"Spade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the autumn operations began, as many as 3000 of its men were down at one time with malaria, but care and tonic of the battle pulled the ranks together, and the Irish Division, a purely Irish division, campaigned up to the glorious traditions of their race. They worked like gluttons with rifle and spade, and their pioneer work on roads in the Judean hills will always be ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... good times out of doors with a spade, a cart, and the sandpile. Boys most thoroughly enjoy a track with its engine and cars, switches, etc. They build sham fortifications, truly works of art, with their blocks, while the girls are happiest with dolls and household sets. However, occasionally we meet a mother who ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... be in your hands to-day. The more I hear and the more I think, the more firmly am I convinced that the truth we are out to find can only be discovered by a deal of hard digging in past times. There is a lot of spade work demanded and you, or I, may have to return to England to do it—unless we can get the information without the labour. But I've no reason to count on any ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... at some time why the clubs and spades on cards are so called. The latter figure, it is true, bears some resemblance to a spade, but no giant of fiction is depicted with a club with a triple head. The explanation is that we have adopted the French pattern, carreau (see p. 161), diamond, c[oe]ur, heart, pique, pike, spear-head, trefle, trefoil, clover-leaf, but have given to the two latter the names used in ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... observe it, but rose from his chair, stooped and kissed her on the forehead, and resolutely marched out to his garden. He worked that afternoon in a small patch which commanded a view of the ferry and also of the road leading up to Hall: and at half-past three, or a few minutes later, dropped his spade and strolled down to the edge of his property, a low cliff ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... most. To have him rendered homeless at eighty-two with winter coming on seemed to me an intolerable cruelty, and so with a driving haste I set to work with my own hands to clear away and restore. Wielding the wrecking bar and the spade each day, I toiled like a hired man—even after the carpenters were gone at night I ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... digging, a spade or two, As his aching back could lift, When he saw something glisten at the bottom of the trench, And to get it out ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... with which the people will finally crown their own self-respect and decorate their own majesty. But we did not expect to see this sure prophecy turning itself into history in our day. We thought the people were too busy with the spade and the quill to care for any other sceptres at present. But it is now plain that they have been dreaming princely dreams and thinking royal thoughts all the while, and are now ready to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... in its evolution. Mr. W. R. Cremer, M.P., the well-known Radical, made the following comment in the Daily News as to this victory for Arbitration: "It has been the privilege and joy of others to do the spade work in this beneficent movement, but to King Edward the opportunity was, at the psychological moment, presented to complete the work of thirty years. How well and how nobly His Majesty performed ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... reproduce appeared in "Harper's Weekly," September 17th, 1864, and shows General McClellan, with his little spade in hand, being subjected to the scrutiny of the President—the man who gave McClellan, when the latter was Commander-in-Chief of the Union forces, every opportunity in the world to distinguish himself. There ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... president of the State Agricultural Society, and was eminent, not only for his knowledge of his subject, but for his power of making it interesting. Men came away from Mr. Gould's lectures filled with intense desire to get hold of a spade or hoe and to begin ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... whole party ascended to the battery. There lay the spade and the sack of earth. The tool with which the work had been done was still in the mouth of the second cannon and, on pulling it out, the powder cartridge came with it. Then Leigh led them to the next gun, and a man who had a bayonet ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... one more. She had wonderful faith in the selection, had Mother. She pleaded until the fire burned low, then Dad rose and said: "Well, we'll try it once more with corn, and if nothing comes of it why then we MUST give it up." Then he took the spade and raked the fire together and covered it with ashes—we always covered the fire over before going to bed so as to keep it alight. Some mornings, though, it would be out, when one of us would have to go across to Anderson's and borrow a fire-stick. ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... friar, that trembles, sighs, and weeps: We took this mattock and this spade from him As he was coming from ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... shoulder to shoulder in defence of their adopted country. The man of money, the man of law, the merchant, the artist, and the artisan swelled the lines hastening to the scene of action, armed either with musket, pick, or spade. Added to these was seen Dickson's long and dusky brigade of colored men, cheerfully wending their way to labor on the fortifications, evidently holding it their especial right to put whatever impediments they could in the northward path of those whom they considered their own peculiar ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... for countless Germans. He dreamt of swift armoured aeroplanes swooping down upon the flying airship, and sending it reeling earthward, the men screaming. He imagined a shattered Zeppelin staggering earthward in the fields behind the Dower House, and how he would himself run out with a spade and smite the Germans down. "Quarter indeed! Kamerad! ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... de spade what Massa Will sis pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I had to ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... to be still in progress. Indeed the arrangements for the two operations, the selection and purchase of the implements for both, may go on simultaneously. The plough, indeed, is sometimes used as a draining implement for making a deep furrow, in which, with more or less emendation from the spade, the tiles or other draining materials may subsequently be laid. But in this case, the draught is excessive, and many horses must often be yoked into the same plough, in order to drag it through the ground. Here, therefore, the young farmer must learn a new art—the art of harnessing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... room and Carnehan's shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: "The country isn't half worked out because they that governs it won't let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can't lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that, without all the Government saying, 'Leave it alone, and let us govern.' Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn't crowded and can ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... Flemming saw the toothless old sexton treading the fresh earth into the grave of the little child, with his clouted shoes. He approached him, and asked the age of the deceased. The sexton leaned a moment on his spade, and shrugging ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... ancient paths and reached the orchard on the slope; and as soon as Madame Bavoil caught sight of them she grounded arms, so to speak, setting her foot in gardener fashion on the spade she had stuck into ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... which case there is much room for good sense in taking them up. Many lay hold upon the canes and pull so hastily that little save sticks comes out. A gardener wants fibrous roots rather than top; therefore, send the spade down under the roots and pry them out. Suckers and root-cutting plants can be dug in October, after the wood has fairly ripened, but be careful to leave no foliage on the canes that are taken up before the leaves fall, for they rapidly drain the vitality of the plants. It is best ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... comes the ancient and honorable spade, which, for small garden plots, borders, beds, etc., must still be relied upon for the initial operation in gardening—breaking up the soil. There are several types, but any will answer the purpose. In buying a spade look ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... and go at six? why, about this much, ma'am," said the gardener, marking off a piece of the border with his spade. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... Naumachia, from different discoveries that have been made of vaults which must have conducted the waters to this spot. The meadows and little hills all around are covered with remains of this once important place of amusement; and the labourer is for ever turning up, with his spade or plough, coins and capitals and broken pillars and pavement, belonging to the period of ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... to dig a grave for myself here, Timofei; and lie down here forever between my parents. For this is the only spot which is left to me in the world. Fetch the spade!" ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of his hearers, and permeated above all by strong common sense, called so as locus a non lucendo, because so uncommon even in the pulpit. His thoughts, often strikingly original, are always expressed in a vigorous, manly style. He does not hesitate to call a spade by its proper name. Hence he has often been taken to task for what, gauged by the rule of the Confession of Faith, would be called loose, if not absolutely heterodox notions on sacred things. His memorable speech ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... me on my return journey. I was walking back along the shore, when I saw the fat kid meditatively smacking a jelly-fish with a spade. The girl wasn't with him. In fact, there didn't seem to be any one in sight. I was just going to pass on when I got the brain-wave. I thought the whole thing out in a flash, don't you know. From what I had seen of the two, the girl was evidently fond of this kid, and, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... was bending over, examining something on the ground. When I reached him he grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed to two barely discernible tracks paralleling each other for almost a hundred yards. Between them ran a shallow, jagged rut, where the spade of an aeroplane ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."[57] ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... Away hurried the man, and soon returned with a spade. He set manfully to work to dig out the fox, and worked till the perspiration streamed down his face. The laird sat stolidly looking on, saying never a word; and as he seemed to be nearing the confines of the hole, the poor digger redoubled his exertions. When at length it became ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... cave, Or a vault in the nave When the iron door Is closed, and the floor Of the church relaid With trowel and spade. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... trefoil, or spade design. Found as a border design in many of the Caucasian and some Persian rugs, ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... you remembred Marcus. She's gone, she's fled, sirs take you to your tooles, You Cosens shall goe sound the Ocean: And cast your nets, haply you may find her in the Sea, Yet ther's as little iustice as at Land: No Publius and Sempronius, you must doe it, 'Tis you must dig with Mattocke, and with Spade, And pierce the inmost Center of the earth: Then when you come to Plutoes Region, I pray you deliuer him this petition, Tell him it is for iustice, and for aide, And that it comes from old Andronicus, Shaken with ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... he recognised the photograph of Alice Pitezel as one of the two girls accompanying him. The only furniture the man had taken into the house was a bed, a mattress and a trunk. During his stay at No. 16 this man had called on his neighbour about four o'clock one afternoon and borrowed a spade, saying that he wanted to dig a place in the cellar where his widowed sister could keep potatoes; he had returned the spade the following morning. The lady to whom the house belonged recognised Holmes' portrait as that of the man to whom she had ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... can displace the other without loss. We have all had our day-dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal vision; but as for farming, I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... meant nothing, either by their mistresses or their mythology, but attacks on the court of Rome. Suffice it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I think it is a great pity that Guido Cavalcante did not live to read ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... bitter at the thought. He ought to have hid the rooster. He ought to have got a spade and buried him. He was full of regrets, not for what he had done, but for what he had not done. He would stay here till dark. He would stay here all night. He never would go home any more. He would hide in the woods, and he and Frank ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... far cry from Westminster to Woolwich, and in spite of indefatigable spade-work on his part, it was well on in the third week in May before he so much as caught a ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... lads, I like your spirit. I will not baulk you. Give me a spade; I will try what I can do to expedite the work." And my revered father, as soon as the spade had been handed to him, began digging away with right goodwill, filling the baskets, which were carried up to the embankment. He soon became so interested in the work that he was as unwilling ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... archaeologists has revealed what town-planning meant in a small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period. No other even approximately complete example has been as yet uncovered on any other site. But spade-work at the neighbouring and more famous city of Miletus has uncovered similar street-planning there. In one quarter, the only one yet fully excavated, the streets crossed at right angles and enclosed regular blocks of dwelling-houses measuring ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... deceive ourselves,—the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After all, it is likely that the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you can,—but the moon will still lead the tides, and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... once as if every star in the heavens above shone with the light of the moon. She saw the many-coloured flowers on the surface of the grave move like a fluttering garment. She sank, and the figure threw his dark cloak round her. It became night—the night of death. She sank deeper than the sexton's spade could reach. The churchyard lay like a roof above ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... the mountain-side! Ho, dwellers in the vales! Ho, ye who by the chafing tide Have roughened in the gales! Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot, Lay by the bloodless spade: Let desk and case and counter rot, And burn your ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... off their shoes and stockings, turned up their trousers, and made sand castles. "Look, nurse," bawled Burton to his wife, "see what Cammy and I have done!" "If you please, nursey," whined Cameron, "Dick's snatched away my spade." At that moment Lord Aberdeen, President of the Royal Geographical Society, and a party of grave antiquaries and geographers, mostly run to nose, spectacles, and forehead, arrived on the scene; with the result of infinite laughter, in ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... unnamed ways his knowledge of the world blessed those about him. The small improvements, the little advances in civilisation which the English intruders were introducing into those parts, he adopted: a more orderly house, an increased neatness, a few more acres brought under the plough or the spade, whole roofs and few beggars—these things were to be seen at Morristown, and in few other places thereabouts. And, above all, his neighbours owned the influence of one who, with a reputation gained at the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... a cart on the estate; all the carriage was done on the backs of ponies. The cultivation of the interior was generally executed with a rude kind of spade, and there was not a gig in the county. In 1845 there were one thousand one hundred and thirty carts owned on the estate, and seven hundred and eight ploughs, also ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... morrow the Germans saw a top hat come bobbing and bowing along the French trench and heard loud cries of "Vive le President!" Time after time they riddled that top hat with bullets, and still it went bobbing along until the French took it off the spade handle, threw it into the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... the trouble with communism, those who dig are apt to dig their feet. It is easier to call a spade a spade than to use one. Men may be born free and equal, but if they are, they do not show it. From his first breath man is oppressed by the conditions of his existence, and life is a struggle with environment. Freedom and liberty are terms ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... you act the Part of a Herald, it will be for a Trumpet; if you sound an Alarm, a Horn; if you dig, a Spade; if you reap, a Sickle; if you go to Sea, an Anchor; in the Kitchen it will serve for a Flesh-hook; and in ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Chowles, springing back, and snatching up a spade, "or I will dash out your brains. Are you mad?" he continued, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... The hard-working farmers listened with mystification and consternation. They could not make out how land which they or their fathers had paid for, and which they had tilled and improved, could belong to an absentee who had never turned a spade on it, had never seen it, all simply because he had the advantage of a legal technicality and a document emblazoned with a seal ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... peasant watches the slow colouring of the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by little gather a feeble soil over the iron substance; then, supporting the narrow slip of clinging ground with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... Deism just then. They had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of discovering What was really occurring in the world and How it ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... mother makes everything wrong," said the young girl, attacking with a little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice. And then she returned to her idea of a moment before: "You must promise to tell me—to warn me in some way—whenever I strike a false note. You must give ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... laying down the pot and seizing a spade. She rapidly dug a shallow hole, poured the sticky black mixture into it and tossed back ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... on each dark and gloomy night A form in phosphorescent white, A genuine hair-raising sight, Would wander through the town. And as it slowly roamed around, With a spade it dug each foot of ground; So the folks about Said there was no doubt 'Twas the ghost ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... "See Vassilyevna here came in tchoo—tchoo, just now.... Do you hear? With a trough on the roof" (he slapped himself on the head with his hand), "and there she sits like a spade, and she is cross-eyed, cross-eyed, like Andryushka; Vassilyevna is cross-eyed" (he probably meant to say dumb), "tchoo! My Vassilyevna is cross-eyed! They are both on the same cork now. You may wonder, good Christians! I have only these ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of this is and ought to be self found, and where the child can find his own toys he asks for little more. The seaside supplies him with sand and water, stones, shells, rock pools, seaweed, and he asks us for nothing but a spade, which digs deeper than his naked hands, and a pail to carry water, which ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... times, three times this spade of mine, In spite of bolt or bar, 205 Did from beneath the belfry ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... industry in his manhood as his father did a quarter of a century before. Take the first, in which he compares slothfulness to rust, which will consume iron tools or machinery faster than their constant use will. As the use of a hoe or a spade keeps it polished, so the habitual exercise of the powers of human nature preserves them in a good condition. A key that is cast aside soon rusts, and is spoiled, but "the used key is always bright." It is more fit for use ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... men supplemented the defences made by Lyttelton, and tightened their hold upon the hill. One futile night attack caused them for an instant to change the spade for the rifle. When in the morning it was found that the Boers had, as they naturally would, brought up their outlying guns, the tired soldiers did not regret their labours of the night. It was again demonstrated how innocuous a thing is a severe shell fire, if the position be an extended one ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fool, and said the best thing he could do was to get buried out of the way, because I knew that most of them work by the rules of contrary; but it was all to no purpose. By this time all his relations had collected round the door. His father had a kind of wooden spade to dig the grave with, his mother a new suit of tapa [bark-cloth], his sister some vermilion and a whale's tooth, as an introduction to the great god of Rage-Rage. He arose, took up his bed and walked, not for life, but for death, his father, mother, and sister following after, with ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... circulated. Certain people declared that they had seen a ghastly resemblance of the murderess, robed in her winding-sheet, with the black mark of the rope round her swollen neck, standing on stormy nights upon her husband's grave, and digging there with a spade in hideous imitation of the actions of the men who had disinterred the corpse for medical examination. This was fearful enough—nobody dared go near the place after nightfall. But soon, another circumstance was talked of, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... little owl of a man, with thin black hair, and untidy spade beard, and big round glasses enlarging his big brown eyes, placed a ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... the men and women who died, they two alone had burying. For I digged a hole with the stable-spade under the front lilac; and I wound them in the sheets, foot and form and head; and, not without throes and qualms, I bore and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... was he who called my attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the morning air, whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired this provision of nature. He sang O fortunatos agricolas! indeed, in every possible key, and with many cunning inflections, till I began to wonder what was the use of such people as Mr. Arch, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Warrible's daughters—dressing them in fancy rags, and filling the garden they played in with flowers from our conservatory, and giving the cottage French windows and a trellis-work veranda. He stands leaning on a spade, with silver buckles in his shoes, and the children are playing La Grace with the hoops, covered with pink ribands. I called it 'The Poor Man's Joy;' and Lord Moon has begged me to give it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the tenants. From facts collected on the spot we have come to the conclusion that on the small holdings a good tenant makes an average profit of about L. 4 an acre, but on an allotment cultivated by means of the spade it would probably be at the rate of over L. 6 an acre. Lord Carrington was also successful in establishing small holdings on the Humberston estate in North Lincolnshire and on his Buckinghamshire estate, near Aylesbury. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... glance on the body, Mateo returned to the house for a spade with which to bury his son. He had gone but a few steps when he met Giuseppa, who, alarmed by the shot, was ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... drowsily content. For that day at least, there was a pleasant idleness ahead of him, nothing but his own wants to attend to. The morrow would see him armed with spade and rake, probably wrestling with weeds, digging deep in the good brown earth, possibly mowing the grass, and such like jobs as fall to the lot of an under-gardener. Antony smiled to himself. Well, it would all come in the day's work, and the day's ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... honor to a woman. Admirable!—charming! No young man of my time ever did better." And Mrs. Cheston knew, for she had hobnobbed with kings and queens, her husband having represented his government at the Court of St. James—which fact, however, never prevented her from calling a spade a spade; nor was she ever very particular as ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... stopped digging, threw his spade over his shoulder and walked off, without even glancing at her or ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... side of the house to prune my benzine bushes or to plant a mess of spinach and a profane starling or woodpecker bustles off her nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again that shrill scream of anger and outraged motherhood. A throstle or a whippoorwill is raising a family in the gutter spout over the back kitchen. I go into the bathroom to shave ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... inclined to demur. A few deft and pointed questions, very clear, such as might naturally occur to Hillyard or Luttrell, or Sir Chichester himself might come in usefully to put the polish, as it were, on Millie's spade work. Harry Luttrell ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... for your home an' your own contree! Strike for your native lan'! Kip workin' away wit' de spade an' hoe, Den jump w'en you hear de bugle blow, For danger 's aroun', above, below, But de bugle will tell if it 's tam ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... independent of roads;—at least for the first fifteen hundred miles. The mountain passes, the great rivers, and the post-stations, will determine his general course; but the wilderness through which he must make his way has never been subdued by the axe and spade of civilisation. It is now, as it always has been, a wild, primeval land of snowy mountains, desolate steppes, and shaggy pine forests, through which the great arctic rivers and their tributaries have marked out the only ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... their slavery and their ignorance, I believe that he is a liar and a child of the devil, and that he is at his father's old work, slandering and dividing between man and man. These words may be severe: but they are deliberate; and working men are, I hope, sufficiently accustomed to hear me call a spade a spade, when I am pleading for them, to allow me to do the same when I ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... ate, she stood to serve him, but not with the air of a serving-maid; on the contrary, though her face was bronzed by the winds, and her hands calloused by spade and hoe, there was little of the rustic in her action. Her blouse, cut sailor fashion at the throat, displayed a lovely neck (also burned by the sun), and she carried herself with the grace of an athlete. Her ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... "Out he will go on the roadside, honor and all, if he does not find ten nobles by next Epiphany. But if I could win a ransom or be at the storming of a rich city, then indeed the old man would be proud of me. 'Thy sword must help my spade, Samkin,' said he as he kissed me goodby. Ah! it would indeed be a happy day for him and for all if I could ride back with a saddle-bag full of gold pieces, and please God, I shall dip my hand in somebody's pocket before I see Crooksbury ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Taking a spade of native workmanship from the hands of an exhausted trooper the subaltern set to work with a will, for much had to be done in a very short space of time. It was a case of excavating under extreme difficulties, for apart from the smoke and heat from the blazing ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... ran up and watched him push the setting-peg in at one side of his ready earth, stride across, and push it in the other side, pulling the line taut and clear upon the clods intervening. Then with a sharp cutting noise the bright spade came towards her, cutting a grip into the new, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... it they went with right good will, With spade and shovel and pike and bill; And from evening's close till the dawn of day They worked like miners ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... with which you plastered me and sprinkle you with your villainy." With these words he threw the water into his guests' faces, and then he pelted them with the dishes. Having thus ended the banquet, he went into an outhouse, seized a spade, and quitted Athens ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... sent for me as we wrought at the fort, and both he and I were horny handed and clay stained from the work. I came with spade in hand, and he leaned on a pick. ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... riding a horse that neck-reined at the merest touch, and one that stopped at the slightest tightening of the rein, Bartley had to learn through experience that a spade bit requires delicate handling. He was jogging along easily when he turned to glance back at the town—now a far, huddled group of tiny buildings. Inadvertently he tightened rein. Dobe stopped short. Bartley promptly went over the fork and slid ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... bare is not easy. The burrow penetrates to a depth of about three feet in a compact soil; sometimes in a vertical, sometimes in a horizontal direction. The spade and pick, wielded by hands more vigorous but less expert than my own, are indispensable; but the conduct of the excavation is anything but satisfactory. At the extremity of the long gallery—it seems as though the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... like a rude Macedon, and taught to call a spade a spade.—GOSSON: Ephemerides of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... understanding that the trouble was all about affairs purely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities of place and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in the dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap. The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but to the discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the slope to the crest of the bluff, leaped over a fresh earthwork, and fell among a crowd of soldiers in blue. Dick quickly raised himself to his feet, and saw soldiers about him, many of them wounded, all of them weary and drawn. Others were hard at work with pick and spade, and from a distant point of the earthwork came the sharp ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... not necessary (except in very stony ground) to dig out a place wide enough for a man to stand in, as there are tools made expressly for the purpose, by which a trench may be dug six or seven inches wide, and to any required depth. One set of these implements consists of a long narrow spade and a hoe to correspond, such as are represented in the ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... its weak spots, and strengthened them. He would have seen the thin streams that silently, but steadily and in ever-increasing volume, were working their way through the embankment near its base. In the inky blackness of the night they were unheeded; and while spade and pick were plied with unflagging zeal to strengthen the higher portions, these insidious foes were ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... a lad was working as an apprentice to a Scotch gardener, rising in the dense darkness of the cold winter's mornings at four o'clock, and warming his knuckles by knocking them against the handle of his spade. He was passing through a hard training, but this lad was being prepared to take up the work which Vanderkemp had so well begun, though in a somewhat different sphere, and to repair the loss which had been ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... he perceives "it is possible for a nation to exist in too artificial a state." He then sees the opposite house lit up, and the words "Emigration Committee" written on a transparent blind. He enters, finds the last Emigration squadron is about to sail in a few minutes; is presented with a spade, blanket, and hard biscuit, and quits the port of Hubbabub: what became of him will "probably be discovered, if ever we obtain 'Popanilla's' second voyage"—and thus shuts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... fore legs are large and strong, and each paw has five toes, armed with strong nails. When its toes are together, its fore paw is like a spade; and when they are spread apart, it is ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... presently replaced it by a seat of solid gold: this the Ashanti again requisitioned, together with a large gold ornament in the shape of an elephant, said to have been dug from some ruins. The Amazon replied, with some detail and in the 'spade' language, that she and her brother should exchange sexes, and that she would fight a l'outrance; whereupon the Ashanti, with many compliments about her bravery, gave her twelve months to prepare ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... earth, hidden for ever from the covetous eyes of the human race! These treasures have been buried at such a profound depth by the convulsions of primeval times that they run no chance of ever being molested by the pickaxe or the spade. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... shall be blown upon and lose our lives. So let us fall to work at once, and when we get back to the palace, I will tell you my story and how I became an eunuch.' So they set down the lantern and dug a hole between four tombs, the length and breadth of the chest, Kafour plying the spade and Sewab clearing away the earth by basketsful, till they had reached a depth of half a fathom, when they laid the chest in the hole and threw back the earth over it: then went out and shutting the door, disappeared from Ghanim's ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... he felt the staff move in his hand, and three times it beat upon the ground. He knew in an instant what this indicated; accordingly he drew forth his dagger, made marks on the surrounding trees, and then slipped back into the castle. Then he procured a spade, and awaited night ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... work is too near Nature's heart to appeal to Mrs. Senter, and too clever for my good sister Emily, who will read no author, willingly, unless he calls a spade a pearl-headed hatpin. But Ellaline, strange to say, has been allowed to read him. Evidently French schools are not what they once were; and she and I particularly wanted to go through Dorchester (his Casterbridge) even though we could ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... boiler should render it necessary to be used not more than once in four days or a week. The food should be stirred for two hours, then transferred to flat coolers, until sufficiently gelatinous to be cut with a kind of spade. By the admixture of some portion of soups it may be brought to any thickness requisite. The flesh to be mixed with it should be cut very small, that the greedy hounds may not be able to obtain more than ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a visitor is by." We welcome these and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... of articles intended in normal ages to be transported by two mules, but under the influence of advanced civilisation strapped on the back of one man, in addition to a rifle, half a dozen Mills' bombs, a Lewis-gun, spade or shovel, sheet of corrugated iron, or any other article that can be somewhere ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... longer able to do that," she told Billy, "you can take a spade to that clump of redwoods beside Wild Water and dig a hole. It will be time to ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... daggers, curved scimitars, spears, clumsy matchlocks, and long straight swords, whose hilt was an iron gauntlet, in which the warrior's fingers were laced as they grasped a handle placed at right angles to the blade, after the fashion of a spade. There were shields, too, and bows and arrows, and tulwars and kukris, any number of warlike implements from the East, while beside the statues, the West had to show some curious chairs, and a full-length portrait of an Englishman ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... but this is also frequently made of a bright-coloured fabric. This is their every-day dress, and thus habited the men work with square-bladed spades resembling our own, whilst those of the women have handles as long as a broomstick and bent spade-or heart-shaped blades. The gala or holiday dresses of the peasantry are very handsome, each district having its own peculiar costume, but of these we will say a few words hereafter. Sometimes, as one walks or drives through the country, he may ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... front of him some dark figures actively engaged, and heard dull sounds. On reaching the spot he found the parties who had preceded him hard at work with shovels throwing up an intrenchment. In the darkness he had not perceived that each of the soldiers carried a spade in addition to his arms. The soil was deep and soft, and the operations were carried on with scarce a sound. As each party landed they fell to work under the direction of their officers. All night the labour continued, and when the ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... any other living man today, has given vitality to the supreme necessity of cleanliness of mind and body. He has, by reason of his great prominence, been able to emphasize these two vital essentials. He called a spade a spade and his message went far. From those who knew the value of his words came nods of approval—others took heed. From boyhood he has systematized his life, taking the exercise needed, filling his mind with the learning of the world, winning when others would have failed, profiting ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... town has enriched his experience. More probably, however, the wind and clouds, the weather, the soil, crops and taxes, his family and food and how to provide for them, are the main thoughts that occupy his mind. Before he will strike mattock or spade in the soil, lay axe to a tree, collect or burn underbrush, he will select a stone, a slab of rock or a stick of wood, set it upon hill side or mud field-boundary, and to this he will bow, prostrate himself or pray. To him, this stone or stick is consecrated. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... we should not be impeded by human savages. Day after day we trudged forward. The only water we could obtain was by digging into certain depressions in the ground which our guide pointed out, when, having scraped out the sand with the single spade we possessed and our hands, we arrived at a hard stratum, beyond which he advised us not to go. In a short time the water began to flow in slowly, increasing by degrees until we had enough ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... loved going to cover as frantical as the pa'son, so much so that whenever he saw or heard the pack he could no more rule his feelings than if they were the winds of heaven. He might be bedding, or he might be sowing—all was forgot. So he throws down his spade and rushes in to the pa'son, who was by this time as frantical to ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... let me go with Billy." Then, breaking off with the unexpected garrulity of children, she continued: "I am getting quite strong now; I was down on the beach this morning, and watched the little boys and girls building mounds. When I am quite well, uncle, won't you buy me a spade and bucket, and mayn't ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... mind. However, as he passed the garden gate of Tamiya his eye caught the factitious sotoba standing white in the fitful moonlight. He stood stock still; then clapped his hands in mad joy and decision. Hastening to his home he sought out an old battered mattock and a rusty spade. Soon he was back at the garden gate. A blow and the bar fell. Goemon passed within. "She lies but four shaku deep. The task is quickly performed. None pass here at this hour." The dirt flew under his nervous arms. Soon he had the box out on the ground beside him. A peal ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... good deal inferior to that of a common ass. The plough was unknown among them. They were ignorant of the use of iron. They had no coined money, nor any established instrument of commerce of any kind. Their commerce was carried on by barter. A sort of wooden spade was their principal instrument of agriculture. Sharp stones served them for knives and hatchets to cut with; fish bones, and the hard sinews of certain animals, served them with needles to sew with; and these seem to have been their principal instruments ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... one of the harmless snappers up of unconsidered trifles is the truffle-hunter. At Alton, in Hampshire, one of these men appeared in summer; he carried an implement like a short-handled thistle spud, but with a much longer blade, similar to that of a small spade but narrower; he was accompanied by a frisky little Frenchified dog, unlike any dog one commonly sees, and very alert. The hunting ground was beneath the overhanging branches of beech-trees, growing on a chalky soil; the man encouraged the dog by voice to hunt the surface of the land ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... and, like every one else, He wanted a good one, you know; Where his clothes would not soil and his hands would keep clean, And the salary must'nt be low. He asked for a pen; but they gave him a spade, And he half turned away with a shrug. But he altered his mind, and seizing ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... monster before we go to bed." And, sure enough, under his directions, and by his assistance, we contrived, in a quarter of an hour, to throw sand, earth, and leaves enough over the huge carcase to cover it completely. "There's a cairn for you!" exclaimed the Admiral, throwing down his spade, which he had been using with his only hand; "and now let us turn in; for by the first peep of the morning we must have a touch at the wild ducks and peacocks on the sides of the lake, and perhaps we may contrive to have a shot at a ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... external nature, another fact must take place in my mind, a process must be performed upon my ideas; but so it must in every thing else that I do. I can not dig the ground unless I have the idea of the ground, and of a spade, and of all the other things I am operating upon, and unless I put those ideas together.(30) But it would be a very ridiculous description of digging the ground to say that it is putting one idea into another. Digging is an operation which is performed ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... time the Scarecrow stood perfectly still beside the bean pole—thinking. Then he got a spade from the shed and began clearing away the cornstalks and dried leaves from around the base of the pole. It was slow work, for his fingers were clumsy, but he persevered. Then a ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the fire, pull round the screen, And fill me up a glass of grog Before I tell of matches seen And heroes of the mighty slog! While hussies play near mistletoe The game of kiss-me-if-you-dare, I'll dig for you in memory's snow, And where my eager spade shall go Uncover bliss for you to ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... hover over all those graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... not listening; he had fallen into a brown study, turning the piece of metal in his skilful, wonted, knotty fingers, with their spade tips. ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... remarked, stopping before Shelton, and looking down, as if at last aware of him, "to those who talk of being justified through Art. I call a spade a spade." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... further interesting Roman relics of another kind was made in 1896. The owner of a garden near Queen Street, in the south-eastern part of the town, was digging up an apple tree when he came across a fine bed of gravel. Continuing the digging, in order to find the thickness of this deposit, his spade struck against a hard substance, which proved to be a lead coffin. After this had been examined by others invited to inspect it, without any satisfactory result, the present writer was requested to conduct ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... a wider, better feeding area for growing roots, permits greater water storage, forwards growth of trees and brings them into bearing earlier than trees set in spade-dug holes. Write for FREE BOOKLET about how to blast tree holes ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... that they used their "curtlaxes" (cutlasses) to dig the frozen ground to get at the Indians' corn, "having forgotten to bring spade or mattock." "Daggers" are mentioned as used in their celebrated duel by Dotey and Leister, servants of Stephen Hopkins. Bradford narrates that on one of their exploring tours on the Cape the length of guard duty performed at night by each "relief" was determined by the inches of slow-match burned ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... 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.— ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... has somewhat the shape of a bent bow or the spade on a playing-card, the shaft of the arrow being the entrance in; the passage is very deep, but not more than 100 yards wide, and it goes in nearly S.W.; inside it is deep and quite secure, and protected from all winds. The lands westward ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... the dam was most complete. The river rose so as to overflow the marshes, which enabled us to push all the vessels up the channel without the necessity of deepening it by spade labour. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see. "Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a divine ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... was taking out a stump when the troopers came. His foot is still resting on the spade, which is half driven home. He watches the troopers take the boy up to the house, and then, driving the spade to its full depth, he turns up another sod. The troopers reach the door of the homestead; but still he digs steadily, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... she said, "it always brings the shudder; it never palls on me, never grows stale." She whipped the ominous spade from the pack and held it out. "La Mort!" she exclaimed in mock tragedy, yet there was another undertone ringing through it, sounding, too, in her following laugh. "Draw!" she commanded, holding out the pack; ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... followed, at least in part. The wagons were drawn up in a great circle in an open space, where they could not be reached by a rifle shot from the trees, and then more than two hundred men, using pick and spade, speedily threw up an earthwork three feet high that inclosed the wagons. Henry Ware regarded it ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... honest men will have a chance To play an even game, And thrift and virtue swift advance To happiness and fame; No more will robbers ply their trade, Nor shout the tin-horn's spiel; The world will call a spade a spade When Teddy squares ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... regular people I went to count the little people. I took a spade and spaded off the top of their town to get in. But they put an encanto on me, and made me and Mula run ...
— Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas • Raphael Aloysius Lafferty
... courage into the heart of a young literary man known to us. "I have long yearned to break away from the weaklings who can do no more than call a spade a spade," he said the other day. "I feel that I now have a master's authority for doing so. In gratitude I can do no less than send Mr. Kipling a copy of my new book, The Seven D's, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... to borrow all that was wanted in the way of furniture and bedding. Then we returned to Mr. Brownjohn's to buy bread, bacon, and groceries, and he in turn sent us to Mr. Marling for vegetables. Mr. Marling heard us, and soberly taking up a spade and other implements led us out to his garden and dug us a mess of potatoes while we waited. In the meantime good Mrs. Flowerdew had not been idle, and we formed the idea that her neighbours must have been her ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... dead, and one that's gone to his account in an awful way, Mr. Basset had been over here time and time again, and helped himself. I ain't going to say he stole; he helped himself. He helped himself to our kindling wood, and our hammer, and our spade, and our rake. After the spade went, I made a notch on the rake-handle so I could tell it, and when that went, I slipped over to Mr. Basset's one day when I knew he wasn't there, and there was our rake in his shed. I said nothing to nobody, but I just brought our rake home again, and ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that it comes to much the same in the end, for it does not matter whether "yea" is called "yea" or "nay," so long as it is understood which it is to be; but our own more direct way of calling a spade a spade, rather than a rake, with the intention that every one should understand it as a spade, seems more satisfactory. On the other hand, the Erewhonian system lends itself better to the suppression of that downrightness ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... chanting a few sentences. The grave was then dug, as usual, due east and west, with no better instruments than sticks and hands; but afterwards, when many Europeans had assembled at the spot, to the great annoyance of the natives, these last occasionally employed a spade, although, from the extreme narrowness of the grave, it was no easy matter to make use of this implement. During the digging an insect had been thrown up, whose motions were watched with the deepest interest, and since the animal crawled ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... you walk, a bloodless shade, A singer all men else forget. Your chants of hammer, forge and spade Will move ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... before dawn when Heng-cho appeared, bearing across his back a well-filled sack and carrying in his right hand a spade. His steps were turned towards the fig orchard of which Yan had spoken, so that he must pass Chou-hu's house, but before he reached it Tsae-che had glided out and with loosened hair and trailing robes she ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... sweet hope to them, that came in that wild sermon of a bishop-silenced young heretic. They thought about it a good deal, and began, some of them whose terms were to expire with life, to dig down into the rust and mire with the spade of conscience ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... and in the bulrushes that grew round the cradle of Moses! Our railway tunnels are wonderful works of science, but the mole tunnelled with its foot, and the pholas with one end of its shell, before our navvies handled pick or spade upon the heights of the iron roads: worms were prior to gimlets, ant-lions were the first funnel makers, a beaver showed men how to make the milldams, and the pendulous nests of certain birds swung gently in the air before the keen wit of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... magnificent flowers, growing among the tall sedges and "cat-tails" of the marshes, make the most insensate traveler exclaim at their amazing loveliness. To reach them one must don rubber boots and risk sudden seats in the slippery ooze; nevertheless, with spade in hand to give one support, it is well worthwhile to seek them out and dig up some roots to transplant to the garden. Here, strange to say, without salt soil or more water than the average garden receives from showers and hose, this handsomest ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... been weakened in itself, by anything that has taken place in critical study. On the other hand, the net result of such studies as archaeology has been the confirmation of much that was once disputed. Sir William Ramsay is authority for saying that the spade of the excavator is to-day digging the grave of many ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... guilty than one of their representatives? But while the exalted offender can find means to baffle the law, new capital punishments must be devised, new snares of death must be spread for the wretched mechanic, who is famished into guilt. These men were willing to dig, but the spade was in other hands: they were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them: their own means of subsistence were cut off, all other employments pre-occupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... away, but soon returned, one after another, each with a pickaxe on his shoulder and a spade in his hand. As soon as they were gathered, the captain led them in a straight line to another part of the hill. Diamond rose ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... two existences, a day and a night one—a day and a night population—the clown and his tillage in the light, the smuggler and his trade in the dark; yet the same peasant frequently exhibiting a versatility for which John Bull seldom gets credit.—The man of the plough-tail and the spade, drudging and dull through one half of his being; the same man, after an hour or two of sleep, springing from his bed at midnight, handling the sail and helm, baffling his Majesty's cruisers at sea, and making ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... was not at all for mincing words with his important confreres, when it came to vital issues. He preferred, in his grandiloquent way, to call a spade a spade. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... I defy philosophy with a twenty-pound salmon fast hooked, and a pool right ahead four hundred yards long and half full of water-lilies. "Keep him up the strame," shrieked a Paddy, who, on the screaming of the wheel, had flung down his spade in the turf bog and rushed up to see the sport. "Keep him up the strame, your honor—bloody wars! you'll lost him else." We were at fault, Jack and I. We did not understand why down stream was particularly dangerous, and Pat was too eager and too busy swearing to explain himself. Alas, ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... yesterday—going out with him to fish for barbel, and joining him over-night to go in search of bait. I found him crouched by his fire, eating potatoes out of the same plate with his dog. This frugal meal over, he took up a small lantern, a large box, and a long spade, and beckoned me to ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... we must speak of the one memorial which is usually looked at first, the famous picture of Old Scarlett, on the wall of the western transept. He is represented with a spade, pickaxe, keys, and a whip in his leathern girdle; at his feet is a skull. At the top of the picture are the arms of the cathedral. Beneath the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... wrote and toiled in vain. May it not be that there is some reason for this? May it not be that the ends they struggled for were ends never intended for the Gael?... The Gael is not like other men; the spade and the loom and the sword are not for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of Britain, awaits him: to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life, the regenerator and ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... as I still am, I am a fierce critic of the manners of our times. I learned my, perhaps, old-fashioned ideas from my father, an honest, upright, country parson, who loved to ride with the hounds, who called a spade a spade, and openly denounced a liar as such. He never minced matters, and stuck to his opinion, yet he was a pious, generous, open-hearted Englishman, who had no use for the "international financier," who has lately become the pseudonym for a ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... do prefer it. Any fool could call a spade a spade. The natural ambition would be to find something more flowery ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter. Nature and the earth and ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... that longs to make things pure and happy, with groanings that cannot be uttered. The worst of some kinds of worship is that they drug you with a sort of lust for beauty, which makes you afraid to go back and pick up your spade. We mustn't swoon in happiness or delight, but if we say 'Take me, use me, let me help!' it is different, because we want to share whatever is given us, to hand it on, not to pile it up. Of course it's little enough that we can do: but think of old Mrs. Chetwynd again—what ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Constantinople was a nest of free-lances and adventurers. Abraham Yachiny, the illustrious preacher, an early believer, was inspired to have a tomb opened in the ancient "house of life." He asked the sceptical Rabbis to dig up the earth. They found it exceedingly hard to the spade, but, persevering, presently came upon an earthen pot and therein a parchment which ran thus: "I, Abraham, was shut up for forty years in a cave. I wondered that the time of miracles did not arrive. Then a voice replied to me: 'A son shall ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... garden in a mess, So this year we mean to have no kitchen-garden but mustard and cress. One of us plants, and the other waters, but Jack likes the watering-pot; And then when my turn comes to water he says it's too hot! We sometimes quarrel about the garden, and once Jack hit me with the spade; So we settled to divide it in two by a path up the middle, and that's made. We want some yellow sand now to make the walk pretty, but there's none about here, So we mean to get some in the old carpet-bag, if we go to the seaside this year. On Monday we went to ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... our ramble, yet not a drop of water did we obtain. Our lips were parched, our tongues dry: without water we could not eat, we loathed food, supperless we lay down to sleep. All night long I was dreaming of sparkling fountains and running brooks. As soon as it was daylight we again set out with a spade and pickaxe, prepared, if we could find no running stream, to dig wherever verdure showed that moisture was at hand. We walked on and on, searching in every direction round the shore, but no sign of a stream emptying itself into the sea could we discover, and when we dug we ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... up to the archway of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing near his monster. The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade, and with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from one of the scorching mouths, and fled therewith, and the fireman never stirred. Then Darius, to whom the mentor kindly lent his spade, attempted to do the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... graves which had not been paid for for twenty years were, after the lapse of that time, again made use of, according to the rule and custom of the Church. It was thus no unusual thing to find coffins while a new grave was being dug, which fell to pieces under the spade. The bodies had been packed closely, and often several had been placed ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland |
