"Tilled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a considerable distance, but the greater part remained as it had been tilled by nature, the want of assistance confining his efforts to a comparatively small garden; but he used to say to me, in ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... of this stout utterance he brought down his club on the head of the little penguin, who fell dead upon the field that his own hands had tilled. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... passage in the face of storm and wind. In their slender open ships they braved the elements on voyage after voyage. We think of the vikings as pirates, and so they were. But they were also diligent colonists who tilled the ground wherever it would yield even the scantiest living. In Iceland and Greenland they must have labored mightily to carry on the farms of which the Sagas tell us. When they made their voyages, honest commerce was generally in their minds quite as much ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... brown village, standing on the hillside, as if it had economically crept up there among the pines, so as to leave available for cultivation every inch of the wonderful soil of the plain. Below, the vast fertile plateau, tilled like a garden, lies to the westward, while to the east the rising undulations terminate in the bare uplands of Inca. Olive-trees cover the plain like an army, trees that were planted by the ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... King. Toland, on entering his country, was struck rather with the signs of good administration everywhere. No sooner have you crossed the Prussian Border, out of Westphalia, says Toland, than smooth highways, well-tilled fields, and a general air of industry and regularity, are evident: solid milestones, brass-bound, and with brass inscription, tell the traveller where he is; who finds due guidance of finger-posts, too, and the blessing of habitable inns. The people ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... no reply, so Peter quickly tilled the cocoa-nut shell, bore it to his companion's side, and ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... was in a little neighborhood consisting of farmers, who tilled their own grounds, and were equal strangers to opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primeval simplicity ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... the slave, crushed into the condition of the wretches who "labored, foredone, in the field and at the workshop, like haltered horses, if blind, so much the quieter." The base of the new society was the freeman who fought, tilled, judged and grew from more to more. He wrought a state out of tribal kinship and fostered an independence and self-reliance which no oppression could destroy. The story of man's slow ascent from savagery through barbarism and self-mastery to civilization is the embodiment of the ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... becomes too thick. All common bushes may usually be planted as close as two to three feet apart each way, especially if one gets many of them from the fields, so that he does not have to buy them. If there are not sufficient of the permanent bushes for thick planting, the spaces may be tilled temporarily by cheaper or commoner bushes: but do not forget to remove the fillers as rapidly as the ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... but when only a boy had been brought with the rest of his family to the banks of the Yadkin in North Carolina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came of age he married, built a log hut, and made a clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of his backwoods neighbors. They all tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters. With Boon hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... just as soon as mankind turned its energy to decreasing its needs instead of increasing its desires, the whole thing was easy. Chemical Food came first. Heavens! the simplicity of it. And in your time thousands of millions of people tilled and grubbed at the soil from morning till night. I've seen specimens of them—farmers, they called them. There's one in the museum. After the invention of Chemical Food we piled up enough in the emporiums in a year to last for centuries. Agriculture went ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... then Polly Ann called him a thief to take away the land Tom had fought for and paid for and tilled. The man was all politeness once more, said that the matter was unfortunate, and that a new and good title might be ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and shoreward drive the prey. Nay, no such violence our thoughts intend, Such pride suits not the vanquished. Far away There lies a place—Greeks style the land to-day Hesperia—fruitful and of ancient fame And strong in arms. OEnotrian folk, they say, First tilled the soil. Italian is the name Borne by the later ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... Rebecca, Finding her at last in Virginia, Two children dead in the meanwhile. We went by oxen to Tennessee, Thence after years to Illinois, At last to Spoon River. We cut the buffalo grass, We felled the forests, We built the school houses, built the bridges, Leveled the roads and tilled the fields Alone with poverty, scourges, death— If Harry Wilmans who fought the Filipinos Is to have a flag on his grave Take ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... have begun to be tilled and houses and barns to be built, the scared flying of domestic animals at sound of the terrific visitor,—the resistless chariot of civilization with scythed axles mowing down ignorance and prejudice as it whirls along,—tells a whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... pleas for inequality. The Pharisees themselves have organized communism in capital. Joint stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return to individual properties as the basis of our production would smash civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to you the particular length of rail, the particular seat in the railway carriage, the particular lever in the engine that is his very own and ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... gates of the park before the cafe? It was the preserve,—the hunting-park of one of the old grand seigneurs, still kept up by his descendants, the Comtes de Fontonelles—hundreds of acres that had never been tilled, and kept as wild waste wilderness,—kept for a day's pleasure in a year! And, look you! the peasants starving around its walls in their small garden patches and pinched farms! And the present Comte de Fontonelles cascading gold on his mistresses in Paris; and the Comtesse, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... the great Irish monasteries lived St. Brandan, of the holy brotherhood that tilled the soil, taught the permitted sciences, copied and illumined the works of the early Christians, fed four hundred beggars daily, though living on bread, roots, and nuts themselves, lodging and studying in unwarmed cells of stone. Once in seven years the people ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... wide intervals were shanties; the clearances in which they were set cluttered with stumps. How different now. Handsome residences have replaced the log-shanties, the bush has become a graceful fringe in the background of smooth, well-tilled fields. Like the ocean which keeps no trace of the keels that have furrowed its wastes, these beautiful fields are the speechless bequest of the men and women who redeemed them from savagery at the cost of painful privations, ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... we tramped steadily forward through the bright sunshine, along canals filled with clear, cool water, and across fields no longer tilled by slaves, until we discovered the secret path which led forth from this death valley. A moment we paused, glancing back toward the village, and up at the frowning front of rock, the tomb of the Natchez. Then silently, soberly, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... French, amounted to one-fifth of the rent, or 20 per cent. The wages of labour were from 15 sous to one franc a-day; but the labourer dined with the farmer, his employer. Most of the land was laid out in garden cultivation, and every where tilled with the utmost care. The soil appeared rich and friable; and the crops, both of agricultural and garden produce, were extremely heavy. The rent was stated as varying from 60 to 150 francs journatier, which appeared to be about three-fourths ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... an Editor, young man, pause and take a big think! Do not rush into the editorial harness rashly. Look around and see if there is not an omnibus to drive—some soil somewhere to be tilled—a clerkship on some meat cart to be filled—anything that is reputable and healthy, rather than going for an Editor, which ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... desire to see this fertile soil well tilled, for it will yield an abundant harvest. Mankind is dying in strife and despair; the torrent of human activity is everywhere seething and foaming. Here ignorance buries its victims in a noisome den of slime and filth; there, the strong and ruthless, veritable ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... richest and most productive portion of Italy. Piedmont alone vies with her, and is improving far more rapidly, but Lombardy has great natural capacities peculiarly her own. Her soil, fertile and easily tilled from the first, was long ago improved by a system of irrigation which, probably from small and casual beginnings, gradually overspread the whole table land, embracing, beside that of the Adige, the broad valley of the Po and the narrower ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... to him the lily is Christ, for Our Lord alluded to Himself when He said, 'I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valley;' and in these words, the field, meaning tilled land, represents the Hebrew people, taught by God Himself, while the valleys or fallow land are the ignorant, or, in ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... of the kind, although they sailed some three hundred leagues along the coast, nor did they see any sort of tilled land. This certainly could not be Cipangu or Cathay with their seaports and gilded temples. Whatever else it was, it was a land of wild people, savage hunters. John Cabot left on a bold headland where it could not fail to be seen, a great cross, with the flag ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... woman, or child, saving in cities or towns, nor yet see any beast, save foxes, wolves, or the ravening beasts." And barren and desolate as it was when Raleigh received it, it soon became known as the best tilled land in all the country-side. For he brought workers and tenants from his old Devon home to take the place of the beggared or slain Irish. He introduced new and better ways of tilling, and also he brought to Ireland ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... contempt for "merchants, advocates, town-orators, churls, tinkers, and base mechanic men, born not to command but to obey." Who were the people when the educated classes and the working classes were thus carefully eliminated? Hardly the simple peasantry—the boors—who tilled the soil. At that day the agricultural labourers less than all others dreamed of popular sovereignty, and more than all others submitted to the mild authority of the States. According to the theory of the Netherland constitutions, they were supposed—and they had themselves not yet discovered ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... too proclaim their story, and tell us of the Saxon folk who were our first farmers, and made clearings in the forests, and tilled the same soil we work to-day. They tell us too of the old monks who knew so much about agriculture; and occasionally the plough turns up a rusty sword or cannon ball, which reveals the story of battles and civil wars ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... admitted. "But the work was not so difficult ... Seeds of revolution are easily sown in land thoroughly tilled by forces of discontent. And what land has been better tilled? To vary the figure: England is all seething beneath a thin crust of custom and established habit whose integrity a conservative and reactionary government has ever since the war been struggling ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... to the feast. God's summons comes into collision with many wishes, but with no duties or legitimate occupations. The more a man accepts and lives upon the good that Jesus Christ spreads before him, the more fit will he be for all his work, and for all his enjoyments. The field will be better tilled, the bullocks will be better driven, the wife will be more wisely, tenderly, and sacredly loved if in your hearts Christ is enthroned, and whatsoever you do you do as for Him. It is only the excessive and abusive possession of His gifts and absorption ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... must be occupied and tilled by a people adapted to the soil and climate. The principles of agriculture must be instilled. What a wonderful ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... towns that I didn't see nor the villages that I took good care to go around. No! I crossed the ploughed fields; I leaped the hedges; I scrambled over the fences; I dug my heels into my nag; I thrashed him; I fairly lifted the poor fellow off his feet! At last I got to the end of the tilled land. Good! There was the desert. 'That suits me!' said I, 'for I can see better ahead of me and farther too.' I was hoping all the time to see the balloon tacking about and waiting for me. But not ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... they rode the hills for five days, falling in with few folk, and going slowly because of the rough ways. Thereafter they needed victual, and had been fain of better lodging might they get it; and whereas they saw a fair plain well builded and tilled, with good roads through the same, and knew that this was the nighest way to the Wood Masterless, they turned down thither at all adventure, and found no evil haps there, but that the folk were well enough pleased to make their market of the riders, ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... too dry and stony to be cultivated; but the slopes of some have fine grassy pastures, and the soil of the valleys is exceedingly rich, bearing figs, vines, olive trees, and corn in plenty, wherever it is properly tilled. With such hills, rivers, valleys, and pastures, it was truly a goodly land, and when God's blessing was on it, it was the fairest spot where man could live. When the Israelites entered it, every hill was crowned ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the (dykes of the) estuaries, whereby the waves of the sea are commonly checked among that people, are broken through by the greatness of the storm, such a mass of waters is wont to overrun the fields that it sometimes overwhelms not only the tilled lands, but people ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Tartar sway, rude, vacillating and awfully cruel, extended from remote China to the shores of the Baltic. The Roman, Grecian and Russian empires thus crumbling, the world was threatened with an universal inundation of barbarism. Russian princes, with more or less power ruled over the serfs who tilled their lands, but there was no recognized head of the once powerful kingdom, and no Russian prince ventured to disobey the commands even of the humblest captain of ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... tillage extended. I saw men dig up little fields entirely with the spade among the sudden rocks of Port-a-dorus. Some of the patches a horse with a plough attached could not turn in, yet they were tilled; there was not a spade's breadth left in any corner. And they paid high rent for this ground, rocks and all. They fell behind in famine time—not so very far—and humbly grateful were they for the help that came from outside in that time, and a mercy ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Horace. More interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT (1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of French citizenship; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The villanelle J'ai perdu ma tourterelle and the ode on May-day show Passerat's art in its ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... between reckless comfort and moody discontent. Let them be sure that they will help rather than injure the labour- market of the colony, by making the labourer also a small free- holding peasant. He will learn more in his own provision ground— properly tilled—than he will in the cane-piece: and he will take to the cane-piece and use for his employer the self-helpfulness which he has learnt in the provision ground. It is so in England. Our best agricultural day-labourers are, without exception, those who ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Woman had become less womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of God had been forgotten. But Socialism was springing up, a rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the Union Jack had not yet replaced the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... settlement had for now nearly four years been tilled by the squaws and young Indians, under the direction of the white men, and although the occupation was by no means congenial to their nature, the Prince had every anticipation that, with time and example, the Shoshones would perceive the advantages, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... pays five shillings a year. The Allotments you see about us, occupy some sixteen or eighteen acres, and each garden is as large as experience shows one man to be able to manage. You see how admirably they are tilled, and how much they get off them. They are always working in them in their spare hours; and when a man wants a mug of beer, instead of going off to the village and the public-house, he puts down his spade or his hoe, comes to the club- house and gets it, and goes back to his work. When he ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... solitude upon their waters, and the crocodile basks upon their shores; the thousands of acres which formerly produced rice for a dense population are now matted over by a thorny and impenetrable jungle. The wild buffalo, descendant from the ancient stock which tilled the ground of a great nation, now roams through a barren forest, which in olden times was a soil glistening with fertility. The ruins of the mighty cities tower high above the trees, sad monuments of desolation, where all was ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... nor so dense, Those savage wild beasts, that in hatred hold 'Twixt Cecina and Corneto the tilled places. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... describing in Paracelsus and Sordello. Once more Teufelsdroeckh travels, but this time how differently! Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of himself, he sees the world full of vital interests—cities of men, tilled fields, books, battlefields. The great questions of the world—the true meanings alike of peace and war—claim his interest. The great men, whether Goethe or Napoleon, do their work before his astonished eyes. "Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... at length arrived, there was an interchange of occupants and then we proceeded amid heavy clouds of thick black smoke which, for a time, the wind blew with us. Across the tilled fields are narrow paths leading to dykes and roads. There are many green ditches filled with water and in them we could see rather heavy splashes from time to time. These we discovered were made by large green bull frogs—really monsters they were, too. Of course we were below the sea ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... you might naturally infer that he must be a kid-glove soldier, and a little too nice and dreamy and speculative for the actual work of life. But you never were more mistaken. He is leaving behind him some of the finest manufactories and best-tilled fields in the world. Moreover, he is an admirable painter and, as all the world knows, an almost unequalled musician; or if you want proof of his genius for business, look at the speed and regularity with which he and his comrades have transported themselves ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... officials and other favoured nobles; and that eventually a democratic government and the increasing power of the people secured for them not only actual liberty but a real ownership of the soil which they had for centuries tilled for landlords who ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... where her forefathers had lived and toiled. Here were the orchards they had planted, the fields they had tilled, the streams they had fished, the hills they had climbed; and here was the house built by their hands, the chairs in which they had rested, the beds in which they had slept. Her former life had contained none of these elements of permanence. On the contrary, ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... livelihood. The Reformation at once checked alms-giving; so that, Selden says, in places where twenty pounds a year had been distributed formerly, not a handful of meal was given away in his time, for the wedded clergy could not afford it. The confiscation of the lands where thousands had tilled the soil under the shadow of the monastery or the Church, was followed by a new system of cultivation, which deprived the peasants of their homes. The sheep, men said, were the cause of all the woe; and whole towns were pulled down to make room for them. The prelates of the sixteenth ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... snowy peaks of Aidzu scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the sunlight. The plain of Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in the south, and the frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is a perfect garden of Eden, "tilled with a pencil instead of a plough," growing in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants, walnuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates; a smiling and plenteous land, an Asiatic Arcadia, prosperous and independent, all ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... love was for the soil—a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in it. Of Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast continually draining and devouring. Of all forms of government he was alike ignorant. So long as he tilled his little angle of land in peace, so long as the sun ripened his fruits and corn, so long as famine was away from his door and his neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with him, so long he was happy, and cared not whether he was thus happy under a monarchy, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... and resourceful men, to plant them somewhere in the Appalachian mountains near slave territory and from their mountain fastness to run off the slaves, ever extending the area of operations and eventually settling the Negroes in the territory that they had long tilled for others. He believed that operations of this kind would soon demoralize slavery in the South and he counted upon getting enough help from Canada to give the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... soil for bread, took arms and tramped; High-breasted to match men or elements, Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled: War's ragged pupils; many a wavering line, Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled, Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon, To jest at famine, ply The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field; Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents; Fronting the red artillery straighten spine; Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn; Over an empty ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... public career, without which few men can long serve the public with honor and success. And this was a principal reason of the former supremacy of Southern men in Washington; nearly all of them being men who owned land, which slaves tilled for them, whether they were present ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... third day thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth; six parts hast thou dried up and kept them to the intent that of these some, being planted of God and tilled, might ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... farm, and a snug sense of comfort and a home-longing filled him at the sight of the old farmhouse, its lawn stretching into gardens, its gardens into orchards, orchards into meadows, and meadows into woodlands. Through the long, hot summer he tilled the fields, and invested the proceeds in clothes and books for ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... of the rich and ambitious, and the small landed proprietor disappeared. Great estates called villas covered Italy, Gaul, and Britain. These were cultivated and managed by armies of slaves, who not only tilled the land, but supplied their master, his household, and themselves with all that was needed on the plantation. The artisans among them made the tools, garments, and other manufactured articles necessary for the whole community, or "family," ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... when the entire area of this noble valley will be tilled like a garden, when the fertilizing waters of the mountains, now flowing to the sea, will be distributed to every acre, giving rise to prosperous towns, wealth, arts, etc. Then, I suppose, there will be few left, even among botanists, to deplore the ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... cultivated for man's benefit, notwithstanding the Christians whom I bless are in the minority, the great mass of those profiting by me being wicked men. What am I to do? I will endure the conditions and permit myself to be tilled because my Creator so orders; meanwhile I hope for a different order eventually, when I shall no longer be subject to wickedness and obliged to serve ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... of the tilled fields in Goshen which, after having borne an abundant harvest, remained arid and bare till the moisture of the river came to soften the soil and quicken the seed which it had received. So it had been with her soul, only she had flung the ripening grain into the fire and, with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Syrian villagers perform their farm labours in common we shall see best if we watch them ploughing the land, and sowing corn. They go forth in a band from the village, and make their way to the plot which is to be tilled. Every man is armed, for beyond the cultivated land there is a great waste, or desert, over which bands of robbers roam at will, or there are rocky mountains in which they may hide, and set all ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... deplored the gratuitous distribution of lands, which by sale would yield large revenues. His often-repeated reply was the quintessence of Western statesmanship. The pioneer who went into the wilderness, to wrestle with all manner of hardships, was a true wealth-producer. As he cleared his land and tilled the soil, he not only himself became a tax-payer, but he increased the value of adjoining lands and added to the sum total ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... among the eight millions of negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasure from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your buckets among my people, ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... And, moreover, whatever labour town developments have demanded has been supplied by the muscle of its fecund ranks. It has been, in fact—and to some extent still is—the multitudinous living machinery of the old social order; it carried, cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian, and sometimes ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... rows, twenty-one to the task, each row being one hundred and five feet long. Tony staked off the tasks anew, throwing twenty-four instead of twenty-one rows into the task, thus adding twelve rows to every acre, which the people blindly tilled, never suspecting but that they were having their own way ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... hill where the copse was situated, a scene was spread out than which there could have been none more pleasant in France or in old England, or indeed in any other part of the world. A smiling, wooded landscape stretched into the far distance, broken into plots of neatly tilled fields, and intersected at one point by a river, which, winding between the hills and flowing sluggishly through forest country, disappeared in the distance, carrying on one of its banks the broad track of a railway. In the foreground, perhaps five hundred yards ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... the capital, were composed of two classes. That country had originally been conquered by the Spartans, and the ancient inhabitants, who were known as Helots, were held as slaves by their Spartan conquerors. They tilled the ground to raise food for the citizens, who were all soldiers, and whose whole life and thought were given to keeping the Helots in slavery and to warlike activity. That they might make the better soldiers, Lycurgus formed laws to do away with all luxury and inequality of conditions, ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... filled with mealies and Kafir corn placed in groups around the sheller. He counted no fewer than 12,300 bags, and knew that his share would total 6,150, representing about 3,000 Pounds gross. Could he ever succeed in getting so much, with so little trouble, if poor whites tilled his lands instead of these Natives? he thought. After all, his dear Johanna was right. This law is blind and must be resisted. It gives more consideration to the so-called poor whites (a respectable term for lazy whites), than to the owners of the ground. He, there and then, resolved to resist ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... foliage, handsome pendent cones, and a shaft exquisitely straight and regular. For so large a tree it is astonishing how many find nourishment and space to grow on any given area. The magnificent shafts push their spires into the sky close together with as regular a growth as that of a well-tilled field of grain. And no ground has been better tilled for the growth of trees than that on which these forests are growing. For it has been thoroughly ploughed and rolled by the mighty glaciers from the mountains, and sifted and mellowed and outspread in beds hundreds of feet in depth ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... on the other had a dozen curves, and came up to a point. With such irregular enclosures it was impossible that the farmer could plan out his course with the necessary accuracy. The same incompleteness ran through everything—one field was well tilled, the next indifferently, the third full of weeds. Here was a good modern cattle-shed, well-designed for the purpose; yonder was a tumble-down building, with holes in the roof ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... the sand and gravel do not come too near the surface, and second, that the normal rainfall is sufficient. On such soils it seldom fails to grow, is not liable to heave in the winter or spring, and usually produces excellent crops when these soils are properly tilled. It has special adaptation for being grown on calcareous or limy soils. It also, usually, grows well on soils underlaid with yellow clay ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... Anyhow, it was to save him five miles, and that was something in this accursed weather. The path was clear—he could see it squelching below him, pale in the last wet daylight—but where the devil did it lead? Into the heart of a moss, it seemed, and yet Brampton lay out of the moors in the tilled valley. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... of a piece," Belward said to himself, glancing from the trim hedges, the small, perfectly-tilled fields and the smooth roads, to Ridley Court itself, where many lights were burning and gates opening and shutting. There was some affair on at the Court, and he smiled to think of his own ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by the people. The lands belonging to the Sun were first attended to. They next tilled the lands of the old, of the sick, of the window and the orphan, and of soldiers engaged in actual service; in short, of all that part of the community who, from bodily infirmity or any other cause, were unable to attend to their own concerns. The people were then allowed to work on ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... wanton Luxury lays waste the land With difficulty tilled by Thrift's hard hand! Then dies the State!—and, in its carcass found, The millionaires, all maggot-like, abound. Alas! was it for this that Warren died, And Arnold sold himself to t' other side, Stark piled at ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Cave, "a good Indian" turned bad in one brief hour. Dear are the memories of that springtide. Many a glorious April have I seen in this land of sunshine, but none has ever seemed quite like that one to me. Nor waving yellow wheat, nor purple alfalfa bloom, nor ramparts of dark green corn on well-tilled land can hold for me one-half the beauty of the windswept springtime prairie. No sweet odor of new-ploughed ground can rival the fragrance of the wild grasses in their waving ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... country is well inhabited, and very well cultivated, particularly towards the bed of the river, which is here and there ornamented with trees. Numbers of villagers are seen on the road as spectators. Beans very abundant, mustard less so, excellent crops of wheat; the fields are well tilled, and very cleanly kept: this portion of the valley, though small, is perhaps the best populated and cultivated place we have yet seen: the descent throughout is gradual: the boundary hills, at least lower ranges present a very barren character, covered ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... such as lignum-vitae, fustic, bullet-wood, santa-maria, ironwood, rosewood, &c. The coloured inhabitants are unsurpassed as woodmen, and averse from agriculture; so that there are only about 90 sq. m. of tilled land. Sugar-cane, bananas, cocoanut-palms, plantains, and various other fruits are cultivated; vanilla, sarsaparilla, sapodilla or chewing-gum, rubber, and the cahoon or coyol palm, valuable for its oil, grow wild ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of the two men stood very differently. Angus Dhu had more than realised the expectations of his neighbours. He was rich—richer even than his neighbours supposed. More than half of his farm of two hundred acres was cleared and under cultivation. It was well stocked, well tilled, and very productive. Near the site of the log-house built by his father stood a comfortable farm-house of stone. All this his neighbours saw, and called him a prosperous man; and now and then they speculated together as to the amount of bank-stock to which ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... worthy couple, lived in a glass pickle-jar. The house, though small, was snug, and so light that each speck of dust on the furniture showed like a mole-hill; so while Mr. Vinegar tilled his garden with a pickle-fork and grew vegetables for pickling, Mrs. Vinegar, who was a sharp, bustling, tidy woman, swept, brushed, and dusted, brushed and dusted and swept to keep the house clean ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... seem Event and circumstance upon the earth, Though favours fall on those who none esteem, And insult and indifference greet worth, Though poverty repays a life of toil, And riches spring where idle feet have trod, And storms lay waste the patiently tilled soil - Yet Justice sways the ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a state of sober jubilation. His only brother, a lonely, unloved, and avaricious merchant in a small way, had lately died, and had left him money. The hundred acres upon the Three-Notched Road that Gideon had tilled for another were in the market. The money would buy the land and the small, dilapidated house already occupied by the Rands. The purchase was in train, and in its own fashion Gideon's sluggish nature rejoiced. He was as land-mad as any other ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free labour nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labour, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye fields and wheat fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... hill and dale greeted the eye of the traveller as he drove along the hard-packed highway, fifteen miles in length, which formed the connecting link between the two towns above mentioned. The land was carefully tilled, and the houses, generally speaking, were of a better class than were to be found in most rural communities in Upper Canada at that period. Savareen's own dwelling was unpretentious enough, having been originally erected for one of the squire's ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... thus permitted to live together by the owners of Amelia, who realized how much more valuable the children would be as a marketable group after some years of such care and attention as the mother would be sure to bestow. Milly, as she was familiarly called, reared the children, tilled the garden, and, being especially handy with the needle, turned off many a job of sewing for the family of her mistress. She was entirely ignorant so far as books go, but Paul read the Bible to her when visiting ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... in the neighborhood of Chinon, named Jean Birotteau, married the waiting-maid of a lady whose vines he tilled. He had three sons; his wife died in giving birth to the last, and the poor man did not long survive her. The mistress had been fond of the maid, and brought up with her own sons the eldest child, Francois, and placed him in a seminary. Ordained priest, Francois Birotteau hid himself during the ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... flying as of opening their doors to strangers, and indeed their rooms were scarcely furnished in a way to receive them. On the other hand, many farmhouses are empty altogether, and the land is un-tilled, because it cannot be let at any price, and lapsing backwards into barbarism. Everything used to be so fixed: there was a sort of caste of farmers. A man born in a farmhouse never thought of anything else but farming, and waited ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... one by one, and count their achievements. Begin with the first—the lord of them all— Agriculture. Six thousand years have passed since we were set to till the ground, from which we were taken. How much of it is tilled? How much of that which is, wisely or well? In the very centre and chief garden of Europe—where the two forms of parent Christianity have had their fortresses—where the noble Catholics of the Forest Cantons, and the ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... they themselves address. Near Esthwaite's foot exists a lonely spot, Named by the country people "The Priest's Pot"; A strange, deep hole, with crystal water filled, By land surrounded which was never tilled; Of spongy texture, yielding to the foot— Quite full of danger is this marshy spot. To this place WILLIAM once a fishing went, And, ere his patience was completely spent, Took up a fresh position; but, alas! His foothold proved but little else than grass. While sinking ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... on all hands admitted to be wholly harmless, and at times beneficial to the agriculturist. It is an undoubted fact that it thrives with the highest system of cultivation, and the lands that are the most carefully tilled, and bear the greatest quantity of grain and green crops, generally produce the greatest ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Arruntius were the consuls, the river caused another flood which submerged the City, and many objects were struck by thunderbolts, among them the statues in the Pantheon; and the spear even fell from the hand of Augustus. The pestilence raged throughout Italy so that no one tilled the land, and I think that the same was the case in foreign parts. The Romans, therefore, reduced to dire straits by disease and by famine, thought that this had happened to them for no other reason than that they did not have Augustus for consul this time also. They accordingly wished to ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... in front of his cave. The view from that point was a magnificent one. To the right and left, the bare and billowy leagues of Downs; in front, the vale, with its clustered homesteads, its threads of white roads running through orchards and well-tilled acreage, and, far away, a hint of grey old cities on the horizon. A cool breeze played over the surface of the grass and the silver shoulder of a large moon was showing above distant junipers. No wonder ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... the Rocky Mountains. Dry-farmers in that section will of necessity be obliged to adopt cultural methods that will prevent the excessive evaporation naturally induced by the unhindered wind, and the possible blowing of well-tilled fallow land. ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but that he was still full of ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... ye tell me that?" I said to try him; "coarse, maybe, as our father Adam, when he tilled his garden, and common as the poor humanity that is yet of his ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... was hoed the previous year. If properly tilled, such land is rich, free from weeds, and easily pulverized. Sod, plowed deep in the fall, rolled early in the spring, well harrowed, the seed sown and harrowed in, and all rolled level, will produce a good ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... 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 ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that she had so planned her summer as to spend it with her father, while of course it was going to be delightful to have her lover with her. So going she came to a most attractive lane that led from the road between tilled fields, back to a wood on one side, and open pasture on the other. Faintly she heard the shouts of children, and yielding to sudden impulse she turned and followed the grassy path. A few more steps, then she stopped in surprise. An automobile was standing on the bank of a brook. ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... agricultural community bent on industry, and, like the Hindus, even at this day, valuing as most sacred the cattle which form their chief substance. On the other hand, there are men who dwell on the outskirts between the tilled land and the wilderness, who are constantly making raids on the farms, driving off and killing the cattle for sacrifice and for food, and ruining the fields by destroying the irrigating works on which their fertility depends. And there is ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the monk to the gate which led to the so-called road by which Figeon's was approached. It was nothing but a rude cart track; and although well-tilled fields lay on one side of this track, the forest lay upon the other, stretching away black and dim ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... they bought him a small share in a fishing-boat, besides enabling him to rent the tenement in the Doctor's House, and to make it habitable with a few sticks of furniture. Also he rented a potato-patch, beyond the coastguard's hut, around the eastward cliff, and tilled it assiduously. Being a man who could do with a very little sleep, he would often be found hard at work there by nine in the morning, after a long ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... men are to rise up; new ideas are to bud and blossom; and there will be men with different ambition and altered policy. 7, Meanwhile, the South, no longer a land of plantations, but of farms; no longer tilled by slaves, but by freedmen, will find no hindrance to the spread of education. Schools will multiply. Books and papers will spread. Churches will bless every hamlet. There is a good day coming for the South. Through darkness and tears and ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... off without meddling with the stalk; there was no need of threshing and winnowing. None of the Old World cereals can be cultivated without much more industry and intelligence. At the same time, when Indian corn is sown in tilled land it yields with little labour more than twice as much food per acre as any other kind of grain. This was of incalculable advantage to the English settlers of New England, who would have found ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... the broad road—that leads to Besancon; we remain in the lesser one, here in the valley where the town lies. The beautiful valley! The green mountain-sides we keep to our right; on it are scattered houses, with large stones upon their steep wooden roofs, and with little gardens tilled with plum-trees. Steep cliff-walls shut in the valley; there stands up a crag; if thou climbest it thou canst look straight into France: one sees a plain, flat like the Danish plains. In the valley ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... land. Never yet had more wretchedness been in the land, nor ever did heathen men do worse than they did; for oftentimes they forbore neither church nor churchyard, but took all the property that was therein and then burned the church and all together.... However a man tilled, the earth bare no corn; for the land was all fordone by such deeds; and they said openly that Christ and his ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... said by Professor Huxley; though, in justice to myself, I must add that their complete opposites had likewise been said by him. But the office which I here proposed to myself was mainly that of an eclectic, who, going over a field which another husbandman has tilled, separates the wheat from the tares, and binds up the former into shapely and easily portable sheaves; and no more satisfactory assurance can be given of my having been usefully employed in such subordinate capacity than that Professor Huxley, who, amongst all his numerous admirers, has ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... in the direction of restoring the soil to its once high state of fertilization. Owning this farm, we had the "Big House" where the master once lived, and several of the slave cabins, which still remain, where the slaves resided. Hundreds of slaves, I have been told, tilled this soil in the days long ago, when its productive power was greater than that of any estate in this ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... Iceland nearly a thousand years ago, he would have found the island full of busy, industrious people, who made the most of their short summer, and tilled the ground so well that they generally reaped a golden harvest. Many of the families were akin, and had fled some sixty years earlier from Norway and the islands of the sea because the king, Harald Fairhair, had introduced new laws, which displeased ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... tombs of ancient men; all about them, undulant to the far horizon, a brown wilderness dotted with ruins. Ruins of villas, of farms, of temples, with here and there a church or a monastery that told of the newer time. Olives in scant patches, a lost vineyard, a speck of tilled soil, proved that men still laboured amid this vast and awful silence, but rarely was a human figure visible. As they approached the city, marshy ground and stagnant pools lay on either hand, causing them to glance sadly at those great aqueducts, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... of those acts exceeds, on a moderate calculation, ten thousand square miles. How many square miles, which were formerly uncultivated or ill cultivated, have, during the same period, been fenced and carefully tilled by the proprietors without any application to the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems highly probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of little more than a century, turned from a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the villeins—a sentiment which very few indeed would have dreamed of sharing with him. The labourers on the land were serfs, and had no feelings,—that is, none that could be recognised by the upper classes. They were liable to be sold with the land which they tilled; nor could they leave their "hundred" without a passport. Their sons might not be educated to anything but agriculture; their daughters could not be married without paying a fine to the master. Worse things than these are told of some, ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... to them by their sovereign; and many beys and agas have bequeathed their names in perpetuity to the richest villages on the Messenian and Thessalian plains, to remind the modern peasant that his Christian ancestors once tilled the soil as serfs of a Moslem timariot. But the sultan, unlike his western contemporaries, was not content with irregular troops, and the serf-communes of Greece had to deliver up a fifth of their male children every fourth year to be trained at Constantinople as professional soldiers and fanatical ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... in her life that May Beverly had found herself mastered by an enthusiasm. The consciousness of it suddenly seized her and tilled her with a curious misgiving. She knelt down upon the floor of the balcony, and, leaning her forehead against the cushion of the balustrade, she tried to collect her thoughts, to ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... the Irish will forgive me) greener than Erin's Isle. The methods of cacao cultivation in vogue there might seem natural to the British farmer, but they are considered remarkable by cacao planters, for in Grenada the soil on which the trees grow is forked or tilled. Possibly from this follows the equally remarkable corollary that the cacao trees flourish without a single shade tree. The preparation of the bean receives as much care as the cultivation of the tree, and the cacao which comes from the estates has an unvaried constancy of quality, not ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... of hearing while the gray-head yelled something about a dance at the Bay of Bulls and a dead man in the foc'sle. Harvey shuddered. He had seen the sloven tilled decks ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had a favorite cow. This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one, for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of kicking. She would kick all day and ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... having been induced by the representations of my father's uncle, Thomas Gainor, then living in Albany, N. Y., to try their fortunes in the New World: They were born and reared in the County Cavan, Ireland, where from early manhood my father had tilled a leasehold on the estate of Cherrymoult; and the sale of this leasehold provided him with means to seek a new home across the sea. My parents were blood relations—cousins in the second degree—my mother, whose maiden name was Minor, having descended from ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... Brunswick, rang for mass at early morning, and for vespers at sunset. Rale's leisure hours were few. He preached, exhorted, catechised the young converts, counselled their seniors for this world and the next, nursed them in sickness, composed their quarrels, tilled his own garden, cut his own firewood, cooked his own food, which was of Indian corn, or, at a pinch, of roots and acorns, worked at his Abenaki vocabulary, and, being expert at handicraft, made ornaments for the church, or moulded candles from the fruit of the bayberry, or wax-myrtle.[233] ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... and the broad ocean laves The Latian coast where sprung the Epic war, 'Arms and the Man,' whose reascending star Rose o'er an empire,—but beneath thy right Tully reposed from Rome;—and where yon bar Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight, The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... of this additional tract, which only stood in need of proper irrigation to become highly productive, had the advantage of increasing considerably the extent of the arable land of Egypt. In many places we still find evidence of its having been tilled by the ancient inhabitants, even to the late time of the Roman empire; and in some parts of the Fyoom the vestiges of beds and channels for irrigation, as well as the roots of vines, are found in sites lying far above the level of ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when, in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire: the rich land tilled with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows—I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire—an image of a great agony—the agony of the Cross. It has stood, perhaps, by the clustering apple-blossoms, or in ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... chestnuts. He fed some of them to my horse. It is their one crop. Many people have nothing but twenty or thirty or forty acres of chestnuts and a little garden—a little garden made by retaining walls making a terrace that must be tilled by hand. That is the whole sustenance of the people. The value of the land is usually estimated on a tree basis, and very seldom put on a land basis. The value of land covered with trees is from two hundred to three hundred dollars an acre, and land along side ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... guilds on the towns, and called it "tenserie"; and when the wretched men had no more to give, then they plundered and burned all the towns; that well thou mightest go a whole day's journey and never shouldest thou find a man sitting in a town, nor the land tilled. Then was corn dear, and flesh, and cheese, and butter; for none was there in the land. Wretched men starved of hunger. Some had recourse to alms, who were for a while rich men, and some fled out of the land. Never yet was there more wretchedness ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II in 1861 had done little more than substitute economic for legal slavery; for the emancipated peasants were only given as proprietors the refuse of the land they had tilled as serfs, and for it they had to pay tribute calculated upon the value of their labour when applied to the richer soil of their lords. Freedom therefore meant unavoidable penury, but the demand of the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... show that we are emerging from the region of complete destitution and approaching a land of at least struggling civilisation. At last, and by a transition that is not always easy to mark, the scene glides into those rich pasture-lands and well-tilled farms that form the wealth of the midland counties. Gentlemen's seats and waving plantations succeed, and we are in a country of comfort ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... was Caesar Pharamond himself said this to me: and I deduce the shadow of a crown has led him into an ugly pickle, for all that he is the mightiest monarch in the world. And I would not change with Caesar Pharamond, not I who am a respectable pawnbroker, with my home in fee and my bit of tilled land. Well, this is a queer world, to be sure: and this garden is visited by no stranger things than pop into a man's mind ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... generations on the soil. It was like skipping two centuries and getting back where life was primitive from necessity. There were few if any complications here, nor were there subtleties to consider. As far back as he knew anything of his Thorley ancestors, they had hewed and hacked and delved and tilled on and about this hillside, getting their changes from its seasons, their food from its products, their science from its bird-life and beast-life, their arts and their simples, their dyes and their drinks from its ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... have no stockings to empty. The misery is frightful, I must admit it. Those who have any money prefer to spend it in the towns in a petty way rather than to risk it in agricultural or manufacturing enterprise. Factories are but slowly built, and the land is almost everywhere tilled in the same primitive manner as it was two thousand years ago. And then, too, take Rome—Rome, which didn't make Italy, but which Italy made its capital to satisfy an ardent, overpowering desire—Rome, which is still but a splendid bit of scenery, picturing the glory of the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... which is supposed to dim the eye, seemed to improve the ocular views of Joel Newschool amazingly, for he had been enabled in his late years to see that a vast difference of caste existed between those that tilled the soil, wielded the sledge hammer, or drove the jack-plane, and those that were merely the idle spectators of such operations. He no longer groped in the darkness of men who believed in such fallacies as that wealth gave man no superiority over ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... face of the girl. At last he said to himself: "Look here! She is not a baby. She is nearly twenty years old. I have been wondering why her face was so steady and wise." The thought that she was not a child tilled his heart with pleasure and his face with light. But his volubility seemed to die suddenly away. He sat for a good while in silence, and started a little as she looked ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... house-fronts gaping doorless and windowless, more walls with ragged rents, and tumbled heaps of brick lying under the yawning black holes. But the grass is still green, and the trees thick with foliage, the fields neatly ploughed and tilled and cultivated, with here and there a staring notice planted on the edge of a field, where the long, straight drills are sprinkled with budding green—'Crops sown. Do not walk here.' Altogether there is little sign of the heavy hand of war upon the country, ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... blessed Southland is being pushed forward vigorously to-day by the monetary backing of Wall Street. The vast fields of the fertile West, luxurious in the beauty and rich in the promise of tasselled corn and bearded grain, are tilled and harvested by helpful loans from Wall Street. Old railroads, run down in their physical condition and thereby seriously impaired for public service, are constantly being rehabilitated with Wall Street money, while eight out of every ten new ones draw the means for their construction ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... by the wayside,—the remains of temples and monuments when the land was in its prime. You scarce take note of the scattered and stunted olives which are dying through age. The fields are wretchedly tilled, where tilled at all. The country appears to grow only the more desolate, and the silence the more dreary and unsupportable, as you advance. "Roma! Roma!" is chanted forth in melancholy tones by the postilion. "Roma" is graven on the milestones; ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... in a garden Of aster and golden-rod, Tilled by the rain and the sunshine, And sown by the hand of God,— An old New England pasture Abandoned to peace and time, And by the magic of beauty Reclaimed ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... 12 miles north-east, over a plain of fine soil, more scantily tilled than any we saw on the other side of the Ghagra, but well studded with groves and fine single trees, and with excellent crops on the lands actually under tillage. One cause assigned for so much fine land lying waste is, that the Rajpoot tallookdars, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... one-time "great abundance" of hatchets. Such is not the case at any other permanent prehistoric site in the general region, where pestles and hatchets continue to be found even in streets, as well as in yards, and well-tilled gardens. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the Fathers. In 1617 all the buildings which had been erected at Quebec lay by the water's edge. Hebert was the first to make a clearing on the heights. His first domain covered less than ten acres, but it was well tilled. He built a stone house, which was thirty-eight feet by nineteen. Besides making a garden, he planted apple-trees and vines. He also managed to support some cattle. When one considers what all this means in terms ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... extreme. My men could never cease admiring its capability for raising their corn ('Holcus sorghum'), and despising the comparatively limited cultivation of the inhabitants. The Portuguese informed me that no manure is ever needed, but that, the more the ground is tilled, the better it yields. Virgin soil does not give such a heavy crop as an old garden, and, judging from the size of the maize and manioc in the latter, I can readily believe the statement. Cattle do well, too. Viewing the valley ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... dust it swept before it. The dread of going forth to face an unknown future had stolen into every heart, and many a man who had waved his staff full of trust and joyful enterprise was now held, as if with clamps and fetters, to his well-tilled garden, the home of his ancestors, and the harvest in the fields, which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sank in and left a very deep gap, and about four miles from here the earth opened itself like a gulf in the mountain, and threw out a sudden and immense flood of water which scoured the whole of a little valley of the tilled soil, vineyards and houses, and did the greatest mischief, wherever ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... he should eat and earn his bread. Again it is to be observed, that the wants of these people are very few: they live on ghaseb and milk, eating little meat; these come to them almost without labour. The ground is tilled by burning the stubble of the previous year, or by burning the trees on new land. The seed is thrown in when the rain begins, and nothing more is done till the grain is ripe for the sickle, when it is gathered in. It is collected under small sheds made ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... them; if they are not artificially called forth and upheld, they simply remain non-existent. In Freeland no one possesses this power because here no one need sequestrate the land in order that it may be tilled. But the magic which enables us to cultivate ownerless land without giving rise to disputes is the same that enables us to produce without ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... not really poor. Most of them own farms of three or four hundred acres; and the soil, if properly tilled, would be quite productive. Their plowing is done in the most primitive manner. A single horse attached to a little shovel plow simply tears the sod a little, enough so the weeds spring up luxuriantly, and the women and children must work hard in the hot sun to destroy them, while the lord ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... the dead reply: God giveth us His life. Ye die, Your barren lives are tilled with tears, For glory, ye are clad with fears. Oh, living ones! oh, earthly shades! We live; your ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo |
