scraping

When I returned with the pistol the table had been cleared, and Holmes was engaged in his favourite occupation of scraping upon his violin.

The flat was accordingly pushed off, scraping roughly over an old embedded stake in the process.

In the first place, I was four years making the tools I possess, and have been two years scraping and digging out earth, hard as granite itself; then what toil and fatigue has it not been to remove huge stones I should once have deemed impossible to loosen.

Together, they spent the remainder of the evening carefully scraping away the erroneous ink and charting the true, unvarnished coastline.