United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They it is who, every spring, come down in large companies from their native mountains, to break up the heavy clods with pickaxes, and complete the work of the plough. It is they, too, who return to harvest the crop under the fatal heat of the summer sun. They attack a field waving with golden corn. They reap from dawn to dusk, with no food more nourishing than bread and cheese.
Behind a wall of stone and unbaked brick, that readily yielded to the pickaxes of the workmen, was discovered the stone slab which formed the doorway of the subterranean monument.
But as to OUR country and OUR race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion; as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat Bedford Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.
What a strange sight it presented in the brilliant morning sunshine! To the untutored eye nothing more or less than a vast rubbish-heap of sand and stones and broken rocks, with here and there patches of sparsely-clad natives working away with pickaxes and the tall figure of a white-robed gaphir, standing on a hillock of sand, watching them with unremitting care.
As I see my esteemed friend Joe Whitton, of Niblo's Garden, sitting right before me, I will give him an anecdote which he will appreciate. There is considerable barter in Salt Lake City horses and cows are good for hundred-dollar greenbacks, while pigs, dogs, cats, babies, and pickaxes are the fractional currency.
He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in another now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered London, which was short of water.
Two of them carried pickaxes in their hands, which they had been using to clear away the wreckage across the street. "Say, mister," stammered the abashed small boy, "is this the place?" "Are you a Gautier man?" asked Mr. Smith kindly. "Yes, sir, me and me father, but he's gone." "Give us your name, my boy, and report at the lower works at 4 o'clock.
We used to break into the old shafts and adits which they had made, and find old stags'-horn pickaxes, that crumbled to pieces when we brought them to grass; and they say, that if a man will listen, sir, of a still night, about those old shafts, he may hear the ghosts of them at working, knocking, and picking, as clear as if there was a man at work in the next level. It may be all an old fancy.
When we can definitely determine the centre of vital force, as exercised in building up vital structure, not in wielding pickaxes, it is to be hoped we shall be able to distinguish, by the proper correlates, vital force from that which is mechanical. But the task is manifestly a hopeless one with the materialists.
The infidels attempted to enter, and a sharp conflict took place; all the faithful repeating the creed of testimony, and swearing to die, rather than submit.... Their little troop being mostly killed and wounded, the assailants advanced close to the wall, which they began to throw down with pickaxes and hatchets, so that the sultan was reduced to the extremity of distress.
Word Of The Day