"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Atlantean's beard glinted like metal as he shook with a grim, silent laughter. "These great retortii can shoot half a league and will blast any living thing in their path. I tell thee, friend Nelson, the discharge of even a small retortii will strip the flesh from a man's bones as a peasant strips the husk ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... moving trains by holding the ends of a rope stretched across the track in front of the engine, and with results which greatly surprised them When the lines were first constructed in northern Mexico the Mexican peasant could not be induced to refrain from trying personal experiments with the new power, and scores of him were killed before he learned that standing on the track was dangerous. In the United States the era of accidents through indifference to common-looking ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... grey little village, where civilians were still living, and then to a gate and a garden. In the cottage was a French peasant woman who smiled, patted my hair because it was curly, and chattered interminably. The result was a huge omelette and a bottle of champagne. Then came a touch of naughtiness—a lady visitor with a copy of La Vie Parisienne, which she promptly bestowed on ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... appeared worthy of all admiration, I grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a peasant's hut which did not present a very promising appearance, but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... precipitate. Nature gave him the warm and responsive soul by reason of which he became a part of all he met. Unlike most of his associates among the upper classes to which he rose, his sympathies could include the freedman, the peasant, and the common soldier. Unlike most of the multitude from which he sprang, he could extend his sympathies to the careworn rich and the troubled statesman. He had learned from his own lot and from observation ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... humdrum and prosaic. But remember that for almost thirty years our Lord lived just such a life in Nazareth, making ploughs and yokes; and then, when the younger brothers and sisters were able to care for themselves, snatched three years from supporting a peasant family in Galilee to redeem a world. And who was Peter ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... to place a dying person under the icn. One or more icns hang in the hut of each Orthodox peasant. ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... his suit of black velvet, drew sword and stood behind the shattered barrier. "Are you ready to run against this?" he asked. "Poor peasant, go back; what are ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... hair-dressing and ornament in the costume of the jingling belles of Nootka and the maidens of Nubia as in any court or coterie which we aspire to imitate. The only difference is that remote and unsophisticated communities are more constant to a style they once adopt. There are isolated peasant communities in Europe who have kept for centuries the most uncouth and inconvenient attire, while we have run through a dozen variations in the art of attraction by dress, from the most puffed and bulbous ballooning to the extreme of limpness and lankness. I can only conclude that the civilized ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... wild and open one. Rights of proprietorship may exist equally in both; but there is an important sense in which the open country belongs to the proprietors and to the people too. All that the heart and the intellect can derive from it may be alike free to peasant and aristocrat; whereas the cultivated and strictly fenced country belongs usually, in every sense, to only the proprietor; and as it is a much simpler and more obvious matter to love one's country as a scene of hills, and streams, and green fields, amid which Nature ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... so too in the manufacturing places of Normandy and other parts of France, especially those that produce no wine; and Champney, who doubtless studied from life, painted at Ecouen the picture of an old peasant-woman hauling her husband home in a hand-cart dead drunk; but, for all that, the French are emphatically a sober people, either constitutionally or from climatic or other reasons: I do not pretend to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... army upon the land, A navy upon the seas, Creeping along, a snail-like band, Or waiting the wayward breeze; When I saw the peasant faintly reel, With the toil which he faintly bore, As constant he turned at the tardy wheel, Or tugged at ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... into an inland road, which led him between pastures and fields of maize, gently upwards. On a height before him stood a house, which he believed to be that he sought; he had written down its unrememberable Basque name, and inquiry of a peasant assured him that he was not mistaken. Having his goal in view, he stood to reflect. Could he march up to the front door, and ask boldly for Miss Elvan? But—the doubt suddenly struck him—what if Rosamund were not living ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... occasion, however, although the Dobby's Walk[*] was within the inhabited domains of the Hall, the Lady Peveril determined to avail herself of it, for the purpose of shortening her road home, and she directed her steps accordingly. But when the peasant-boy, her companion, who had hitherto followed her, whistling cheerily, with a hedge-bill in his hand, and his hat on one side, perceived that she turned to the stile which entered to the Dobby's Walk, he showed symptoms of great fear, and at length coming to the lady's ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... hill-side, Willie Ferrars was holding the hand of the chestnut-curled, black-eyed fairy, 'little Awk,' who was impressing him by her fluency in two languages at once, according as she chattered to him in English, or in French to a picturesque peasant, her great ally, who was mowing his flowery crop of hay, glancing like an illumination, with an under-current of brilliant ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... engaged the fearful gaze of the boy were the figures of two ladies; red drugget cloaks they had on, like the peasant girls of Munster and Connaught, and the rest of their dress was pretty much in keeping. But they had the grand air, the refined expression and beauty, and above all, the serene air of command that belong to people of a ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... peasant lad's first taste of Kaskaskia. He could hardly believe he was there. The rapture of it at first shook him like a palsy. He had risen while the whole peninsula was yet a network of dew, and the Mississippi's sheet, reflecting the dawn, threw silver in his eyes. All thoughts of his grandfather ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... peasant came by, and when he saw what had happened, he took his wooden shoe, broke the ice-crust to pieces, and carried the Duckling home to his wife. Then it came to itself again. The children wanted to play with it, but the Duckling ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... to all outlaws in Nottinghamshire. But yet, I say again, Alas! For, though Robin Hood and his band may be outlaws, yet he taketh only from the rich and the strong and the dishonest man, while there is not a poor widow nor a peasant with many children, nigh to Sherwood, but has barley flour enough all the year long through him. It grieves my heart to see one as gallant as this Stutely die, for I have been a good Saxon yeoman ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... Tempel, a Saxon peasant by origin, later a skilled engraver, discovered with a small telescope, bought out of his scanty savings, an elliptical nebulosity, stretching far to the southward from the star Merope. It attracted the attention of many observers, but was so often missed, owing to ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... a young peasant woman of the better class and yourself as a small cultivator, I will mention to my servant that I am expecting my newly-married niece and her husband to stay with me for a few days. The old woman will have no idea that I, an Irishman, would not have ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... the whole world, my dear. Think of all the stories of little peasant-boys who have thus risen to be the companions of kings, whereby the kings were the parties most honoured. Remember the stories of Francis I. and Titian, of Henry VII. and Hans Holbein, of ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... first day that Chekhov moved to Melihovo the sick began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his door waiting. He would go out, listen to them and sound them, and would never let one go away without advice and medicine. His expenditure on drugs was considerable, as he had to keep a regular store of them. Once some wayfarers brought ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... up with slight material a complete little world of its own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the charm in the pictures of his school—in the wooded hill or peasant's courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... One day a peasant came to his house and Sholom went with him on his wagon. That was a wonderful day; he played hookey. The next day the rabbi, who believed in corporal punishment, expressed his views ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... from sacrifices that he considers useless or worse than useless, although the same exertions and the same sacrifices would, but a few months earlier in the days of his inexperience, have been met by him with the same alacrity that the ignorant peasant of Europe displays in obeying the orders of his hereditary chief in the service of ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... parish priest is not so frequently opposed to the law, as is his curate. The parish priest is willing that the landlord shall receive his rents, is not at least anxious, that he shall be dispossessed of his land. But the curate has ideas of peasant proprietors; is very hot for Home Rule, is less obedient to the authority of the bishops than he was of yore, and thinks more of the political, and less of the religious state of ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... the dilettante And idle dreamer; 'tis the poor excuse Of mediocrity. The truly great Know not the word, or know it but to scorn, Else had Joan of Arc a peasant died, Uncrowned by glory and ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... different social strata. In the servant-class in the country, for instance, pre-marital sexual intercourse, and even pre-marital motherhood, is far from having the seriousness which attaches to these things among the old peasant families firmly rooted to the soil. Among the servant-class in towns, the matter has a more serious aspect than among the same class in the country. On the other hand, in many artistic circles in the Metropolis, pre-marital intercourse, even on the part of women, is regarded ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... from the Pale and one Jewess from America in the ranks; there were Chinese girls, Poles, a child of fifteen from Trebizond, a Japanese girl, a French peasant lass; and there were Finns, too, and Scandinavians—all with clipped hair under the astrakhan caps—sturdy, well shaped, soldierly girls who handled their heavy rifles without effort and carried a regulation equipment as though it were ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... evils, life is a, 142-l. Blessings of trials, pain, sorrow, will be understood, 240-l. Blindness, misery, bondage, symbolized by the condition of candidate, 639-u. Blows symbolize Christ's betrayal, refusal of protection, condemnation, 641-l. Blucher, guided by peasant boy, saves Wellington from rout, 42-m. Blue Masonry, mistaken explanation of symbol of the weeping virgin in, 379-u. Boaz and Jachin explain the mysteries of natural antagonisms, 772-u. Boaz and Jachin, parallel lines, point in circle, represent Solstices, 506-u. Boaz and Jachin, symbols of the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... character-painting with a vengeance. Portrait of a Scotch laird by the son of a Scotch peasant. Carlyle's Boswell is to me the very man. If so, Carlyle's paradox seems as great as Macaulay's, for though Carlyle does not call Boswell a great fool in plain set terms, he goes very near it. But he keeps open a door through which he effects his escape. Carlyle sees in Bozzy 'the old reverent ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Legrand and the French maid awake. Juliette was serviceable as of old. She inquired of me sweetly what chance her mistress had and took my assurances philosophically. She would do her duty, I was sure, but I doubted the depth of her affections. She came of sound, sensible peasant blood. And this was what was needed at the moment, for we had to see to some breakfast, Legrand agreed to mount guard while I went on an excursion of investigation along the north shore. Here I was hidden from the eyes ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... about her, and the sea stormier, while hope retreated so far into the heavenly regions, that hope and heaven both were lost to her view. Thus, alas! the things in which he was superior to her, most of all that he was a gentleman, while she was but a peasant girl— the things whose witchery drew her to his will, he made the means of casting her down from the place of her excellency into the mire of shame and loss. The only love worthy of the name ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... steamer remained in each port to lionise the little towns we touched at, and to make such excursions into the interior as time permitted. In fact, except in the capital, there is not a really good hotel to be met with, although primitive accommodation may be found in the peasant ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked, the more ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... northerly extension of tropical Hackbau, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... the well, he met a peasant, and changed clothes with him, but he kept the sword, the three balls, and the horse-hair. He went into the town, where he took lodgings with a tailor, and kept himself in retirement. The prince gradually rose in the tailor's esteem by letting ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... most of his life in a sequestered village in Little Russia, where he tilled the soil and even wore the national peasant costume. When his son and only child, a poor widower with a boy of twelve on his hands, emigrated to America, the father's heart bled. Yet he chose to stay in his native village at all hazards, and to die there. One day, however, a letter arrived from ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I always meet with misfortunes. If I had been a good little boy, as so many are; if I had remained at home with my poor papa, I should not now be in the midst of the fields and obliged to be the watch-dog to a peasant's house. Oh, if I could be born again! But now it is too late and I must ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... wattled stakes, chimneyless peat-fires from which there was scarcely an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken peasant, with no help except shrine-cure! How was it possible that the population could increase? Shall we, then, wonder that, in the famine of 1030, human flesh was cooked and sold; or that, in that of 1258, fifteen thousand persons ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... as a peasant. Roture is derived from the Latin ruptura, the action of breaking the earth, and is the base of ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... still only a peasant she had been well content to dress in homespun and live as a peasant should, but after she became Queen she would wear nothing but the most magnificent robes and jewels and ornaments, for that seemed to her only right and proper for a Queen. But the King, who was of a very jealous nature, ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... from the camp. He spake, and at the word, Andraemon's son Thoas arose, who, casting off his cloak, Ran thence toward the ships, and folded warm 610 Within it, there lay I till dawn appear'd. Oh for the vigour of such youth again! Then, some good peasant here, either for love Or for respect, would cloak a man like me, Whom, now, thus sordid in attire ye scorn. To whom, Eumaeus, thou didst thus reply. My ancient guest! I cannot but approve Thy narrative, nor hast thou utter'd aught Unseemly, or that needs excuse. No want Of raiment, therefore, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... Ser Piero da Vinci, being at his villa, was besought as a favour, by a peasant of his, who had made a buckler with his own hands out of a fig-tree that he had cut down on the farm, to have it painted for him in Florence, which he did very willingly, since the countryman was very skilful at catching birds and fishing, and Ser Piero made much use of him ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... appointed to assist an invalid vicar, in whose home a regular vicar's cook kept house with her sixteen year old girl, whom she had from the old vicar. In the same year Poldl's mother was laid to rest and her son appeared at her funeral, where the robust peasant girls and maidens pressed themselves upon him. But he "withdrew shyly from every one of them and gave his hand to no one, as he obligingly might have done. He has always before this appeared like milk and blood," thought Martin, the ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... composed the libretto and thought out the plot. It's about a princess who grew tired of staying at home in her father's castle and going to state dinners and receptions, so she put on the dress of a peasant girl and ran away from the castle to see the world. She took some gold with her, but it was stolen from her the very first thing. No one paid any attention to her because she was poor, and she had a dreadfully hard time. But she was so stubborn ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... borrowed these from tradition and gave them literary and courtly shape. But Cendrillon or Chaperon Rouge in the mouth of a French peasant, is apt to be the old traditional version, uncontaminated by the refinements of Perrault, despite Perrault's immense success and circulation. Thus tradition preserves pre-literary forms, even though, on occasion, it may borrow from literature. ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... of all; for the meanest peasant has an advantage over the prince in the point on which we most desire to be free—that of the choice in his partner in life. He has none, but must submit to the wishes of his people, and trammelled by custom, must take to his ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... a time passed in this manner before I was aroused by the appearance of an old peasant around the corner of my rock, bending under a huge bundle of faggots. I addressed myself to him in the best Italian I could then command, and asked whether it were possible to enter the city—entrare la citta. He rung a bell by pulling a rope that hung down over the wall, and we went ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... bagnios, of which there were then six in Algiers, each containing a number of cells in which fifteen or sixteen slaves were confined. Every rank and quality of both sexes might be seen in these wretched dens, gentle and simple, priest and laic, merchant and artisan, lady and peasant-girl, some hopeful of ransom, others despairing ever to be free again. The old and feeble were set to sell water; laden with chains, they led a donkey about the streets and doled out water from the skin upon his back; and an evil day it was when the poor captive did not bring home ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... meals out of doors, or in "sun-rooms," where the light is strong, the dark peasant pottery, like Brittany, Italian and Hungarian, is very effective on dull-blue linen, heavy cream linen or coarse lace, such as ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... which distinguish a mountaineer, and brave and undaunted from his familiar intercourse with the dangers that attend them. He laughed at the timidity of his brothers. "Tell me not of such folly," he said; "the demon is a good demonhe lives among us as if he were a peasant like ourselveshaunts the lonely crags and recesses of the mountains like a huntsman or goatherdand he who loves the Harz forest and its wild scenes cannot be indifferent to the fate of the hardy children of the soil. But, if the demon were as malicious as you would ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... towards Kilcullen, I saw a crowd of the peasant-people assembled round a one-horse chair, and my friend in green, as I thought, making off half a mile up the hill. A footman was howling 'Stop thief!' at the top of his voice; but the country fellows were only laughing at his distress, and making all sorts of jokes ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes. This possibility is converted into certainty by farther observation, when they remark that, upon an exact scrutiny, a contrariety of effects always betrays a contrariety of causes, and proceeds from their mutual opposition. A peasant can give no better reason for the stopping of any clock or watch than to say that it does not commonly go right: But an artist easily perceives that the same force in the spring or pendulum has always ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... her maid came to help her to dress for dinner. Lesley looked at her with new interest. For was she not one of the great, poor, struggling mass of human beings whom her father called "the People?" Not the happy peasant-class, as depicted in sentimental storybooks: whether that existed or not, Lesley was not learned enough to say: it certainly did not exist in London. She looked at the woman who waited on her with keenly observant eyes. Her name was Mary Kingston, and Lesley knew ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... certificate of the refusal of burial; but then the peasant threshers began to make a fuss. "What! bury a corpse within our boundaries which has not been blessed? Why, then, as certain as the Amen to the Pater Noster, the hail would destroy our crops. And you need not try ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... which can be said to change the genuine Journal. One of the best criticks of our age conjectures that the imperfect passage above has probably been as follows: 'In his book we have an accurate display of a nation in war, and a nation in peace; the peasant is delineated as truly as the general; nay, even harvest-sport, and the modes of ancient theft are described.'] MONBODDO. 'Ay, and what we' (looking to me)?'would call a parliament-house scene; a cause pleaded.' JOHNSON. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... musician, who concluded by announcing from his platform a special dance in honor of the family of Dr. Mayor. In this dance the family with some of their friends and neighbors took part,—the young ladies dancing with the peasant lads and the young gentlemen with the girls of the village,—while the rest formed a circle to ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... or fur, tight leather breeches, and top-boots; making themselves conspicuous at fairs, markets, races, and assizes, and in other places where people congregated. They excelled in athletic sports, especially in the game of hurling, when they took the lead among the young men of the peasant class who engaged in it, and thus became identified with them, and could on all occasions rely on their support. Though the crime of abduction was punishable with death, as the girls who were thus carried off were in most instances immediately ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... the street clothes which they have seen. They are striving to conform to a common standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs to all of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasant woman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheap street hat. But it is easy to recognize the first ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... and she grew reckless more and more, Until the humblest peasant closed his door, And where she passed, fair dames, in scorn and pride, Shuddered, and drew their rustling robes aside. At last a yearning seemed to fill her soul, A longing that was stronger than control: Once more, just once ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... behind yon alien hills Whose heather-purple slopes, in glory rolled, Flush all my thought with momentary gold, What pang of vague regret my fancy thrills? Here 'tis enchanted ground the peasant tills, Where the shy ballad dared its blooms unfold, And memory's glamour makes new sights seem old, As when our life some vanished dream fulfils. Yet not to thee belong these painless tears, Land loved ere seen: before ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... he, Of stately halls secure; A low-born peasant she, Of parentage obscure. How soft the honeyed words He breathes into her ears!— The melody of birds! The music of ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... Zanthon, laughing in his foxy beard: "When Amine meets me in the plane-tree walk (Where pairing little finches seek to build, We saw the cuckoo thieve their nests when boys), Shall I then tell her, in my peasant way, Your broken promise, and her troth denied?" And he was gone—gone, with the stud he bought From Schamyl's son, up by Caucasus way, Leaving me solitude to reason with. Around me, then, an odor swept—the rose! It plagued my nostrils day and night, in gusts It blew, but one way only—towards ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... animosity, its constant menace and the hopelessness of escape therefrom. He gave me particulars of burnings and rackings, he described to me the torments of the water, the wheel and the fire until my soul sickened. He told me how it menaced alike the untrained savage, the peasant in his hut and the noble in his hall. I heard of parents who, by reason of this corroding fear, had denounced their children to the torment ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... their political rights. The elections, moreover, were not all held on one day, as with us, but consuls, praetors, and other magistrates were chosen on different days, while meetings of the assemblies might be held at any time of the year. A country peasant who really tried to fulfill his duties as a citizen would have had little time for anything else. In practice, therefore, the city populace at Rome had the controlling voice in ordinary legislation. The Romans were never able to remedy this grave defect in their political system. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... unoccupied, and, as we were informed, the day before the exhibition tickets are nearly always sold at a premium. The devotion of the Spaniards to this national sport is universal, from the grandee to the peasant. More than once has the attempt been made by the throne to bring the cruel business into disrepute, but it has been found unavailing. The taste is too deeply rooted in the masses of the people. We were told subsequently, at Madrid, that ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... were peasant people, and they hung on to their money by instinct; it was quite in vain that the agent hinted at promptness—they would see, they would see, they told him, they could not decide until they had had ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... gross blunder of the English public has been talking of Burns as if the character of his poetry ought to be estimated with an eternal recollection that he was a 'peasant'. It would be just as proper to say that Lord Byron ought always to be thought of as a 'Peer'. Rank in life was nothing to either in his true moments. Then, they were both great Poets. Some silly and sickly affectations connected with the accidents of birth and breeding may be observed in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... of Gaunt; about John Northrugge and Hanyn Narrett, I find very little; Simond de Bokenham was chief sergeant of the King's larder; and John Legge, who seems to have been really an esquire at arms, met his death in the Peasant's Revolt. ...
— Chaucer's Official Life • James Root Hulbert
... incomes—5 per cent [Footnote: Five per cent in theory; in practice in the reign of Louis XVI it was 11 per cent] on the salary of the judge, on the rents of the noble, on the earning of the artisan, on the produce of the peasant. The clergy were entirely exempted from this tax; the more influential nobles and bourgeois contrived to have their incomes underestimated, and the burden fell heaviest on the poorer classes. Capitation was a general poll or head tax, varying in amount according to whichever of twenty-two classes ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... it seemed to them to be uttered close by, as indeed it was, they got up to look for the speaker, and before they had gone twenty paces they discovered behind a rock, seated at the foot of an ash tree, a youth in the dress of a peasant, whose face they were unable at the moment to see as he was leaning forward, bathing his feet in the brook that flowed past. They approached so silently that he did not perceive them, being fully occupied in bathing his feet, which ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... picturesquely the difficulties of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had "seen ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... said to me one day: "you are only a peasant's son, but you know well your catechism and sol-fa, and some day, perhaps, if you are good and industrious, you ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of Northumbria, the Saxons of Wessex were almost foreigners. Even at the present day, when the existence of a recognised literary dialect has done so much to obliterate provincial varieties of speech in England, a Dorsetshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the classical West Saxon of AElfred, has great difficulty in understanding a Yorkshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the classical Northumbrian of ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... a little phrase the other day that touched me so deeply: it said so well what I have wanted to say since we have known each other. Some peasant rhymer, an Irishman, is singing his love's praises, and sinks his voice from the height of his passionate superlatives to call her his "share of the world." Peasant and Irishman, he knew that his fortune did not embrace the ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... lord is the peasant that was, The peasant the lord that shall be. The lord is hay, the peasant grass, One dry and ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... he had been attached from his infancy. He had often made excursions to it when a boy, and the impressions of delight given to his mind by the homely kindness of the grey-headed peasant, to whom it was intrusted, and whose fruit and cream never failed, had not been obliterated by succeeding circumstances. The green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom—the woods, under whose refreshing ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... how thy youth and fortune was wasted in those years, and triumph not in the enjoyment of an existence which levelled thee with the beasts that perish. Bethink thee how this poor man's vanity gave at least bread to the labourer, peasant, and citizen; and his profuse expenditure, like water spilt on the ground, refreshed the lowly herbs and plants where it fell. But thou! Whom hast thou enriched during thy career of extravagance, save those brokers of the devil—vintners, panders, gamblers, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... A peasant of Samara sent to a Russian editor, together with three colored eggs, a letter which he asked to have forwarded to America. The following is an ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... but Ibanez became master while he was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, La Barraca, or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia, studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge. It is not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a novela de costumbres, or novel of manners, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... heirs to thoughts that breathe and words that burn, we enter into the life, the acts, the arts, the loves, the lore of the wise, the witty, the cunning, and the worthy of all ages and all places; we learn, as says the peasant poet of Scotland, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... you two, my friend. Somehow there yawns between you a great, impassable gulf. You are as far apart in your lives as prince and pauper, lord and serf, king and peasant ever were in the world's history. It is wonderful, this chasm that yawns between you. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... feeling animates some of his noblest poems, and whether as an original writer—and no one could be more original—or as adapting and revising the existing poetry, he represents the essential spirit of the Scottish peasant. I need not point out that this implies certain limitations, and some failings worse than limitation. But it implies also the spontaneous and masculine vigour which we may call poetic inspiration of the highest ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... he said and did; they were accustomed to that order of things from the beginning and had no other thought; on the whole too, without doubt, they received regular and kindly treatment. Furthermore, there was no redress for the peasant in case of harshness; it was always the wise policy, therefore, for him to accept whatever was given without even the appearance of dissatisfaction. This spirit was connected with the dominance of the military class. Simple ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the boy will wel vsurpe the grace, Voice, gate, and action of a Gentlewoman: I long to heare him call the drunkard husband, And how my men will stay themselues from laughter, When they do homage to this simple peasant, Ile in to counsell them: haply my presence May well abate the ouer-merrie spleene, Which otherwise would grow into extreames. Enter aloft the drunkard with attendants, some with apparel, Bason and Ewer, & other ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... earth! Her large, meaning eyes, glow beneath her arched brows, while her auburn hair, laid in smooth folds over her ears and braided into a heavy circle at the back of her head, gives her the fascinating beauty of a Norman peasant. Annette plays around her, is dressed in her very best,—for Marston is proud of the child's beauty, and nothing is withheld that can gratify the ambition of the mother, so characteristic, to dress with fantastic colours: the child gambols at her ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... can wrest from the soil for their existence. Their plough, an heirloom from remote antiquity, merely scratches the earth. The use of superior implements would result in superior tillage and augmented crops; but it would be as simple to induce the peasant to change his religion as to get him to forsake the plough used by his ancestors. The implements of daily life mostly belong to the barbarous ages. Attempt to introduce any other and you are rebuked by the reply: "It ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... and hotels on a New York model, hears the same slang and much the same general conversation from New Haven to Los Angeles. But this monotony is superficial. Beneath the surface there are infinite strainings and divergences—the peasant immigrant working toward, the well-established provincial holding to, the wide-ranging mind of the intellectual working away from, this dead level of conventional standards. Where we are going, it is not yet possible to say. Quite certainly not toward an un-British culture. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... inherited a small property from his wife's father, and the toll on the highway being at the same time abolished, he bought the now superfluous house cheap from the State, and set up as a peasant proprietor. He had now a new source of pride: that this land, which he watered with his sweat, should bring forth abundantly; that his cattle, whom no strange hand might touch, should be the sleekest and fattest of all. Solitary and unaided he laboured in house and ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... you were something more than a peasant girl. Pardon me, I have spoken too familiarly. I knew ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom were in a very different position from the peasant communities of Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... stand the jolting of the car—and had to be left at a village and picked up by the party on its way back. They found him better, but still shaky. I cross-examined the particular officer in charge about that halt, and learned that Gresson had been left alone in a peasant's cottage, for he said he only needed to lie down. The place was ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... comedies of character, in which the foibles of some one central figure are held up to ridicule, particularly as they are revealed in his relations with a well-defined family group. The scene in such comedies, usually the home of a peasant or a member of the bourgeoisie, is pictured with uncompromising realism. Holberg insisted that his audiences should see everything that he saw. If a Danish peasant actually lay at times in a drunken stupor on a dunghill, he saw no reason why Jeppe ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... breasts; and, over this, a blue mantle, in which they envelop the upper part of the body, the head, and the face, and allow a part to hang down in front like a veil. Girls who do not always have the head covered, nearly resemble our own peasant girls. Like the dancers, they are overloaded with jewellery; when they cannot afford gold and silver, they content themselves with some other metals. They wear also rings of horn, bone, or glass beads, on the fingers, arms, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Hebrew peasant from the hills of Galilee, without learning, noble birth, or power, subverts all the philosophies of the world, and makes himself the central figure of all ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... multitude. To escape from these restrictions was to Mr. O'Connell and his followers an object of greater importance than that the multitude whom they misled should be tried only by the regular tribunals of the country—that the peasant should have the benefit of the jury, or of an investigation by the civil magistrate. The lord-lieutenant of Ireland had recommended that the whole act should be renewed, with the exception of the clause relative to courts-martial; but on the 23rd of June, Earl Grey received a communication from him, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Roman society and the sinew of the army and the State, were covered with herds of cattle and herds of slaves, and the substance of the governing democracy was drained. The policy of the agrarian reform was to reconstitute this peasant class out of the public domains, that is, out of lands which the ruling families had possessed for generations, which they had bought and sold, inherited, divided, cultivated, and improved. The conflict of interests that had so long slumbered revived with a fury unknown in the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... After breakfast, he found Tamihana at his plough: "The day was wet; he was soaked with rain and bedaubed with mud. The great man—for such he really is—was dressed in a blue serge shirt and corduroy trousers, without hat, and toiling like a peasant." The missionary was then taken to the school, where this Maori Tolstoi gave the children some practical problems in arithmetic, and a dictation lesson from his ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... shorthand amanuensis, or playing dice with a friend; a dashing youth driving his own chariot in professional style to the disgust of the sober-minded; a languid matron lolling in a litter carried by six tall, bright-liveried Cappadocians; a peasant on his way to town with his waggon-load of produce and cruelly belabouring his mule. If you are very fortunate you may meet Nero himself on one of his imperial progresses. If so, you had better stand aside and wait. It ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... were having this beautiful furniture made for their use, the peasant class was serenely going on its way decorating its furniture according to its own ideas and getting charming results. The designs were usually conventionalized field flowers done with great spirit and charm. From the peasants of Brittany and Flanders ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... is Giorgione? The son of some unknown peasant woman. And if Bellini wanted to adopt him, treat him as his son indeed, kissing him on the cheek when he came back just from a day's visit to Mestre, whose ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... giant in a slovenly surtout. "Bad luck to ye, ye gomerals, make up your minds whether ye're nine or eleven," he would say. "A man ought to know the size of his family: Mother in heaven, I never thought mine was half so large!" These attempts to take a census of his children generally occurred after a peasant had brought him up the drive—"hat in one hand, and Squire in the other," as the patter-song had it. At the moment of assisted entry his paternal dignity was always at its stateliest, and it was not till he had gravely hung his ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... monthly stage, The yearly march doth mete and guage And rustic peasant's messuage, Dost brim ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... home and another in churches, all now read the new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in the century of its birth. To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence of peasant speech. It runs like a golden thread through all our writing subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... he knows how to argue and chatter. A peasant knows nothing, he is a being unskilled even in cultivating the soil. But the agriculturist of the office is a farmer emeritus, etc. Is it then believed that there is ability only in the general staff? There is the assurance of the scholar there, of the pedagogue ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... While they were working the Boers gathered round us to the number of a couple of hundred. They were very silent, eyeing us with an absorbed interest that embraced every article of our equipment. Men of the humblest peasant class, poorly—in many respects wretchedly—clad, they presented, in their ragged and shabby apparel, a sharp contrast to our Yeomanry soldiers, who seemed, by comparison, trim and well cared for. The Boers wore their ordinary clothes, which were relieved by only one military ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... Margaret, daughter of Colin Campbell of Inveresragan, who survived him by a single year. By her he had the patriarchal number of twelve children, whom he brought up on the old Scotch system,—common to the households of minister, man of business, farmer, and peasant alike,—on fine air, simple diet, and a solid training in knowledge human and divine. Two generations after, Mr. Carlyle, during a visit to the late Lord Ashburton at the Grange, caught sight of Macaulay's face in unwonted repose, as he was turning over the pages of a book. "I noticed," ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... novelette written about 1250 by a man who calls himself Wernher the Gardner. The locus of the story, which is interesting as a picture of the times, is the region about the junction of the Inn and the Salzach. Its hero is a depraved young peasant, who gets the idea that the life of a robber knight would be preferable to hard work upon his father's farm. So he dresses himself in fine clothes to ape the gentry, becomes a robber and commits all manner of outrages ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... direction. A space extending from Otricoli to Terracina, above sixty miles in length, and on an average twenty in breadth, between the Apennines and the sea, containing nearly four thousand square miles, in the finest part of Italy, does not maintain a single peasant.[16] A few tombs lining the great roads which issued from the forum of Rome to penetrate to the remotest parts of their immense empire; the gigantic remains of aqueducts striding across the plain, which once brought, and some of which still ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... creed become wonderfully softened in passing between the lips of a mother. The cruel doctrine at which all but case-hardened "professionals" shudder cones out, as she teaches and illustrates it, as unlike its original as the milk which a peasant mother gives her babe is unlike the coarse food which furnishes her nourishment. The virus of a cursing creed is rendered comparatively harmless by the time it reaches the young sinner in the nursery. Its effects fall as far short ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... prisoners, had a companion attached to him. He was fastened by the arm to a peasant of Poujols named Mourgue, a man about fifty, who had been brutified by the scorching sun and the hard labour of tilling the ground. Crooked-backed already, his hands hardened, his face coarse and heavy, he blinked his eyes in a stupid manner, with the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... opened her door and saw the figure of a woman standing there, she was at first surprised, for the dress struck her at once as not being that of a peasant. ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... less confused. I see a little toothless head. From out the ragged beard comes a peasant voice, broken in tone, but touching and almost melodious. The man who ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... the stringy meat served twice a week at Mittagessen; and he smiled to think again of the half-rations that was the punishment for speaking English. The very odour of the milk-bowls,—the hot sweet aroma that rose from the soaking peasant-bread at the six-o'clock breakfast,—came back to him pungently, and he saw the huge Speisesaal with the hundred boys in their school uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down the coarse bread and scalding milk in terror of the bell that ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... I was but a poor peasant, and that I could not help him. All I could do was to advise him not to rest till he had found a copy of that book which had given me such wisdom as I possessed. I knew not how further ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... in the close coat dress, buttoned up to the throat, and finished only by a cuff at the wrist; but it is never so elegant, after all, as the style now so much in vogue. This season, the V shape from the breast has given place to the square front, introduced from the peasant costumes of France and Italy. It will be seen in fig. 1, which is intended to be worn with that style of corsage, and corresponds to it exactly. The chemisette is composed of alternate rows of narrow plaits and insertion, and is edged with muslin embroidery to correspond. ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... Peasant on the Right Hon. J. Lowther's Proposition—that he should pay "a farthing a week" on his Bread to ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... by burning alive the bewitched animal you in like manner oblige the witch to appear. This principle may perhaps be unknown to science, falsely so called, but it is well understood in Ireland and has been acted on within recent years. In March 1895 a peasant named Michael Cleary, residing at Ballyvadlea, a remote and lonely district in the county of Tipperary, burned his wife Bridget Cleary alive over a slow fire on the kitchen hearth in the presence of and with the active ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... instance, the portrait Madonnas by Gabriel Max. Here are no details to divert the attention from motherhood, pure and simple. We do not ask of the subject whether she is of high or of low estate, a queen or a peasant. We have only to look into the earnest, loving face to read that here is a mother. There are two pictures of this sort, evidently studied from the same Bohemian models. In one, the mother looks down at her babe; in the other, directly at the spectator, ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... uncertainly. And then, because his Scotch peasant reticence had been quite broken down by Bobby's shameless devotion, so that he told the little dog many things that he cannily concealed from human kind, he confided the strange weakness and dizziness in the ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... her mother's wish, but the heat and dust, together with her own intense desire to rescue the lost wand, made her tremble so that she had great difficulty in walking. They went among gypsies, fruit-women, peasant girls, children, travelling musicians, common soldiers, and laborers; the heat increased, and the dust and the noise, and at last Hulda and her parents were borne forward into the old ruin among a rush of people running and huzzaing, and heard the ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... were loading their muskets. Thence, introduced into a half-subterranean gallery, he became, on the part of those who had brought him, the object of the grossest insults and the harshest treatment. The officers perceived that they had not to deal with a gentleman, and they treated him like a very peasant. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The peasant shrugged his shoulders. "It is evident to me that you do not know the count. It is this way, colonel. What I tell you is the truth, and I am not afraid that you should test it. The Count of Chateau Noir is a hard man, even at the best ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... name, the restoration of the Chateau de Keragouil, half the year at Paris, in the Cercle Royale, in the regions of art, and among the great minds that were still young in the Quartier—and all that was in the possession of a plump Gascony peasant, whose ideas of comfort and pleasure were satisfied by one hundred and twenty ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... recognize such in them; quietly talking and drinking tea with dignity and care and biting their sugar with the force of explosions. They never put their sugar into the tea-tumblers. Later a man with a disagreeable face entered the room and looked around. This was not a peasant, I said to myself,—he would not take off his hat. The newcomer was evidently looking for me, as when he noticed me, he first bought some tea and a sandwich, and then, as if there were no other place in the room, picked out a ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... found that the proposed rebellion had commenced in various districts, and that already several peasant bands had proceeded to acts of violence. Immediately he thought that the castle of the Count of Furstenburg might be attacked, and he accordingly set out to warn him of the danger. Had he been able to write he would have sent Karl, ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... see them in the twilight: pathetic little round-eyed things of goblin shape, dimly luminous against the darkening air. Whence come you, little tender Thought, tapping at my brain? From the lonely forest, where the peasant mother croons above the cradle while she knits? Thought of Love and Longing: lies your gallant father with his boyish eyes unblinking underneath some tropic sun? Thought of Life and Thought of Death: are you of patrician ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... to which these ancient rites are still practiced as part and parcel of modern religious observances is not realized by those who have given no special attention to the subject. As spring advances, all ranks of Russians from the Czar to the humblest peasant proceed with their clergy to the Neva, where with solemn pomp the ice is broken and the water, which is held to be of virgin purity, is sprinkled upon the heads of Czar, nobles, and other dignitaries. The following is an account given of the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... him too. I went there the other day. I had something else to settle, you know. Well, so I sat and chatted awhile and then came to the point. "Tell me, Ivn Mosvitch," says I, "how's one to manage an affair of this kind? Supposing," says I, "a peasant as is a widower married a second wife, and supposing all the children he has is a daughter by the first wife, and a daughter by the second. Then," says I, "when that peasant dies, could an outsider get hold of the homestead ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... herself, who had made me write on a piece of paper the words "I travel to Naples" and my name, disappeared for a day, and came back with a letter, which she commanded me not to read then. Finally, in the midst of night, she led me out of the robbers' den and took me across a rocky path to a dumb peasant with an ass, which I was made to mount. She kissed my forehead and departed. When daylight broke I opened the letter, which contained a passport in my name, an order for five hundred scudi on a Naples bank, and the words ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... underlies all other considerations, and the appeal of our purest Rumanian blood which lies beyond the Transylvanian Alps has ever been the strongest influence in the public opinion of all Rumania, from the throne to the lowest peasant. Inasmuch as Hungary was the master that held millions of our blood in perpetual bondage, Hungary has been our traditional enemy. The Bulgar, with his efficient and unquestionably courageous army, on a frontier difficult to defend, has logically become our southern ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... quiet abeyance of faculties that was but a step apart from the normal intelligence of his kind. At his worst he was a stricken madman acutely sensitive to impressions; at his best an inoffensive peasant who said nothing ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Country is full of the most wonderful stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and scholars—of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and sea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot to a caschrom, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, would tell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunning regard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people of esteemed cultivation in the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... it!" cried West. "You cowardly cur!" And turning as the Boers closed him in, he continued, with bitter contempt, and speaking in their own tongue: "I suppose you are a specimen of the brave peasant farmers making a ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... peasant blood, had been an extraordinary woman. She, young as she was, had thought much, and felt deeply the sufferings of her class. She pointed out to the Marquis how the people were weighed down by taxes, and how little their ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... to the Vosges, from the marches of Schleswig to the Bavarian highlands, one peasant-farm neighboured another. The towns had grown no larger, for a new and happy race of men cultivated the soil: a lusty race, who flooded the cities with fresh vigour; a free race, loving its fatherland with a jubilant, willing, conscious ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... lavished upon Laurence, their only squire; for Maitre Hebert was far too distant and elderly a person for their little coquetries. Rosette dealt in little terrors, and, if he was at hand, durst not step across a plank without his hand, was sure she heard wolves howling in the woods, and that every peasant was 'ce barbare;' while Babette, who in conjunction with Maitre Hebert acted cook in case of need, plied him with dainty morsels, which he was only too apt to bestow on the beggars, or the lean ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not dismount and rest you, Sir Knight?" said the peasant, who had, by this time, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... or thyroid deficient, the cretinoid type, the type resembling the cretin, is fairly common. The peasant's face, with the broad nose and the tough skin, coarse straight hair, the undergrowth, physical and mental, a persistent babyishness and a retardation of self-control development, make up the picture. He needs an excess of sleep, sleeps heavily, needs ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... cannot, in these disturbed times, afford to tolerate princes of an independent turn of mind. Such men are apt to make the peasant think himself more important than he is. I dare say, madame, that you are already tired of Russia. It might perhaps serve your ends if this country was made a little too hot for your husband, eh? I see your proud lips quivering, princess! ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Norwegian philologist and lexicographer, was born at Aasen i Orsten, in Sondmore, Norway, on the. 5th of August 1813. His father, a small peasant-farmer named Ivar Jonsson, died in 1826. He was brought up to farmwork, but he assiduously cultivated all his leisure in reading, and when he was eighteen he opened an elementary school in his native parish. In ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Galilean peasant, in a borrowed upper room, within four-and-twenty hours of His ignominious death which might seem to blast all His work, who steps forward and says, 'I put away that ancient covenant which knits this nation to God. It is antiquated. I am the true offering and sacrifice, by the blood of which, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... disarranging their plans and delaying their journey. He urged them to go on and leave him, but they would not consent. Sometimes the Little Colonel slipped into the room with a bunch of Alpine roses or a cluster of edelweiss that she had bought from some peasant. Sometimes she sat beside him for a few minutes, but most of her time was spent with Hero, wandering up and down beside the lake, feeding the swans or watching the ...
— The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... as the direct connection of the name of the person with his power of change do we find extraordinary parallelisms between the superstition of the red man of America and the peasant of Germany. As in Mexico the nagual was assigned to the infant by a form of baptism, so in Europe the peasants of east Prussia hold that if the godparent at the time of naming and baptism thinks of a wolf, the infant will acquire the power of becoming one; and in Hesse to pronounce ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... lance shaft, so straight are they in their carriage. Their dress is a bunch of feathers and the third of a silk pocket handkerchief, with a copper ring around the ankle and another around the wrist. They do most of the daily toil, such as it is, though I know of no peasant population in any other part of the world who get a living as easily as these folk. The men allow the women to do most of the field labour, but when the grain is bagged the males place it in single bags across the back of a pony, and so take it to market. ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... house and his cook brought me some food. She was the only member of his household who had not deserted him, and together they were serving the staff-officers, he acting as butler, waiter, and valet. The cock was an old peasant woman with a ruffled white cap, and when she left, in spite of the sentry, she patted me encouragingly on the shoulder. The owner of the house was more discreet, and contented himself with winking at me and whispering: "Ca va mal pour vous en bas!" As they both ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... hand in hand, and sat opposite each other at the little rickety table, while the peasant woman from whom they had taken the house waited upon them. The day before, after looking at the auberge, and finding it full of artists come down to look for spring subjects in the forest, they had wandered on searching for ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... times there was a great difference between a clergyman and a layman. The clergyman was educated; the peasant was ignorant. The tables have been turned. The thought of the world is with the laymen. They are the intellectual pioneers, the mental leaders, and the ministers are following on behind, predicting failure and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... lay preaching over clerical. The most brilliant orators of the Christian pulpit are bad converters; their eloquent appeals may captivate the imagination and lead a few men of the world to the foot of the altar, but these results are not more brilliant than ephemeral. But let a peasant or a workingman speak to those whom he meets a few simple words going directly to the conscience, and the man is always ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... he (that was the name of the priest), "I pray thee go to my brother Anselm; thou shalt tell him that I conjure him to restore an ox which I took from a peasant," naming him; "and also to repair the damage I did to a village which did not—belong to me, by wrongfully imposing taxes thereupon. I was unable to confess, or to expiate these two sins, for which I am grievously tormented. As an assurance of what I tell ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier |
