"Gopher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there to see?" The youth with the scornful voice came to lean against the doorway beside her. "A patch of corn—miles and miles of some withered stuff that calls itself grass, all of it as flat as your hand—oh! and, by Jove! a little brown fellow—gopher, is that their silly name?—scootling along the line. Go it, young 'un!" Philip shied the round end of a biscuit tin after the disappearing brown thing. "A boggy lake with a kind of salt fringe—unhealthy and horrid and beastly—a wretched farm ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... o'clock in the morning. The night was an unusually dark one and the atmosphere was very humid. After we had been on guard possibly an hour, John Officer and I riding in one direction on opposite sides of the herd, and The Rebel circling in the opposite, Officer's horse suddenly struck a gopher burrow with his front feet, and in a moment horse and rider were sprawling on the ground. The accident happened but a few rods from the sleeping herd, which instantly came to their feet as one steer, and were off like a flash. I was riding my Nigger Boy, and as the cattle ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... an implement, in use in Illinois and other Western States, called the Gopher Plow, worked by a capstan, which drains wet land by merely drawing through it an iron shoe, at about two and a half feet in depth, without the use ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... dog," said the warm-haired proposition, as he kicked because the melon was not ripe. "Did you ever drown out a gopher, ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... old a flood of waters was to be sent on the world, Noah was commanded to build an ark of gopher wood for the saving of his house. God gave him special instructions regarding its length, its breadth, its height: he was told where to place its door and window, how to arrange its storeys and rooms, and specially to gather "of all food that is eaten," ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... personal guarantees that savin' racket goes. Did I hear any mangy son-of-a-coyote guess he didn't believe no such guarantee? No, an' I guess he best not. I'm a man of peace, as all knows in this yer city, but I'd hate to try an' shut out a blizzard in winter by stuffin' that gopher's perforated carkis under the doorjamb when I was thro' with it. I say right here we're out to save carkises—I mean souls. An', say, fellers, jest think. Gettin' your souls saved for a few measly cents. Ain't that elegant? No argyment, no kickin'. Them souls is jest goin' ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... stockade which was extended to form an enclosure behind them. A number of tame parrots and parakeets, of several different species, scrambled over the roofs and entered the houses. In the open pastures near by were the curious, extensive burrows of a gopher rat, which ate the roots of grass, not emerging to eat the grass but pulling it into the burrows by the roots. These burrows bore a close likeness to those of our pocket gophers. Miller found the animals difficult to trap. Finally, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Fair flower of early spring; the gopher white, And fragrant thyme, and all the unsown beauty Which in moist grounds the verdant meadows bear; The ox-eye, the sweet-smelling flower of love, The chalca, and the much-sung hyacinth, And the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... summer—powerful dry," said the rancher, with a wink at his guests. "Zen, I think there's a bit of gopher poison in there ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... to fall; And he was a Texas cowboy,—never heard of Rome at all. Don't tell me of yer Romans, or yer bridge bein' held by three; True manhood's the same in Texas as it was in Rome, d'ye see? Did the Greaser escape? Why certain. I saw the hull crowd over thar At the ranch of Bill Simmons, the gopher, with their glasses over the ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... persistent work—of loneliness, privation, and hardship. But it was also a life of courage, of health, of resourcefulness, of a wild, exhilarating freedom found only in God's open spaces. They had learned to know the animals of the field—the cheeky gopher; the silent, over-industrious badger; the skunk, unchallenged monarch of his immediate circle; the sneaky coyote, whose terror is all in his howl; the red fox, softly searching amid the grass for the nests ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... Guggenhammers and the big English concerns sending in their high-salaried experts. That was their scheme. That was why they had approached him for the sale of worked-out claims and tailings. They were content to let the small mine-owners gopher out what they could, for there would be ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Eagle mountains, unmoving hour by hour, his rifle shoved out before him among the dead grasses, his chin resting on the back of his folded hands, and always his attentive eyes roved from point to point over the landscape below him. A cat lies passive in this manner half a day, watching the gopher hole. ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... the mouth of its hole, ready for the dive to safety far below. No! the prairie-"dog," rattlesnake and burrowing owl emphatically do NOT dwell together in peace and harmony in the burrow of the "dog." The rodent hates both these interloping enemies, and carefully avoids them. The pocket gopher does his migrating and prospecting at night, when his enemies are asleep. The gray squirrel builds for itself a summer nest of leaves. At the real beginning of winter the prairie-"dog" tightly plugs up with moist earth the mouth of his burrow; and he packs ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... with a courage scarcely compatible with lupine characteristics, ready to wage this unequal battle to the death. But his brave fight was tragically hopeless. For all that his hundred and fifty pounds were, every ounce, lightning muscle and vibrant sinew, it was as if a gopher had waged war with a lynx. Yet by the law of his wild heart he could not turn and flee. His master—his stalwart god whose words thrilled him to the uttermost depths—had given his orders, and he must obey ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... he gazed at the gun he saw that the muzzle was as large as a gopher-hole. A bullet of that size would sink a ship, he meditated in a panic, and as for his foot—what frightful execution it would work! But—it were better to lose a foot than a foot-race, under present conditions, ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... was almost certain it was made by a bird; the President was of like opinion; and I kicked about in the tufts of grass, hoping to flush the bird. Now here, now there, arose this sharp, but bird-like note. Finally we found that it was made by a species of gopher, whose holes we soon discovered. What its specific name is I do not know, but it should be called the ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... with the air of a turkey-gobbler about to peck, he crooned, softly: "Ira, it's a heap risky puttin' your faith in maverick sharps that trail around the country, God-a'mightying it, renaming little, old rocks into precious stones, seein' gold mines in every gopher-hole they come to. They names your backyard and the rocks appertainin' thereunto a heap fashionable, and like as not some sucker gives him good money to float ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... regular," he said. "He's leading a sorrel horse—Dolver's horse. Old Morgan got Dolver—looks like, the damned old gopher! Men as willing as Dolver are not found every day." He looked at the third ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, I overheard a conversation that interested me very much. The subject of it was a queer little animal called a "gopher," which sat stuck up in a case with its comical little head perched up in the air; for it wasn't even alive, but was a poor little ...
— The Nursery, June 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 6 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... content to be assistant editor of the Mail; content to be bullied and belittled by old Rogers; content to go on his own idle, sunny way, playing with his small, chubby son, foraging the woods with a dozen small boys at his heels, working patiently over a broken gopher-trap or a rusty shotgun, for some small admirer. Worst of all, Barry had been intemperate, years ago, and there were people who believed that his occasional visits to San Francisco, now, were merely excuses for revels with ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... Achates[Lat][obs3], pal, buddy, alter ego. [criminal law] confederate; accomplice; complice; accessory, accessory after the fact; particeps criminis[Lat]; socius criminis[Lat]. aide-de-camp, secretary, clerk, associate, marshal; right-hand, right- hand man, Friday, girl Friday, man Friday, gopher, gofer; candle-holder, bottle-holder; handmaid; servant &c. 746; puppet, cat's-paw, jackal|!. tool, dupe, stooge, ame damnee[Fr]; satellite, adherent. votary; sectarian, secretary; seconder, backer, upholder, abettor, advocate, partisan, champion, patron, friend at court, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it all in the Association. These Indian boys had not money to give to the Sunday-school Society, but they saw a premium offered for killing gophers. They are a mischievous little animal, devouring a large amount of wheat, corn and other grain every year. The farmers pay two cents for each dead gopher. The proof that the gopher has been killed is his tail. Now these little Indian boys had been so interested in the story told of the work being done by the Sunday-school Society, that they spent their Saturday afternoon holiday snaring gophers. They brought ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... elapsed. A fearless blue-jay alighted on the bank and made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave way to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between the pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous fascination. Then there was a splash, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... us to understand that the wood of the white pine is that mentioned in the Scriptures as gopher wood out of which Noah built the ark. Certainly if the white pine of Josselyn's day was abundant in the neighborhood of Ararat in Noah's time he could have done no better. The wood is light, soft, close and straight grained. You may search the world for one more easily worked or more generally ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... important member of the party, but proved a constant source of amusement to all. In the novel domains they now traversed the small dog's excitable nature led him to investigate everything that seemed suspicious, but he was so cowardly, in spite of this, that once when Patsy let him down to chase a gopher or prairie dog—they were not sure which—the animal turned at bay and sent Mumbles retreating with his stubby tail between his legs. His comradeship for Wampus surprised them all. The Canadian would talk seriously to the dog and tell it long stories as if the creature ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... short with a grab at the other's arm that was like the shutting of a vise—and then bolted for his engine like a gopher for its hole. From down the track came the heavy, grumbling roar of a freight. Everybody flew then, and there was quick work done in the next half minute—and none too quickly done—the Limited was no more than on the siding when the fast freight rolled her long string ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... is he to do? He is powerful in passion, but weak in physical strength. Compared with his rival, he is nought. In a conflict the Texan would crush him, squeeze the breath out of his body, as a grizzly bear would that of a prairie squirrel or ground gopher. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... got a little worried and wrote to me about it. He said that our soft-eyed mining savant was getting us a good many subscribers, and writing up every little gopher hole in North Park, and living on Cincinnati quail, as we miners call bacon; but he said that none of these fine, blooming letters, regarding the assays on "The Weasel Asleep," "The Pauper's Dream," "The Mary ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... nearly two miles, through the dark gravel-banks of the railroad cut, across the high trestle over Joralemon River where Gertie had to be coaxed from stringer to stringer. They stopped only when a gopher in a clearing demanded attention. Gertie finally forgot the superiority of age when she saw Carl whistle the quivering gopher-cry, while the gopher sat as though hypnotized on his pile of fresh black earth. Carl stalked him. As always happened, the gopher popped ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... vigorously. "I wouldn't risk her among those gopher-holes." He slid out of his seat and, with an arm around the mare's neck, whispered into her ear, "We won't have any broken legs and broken hearts, will we, honey girl?" Rosa answered by nosing the speaker over with brazen familiarity; then when he had removed her equipment and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... was like balsam to a wound. By Jove, it is balsam! These hills are for the healing of men. I have been here three days and have taken more exercise than in three months—walking and climbing; beside the creek lined with great sycamores—alluvial soil, crumbles in your hand, and with our friend the gopher in it; and climbed up through a bit of manzanita—big fellows, twenty feet high some of them— and such a rich brown, near-burgundy red! I barked a bit of the bole to get that green beneath, spring ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... "special," who leads us to the gate of the catacombs, and bids us follow him. I know not to what extent the earth has been riddled under the Chinese Quarter; probably no man knows save he who has burrowed, like a gopher, from one living grave to another, fleeing from taxation or the detective. I know that we thread dark passages, so narrow that two of us may not cross tracks, so low that we often crouch at the doorways that intercept ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... you are," replied Old Mother Nature. "It isn't a very close relationship, still you are related. All of you are Rodents. So are all the members of the Rat and Mouse family, the Beaver family, the Porcupine family, the Pocket Gopher family, the Pika family, ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... tremblin'—wuss'n when Dutchy had the drop on me an' me without a gun. Juno, ole woman, yuh done us fine that time. . . . Only two more to git, Mira, an' then we're free. I don' say them two ain't goin' to take some gittin'; they're in the boss's own stable, an' he has ears like a gopher. He 'n' the young missus ride 'em—ur they think ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day. The little Ocklawaha steamboat Marion—a steamboat which is like nothing in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously exaggerated back—had started from Palatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and by seven o'clock of such a May morning as no words could describe, unless words ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... that unfriendly. Guess them's gopher's words. But say, pard, the law ain't got me yet. Wot d'ye think of the road across the keg? Mighty fine trail that." He laughed as though ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... accessory, accessory after the fact; particeps criminis [Lat.]; socius criminis [Lat.]. aide-de-camp, secretary, clerk, associate, marshal; right-hand, right-hand man, Friday, girl Friday, man Friday, gopher, gofer; candle- holder, bottle-holder; handmaid; servant &c 746; puppet, cat's-paw, jackal^. tool, dupe, stooge, ame damnee [Fr.]; satellite, adherent. votary; sectarian, secretary; seconder, backer, upholder, abettor, advocate, partisan, champion, patron, friend at ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... kinds of Turtle and Tortoises in North America, some of which live on the land and feed largely upon plants, e. g., the Common Box Turtle, found from the New England States to South Carolina and westward to Kansas, and the Gopher Tortoise of the Southern States. Others are aquatic, like the Painted Turtles, which are found in one form or another practically all ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... thrown up in little hillocks, sometimes a score or more of them bunched together. The drivers will tell you that these are molehills, which isn't quite true. For the Mole is a creature unknown in the Park, and the animal that makes these mounds is exceedingly abundant. It is the common Mole-gopher, a gopher related very distantly to the Prairie-dog and Mountain Whistler, but living the underground life of a Mole, though not even in the same order as that interesting miner, for the Mole-gopher is a rodent (Order Rodentia) and the Mole a bug-eater (Order Insectivora); just as different ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... bush, glistening with its luscious black berries, and began nibbling at them. A gopher, coming to his supper bush, gave a little squeak of annoyance, and Peter saw the bright eyes of the midget glaring at him from under a big fern leaf. Peter wagged his tail, for the savagery of his ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... some grain sacks out of the empty wheat bin and advised Luther to wrap them around himself. "I'm some wet, myself," he announced, "but I've got warm ragin' round here like a gopher. Now tell us how you folks come t' get here in all this storm. What'd you ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... can go anywhere. It trails along the slope of shelving hills like a wild vine; it slides through gopher-hole tunnels as a thread slides through the eye of a needle; it utilizes water-courses; it turns ridiculously sharp corners in a style calculated to remind one of the days when he played "snap-the-whip" and ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... is ingenious in devising many kinds of traps for birds and animals. Into the burrow of the gopher he places a small upright frame cut from a piece of bark. There is a groove inside of the frame, and in this the snare runs; and a string is attached to a bough above ground. Another string, on which some grains of corn are ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... its journey down the valley. He forded that with a great splashing, climbed the farther bank, followed a stubby, rocky bit of road that wound through dense willow and cottonwood growth, came out into a humpy meadow full of ant hills, gopher holes and soggy wet places where the water grass grew, crossed that and followed the road around a brushy ridge and found himself ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... to the foot-hills, escorted by Dick. They were covered with yellow and purple lupins, miniature jungles which harboured nothing more sanguinary than the gopher and the cotton-tail. The tawny poppies had hills all to themselves, a blaze of colour as fiery as the sun to which they lifted their curved drowsy lips. The Mariposa lilies grew by the creeks, in the dark shade of ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Street, and then dropping in at the Cafe Acropolis, in Halsted Street, and lodging houses in even less savory quarters. He duly canvassed every likely dive, every "melina," every gambling house and yegg hang out. He engaged in leisurely games of pool with stone-getters and gopher men. He visited bucket-shops and barrooms, and dingy little Ghetto cafes. He "buzzed" tipsters and floaters and mouthpieces. He fraternized with till tappers and single-drillers. He always made his inquiries after Binhart seem accidental, a case apparently subsidiary to two or three others ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... in his leisure moments, placed this chair on deck just outside the starboard entrance to the engine room, loaded his pipe, laid his trusty monkey wrench across his knee and gave himself up to the contemplation of this riot we call life. He resembled a cat watching beside a gopher hole. By half-past three o'clock he had finished figuring out approximately the amount of money Mrs. Reardon would have in the Hibernia Bank at the end of five years—figuring on a monthly saving of fifty dollars and interest compounded at the rate of four per cent. So, having satisfied himself ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... marrid an' divoorced, bring up fam'lies, an' are supported or devoured be thim, as th' case may be, accumylate money, dodge taxes, dhrink to excess, an' in ivry way act like human bein's. I wudden't be surprised to know that a bear had a tillyphone in his room, an' that th' gopher complained ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a destination. The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole. Boys we felt to be their special danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions would be wax. We thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woodrat proves itself a nuisance about the houses where it is as omnivorous an eater as is its far-removed cousin, the house rat. The gopher is one of the mammals whose mark is more often seen than the creature itself. It lives like the mole in underground burrows, coming to the surface only to push up the dirt ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... interested in me romantic past, of course. Ain't I the 'cute little gopher when it comes to the ladies? Fan me, Collie, and slow music and a beer for one. I'm ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... him, by gopher!" he cried. "There's enough eat up here now without having the vermin taking ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... the trees, but was hopelessly outdistanced on the fallow field adjoining, across which the mare tore with a fine disregard for heavy ground and gopher-holes. When she turned at a sharp angle into the thicket-land beyond, Lute took the long diagonal, skirted the ticket, and reined in Ban at the other side. She had arrived first. From within the thicket she could hear a tremendous crashing of brush ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... tracks of the ermine and, now that they were reaching the high altitudes, the trail of the ptarmigan in the snow. Mink, fox, and coyote had hunted each other gayly through the drifts, and all three had hunted the snowshoe rabbit and field mouse; a half-blind gopher had emerged from his den to view the morning and had ducked quickly back at the sight of the snow; an owl had snatched a Canada jay from her perch and had left a few clotted feathers when the daylight had driven him from ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... together the connecting pages. The next morning he read on the bottom of one page, "When Noah was one hundred and twenty years old he took unto himself a wife, who was—" then turning the page—"140 cubits long, 40 cubits wide, built of gopher wood—and covered with pitch inside and out." He was naturally puzzled at this. He read it again, verified it, and then said, "My friends, this is the first time I ever met this in the Bible, but I accept this as an evidence of the assertion that we are ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... mastery among his hinds. There vainly sprung the affrighted antelope, Beset by glittering eyes and hurrying feet. The dancing grouse at their insensate sport, Heard not the stealthy footstep of the fox; The gopher on his little earthwork stood, With folded arms, unconscious of the fate That wheeled in narrowing circles overhead, And the poor mouse, on heedless nibbling bent, Marked not the silent coiling of the snake. At length we heard a deep and solemn sound— Erupted moanings of the troubled ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... Pete's been layin' off. He claims his horse stepped in a gopher hole and threw him. Jasper took him along, feelin' like he wanted some one on account of his rheumatics. Jasper gets so stiff ridin' that sometimes he can hardly get on his horse. Mebby you noticed Pete's pony, that chunky bay ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... her, and hearing her own language about her all day long. Here she could wear her nightcap and sleep with all her windows shut, listen to Ivar reading the Bible, and here she could run about among the stables in a pair of Emil's old boots. Though she was bent almost double, she was as spry as a gopher. Her face was as brown as if it had been varnished, and as full of wrinkles as a washerwoman's hands. She had three jolly old teeth left in the front of her mouth, and when she grinned she looked very knowing, as if when you found out how to take it, life wasn't ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... good. The White Rabbit is wise. Her words fall as the snow on Tootoonolo, and the rocky heart of Muck-a- Muck is hidden. What says my brother the Gray Gopher ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... when big Joe came running up to camp one day and told her he had found her rat's nest. The men had been digging on a little hill preparing to build the foundation of an extra tent. The hill was covered with rat holes and gopher holes, and Joe lifted up a shovel full of adobe and underneath was a little cave all carefully lined with warm clothing. On the soft bed lay mother rat and six tiny little fellows with eyes just opened. They were peering around with a frightened look and giving ...
— Little Tales of The Desert • Ethel Twycross Foster
... our money. We'll fotch you yams and honey, We'll fill your pipe wid 'baccer, An' twiss your tail wid hay! We'll shod your hoofs wid copper, We'll knob your horns wid silber, We'll cook you rice and gopher, Ef you will clar ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... Dinky-Dunk made a confession. When he first bought that ranch there was no water at the shack, except what he could catch from the roof. Water had to be hauled for miles, and it was muddy and salty, at that. They used to call it "Gopher soup." This lack of water always worried him, he said, for women always want water, and oodles of it. It was the year before, after he had left me at Banff, that he was determined to get water. It was hard work, putting down that well, and up to almost the last moment it promised to ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... Service Chief, and the two were as brothers of one mind. To lapse into the rustic figures of the farms, on that subject of secrecy they fell together like a shock of oats. Why should the world know of the splendid gopher work of London Bill? The gold had been saved; to publish the dangers it had grazed might inspire other bandits. No, secrecy was the word; that question Inspector Val and the Secret Service Chief ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... several times the word "Noah." The Cossack grinned; but he was such a cheery, genial fellow that I think he would have grinned whatever I had said, and I cannot be sure that he took my meaning, and recognized the wood as a fragment of the true Ark. Whether it was really gopher wood, of which material the Ark was built, I will not undertake to say, but am willing to submit to the inspection of the curious the bit which I cut off with my ice-axe and brought away. Anyhow, it will be hard to prove that it is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... incubator; a litter of new-born pigs must be admired; horses and cows were forever doing things which they should or should not do; men and maids had griefs and joys to share with mistress or Headman; flowers were blooming, trees were leafing, a robin had built in the black oak, a gopher was tunnelling the rose bed,—a thousand things, full of interest, were happening every day. As a place where things the most unexpected do happen, recommend me to a ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... West and New England have been made again to figure in the imagination. Rural New Hampshire and Illinois are alive to-day for those who have read Masters, Lindsay, and Frost. In prose Chicago, New York, New Haven, Richmond, Detroit, San Francisco, and the ubiquitous Main Street of a hundred Gopher Prairies have become wayfares for the memory of the reader, as well as congeries of amusement and trade. In particular our universities, which in the 'eighties and 'nineties were darkly lit by a few flaring torches of mawkish romance, have been illumined for the imagination by a series ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to-day," asserted Maud, gravely; "but I didn't blame him. He sent out a party to ride down a steep hill on horseback, as part of a film story, and a bad accident resulted. One of the horses stepped in a gopher hole and fell, and a dozen others piled up on him, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... for the next few years was the whole series of hard-luck parables, with a few chapters from Job thrown in, and then one day he met old Jim. He seemed to cotton to Thorn from the jump. Explained to him that there was nothing in this digging gopher holes in the solid rock and eating Chinaman's grub for the sake of making niggers' wages. Allowed that he was letting other fellows dig the holes, and that he was selling them at a fair margin of profit to young Eastern capitalists ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... good time coming comes will not be all alike. I can tell you another thing about them, though you may not believe it; there will be no wool carpets on the floors,—no, nor rag ones either. The people will walk upon planks of fir and boards of cedar, sycamore from the plains and algum-trees, gopher wood and Georgia pine, inlaid in forms of wondrous grace. There will be no moth or dust to corrupt and strangle, neither creaks nor cracks to annoy. It's a question among theologians whether the millennium will come "all at once and all o'er," or gradually. ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... said Link, bashfully turning his face. "And as for him,"—as she passed on to the five-year-old,—"that's Chokie; he's a reg'lar prairie gopher for digging holes; you won't find a spot on him big as a sixpence clean enough to kiss, I ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... gent will promise a whole lot that he'll quit bothering you, I'll let him off and won't throw him out of the window. Speak up, you whining, chattering gopher! Make the promise instanter, or out ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... easy. But grapevines are smitten by a mysterious disease called "cellular degeneration," and phylloxera; a black scale that injures orange and olive, and a white scale that is worse. Apples are not free from worms; the gopher is sure to go for every root it can find. There was a serpent even in the original Eden. The historian remarks: "The cloddish, shiftless farmer is perhaps safer in Massachusetts." I think of experiences ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... cabin of Settler Rowland, as a landmark, stood forth. Barred it was—the white of barked cotton-wood timber alternating with the brown of earth that filled the spaces between—like the longitudinal stripes of a prairie gopher or on the back of a bob-white. Long wiry slough grass, razor-sharp as to blades, pungent under rain, weighted by squares of tough, native sod, thatched the roof. Sole example of the handiwork of man, it crowned one of the innumerable rises, too low to be dignified by ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... and his squid-line. The signal station and the hull of the lost vessel were only a shed and timber to him. How can any man be alive to the significance of a wreck and fluttering flag which he sees twenty times a day? Noah, no doubt, after a year in the ark, came to look upon it as so much gopher-wood, and appreciated it as a good job of joinery ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... most of the mountainous terrain in this region of Mexico, is volcanic in origin. To the south the Sierra del Tigre descends abruptly to lower elevations of the arid coastal plains, uninhabited by gophers of this genus. The small pocket gopher occurring in the Sierra del Tigre seems to be an undescribed species of the genus Pappogeomys which may be ...
— A New Species of Pocket Gopher (Genus Pappogeomys) From Jalisco, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... it!" said Mitchell. "Don't remember your name—but you're the very man Judge Harney pointed out to me as the unluckiest prospector in Montana. Said you could locate a claim bounded on all sides by paying property and gopher through to China without ever ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Vicksburg, Miss., fell a small piece of alabaster; that, at Bovina, eight miles from Vicksburg, fell a gopher turtle. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... out stepped the little band of white men, marking time for the Western Sea. The course lay west-southwest, up the Souris River, through wooded ravines now stripped of foliage, past alkali sloughs ice-edged by frost, over rolling cliffs russet and bare, where gopher and badger and owl and roving buffalo were the only signs of life. On the 21st of October two hundred Assiniboine warriors joined the marching white men. In the sheltered ravines buffalo grazed by the hundreds of thousands, and the march was delayed ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut |
