"Mattock" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King Philip to ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... edge, cutting edge; blade, edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury^, lancet; plowshare, coulter, colter^; hatchet, ax, pickax, mattock, pick, adze, gill; billhook, cleaver, cutter; scythe, sickle; scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c (arms) 727; bodkin &c (perforator) 262; belduque^, bowie knife^, paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Jno. Bleeker, James Cogswell, Lawrence Embree, Thomas Burling, Willett Leaman, Jno. Lawrence, Jacob Leaman, White Mattock, Mathew Clarkson, Nathaniel Lawrence, Jno. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... glimpse of a grim old man, who lays down a scythe and hour-glass in the corner while he shifts the scenes. There, too, in the dim background, a weird shape is ever delving. Sometimes he leans upon his mattock, and gazes, as a coach whirls by, bearing the newly married on their wedding jaunt, or glances carelessly at a babe brought home from christening. Suddenly (for the scene grows larger and larger as we look) a bony hand snatches back a performer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to whom he visits paid, Was neighbour Peter, one who used the spade; A villager that God, in lieu of lands, Had furnished only with a pair of hands, To dig and delve, and by the mattock gain Enough his wife and children to maintain. Still youthful charms you in his spouse might trace; The weather injured solely had her face, But not the features which were perfect yet: Some wish perhaps more blooming belles to get; ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... fields are churches, demolished by war; and already men are coming with mattock and masonry to raise the walls again. The ray of his outstretched arm shines in space, and his clear ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... done for different crops, as, if you wish to make an orchard or an arbustum, you trench and grub and plough; if you plant grain, you plough and harrow; while, if you cultivate trees, you mulch their roots by breaking the earth with a mattock, more or less according to the nature of the tree, for some trees, like the cypress, have a small, and others like the plane tree have a large, root system (for example, that in the Lyceum at Athens described by Theophastus, which, when it was still a young tree, had a spread ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... never used as bread, but commonly preserved as a sweetmeat. The rudest, and probably the earliest practised mode of cultivating rice, consists in taking from forest lands a fugitive crop, after burning the trees, grass, and underwood. The ground is turned up with the mattock, and the seed planted by dibbling between the stumps of trees. The period of sowing is the commencement of the rains, and of reaping that of the dry season. The rice is of course of that description ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... inshrin'd in thy admired Parts, And hast no Heraldry but thy Deserts. Yet let not them their prouder Marbles boast, For they rest with less Honour though more Cost. Go search the World, and with your Mattock wound, The groaning Bosom of the patient Ground: Dig from the hidden Veins of her dark Womb, All that is rare and precious for a Tomb. Yet when much Treasure, and more time is spent, You must grant his the Nobler Monument; Whose ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... who could give them strength and solidity; that, under this person, he should be willing to serve in any capacity, not only as a General Officer, but as a pioneer; and would take up a spade and a mattock." When he quitted the seals, they were offered first to Lord Egmont, then to Lord Hardwicke; who both declined them, probably for the same reasons that made the Duke of Grafton resign them; but after their going a-begging for some time, the Duke of———-begged ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Giant's daughter said again, "My father's breath is burning my back;" and then her husband put his finger in the filly's ear, and took out a piece of grey stone, and threw it behind him, and there grew up directly a great rock twenty miles broad and twenty miles high. Then the Giant got his mattock and his lever, and made a way through the rocks, and came after them again. Now it was near sunset, and once more the Giant's daughter felt her father's breath burning her back. So, for the third time, her husband put his hand into the filly's ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn, as far below him, is not fit for the spade and mattock: nor will he serve a poor man for so small a hire, and in so low a diet as he can afford to give him.' To this he answered, 'This sort of men ought to be particularly cherished, for in them consists the force of the armies for which we have occasion; since their birth inspires them ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... clear that he must have had assistance in the labor. But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... The peaceful mattock, ploughshare, spade, Sickle, and pruning-hook he made, Eschewing martial labours. Thus bees will rather honey bring, Than hurtfully employ their sting ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... been, Simon Ford was proud of belonging to this ancient family of Scotch miners. He had worked diligently in the same place where his ancestors had wielded the pick, the crowbar, and the mattock. At thirty he was overman of the Dochart pit, the most important in the Aberfoyle colliery. He was devoted to his trade. During long years he zealously performed his duty. His only grief had been to perceive the bed becoming impoverished, and to see the hour approaching ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... night, for the grace of God, keep lights burning at the convent windows from midnight to day-break, and let masses be said by the holy sisterhood." At sundown came the devil with pickaxe and spade, mattock: and shovel, and set to work in right good earnest to dig a dyke which should let the waters of the seas into the downs. "Fire and brim-stone!"—he exclaimed, as a sound of voices rose and fell in sacred song—"Fire and brim-stone! What's the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... tell you that at once," she said quickly; "I have but just dug it with a mattock I was so lucky as to find by a stopped earth on the bank yonder. The rest I will gladly acquaint you with by and by. But first let us be rid ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... if for departure, bundling up the various articles which each had appropriated. Still, however, there remained something to be done. Two of them, after some rummaging which not a little alarmed Brown, produced a mattock and shovel; another took a pickaxe from behind the straw on which the dead body was extended. With these implements two of them left the hut, and the remaining three, two of whom were the seamen, very strong men, still remained ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... digging, by choice, graves for the dead in the various churchyards of the town. There were those who had seen him thus employed (that form seeming still to carry something of real sun-gold upon it) peering into the darkness, while his tears fell sometimes among the grim relics his mattock ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... slouching and sullen, and they moved about their duties with gloomy brows. Even the gardener and his two stout boys struck sadly away with mattock and spade as if digging graves. No chirp of bird, no baying of a friendly dog, no burst of childish merriment broke the droning silence. And this was the home to which a father had ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... little girls, girls that yet know nothing of women's affairs and have not yet had relations with men. We put the medicine in the horns of oxen, and these children go to all the fords, to all the entrances of the country. A little girl turns up the soil with her mattock, the others dip a branch in the horn and sprinkle the inside of the hole saying, 'Rain! rain!' So we remove the misfortune which the women have brought on the roads; the rain will be able to come. The ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... saint came to Cornwall (always supposing that he was not born here), he is reputed to have landed in the Gannel, and to have built his cell on a strip of land that the local chieftain gave him. While whittling the handle of his mattock he noticed that a wood-pigeon picked up the shavings in its mouth and carried them to a certain spot. He took this as a sign that he was to build his church there, and this, says tradition, is the present site of Crantock Church. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... with approval. "Come out-of-doors," he said, picking up a mattock. And he led the way to a bed of seedling spruces that had been heeled in the ground, and dug up ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... work; and the sun rose yet higher in the heavens, and it was noon and more. And now there was no more laughter among those toiling lords, and the strokes of the hoe and mattock came far slower, while the dung-bearer sat down at the bottom of the hill and looked out on the river; but the King yet worked on doggedly, so for shame the other lords yet kept at it. Till at last the next man to the King let his hoe drop with a clatter, and swore a great oath. Now he was ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... heave up the stone, and then Dousterswivel with a mattock and shovel proceeded to dig. He had not thrown out many spadefuls, when something was heard to ring on the ground with the sound of falling metal. Then the treasure-seeker, snatching up the object which his mattock had thrown out, exclaimed: ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... planting, a few plants are dug up, set in a pail with thin mud at the bottom and carried to the place of planting. The most economical method of planting is for one man to make the holes with a mattock. These holes are made about a foot in diameter, by scraping off the sod with the mattock and then digging a little hole in the dirt underneath. A second man follows with a pail of plants and sets a single plant in this hole with his hands, see Fig. 129, making sure that the roots are straight ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... manly brood of rustic soldier folk, Taught, when the mother or the father spoke The word austere, obediently to wield The heavy mattock ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... Pilot, like the landsman in a storm; to his Father, as an infant in the dark. For guilt, he had a Saviour, and he thought of him in penitence; for trouble, a Guardian, and he looked to him in peace; and as for toil, back-breaking toil, there was another Master whom he served with spade, and mattock, and a thankful heart, while he only seemed to be working for the landlord ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... not one had been left without its walling-in, and only one was then intact, some, I fancied, having been broken open by their own builders at the spur of suffocation, or hunger; and the one intact I broke into with a mattock—it was only a thin cake of plaster, but air-tight—and in a space not seven feet long behind it I found the very ill-smelling corpse of a carting-boy, with guss and tugger at his feet, and the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... had ceased. The daughter-in-law went to the stables, the son took his mattock and cleared the little gutter in front of the door which the mud had obstructed. Modesta had disappeared at the beginning of the story. Christophe was left alone in the room with the mother, and was silent and much moved. The old woman, who was rather talkative, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... it about to assure himself of the fact. Perceiving no symptoms of life, he then threw it over his shoulder, intending to make a cap of the skin, and ornament his cottage wall with the brush. While the fox hung over one shoulder, his mattock balanced it on the other. The point of the instrument, as he walked along, every now and then struck against the ribs of the fox, which, not so dead as the man supposed, objected to this proceeding, ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... of his arch enemy, the huntsman. The thick breath of the hounds make hot the air within his hole. The sound of their voices is close upon his ears. His breast is nearly bursting with the violence of that effort which at last has brought him to his retreat. And then pickaxe and mattock are plied above his head, and nearer and more near to him press his foes,—his double foes, human and canine,—till at last a huge hand grasps him, and he is dragged forth among his enemies. Almost as soon as his eyes have seen the light the eager noses ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... Asters are wanted for a flower show make the ground as wet as mud. Then lift each plant with a spade or mattock slowly and skillfully. The roots, dirt and all, will come up in a solid mass. Pot at once, before any of the earth is shaken off. They will not wither in the least if kept out of direct sunshine for a few days. If enormous blooms are wanted, ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... hostel somewhere in those parts which was especially famous for the stewing of eels. The clerk having made answer that he had heard the eels of Sowley well spoken of, the friar sucked in his lips and hurried forward. Close at his heels came three laborers walking abreast, with spade and mattock over their shoulders. They sang some rude chorus right tunefully as they walked, but their English was so coarse and rough that to the ears of a cloister-bred man it sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue. One of them carried a young bittern ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mornings I would be at it with mattock and spade delving hard at the founds, and I had the great days sliping stones. Indeed, I became so strong and proud of myself that you will see to this day on that hillside the dents I struck on great boulders, that ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... satisfied, for this chest contained tools, weapons, instruments, clothes, books; and this is the exact list of them as stated in Gideon Spilett's note-book: —Tools:—3 knives with several blades, 2 woodmen's axes, 2 carpenter's hatchets, 3 planes, 2 adzes, 1 twibil or mattock, 6 chisels, 2 files, 3 hammers, 3 gimlets, 2 augers, 10 bags of nails and screws, 3 saws of different sizes, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... slowly worked their way towards the Tongres gate, while at the same time the more ostensible operations were in the opposite direction. The besieged had their miners also, for the peasants in the city had been used to work with mattock and pickaxe. The women, too, enrolled themselves into companies, chose their officers—or "mine-mistresses," as they were called—and did good service daily in the caverns of the earth. Thus a whole army of gnomes were noiselessly at work to destroy and defend the beleaguered ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Westminster. Finding on enumeration that they have, with a with-two- hands-and-one-tongue-to be-applauded liberality, contracted for more gunpowder than they want, they have parted with the surplus to the mattock-carrying and hustings-hammering high-bailiff of Westminster, who has, with his own shovel, dug a large hole in the front of the parish-church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, that, upon the least symptom of ill-breeding in ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... the way physicians mend or end us, Secundum artem: but although we sneer In health—when ill, we call them to attend us, Without the least propensity to jeer; While that "hiatus maxime deflendus" To be filled up by spade or mattock's near, Instead of gliding graciously down Lethe, We tease mild Baillie,[545] or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... best in your grounds progresses to those parts afflicted by such rank weeds as burdocks, thistles, milkweed, poison ivy and the like. Weeds with the long tap root like burdock and yellow dock can be eliminated best with a mattock. With one sharp blow, cut the root two or three inches below the surface. Then pull up the top and toss it aside where it will wither in the sun. What is left in the ground also dies and will not sprout. A Canadian thistle is really a handsome sight especially ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... clergymans, and goot Mr. Oldenbuck, and young Mr. Lofel, who is a very goot young gentleman also, I will show you dat it is possible, a vary possible, to discover de spring, of water, and de little fountain hidden in de ground, without any mattock, or spade, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the cellar, Croyden leading the way. Moses was off for the evening, they had the house to themselves. As they passed the foot of the stairs, Macloud picked up a mattock. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... Do not use the side edges of the shovel blade as a mattock, for this will deform ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... house; his father and mother; a girl with a wheelbarrow full of clover; a peasant, his hay-laden cart, and his cart-horses; a man and his pigs; a shepherd, his flock and dog; lastly, cabbages belonging to an old woman who cuts him in two with her mattock just as he tries to eat her. Out of him jump unhurt every thing and every one he has swallowed. In a story from the south of Siberia (Gubernatis' Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 140) the hero vanquishes a ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... standing close together, leaning on mattock and spade, grouped around something in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... "There was no smith found through all the land of Israel," says the chapter, "for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews (i.e. the Israelites) make them swords or spears. But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his ax, and his mattock." Saul was raised up to throw off this heavy yoke, and to destroy the cruel oppressors of his people. He "chose him three thousand men, and with a third of them Jonathan, his son, smote the garrison of the Philistines ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... in their cotton pyjamas, with bare feet, humming a song. Then they put on old flannels and a blazer, wrap a towel round their neck, light a cigarette, pick up a mattock and stroll to Hyde Park. When they get there they feloniously break the KING'S ice. Then they "ugh." The mere thought of these people ughing with a great splash into the Serpentine makes me feel ill. When I think of them afterwards sitting lazily on the bank and letting the blizzard dry their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... intolerable heat And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob From mortal kind. And what is left to till, Even that the force of nature would o'errun With brambles, did not human force oppose,— Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave The soil in twain by pressing ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... amusing himself with conjectural speculations, should find means of persuading the peer to inspect his steward's accounts, or repair the rural mansion of his ancestors; who could replace the tradesman behind his counter, and send back the farmer to the mattock and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... "men folks" went forth to the day's toil. It was hard, partly from its then rough character, partly from poverty of appliances. For the hardest jobs neighbors would join hands, fighting nature as they had to fight the Indians, unitedly. Farming tools, if of iron or steel, as axe, mattock, spade, and the iron nose for the digger or the plough, the village blacksmith usually fashioned, as he did the bake-pan, griddle, crane, and pothooks, for indoor use. Tables, chairs, cradles, bedsteads, and those straight-backed "settles" of which a few may yet ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... fetched mattock and pick, and dug a grave for that champion amidwards of the hazel-garth, and there they laid him, and heaped up mould and stones over his grave; and to this day it is called Hardcastle's Howe there, or for short, ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip and Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have it ends with Philip invalided home from service in India, and Jane, a victim of love, catching "glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign." There ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... groweth three times in fiue moneths: in May they sow, in Iuly they reape, in Iune they sow, in August they reape: in Iuly they sow, in September they reape: onely they cast the corne into the ground, breaking a little of the soft turfe with a wodden mattock, or pickeaxe: our selues prooued the soile, and put some of our Pease in the ground, and in tenne dayes they were of fourteene ynches high: they haue also Beanes very faire of diuers colours and wonderfull plentie: some growing ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... I met with of its having been previously visited by man was the English chickweed; and this I traced to a mound that marked the grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with the plant, doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the spade or mattock with which the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... where ravens were croaking. Birds of worse omen than these were abroad, straggling groups, and sometimes entire companies of soldiers, on their way from one part of the duchy to another; while in the fields, women, prematurely old with labor, were wielding the hoe and the mattock, and the younger and stronger of their sex were swinging the scythe. In all the villages through which we passed, in the very smallest, troops were posted, and men in military uniform were standing at the doors, or looking from the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... appeared, and the trees were silent. Not a bird sang, not a squirrel, mouse, or weasel showed itself, not a belated moth flew athwart my path. But as I went I kept watch over myself, nor dared let my eyes rest on any forest-shape. All the time I seemed to hear faint sounds of mattock and spade and hurtling bones: any moment my eyes might open on things I would not see! Daylight prudence muttered that perhaps, to appear, ten thousand phantoms awaited ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... equal Parties, and "always two spademen to one pickman" (which indicates soft sandy ground): these, with the escorting or covering battalions, Twelve Parties they also, on both sides of the River, are to be in their several stations at the fixed moments; man, musket, mattock, strictly exact. They are to advance at Midnight; the covering battalions so many yards ahead: no speaking is permissible, nor the least tobacco-smoking; no drum to be allowed for fear of accident; no firing, unless you are fired on. The covering battalions are ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sword-hilts, watches, buckles, snuff-boxes, and the like. Lord! thought I, that this island were of good honest mother earth instead of ice, that we might bury the pirate's booty if we could not save the ship, and make a princely mine of its grave, ready for the mattock should we survive to ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... of the sages their ringing was to announce the precise moment when the laborers were to turn the first sod. The calculations of the astrologers were, however, anticipated by a raven, who perched on one of the ropes and set the bells jingling, upon which every mattock was struck into the earth, and the trenches were opened. It was an unlucky hour; the planet Mars (El-Kahir) was in the ascendant; but it could not be undone, and the place was accordingly named after the hostile planet, El-Kahira, "the Martial" or "Triumphant," in the hope that the sinister omen ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the line to mark the trench, and stretch it on the sward!" The trench is marked, the tools are brought, we utter not a word, But stack our guns, then fall to work with mattock and with spade, A thousand men with sinewy arms, and not a sound is made; So still were we, the stars beneath, that scarce a whisper fell; We heard the red-coat's musket click, and heard him ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... interesting. Moreover, the paymaster was coming, which overshadowed all minor considerations, and Turner was to take twenty men and meet him midway over to McDowell, and could have taken fifty had volunteers been called for, and the garrison to a man would have offered to sally forth, "with mattock and with spade" to patch up the crazy road that twisted through Picacho Pass—anything to get the man and his money to Camp Almy, for "devil a cent of four months' pay had the garrison, and more than double that," said Sergeant Malloy, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... dawn, with a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and in his ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... implements of their craft; two or three public notaries with penhorn and pencase complete, a huntsman with his horn, and in Newland Church one of the free miners of the Forest of Dean, cap and leather breeches tied below the knee, wooden mine-hod over shoulder, a small mattock in his right hand, and a candlestick between his teeth. This kind of historical evidence will help us with Thomas Paycocke. His family brasses were set in the north aisle of the parish church of St Peter Ad Vincula. Several of them have disappeared in the course of ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... hard, high up there in the exposed place, that the only way to be safe was to stand nailed by the wind to the wan of the tower. At their feet fell the precipice where the limestone was quarried away. Below was a jumble of hills and tiny villages—Mattock, Ambergate, Stoney Middleton. The lads were eager to spy out the church of Bestwood, far away among the rather crowded country on the left. They were disgusted that it seemed to stand on a plain. They saw the hills of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... and place of change, they hie Whither Sir Aldigier's advices teach; And there survey an ample band who lie Exposed to fierce Apollo's heat; in reach, Nor myrtle-tree nor laurel they descry, Nor tapering cypress, ash, nor spreading beech: But naked gravel with low shrubs discerned, Undelved by mattock and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Mountains and hills are terraced and tilled far up their slopes. Meadows are conspicuously absent, as are also fallow fields. Land is too valuable to lie idle. Labor is chiefly manual and is shared by the women and children; mattock and hoe are more common than the plow.[982] Such elaborate cultivation and such pressure of population eventuate in small holdings. In Japan one hectar (2 1-2 acres) is the average ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... fort in Mag Breg, at the place where the Mattock falls into the Boyne, about three miles ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... example, among many villages on the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood. Rheinschnacke (of which the equivalent is perhaps "water-snake") is the standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who repays it in kind by the epithet "karst" (mattock), or "kukuk" (cuckoo), according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or the forest. If any Romeo among the "mattocks" were to marry a Juliet among the "water-snakes," there would be no lack of Tybalts and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... upon the bench, and gasped, apparently unable to speak; he looked to Vanderhoek, and pointed to an instrument in the shape of a mattock—shaking his hand, and muttering indistinctly, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... was no mark to show— No dint of spade, or mattock-loosened sod,— Only the hard bare ground, untilled and trackless. Whoe'er he was, the doer left no trace. And, when the scout of our first daylight watch Showed us the thing, we marvelled in dismay. The Prince was out of sight; not in a grave, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... a glass, evidences that whatever might be the ulterior object of their stealthy communion, the immediate comfort of the creature had not been altogether overlooked. At the feet of one of the personages were laid a mattock, a horn lantern—from which the candle had been removed—, a crowbar, and a bunch of keys. Near to these implements of a vocation which the reader will readily surmise, rested a strange superannuated terrier with a wiry back and frosted muzzle; a head minus an ear, and a ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Mathematician matematikisto. Matrimony geedzeco. Matrix utero. Matron patrino. Matron patronino, estrino. [Error in book: potronino] Matter sxtofo. Matter materialo. Matter (pus) puso. Mattock pikfosilo. Mattress matraco. Mature matura. Mature maturigi—igxi. Maturity matureco. Maul bategi. Maxillary makzela. Maxim proverbo. Maximum maksimumo. May (month) Majo. May-bug majskarabo. Mayhap eble. Mayor urbestro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... shamrock, within sight of the shanties decorated with the honorable order of the thistle. A lovely evening in the month of June! Not with spumy cannon and prickly bayonets, but with peaceful spade and mattock, advanced the sons of St. Patrick towards the children of a sister isle. Then did Roderick Dhu step forth from his shanty, and inquire, in choice Gaelic, if a person named Brian Borheime was in the ranks of the approaching forces. Then then did Brian Borheime ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... beggar, of a rich winding sheet and a shroudless burial, of a solitary grave and a family vault—were this all, then, indeed it would be true that death is a common leveler. Such paltry distinctions as those of wealth and poverty are soon leveled by the spade and mattock; the damp breath of the grave blots them out forever. But there are other distinctions which even the mace of death can not level or obliterate. Can it break down the distinction of virtue and vice? Can it confound the good with the bad? the noble with the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the work was to be done; so she dragged the body away thence, and across the brook, and a little way into the meadow, and then she went back and fetched mattock and spade from the outhouse, where she knew they lay, and so fell to digging a grave for the corpse of her dead terror. But howso hard she might toil, she was not through with the work ere night began to fall on her, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... Joliffe, "unless"—and again he looked piteously at Dr. Rochecliffe, who saw no time was to be lost in appeasing the ranger's terrors, as his ministry was most needful in the present circumstances.—"Get spade and mattock," he whispered to him, "and a dark lantern, and meet me ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... through the whin-bush, Straightest down the ridge his furrows sped; Early on the mountain ranged his reapers, Above his mattock late ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... looked, he was ware of two coming towards him with pick and mattock on their shoulders. Swiftly they came, and soon they were at his side, fawning on him, and speaking in soft, wheedling voices. Their faces were eager and servile, ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... legion was modified, the infantry wore cuirasses and helmets, and two swords; namely, a long one and a dagger. The select infantry carried a long spear and a shield, the rest a pilum. Each man carried a saw, a basket, a mattock, a hatchet, a leather strap, a hook, a chain, and provisions for three days. The Equites wore helmets and cuirasses, like the infantry, with a broad sword at the right side, and in their hand a long pole. A buckler swung at the horse's flank. They were also furnished with a quiver ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... cattle and swine upon it, and also of sharing in the division of the harvest. The basis of the life was agricultural. Our Saxon ancestors in Germany did not subsist exclusively by hunting or fishing, although these pursuits were not neglected. They were as skilful with the plough and mattock as they were in steering a boat or hunting a deer or pursuing a whale. They were coarse in their pleasures, but religious in their turn of mind; Pagans, indeed, but worshipping the powers of Nature with poetic ardor. They were born warriors, and their passion for the sea led to adventurous ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... of the Cat family is the power of sheathing their talons. Claws to a cat are of as great importance to him in the securing of his prey as are his teeth. The badger is a digger, Hodge, who carries his mattock on his shoulder; but the feline is the free-lance whose sword must be kept keen in its scabbard, so by a peculiar arrangement of muscles the points of the claws are kept off the ground, while the animal treads noiselessly on soft pads. Otherwise by constant abrasion they would get so blunted ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... to make out. He dragged a chair to the table. That man Bronson was all right. Let's see—the thirtieth—looked stockier in daylight. Had a good grip, too, and a clear, level eye. One mattock missing in the lookout cabin—and the girl; such a slender whip of a girl! Just like a young willow, but not a bit like an invalid. Buckley reports that his man will have the sheep across the reservation by the fourth of the month. Her father had said she was not over-strong. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... for days below the paddock How the wilderness would yield To the spade, and pick, and mattock, While we toiled to win the field. Bronzed hands we used to sully Till they were of darkest hue, 'Burning off' down in the gully At ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... "I hear the mattock in the mine, The ax-stroke in the dell, The clamor from the Indian lodge, The Jesuits' ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... tongue, to destroy, to scatter,[225] day by day making the crooked straight and the rough places plain.[226] He rejoiced as a giant to run everywhere.[227] You might call him a consuming fire burning the briers of crimes.[228] You might call him an axe or a mattock casting down[229] evil plantings.[230] He extirpated barbaric rites, he planted those of the Church. All out-worn superstitions (for not a few of them were discovered) he abolished, and, wheresoever he found it, every sort of malign ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... was to push aside the straw, as it left the machine; but after working half a day he left off, as the palms of his hands were blistered and sore. Another time he started off with me and some other workmen to root up trees, but he grazed his neck with a mattock. ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... workmen were building. Romulus all the time was standing by. At length, in order to enforce what he said about the insufficiency of the work, Remus leaped over a portion of it, saying, "This is the way the enemy will leap over your wall." Hereupon Romulus seized a mattock from the hands of one of the laborers, and struck his brother down to the ground with it, saying, "And this is the way that we will kill them if they do." Remus was ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... caught a sound, or, rather, a confused mingling of sounds, as of men digging in the earth. It was faint, and some distance beyond us in the heart of the beech woods, but as we traveled the sound increased and I could distinguish the strokes of the mattock, and the thrust of the shovel and the clatter of the earth ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... and mattock, however, have subserved, and will subserve, other important archaeological purposes besides the opening of ancient cemeteries. They will probably enable us yet to solve to some extent the vexed question of the true character of our so-called "Druidical ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... years from now should anyone break open our gilded tomb, he will find Melicent to be no more admirable than Demetrios. One skull is like another, and is as lightly split with a mattock. You will be as ugly as I, and nobody will be thinking of your eyes and hair. Hail, rain and dew will drench us both impartially when I lie at your side, as I intend to do, for a hundred years and yet another hundred years. You need not frown, for what ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... situation to be a scene of mortal strife, both were surprised to observe that a grave was dug close by the foot of the rock with great neatness and regularity, the green turf being laid down upon the one side, and the earth thrown out in a heap upon the other. A mattock and shovel lay by ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... thou hast heretofore been digged about; God's mattock has heretofore been at thy roots; thou hast heretofore been striven with, convinced, awakened, made to taste and see, and cry, O the blessedness! Thou hast heretofore been met with under the word; thy heart ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... these gentlemen descend to tell us how we are to separate the "spiritual" gold which faintly streaks the huge mass of impure ore of fable, legend, and mysticism. Each man, it seems has his own particular spade and mattock in his "spiritual faculty"; so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir. You will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the internal oracle, listen to its responses ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... maker of the dead man's bed, The sexton, hoary-headed chronicle! Of hard, unmeaning face, down which ne'er stole A gentle tear; with mattock in his hand, Digs thro' whole rows of kindred and acquaintance By far his juniors! Scarce a skull's cast up But well he knew its owner, and can tell Some passage of his life. 1651 BLAIR: The ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... would watch for the Count, for there is something going on. The Szgany are quartered somewhere in the castle and are doing work of some kind. I know it, for now and then, I hear a far-away muffled sound as of mattock and spade, and, whatever it is, it must be the end of some ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... of thy face." Those that make conscience of walking in the commandments of God, they shall be blessed with the bread of life, when others shall be hunger-bit. That may also be mystically applied, "On all hills that shall be digged with the mattock, there shall not come thither the fear of briars and thorns; but it shall be for the sending forth of oxen, and for the treading of lesser cattle" (Isa 7:25). The meaning is, Where people are diligent according ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... all seemed accomplished. A large, covered basket was partially loaded with the contents—heavy as lead—and, between them, they bore it out into the storm and darkness again, and I heard the sound of the spade and mattock at work on ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... said the voice, "oh, children of God, put up your steel and pray for one whose white soul doth mount e'en now to heaven!" and forth into the light came one clad as a white friar—a tall man and slender, and upon his shoulder he bare a mattock that gleamed beneath the moon. His coarse, white robe, frayed and worn, was stained with earth and the green of grass, and was splashed, here and there, with a darker stain; pale was he, and hollow-cheeked, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... into the valley on the other side. Hearing a clinking sound some distance from the road, as of metal striking stone, Hradzka stole cautiously through the woods until he came within sight of a man who was digging with a mattock, uprooting small bushes of a particular sort, with rough gray bark and three-pointed leaves. When he had dug one up, he would cut off the roots and then slice away the root-bark with a knife, putting it into a sack. Hradzka's lip curled contemptuously; the fellow ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... men of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not do it, knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn as far below him, is not fit for the spade and mattock; nor will he serve a poor man for so small a hire and in so low a diet as he can afford to give him.' To this he answered, 'This sort of men ought to be particularly cherished, for in them consists the force of the armies for which we ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... and call it the Well at the World's End: belike it will be for her as helpful as the real one.' Then she turned to me and said: 'Do thou with the rest what thou wilt,' and therewith she went back hastily to the house. But as for me, I went back also, and found a pick and a mattock in the goat-house, and came back in the moonlight and scraped the snow away, and dug a pit, and buried the poor damsel there with ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... his mattock and his spade, and filled a grave prepared by other hands. At his feet lies a lovely daughter, snatched suddenly away, ere the bloom of youth had passed, and almost without a moment's warning, leaving a husband and a dear little child, too ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... the summer (B.C. 134) in extensive preparations, and it was not till winter that he drew his army round the walls of Numantia, defended by only eight thousand citizens. Scipio even declined a battle, and fought with mattock and spade. A double wall of circumvallation, surmounted with towers, was built around the city, and closed the access to it by the Douro, by which the besieged relied upon for provisions. The city sustained a memorable siege of nearly a year, and ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... they fared through the mountains, and that highway's fashioner Forsooth was a fearful craftsman, and his hands the waters were, And the heaped-up ice was his mattock, and the fire-blast was his man, And never a whit he heeded though his walls were waste and wan, And the guest-halls of that wayside great heaps of the ashes spent But, each as a man alone, through the sun-bright day they went, And they rode till the moon rose upward, and the stars were small ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... old tomb, With its quaint tracery, gilded here and there With sunlight glancing through the o'er-arching lime, Far flinging its cool shadow, flickering light— Our greyhair'd sexton, with his hard grey face, (A living tombstone!) resting on his mattock By the low portal; and just over right, His back against the lime-tree, his thin hands Lock'd in each other—hanging down before him As with their own dead weight—a tall slim youth With hollow hectic cheek, and pale parch'd lip, And labouring breath, and eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... within. I stood beneath a tall locust-tree, and the small, round leaves; yellow now as the long cloud-bar across the sunset, kept dropping, and dropping at my feet, till all the faded grass was covered up. There the mattock had never been struck; but in fancy I saw the small Heaves falling and drifting about a new and smooth-shaped mound—and, choking with the turbulent outcry in my heart, I glided stealthily homeward—alas! to find the ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... that the East Indian was thought to be insane; partly from the fact that, through all the horrors of the flight, and while others were casting away their very food and weapons, Secundra continued to stagger forward with a mattock on his shoulder, and partly because, in the last days, and with a great degree of heat and fluency, he perpetually spoke with himself in his own language. But he was sane enough when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... glooming light Of middle night, So cold and white, Worn Sorrow sits by the moaning wave; Beside her are laid, Her mattock and spade, For she hath half delved her own deep grave. Alone she is there: The white clouds drizzle: her hair falls loose; Her shoulders are bare; Her tears are ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... however, stood a man who was not so busy. To put it plainly, he was loafing, with the handle of his improvised mattock supporting his weight. Clearly the two up in the air were concerned only ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... could start getting the ground ready for the sweet peas. It wouldn't do any harm to plant them now, though it might not do any good either; and he mustn't be surprised to find occasional chunks of earth still frozen. She would be over in a little while to show him about it. Let him get his pick-mattock, spade, and rake ready, up by the corner ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... about it. He had a field of corn, and a little garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle, and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... Connecticut and Long Island, it was owing to these bloody charms that honest money-diggers have ever experienced so much difficulty in removing these buried treasures. Often, indeed, have the lids of the iron chests rung beneath the mattock of the stealthy midnight searcher for gold; but the flashes of sulphurous fires, blue and red, and the saucer eyes and chattering teeth of legions of demons have uniformly interposed to frighten the delvers from their posts, and preserve the treasures from their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to her arrive. This only would I have thee clearly note: That so my conscience have no plea against me; Do fortune as she list, I stand prepar'd. Not new or strange such earnest to mine ear. Speed fortune then her wheel, as likes her best, The clown his mattock; all things ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... if shot, and stood facing the church whose flag streamed to the south. The roadman straightened himself and leaned upon his mattock; the huswife shut the back door, and the dog crept into his barrel. The schoolyard, accustomed at that hour to flood suddenly with noise, remained empty. But the milkmaid's horse drew to the hedge for a bite, the ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... ploughing, when you hold in your hand the end of the plough-tail and bring down your stick on the backs of the oxen as they draw on the pole-bar by the yoke-straps. Let a slave follow a little behind with a mattock and make trouble for the birds by hiding the seed; for good management is the best for mortal men as bad management is the worst. In this way your corn-ears will bow to the ground with fullness if ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... In the Island of Eigg, too, in an Oolite deposit, locked up in trap, and whose stratigraphical relations cannot in consequence be exactly traced, great fragments of Pinites Eiggensis are so abundant, that, armed with a mattock, I have dug out of the rock, in a few minutes, specimens enough to supply a dozen of museums. In short, judging from its fossiliferous remains, it seems not improbable that old Oolitic Scotland was as densely covered with coniferous trees as the Scotland of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... you to your tools. You, cousins, shall Go sound the ocean and cast your nets; Happily you may catch her in the sea; Yet there's as little justice as at land.— No; Publius and Sempronius, you must do it; 'Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, And pierce the inmost centre of the earth: Then, when you come to Pluto's region, I pray you deliver him this petition; Tell him it is for justice and for aid, And that it comes from old Andronicus, Shaken with sorrows in ungrateful Rome.— Ah, Rome!—Well, ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... in the afternoon. The steady sound of the mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common bustling world that lay close around the ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... burn, Give hail and glory to your King's return! For Agamemnon cometh! A great light Cometh to men and gods out of the night. Grand greeting give him—aye, it need be grand— Who, God's avenging mattock in his hand, Hath wrecked Troy's towers and digged her soil beneath, Till her gods' houses, they are things of death; Her altars waste, and blasted every seed Whence life might rise! So perfect is his deed, So dire the ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus |
