The smithy was besieged for picks, for shovels, for iron ladles.
"Well, then," I says, "if we don't want the picks and shovels, what do we want?"
A dry chamois skin picks up the dust and grit and gradually scours off the fine finish.
Little Anne, aged scarcely eight, picks out the politicians of the day for her chief men.
In place of guns over their shoulders, they had picks and hammers and such stout sticks as mountaineers use in climbing.
When men drifted in to trade dust and nuggets for picks and flour, the fur-traders smiled, and rightly surmised that the California diggings were playing out.
The Crested Lark crumbles the mule-droppings in the road and thus picks up his food, the oaten grain which he would never find by soaring in the sky, his throat swollen with song.
How gingerly she treads, how carefully picks out the driest spots, lifting each fore-paw and shaking it with an air of supreme disgust, and finally, for the last few yards, making a reckless bolt to the front door.
When he is sitting on the floor she picks him up, saying "up." When she puts him from her lap to the floor she says "down." If he is naughty she says "naughty," and perhaps spats his little hands, and so on through the day.
'He puts on the baby's frock upside down, and, one day, I found him trying to feed her with boiling soup, and her mouth was scalded for days after. Then he picks up stones in the road and sows them instead of potatoes, and one day he wanted to go into the garden from the top window, because he declared it was a shorter way than through the door.'