"Navvy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ladies who have been delicately brought up shall travel with any Tom, Dick and Harry?—perhaps with convicts being conveyed to gaol, or with journeymen labourers? Is his honour the Chief Magistrate, who is a Commander of a noble Order of Knighthood, to travel side by side with a drunken navvy? Supposing the King were to pay a visit to this beautiful district, which has acquired such a reputation since so many of the best people from town have taken villas here; is his Majesty to make the journey in one of these third-class carriages, with the chance ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... of the N.L.E.S.R.O. (Navvies' League for the Encouragement of Spectators at Roadmending Operations) in providing deck chairs upon the pavement at a penny an hour is universally appreciated, and it is now no uncommon thing to see a navvy taking a holiday and egging on his sturdy comrades to greater efforts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... very moment Smiley and Young Bill were standing open-mouthed before the scouts' fire with the sleeping Raven at their feet. Smiley was a little twisted old fellow, but Young Bill was a gigantic navvy, powerful as a five-year-old bull. Their faces, too, were blacked in readiness for the night's work. Three minutes after Dick had crept away, they had slipped along the brook under the wood, turned a sharp corner, and ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... papal flavour. Mr. Harrison speaks with authority and not as one of the common scribes of the period. He knows not only what agnosticism is and how it has come about, but what will become of it. The agnostic is to content himself with being the precursor of the positivist. In his place, as a sort of navvy levelling the ground and cleansing it of such poor stuff as Christianity, he is a useful creature who deserves patting on the back, on condition that he does not venture beyond his last. But let not these scientific Sanballats presume that they are good enough ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... 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
... themselves into his very soul, which had sent him out with murder in his brain to seek the man who had robbed him of the one thing which stood between him and despair; the pent-up fury of a lifetime which had tingled in his blood and had given him the strength of the navvy in those few minutes ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... silently, and I dared not meet his glance because I knew I should give myself away. The rascal has not been running his eye over young women all these years without being able to tell them in a moment, even in navvy's clothes. ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... proclaim such gladness as the following: "Twins Born in Tooting: Trio Doing Well"; "Chelsea Churchwarden much Improved, and Swallowing Beef-Tea With Ease"; "A Famous Barking Belle Gets Off at Last"; "A Navvy's Love of Greek"; "Young Poet Earns a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... same skeptics believe the impudent lies, and monstrous arithmetic of geology, which babbles about a million years, a period actually beyond the comprehension of the human intellect; and takes up a jaw-bone, that some sly navvy has transplanted over-night from the churchyard into Lord knows what stratum, fees the navvy, gloats over the bone, and knocks the Bible down with it. No, Mr. Coventry, your story is a good one, and well told; ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... unexpectedly favourable for the class 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 exile, presented itself as a highly desirable step towards social betterment. Emigration ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... were to an implement less mighty than the pen, perspired beadily and willingly with the pick and shovel. Even the ladies, regardless of blisters and the snowy whiteness of their hands, revelled in the role of navvy. Hallowed little garden patches were ruthlessly excavated; converted into "dug-outs"—disagreeably suggestive of the grave—and these were covered over and hedged in with sacks of earth. The apartments thus improvised were excellent in their way, but somewhat ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... satisfy me, for two reasons: first, to ask workers equipped with tools for cutting clay as hard as granite to cut a piece of gauze does not strike me as a happy inspiration; you cannot expect a navvy's pick-axe to do the same work as a dressmaker's scissors. Secondly, the transparent glass prison seems to me ill-chosen. As soon as the insect has made a passage through the thickness of its earthen dome, it finds itself in broad ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... orders. "One of them rich snobs!" said the laborers, grumbling; "all the laborers in town have to march out here so that he can pick himself the best. And he's beaten down the day's wages to fifty ore. He's been a navvy himself, too; but now he's a man who enjoys his hundred thousand a year. A ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... working like a navvy, at a mechanic's shop, fagging up a lot of things I knew how to do on principle, but had seldom or never done with my own hands. I was always a lazy beggar, I'm afraid, and it was better fun to smoke and watch my man Collet making or fitting in a new ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... had secretly affected a naturally sweet temper. He was suffering besides from a haunting sense of contrast between these rainy November days, and the glowing harvest weeks in which he had worked like a navvy for and with Rachel Henderson. It was over, of course. None of the nice things of life ever came his way for long. But he did feel rather sorely that during his short spell of favour with her, Miss Henderson had encouraged ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Hornby, rising slowly to his feet, "I'd have let them send me if I'd have known what I was in for, do you? Not much. Up at five in the morning and working about the place like a navvy till your back feels as if it 'ud break, and then back again in the afternoon. And the same thing day after day. What was the good of sending me to Harrow and Oxford if that's what I've got to do all ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... when Bishop of Peterborough, encountered a drunken navvy one day as he was walking through the poorer quarters of that town. The navvy staggered out of a public-house, diffusing a powerful aroma of gin all round him; when he saw his Chief Pastor he raised ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... chair on the other ride of Hector] Never fear: there's no question of his becoming a navvy, Mrs Malone. [To Hector] There's really no difficulty about capital to start with. Treat me as ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... 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, stone sawer; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up faggots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days work occasionally, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... their decorations. The members' wives and their friends are all taking part in the scene too, bringing voters along in their carriages, and shaking hands with everybody indiscriminately. I heard an old navvy protesting once that "Lady —— never troubled to shake 'ands with him any other time, but was generally that 'orty she'd step over you as ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... comrades at Wood Green who recall how on Wednesday nights Kate would go to the hall, fold a large bundle of 'War Crys,' and sally forth to the streets to sell them. The first time she ventured out on this service she saw a great, drunken navvy lounging against the door of a public-house. Mustering all her courage, the girl advanced and offered the paper to the drunkard. She felt she had scored quite a victory when the navvy bought a copy. By degrees she became braver, and would even go into the saloons to sell the periodicals. ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... a navvy and how does he live? The navvy is an inland navigator who used to dig dykes and canals and now constructs railroads. In the forties the navvies are getting 5s. a day, and for tunnelling and blasting even more, but they are a ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Beitunia to support the left of the 52nd Division's attack on El Jib, but the enemy was too strong to permit of the yeomanry proceeding more than two miles east of Foka. The roadmakers had done an enormous amount of navvy work on the track between Foka and Tahta. They had laboured without cessation, breaking up rock, levering out boulders with crowbars, and doing a sort of rough-and-ready levelling, and by the night of the 24th the track was reported ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... whole base, is anxious to hang on to being what servants call a real lady, is accordingly constantly forced into a regrettable want of candour. I wish Bernd weren't a Junker. It is a great blot on his perfection. I'd much rather he were a navvy, a stark, swearing navvy, and we could go in for stark, swearing candour, and I needn't be a lady any more. It's so middle-class being a lady. These German aristocrats are ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... hose, each forty feet long, had been attached. Baxmore and Corney were at the extreme end, screwing on the "branch" or nozzle by which the stream of water is directed, and Dale was tumbling a half-drunk and riotous navvy head-over-heels into the crowd, in order to convince him that his services to pump were not wanted—a sufficient number having been procured. A couple of policemen walked this navvy quietly from the ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... at every carpenter's shop 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, in order ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in Donegal in 1890. He was the son of poverty-stricken peasants and, between the ages of 12 and 19, he worked as farm-servant, drainer, potato-digger, and navvy, becoming one of the thousands of stray "tramp-laborers" who cross each summer from Ireland to Scotland to help gather in the crops. Out of his bitter experiences and the evils of modern industrial life, he wrote several vivid ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... 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 ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... wonder that the son and heir of Old Grim Barnes sweated. It wasn't perspiration. One doesn't perspire in such awful straits—one sweats, like a navvy. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... 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[Afrikaans]; sappers and miners, pavior[obs3], navvy[obs3]; 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; till the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... had passed the window, to let the curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend put away the pocket-book), he ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... There is nothing in the world like the smell of a Chinatown in a Western city. It is a grand battle between a variety of odours, but opium prevails. The mouth of West India Dock Road is foul with it. For you might as well take away a navvy's half-pint of beer as deprive a Chink of his shot of dope and his gambling-table. Opium is forbidden under the L.C.C. regulations, and therefore the Chink sleeps at a licensed lodging-house and goes elsewhere for his fun. Every other house in this quarter is a seamen's lodging-house. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... more than threepence. Other things were in proportion, and Essex to-day has quite a lot of nice new shops, unknown before the advent of the First Sportsman's Battalion. It is pleasing to remember that a Navvy Battalion followed us! ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... brims preposterously broadened out. The front of his shirt is befrilled and embroidered, and his studs are the largest diamonds; not even financiers in England wear such important stones. He wears a low collar without a necktie, but ties a silk handkerchief round his neck like an English navvy; an Eton jacket, fitting very tightly, brown, black, or grey, with elaborate frogs and much braiding; the trousers, skin-tight above, loosen below, and show off the lower extremities when, like the heroes of feminine romance, the wearer has a fine leg. Indeed, it is a mode of dress which exhibits ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... through the woods leading and dragging the Indian. I felt sorry for the Navvy, for I felt that his fear was not so much physical as spiritual. And it seemed no wonder to me that the Navvy should hang back from this sacrilegious treatment of his god. A natural wisdom, which I had in common with ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... "Navvy, you've sure got bad manners," said Lake, shaking the mustang's bridle. He spoke as if he were chiding a refractory little boy. "Didn't I break you better'n that? What's this gentleman goin' to think of you? Tryin' ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... part to go and purchase a pair of boots for the winter. Very few in his place would have been as thoughtful as that; they would have got boots somehow in the end, but not beforehand. This life of animal labour does not grow the spirit of economy. Not only in farming, but in navvy work, in the rougher work of factories and mines, the same fact is evident. The man who labours with thew and sinew at horse labour—crane labour—not for himself, but for others, is not the man who saves. If ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... Haxell, the carpenter, who was standing close beside him now, quiet a bit after exerting himself like a navvy in helping to clear the wreck, "you forgets as how the poor dear thing never recovered that spring it had ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of the gospel, we lay every laudable snare to induce men to learn to read and write. In doing this, spare time is occupied to the best account, and the enemy is foiled in some of his thousand-and-one ways of ensnaring the toil-worn navvy at the close ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... It would be worth the grind. I mayn't be the beauty of the family, but I believe I've got the best share of the brains. Beatrice would be proud of me if I took my degree. I must make something of this essay if I 'burn the midnight'. Miss Roscoe will expect me to turn up trumps. I'll toil like a navvy!" ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... witness-box, a woman came forward—one of the most extraordinary looking creatures that he had ever seen, thought Brent. She was nearly six feet in height; she was correspondingly built; her arms appeared to be as brawny as a navvy's; her face was of the shape and roundness of a full moon; her mouth was a wide slit, her nose a button; her eyes were as shrewd and hard as they were small and close-set. A very Grenadier of a woman!—and apparently quite unmoved by the knowledge that everybody ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... Clearly that the work will not be undertaken; that the building of railways will come to an end, and that the Irish peasants who have devoted themselves to railway work will go to England and try to find employment there. Once a railway navvy, always a railway navvy, is a well-known ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Irish 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... that the war in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... were the navvy!" said Ivan. "I didn't know that, but I at once made up my mind it was dangerous to meddle with Fairfield if he was watched. I gave him the slip, went back to Mr. Grell, and typed out a note to ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... the collier would all be paid the same wages. In another kind of Socialism there would be no wages, but all would be called upon to work, and all who worked would 'take according to their needs.' In another kind of Socialism the civil engineer would be paid more than the navvy, the opera singer more than the milliner, the general more than the sergeant, and the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... anywhere near it. We talk about the popular Press; but in truth there is no popular Press. It may be a good thing; but, anyhow, most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the Press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely interested; such as horse-racing. Sometimes the Press is about as popular as the Press Gang. We talk of Labour leaders in Parliament; ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... of comprehension. He was reasonably well acquainted with his comrade's character, and fancied he knew who had brought the doctor out. He knew also that Wyllard had been earning his living as a railroad navvy or chopper then, and, in view of the cost of provisions brought by pack-horse into the remoter bush, the reason why he had abandoned his prospecting trip after spending a week or two taking care of the sick lad was ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... 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; till ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... railroad north of the Forth was that between Dundee and Arbroath, hardly an hour long. Now the iron pathways are running in every direction, making grand junctions at points which had never felt the navvy's pick a dozen years ago. Here is one heading towards John O'Groat's, grubbing its way like a mole around the firths, cutting spiral gains into the rock-ribbed hills, bridging the deep and dark gorges, and holding on steadily ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... had burned itself into my brain, and I could go to the spot to-day as readily as I went on that occasion. There it was, lying among the grass, but not quite in the place where it had fallen. Apparently some navvy had found it, looked at it, and then dropped it. It was half-full of water, and here and there it was sticking together; but I took it up tenderly, and several times on the way back to the station I felt in my pocket to make sure ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... physical attributes as in the case of Mr. Webster. His general appearance and his eyes are the first and last things alluded to in every contemporary description. Every one is familiar with the story of the English navvy who pointed at Mr. Webster in the streets of Liverpool and said, "There goes a king." Sidney Smith exclaimed when he saw him, "Good heavens, he is a small cathedral by himself." Carlyle, no lover ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... opportunities of seeing the real life of a navvy while we lived in the shanty. Our men came from nearly all parts of the world—Russia, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the Dominion. There were also many Scotch and French half-breeds, as well as full-blooded Indians, among ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... choleric, obstinate, serene, with a passion for 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.... ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... work, to be so sensible of the indispensability of lookers-on, that they themselves have sat up in that capacity, and have been unable to subside into the acceptance of a proffered share in the job, for two or three days together. Sometimes, the 'navvy,' on tramp, with an extra pair of half-boots over his shoulder, a bag, a bottle, and a can, will take a similar part in a job of excavation, and will look at it without engaging in it, until all his money is gone. The current of my uncommercial pursuits caused me ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... of one—'that he that soweth and he that reapeth may 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, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... stubby mustache and looked the bunch over. "You know that country?" he asked, still doubtfully. "Them Navvies are plumb snaky, lemme tell yuh. Ain't like the Pueblos—you're taking a risk when yuh ride into the Navvy country. They'll get yuh if they get a chancet; run off your horses, head yuh away ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... now!" exclaimed her companion one evening as the navvies passed. And all three turned round, to find all three turning round. Alvina laughed, and made eyes. At that moment she would cheerfully have gone along with the navvy. She was getting so tired ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... this type rushed to the aid of syndicalism. Its savage vigor appeals to some artists, decadents, and declasses. Neurotic as a rule, they seem to hunger for the stimulus which comes by association with the merely physical power and vigor of the working class. The navvy, the coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back,"[12] awakens in them a worshipful admiration, even as it did in the effete Cleon. Such a theory as syndicalism, declares Sombart, "could only have grown up in a country possessing so high ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Richmond stands close upon its banks, within the barony of Desmond, and in that Kanturk region through which the Mallow and Killarney railway now passes, but which some thirteen years since knew nothing of the navvy's spade, or ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... others had failed. The conversation of many of them was very amusing. One man 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 ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the world as it wags, is a farm-labourer, an artisan, a mill-hand, a navvy. He has untrammelled freedom of contract to follow the plough on another man's land, or to work twelve hours a day in another man's factory, for that other man's benefit—provided always he can only induce the other man to employ him. If he can't, he is at perfect liberty to tramp the high road ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... him 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, women like giant butchers, with heaps and heaps ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... wi' his mehogany wheelbarrow, Cum dig the furst sod wi' his spade o' silver, He wheel'd it daan th' plank as strayt as a arrow, An' tipt it as weel as a navvy or delver. ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... have just been reading the first book that I've found that absolutely gets the atmosphere of the Western Front—namely, "The Red Horizon," by Patrick McGill, the navvy poet. It really is great. He doesn't spare the horror of the thing one iota, but it "gets one right." "Sapper" has a good picture of the fighting man, but a very bad one of the Front. McGill has got a pretty good one of the man and ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Jews in it are statesmen. It will be a success when the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps, when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen. When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has not risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his ease as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village, then indeed the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance. Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even, if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... thing to do, sir," observed a navvy who had seen the whole proceeding, and who afterward retailed it to Erle Huntingdon; "I don't know as ever I saw a pluckier thing in my life. Ay, and the poor young gentleman would have done it too, for any one could see he knew what he ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... aristocracy; where productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys or a coster's ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Bellinzona, again I went in terror of the new, evil high-road, with its skirting of huge cubical houses and its seething navvy population. Only the peasants driving in with fruit were consoling. But I was afraid of them: the same spirit had set ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... "Noddle, 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
... 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 ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... much—we stand too much outside his eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or any age. Here and there a good-natured cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded flautist or bagpiper, or a little street Arab, like the small boy who pointed out the jail doctor to his pal and ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... learnt from some physiologist who allows nothing to escape him; but those skilful slayers have no merit as builders of dwelling-houses. What is their home, in point of fact? An underground passage, with a cell at the end of it; a gallery, an excavation, a shapeless cave. It is miner's work, navvy's work: vigorous sometimes, artistic never. They use the pick-axe for loosening, the crowbar for shifting, the rake for extracting the materials, but never the trowel for laying. Now in the Eumenes we see real masons, who build their houses bit by bit with stone and mortar and ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... down the bed of the sluit a little way and came to an overhanging bank, under which, sitting on the red sand, were two men. One was a tiny, ragged, old bushman, four feet high; the other was an English navvy, in a dark blue blouse. They cut the kid's throat with the navvy's long knife, and covered up the blood with sand, and buried the entrails and skin. Then they talked, and quarrelled a little; and then they talked ...
— Dream Life and Real Life • Olive Schreiner
... colonel seems a good sort of fellow, and even the prisoners speak well of him. Then it is a comfort to hear that all that talk about the quicksilver mines was a lie, and the work is going to be no worse than a gold-digger would have in California or a navvy at home. There is no great hardship about that, at any rate for a time. If it was not for the thought of how horribly anxious they must be at home about me, I should not mind. It will be something to talk about all one's life. The first thing for me to do is to learn from the others as ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... the country was already overrun with floods; the railway system daily required more hands, daily the superintendent advertised; but "the unemployed" preferred the resources of charity and rapine, and a navvy, even an amateur navvy, commanded money in the market. The same night, after a tedious journey, and a change of trains to pass a landslip, Norris found himself in a muddy cutting behind South Clifton, attacking his first ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... our race had its childhood. Their virtues, and their sad failings, and failures, I can understand on no other theory. The nearest type which we can see now is I fancy, the English sailor, or the English navvy. A great, simple, honest, baby—full of power and fun, very coarse and plain spoken at times: but if treated like a human being, most affectionate, susceptible, even sentimental and superstitious; fond of gambling, brute excitement, childish amusements ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... over his kindly face, as if the memory of the bitter past was more than he could bear. "The two years that followed were crammed with poverty and privation; there was almost constant sickness in the home, and I could get no work except occasional jobs of manual labour, at which any drayman or navvy could have beaten me easily, by reason of superior strength. I left Bristol and went to Cardiff, hoping that I might lose my want of a character in the crowd. But it was of no use. 'Give a dog a bad name and hang him', is one of the truest proverbs ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... he leaped to his feet, seized one of the navvies about the waist, and there on the public pavement did a crude dance with him to the strain of the "Marseillaise" from the steam orchestrion. Not only this, but when the music had ceased he traded hats with the navvy, securing a most shocking affair in place of the new one, and as they parted he presented the fellow with the gloves and stick I had purchased for him that very morning. As I stared aghast at this faux pas the navvy, with his new hat at an angle and twirling ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Oxford next year; their best men have left, and they have to lick a lot of raw recruits into shape. Well, what was I saying?—when Cedric has taken his beating and cooled down a bit, he will settle to work like a navvy." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... noted that in the tap-room of the Nag's Head, where the blasphemy of the Divine name was a normal occurrence, Snarley, of whose displeasure everybody went in fear, would never allow the name of Christ to be so much as mentioned, not even argumentatively by Hankin; and once when a foul-mouthed navvy had used the name as part of some filthy oath, Snarley instantly challenged the man to fight, struck him a fearful blow between the eyes and pitched him headlong, with a shattered face, into the village street. But in the matter of contempt for the religious practice of his neighbours, his attitude ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... told us all their history. Not a possible drop of blood bluer than a navvy's could circulate in their veins, and yet their wrists were fine, their heads were small, and their general appearance ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... the close time, but uses illegal means to achieve his purpose, such as nets with meshes smaller than they should be, and the three-pronged spear. In the Tarn and other French rivers the fish have been destroyed in a woeful manner by poison and dynamite, but it is the rock-blaster and the navvy, not the regular poacher, who is chiefly to be blamed for this. Men who have the constant handling of dynamite, and who move from place to place, are rapidly destroying the life of the rivers and streams. Having noted a good pool, they return by night and drop into it a dynamite cartridge, the explosion ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... to the tune 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 participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... town was in flames, the other half pursued its accustomed life. In the mornings, milk pails could be heard jingling in the dairy carts. In a deserted avenue some old navvy might be seen seated against a wall slowly eating hunks of bread with perhaps a little meat. Almost all the presidents of the trusts remained at their posts. Some of them performed their duty with heroic simplicity. Raphael Box, the son of a martyred multi-millionaire, was blown up as he ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Indeed, he would have been violently assaulted by the mob, had he not been protected by the police. He proved to be an Irishman, named Hamilton, from Limerick, who had come over from Ireland five years before, and worked as a bricklayer's labourer and a navvy both in England and France. Latterly he had been earning a scanty livelihood by doing chance jobs. There was this to distinguish him from the other dastardly assailants of the Queen: he was not a half-crazed, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... the place they call Little January, y'know, there's a steep hill that gets wider as it goes down an' there's a gaslamp and a watchman's box where all the cyclists that want to smash their faces, and a few days ago now a navvy comes and sticks himself in there and no one never knew his name, an' he got a cyclist on his head an' he's gone dead. And against that gaslamp broken up by blows from cyclists they proposed to put a ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... the construction of the Carlisle and Glasgow road, he was very fond of getting a few of the "navvy men," as he called them, to join him at an ordinary at the Hamilton Arms Hotel, Lanarkshire, each paying his own expenses. On such occasions Telford would say that, though he could not drink, yet he would carve and draw corks for them. One of the rules he laid down ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... how does he live? The navvy is an inland navigator who used to dig dykes and canals and now constructs railroads. In the forties the navvies are getting 5s. a day, and for tunnelling and blasting even more, but they are a rowdy crowd, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Kaiser rides by to the castle after his morning exercise; and he sits his horse and manages him with the easy skill of the real horseman, and looks every inch a king besides. It is told of Daniel Webster, walking in London, that a navvy turned to his companion and remarked: "That bloke must be a king!" You would say the same of the Kaiser if you ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... eating, in dressing, and in undressing, and with Margaret. As a result, I feel the need for more sleep than I am getting. I scarcely read at all, now. The moment my head touches the pillow I am asleep. Oh, I sleep like a baby, eat like a navvy, and in years have not enjoyed such physical well-being. I tried to read George Moore last night, and was dreadfully bored. He may be a realist, but I solemnly aver he does not know reality on that tight, little, sheltered-life archipelago ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... awake; the streets were a-clatter with cabs; the pick of the navvy resounded; night loiterers were disappearing and giving place to hurrying early risers. In the resonant morning the young men walked together to the Corner. There they stopped to bid each other good-bye. John called a cab, and returned ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... time ago a navvy working in Sussex came upon a round object like a cocoa-nut which he flung carelessly out of the way. It would soon have disappeared for ever. But by an almost miraculous chance a man of science passed that way and secured the object, easily discernible as a portion of a human skull. ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the Finn. "Look my hands." He showed palms calloused, split, swollen lumps of chilblained flesh worn down and stiffened. "I bin seaman, not goddam navvy." ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... democratic 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 narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... work. Meanwhile it gets us a blowzy character, by shouldering roughly among the children of civilization. Skepsey, journeying one late afternoon up a Kentish line, had, in both senses of the word, encountered a long-limbed navvy; an intoxicated, he was compelled by his manly modesty to desire to think; whose loathly talk, forced upon the hearing of a decent old woman opposite him, passed baboonish behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly intervened; subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... growled Mosk, pushing a foaming tankard towards an expectant navvy, 'and what's more, sir, she's asleep, sir, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... more. Don't get to building romances about me merely because I have the instincts of a gentleman, Sir Henry. Just simply remember that Nature does make mistakes sometimes; that she has been known to put a horse's head on a sheep's shoulders and to make a navvy's son look more royal than a prince. I am Cleek, the detective—simply Cleek. Let it ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... a pleasant colour scheme. The track is so tidy that there are white quartz stones arranged along each side of the yellow quartz ballast, and where there is sand ballast it is patted down as neatly as a pie crust. R. says it is difficult to prevent the native navvy making geometric designs with the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... deduction of fee; I had the two hours' walk, and was all the better for it. Then the appetite with which I sat down to breakfast, whether I had done my coaching or not! Bread and butter and coffee—such coffee!—made the meal, and I ate like a navvy. I was in magnificent spirits. All the way home I had been thinking of my day's work, and the morning brain, clarified and whipped to vigour by that brisk exercise, by that wholesome hunger, wrought its best. The last mouthful swallowed, I was seated at my writing-table; aye, and there I sat ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... man I ever saw in my life, Archie. He looked as strong as a navvy; and his shoulders reminded me of one of those men one sees in brewers' drays. And his face was so red, and his hair, too,—that dreadfully red color, you know, that no one admires; and his hands, and even his ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... His voice was wonderful, his style was forceful, and his language was simple and direct. But after all, it was his striking personal appearance which made the deepest impression upon the men and women who heard him speak. It is told that one day when he was walking through a street of Liverpool, a navvy said of him: "That must be a king!" On another occasion Sydney Smith exclaimed: "Good heavens, he is a small cathedral by himself!" He was nearly six feet tall. He had a massive head, a broad, deep brow, and great, coal-black eyes, which once seen ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... days, as all who like Mr. Chevalier's admirable coster-songs are aware. Old Europe itself has become less tolerant of distinctions of rank; even Austria is becoming so. It is only in southeastern Bulgaria—and even of this I am not absolutely sure—that the navvy who happens to be of noble birth refuses to work in the same gang with the navvy who isn't; and that's what I call real "esprit de corps," without which no aristocracy can ever hope to hold its own ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Madonna his own special property, but would sell the figure, and go shares with all, when they got the ship afloat again, and reached San Francisco. My friend the carpenter thus artfully 'pointed his moral,' in order to make us work the harder at the novel navvy work at which we were engaged— strange, at least, to ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... convent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds; and he summoned the French Government, despite his old quarrel with it, to kidnap and send back the woman over whom he had no legal rights, and certainly no moral ones, with the obstinacy and violence of a drunken navvy clamouring for the wife whom he has well-nigh done to death. Beyond the mere intemperance and the violence born of intemperance which made Charles Edward's name a byword and served the Hanoverian dynasty better than all the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... was transcendently happy in his work; his mind was in it; no exertion, no care or trouble, was too much. He worked harder than any navvy, and never felt fatigue. People said of him—'What a wonderful man!' He was so genuine, so earnest, so thorough, men could not choose but believe in him. The sun shone brightly, the crops ripened, the hum of the threshing-machine droned on the wind—all was life and happiness. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies |
