Shovel

“ The snow was ice and turned the shovel aside. He must crack its surface with the ax, and it was hard for his frozen fingers to grip the handle. Only the sheer necessity of finishing the work made it possible for him to stand the pain. By the time he reached the soil deep below, he was so tired and so hot that he flung off his overcoat and his muffler and gloves.
The ground was like a boulder and the ax rang and glanced and sprinkled sparks of fire. ”

“ And the one in the rear always repeated the same gesture and pose, the planting of the shovel point alongside, the leaning forward against the face of the frozen snow, and the holding of the arms overhead as a protection against the stray bits of ice chipped out from above. ”

“ How secure it must feel, on those slopes never climbed by man, with the autumn rains months away, and the fire fighters like so many ants trying with axe and shovel to mark off on the hot forest floor a boundary beyond which the fiery tongues must not lick. ”

“ Then let it be a token for thee that, when on thy pilgrimage with thine oar upon thy shoulder, thou shalt meet a man who shall call the oar a shovel, that it is the place which the gods have set apart for the haven of thine old age. ”

“ Luckily we had a pickaxe and a shovel lying out behind the house, so taking off my sheepskin jacket and balaclava, I started off to excavate the hole which I proposed should form a sort of cellar.
It was a big job, and my servant and I were hard at it, turn and turn about, the whole of that day. A dull, rainy day, a cold wind blowing the old sack about in the doorway, and in the semi-darkness inside yours truly handing up Belgian soil on a war-worn shovel to my servant, who held a sandbag perpetually open to receive it. ”

“ What the claim means to appropriate is a shovel 'formed and mounted and constructed as described.' There is nothing in the form of mounting-that is, placing it upon the beam of the plow that is peculiar. ”

“ Some had coarse rakes, and one an old shovel, and they showed me the movable blocks, fitting like a large mosaic in a kind of trough, over which the débris is raked after a fresh portion of the hill has been sluiced. The fine mud settles, and about once a fortnight they lift the blocks and wash the silt. ”

“ There is a broken shovel at your feet and near by in the long grass you see the fragment of a sluice’s false bottom, bored through with anger holes to catch the gold and worn quite thin by the attrition of pebble and boulder along its upper surface. This is about the only vestige of the miner’s former work. Stop! On{282} the hillside yonder is a mound-like elevation and beyond that a long green raised line. One marks the reservoir and the other the ditch. ”

“ Then, forcing the shovel down as far as he could drive it, he brought up a dripping quantity of sand and small gravel, placed it in the basket, returned for another shovelful, and placed it with the other before handing the shovel to me.
“If there is much gold,” he said, “it would lie at the bottom of that eddy, where it would be swept when the stream is in flood. ”

“ The more ingenious, perhaps, are fashioning buckets or powdering tubs, or weaving skeps, baskets or snowshoes. Some, it may be, sit astride the wooden shovel, shelling corn on its iron-shod edge, while others are pounding it into samp or hoiminy in the great wooden mortar. ”

“ Ever since plows have been used,-and there is no secular history of man in which the plow and the hoe are not recorded,-we may safely believe that there has been an inclination, sometimes greater and sometimes less, in the shovel and mould-board. A perfectly upright shovel would be nearly immovable, except in a light soil and to a very slight depth, while one perfectly flat would be of little value. ”

“ A better choice is a flat-bladed, square-front shovel designed to lift loose, fine-textured materials from hard surfaces. However, even well-sharpened, these tend to stick when they bump into any obstacle. ”

“ Wherefore, when he spat upon his hands and lay hold of the long-handled shovel wherewith they are wont to shovel, he struck his elbow upon the wall of the shaft wherein he stood, and he poured the earth and the broken rocks over against the back of his neck. ”

“ With some iron utensils that I had brought from the yacht, including the iron coal-shovel and poker, I commenced making an excavation in the ground. I dug a hole at least four feet deep before I found anything out of the ordinary, but when at about that depth, my shovel struck upon something that was not earth, as I felt assured, and I soon laid open before my eyes the top of what was evidently a wooden box of some foot or two in diameter, but so interwoven with the roots of the tree that had evidently grown about it since it was placed there, that I was unable to extricate it. ”

“ He wrenched a shovel out of his hands, and then threw him down. Observing how the boatswain handled his man, he followed his example, holding the rascal down with his foot, while he menaced him with the shovel if he attempted to use his hands. ”

“ With pick and shovel he filled the hole. Then he loaded the gold on his horse. It was too great a load for the animal, and when he had gained his camp he transferred part of it to his saddle-horse. Even so, he was compelled to abandon a portion of his outfit—pick and shovel and gold-pan, extra food and cooking utensils, and divers odds and ends.
The sun was at the zenith when the man forced the horses at the screen of vines and creepers. To climb the huge boulders the animals were compelled to uprear and struggle blindly through the tangled mass of vegetation. ”

“ John took out the mineral-rod wrapped in an old coat, and Pete took the two new shovels and threw them over his shoulder. John led the way, and they walked over to the top of the hills.
“Accordin’ to my dream,” spoke John, “this is far enough west to begin. Stick one shovel down here, and the other we’ll use at the east end in the same way so as to keep track of what we’ve been over. We’ll have to change the shovel at each end every time till we get over to the edge of the woods.”
Pete pushed the shovel into the sand, and John undid the coat and took out the mineral-rod. ”

“ Botham, the space between the rows is ploughed deep, the cane tops tied up, and an instrument like a broad shovel, with teeth at the bottom, a spade handle, and two cords fixed to the body of the shovel, ending by a wooden handle for a purchase, is used by two persons to earth up the cane, the strongest holding the handle of the shovel, and pressing it into the ploughed earth, while the other on the opposite side of the plant, by a jerk of the cord, draws up to the plant all the earth that the plough had loosened. ”

“ In his own words, it is 'the inclined shovel mould-board B, formed and mounted substantially as described, and constructed highest at its outer edges, so as to form on each side of the standard A a recess c, through which recesses a portion of the earth may, after rising upon the mould-board, descend into the furrow in the rear of the plow.'
An inclined shovel mould-board, simply and alone, is not spoken of as an invention. ”

“ Sometimes we are told of a shovel being made red-hot and held before the child's face; sometimes he is seated on it and flung out into the dung-pit, or into the oven; or again, the poker would be heated to mark the sign of the cross on his forehead, or the tongs to take him by the nose. Or he is thrown bodily on the fire, or suspended over it in a creel or a pot; and in the north of Scotland the latter must be hung from a piece of the branch of a hazel tree. In this case we are told that if the child screamed it was a changeling, and it was held fast to prevent its escape. ”

“ I had no idea that any man could work so with a shovel, which seems such a clumsy tool compared with a spade: but a gentleman who knows the country and the people told me that, with their native weapon, Moonites will do as much digging in an hour as other folk get through in an hour and a half with a spade. ”

“ Of course, the object was to get out of the mud. When once a man's leg or arm was off he would no longer be able to handle a shovel, and would necessarily be [Pg 450] placed in an inside or cripples party and set to work picking oakum or breaking stones, with the result that, being free from severe toil and sheltered from the storms, they would not be so hungry. ”

“ The inside of the breastwork was to be revetted with frames of woodwork and expanded metal, and, in order that the parapet might be really bullet proof, the soil for it had to be dug from a "borrow pit" several yards in front. The soil was sticky and would not leave the shovel, which added terribly to the work; for each man had literally to dig a shovel full, walk five or six yards and deposit it against the revetting frames. Fortunately for us the Boche did not seem to object to our work, in any case he left us in peace each night. ”

“ The moment the door flap fell behind the man as he entered, the boy caught up the ball of light and put it in the turned-up flap of his fur coat in front. Catching up the shovel in one hand, he ran away to the north, running until his feet became tired. ”

“ For a first-class shoveler there is a given shovel load at which he will do his biggest day's work. ”

“ When digging, one man holds the handle of the shovel while two others do most of the work by pulling it with ropes. Except in cities which have felt European influence, it is the men who wear skirts or flowing bloomers, and the women who wear trousers. ”

“ The excavator or shovel, D, is a box of wrought iron, with strong points in front to act as picks in loosening the earth, and its bottom hung by a hinge at d, so that, by detaching a catch, it may fly open and discharge the material raised. ”

“ The iron comes from ore in the mines, picked out with small picks, one pick at a time. The ties on which the rails rest are trees that once were little seeds. The gravel of the road bed is made of heaps of sand, shovelled with hand shovels, one shovel at a time. ”

“ When the warders are looking, you can pass them freely, because they sleep with their eyes open. If they have their eyes closed, go not, for they are awake, not sleeping, with their eyes closed. When you come into the garden, there under the vine stand two shovels—one of wood, and the other of gold. But mind you don’t take the golden shovel to dig up the vine, for the shovel will ring, and will wake up the watch; the watch will seize you, and you may fare badly. ”

“ We men all went down to the foot of the fall, and threw out all the large rocks, then piled up all the sand we could scrape together with the shovel, till we had quite a pile of material that would tend to break a fall. We arranged everything possible for a forced passage in the morning, and the animals found a few willows to browse and a few bunches of grass here and there, which gave them a little food, while the spring supplied them with enough water to keep them from suffering with thirst. ”

“ Nature has conveniently left narrow shelves, crevices, and less precipitous slopes here and there, which need only the application of the pick and shovel to be made passable even for pack animals. Where the trail winds into shady recesses, we find stunted fir and pine trees clinging to the crevices and stretching their roots down into the waste rock collected upon projecting ledges. ”

“ Mainwaring told the boys that there is keen rivalry among the steam-shovel men. Prizes are given every month for the record amount of dirt that flies. Each shovel is pushed to the limit of its capacity. ”

“ How industriously these men are working. One is picking down the hard gravel, with a pick-axe: the other is taking it up with a shovel, and putting it into a sieve. All the small pieces go through, and the great stones remain. ”

“ So he got a horn, shovel, and pickaxe, and went over to the Mount in the beginning of a dark winter's evening, when he fell to work, and before morning had dug a pit twenty-two feet deep, and nearly as broad, covering it over with long sticks and straw. ”

“ And as the old hunting instincts had aroused that day in the wolf-dog, so in him recrudesced all the old hot desire of gold-hunting. Dropping the hammer and pipe-wrench, but retaining pick and shovel, he climbed up the slide to where a vague line of outputting but mostly soil-covered rock could be seen. It was all but indiscernible, but his practised eye had sketched the hidden formation which it signified. Here and there, along this wall of the vein, he attacked the crumbling rock with the pick and shoveled the encumbering soil away. ”

“ The young natives of the interior usually carry a small wooden shovel (see foreground figure, Plate 12 Volume 1) with one end of which they dig up different roots, and with the other break into the large anthills for the larvae, which they eat: the labour necessary to obtain a mouthful even, of such indifferent food, being thus really more than would be sufficient for the cultivation of the earth according to the more provident arrangements of civilised men. ”

“ Square acres of earth on the hill-sides may thus be swept away into the hollows without the aid of a pick or a shovel in excavation. Water performs all the labour, moving and washing the earth in one operation, while in excavating by hand the two processes are of necessity entirely distinct. ”

“ Women dig small holes in the snow, which they roof over with canvas and use for work-rooms in which to dress seal skins. In such cases there is probably some superstitious reason, which we failed to learn, for not doing the work in the iglu. The tools used in building the snow houses are the universal wooden snow-shovel and the ivory snow-knife, for cutting and trimming the blocks. ”

“ Fig. 2.—Ancient Paddle, used by the Miners on Isle Royale for moving Dirt.
of Captain William Jacka, and a cross-section of the blade in Fig. 3: a represents the upper side of the blade, and the ridge, evidently designed to strengthen the instrument, extends to within an inch or two of the end, and gradually and smoothly sinks to the level of the surface. This shovel was found within a few feet of one of the large masses of copper, in the summer of 1879. ”