"Navvy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mosk, pushing a foaming tankard towards an expectant navvy, 'and what's more, sir, she's asleep, sir, so you ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... continued, the country was already overrun with floods; the railway system daily required more hands, daily the superintendent advertised; but "the unemployed" preferred the resources of charity and rapine, and a navvy, even an amateur navvy, commanded money in the market. The same night, after a tedious journey, and a change of trains to pass a landslip, Norris found himself in a muddy cutting behind South Clifton, attacking his first shift ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... solid food and 14 oz. of red wine a day for a period of something like 60 years, from 38 years of age to about 97, and had vigorous health during the time except when he transgressed his rule. Of course, he was not a hard physical worker—i.e. he did not do the work of a navvy. But how, in view of these differences, can M.D. say: "These quantities were settled by physiologists many years ago, and no good reasons have since been adduced for altering them"? It is amazing to me to read such a statement. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... few in his place would have been as thoughtful as that; they would have got boots somehow in the end, but not beforehand. This life of animal labour does not grow the spirit of economy. Not only in farming, but in navvy work, in the rougher work of factories and mines, the same fact is evident. The man who labours with thew and sinew at horse labour—crane labour—not for himself, but for others, is not the man who saves. If he worked for his own hand possibly he might, no ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... aristocracy at all; it is in the slums. It is not in the House of Lords; it is not in the Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a certain spirit. It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a gentleman. From a democratic point of view he might as well say that he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the navvy!" said Ivan. "I didn't know that, but I at once made up my mind it was dangerous to meddle with Fairfield if he was watched. I gave him the slip, went back to Mr. Grell, and typed out a note to you. You ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do. He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... like a navvy, at a mechanic's shop, fagging up a lot of things I knew how to do on principle, but had seldom or never done with my own hands. I was always a lazy beggar, I'm afraid, and it was better fun to smoke and watch my man Collet making or fitting in a new part than ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... by a slave, and I and my slaves might be murdered by some stray brigade, under some general of Ismail's, working without orders, without orders, of course—oh, very much of course! Why shouldn't I play the boy to-day, little Dicky Donovan? I am a Mahommedan come Christian again. I am a navvy again come gentleman. I am an Arab ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... having a gashed hand dressed and strapped, and a navvy with bandages about his head was being led away by a friend. Nurses and dressers were waiting ready to take their orderly turns at the incoming casualties, and as we looked a more serious case was brought in on an ambulance by two policemen. The patient was a ragged, disreputable-looking ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain what a ward is. It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless man, if he be lucky, may casually rest his weary bones, and then work like a navvy next day to pay ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... along the cliff, towards Raxton, I became more calm and collected. I determined not to go near the Hall, lest my movements should be watched by the servants. The old churchyard was full of workmen of the navvy kind, and I learned that for the safety of the public it had now become necessary to hurl down upon the sands some enormous masses of the cliff newly disintegrated by the land-springs. I descended the gangway at Flinty Point, and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... wooden skips, and the pressure of steam was forty-five lb.; but after a time there arrived large iron skips that the crane could not lift, even when empty; there were about twenty men depending on the crane for their work and the navvy-ganger was anxious for "something to be done," and the crane man hinted about weighting the safety-valve, and no sooner said than almost done; the safety spring balance was screwed down, and a railway chair suspended from it by strong ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor
... said Hornby, rising slowly to his feet, "I'd have let them send me if I'd have known what I was in for, do you? Not much. Up at five in the morning and working about the place like a navvy till your back feels as if it 'ud break, and then back again in the afternoon. And the same thing day after day. What was the good of sending me to Harrow and Oxford if that's what I've got to ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett |
