"Digger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... charitably taken in by an old lady who prevented her from following the sad procession of her daughter's funeral. A man of triple functions, the bell-ringer, beadle, and grave-digger of the parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,—a church well known, a classic church, with a square tower and pointed roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong corner buttresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... it was too late. The place was rushed. In other words, diggers swarmed to the spot, with no idea of law but digger's law. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... will become a hundred—the one hundred will become two, three, four, five, until at last one individual will be left, for whom there will be no grave-digger." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... what he had done, he did not very much desire to go, there as he would probably have been shot as a deserter; for Captain Raminez was a savage fellow, and more than willing to punish transgressions against his orders. This deserter, Banker by name, was an American, who had been a gold-digger, a gambler, a rough, and a dead shot in California, and he was very well able to take care of himself in any part ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... appeal to you because ... you have been the party heretofore to extend the suffrage. It was the Democratic party that fought most valiantly for the removal of the 'property qualification' from all white men and thereby placed the poorest ditch digger on a political level with the proudest millionaire.... And now you have an opportunity to confer a similar boon on the women of the country and thus ... perpetuate your political ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... Ranges, there were soon no less than two hundred persons scouring those hills, though for a long time without success. The first useful discovery in Victoria seems to have been made on 1st July, by a Californian digger named Esmond, who, like Hargraves, had entered on the search with a practical knowledge of the work. His experience had taught him the general characteristics of a country in which gold is likely to be found, and he selected Clunes as a favourable spot. He found ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... sometimes stranger than fiction. Where in the whole cycle of romance shall we find anything more wild, grotesque, and sad than the easily authenticated history of Benedict Mol, the treasure-digger of St. James?" ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... and other abnormal manifestations of the sexual impulse which may be practiced merely faute de mieux and not as, in the strict sense, perversions of the impulse. Even necrophily may be thus practiced. A young man who when assisting the grave-digger conceived and carried out the idea of digging up the bodies of young girls to satisfy his passions with, and whose case has been recorded by Belletrud and Mercier, said: "I could find no young girl who would agree to yield to my desires; that is why I have done this. I should have preferred ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... carrying their swags, one of them was unusually tall. Jack said: "Do you see that big fellow there? His name is McKean. He comes from my part of Ireland. He is a lawyer; the last time I saw him he was in a court defending a prisoner, and now the whole six feet seven of him is nothing but a dirty digger." ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... with the grave-digger's wife, and from thence she went to the count's splendid country-seat, where she lived in handsome rooms, and was dressed in silks and fineries; not a breath of wind was to blow on her; no one dared to say a rough word to her, nothing was to be done to annoy her; for she ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... in a winking 'twas some great navigator that I see a standing there,' said Haymoss. 'But whe'r 'twere a sort of nabob, or a diment- digger, or a lion-hunter, I couldn't so much as guess till ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... inclined to say more to the grave-digger; but Aunt Lavvy frowned and shook her head at her, and they went on to where a path of coarse grass divided the pauper burying ground from the rest. They were now quite horribly near the funeral. And going down the grass path they saw another that came towards them; the palled coffin swaying ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... horror at the savage slaughter at Magdeburg, the triumphant Tilly marched upon and captured the city of Leipsic. Here he fixed his headquarters in the house of a grave-digger, where he grew pale at seeing the death's-head and cross-bones with which the owner had decorated his walls. These significant emblems may have had something to do with the unusual mildness with which he treated the citizens of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... night they have built up a new wall about the city!" Moses did not see clearly in the misty morning, for there was no wall, but only the giant Og who sat upon the wall with his feet touching the ground below. [685] Considering Og's enormous stature, Moses' mistake was pardonable, for as a grave-digger of later times related, Og's thigh-bone alone measured more than three parasangs. "Once," so records Abba Saul, "I hunted a stag which fled into the thigh bone of a dead man. I pursued it and ran along three parasangs ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... folks thought 'twas softenin' o' th' brain; but my 'pinion is he never had any brains to get soft. Still he were a good digger, but the man we got next ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... continuous application, finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve demanded by his task, he is allowed without forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in order that his hand may recover the requisite precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of sensibility came drifting into my memory. "The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense," says Shakespeare, ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so," she said, gravely examining it, "but I kin mend it as good as new. I reckon you allow I can't sew," she continued, "but I do heaps of mendin', as the digger squaw and Chinamen we have here do only the coarser work. I'll send it back to you, and meanwhiles ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... chairs, our beards were taken off, and the officiating artists were ordered to give each man's hair "a decent cut." We found that according to the penitentiary code, the decent way of wearing the hair was to cut it all off—if the same rule had been adopted with regard to clothing, the Digger Indians would have been superfluously clad in comparison with (what would have been), our disheveled condition. Some young men lost beards and moustaches on this occasion, which they had assiduously ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... a plan!" suddenly cried the bush. "You are a very good digger, so why can't you dig a tunnel right under me? Start it inside here and curve it up so that it comes outside of my prickly branches, and then ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... combined the light duties of grave-digger and clerk to the parish of Farlingford in Suffolk with a small but steady business in fish of his own drying, nets of his own netting, and pork slain and dressed by his own ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... works, they undergo, as traffic progresses, many improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one, filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... said it was one of his, I took it to mean that he had been the digger for the occasion. So we followed through a little rustic gate—Hamlet Hopkins and Horatio Hosley—into a fenced lot comprising about two acres of level ground, laid out in the smallest graves I had ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... base nuptials I am join'd— Ores. I feel thy brother's grief!—To one of rank? Elec. Not as my father once to place me hop'd— Ores. That hearing I may tell thy brother, speak. Elec. This is his house: in this I dwell remote. Ores. This house some digger or some herdsman suits. Elec. Generous, though poor, in reverence me he holds. Ores. To thee what reverence doth thy husband pay? Elec. He never hath presumed t' ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... the "tipple," where the coal that came out of the mine was weighed and recorded. Every digger, as he came from the cage, made for this spot. There was a bulletin-board, and on it his number, and the record of the weights of the cars he had sent out that day. And every man, no matter how ignorant, had learned enough English to read ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... the small force might in time become more effective; and the Earl spent freely of his own substance to supply the wants of his followers, and to atone for the avarice of his sovereign. The picture painted however by muster-master Digger of the plumed troops that had thus come forth to maintain the honour of England and the cause of liberty, was anything but imposing. None knew better than Digges their squalid and slovenly condition, or was more anxious to effect a reformation therein. "A very wise, stout fellow he is," said the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Almighty's arms, was carried to the opening of a cave and placed in crypt, and one stroke of the divine hand smoothed the features into an everlasting calm, and a rock was rolled to the door, and the only obsequies at which God did all the offices of priest, and undertaker, and grave-digger, and mourner were ended. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... confess I was a little shocked when Hamlet's mother became Pantaloon, and was instantly knocked down by Clown Claudius. Grimaldi is getting a little old now, but for real humor there are few clowns like him. Mr. Shuter, as the grave-digger, was chaste and comic, as he always is, and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Magh. The preparations for festivity are ever interesting to young folk. But this digging had a special attraction for me. Though I had watched it done year after year—and seen the hole grow bigger and bigger till the digger had completely disappeared inside, and yet nothing extraordinary, nothing worthy of the quest of prince or knight, had ever appeared—yet every time I had the feeling that the lid being lifted off a chest of mystery. I felt that a little ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... to the chalk digger, whose business it was to excavate for chalk, and told him the situation. The man listened, but said nothing. When she had ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... World, as regards both the red men and the white men. It could be planted without clearing or ploughing the soil. It was only necessary to girdle the trees with a stone hatchet, so as to destroy their leaves and let in the sunshine. A few scratches and digs were made in the ground with a stone digger, and the seed once dropped in took care of itself. The ears could hang for weeks after ripening, and could be picked off without meddling with the stalk; there was no need of threshing and winnowing. None of the Old World cereals can be cultivated without much more industry ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... morning she died. Old women, neighbours, washed her, dressed her, and laid her in the coffin. To avoid paying the sacristan, Yakov read the psalms over the body himself, and they got nothing out of him for the grave, as the grave-digger was a crony of his. Four peasants carried the coffin to the graveyard, not for money, but from respect. The coffin was followed by old women, beggars, and a couple of crazy saints, and the people who met it crossed themselves piously. . . . And Yakov was very much ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... firing of two anvils, the strains of a brass band, the hoisting of a new flag on the liberty-pole, and later the ceremony of the Ditch opening, when a distinguished speaker in a most unworkman-like tall hat, black frock coat, and white cravat, which gave him the general air of a festive grave-digger, took a spade from the hands of an apparently hilarious chief mourner and threw out the first sods. There were anvils, brass bands, and a "collation" at the hotel. But everywhere—overriding the most extravagant expectation and even the laughter it provoked—the ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... new-comers especially had no trouble in getting on to a good show. I was the youngest of the party, and consequently the most inexperienced, but my mates good-naturedly overlooked my shortcomings as a prospector and digger, especially as I had constituted myself the "tucker" provider when our usual rations of salt beef ran out. I had brought with me a Winchester rifle, a shot gun and plenty of ammunition for both, and plenty of fishing tackle. So, at ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... gold-digger, sometimes a dock laborer, sometimes a soldier, sometimes a sailor, but whatever he is he ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... elongated ovals, based on singularly mobile pivots, while the pupils resemble the bubble of a spirit-level. Not only is the range of vision a complete circle, but the crab seems able to concentrate its gaze upon any two given points instantly and automatically. To spite all its skill as a digger, to set at naught its superb visual alertness, the sand crab has a special enemy in the bird policeman which patrols the beach. Vigilant and obnoxiously interfering, the policeman has a long and curiously curved beak, designed for probing into the affairs of crabs, and unless the "hatter" ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of the North American continent (concerning whose civilisation more will be said in the account of their divine myths) occupy every stage of culture, from the truly bestial condition in which some of the Digger Indians at present exist, living on insects and unacquainted even with the use of the bow, to the civilisation which the Spaniards destroyed ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... money of the Sabbatical year to a well-digger, nor to a bath-keeper, nor to a barber, nor to a skipper, but one may give it to a well-digger for drink, and to all persons one may give a ...
— Hebrew Literature
... fife before a rude altar, upon which incense was burning. There was also marching, by these musicians, around the altar, led by a dirty, blear-eyed priest. The scene was strongly suggestive of a powwow as performed by the Digger Indians of California. So great was the din, we were quite willing to take for granted the presence, in another part of the temple, of the tooth of Buddha, without personal inspection, and hastened to ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Wickam looked hard at her patient in the act of drinking, screwed her mouth up tight, her eyebrows also, and shook her head, expressing that tortures shouldn't make her say it was a hopeless case. Mrs Wickam then sprinkled a little cooling-stuff about the room, with the air of a female grave-digger, who was strewing ashes on ashes, dust on dust—for she was a serious character—and withdrew to partake of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to his imaginative power,—the second of the qualities which we have distinguished as dominating his literary temperament. "I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man," he testified.[11] A recent writer has ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... to a returned gold-digger of his 'luggage'! Mine consists of a hand portmanteau, and that is at the Golden Fleece. I can order it up here if you'd like me to stay with you a few days. I should ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... with us; and besides, swappin' where you don't know the county and its tricks, (for every county has its own tricks, different from others), is dangersome too. I've seen swaps where both sides got took in. Did ever I tell you the story of the "Elder and the grave-digger?" ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than be the founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse, that robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the dissecting-knife,—in a being that escapes the grave-digger. Burn your book! Accept This Book instead; ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no occasion for that," Frank went on. "You can tell him that you have come across that nugget in the claim," and Frank tossed into the hole a nugget for which he had half an hour before given a digger ten ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... smilingly, "and you may be sure that I shall be promptly on hand. I shall be as punctual as the digger after a hidden treasure, who must disinter it at the stated hour, if he does not want to lose it entirely. I shall be at the chapel at ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... that goes to form the crust along with the ochre, but failed, as in the previous case, to form crystals in the interior. A third, fourth, and fifth are found to be as hollow as the last, and the 'digger' begins to look a little crestfallen, and abate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... The "Digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... another lily-pad sat Spotty the Turtle. On the bank on one side of the Smiling Pool were Peter Rabbit, Jumper the Hare, Danny Meadow Mouse, Johnny Chuck, Jimmy Skunk, Unc' Billy Possum, Striped Chipmunk and Old Mr. Toad. On the other side of the Smiling Pool were Reddy Fox, Digger the Badger, and Bobby Coon. In the Big Hickory-tree were Chatterer the Red Squirrel, Happy Jack the Gray Squirrel, and ...
— The Adventures of Buster Bear • Thornton W. Burgess
... power as a novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his incognito. But this he might have preserved without telling a circumstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance of emerging from the obscure station of a grave-digger's son, and carrying into comfort the dear female relatives that had half-starved themselves for him (I speak of things which have since come to my knowledge thirty-five years after Chatterton and his woes had been buried in a pauper's coffin), lay in bribing public ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... lover, is lashed in act v. sc. I, in disfigured verses of a song sung by the grave-digger, which dates about from the year 1557, and at Shakspere's time probably was very popular. In the original, where the image of death is meant to be represented, an old man looks back in repentance, and with great aversion, upon his youthful days when he found ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... Lonsdale light twinkled out of the darkness, and a low murmur ran round the decks—a murmur without words, since it came from men whose only fashion of meeting any emotion is with a joke; and even for a "digger" there is no joke ready on the lips, but only a catch at the heart, at ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... artists have all been a little modest about ourselves lately. During the war we asked ourselves gloomily what use we were to the State compared with the noble digger of coals, the much-to-be- reverenced maker of boots, and the god-like grower of wheat. Looking at the pictures in the illustrated papers of brawny, half-dressed men pushing about blocks of red-hot iron, we have told ourselves that these heroes were the pillars of society, ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... mansion, which was now the property of James Colton, the New York millionaire, whose rumored coming to Denboro to live had filled the columns of the country weekly for three months. The quahaug boats were anchored just inside the Point; a clam digger was wading along the outer edge of the sedge; a lobsterman was hauling his pots in the channel; even the bluebird on the wild cherry stump had a straw in his beak and was plainly in the midst of nest building. Everyone had something to do and ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... reception of convicts, struggles over land questions, religious questions, financial questions, the emancipation of ex-convicts, and the many difficult problems raised by the discovery of gold and the mushroom growth of digger communities in remote places. There was in the air more genuine lawlessness—irrespective, I mean, of revolt against bad laws—than ever existed in Ireland, though there was never at any time any practical ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... said. "I am Fray Juan de la Cruz, at your service; from the convent of N. S. de la Pena near by. I have to be my own grave-digger; but will you be so obliging as to commit the body while I ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... Digger, n. a gold-miner. The earliest mines were alluvial. Of course the word is used elsewhere, but in Australia it has this ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... plant, the leaves and blossoms of which climbed up the sides of the cave with its antediluvian relics. The gleam was the gleam of gold, and on removing the loose earth round the roots of the plant, we came on— No, I will not, I dare not, describe it. The gold digger would cast it aside; the naturalist would pause not to heed it; and did I describe it, and chemistry deign to subject it to analysis, could chemistry alone detach or discover ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... and Charnock near the half-finished bridge, which crossed the river obliquely. The track approached its end in a curve and then stopped where a noisy steam-digger was at work. Between the machine and the bridge, the hillside fell in a very steep slope to the water, which rolled in angry turmoil past its foot, and the channel dividing the bank from the island that supported the central bridge-pier was deep. Here ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... plight: Through my life I was weaned in journeying to death * In stress or in solace, in joyance or despight: So when money-bags are bloated, and dinar unto dinar * Thou addest, all may leave thee with fleeting of the night: And the driver of a camel and the digger of a grave[FN115] * Are what shine heirs shall bring ere the morning dawneth bright: And on Judgment Day alone shalt thou stand before thy Lord, * Overladen with thy sins and thy crimes and shine affright: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... morning he made a steel chopper-digger for each of them, and half a dozen extras for replacements in case more Fuzzies showed up. He also made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a handsaw out of a piece of broken power-saw blade and half a dozen little knives forged in one ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... master digs at the point indicated. If the spade goes astray the dog corrects the digger, sniffing at the bottom of the hole. Have no fear that stones and roots will confuse him; in spite of depth and obstacles, the truffle will be found. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... a big field of potatoes," said the children's father, "he may use a machine potato-digger. This is drawn by horses, who walk between the rows, drawing the machine right over where the potato vines are growing. The machine has iron prongs which dig under the dirt like giant fingers, turning out the potatoes which are tossed between the rows of dirt ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... accident, both in natural things and in human affairs, is reduced to a preordaining cause, which is Divine Providence. For nothing hinders that which happens by accident being considered as one by an intellect: otherwise the intellect could not form this proposition: "The digger of a grave found a treasure." And just as an intellect can apprehend this so can it effect it; for instance, someone who knows a place where a treasure is hidden, might instigate a rustic, ignorant of this, to dig a grave there. Consequently, nothing hinders what happens ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... when the excitement had somewhat subsided, and while they were all sitting down quietly to tea, the ladies produced their nuggets, passing them round for inspection, and relating the manner in which they had been found. Lance's experience as a gold-digger now served the party in good stead, for he had no sooner taken the dull yellow lumps into his hand than he pronounced them to be veritable nuggets of pure gold; and after extracting from the fair finders as accurate a description as they could give him of the locality ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... production and consumption of leather; or the cloth merchant, who cuts the material from the piece, an assistant preparatory to the tailor. The labor of commerce is especially like that of the fisherman or the turf digger, because they produce only in so far as they transfer goods from inaccessible to accessible places. See, however, Rau, Lehrbuch, I, 103. See the demonstration of the productive power of commerce in general, as well as of what is, by way of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... journeyed together from Prato to Florence and became very friendly. Your dry old woman, who hath had losses, who has become, in fact, world-worn and very wise, or like one of Shakespeare's veterans—the Grave-digger, or the Countryman in Antony and Cleopatra—has probed the ball and found it hollow; such a battered and fortified soul in petticoats is peculiar to Italy, and countries where the women work and the men, pocketing their hands, keep ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... raised her shapely head and pricked up her ears, and listened; and, in an instant, the girl sprang up and took a Smith and Wesson revolver from her saddle. The blacks about Repulse Bay and Whitsunday Passage had an evil reputation, and many an unfortunate stockman or digger had been slaughtered by them when camped in apparent security; even within a few score miles of such towns ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... been to Ballarat. I had given the thing a trial. For the most odious weeks I had been a licensed digger on Black Hill Flats; and I had actually failed to make running expenses. That, however, will surprise you the less when I pause to declare that I have paid as much as four shillings and sixpence for half ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... this pleasing hope of the future he saw much to redeem what he regretted of the past. Still, however, the wild flare of the pine-torch over the lone grave of his adversary, and the horrid answer of the grave-digger, that he was but "finishing his work," would recur to his memory and awake ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... set in. A wise physician once said to me: "I observe that every one wishes to go to heaven, but I observe that most people are willing to take a great deal of very disagreeable medicine first." The lives that one least envies—as of the Digger Indian or the outcast boy in the city—are yet sweet to the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The flashing speed of the swallow in the air, the cool play of the minnow in the water, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... needn't have been frightened at the diggers. As far as we saw they were the sensiblest lot of working men we ever laid eyes on; not at all inclined to make a row for nothing—quite the other way. But the shutting off of public-houses led to sly grog tents, where they made the digger pay a pound a bottle for his grog, and didn't keep ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... accusation of theft foolishly leaves England for America. He works his passage before the mast, joins a small band of hunters, crosses a tract of country infested with Indians to the Californian gold diggings, and is successful both as digger and trader. ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... buried them in a trench, and covered them, and laid little fires at intervals along the new-stamped earth and set light to those. We did not bury them very deep, because a bayonet is a fool of a weapon with which to excavate a grave and a Syrian no expert digger in any case; so when the fires were burned out we piled rocks on the grave to ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... are about 200 of us—and there are about 30,000 following, strung out all the way from here to the Rocky Mountains, I guess. That's a tough trail, across the desert from Fort Hall; but we made it, though the Digger Injuns 'most got our scalps, once. Part of the crowd's coming in by way of Oregon; and that's a harder trail still, we hear. Some of our own company, branched off, other side of the Sierra, for the Carson ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... Lone Star State, has never yet experienced the feeling of bein' daunted by face of man. No, su'! By God, su'!" He held the shovel aloft like a sword. "Let 'em come as they will, male and female after their kind, from a ninety poun' Jew peddler to Sittin' Bull himself, and from a pigeon-toed Digger-Injun squaw to a fo'-hundred-weight Dutch lady, I turn my back ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Philip as a dentist; but he had his own plans for making a fortune, and hoped to win for himself a larger fortune than is, often made in the law. He was a hunter of genealogies, a grubber-up of forgotten facts, a joiner of broken links, a kind of legal resurrectionist, a digger in the dust and ashes of the past; and he expected in due time to dig up a treasure rich enough to reward the labour and patience of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... friable and poor that the Greek burglar was known as a "Wall-digger." It did not pay him to pick a lock; it was simpler for him to quarry his way through ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... shepherd—Corydon, suppose, or Alphesibus—to this goodly set of lambs! How he must have admired the hero of the "Odyssey," who in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it no such easy matter to deal with the English suitors, who were not the feeble voluptuaries of the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to be butchered as unresistingly as sheep ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... must remember what is bad for the master must be equally bad for the man. So if a Doctor is excluded, a Chemist, an Undertaker, and a Grave-digger would also be kept away. A Lawyer would carry with him Judges, Magistrates, Clerks, and Law Stationers. The Clergy would represent everyone connected with a church, from an Archbishop to a Bell-ringer. Then, if we are to take away the Professions, Commerce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... southeast corner of the cellar. To systematize the labor, the party was divided into squads of five each, which gave the men one night on duty and two off, Rose assigning each man to the branch of work in which experiments proved him the most proficient. He was himself, by long odds, the best digger of the party; while Hamilton had no equal for ingenious mechanical skill in contriving helpful, little devices to overcome or lessen the difficulties that beset almost every ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Chamber of Deputies has organized itself into a chapel. Treasurer and secretary, M. Laborie. Contractor for burials, M. de La Bourdonnaye. Grave-digger, M. Duplessis-Grenedan. Superintendent, M. de Bouville, and in his capacity of vice-president—rattlesnake. Dispenser of holy water (promise-maker), M. de Vitrolles. General of the Capuchins, M. de Villele; and he deserves the post for his voice. Grand ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... themselves with a roll of pamphlets and newspapers, containing many of the low, cunning, lying stories about the Prophet Joseph walking on the water, being a money digger, an impostor, and a thousand such tales. Mr. Cantrall read and emphasized each story, as his prompters handed them to him. He occupied two hours and a half in this manner, and about half an hour in trying to point out discrepancies in the ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... us that he is making (April 1866,) some modifications of his machinery. He employs a revolving digger to take up the peat from the bed, and carry it to the machine. At the time of going to press, we do not learn whether he regards his experiments as leading to a ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... digger named Jack L'Estrange, a great friend of the Bensons, was reading an article from the Bulletin to her father, and Kitty, as she was then called, was whiling away the time by pulling his moustache, an occupation which interfered somewhat with the reading, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... following be true, though in ever so limited a manner, it deserves investigation. Notwithstanding his twenty-three years' experience, the worthy grave-digger must have been mistaken, unless there is something peculiar in the bodies of Bath people! But if the face turns down in any instance, as asserted, it would be right to ascertain the cause, and why this change is not general. It is now ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... always the prospect of a big find in the near future to keep up the spirits of the gold-digger. What did his condition to-day matter to him, when to-morrow he might fill his pockets full of gold! When all he had to do was to shoulder his pick and shovel, pick up his gold-pan, and go out almost anywhere and dig enough gold out ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... at the publisher's house there was something in the loftiness of my air, and the dinginess of my dress, that struck the clerks with reverence. They doubtless took me for some person of consequence, probably a digger of Greek roots, or a penetrator of pyramids. A proud man in a dirty shirt is always an imposing character in the world of letters; one must feel intellectually secure before he can venture to dress ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... against the elements, and we need for comfort some sort of shelter. But in securing these essentials to self-preservation where is the difference, except in method, between the banker who manipulates millions and the post-hole digger on the farm? Not a darned bit, in reality. They're both after exactly the same thing—security against want. If the post-hole digger's wants are satisfied by two dollars a day he is getting the same ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... we crouched, put up only to keep the sun from the grave-digger, bent to north and south, and threatened to wing away. But suddenly the shower ran away in a minute, as if it had an engagement elsewhere, and the sun shone more ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... dig in here will think she's a patient—unless the digger knows that this room is supposed to be occupied by one Steve Cornell, obviously male. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... that in other plays of Shakespeare,—in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As you like it, Hamlet, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, and The Merchant of Venice, he performed Launce, Touchstone, the Grave-digger, Justice Shallow, and Launcelot. On the first production of Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, a character[vii:1] was assigned to him; and there is good reason to believe that in Every Man out of his Humour, by the same ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... Sophie Dawes as a personality wins 'hands down.' Whether she was a criminal or not is a question even now in dispute. Unscrupulous she certainly was, and a good deal of a rogue. That modern American product the 'gold-digger' is what she herself would call a 'piker' compared with the subject of this chapter. The blonde bombshell, with her 'sugar daddy,' her alimony 'racket,' and the hundred hard-boiled dodges wherewith she chisels money and goods from her prey, is, again in her own crude phraseology, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... domine was the voorleezer or chorister, who was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm"; turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... American spoke for the first and last time. 'You think you're going to be carried to hospital,—you're wrong. Put him down, Digger!' And that ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... Rabbit began to receive callers who wanted to hear the story all over again from Peter himself. So Peter was obliged to repeat it ever so many times, and every time it sounded to him more foolish than before. He had to tell it to Jimmy Skunk and to Johnny Chuck and to Danny Meadow Mouse and to Digger the Badger and to Sammy Jay and to Blacky the Crow and to Striped Chipmunk and to Happy Jack Squirrel and to Bobby Coon and to Unc' Billy Possum and ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... society. Possibly an education may be the wider and the richer for a large experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and Clarence King, at about the same time, were enriching their education by a picturesque intimacy with the manners of the Apaches and Digger Indians. All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even the doctrine of accidental education broke down. There were no accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... he been a brawny cottager, carpenter, mason, blacksmith, well- digger, navvy, tree-feller—any effective and manly trade, in short, a worker in which can stand up in the face of the noblest and daintiest, and bare his gnarled arms and say, with a consciousness of superior power, "Look at a real man!" I should have been able to show you antecedents ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... is, about six or seven feet—will take about an hour and a half, though an expert native will do it in perhaps half that time. It is a blessing to get water at this time, and a great shout goes up from the well-digger, as the delicious fluid comes bubbling up through the narrow well, that is echoed by the igloo builders and spreads throughout the camp. Then the women repair with tin dippers and cups cut from musk-ox horn, and after refreshing themselves carry a drink to their husbands. One can ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... many misdeeds on his conscience, but his conduct towards the Badger is peculiarly indelicate. The Fox is a skilful digger, and when he cannot avoid it, he can hollow out a house with several rooms. The dwelling has numerous openings, both as a measure of prudence and of hygiene, for this arrangement enables the air to be renewed. He prepares several chambers ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... himself up, lovingly devoting his whole time to the study of natural history. He was particularly fond of physiology. It was known in the town that he frequently purchased dead bodies from the hospital grave-digger, a circumstance which rendered him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen. Fortunately, they did not actually look upon him as a sorcerer; but his practice diminished, and he was regarded as an eccentric ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... myself a small barometer, a large knife and digger for plants, note-book, telescope, compass, and other instruments; whilst two or three Lepcha lads who accompanied me as satellites, carried a botanising box, thermometers, sextant and artificial horizon, measuring-tape, azimuth ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Avoca River the lizard's future master had, as was the digger's custom, come out of his hole, or shaft, at eleven o'clock for a short half-hour's rest between breakfast and the midday meal. He threw himself down in a half-sitting posture, and was dreamily smoking ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... weapons needed with gentry of that class," he said, contemptuously. "Bah! I think more of Digger Injuns." ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... to wonder at?"—with a hoarse, unnatural laugh. "That's Nature. You cannot make fat pastures out of sea-sand, any more than a thorough-blood gentilhomme out of a clam-digger. The shark's teeth will show, do what you will." He pulled at his whiskers nervously, went to the window, motioning Doctor Bowdler roughly aside. "Let me see what the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... know is that they now and then snatch up some unhappy friend of ours and imprison him in their terrible castle of Nongtongpaw, whence, if he ever escape, he comes back to us emaciated, unintelligible, and with a passion for roots that would make him an ornament of society among the Digger Indians. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... drew the winsome figure close within his arm, resting his red head against the dark one below it. "I don't seem to feel particularly tired, now," he observed. "Curious, isn't it? Fatigue, as I've often noticed, is more mental than physical—with most of us. Your ditch-digger is tired in his back and arms, but the ordinary person is merely tired because his mind tells ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... policy of increasing unanimity at home, by equalizing rights and privileges, what is the ignorant, arrogant, and wicked system which has been pursued? Such a career of madness and of folly was, I believe, never run in so short a period. The vigour of the ministry is like the vigour of a grave-digger—the tomb becomes more ready and more wide for every effort which they make.... Every Englishman felt proud of the integrity of his country; the character of the country is lost for ever. It is of the utmost consequence to a commercial people at war with the greatest part of Europe, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... a ship, as a sailor boy, to San Francisco, and finally arrived at the diggings where his uncle was engaged in mining. In those early days of California mine digging the miners were generally a very rough class of men. So it happened that soon after Ned's arrival a great gruff "digger" offered to treat Ned to a drink of liquor, and became very angry because ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... liberty of will. So in the face of the fact that civilization with all it offers has proved a dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,—on the whole, I say, a dead failure,—they talk as if they knew from their own will all about that of a Digger Indian! We are more apt to go by observation of the facts in the case. We are constantly seeing weakness where you see depravity. I don't say we're right; I only tell what you must often find to be the fact, right or wrong, in talking with doctors. You see, too, our notions ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... the other day, a digger's assistant came up to me and inquired "If I had," as I understood him, "my gin pack'd." I returned that I never took spirits. Found out subsequently that word was spelt "mijinpacht," which is African-Dutch for "lease." Well, why didn't he say so before? ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... that equestrian stranger till after I finishes my grub. Alizan, he comes up all shiverin' an' sweatin' an' stands thar; an' mebby in a hour or so I strolls out to the deceased. It shorely wearies me a whole lot when I sees him; he's nothin' but a common Digger buck. You can drink on it if I ain't relieved. Bein' a no-account Injun, of course, I don't paw him over much for brands; but do you know, Pickles, from the casooal glance I gives, it strikes me at the time it's mighty likely to be your oncle. This old bronco fancier's skelp is over on my bridle, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... standing near, was doubtless exchanged between the head that made 'The Philosophical Dictionary' and the head that made 'The Social Contract,' When that was done, when the sack was shaken, when Voltaire and Rousseau had been emptied into that hole, a digger seized a spade, threw into the opening the heap of earth, and filled up the grave. The others stamped with their feet upon the ground, so as to remove from it the appearance of having been freshly disturbed. One of the assistants took for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard |
