"Mattock" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood. Rheinschnacke (of which the equivalent is perhaps "water-snake") is the standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who repays it in kind by the epithet "karst" (mattock), or "kukuk" (cuckoo), according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or the forest. If any Romeo among the "mattocks" were to marry a Juliet among the "water-snakes," there would be no lack of Tybalts and Mercutios to carry the conflict from words to blows, though neither ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... unravel. After breakfast he wandered out, and lost in the maze of thought, sauntered, ere he was aware of it, into the churchyard. Shortly afterwards the church-door was opened by the sexton, who kept his pickaxe and mattock in a corner of the belfry, and Frantz remembering that as yet he had not entered the church, followed him in, and was struck with the appearance of many portraits ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... Be you remember'd, Marcus; she's gone, she's fled. Sirs, take you 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 ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... out with the hoe of the tongue, to destroy, to scatter,[225] day by day making the crooked straight and the rough places plain.[226] He rejoiced as a giant to run everywhere.[227] You might call him a consuming fire burning the briers of crimes.[228] You might call him an axe or a mattock casting down[229] evil plantings.[230] He extirpated barbaric rites, he planted those of the Church. All out-worn superstitions (for not a few of them were discovered) he abolished, and, wheresoever he found it, every sort of malign influence sent ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... ready 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 ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... bottle and a glass, evidences that whatever might be the ulterior object of their stealthy communion, the immediate comfort of the creature had not been altogether overlooked. At the feet of one of the personages were laid a mattock, a horn lantern—from which the candle had been removed—, a crowbar, and a bunch of keys. Near to these implements of a vocation which the reader will readily surmise, rested a strange superannuated terrier with a wiry back and frosted muzzle; a head minus an ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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
... means of persuading the peer to inspect his steward's accounts, or repair the rural mansion of his ancestors; who could replace the tradesman behind his counter, and send back the farmer to the mattock and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... hatchel^, heckle. wedge; knife edge, cutting edge; blade, edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury^, lancet; plowshare, coulter, colter^; hatchet, ax, pickax, mattock, pick, adze, gill; billhook, cleaver, cutter; scythe, sickle; scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c (arms) 727; bodkin &c (perforator) 262; belduque^, bowie ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and mother; a girl with a wheelbarrow full of clover; a peasant, his hay-laden cart, and his cart-horses; a man and his pigs; a shepherd, his flock and dog; lastly, cabbages belonging to an old woman who cuts him in two with her mattock just as he tries to eat her. Out of him jump unhurt every thing and every one he has swallowed. In a story from the south of Siberia (Gubernatis' Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 140) the hero vanquishes a demon, who tells him that in ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... beggar, of a rich winding sheet and a shroudless burial, of a solitary grave and a family vault—were this all, then, indeed it would be true that death is a common leveler. Such paltry distinctions as those of wealth and poverty are soon leveled by the spade and mattock; the damp breath of the grave blots them out forever. But there are other distinctions which even the mace of death can not level or obliterate. Can it break down the distinction of virtue and vice? Can it confound the good with the bad? the noble with the base? all that is truly great, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... that Kidd—if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not—it is clear 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 ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... are wanted for a flower show make the ground as wet as mud. Then lift each plant with a spade or mattock slowly and skillfully. The roots, dirt and all, will come up in a solid mass. Pot at once, before any of the earth is shaken off. They will not wither in the least if kept out of direct sunshine for a few days. If enormous blooms ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... learning and laws, of society itself, was implied in the fact. The more intrepid intelligence, the more versatile energy, amid which we live, have achieved the success of combining the two: so that while it is true now, as of old, that "no mattock plunges a golden edge into the ground, and no nail drives a silver point into the plank," it is also true that, under the stimulus of the larger expenditure which the added supplies of gold make possible, the duller metal has taken a fineness, a brightness and hardness, with ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... whose name was Mrs. Mattock, directing her peculiar sweet-sour smile at the distinguished ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have been upon that force of inspiration that urged him on; whether it would have daunted him, and prevented him from driving his adits into places where no theory pointed to a lode. If so, then we may rejoice that this strong delver at the mine of natural knowledge was left free to wield his mattock in his own way. It must be admitted, that Faraday's purely speculative writings often lack that precision which the mathematical habit of thought confers. Still across them flash frequent gleams of prescient wisdom which ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... Oppression, hand in hand With Pride, stalk'd proudly through the land; When weeping Justice was misled From her fair course, and Mercy dead: 120 Such were the men, in virtue strong, Who dared not see their country's wrong, Who left the mattock and the spade, And, in the robes of War array'd, In their rough arms, departing, took Their helpless babes, and with a look Stern and determined, swore to see Those babes no more, or see them free: Such were the men ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... of the dead man's bed, The sexton, hoary-headed chronicle! Of hard, unmeaning face, down which ne'er stole A gentle tear; with mattock in his hand, Digs thro' whole rows of kindred and acquaintance By far his juniors! Scarce a skull's cast up But well he knew its owner, and can tell Some passage of his life. 1651 BLAIR: The Grave, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... He used the mattock slowly and methodically. With the cottage as a background, and the muddy bit of garden, the picture he made was typical of the country and the ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... 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. In any case the slave became ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... but one man MEANING, AS YOU WILL EASILY SUPPOSE, MR. PITT who could give them strength and solidity; that, under this person, he should be willing to serve in any capacity, not only as a General Officer, but as a pioneer; and would take up a spade and a mattock." When he quitted the seals, they were offered first to Lord Egmont, then to Lord Hardwicke; who both declined them, probably for the same reasons that made the Duke of Grafton resign them; but after their going a-begging for some time, the Duke of———-begged them, and has them 'faute de mieux'. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... of a squatter, mattock in hand, comes tumblin' down the hillside from some'ers out back of the shanty ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... The inauguration of the mound took place on the ninth of October 1836. To the sound of martial music, drums and cannon, the first layers of earth were deposited, men, women and children taking part in the proceedings. A year later no less than ten thousand French friends of Poland with mattock and spade added several feet to Kosciusko's mountain. But the celebration got noised abroad. Afraid of anti-Russian manifestations the government of Louis Philippe prohibited any further Polish fetes. Thus ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... round; And who so artful as to put it by? 'Tis long since death had the majority; 450 Yet, strange! the living lay it not to heart. See yonder maker of the dead man's bed, The Sexton, hoary-headed chronicle; Of hard, unmeaning face, down which ne'er stole A gentle tear; with mattock in his hand Digs through whole rows of kindred and acquaintance, By far his juniors.—Scarce a skull's cast up, But well he knew its owner, and can tell Some passage of his life.—Thus hand in hand The sot has walk'd with death ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... heat) it began to erect itself, and fly at his wife and children, filling the whole cottage with dreadful hissings. The Countryman heard an outcry, and perceiving what the matter was, catched up a mattock and soon dispatched him; upbraiding him at the same time in these words:—"Is this, vile wretch, the reward you make to him that saved your life? Die as you deserve; but a single death is too good ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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. Wherefore ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... of Eigg, too, in an Oolite deposit, locked up in trap, and whose stratigraphical relations cannot in consequence be exactly traced, great fragments of Pinites Eiggensis are so abundant, that, armed with a mattock, I have dug out of the rock, in a few minutes, specimens enough to supply a dozen of museums. In short, judging from its fossiliferous remains, it seems not improbable that old Oolitic Scotland was as ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the man drew it out by the tail, and swung it about to assure himself of the fact. Perceiving no symptoms of life, he then threw it over his shoulder, intending to make a cap of the skin, and ornament his cottage wall with the brush. While the fox hung over one shoulder, his mattock balanced it on the other. The point of the instrument, as he walked along, every now and then struck against the ribs of the fox, which, not so dead as the man supposed, objected to this proceeding, though he did not mind being carried along with his head downward. Losing patience, he gave a sharp ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... make out. He dragged a chair to the table. That man Bronson was all right. Let's see—the thirtieth—looked stockier in daylight. Had a good grip, too, and a clear, level eye. One mattock missing in the lookout cabin—and the girl; such a slender whip of a girl! Just like a young willow, but not a bit like an invalid. Buckley reports that his man will have the sheep across the reservation by the fourth of the ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... the future soldiers exercised 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 not to allow the men to be unoccupied; once a day, at least, they ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... by favour. The mercy extended to Secundra he explains on the ground that the East Indian was thought to be insane; partly from the fact that, through all the horrors of the flight, and while others were casting away their very food and weapons, Secundra continued to stagger forward with a mattock on his shoulder, and partly because, in the last days, and with a great degree of heat and fluency, he perpetually spoke with himself in his own language. But he was sane enough when it came ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a ridge the huge corpse of Vertumnus is being devoured by red dogs. The rustic gods depart weeping, Sartor, Sarrator, Vervactor, Eollina, Vallona, and Hostilenus—all covered with little hooded cloaks, and each bearing a mattock, a fork, a hurdle, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... digging, by choice, graves for the dead in the various churchyards of the town. There were those who had seen him thus employed (that form seeming still to carry something of real sun-gold upon it) peering into the darkness, while his tears fell sometimes among the grim relics his mattock had disturbed. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... October is always a bad time of year for fires in foothill California—between the rains, the heat of the year, everything crisp and brown and brittle. This threatened the whole valley and water shed. The Gateses turned out, and all their neighbours, with hoe, mattock, axe, and sacking, trying to beat, cut, or scrape a "break" wide enough to check the flames. It was cruel work. The sun blazed overhead and the earth underfoot. The air quivered as from a furnace. Men gasped ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... dawn, with a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and in ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... show-box has its solemner suggestions. Now and then we catch a glimpse of a grim old man, who lays down a scythe and hour-glass in the corner while he shifts the scenes. There, too, in the dim background, a weird shape is ever delving. Sometimes he leans upon his mattock, and gazes, as a coach whirls by, bearing the newly married on their wedding jaunt, or glances carelessly at a babe brought home from christening. Suddenly (for the scene grows larger and larger as we look) a bony hand snatches back a performer in the midst of his part, and him, whom yesterday ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... This is never used as bread, but commonly preserved as a sweetmeat. The rudest, and probably the earliest practised mode of cultivating rice, consists in taking from forest lands a fugitive crop, after burning the trees, grass, and underwood. The ground is turned up with the mattock, and the seed planted by dibbling between the stumps of trees. The period of sowing is the commencement of the rains, and of reaping that of the dry season. The rice is of course of that description which does not ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... everywhere, day after day—in the trenches, on the towers, teaching the bowmen their business, crying 'Mort de Dieu!' when a mangonel did its work, and some flung rock made the wall to fly; he crouched under the tortoise-screens with the miners, took a mattock himself as indifferently as an arbalest or a cross-bow. He could do everything, and have (if not a word) a cheerful grin for every man who did his duty. As it was evident that he knew what such duty should be, and could have done it better himself, men sweated to win his praise. ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... thee with heavy loads; I will hunt thee through heat and cold, till thou thinkest more of food than of play." He therefore sustained his fainting spirit with the juice of herbs and a few figs, after each three or four days, praying frequently, and singing psalms, and digging the ground with a mattock, to double the labour of fasting by that of work. At the same time, by weaving baskets of rushes, he imitated the discipline of the Egyptian monks, and the Apostle's saying—"He that will not work, neither let him eat"—till he was so attenuated, and his ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... at this date. When the saint came to Cornwall (always supposing that he was not born here), he is reputed to have landed in the Gannel, and to have built his cell on a strip of land that the local chieftain gave him. While whittling the handle of his mattock he noticed that a wood-pigeon picked up the shavings in its mouth and carried them to a certain spot. He took this as a sign that he was to build his church there, and this, says tradition, is the present site of Crantock Church. There was a collegiate foundation here in Saxon times, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... well by its gloom and sequestered situation to be a scene of mortal strife, both were surprised to observe that a grave was dug close by the foot of the rock with great neatness and regularity, the green turf being laid down upon the one side, and the earth thrown out in a heap upon the other. A mattock and shovel lay by ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... building. Romulus all the time was standing by. At length, in order to enforce what he said about the insufficiency of the work, Remus leaped over a portion of it, saying, "This is the way the enemy will leap over your wall." Hereupon Romulus seized a mattock from the hands of one of the laborers, and struck his brother down to the ground with it, saying, "And this is the way that we will kill them if they do." Remus was killed ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... barn—William Turnbull, observing these short-cuts, approved of their purpose, but not of their method. He went through the woods once or twice on odd days after his hay was in, and did a little grading with a mattock. Here and there he made steps out of flat stones. He told his wife he thought it would be some handier for her, and she told him—they were both from Connecticut—that it was quite some handier, and that it was real thoughtful of him; and ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... 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 of ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... again, thereof Well-nigh two-thirds intolerable heat And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob From mortal kind. And what is left to till, Even that the force of nature would o'errun With brambles, did not human force oppose,— Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave The soil in twain ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... trunk of obtrusive proportions stood in the centre of 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 which he was ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte |
