger was insolent ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... Eloisas, and Father Anselm: There were jewels, and gold, and the amulet's power, A hero to spout, and to rant by the hour; A lady to love, and be loved, and to faint, As a matter of course, turning pale through her paint! There were clowns who the grave-digger clown could outvie, And princes who on the stage strutted so high That Prince Hamlet they'd cut; who could pick up a scull, Vote his morals a bore, and his wit mighty dull! There were spirits that roam in the caves of the deep, Coming back to our earth, as ghosts will do, to peep! A king of the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... thought 'twas softenin' o' th' brain; but my 'pinion is he never had any brains to get soft. Still he were a good digger, but the man we ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... knows but the posterity of Solomon may be retailing old clothes, and the heirs of the Nebuchadnezzar dynasty still exist somewhere—perhaps among our graziers or cattle-dealers, our keepers of dairies or secretaries of agricultural associations. The line of Tamerlane may have ended in a grave-digger, and that of Frederick Barbarossa in a hair-dresser. The ideal transmigration of Pythagoras was not more improbable or more wonderful than the strange metamorphoses through which, in the course of centuries, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... lightly about among the rocks, scraping off mussels with her hoe; and the Modoc, the champion clam-digger of all, spreading her tentacles here and there, and never failing to come up with a bivalve. It was a picturesque scene, viewed from the great rock; and when the tide began to sweep in again, George Olver sent a piercing whistle along shore, to call ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... off for the field, with your trusty mate marching step by step beside you, pick and shovel on your shoulders, and both resolved to make your fortunes in the twinkling of an eye. When you get there, there's the digger crowd, composed of every nationality. There's the warden and his staff, the police officers, the shanty ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... uneasily if the stiffness of his expression was not a thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he had, until now, worn with a ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... will not trouble the gentle reader. He has been in California a long time, and he does not know that he was ever anywhere else. His pedigree does not trouble him; he is more concerned about getting something to eat. It is not because he is an agriculturist that he is called a Digger, but because he grabbles for wild roots, and has a general fondness for dirt. I said he was not handsome, and when we consider his rusty, dark-brown color, his heavy features, fishy black eyes, coarse black hair, and clumsy gait, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... occupied, and she looked very much as if she were sulking, much as Donny had sulked. She had her chin in a pink palm and was digging little holes in the sand with the tip of her rod, which was not at all beneficial to the rod and did not appear even to interest the digger; for her wonderfully blue eyes were staring at the green-and-white churn of the rapids, and her lips were pursed moodily, as if she did not even see what she was looking ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... from a merchant the following story:—A grave-digger, on his way to the churchyard with one of these deceased angelitos, tarried at a tavern to refresh himself with a cup of wine. The landlord inquired what he was carrying under his cloak, and on learning that it was an angelito, offered him a shilling for it. A bargain was soon ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... by another, so that she was openly mentioned as "the kettle-drum." The noble boy in the ancestral boots was inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even—on his being detected in holy orders, and declining ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... they undergo, as traffic progresses, many improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one, filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle bridge plan of expediting the completion, and cheapening ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Farm has been gradually dismembered: Coulonge Cottage, at the outlet of the Gomin Road, [272] is built on Holland farm. A successful gold digger by the name of Sinjohn purchased in the year 1862 a large tract of the farm fronting the St. Louis road with Thornhill as its north eastern and Mr. Stuart's new road as its south-western boundary. His cottage is shaded by the Thornhill Grove, with a garden and lawn and adjoins a level pasturage ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... remember to attempt it if she were frightened. The idea that she was a captive white, held by the Indians, became ridiculous when he thought of the nearness of civilization and the peaceful, timid character of the "digger" tribes. That she was some unfortunate demented creature who had escaped from her keeper and wandered into the wilderness, a glance at her clear, frank, intelligent, curious eyes had contradicted. There was but one ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... returns Texas, still morbid an' f'rocious, 'that you or any other fortune teller might better have been born a Digger Injun to live on lizards, sage bresh an' grasshoppers than come messin' 'round in my mar'tal affairs with a view to reebuildin' 'em up. My hopes in that behalf is rooined; an' whoever ondertakes their rehabil'tation'll do it in the smoke. What I'm out after now is the ca'm onbroken ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with a deal-board under and another over, and tied down with a cord, was carried to the grave on a bier. There were present only Tomo Chichi, three of the chiefs, the upper church-warden, and the grave-digger. When the body was laid in the earth, the clothes of the deceased were thrown in; after this, a quantity of glass beads and some pieces of silver; the custom of these Indians being to bury such effects of ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... with its thatch, which nearly reached the ground, covered with a thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an overgrown grave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of the last mattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as grave-digger to the vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn, leaving a message that early next morning he would again call for the person whose double occupation connected him at once with the house of mourning and the house ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... speaker smiled. "You have trained yourself to remember faces, Mallow. Your researches—scientific researches, my dear Professor—have led you into quarters which I have never explored. I must identify this venturesome little gold digger without delay, for Buddy yearns to make her all his; matrimony is becoming the one object of ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... transactions. There are many Englishmen who have made fortunes in the Peruvian trade. You may hope to follow their example. We may choose different occupations and still be near each other. One thousand pounds each may give both of us a start,—you as a merchant of goods, I as a digger for gold. Peru is the place for either business. Decide, Dick! Shall we sail for the scenes rendered celebrated ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... Digger, n. a gold-miner. The earliest mines were alluvial. Of course the word is used elsewhere, but in Australia it ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... have made mention of that wife of a counselor of Cologne,[564] who having been interred with a valuable ring on her finger, in 1571, the grave-digger opened the grave the succeeding night to steal the ring. But the good lady caught hold of him, and forced him to take her out of the coffin. He, however, disengaged himself from her hands, and fled. The resuscitated lady went and rapped at the door of her house. At first they thought it was a phantom, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Mouse smiled as he saw what the builders of his house had done. They had made everything exactly to suit him. He knew that he could have done no better himself; in fact he knew that he couldn't have done nearly so well. For he was no digger. But he told himself that there was no reason why he should feel sad about that, so long as others were kind enough to dig a fine home and leave it for ...
— The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse • Arthur Scott Bailey
... wid Black Bart! Oh, ye divil! An' ye licked the dirthy spalpane, an' got away wid his gyurl! Glory be! And would Oi take her? Well, Oi would. Niver doubt that, me bye. She may be the quane av Shaba, an' she may be a Digger Injun Squaw, but the loikes av him had betther kape away from Kate Murphy. It's glad Oi am ter do it! Bring her in. Oi don't want ter hear ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... A parcel of Teagues, Whom he brings in among us And bribes with mundungus. [He little believes How they laugh in their sleeves.] Hail, fellow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man; Who makes the best figure, The Dean or the digger; And which is the best At cracking a jest. [Now see how he sits Perplexing his wits In search of a motto To fix on his grotto.] How proudly he talks Of zigzags and walks, And all the day raves Of cradles and caves; And boasts of his feats, His grottos and seats; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... land's great store; Enough is provided if rightly divided; Let each man take what he needs—no more. Shame on the miser with unused riches, Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard, Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches, And steals the bread ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the bats, moles, and other insect-feeders; then come the great family of apes, from the small monkeys up to the orang-outang, chimpanzee, and other forms nearly approaching man. And then comes the highest, Man, from the Kaffir, Bush-man, Cave-man, and Digger Indian, up through the many stages until the highest forms of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... unusually tall. Jack said: "Do you see that big fellow there? His name is McKean. He comes from my part of Ireland. He is a lawyer; the last time I saw him he was in a court defending a prisoner, and now the whole six feet seven of him is nothing but a dirty digger." ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... continuous application, finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve demanded by his task, he is allowed without forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in order that his hand may recover the requisite precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of sensibility came drifting into my memory. "The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense," says Shakespeare, who ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... sceptical. He and another rustic functionary, of whom we shall speak anon, the grave-digger, are always the strong-minded men of the neighborhood. They have talked so much about ghosts, and are so familiar with all the tricks of which those mischievous spirits are capable, that they fear them hardly ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... digger, and his claws were dulled; the black was not a digger, but a tree-climber, and his claws were like knives. And like knives they buried themselves in Thor's wounded shoulder, and the ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... better stay and get your dinner with me. It will take you pretty much all day to bury Brian. You probably never buried a bear before," she added, as patronizingly as if she herself had been a professional grave-digger, "and you don't know what a piece of work it's ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... grafting, my opinion is that two or three cuttings, say a week apart, will be better. Root pruning, where it can be practiced to advantage, will be found more effective still. I have never known newly transplanted stocks or those which had the tree digger run under them, to bleed freely when grafted, and we have sometimes gotten a good stand of grafts on such stocks, but such stocks may not always have sufficient sap for the best results in grafting, if they have been recently transplanted or root pruned. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... little shocked when Hamlet's mother became Pantaloon, and was instantly knocked down by Clown Claudius. Grimaldi is getting a little old now, but for real humor there are few clowns like him. Mr. Shuter, as the grave-digger, was chaste and comic, as he always is, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be looking for?" thought Edmond. "The spade, perhaps." An exclamation of satisfaction indicated that the grave-digger had found the object of his search. "Here it is at last," he said, "not without some ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... suddenly cried the bush. "You are a very good digger, so why can't you dig a tunnel right under me? Start it inside here and curve it up so that it comes outside of my prickly branches, and ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... status of the Pit River dialects can not be considered to be finally settled. Powers speaks of the language as "hopelessly consonantal, harsh, and sesquipedalian," * * * "utterly unlike the sweet and simple languages of the Sacramento." He adds that the personal pronouns show it to be a true Digger Indian tongue. Recent investigations by Mr. Gatschet lead him, however, to believe that ultimately it will be found to be linguistically ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... time I followed the mob to Magpie Gully. It was a digger's life. Hard work by day, blazing fire in the evening, and sound sleep by night at the music of drunken quarrels all around, far and near. I had marked my claim in accordance with the run of the ranges, and safe as the Bank of England I bottomed on gold. No search for ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... view very generally taken of Layard's work by both Turks and Arabs, from the Pasha down to the humblest digger in his band of laborers, and he seldom felt called upon to play the missionary of science, knowing as he did that all such efforts would be but wasted breath. This want of intellectual sympathy did not prevent the best understanding from existing between ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... autumn, to be earthed up by the plough for the winter, each year, till the plants are three years old, when they are of the proper size and age for lifting, which must be done by trenching the land two feet deep—several hands accompanying the digger to pick out the roots, which must be thoroughly cleaned and dried on a kiln till they are so brittle as to break across, when they are fit to be packed in bags, and sold to the dye-stuff manufacturers who grind and reduce them to powder ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Gotzkowsky knew this, he would kill her, or die himself of grief. Die of grief!" continued he, after a pause, completely buried in his sad and bitter thoughts—"it is not so easy to die of grief. The sad heart is tenacious of life, and sorrow is but a slow grave-digger. I have heard that one could die of joy, and it seemed to me just now, when Elise rewarded me with a kiss, that I could understand this. If she only loved me, it were a blessing of God to die, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... party was divided into squads of five each, which gave the men one night on duty and two off, Rose assigning each man to the branch of work in which experiments proved him the most proficient. He was himself, by long odds, the best digger of the party; while Hamilton had no equal for ingenious mechanical skill in contriving helpful, little devices to overcome or lessen the difficulties that beset almost every step of the ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... the back-ache and general unpleasantness incident to digging is avoided, or greatly mitigated, by having the potatoes large and sound, turning out a peck to the hill, especially if the digger is ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwell was the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally fluent verses, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... among whom were Orrin S——- and I. The burial-ground (there are two in the town) is on the sides and summit of a round hill, which is planted with cypress and other trees, among which the white marble gravestones show pleasantly. The grave was dug on the steep slope of a hill; and the grave-digger was waiting there, and two or three other shirt-sleeved yeomen, leaning ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you had simply the hunter, digger, and robber; now you have also the manufacturer and salesman. The ideas of ingenuity with the hand, of fairness in exchange, have occurred to us. We can do something now with our fingers, as well as with our fists; and if we want our neighbours' goods, we will not simply ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... and shovel with vigor and effect. The yellow, gravelly sand was heaping on both sides, and the shoulders of the sturdy digger were sinking below the level. After an hour's digging, enlivened by frantic rushes of the dogs after the old fox, who hovered near in the woods, ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... the case it is on your part, not mine," retorted the mechanic, with more feeling. "I am not a digger of gold out of the earth, nor a coiner of money. I must be paid for my work before I can pay the bills I owe. It was not enough that I told you of the failure of my customers ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... and Fenns Bank. This, it was supposed, might even be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... 1883, I was digging, with my son Emile, in the sandy heap where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Emile presented me with an unknown object. Absorbed in my task of collection, I slipped the find into my box without examining it further than with a rapid glance. We left the spot. Half-way home, the ardour of my search ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... found the head and hoofs of my favorite horse, "Digger," a fine little sorrel pony, and knew that he had served them for dinner. We followed their trail far into Old Mexico, but did not overtake them. We had been accustomed to say "it was Geronimo's band," ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... placed with the grave-digger's wife, and from thence she went to the count's splendid country-seat, where she lived in handsome rooms, and was dressed in silks and fineries; not a breath of wind was to blow on her; no one dared to say a rough word to her, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... next day. Behind Ramel's coffin, not a person followed. Himself, Garnier, and one or two old women from the house on Rue Boursault, who did not go all the way to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen because it was too far, were all that were present. At the grave Sulpice Vaudrey stood alone with the grave-digger and the workman Garnier. They buried Ramel in a newly-opened part close to the foot of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder world, blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a root-digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years wandered the world around seeking meat to devour and sheltered nests ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... furrow: a flock of sheep or goats brings up the rear, and as they walk, they tread the seed into the ground. The herdsmen crack their whips and sing some country song at the top of their voices,—based on the complaint of some fellah seized by the corvee to clean out a canal. "The digger is in the water with the fish,—he talks to the silurus, and exchanges greetings with the oxyrrhynchus:—West! your digger is a ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... one of his friends, who holds a judicial appointment, had, a short time previous, been called to decide a curious case. A grave-digger was carrying one of these deceased angels to the churchyard, when he stept into a tavern to take a dram. The landlord inquired what he had got under his poncho, and on learning that it was an angelito, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Zarco was one of the keenest criminal judges in Spain. Within a very few days he discovered that the corpse to which this skull belonged had been buried in a rough wooden coffin which the grave digger had taken home with him, intending to use it for firewood. Fortunately, the man had not yet burned it up, and on the lid the judge managed to decipher the initials: "A.G.R." together with the date of interment. He had at once searched the ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne |
