"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
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