"Shovel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought of it the more I saw that the only way was to tell him everything; for if you only tell parts of things you sometimes find yourself telling lies before you know where you are. So I put on my cloak and my mask, and took the shovel and bier into the study, and sat down on the little foot-stool I always wait on when Godfather Gilpin is in the middle of reading, and keeps his head down to show that he does ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... dean—didn't you see the cloven foot sticking out from under his shoe-buckle? What news for your mother! What will the ghosts of your grandfathers to the seventh generation say to this, Alton? Colloquing in Pagan picture galleries with shovel-hatted Philistines! And that's not the worst, Alton," he ran on. "Those daughters ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... rank of engineer in less than four years. The firemen themselves are selected men who must pass several physical examinations and then submit to the test of as arduous an apprenticeship as modern industrialism affords. In the course of an eight- to twelve-hour run firemen must shovel from fifteen to twenty-five tons of coal into the blazing fire box of a locomotive. In winter they are constantly subjected to hot blasts from the furnace and freezing drafts from the wind. Records show that out of every hundred who begin as firemen only seventeen become engineers ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... be abbot. So he is abbot, and we had to come back to Florence.' As I read in the 'Life of San Gualberto,' laid on the table for the edification of strangers, the brothers attain to sanctification, among other means, by cleaning out pigsties with their bare hands, without spade or shovel; but that is uncleanliness enough—they wouldn't touch the little finger of a woman. Angry I was, I do assure you. I should have liked to stay there, in spite of the bread. We should have been only a little thinner at the end. And the scenery—oh, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... thing towards rescuing them. Gradually one by one they were hit, and soon their festering carcases, lying swollen in the sun, added a little more to the awful stenches which now surround us. Some men volunteered to go out and bury them, and cautiously creeping out, shovel in hand, just as night fell, once more our Peking dust was requisitioned, and a coverlet ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... eggs, pour them into an omelet pan, and sprinkle a little white sugar over them while frying, hold a salamander or hot shovel over the uppermost side of the omelet, as it must only be fried on one side. As soon as it is set, slide it on to a hot dish, double it, and sprinkle sugar over it ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... Cavalry. A confiding friendship followed, and the two men entered at once upon the plan of gaining their liberty. They agreed that the most feasible scheme was a tunnel, to begin in the rear of the little kitchen-apartment at the southeast corner of Rat Hell. Without more ado they secured a broken shovel and two case-knives ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... slaves, the latter signed them to descend. The negro swung himself down like a monkey, and received the baggage, which, besides the bundles already mentioned, consisted of some tools, notably a pick, a shovel, and a stout crowbar. An empty water-skin was also sent down, followed by a basket suggestive of food. Then the passenger, with a foot over the side of the vessel, gave ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the beach, I found the shell of an immense clam, with which I returned, and using it as a scoop, or shovel, removed two or three bushels of sand, when a moist stratum was reached, and my clam- shovel struck the chime of a flour-barrel. In my joy I called to Saddles, for I knew our parched throats would soon be relieved. It did not take long to empty the barrel ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... this fatal retreat has been often told. The result was communicated in the following manner to the British troops shut up in Jelalabad: 'At last, on the 13th of January, when the garrison were busy on the works, toiling with axe and shovel, with their arms piled and their accoutrements laid out close at hand, a sentry on the ramparts, looking out towards the Cabool road, saw a solitary white-faced horseman struggling on towards the fort. The word was passed; the tidings ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... measure me with his eye as one of my uncles did. "There's a much littler boy than you goes with one of the carts, and I see him cutting about the market with a book under his arm, looking as chuff as a pea on a shovel. He ain't nothing to you. Come along o' me. I'll take an old coat for wrapper, and you'll be as right as the mail. You ask ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Peterkin and Elizabeth Eliza would need new dresses for this occasion. The little boys' hoops went in; so did their india-rubber boots, in case it should not rain when they started. They each had a hoe and shovel, and ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... our use to-day. And it is so full of force that a piece of coal that will weigh three pounds (as big as a large pair of fists) has as much power in it as the average man puts into a day's work. Three tons of coal will pump as much water or shovel as much sand as the average man will pump or shovel in a lifetime; so that if a man proposes to do nothing but work with his muscles, he had better dig three tons of coal and set that to do his work and then die, because ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... sand and boulders and examined the cliff. It was virgin rock; never a tool mark was to be seen. Already the men were going, when the same strange instinct which had drawn him to the spot caused him to take a spade from one of them and begin to shovel away the sand from the face of the cliff—for here, for some unexplained reason, were no boulders or debris. Seeing their master, to whom they were attached, at work, they began to work too, and for twenty minutes or more dug on cheerfully ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... hanging on spikes driven into pieces of wood built into the structure for the purpose, were the long-handled frying-pan, the pot-hook, the boring iron, the branding iron, the long iron peel, the roasting hook, the fire-pan, the scoop-shaped fire-shovel, with a trivet or two. The stout slice and tongs lean against the jambs ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... was, however, only a bit of the tangled jungle which must be cleared before the first American shovel could begin its work. For over twenty years a contest had been waged between experts in the United States as to the relative merits of the Panama and the Nicaragua routes. The latter was the more popular, perhaps ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... Scott, 'I've been keeping it warm for you. Shovel it down. I want to be starting for the nets. Quicker, man, quicker! Don't roll it round your tongue as if it was port. Go for it. Finished? ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... pale that I fetched brandy, but put the street-door key in my pocket as I went. "If she don't let me in," I thought, "she shan't have the key,—and what will she tell her sister about that?" It was a key almost as big as a shovel; she never noticed that I had taken it away. She thought by her dodge that she had got rid of me, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... had an opportunity of discovering that the person he had thus unfortunately encountered, was no other than a stout raw-boned coalheaver, and that the noise he had heard was occasioned by his sticking his pointed coal-shovel in the earth, with intention to help him up after his fall. Pursuing their way, and presently turning to the right, Bob was suddenly delighted by being brought from utter darkness into marvellous light, presenting a ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the army stevedores, lusty and virile and strong, We are given the hardest work of the war, and the hours are long. We handle the heavy boxes, and shovel the dirty coal; While soldiers and sailors work in the light, we burrow below like a mole. But somebody has to do this work, or the soldiers could not fight! And whatever work is given a man, is good if he does ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... round the wounded foot and leg; I'm sure the cold must be good for it;' and, with the axe for their only shovel, the two girls gathered a pile of frozen snow, as a cushion and covering to the limb—'Oh, if Edith were here! if Edith were here!' ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the notes for all these escapes. After some twenty adventures Furwitz is beaten off, and Umfallo tries his powers. Here the misadventures do not involve so much folly on the hero's part— though, to be sure, he ventures into a lion's den unarmed, and has to beat off the inmates with a shovel. But the other adventures are more rational. He catches a jester—of admirably foolish expression- -putting a match to a powder-magazine; he is wonderfully preserved in mountain avalanches and hurricanes; reins up his horse on the verge ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... institutions as I find them, and wait for time and truth to develop, or fortify, or (if you like) destroy them? A college tutor, or a nobleman's toady, who appears one fine day as my right reverend lord, in a silk apron and a shovel-hat, and assumes benedictory airs over me, is still the same man we remember at Oxbridge, when he was truckling to the tufts, and bullying the poor under-graduates in the lecture-room. An hereditary legislator, who passes his time with jockeys ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... after her. Up to the big pile of snow, which did not look much like a house now, ran the cook. Then, just as she might have stirred a cake with the big spoon, she began digging in the snow. It was almost as good as a shovel. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Home • Laura Lee Hope
... Nancy. "There are things we say when we are raging mad at a person, and there are things we say when we think them the dirt under our feet. You kept him down with your dirt-shovel, and you called him—what ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... hole that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever; and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... in an open sleigh. Night clear, cold, and moonlit. Driver Mr. Samuel Smart. Through Echo Canyon to Hanging Rock Station. The snow is very deep, there is no path, and we literally shovel our way to Robert Pollock's station, which we achieve in the Course of Time. Mr. P. gets up and kindles a fire, and a snowy nightcap and a pair of very bright black eyes beam upon us from the bed. That is Mrs. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... all parts of Peru dress in a very extraordinary, not to say outlandish manner. One of the lower grade wears a very capacious shovel hat, projecting as much in front as behind, and looking very like a double-ended coal-heaver's hat. A loose black serge robe covers him all over, as with a funereal pall, and being fastened together only at the neck, gives to his often obese ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... well as on all the railways. The yellow flood was threatening to destroy the very foundations of our domestic economy by forcing down all wage-values. The yellow immigrant who wrested spade and shovel, ax and saw, from the American workman, who pushed his way into the factory and the workshop and acted as a heartless strike breaker, was not only found in the Pacific States but had pushed his way across the Rockies into the very heart of the eastern ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... horse. Steve comes from stable leading another horse, with couple of large saddle-bags, pick, and short-handled shovel, on its back. He points to these and mounts his horse. Jess smiles gratefully, then looks grave again. He reaches down and just touches her reassuringly on the shoulder. Then he rides quickly away, leading the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... stepped forward again. He tripped over a shovel, and his foot plunged into something that went squelch and swallowed the foot past the ankle. He fell forward into a heap of sand, and his foot went deeper into ...
— The Hoofer • Walter M. Miller
... I heard them run up and down past the door, wisping it with their tails. Then Zoe would cling to me. And I would take up the rifle in anticipation of the wind opening the door and admitting the marauder. We were snowbound the whole month of February. I had to shovel a path to the brook. But it was out of the question for any one to go to town, or for any one to come to us. And of course during these bitter days nothing was done on my new house. The logs were all cut. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... American Indian to strut up Broadway with a female behind him carrying his pack. And so, sir, while all the ragged boys I knew could get little jobs to earn bread, I, because I was a girl, was not allowed to carry a gentleman's parcel or black his boots, or shovel the snow off a shopkeeper's pavement, or put in coal, or do anything that I could do just as well as they. And so because I was a girl there seemed to be nothing but starvation ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... several dressmakers in all departments, half a dozen drapers' assistants, four grooms, sixty navvies in one advertisement, millers, haymakers, woodcutters, spademen, needlewomen, quarrymen, etc., two wheelwrights, a verger at L120 a year, pick and shovel men. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... all, if you take that view of it," Harry retorted. "Yet there's a thing called responsibility, and many wise men have declared that it takes more out of a man than hours of toiling with pick and shovel." ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... burrowings. So are our books. Religion burrows. It barely so much as looks at heaven. Why should a civilised man—a man who has a pocket in civilisation—a man who can burrow—look at heaven? It is the glimmering boundary line where burrowing leaves off. Time enough. In the meantime the shovel. Let the stars wheel. Do men look at stars ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... offer, and the king expected to see him begin to shovel. But Hercules, after he had called the son of Augeas to witness the agreement, tore the foundations away from one side of the stables; directed to it by means of a canal the streams of Alpheus and Peneus that flowed near by; and let the waters carry ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... healthy ruddy cheek, a clear, cheerful eye, hair white as snow! with a small stout figure, clothed in a suit of somewhat rusty black, (knee-breeches and gaiters all round the year,) and with a small shovel-hat. No one lives in the vicarage with him but an elderly woman, his housekeeper, and her husband, whose chief business is to look after the doctor's old mare and the little garden; in which I have often seen him and his master, with his coat ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... came ashore here to see if I couldn't find some clams," added Laud, as he held up a clam-digger he carried in his hand—a kind of trowel fixed in a shovel-handle. ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... says Miss Tarbell, "he made long extracts, with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook. The wooden fire shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when it had become too grimy for use. The logs and boards in his vicinity he covered with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... owl come to a house and start screechin'. We always said, 'somebody is gwine to die!' Honey, you don't hear it now and it's good you don't fur it would skeer you to death nearly. It sounded so mo'nful like and we'd put the poker or the shovel in the fire and that always run him away; it burned his tongue out and he couldn't holler no more. If they'd let us go out lak we always wanted to, Ah don't 'spects we'd a-done it, 'cause we wuz too skeered. Lawdy, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... for the storm had passed. But oh? what a lot of snow there was! In big drifts it was scattered all over the place, and one side door was snowed in completely; and could not be opened. Sam had to shovel a lot of snow away from the kitchen steps ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Snow Lodge • Laura Lee Hope
... amount of educational privilege which a mission should furnish to its people. President Stanley Hall has recently maintained that, even in this country, many are educated who should not be. They should, he says, be left to the hoe and shovel. He claims that not a few are, through education, spoiled for usefulness in the lowest sphere of manual labour for which they were by nature designed; while they are also disqualified for the highest sphere of service and life. If this be true in America it is doubly ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... in mind that I wanted many things notwithstanding all that I had amassed together; and of these, ink was one; as also a spade, pickaxe, and shovel, to dig or remove the earth; needles, pins, and thread; as for linen, I soon learned to ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... rancher will fire his clearing, thus getting rid of a large share of the logger's waste with practically no labor. To the task of disposing of the remaining logs and stumps he will bring modern tools and methods into action. The axe and shovel and hand lever have given place to gunpowder, the donkey engine, derrick and winch. Stump powder puts all the big stumps into pieces easily. The modern stump-puller lifts out the smaller stumps with ease. The donkey engine and derrick pull ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... and dropped it into the oven he had set aside on the hot coals. Swiftly he shaped eight or ten other biscuits and dropped them as the first. Then he put the heavy iron lid on the pot, and with a rude shovel, improvised from a flattened tin can, he shoveled red coals out of the fire, and covered the lid with them. His next move was to pare and slice potatoes, placing these aside in a pan. A small black coffee-pot ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... of Miss Fuller's heifer; and, whenever they are turned out of the barn, she is compelled to take refuge under our protection. So much did she impede my labors by keeping close to me, that I found it necessary to give her two or three gentle pats with a shovel; but still she preferred to trust herself to my tender mercies, rather than venture among the horns of the herd. She is not an amiable cow; but she has a very intelligent face, and seems to be of a reflective cast of character. I doubt not that she will soon perceive the expediency ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "documents" of the Traders' Bank, of Boston,—from which institution he had drawn a pile of funds, to invest in coal at Richmond,—and no sooner did B. place an X, of the Traders' Bank, upon the bar, than the excited landlord's eyes danced like shot on a hot shovel, and giving the constables the cue, poor B. found himself waited upon, in a brace of shakes, by those two custodians, while the landlord grabbed the wallet out of B.'s hand, with a ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... and worldliness unspiritualize thousands of professed Christians. The present artificial arrangements of society antagonize devotional meetings and special efforts to promote revivals. On Sabbath mornings many a minister has to shovel out scores of his congregation from under the drifts (not very clean snow either) ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... opening up of our coal, iron and copper mines we were at last in a position to make our railroads successful. Then science began to evolve wonderful labor-saving machinery which did away with the slow, primitive methods our pioneer engineers had been obliged to employ. The steam shovel was invented, the traveling crane, the gigantic derrick, the pile driver. The early railroad builders had few if any of these devices and were forced to do by hand the work that machinery could have ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell, The gate is pass'd, the new-dug grave is halted at, the living alight, the hearse uncloses, The coffin is pass'd out, lower'd and settled, the whip is laid on the coffin, the earth is swiftly shovel'd in, The mound above is flatted with the spades—silence, A minute—no one moves or speaks—it is done, He is decently put away—is there ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... singlestick is it?" George replied gleefully, as he made a successful grab at another stick a couple of yards away. It was the handle of a shovel; there were several broken ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... and Scotland, one of the most noted prickers being a wretched imposter named Matthew Hopkins who was sent for to all parts of the country to exercise his vile art. Ralph Gardner, in his England's Grievance Discovered (1655), speaks also of two prickers, Thomas Shovel and Cuthbert Nicholson, who, in 1649 and 1650, were sent by the magistrates of Newcastle-on-Tyne, into Scotland, there to confer with another very able man in that line and bring him back to Newcastle. ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... Dredge and shovel are laboring hard to guide or check the endless undersea coral growth before bay and channel and lagoon shall all be dry land. The wormlike, lazy, fast-multiplying Anthozoa is fighting passively but with terrific ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... box dat de dead man was a-lying in. Jest as he did dat, a light jumped out'n dat grave right in front of us and all over Wade's shovel. Our two dogs tuck and run and holler and stick dey tails betwix dey legs like somebody a-whipping dem. Dem dogs never stopped running and howling 'till dey reached home, me and Wade right behind dem. Wade had dat 'possum in his hand. Dat light ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... calleth Bit, to which he tieth a thing of leather called Rein; and, when he sitteth in the saddle on my back, he taketh the rein in his hand and guideth me with it, goading my flanks the while with the shovel stirrups till he maketh them bleed. So do not ask, O son of our Sultan, the hardships I endure from the son of Adam. And when I grow old and lean and can no longer run swiftly, he selleth me to the miller who maketh ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... himself. He passed for a young heir; Gawtrey for his tutor—a doctor in divinity; Birnie for his valet. The task of maintenance fell on Gawtrey, who hit off his character to a hair; larded his grave jokes with university scraps of Latin; looked big and well-fed; wore knee-breeches and a shovel hat; and played whist with the skill of a veteran vicar. By his science in that game he made, at first, enough; at least, to defray their weekly expenses. But, by degrees, the good people at Tours, who, under pretence of health, were there for economy, grew ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... few generations ago an American workman could have saved money, gone West and taken up a homestead. Now the free lands were gone. In earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own a mine. That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority, and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their grasp ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... several bright-barreled muskets in holding him at bay. The Lord punished Israel by the hand of Jehu and Hazael, both wicked men. Slavery was bursting her bounds, coming over on us like the sea on Holland. One very dirty shovel might be worth a hundred silver teaspoons in keeping back the waters, and this Free Soil party could do more to check its advance than a hundred of the little Liberty Party with that pure patriot, Gerrit Smith, ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... soft thud. Zorzi took the lamp and examined the edges. One of them was a little chipped by the crowbar, and he rubbed it with the greasy tow and scattered dust over it. Then he got a cypress broom and swept the earth carefully away into a heap. Beroviero himself brought the shovel and held it close to the stones while Zorzi pushed the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... decided upon a location, which is always in clay, adobe or stiff soil, he excavates the shaft by means of the sharp horns at the end of his mandibles, which are his pick and shovel and mining tools. The earth is held between the mandibles and carried to the surface. When the shaft is of the required size, the spider smoothes and glazes the wall with a fluid which is secreted by itself. Then the whole shaft is covered with a silken paper ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Krantz brought out of the tent the only shovel in their possession, and they, one by one, buried their dollars many feet deep in the yielding sand. When they had all secured their wealth, he brought them one of the axes, and the cocoa-nut trees fell, and ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to do who has found a good pocket is to buy himself into business and keep away from the hills. The logical thing is to set out looking for another one. My friend the Pocket Hunter had been looking twenty years. His working outfit was a shovel, a pick, a gold pan which he kept cleaner than his plate, and a pocket magnifier. When he came to a watercourse he would pan out the gravel of its bed for "colors," and under the glass determine if they ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... the top of Marahemo down to the very foot, there's the Maori middens: a regular reef of nothing but shell, oysters and pipi and scollops and all the rest. There must be hundreds and hundreds of tons of pure shell. All we've got to do is to make a kiln near the bottom and shovel the shell into it; and there's any amount of ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... plows in the State six years ago. The implement has there, as well as in many other places, ceased to be a curiosity; and the man who now objects to its use, is classed with him who shells his corn on a shovel over a half-bushel, instead of employing an improved machine, which will enable him to do more in a day than he can do in the "good old way" in ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... for this ill is not to sit still, Or frowst with a book by the fire; But to take a large hoe and a shovel also, And dig till you ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... customary," says the former, "to extend the guard-line in the morning for the purpose of allowing prisoners (as previously stated) to collect fuel on a piece of timbered land just opposite the camp, and it was our intention this morning to take a shovel, when permitted to pass to the woods, and make a hole in the ground large enough to receive our two 'skeletons,' and then enlist the services of some friend, who would cover us up with brush and leaves, so that, when the guard was withdrawn, we would be left without ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Sully,—Robert M. Sully, nephew of Thomas Sully, and a capital draughtsman,—to serve as a companion piece for the Greenwich Pensioner by the same artist. The man had served against us in the Revolutionary War, and participated in the "affair" of Bunker Hill. The shovel hats, the long chins and retreating mouths of these aged men at Greenwich, are wonderfully hit off by Cruikshank, with a mere flourish of the pen. I have a scene in a watch-house, with half a score of heads, thoroughly Irish, drunk or sleepy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... to be in a continual state of repair. Dredgers were everywhere; some of the ordinary shovel type, others working by suction, and discharging far inland by means of weird huge pipes that apparently meandered at will over the face of nature. The control stations were beautifully French and neat, painted yellow, each with its gorgeous bougainvilleas in flower, its square-rigged ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Improvers meant to plough up all the roadsides and set them out with geraniums. Mr. Levi Boulter warned his neighbors that the Improvers would insist that everybody pull down his house and rebuild it after plans approved by the society. Mr. James Spencer sent them word that he wished they would kindly shovel down the church hill. Eben Wright told Anne that he wished the Improvers could induce old Josiah Sloane to keep his whiskers trimmed. Mr. Lawrence Bell said he would whitewash his barns if nothing else would please them but he would NOT hang ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I'm afraid.' He had a shovel in his hand, and eyed it curiously. 'She has not told you that I am considerably in debt to various people, and that, not long ago, I was obliged to ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the extended chain was turned amidst great popular rejoicings. So speedy had been the preparations that no time availed to procure a more ornamental implement, and the Countess Vane had to use an ordinary iron shovel for the purpose! A contemporary record gives ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... shovel along," said Sut, as he threw one over his shoulder, and sprang upon his horse. "We'll be likely to find need for it ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... evening and saw a man at work with a team and scoop shovel, the method being to scoop up the gravel and sand, then dump it in an iron car. This was then pulled by the horses to the top of a derrick up a sloping track and dumped. A stream of water pumped up from the river mixed with the gravel, ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... this with a sententious air, the Doctor took his shovel-shaped hat, and went down to the Castle green, to conclude a match of bowls with Whitaker, which had probably suggested this notable illustration of the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... he'll want to do is to explore that hole," he mused. "Probably, that'll mean some excavating. I'd better get a wrecking train with a crane on it and a steam shovel here. A gang of men with picks and shovels might be ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... useful to the value of a cloak pin: the former was engaged in sweeping up the dust, which, from the clouds that surrounded us, would not appear to have been disturbed for six months before at least. I had nearly broken my shins, on my first entrance, over the fire-shovel and bucket, and I was now in more danger of being choked with filth. "Who inhabited this delightful place before, Mark?" "A mad wag, but a generous gentleman, Sir, take notice, one Charles Rattle, Esq., who was expelled college for smuggling, take notice: the proctor, with ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... often been told that a rat's tail looked like a red worm and spoiled the creature's pretty looks, that I selected one of the younger generation and cut off the much criticised caudal appendage with a red-hot shovel. The little rat bore the operation very well, grew apace, and became an imposing fellow with mustaches. But though he was the lighter for the loss of his tail, he was much less agile than his comrades; he was very careful about trying gymnastics and fell very often. ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... delay of perhaps 40 minutes, the D.C.L.I. or 479 have observed our arrival and tools are counted out and issued, the homely pick and shovel. The task is pleasantly situated about 150 yards in front of several batteries of our field guns (which open fire directly we are in position) and consists in relaxing duckboards, excavating the submerged sleepers of ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... dress with three flounces came to the threshold of the door to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she led to the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The servant's breakfast was boiling beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first rays of the sun coming in through the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... orchard in fall where possible, always turning the furrows toward the trees, leaving the dead furrows as drainage ditches between the rows. At Beechwood Farm we have always banked the trees with earth in the fall, using a shovel. This not only firms the soil about the tree, holding it straight and strong through the winter, but it affords good protection against rodents, especially mice. Where rabbits are prevalent it ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... cashier through the grating. Then I eyed him narrowly. Would not that astute official see that I was only posing as a Real Person? No; he calmly opened a little drawer, took out some real sovereigns, counted them carefully, and handed them to me in a brass-tipped shovel. I went away feeling I had perpetrated a delightful fraud. I had got some of the gold of ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... a pickaxe and shovel.' Well, to resume: facts of the case—Roger Tallis murders the jeweller, and you murder Roger Tallis; after that, as you say, 'nothing but a ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... brutally by the sheriff with revolver in hand, they made their way down one flight of stairs, and in the moment of excitement, as good luck would have it, plunged into the sheriff's private apartment, where his wife and children were sleeping. The wife cried murder lustily. A shovel full of fire, to the great danger of burning the premises, was scattered over the room; out of the window jumped two of the female fugitives. Our hero Henry, seizing a heavy andiron, smashed out the window entire, through which the others ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... ascent to the summit of the bluff was by a narrow path that had been found by Kate in one of the many clefts riven in the side of the black-faced cliff, and her father's mates had so improved it with pick and shovel that Aulain could discern it ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... farther from the home land. Every additional mile put between that shore and the boat, increased the prince's sense of power. He was working for his excellency and against her. In a revulsion of feeling he leaned on his shovel, whereupon a besooted giant of the lower regions tapped his shoulder. This person—foreman of the gang—pointed significantly to the inactive implement. His brow was low, brutish, and he had a fist ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... ones, for the precious metals, in the world,) I saw long rows of vats, pans, cover'd by bubbling-boiling water, and fill'd with pure silver, four or five inches thick, many thousand dollars' worth in a pan. The foreman who was showing me shovel'd it carelessly up with a little wooden shovel, as one might toss beans. Then large silver bricks, worth $2000 a brick, dozens of piles, twenty in a pile. In one place in the mountains, at a mining camp, I had a few days before seen rough bullion on the ground in the open ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... could not lie on it comfortably. The room was chilly though the fire was hot, and how grandmamma did poke it! Fred thought she did nothing else the whole afternoon; and there was a certain concluding shovel that she gave to the cinders, that very nearly put him in a passion. Nothing would make him comfortable till Henrietta came in, and it seemed very long before he heard the paddock gate, and the horses' feet upon the gravel. ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hay, Prime Ministers and such as they Grew like asparagus in May, And Dukes were three a penny. Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats. And Bishops in their shovel hats Were plentiful as tabby cats— If possible, too many. On every side Field-Marshals gleamed, Small beer were Lords Lieutenant deemed With Admirals the ocean teemed All round his wide dominions; And Party Leaders you might meet In twos and threes in every street Maintaining, ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... Brown's inexpressible relief, began to make some preparations as 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 ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... building a little house of red bricks, and it was the tap-tap-tapping of his trowel, or mortar-shovel, that made the ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... cleaning the fish that the woman and children had caught, the man came back, and he had fifteen of the handsomest trout I had ever seen on a string. He greeted us with a laugh and said this was the first stream he had ever seen where a man could take a long-handled shovel and pitch out all the fish he had a mind to. "It is wonderful to think of the amount of fish that has been taken out of that stream, and they would not be missed if we ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... know what the devil you're talking about. Everything I know about the Hittite Empire is published and available to anybody. Hittitology's like Egyptology; it's stopped being research and archaeology and become scholarship and history. And I'm not a scholar or a historian; I'm a pick-and-shovel field archaeologist—a highly skilled and specialized grave-robber and junk-picker—and there's more pick-and-shovel work on this planet than I could do in a hundred lifetimes. This is something new; I was a fool to think I could turn my back on ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... Bannatine and Mr. McGregor, to bring a wheelbarrow, pick-axe, and large shovel with them, since we should probably need the two latter to dig up the gold, while the wheelbarrow would be handy to carry it home. Everything was provided for in advance, and I felt confident of the ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... on irrefragable experience, which is what I always build upon, that the way to ruin the poor of Ireland would be to educate them, sir. Look at the poor scholars, as they call themselves; and what are they? a parcel of young vagabonds in rags, with a book under their arm instead of a spade or a shovel, sir. And what comes of this? that they grow up the worst-disposed, and the most troublesome seditious rascals in the community. I allow none of them about New-town-Hardcastle—none— banished them all. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... good nose for shovels looks through the more likely hiding-places. The search is rendered pleasant as well as interesting by the fact that all the Brigade has been trodden into a morass by months of shovel-hunting. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... 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, on the shovel, is written Idem,—"The Same." In this word is the key to the popularity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... butter, a little flour, some good broth, and a little cream; when it boils add a little Parmesan cheese. Put your maccaroni into the sauce, and just stir it together. Put it on the dish for table, with grated Parmesan cheese over it, and give it a good brown colour with a hot shovel or salamander. ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... work returning tir'd and lean, More tann'd than though you'd twenty summers seen, The wonted gard'ning tools again you'd take Your long-accustom'd shovel and your rake; And then exclaiming, you would surely say, 'Twere better far to labour many a day Than e'er attempt to take such useless flights, And vainly strive to gain poetic heights, Impossible ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... ourselves with five horses—three of them for the saddle, and the other two for carrying our cooking utensils, ammunition, fishing tackle, blankets and buffalo robes, a pick, and a pan, a shovel, an axe, and provisions necessary for a six weeks' trip. We were all well armed with repeating rifles, Colt's six-shooters and sheath-knives, and had besides a double barreled shotgun for small game. We also had a good field glass, a ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... is still-born; a Medici never survives his swaddling-clothes. Into the tiny graves are huddled a million destinies. The sexton's shovel smothers up a Renaissance; soon the daisies will blow above History. Those eyebrows are lifted, that lip curls, and two fair homes go down in sorrow. This man misses a train, to travel with Fortune in the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the alluvial will be taken up, and the Terrible Hollow will re-echo with the sound of pick and shovel." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... afraid, Jup, a great big negro like you, to take hold of a harmless little dead beetle, why, you can carry it up by this string—but, if you do not take it up with you in some way, I shall be under the necessity of breaking your head with this shovel." ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Cut, where effort was chiefly concentrated, was 815,270 cubic yards. In April this was increased to 879,527 cubic yards. There was a considerable decrease in the output for May and June owing partly to the advent of the rainy season and partly to temporary trouble with the steam shovel men over the question of wages. This trouble was settled satisfactorily to all parties and in July the total excavation advanced materially and in August the grand total from all points in the canal prism by steam shovels and dredges exceeded all previous United States records, reaching ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... took a shovel and began shoveling silver dollars out of the wheelbarrow into the aluminum dishpan and the galvanized iron washtub. He shoveled out of the wheelbarrow till the dishpan was full, till the washtub was full. Then he put the shovel ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... shovel him off on other people as wants their night's rest. It's takin' advantage—that's ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... on particular Occasions had acquitted himself tolerably at a Ball or an Assembly; to which one of the Company added, that a certain Knot of Ladies took him for a Wit. He was cut off in the Flower of his Age by the Blow of a Paring-Shovel, having been surprized by an eminent Citizen, as he was tendring ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... out, all the burthens and enjoyments of life were equal, and equally divided according to the ideas of the crowd, men like Thaer, Arkwright, and others of their class, who now provide bread for hundreds of thousands from their studies and laboratories, would then be able, at most, with a rake and shovel, to provide food for three or four. The division of labor, with its infinite amount of productive force, would, for the most part, cease. Nor would the consequence be that the humbler classes would be freed from work of a coarse, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... impurity from the cellar in case of neglect. The vaults may be reached from the outside opening, for removing the contents. In the whole arrangement there is not a vestige of impure air, and it is as neat as a parlor; and the man who cleans out the vaults say it is no more unpleasant than to shovel sand from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... they marvelled where "Abe" could have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt the impulse to write; not only making extracts from books he wished to remember, but also composing little essays of his own. First he sketched these with charcoal on a wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on basswood shingles. Then he transferred them to paper, which was a scarce commodity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut his expressions close, so that they might not cover too much space,—a ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... later, in the full light of the afternoon sunshine, Nicky-Nan emerged from the old house with a shovel on his arm and a bundle dangling from it. He had heard 'Bert Penhaligon say that the Boy Scouts were employed by night only for coast-watching. By day the pilots with their telescopes habitually commanded this whole ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... health, and tucked Mrs. Hanger up into the shay, and rode alongside to guarantee them; and then the next day, on the very same horse, up he comes at Hanger-dene, and overhauls every tub on the premises, with a parchment as big as a malt-shovel! Such a man was not fit to lay a knife ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Saturday, August 23, 1914, passed peacefully for the British soldiers, still working on their trenches. But distant boom of guns from the east continued to vibrate to them at intervals. Of its portend they knew nothing. Doubtless as they plied the shovel they again speculated over it, wondering and possibly regretting a chance of their having been deprived of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... breathless, and most utterly still. The farmers shovel a way to their beasts, bind with chains their large ploughshares to their heaviest wood-sled and take of oxen as many as Allah has given them. These they drive, and the dragging share makes a furrow in which a ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... true, that when we woke up at daylight, and found what they had done, we jeered, and laughed at them, and showed them the impossibility of fighting from behind that wall, until some of them got ashamed, and began to shovel down the top, a little. Captain McCarthy sent to let General Kershaw know the absurd situation we were in,—supported by infantry that could not fire a shot, and warning him, that if the enemy charged, they would certainly take the line, unless our two guns alone could hold it. General Kershaw ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... up the shovel and the hoe Take down the fiddle and the bow— Old master has gone to the slaveholder's rest; He has gone where ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... a turn, and I shall probably not have to shovel coal for a living for some time to come, although I have done it, ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... story, the first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening—like Shakespeare—I mean the Stratford one—not by experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... smile over this "Character of Holland"; at the excluded ocean returning to play at leap- frog over the steeples; at the rise of government and authority in Holland, which belonged of right to the man who could best invent a shovel or a pump, the country ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... pocket-handkerchief, my worthy sir," said the old soldier, as I wildly plunged my hands into my heap of gold. "Tie it up, as we used to tie up a bit of dinner in the Grand Army; your winnings are too heavy for any breeches-pockets that ever were sewed. There! that's it—shovel them in, notes and all! Credie! what luck! Stop! another napoleon on the floor! Ah! sacre petit polisson de Napoleon! have I found thee at last? Now then, sir—two tight double knots each way with your honourable permission, and the money's safe. Feel it! feel it, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... wounds of all kinds, or from sores, is great, and it will give immediately relief from the intense pain caused by a gathering. The easiest way to prepare this is to cut all-wool flannel—if you haven't the wool—into narrow strips, take some hot ashes with a few small live coals on a shovel, sprinkle some of the flannel strips on it, and hold the injured member in the smoke for five or ten minutes, using plenty of flannel to make a thick smoke. Repeat as often as seems necessary, though one ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... coolness, and in one corner a little dairy compartment, built over a spring covered by a wooden trap-door, completed the furnishings of the floor. For the rest, the place was a fairly well-stocked tool-house; a scythe and a grindstone, snow-shovel and ladders were arranged compactly; a watering-pot and rake stood fresh from use ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... been drowned if I hadn't come," he laughed; "I wonder if you fellows can sell us a shovel? Our tent ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... individual of our household agrees with us. Now, a man born with a genius for managing a locomotive is one who has a high degree of the fire-making instinct. Mr. Reynolds distinctly says that a man may be a good mechanic, may have even built locomotives, and yet, if he is not a good "shovel-man," if he does not know how to manage his fire, he will never rise to distinction in his profession. The great secret is to build the fire so that the whole mass of fuel will ignite and burn freely without the ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... two of the former speakers in regard to the chestnut that falls free from the bur. I would prefer a chestnut that sticks tight to the bur. We have threshers out there that thresh them out. We can pick up those nuts in the bur with a shovel or fork, throw them into the wagon, take them in the wagon, thresh them out. You have a cleaner nut, you don't have to pick around on the ground with rubber gloves that we use, which is easy enough, but it certainly ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... is merely an American term for a road which has been ploughed on each side, and the earth, so raised, thrown up in the centre by the means of a road-scraper, or turnpike shovel, worked either with horses or oxen. A road engineer or surveyor would call this grading, preparatory to gravelling ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... of its voice, while colonies of ibis croaked out the news of the day in gruff, discordant notes; cranes flying laboriously, with long legs trailing, emitted their deep "honks;" frogs lifted up their voices from out the reeds, and at intervals came the booming cry of the shovel-beaked bittern, and the harsh, baboon-like bark of the green-crested toucan. The noise of the home-going of the winged multitudes ceased as the night drew its ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... hands, however feeble, to work need starve in Sacramento, and for some weeks Dick hung around the town doing odd jobs, and then having saved a few dollars, determined to try his luck at the diggings, and started on foot with a shovel on his shoulders and a few days' ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty |
