"Mattock" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves on the parade-ground, the Campus Martius, on the other side of the Tiber. There the young man marched, ran, leaped under the weight of his arms, fenced with his sword, hurled the javelin, wielded the mattock, and then, covered with dust and with perspiration, swam across the Tiber. Often the older men, sometimes even the generals, mingled with the young men, for the Roman never ceased to exercise. Even in the campaign the rule was ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... New Orleans, in which city it was consumed by fire during the year 1828. Mr. Barlow built another miniature engine for Mr. Rockhill who used it for exhibition. I wish it distinctly remembered so as not to confuse dates, that the first mattock struck and the first stone laid on the Lexington and Louisville Rail Road were done in Lexington June 3rd, 1831, the citizens, the Free Masons and the Military assisting in the ceremonies which took place at the corner ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... The mattock, the coffin, and the melancholy grave admonish us of our mortality, and that, sooner or later, these frail bodies must moulder ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... his sickle through the whin-bush, Straightest down the ridge his furrows sped; Early on the mountain ranged his reapers, Above his mattock late he ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... a sound, or, rather, a confused mingling of sounds, as of men digging in the earth. It was faint, and some distance beyond us in the heart of the beech woods, but as we traveled the sound increased and I could distinguish the strokes of the mattock, and the thrust of the shovel and the clatter of the earth ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... the slave class was other than a small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... he rode off; and Elshie, after looking at him with a scornful and indignant laugh, took spade and mattock, and occupied himself in digging a grave ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... for shelter. Nothing showed the inborn capacity of the Northern soldier to take care of himself better than the way in which we accomplished this with the rude materials at our command. No ax, spade nor mattock was allowed us by the Rebels, who treated us in regard to these the same as in respect to culinary vessels. The only tools were a few pocket-knives, and perhaps half-a-dozen hatchets which some infantrymen-principally members of the Third Michigan—were allowed to retain. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the house watching a burning lamp, while some friends go outside the village and make a miniature hut with sticks and grass and set fire to it. They then call out to the dead man, 'Come, your house is being burnt,' and walk home striking a mattock and sickle together. On coming to the house they kick down the matting which covers the doorway; the man inside says, 'Who are you?' and they answer, 'It is we.' They watch the lamp and when the flame wavers they believe it to show that the spirit of the deceased has followed them and has also entered ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... She had a rope round her waist, to the other end of which a small cart was attached; under the cart, harnessed to the axle, two dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart the man pushed. It contained a disorderly freight: a large feather-bed, a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... first evidence I met with of its having been previously visited by man was the English chickweed; and this I traced to a mound that marked the grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with the plant, doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the spade or mattock with which the grave ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... somewhere in those parts which was especially famous for the stewing of eels. The clerk having made answer that he had heard the eels of Sowley well spoken of, the friar sucked in his lips and hurried forward. Close at his heels came three laborers walking abreast, with spade and mattock over their shoulders. They sang some rude chorus right tunefully as they walked, but their English was so coarse and rough that to the ears of a cloister-bred man it sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue. One of them carried a young bittern which they had caught upon the moor, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one side, however, stood a man who was not so busy. To put it plainly, he was loafing, with the handle of his improvised mattock supporting his weight. Clearly the two up in the air were concerned ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... locoed outfits this here aggregation has got everything else skinned to a hard-boiled finish. Most of them are indoor men, ink-slingers and calico snippers; haven't done a day's hard work in their lives, and don't know a pick from a mattock. They've got a notion they've just got to get up there and pick big nuggets out of the water like cherries out of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... not—it is clear 30 that he must have had assistance in the labor. But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Maori kainga, or village. Hence, the scrub that covered it was not of large growth, while the soil is exceptionally loose and rich, consisting of black mould largely intermixed with shells. This space we cleared and fenced in. Then we went to work with spade and pickaxe and mattock. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... if for departure, bundling up the various articles which each had appropriated. Still, however, there remained something to be done. Two of them, after some rummaging, which not a little alarmed Brown, produced a mattock and shovel, another took a pickaxe from behind the straw on which the dead body was extended. With these implements two of them left the hut, and the remaining three, two of whom were the seamen, very strong men, still ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... This only would I have thee clearly note: That so my conscience have no plea against me; Do fortune as she list, I stand prepar'd. Not new or strange such earnest to mine ear. Speed fortune then her wheel, as likes her best, The clown his mattock; ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... sullenly, and slowly scratched his head. Pressley, unlashing a mattock and shovel from his pack, did not ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... place of change, they hie Whither Sir Aldigier's advices teach; And there survey an ample band who lie Exposed to fierce Apollo's heat; in reach, Nor myrtle-tree nor laurel they descry, Nor tapering cypress, ash, nor spreading beech: But naked gravel with low shrubs discerned, Undelved by mattock and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... different crops, as, if you wish to make an orchard or an arbustum, you trench and grub and plough; if you plant grain, you plough and harrow; while, if you cultivate trees, you mulch their roots by breaking the earth with a mattock, more or less according to the nature of the tree, for some trees, like the cypress, have a small, and others like the plane tree have a large, root system (for example, that in the Lyceum at Athens described ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the so-called religious zeal of the Puritans, Ethelmar's heart was disturbed, as is recorded by a writer of the period, who says that "when the steps of the altar were levelling with the rest of the ground one of the workmen accidentally struck his mattock on this stone and broke it; underneath which was an urn wherein the heart of this Ethelmar was, being enclosed in a golden cup, which thing ... being conveyed to the ears of the committee-men they took the cup for their own use, and ordered ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... have been, Simon Ford was proud of belonging to this ancient family of Scotch miners. He had worked diligently in the same place where his ancestors had wielded the pick, the crowbar, and the mattock. At thirty he was overman of the Dochart pit, the most important in the Aberfoyle colliery. He was devoted to his trade. During long years he zealously performed his duty. His only grief had been to perceive the bed becoming impoverished, and to see the hour approaching ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... for planting, a few plants are dug up, set in a pail with thin mud at the bottom and carried to the place of planting. The most economical method of planting is for one man to make the holes with a mattock. These holes are made about a foot in diameter, by scraping off the sod with the mattock and then digging a little hole in the dirt underneath. A second man follows with a pail of plants and sets a single plant in this hole with his hands, see Fig. 129, making sure that the ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... the peaceful vegetation, like a newly raised altar to an unknown deity. The only suggestion of martial surveillance was an Indian soldier, whose musket, reposing on the ground near Mrs. Markham, he had exchanged for the rude mattock with ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... cannot tell. There was no mark to show— No dint of spade, or mattock-loosened sod,— Only the hard bare ground, untilled and trackless. Whoe'er he was, the doer left no trace. And, when the scout of our first daylight watch Showed us the thing, we marvelled in dismay. The Prince was out of sight; not in a grave, But a thin dust was o'er him, as if thrown ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet-Horatio air: "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" We found our four friends in a space of the churchyard from which the tombstones had been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... herself that the work was to be done; so she dragged the body away thence, and across the brook, and a little way into the meadow, and then she went back and fetched mattock and spade from the outhouse, where she knew they lay, and so fell to digging a grave for the corpse of her dead terror. But howso hard she might toil, she was not through with the work ere night began to fall on her, and she had no mind to go on with her digging by night. ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... many years, with eyes that burn, Give hail and glory to your King's return! For Agamemnon cometh! A great light Cometh to men and gods out of the night. Grand greeting give him—aye, it need be grand— Who, God's avenging mattock in his hand, Hath wrecked Troy's towers and digged her soil beneath, Till her gods' houses, they are things of death; Her altars waste, and blasted every seed Whence life might rise! So perfect is his deed, So dire the yoke on Ilion he hath cast, The first Atreides, King of Kings at last, ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... do any harm to plant them now, though it might not do any good either; and he mustn't be surprised to find occasional chunks of earth still frozen. She would be over in a little while to show him about it. Let him get his pick-mattock, spade, and rake ready, up by the corner ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... excavations—sometimes segmental, sometimes pointed, and often of a considerable height and width—could never have stood in any other kind of earth without strong and numerous supports. And yet M. Place tells us that these very galleries, exactly in the condition in which the mattock left them, "provided lodging for the labourers engaged and their families, and ever since they have served as a refuge for the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages. Workmen and peasants have taken shelter under vaults ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... high up there in the exposed place, that the only way to be safe was to stand nailed by the wind to the wan of the tower. At their feet fell the precipice where the limestone was quarried away. Below was a jumble of hills and tiny villages—Mattock, Ambergate, Stoney Middleton. The lads were eager to spy out the church of Bestwood, far away among the rather crowded country on the left. They were disgusted that it seemed to stand on a plain. They saw the hills of Derbyshire ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... did begin the task. Men shrank from it, however, because, when the first workers touched the earth, blood spouted from it, groans and bellowings were heard, and many phantoms appeared. Nero himself thereupon grasped a mattock and by throwing up some of the soil fairly compelled the rest to imitate him. For this work he sent for a large number of men from ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio |
