i.e., industriously.
bef. 1775. “To be sold by the Printer of this paper, the very best Negro Woman in this Town, who has had the small pox and the measles; is as hearty as a Horse, as brisk as a Bird, and will work like a Beaver.”—One of Fleet’s advertisements in the Boston Evening Post: J. T. Buckingham, ‘Specimens of Newspaper Literature,’ i. 131 (1850).
1835. Ingham worked honestly, like a beaver.—‘Col. Crockett’s Tour,’ p. 73 (Phila.).
1852. You needn’t have no fears that they’ll feel any coldness towards the nomination. They’ll turn to and work for it like beavers.—Seba Smith (‘Major Downing’), ‘My Thirty Years Out of the Senate,’ p. 385–6 (1860).
1860. Do you duty, your whole duty, work like beavers to induce others to go along with you.—Richmond Enquirer, Nov. 2, p. 1/5.
1880. He was keeping his own counsel, but working like a beaver.—‘Southern Hist. Soc. Papers,’ viii. 65.
1882. Although nightly discovered, the men worked like beavers at “tunneling” in some other part of the camp; but I do not believe that a single one of those tunnels ever proved successful.—Id., x. 29.
1884. For three days and nights they worked like beavers [at tunneling].—Id., xii. 272.
1888. The soldiers worked like beavers to get everything they could farther from the water, upon a little rise of ground at one side of our tents.—Mrs. Custer, ‘Tenting on the Plains,’ p. 637.
