"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Vocem. I have found among Italian witches as with Red Indian wizards, every magical operation depended on an incantation, and every incantation on the feeling, intonation, or manner in which it is sung. Thus near Rome any peasant overhearing a scongiurasione would recognize ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... across an open space, and here it was that the suppliants were wont to assemble. On this particular morning there were but two or three—a Parisian, who conceived himself injured by the provost of his guild, a peasant whose cow had been torn by a huntsman's dog, and a farmer who had had hard usage from his feudal lord. A few questions and then a hurried order to his secretary disposed of each case, for if Louis was a tyrant himself, he had at least the merit ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... looked maliciously, for she hastily added—"He has entirely cured me of those horrid eruptions in the face, that made my complexion like a peasant's." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... believing that her procreative powers were returning, she married a vigorous negro of thirty-five and experienced little difficulty in satisfying his desires. Du Peyrou de Cheyssiole and Bonhoure speak of an aged peasant woman, past ninety-one years ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... The largeness of brain with which Shakespeare endows his human devil, and the largeness of heart of which he does not seem to wish us to imagine him as in certain circumstances incapable, contrast sharply enough with the peasant meanness of Lisbeth. Indeed, Balzac, whose seldom erring instinct in fixing on the viler parts of human nature may have been somewhat too much dwelt on, but is undeniable, has here and elsewhere hit the fault of the lower class generally very well. It does not appear that the Hulots, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... night, making the roadway, uncleared as yet at this early hour, very heavy for the horses. It was still falling thickly. But the sleigh must have been observed and marked down. As it drew over to the left before taking a turn, the footman noticed a peasant walking slowly on the edge of the pavement with his hands in the pockets of his sheepskin coat and his shoulders hunched up to his ears under the falling snow. On being overtaken this peasant suddenly ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... destructive weapons than the contempt of a plutocrat. Perhaps, too, though she assured herself that she was without snobbishness, there was a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that one of her ancestors had been a general under Washington while the early Pletheridges were planting potatoes in a peasant's patch in Ireland. Her dignity was more assured than Madame's; for she was perfectly aware of a fact to which Madame was blind, and this was, that, in spite of her position in the social columns of the newspapers and her multitudinous possessions, Mrs. Pletheridge ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... I know. They hate us because we have something they have not. The starved Irish peasant is higher than the English peer. He has a song in his heart, a gay song or a sad song, and his ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... reputation of being a wizard. He belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to take a victim annually; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get off with merely the loss of his shadow; and many a Morayshire peasant has testified to having seen him riding forth on a sunny day, the shadow of his horse visible, with those of his spurs and his whip, but his body offering no impediment to the rays of the sun. He enriched the library with books ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... come in from his work in the forest, and was sitting in his little room in the peasant's hut where he was quartered. An elderly man stepped in—a ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... of changing India. With more than twenty years of work and observation behind him, he saw the widening gulf between rulers and ruled as an almost equal disaster for both. He knew, none better, all that had been achieved, in his own Province alone, for the peasant and the loyal landowner. He had made many friends among the Indians of his district; and from these he had received repeated warnings of widespread, organised rebellion. Yet he was helpless; tied hand and foot in yards ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the young gentlemen from Belforest, to comport themselves ill, but they would probably not have answered his questions even had they been in their own language, and they stared at him in a stolid way, while he disadvantageously contrasted them with the little ready-tongued peasant boys of Italy. However, he had just found the touch of nature which made the world kin, and had made their eyes light up by telling them of a scene he had beheld in Palestine, illustrating the parable they had been repeating, when the change in the Church bells ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... old farm-house stood out in the country, and there lived an old couple, a peasant and his wife. Little though they had, there was one thing they could not do without, and that was the horse, that found a living ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... Editor, and not the author of the Fairy Tales, just as a distinguished man of science is only the Editor, not the Author of Nature. Like nature, popular tales are too vast to be the creation of a single modern mind. The Editor's business is to hunt for collections of these stories told by peasant or savage grandmothers in many climes, from New Caledonia to Zululand; from the frozen snows of the Polar regions to Greece, or Spain, or Italy, or far Lochaber. When the tales are found they are adapted to the needs of British children by various hands, the Editor doing little ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... that I know. Wherein his charm lies is difficult to describe, and you certainly want the patience of Job, and a conscience made of stretching leather to deal with the Kruboy in the African climate, and live. In his better manifestations he reminds me of that charming personality, the Irish peasant, for though he lacks the sparkle, he is full of humour, and is the laziest and the most industrious of mankind. He lies and tells the truth in such a hopelessly uncertain manner that you cannot rely on him for either. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... 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 struggle for ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... He was taught every accomplishment deemed necessary for a knight,—to ride like a centaur, to cast a lance, to wield the sword, and to swing the battle-axe. He even learned to bend the great cross-bow, the weapon of the English peasant, and could send an arrow straight to the mark. These exercises were severe training for the young prince, but they developed the prodigious strength and skill in arms that later made him the greatest ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... into Highland huts, into Indian tepees, in short, into all lands, taking down with the utmost care, accuracy, and respect, the fairy-stories, myths, and legends of the people;—as repeated by old peasant-women, "the knitters in the sun," or by ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... keep him in comfort. He was quite well off, he said, compared to many. There was a subdued and sombre cheerfulness in him, and when I questioned him about his early life, he talked very freely in his slow old peasant way. He was born in a village in the Vale of Aylesbury, and began work as a ploughboy on a very big farm. He had a good master and was well fed, the food being bacon, vegetables, and homemade bread, also suet pudding three times a week. But what he remembered ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... give. This is our prayer to thee. Let us once for all dislodge from our minds the feeble fancy that would make out thy joy to be a thing apart from action, thin, formless, and unsustained. Wherever the peasant tills the hard earth, there does thy joy gush out in the green of the corn, wherever man displaces the entangled forest, smooths the stony ground, and clears for himself a homestead, there does thy joy enfold it ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... their profession, but they were brought up mostly in remote country places, far from the active life of great towns and cities. But genius is of no locality, and springs alike from the farmhouse, the peasant's hut, or the herd's shieling. Strange, indeed, it is that the men who have built our bridges, docks, lighthouses, canals, and railways, should nearly all have been country-bred boys: Edwards and Brindley, the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... of honesty, how many of my readers will be more amused than disgusted with the story. It is a great thing to come of decent people, and Ferdinand Goldberg Redmain must not be judged like one who, of honorable parentage, whether noble or peasant, takes himself across to the shady side of the road. Much had been against Redmain. I do not know of what sort his mother was, but from certain embryonic virtues in him, which could hardly have been ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... you are, women like you, who have money and freedom to 'live your own lives'? You are sexless; you haven't nature's great apology for the animal,—desire. Such women sin, when they sin, with their minds. Great God! I had rather those broad-hipped Italian peasant women of Calabria, with solid red-brown flesh, bred bastards for the country than have these thin, anaemic, nervous, sexless creatures, with their 'souls' and their 'charm,' marry and become mothers! What have you done to the race? The race of blond giants from ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... of acquaintance and human contact in this trade. But the substantial ground of this high requirement in dissipation is in the last analysis no other than that same propensity for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary decency which makes the French peasant-proprietor parsimonious and frugal, and induces the American millionaire to found colleges, hospitals and museums. If the canon of conspicuous consumption were not offset to a considerable extent by other features of human nature, alien to it, any saving ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... or African, or Italian, or Gallic student, after tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be his more ordinary course to Athens, at last casting anchor at Piraeus. He is of any condition or rank of life you please, and may be made to order, from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some Cleanthes, who has been a boxer in the public games. How did it ever cross his brain to betake himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he came thither by accident, how did the love of it ever touch his heart? But so it was, to Athens he came with three drachms in his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... absent lord! Sadness there is, and an unquiet fear, Within my heart, to trace these hereabouts Of idle woods, unthreaded labyrinths, Rude mannered brooks, unpastured meadow sides, All vagrant, voiceless, pathless, echoless, Oh for the farthest breath of mortal sound! From lacqueyed hall, or folded peasant hut,— Some noontide echo sweetly voluble; Some song of toil reclining from the heat, Or low of kine, or neigh of tethered steeds, Or honest clamor of some shepherd dog, Laughter, or cries, or any living breath, To make ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... "The peasant, whose lot was to sow and to reap, The herdsman, who climbed with his goats up the steep; The beggar, who wandered in search of his bread, Have faded away like the ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the Great's people fell, but to the poverty-stricken peasant woman of Prussia, lamenting her husband and dead sons, did it matter that the rich province of Silesia had been added to the Prussian Crown? What was it to that broken mother whether the Silesian peasants acknowledged the Prussian King or the Austrian Empress? Despots ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... we learn that the savage has a good reason for it. He thinks the sneeze expels an evil spirit. Proverbs, again, and riddles are as universally scattered, and the Wolufs puzzle over the same devinettes as the Scotch schoolboy or the Breton peasant. Thus, for instance, the Wolufs of Senegal ask each other, 'What flies for ever, and rests never?'—Answer, 'The Wind.' 'Who are the comrades that always fight, and never hurt each other?'—'The Teeth.' In France, as we read in the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Leonard's notions of such aristocratic costume were naturally fashioned upon the model of Frank Hazeldean. They represented to him a dazzling vision of snow-white trowsers, and beautiful blue coats, and incomparable cravats. Now the dress of this stranger, though not that of a peasant nor of a farmer, did not in any way correspond with Lenny's notions of the costume of a young gentleman: it looked to him highly disreputable; the coat was covered with mud, and the hat was all manner of shapes, with a gap between ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... soldier, one wonders, yet discovered Rudyard Kipling, or is the Wessex peasant aware of Thomas Hardy? It is odd to think that the last people to read such authors are the very people they most concern. For you might spend your life, say, in studying the London street boy, and write ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... ideal king should be (as in "Beowulf's Lay") generous, brave and just. He should be a man of accomplishments, of unblemished body, presumably of royal kin (peasant-birth is considered a bar to the kingship), usually a son or a nephew, or brother of his foregoer (though no strict rule of succession seems to appear in Saxo), and duly chosen and acknowledged at the proper place of election. In Denmark this was at a stone circle, and the stability ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... her prize drawing she replied with misleading truth that it was a study from nature. His imagination pictured a rustic cottage, a water-wheel, a castle and mountains in the distance and cows and a peasant in the foreground. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... Guyot, were extremely puzzled by the course of the illness. At times the girl would seem to be on the mend, then there would come a sudden relapse. After Perrotte's death they pressed for an autopsy, but the peasant relatives of the girl showed the usual repugnance of their class to the idea. Helene was taken red-handed in the theft of wine, and was dismissed. Fifteen days later she took service with ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... In the peasant's mind every effort of religion consisted in loosening the purse strings, in emptying the pockets of men in order to fill the heavenly coffer. It was a kind of huge commercial establishment, of which the cures were the clerks; sly, crafty clerks, sharp as any one ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... now living. Though only an illiterate peasant woman, she has been able for more than twenty years to baffle every scientist who has studied her. Her organism remains the most ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... rode under the crab-tree, but the seat was empty. "What has become of the Blind Man?" the Mayor's son asked of a peasant who was near. ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... not know who you are, sir, nor how to account for your timely and peculiar appearance. But I fully recognize the falseness of your presence here. Eh, well, this is what comes of race prejudice, the senseless battle which has always been and always will be waged between the noble and the peasant. Had I observed you at the proper time, our positions might relatively have been changed. Useless retrospection!" To Annesley: "Sir, we are equally culpable. Here is this note of yours. I might, as a small ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... must serve or we die." Madam Manovska spoke, "It is well, Sir 'Arry King, you carry your head like one prince, for I will make of you one peasant in ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... entertained by an individual dressed in a peasant's frock and a slouched hat, who, pausing in the open doorway, regarded the mixed assembly with a half smile, not wanting a certain superciliousness which in other circumstances would have provoked instant observation. Now, however, the full swing of common enjoyment rendered every one ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... ploughman driving his plough through a field. A vast expanse of country stretches away in the distance, with some poor cabins here and there; the sun is setting behind the hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The peasant is a short, thick-set man, old, and clothed in rags. The four horses that he urges forward are thin and gaunt; the ploughshare is buried in rough, unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in that scene ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... and servants and soldiers; models of boats and ships; models of dance-halls with the man seated drinking wine, around him musicians, before him dancing girls; models of swords, of vessels, of implements. Poorer people must be contented with poorer things, down to the peasant who is buried with the few little necessary pots and pans of his daily life. But always, in every grave, the chapel, small or great, is there. The endowment of funerary priests continues. Every man, I suppose, however poor, had some one to make at least one offering ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... the landlord, smiling with all a Tuscan peasant's desire to please. "In a minute. ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... word "peasant," because they have no idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved amongst them; and they are alike unacquainted ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... melancholy sign from Corentin, and his eyes followed his friend's hand. Lydie's condition can only be compared to that of a flower tenderly cherished by a gardener, now fallen from its stem, and crushed by the iron-clamped shoes of some peasant. Ascribe this simile to a father's heart, and you will understand the blow that fell on Peyrade; the tears started ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... striding across a field in the twilight shadow of a hill. Beyond, where the fold of the hill dips down into the field, another peasant is driving a team of oxen at a plow. The distant figures are aglow with golden mellow light, the last light of day, which deepens the gloom of the shadowing hillside. The sower's cap is pulled tight about his head, hiding under its shade the unseeing eyes. The mouth is brutal and grim. ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... those hours, which appeared to me ten times the length, I heard the barking of a dog, the usual announcement of peasant life; and rejoicing in it, as one of the most welcome of all possible sounds, I worked, felt, and waded, my way to the door of a building, at which, without ceremony, I asked for entrance. My application was for some time unanswered but I heard a rustling within ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... worthy to be extolled; such as, for example, the garments of the women of the Queen of Sheba, executed in a sweet and novel manner; many most lifelike portraits from nature of ancient persons; a row of Corinthian columns, divinely well proportioned; and a peasant who, leaning with his hands on his spade, stands listening to the words of S. Helena—while the three Crosses are being disinterred—with so great attention, that it would not be possible to improve it. Very well wrought, also, is the dead body that is restored to life at the touch of the Cross, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... he was his master? A man's wife labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... this spot; and the high cliffs, circling either side in the form of a bay, tolerably well concealed our meetings from the gaze of the vulgar. It is true (for these cliffs were perforated with numerous excavations) that some roving peasant, mariner, or perchance smuggler, would now and then, at low water, intrude upon us. But our London Nereids and courtly Tritons were always well pleased with the interest of what they graciously termed "an adventure;" and our assemblies were too numerous to think an unbroken ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... do not intend to pay visits. In passing through the Plaza this morning, our carriage suddenly drew up, and the servants took off their hats. At the same moment, the whole population, men, women, and children, vendors and buyers, peasant and Seora, priest and layman, dropped on their knees, a picturesque sight. Presently a coach came slowly along through the crowd, with the mysterious Eye painted on the panels, drawn by piebald horses, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... sort to get the rest of the distance. He was turned out at a lonely rural station with no vehicle for hire within miles. Very good, he would make the best of a small misfortune, and would walk. He got directed by a stupid peasant, and set off in the wrong direction. When he had walked some two miles out of his way, he made further inquiries and retraced his steps. The roads were a little heavy, the sun was hot, and Paul of late had taken ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... in the more remote of these hostelries that the inquisitive stranger will hear the South Saxon dialect in its purity and the slow wit of the Sussex peasant at its best. The old Downland shepherd with embroidered smock and Pyecombe crook is vanishing fast, and with him will disappear a good deal of the character which made the Sussex native essentially different from his cousins of ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... going and coming on this stage, some having just landed from the different steamers that had just arrived, and some about to embark in others that were going away. Small boats were coming, too, over the water, with passengers in them, among whom were many peasant girls, whose foreheads and temples were adorned with a profusion of golden ornaments, such as are worn by the ladies of North Holland. Rollo looked this way and that as he passed along the stage, and he wished for time to stop and examine what he saw; but the commissioner walked ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... drunk), and 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... "Odyssey." In 1873 he had also written another very beautiful poem, "Love is Enough," containing the story of three pairs of lovers, a countryman and country-woman, an emperor and empress, and a prince and peasant girl. This poem was written in the form of a play, not ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... in the class had worked out the face of an old peasant woman illuminated by a candle. "How beautifully you have painted the candle!" Whistler commended. ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... bound to accommodate myself to them. I suppose this is the prince you spoke of," he added, turning to the towering youth already referred to, with the air of a man who had as little—or as much—regard for a prince as a peasant. ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... Irish will have a native for their chief. We caught Churchill young, and educated him in the Propaganda; but he has disappointed us. At first all seemed well; he was reserved and austere; and we heard with satisfaction that he was unpopular. But, now that critical times are arriving, his peasant-blood cannot resist the contagion. He proclaims the absolute equality of all religious, and of the power of the state to confiscate ecclesiastical property, and not restore it to us, but alienate it forever. For the chance ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... however, has prevailed in religious systems, polytheistic or monotheistic. Man has projected on the cloudy unknown the magnified picture of his own individuality and shuddered with terror at the self-created plantasm,[TN-9] like the peasant frightened by the spectre of the Brocken, formed by the distorted image of himself. In his happier moments, with his hopes gratified, the same vice of thought, still active, prevented him from conceiving ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... married—married—married as soon as I knew you were, coming. There was no time to tell you. Oh. oh! You have come all the way for nothing. Oh! And oh, your generosity!" Suddenly he became grave, and said, "Please pardon me; I am rude. I am no better than a peasant, and I—" Here he saw Philip's face, and it was too much for him. He gasped and exploded and crammed his hands into his mouth and spat them out in another explosion, and gave Philip an aimless push, which toppled him on to the bed. He uttered ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... From his father's mistakes he shall learn prudence, and from his mother's resignation, patience. Poverty has no such terrors in it as you imagine. There's no condition of life, sickness and pain excepted, where happiness is excluded. The needy peasant, who rises early to his labour, enjoys more welcome rest at night for't. His bread is sweeter to him; his home happier; his family dearer; his enjoyments surer. The sun that rouses him in the morning, sets in the evening to release him. All situations ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... recalled his early struggles and his hard-won success. It was Paolo's day of triumph. The class honors and the medal were his. The bust that had won both stood in the hall crowned with laurel—an Italian peasant woman, with sweet, gentle face, in which there lingered the memories of the patient eyes that had lulled the child to sleep in the old days in the alley. His teacher spoke to him, spoke of him, with pride in voice and glance; spoke tenderly ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... intention to pass through Mongolia to the nearest port on the Pacific. The officers asked me to bring them out with us. I agreed. Our reconnaissance proved to us that there were no Partisans near the house of the peasant who was to ferry us over the Little Yenisei. We moved off at once in order to pass as quickly as possible this dangerous zone of the Yenisei and to sink ourselves into the forest beyond. It snowed but immediately thawed. Before evening a cold north wind sprang up, bringing with it a small ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... exuberant fun and fancy, in a letter addressed to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1867, and afterwards republished in Friendship's Garland. Arminius, the cultivated Prussian, accompanies his English friend to Petty Sessions in a country town, and is horrified by the degraded plight of an old peasant who is tried for poaching. The English friend (the imaginary Arnold) says that for his own part he is not so much concerned about the poacher as about his children. They are being allowed to grow up anyhow. Really he thinks the time has come when compulsion must be applied to the education ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... establishment was in an uproar. Jeffries cursed himself loudly for his shortsightedness, for his overestimating her young strength. "She'll look like hell this evening," he wailed, wringing his hands like a distracted peasant woman. "Maybe she won't be able ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... fall to, and prove that you have a Delaware stomach, as you say you have had a Delaware edication," cried Hurry, setting the example by opening his mouth to receive a slice of cold venison steak that would have made an entire meal for a European peasant; "fall to, lad, and prove your manhood on this poor devil of a doe with your teeth, as you've already ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... on debatable ground. Where do you find longer lines of trained generations than in those Royal families that cost you so much to support, and what do many of them amount to? How many of them would it take to make one Lincoln? He was a peasant's son, as they ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... Real desperation has so much of agony in its character, that no one can witness it unmoved. His garb was not that in which the reader first beheld him, but a rich, dark, simple suit of velvet, corresponding more with his real rank in life than his former peasant's attire; but it was disordered by his recent conflict, and stained with bloody testimonials of the fray; while his long, sable curls, once his pride and ornament, now hung in intertangled elf-locks, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... may be reaped in the end from earnest and unshrinking toil! No wonder if, in a year or two's time, our friends yonder will write to the dear ones they left at home, in the Perthshire glen, such an account as shall bear witness that they, at least, have found on earth the Peasant's Paradise! ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... about the candle shone like the heads of St. Cecilias and Madonnas in an antique stained-glass window. At last Laure [Laure Aglae Rose de Beaurepaire,—would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?] observed the door open, and another candle glowed upon Jacintha's comely peasant-face in the doorway; she dived into the shadow, and emerged into light again close to the table, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... him away, they left the most part of his raiment and his skin sticking to the chair. Then, not knowing what else to do with him in his sore plight they clapped upon his back the nearest thing they could find, which was the skin of a black sheep that they took from a peasant's flock hard by, and it grew there, and Conan wore it till ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... else and preach, you ignorant peasant! What do you come here for, spoiling our enjoyment, and keeping us awake at nights? Don't you know this is no common conventicle? It is the place where the king says his prayers! Away with you, or we will take off your ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... was often only the addition of a broad, bright-colored stripe to the hem of a short dress could be called a COSTUME—were plain, and seemed to indicate no particular historical epoch or character. A general suggestion of the peasant's holiday attire was dominant in all the costumes. Everybody was closely masked. All carried a short, gayly-striped baton of split wood, called a Pritsche, which, when struck sharply on the back or shoulders ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... once upon a time Napoleon was in Bavaria. The country was at that time his ablest ally. There was a pretty peasant girl." ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... spiritual comfort, of their exalted character and divine worth to assume that legend, myth, and history have combined to produce the perfect harmony which is their imperishable distinction. The peasant dwelling on inaccessible mountain-heights, next to the record of Abraham's shepherd life, inscribes the main events of his own career, the anniversary dates sacred to his family. The young count among their first impressions ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... that her husband should have decided so unjustly, and when the court was over she went to the other peasant and told him how he could convince the King that he had made a rash judgment. So the next day he took a stool outside the King's window and commenced fishing with a fishing-rod ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... varying altitude of the route. Here, on a last patch of mountain ground, were a man or two and a woman or two and odd children, reaping and binding; there, after a few minutes' ascent, on another sloping patch, a solitary peasant ploughed with his team of oxen. Everywhere on the declivitous waysides, tow-haired, blue-eyed children guarded herds of goats, as their forbears had done in the days of Vercingetorix, the Gaul. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... 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 disaster, sighing for ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to history are of first-rate importance to that study as a whole. The eye may now travel down the history of the Nile Valley from prehistoric days to the present time almost without interruption; and now that the anthropologist has shown that the modern Egyptians, Mussulman and Copt, peasant and townsman, belong to one and the same race of ancient Egyptians, one may surely judge to-day's inhabitants of the country in the light of yesterday's records. In his report for the year 1906, Lord Cromer, questioning whether the modern inhabitants of the country ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... indicates wealth or fortune to the peasant, his waking life may be gladdened by receiving or seeing a fifty-cent piece, or finding assuring work, while the same symbol to a wealthy man would mean many dollars, or ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... more populous place I should have suspected them to have been suggested by factitious sentiment derived from books; but the good people of Gersau knew little of books; there was not a novel nor a love-poem in the village, and I question whether any peasant of the place dreamt, while he was twining a fresh chaplet for the grave of his mistress, that he was fulfilling one of the most fanciful rites of poetical devotion, and that he ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... occupation becoming a free man. The story of Cincinnatus, twice summoned from the plough to the highest offices in the state, illustrates the status of the Roman husbandman. The later tendency was towards the absorption of smaller holdings into large estates. As wealth increased the peasant-farmer gave way before the large landowner, who cultivated his property by means of slave-labour, superintended by slave-bailiffs. The low price of grain, which was imported in huge quantities from Sicily and other Roman provinces, operated ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... bark to pass the night; But this hospitable sage denied, "Forbid it, Jove! and all the gods! (he cried), Thus from my walls and the much-loved son to send Of such a hero, and of such a friend! Me, as some needy peasant, would ye leave, Whom Heaven denies the blessing to relieve? Me would ye leave, who boast imperial sway, When beds of royal state invite your stay? No—long as life this mortal shall inspire, Or as my children imitate their sire. Here shall the wandering stranger find ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... his Oracles of a bright future but few. Even in these he does not rise, like the Evangelist of the Exile whom he inspired, to exultation in the Almighty Power of God or to visions of vast spaces of the Divine Providence, or of Israel's service wide as the world. His happy peasant-heart is content to foresee his restored people tending their vineyards again, enjoying their village dances and festivals, and sharing with their long divided tribes the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... me that you had died years ago, but I knew better. Now that I have found you, we'd better start for France at once. Have you your court robes with you? And what have you done with your crown? You are dressed like a peasant." He was disdainfully eyeing her brown, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... homage paid her by force of habit, there was something false and ironical. She thought of herself only as disgraced, betrayed, repudiated. All that was left of her crown was its mark on her brow. Few peasant women in their huts were ever as thoroughly unhappy as was this sovereign in ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... your husband, Whose wrongs towards you are bruited through the land. O, can you suffer at a peasant's hands, Unworthy once to touch this silken skin, To be so rudely beat and buffeted? Can you endure from such infectious breath, Able to blast your beauty, to have names Of such impoison'd hate flung ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... here, far other harvest here Than that which peasant's scythe demands, Was gathered in by sterner hands, With musket, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... give me a fresh, dewy, healthy rose out of Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome exotics, which are only good to make poems about. Lord Byron wrote more cant of this sort than any poet I know of. Think of "the peasant girls with dark blue eyes" of the Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of "filling high a cup of Samian wine;" small beer is nectar compared to it, and Byron himself always drank ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 of those on board the Sea Queen by the intervening range ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... he marshalled the peasant into a veteran, and supplied by discipline the absence of experience; as a statesman, he enlarged the policy of the cabinet into the most comprehensive system of general advantage; and such was the wisdom of his views, and the philosophy of his counsels, that, to the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... promised God that I would look upon every Prussian peasant child as a being who could complain of me before God if I did not provide for him the best education, as a man and a Christian, which it was possible for me ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... prevailed on the King's death. His army fled in dismay; his corpse was left on the ground, till a peasant carried it to Tynemouth; his men were dispersed, slain, or drowned in their flight; his young son Edmund, a stripling of eighteen or nineteen, just contrived to escape to Edinburgh Castle. The first tidings that met him there were, that his mother ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... kingdom, has been a boon too precious to be enjoyed without alloy, it seems; and I have now to exchange the past pleasure for present pain. Adieu! my young friend; let your trust be in Him, to whose eyes both prince and peasant, the European and the American, are alike, and we shall meet again, though it be neither in the island of Britain nor on your own ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Peasant women came up, carrying on their heads large brown circular baskets, made of twigs, about eight inches deep, filled with tempting fruits and salads. It was wonderful how well they balanced them, for they were ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... necessary for membership in this true Church. "External gifts and offices make no Christian, and just as little does the standing of the person, or locality, or time, or dress, or food, or anything external. The kingdom of God is neither prince nor peasant, food nor drink, hat nor coat, here nor there, yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor anything whatever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and an ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... fact, sailed, with Hugh le Despenser and the Chancellor Baldock, for Ireland, but he was driven back by contrary winds, and forced to land in Glamorganshire. He wandered from castle to castle, and was besieged at Caerphilli, whence it is said that he escaped at night in the disguise of a peasant; and, to avoid detection, himself assisted in carrying brushwood to feed the fires of the besiegers. He next took refuge in a farmhouse, where the farmer tried to baffle the pursuers by setting him to dig; but his awkwardness in handling the spade ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... independent sovereigns, over one of the richest and most populous territories of the globe, and though William the Conqueror was the son of one of them, his birth was nevertheless very ignoble. His mother was not the wife of Robert his father, but a poor peasant girl, the daughter of an humble tanner of Falaise; and, indeed, William's father, Robert, was not himself the duke at this time, but a simple baron, as his father was still living. It was not even certain that he ever would be the duke, as his older brother, who, of ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... panel, let into the wall in a corner of the room, is a portrait of Burns, copied from the original picture by Nasmyth. The floor of this apartment is of boards, which are probably a recent substitute for the ordinary flag-stones of a peasant's cottage. There is but one other room pertaining to the genuine birthplace of Robert Burns: it is the kitchen, into which we now went. It has a floor of flag-stones, even ruder than those of Shakespeare's house,—though, perhaps, not so strangely cracked and broken as the latter, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said, "Good friends, we are well out of that. Nay, no thanks! My monks are not a bit the worse of a little additional exercise to keep them humble and lean. Nor is God the less well pleased that we have sought him in time of need—as Prince and Abbot, as well as soldier and peasant, require." ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... into the pit, then he cried—"Father, I did not murder thee; not I, thy son! nay, I always loved thee in my heart. Who is laughing? it is not Dunstan; break his chamber open, slay him: is a monk's blood redder than a peasant's? O Elgiva hast thou slain my father? See, I am all on fire; it is thy doing. Edwy, my king, Dunstan ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Carlyle, who wrote forty volumes, was of peasant origin. [The relative clause is non-restrictive; it is not inseparably connected with the noun it modifies, and to omit it would not change the thought of the main clause. Thus: Thomas Carlyle was ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... extraordinary enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... old peasants say that Sava, father of the young peasant girl, who stands by the side of an old woman, at the head of her companions in the court-yard, is immured in one of these subterranean jails. Sava was always about the Count, who, it was said, had brought him from some distant land, with his little motherless child. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... have wanted to go away somewhere, out of this, and grow into something above this peasant's life; and all this only since I ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... way to the influence of his natural good spirits, excited by the exercise and the bracing effects of the frosty air. He whistled as he went along, not "from want of thought," but to give vent to those buoyant feelings which he had no other mode of expressing. For each peasant whom he chanced to meet, he had a kind greeting or a good-humoured jest; the hardy Cumbrians grinned as they passed, and said, "that's a kind heart, God bless un!" and the market-girl looked more than once over ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... figures were moving to and fro in the royal palace. It seemed as if the representatives of all nations had come together to greet the heroic young king. Greeks and Turks were there in gold-embroidered, bejewelled apparel. Odalisks, Spanish, Russian, and German peasant women in every variety of costume; glittering fairies, sorceresses, and fortune-telling gypsies; grave monks, ancient knights in silver armor, castle dames, and veiled nuns. It was a magnificent spectacle to behold, these splendidly decorated saloons, filled ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... success of this handful of besiegers rested wholly on the spell of terror which had been cast over France, and at this moment the appearance of a peasant maiden broke the spell. Jeanne Darc was the child of a labourer of Domremy, a little village in the neighbourhood of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the cottage where she was born began the great woods of the Vosges where the children ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... country to the S. of Damascus, does great honour to the hospitable spirit of the Turks; but it is, in fact, the only expense that the government thinks itself obliged to incur for the benefit of the people of the country. A peasant can travel for a whole month without expending a para; but people of any distinction give a few paras on the morning of their departure to the waiter or watchman [Arabic]. If the traveller does not choose to alight at a ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... antithesis of what must have been their imagination of the reality, of all the pictures that had been filling their minds as they pushed on across the desert. It was no more incredible that the King Whom they were seeking should be found in humble guise in a peasant's cottage than that they should have been guided to Him by a heavenly star. The gift of God to them was that they should be permitted to enter the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... reproducing 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 attempt toward ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove from the volor station outside the People's Gate, of the old peasant dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and horses—strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It had seemed to remind him that man was human, and ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... our hiding-place till the duke was out of sight, and by the delay we lost a good half-league in our race. I asked Yolanda if she knew how far it was to the next point of contact, She did not know, but I learned from a peasant that the river made a great bend, and that our road gained nearly a league over the other before each again touched the river. This was ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... our friend did, and as we ourselves might have done, when he saw such a creature bounding through the darkness of the moor upon his track. It was a cunning device, for, apart from the chance of driving your victim to his death, what peasant would venture to inquire too closely into such a creature should he get sight of it, as many have done, upon the moor? I said it in London, Watson, and I say it again now, that never yet have we helped to hunt down a more ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... no words and no meaning, but sounds as if some wild and icy god were warbling to himself as he wandered among the peaks of dawn. You look forth across the flowers to the blue snow, and you see, far off, a small figure of a man moving among the grass. It is a peasant singing his mountain song, warbling like some creature that lifted up its voice on the edge of the eternal snows, before the human ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... occasion as being a man who had the greatest power of remaining still under all circumstances, out shooting, when it was necessary to do so, and I may also mention that he was a man who combined the greatest coolness with the greatest daring. He was of a Hindoo peasant family, entered my service as a workman, rose to be a duffadar or overseer, and for many years has been head overseer on my coffee estates, and he is as good as a planter as he is as a shikari. I could give many instances of his cool daring. On one occasion a wounded tigress—it was the ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot |
