"Navvy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where he applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stonecutter; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up fagots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days' work occasionally by offering himself at a shamefully low price, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... cultivation. [State of being prepared] preparedness, readiness, ripeness, mellowness; maturity; un impromptu fait a loisir [Fr.]. [Preparer] preparer, trainer; pioneer, trailblazer; avant-courrier [Fr.], avant-coureur [Fr.]; voortrekker [Afrik.]; sappers and miners, pavior^, navvy^; packer, stevedore; warming pan. V. prepare; get ready, make ready; make preparations, settle preliminaries, get up, sound the note of preparation. set in order, put in order &c (arrange) 60; forecast &c (plan) 626; prepare the ground, plow the ground, dress the ground; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... went to school—he frankly declares that his education only cost three-halfpence a week. He worked at his father's business at Chorley, and before he was twenty-one he was a stone-mason, bricklayer, millwright, carpenter, sawyer, and even a navvy, and all with a view of grounding himself in everything of a practical nature which would tend to make him an engineer—a profession on which his ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'. Youth and age may share without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of 'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... but he does not notice my reluctance. At an adjoining spot he begins flourishing the tools anew with the skill of a navvy, this venerable scholar with letters after his name. Sometimes he falls on his knees, burrowing with his hands in the manner of a hare, and where his old-fashioned broadcloth touches the sides of the hole it gets plastered with the damp earth. He continually ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... coat. This piece of cloth was long preserved in the engineer's office as a memorial of the event! On another occasion some men were at work on a platform, half-way down the shaft, executing some repairs, when a huge navvy, named Jack Pierson, fell from the surface, went right through the platform, as if it had been made of paper, and fell to the bottom. Fortunately there was water to receive him there, else he had been killed on the spot. The men, whom of course he had narrowly missed in his fall, ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... seen it stated that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do. He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions or the Albanian raids, the agricultural and much ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... more for us, Reddy. Drag him out, and now we'll settle this navvy's job. It's one man less in the fo'c'sle mess, and dead men tell no tales; and now we'll have to do the work a bit short-handed; but we can clean it up between us now, and no ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... rejoice together.' So it is a good thing that the hands that laid the foundations so seldom are the hands that finish the work; for thereby there are more admitted into the social gladness of the completed results. The navvy that lifted the first spadeful of earth in excavating for the railway line, and the driver of the locomotive over the completed track, are partners in the success and in the joy. The forgotten bishop who, I know not how many centuries ago, laid the foundations of Cologne Cathedral, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... life, and a great longing for death ...—he saw him in his school, a genial pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, coarse, vagabond, ragged, with hoarse voices, the ragamuffins with whom he squabbled, and sometimes fought like a navvy, one of whom once gave him a mighty thrashing ...—he saw him with his family, surrounded by his twenty-one children, of whom thirteen died before him, and one was an idiot, and the rest were good musicians who gave little concerts.... Sickness, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Noddle, getup! getup!" endeavored to make him go. But Noddle nodded and refused to awaken or budge. Then an ambitious urchin of six fastened his hands in the fur of the sheep and essayed to climb to his back. Willing hands assisted him. "Ride him, Billy, ride him. Getup, Navvy, getup!" ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... of labour which they were best qualified to supply. America was just then opening up and turning to the new West, and the demand for unskilled labour for railway work was unlimited. The Irish emigrant seldom or never takes to the land when he goes to America, and navvy work just suited him. To a man accustomed to sixpence a day the wages offered seemed to represent unbounded wealth, and as the news spread in Ireland the move to America, which at the first seemed hopeless ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... criminal, was born in Ireland in 1792. After trying his hand at a variety of trades there, he went to Scotland about 1817 as a navvy, and in 1827 was living in a lodging-house in Edinburgh kept by William Hare, another Irish labourer. Towards the end of that year one of Hare's lodgers, an old army pensioner, died. This was the period of the body-snatchers or Resurrectionists, and Hare and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... House of Lords; it is not in the Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a certain spirit. It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a gentleman. From a democratic point of view he might as well say that he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic character of the modern English ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Institutes, and the mechanics were unanimous in favour of my views. I have preached in workhouses, beershops, and Lunatic Asylums, and I have been received with enthusiasm. I have addressed navvies on the advantages that would accrue to them if they married wealthy ladies of rank, and not a navvy dissented! ALINE Noble fellows! And yet there are those who hold that the uneducated classes are not open to argument! And what do the countesses say? ALEXIS Why, at present, it can't be denied, the aristocracy hold aloof. ALINE Ah, the working man is the true Intelligence after all! ALEXIS ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... conceal certain slips of technicality; 'you are charged with trespassing in pursuit of game at Essant Hill—that you did use a wire on the estate—on land in the occupation of Johnson.'—'It's a lie!' cries a good-looking, dark-complexioned woman, who has come up behind the defendant (the whilome navvy), and carries a child so wrapped in a shawl as to be invisible. 'Silence! or you'll have to go outside the court. Mr. Dalton Dessant will leave the Bench during the hearing of this case.' Mr. Dalton Dessant, one of the silent magistrates already alluded to, bows ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... worse than any of the other amusements of the millionaire—worse than gambling, worse even than philanthropy. It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium greater than the greatest poet of England. It means losing every democratic sympathy. It means being unable to talk to a navvy about sport, or about beer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about patriotism, or about anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to talk about. It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do. It means pardoning indecency only when ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... they usually forbore to interfere with one another. The Bedfords and the South Staffords worked in broad daylight with their bodies half exposed above the trenches, raising the parapet as the water rose. About 200 yards away the Germans were doing the same. Neither side interfered with the navvy-work of the other, and for the simplest of all reasons: both were engaged in fighting a common foe—the underground springs. When two parties are both in danger of being drowned they haven't time to fight. To speak of drowning ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... idleness, may be sitting an old countrywoman with steady eyes in a lean, dusty-black dress and an old poke-bonnet; by her side, some gin-faced creature of the town, all blousy and draggled; a hollow-eyed foreigner, far gone in consumption; a bronzed young navvy, asleep, with his muddy boots jutting straight out; a bearded, dreary being, chin on chest; and more consumptives, and more vagabonds, and more people dead-tired, speechless, and staring before them from that crescent-shaped haven where there is no draught at their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... rocks and over trembling morasses, the whole way from Liverpool to Manchester. He persevered, however, and in 1830, after four years' toilsome and ceaseless labour, during which he had worked far-harder than the sturdiest navvy on the line, his railway was ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... sixty say she had naturally not ventured on a summer journey to Switzerland till some man who looked after her money affairs, but was in no way related, had given her his consent. I did once hear a German boast of having struck his wife in order to bring her to submission. He was not a navvy either, but a merchant of good standing. He was not a common type, however. German men, on the whole, treat their womenfolk kindly, but never as their equals. Over and over again German women have told ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... of charity and pity. Suddenly he wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was but for ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the eastern division, I fear, from all reports," replied the Convener. "By the way, there is a young English doctor working on that eastern division from the MaCleod end who is making a great stir. Bailey is his name, I believe. He began as a navvy, but finding a lot of fellows sick, and the doctor a poor drunken fellow, Bailey, it appears, stood it as long as he could, then finally threw him out of the camp and installed himself in his place. The contractor backed him up and he has revolutionized the medical work ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... especially interested us by the account he gave of his first journey up the country. He was evidently, from the tone of his voice and manners, a gentleman by education, though in appearance as rough and weather-beaten as a navvy who has put on a black coat for Sunday. He addressed himself to us, as he probably thought that we had come out to turn gold-diggers, and he wished to warn us of the dangers to ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... seen an officer, who wouldn't say 'damn' for a thousand quid, spend five minutes with the old boy, and when he returned, the flow of language from his lips would make a navvy blush for shame. ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the mysterious and the unknown, who saw everything so huge as to disgust one with beauty, painting girls like the trunks of oak-trees, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... he apologized. "Had to post over. I told Walters at the George to keep me the black mare. Instead, he let that waterworks chief navvy fellow have her. The horse he gave me would hardly face ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... is all the more reason why I don't want to stop you from working it out, or rather to make the "one erasure" you suggest. For as to stopping you, "ten on me might," as the navvy said to the little special constable who threatened to take him ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley |
