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More "Labourer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for this tale the peculiarity of its having been the first essay of its author, Alexander Bethune, the self-educated "Fifeshire labourer." This excellent and ingenious man became subsequently well known by his volume of "Tales and Sketches of the Scottish Peasantry," published by Mr. Adam Black, and designated at the time a literary phenomenon. It was truly said of him by the Spectator: "Alexander Bethune, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... resting, filled with an exalted joy, his mind wandered to the longings of the day before, the little adobe home of his co-labourer which he had left, its homeyness and joy; his own loneliness and longing for companionship. Then he looked shyly towards the tree shade where the glint of golden hair and the dark line of his blanket were all he could see of the girl he had found in the wilderness. What if ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... their heads to be ill or to die. A man tolerably well off can at least get his wife some help when she is laid up, and when she is near her end can remain with her to take her last kiss and blessing. Not so the bricklayer's labourer. If his wife is in bed, he must depend upon charity for medicine and attendance. And although he knows he will never see her again, he is forced away to the job on which he is employed; for if he does not go he will lose it, and must apply to the parish ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... almost impossible things. It is these two spirits that are fighting for the possession and control of our machine civilization. I watch the machines and the men beside them and see which side they are on. The labourer who is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the capitalist who is giving as little service as he dares for his money are on the one side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of employers and employees), and there may be seen standing ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the channels of the country, enriching the farmers with prices that frequently rose as high as two dollars and a half the bushel, and sometimes as high as three. Yet no one was so poor in America as to want bread! The dearer the grain, the higher the wages of the labourer, and ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... and your like have left little room in this world except for the dusty roads on which I notice you beginning once more to travel. The rule of them is the same for all, is it not ... from the tramp and the labourer to the plutocrat in his car? This is the age of equality; and it's a fine practical equality ... the equality of the road. But you've fenced the fields of human joy and turned the very hillsides into hoardings, Commercial opportunity is painted on ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... constructions, the abbats voluntarily accepted the rle of labourers. During the building of the Abbey of Bee, in 1033, the founder and first abbat, grand-seigneur though he was, worked as a common mason's labourer, carrying on his back the lime, sand, and stones necessary for the builder. This was Herluin. Another Norman noble, Hugh, Abbat of Selby in Yorkshire, when, in 1096, he rebuilt in stone the whole of that important monastery, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... sweated woman labourer would, of course, be to have the best intellect brought to bear, not specially upon the problem of indigent woman, but upon the whole ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... care until the next morning. It is perfectly possible to do that if one is so constituted as to be willing through all of his life to accept direction, to be an employee, possibly a responsible employee, but not a director or manager of anything. A manual labourer must have a limit on his hours, otherwise he will wear himself out. If he intends to remain always a manual labourer, then he should forget about his work when the whistle blows, but if he intends to go forward and do anything, the whistle is only a signal ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... footsteps came nearer, stumbling up the dark, narrow staircase; then the door was pushed open and a man entered—a broad-chested, broad-faced rough-looking man with stubbly whiskers, wearing the dress and rusty boots of a labourer. ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... might have been pointed to with pride; but so obscure was his birth, that it has not been discovered that he was christened at all; while the fact of his new birth by the Holy Ghost is known over the whole world to the vast extent that his writings have been circulated. He entered this world in a labourer's cottage of the humblest class, at the village of Elstow, about a mile from Bedford.[3] His pedigree is thus narrated by himself:—'My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... There the Labourer shall not half-starve on "swankey." and thin pottage, With a prospect of the Workhouse when no longer he can work; But shall have a fragrant pigstye, and a sanitary cottage, And a voice in local business which the big-wigs cannot burke. The rural working-man shall superintend ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... of the Admiral, when they found that they also were obliged to labour with their hands. But Columbus was firm; there were absolutely no exceptions made; hidalgo and priest had to work alongside of sailor and labourer; and the curses of the living mingled with those of the dying on the man whose boastful words had brought them to such a ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the farm. My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the principal labourer on the farm; for we had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years under these straits and difficulties was very great. To think of our father growing old (for he was now above fifty), broken down with the long-continued fatigues of his life, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... dayly cost] And Forraigne Mart for Implements of warre: Why such impresse of Ship-wrights, whose sore Taske Do's not diuide the Sunday from the weeke, What might be toward, that this sweaty hast[3] Doth make the Night ioynt-Labourer with the day: Who is't that can ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... He never questioned this; he knew right well Who had earned it for him; and he lived grateful and obedient, filling up the duties of his humble station. This was his faith, and his works followed it. He believed that God had placed him in his lot, to be a labourer, and till God's earth, and, when his work is done, to be sent on better service in some happier sphere: the where, or the how, did not puzzle him, any more than divers other enigmatical whys and wherefores of his present state; he only knew this, that it would all come right ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fields as if he never had or would have a holiday. Unquestionably the peasant and labouring class in France is hard-working at his daily task and at his play, for when he plays he also plays hard. This, the eternal activity of the peasant or labourer, whatever his trade, and the worked-over little farm-holdings, with their varied crops, all planted in little bedquilt patches, are the chief characteristics of the French ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... examination of several labourer and peasant witnesses, I have evidence to the effect that very smallest percentage of this district were pro-Bolshevik, majority of labourers sympathizing with summoning of Constituent Assembly. Witnesses further stated that Bolshevik ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o' the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot casualties—our friends outside being a gey sicht better ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of the inviting public-houses in the main street of Haslemere, but turned up a side way and found a little beer-shop, the Good Hope, wherein to refresh himself. And there he ate and gossipped condescendingly with an aged labourer, assuming the while for his own private enjoyment the attributes of a Lost Heir, and afterwards mounted and rode on towards Northchapel, a place which a number of finger-posts conspired to boom, but which some insidious turning prevented ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... other poems, "Awd Isaac" is strongly didactic and religious; its homely piety and directness of speach have won for it a warm welcome among the North Yorkshire peasantry, and many a farmer and farm-labourer still living knows much of the poem by heart. As "Awd Isaac " is too long for an anthology, I have chosen "The Lucky Dream" as an illustration of Castillo's workmanship. Apart from its narrative interest, this poem calls for attention as a Yorkshire variant ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... sir! Why, it's a difficult matter to muster hands enough even to unload or load a ship, with labourer's wages up to a pound a day; and the men who are willing to work even at that figure are either the few long-headed ones who prefer a moderate certainty to the chance of ill luck at the gold-fields, or such poor delicate chaps as can't stand the ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... that the previous heavy rains had loosened the rock, and the warm sunshine having swelled the mass of the earth beneath, had overbalanced it, and thus nearly brought about a catastrophe. But what of the dog's warning? It was strange, that is all the solution I can give. As a Norfolk labourer once said to me when I was pumping him upon the subject ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... the Shakespearean, rich and rare as that was, for it included the results of more than two centuries' patient work, from the days of Sir William Dugdale down to the beginning of the present century. The manuscript collections of Sir Simon Archer, fellow-labourer of Dugdale, the records of the Berkeley, Digby, and Ferrers families, the valued and patient gatherings of Thomas Sharpe, the Coventry antiquarian, of William Hamper, the Birmingham collector, and of William Staunton himself, were all here, forming the most wonderful county collection ever yet ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... and women, there is nothing that we require more than to have what we have, to possess what is ours, to make our own what has been bestowed. You sometimes hear of some beggar, or private soldier, or farm labourer, who has come all at once into an estate that was his, years before he knew anything about it. There is such a boundless wealth belonging by right, and by the Giver's gift, to every Christian soul; and yet, here are we, many of us, like the paupers who sometimes turn ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the Birkets, I'm talking about the Clintons. Poor dear Mr. Clinton is a yokel, for all his ancestry. If he had been changed at birth and brought up a farm labourer, he wouldn't have had an idea in his head above the average of them; he would only have had a little more pluck. Any Birket's brains are worth six of any Clinton's in the open market. Mrs. Clinton is a clever woman, although she doesn't show it, and her dear, stupid ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... time did not mend matters, and as Christmas approached the house was in a state of siege. "All day long, a labourer heats size over the fire in a great crucible. We eat it, drink it, breathe it, and smell it. Seventy paint-pots (which came in a van) adorn the stage; and thereon may be beheld, Stanny, and three Dansons (from the Surrey Zoological Gardens), all painting at once!! Meanwhile, Telbin, in a secluded ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... lingered, "if you cut down the tree it will be necessary to preserve some seed. For my part, I think that the tree ought to be preserved, so that we may graft new life on it. The political revolution, you know, has already taken place; to-day we have got to think of the labourer, the working man. Our movement must be altogether a social one. I defy you to reject the claims of the people. They are weary of waiting, and are determined to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... were reduced to starvation-point, but supplemented out of the poor-rates, under the miserable system of indiscriminate out-door relief graduated according to the size of families. In either case, the entire income of a labourer was far below the modern standard, and the prosperity of trade meant to him an increase in the cost of all necessaries except bread. As for their employers, the golden age of farming, which is often identified with the age of the great war, had really ceased long before. Not ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... proud to deny this trick that you, Sookdee and Hunsa, and that accursed labourer of another caste, the blacksmith, that shoer of Mahratta horses whom Hunsa has bribed, have put upon him in the name ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... as I have seen him in Manchuria, is capable of destroying the present type of worker of the white races. He will drive him off the face of the earth. The Socialists, who preach equality to the labourer, are far from thinking what would be the practical result of carrying out their theories. Is it, then, the destiny of the white races to disappear in the long run? In my humble opinion this destiny depends upon one single factor: Shall we or shall we not have the good sense to close our ears to ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... a bag, and came with him to the station in order to drive the car back to the Dower House; for the gardener's boy who had hitherto attended to these small duties had now gone off as an unskilled labourer to some munition works at Chelmsford. Mr. Britling sat in the slow train that carried him across country to the junction for Filmington, and failed altogether to realise what had happened to the old ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... solemn, the mournful with the pathetic, the amiable with the gay, and all with an ease and unaffected force and freedom known only to the genius of Shakspeare. In "The Twa Dogs" he seeks to reconcile the labourer to his lot, and intimates, by examples drawn from the hall as well as the cottage, that happiness resides in the humblest abodes, and is even partial to the clouted shoe. In "Scotch Drink" he excites man to love his country, by precepts both heroic and social; and proves ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... painfully clear; either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist, a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees and could give no description ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... sisters she sent frequent presents and sums of money. More she could not well do during her husband's lifetime, but when she in turn came to the throne, she brought the whole family—postillion, shoemaker, farm-labourer and serf, their wives and families—to her capital, installed them in sumptuous apartments in her palaces, decked them in the finest Court feathers, and gave them large fortunes ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... substitution of character for beauty is the essential feature of the movement. What is called Impressionism is—let it not be forgotten—a technique which can be applied to any subject. Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by employing this technique for the rendering of religious or ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... bearing on the following event, which was narrated to me by Lord Shaftesbury in 1882. One winter evening in 1867 he was sitting in his library in Grosvenor Square, when the servant told him that there was a poor man waiting to see him. The man was shown in, and proved to be a labourer from Clerkenwell, and one of the innumerable recipients of the old Earl's charity. He said, "My Lord, you have been very good to me, and I have come to tell you what I have heard." It appeared that at the public-house which he frequented he had overheard some Irishmen of desperate character ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... foot, about three inches deep, and lie nearly from north-east to south-west. We counted only seventy-six; but we were not exact in counting. The place where one or both the brothers are supposed to have fallen is still bare of grass. The labourer also showed us where (the tradition is) the wretched woman sat to see the combat." Southey adds his full confidence in the tradition of the indestructibility of the steps, even after ploughing ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... better off in pocket than in Nova Scotia; while the devil a bone in my body that didn't ache with pain, and as for my nose, it took to bleeding, and bled day and night entirely. Upon my soul, Mr. Slick,' said he, 'the poor labourer does not last long in your country; what with new rum, hard labour, and hot weather, you'll see the graves of the Irish each side of the canal, for all the world like two rows of potatoes in a field that have ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the people were kept as much apart as if they were not only separate nations, but separate species. There were thousands, he says, who had never talked to a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to a gardener's workman or some other labourer of the second or third order; while a little time before this they were so averse to have them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stables. Chesterfield, a thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in ...
— Burke • John Morley
... one mass united mix, So bricks attraction feel for kindred bricks; Some in the cellar view, perchance, on high, Fair chimney chums on beds of mortar lie; Enamour'd of the sympathetic clod, Leaps the red bridegroom to the labourer's hod: And up the ladder bears the workman, taught To think he bears the bricks—mistaken thought! A proof behold! if near the top they find The nymphs or broken-corner'd or unkind, Back to the base, "resulting with a ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... "this it is to be leagued with one who knows not even so much of Scripture, as that the labourer is worthy of his hire. I must, as usual, take all the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the king, by way of forced labour.[FN169] When the overseers saw him, they laid hold of him and said to him, "Work thou with these folk at the palace of the king; else we will imprison thee for life." So he fell to working with them as a labourer and every day they gave him a bannock of bread. He wrought with them a month's space, till it chanced that one of the labourers mounted a ladder and falling, brake his leg; whereupon he cried out and shed tears. Quoth Ab Sbir to him, "Have patience and weep not; for in thine ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... imagine this head as bare (see St. Paul much on this) and covered, so to say, only with the sun and stars, of which the crown is a symbol, which is an ornament but not a covering; it has an enormous hat or skullcap, the vault of heaven. The foot is the day- labourer, and this is armed with hobnail boots, because it has to wear and be worn by the ground; which again is symbolical; for it is navvies or day-labourers who, on the great scale or in gangs and millions, mainly trench, tunnel, blast, and in other ways disfigure, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... could confide, he now disguised himself, and travelled as one of their retinue. He first disclosed himself to the elector of Brandenburgh in Prussia, and afterwards to king William, with whom he conferred in private at Utrecht. He engaged himself as a common labourer with a ship-carpenter in Holland, whom he served for some months with wonderful patience and assiduity. He afterwards visited England, where he amused himself chiefly with the same kind of occupation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... sit and spin, seldom now interrupted by any; though at first her neighbours used to flock thither to celebrate the praises of her son. She had loved her son, as warmly as other mothers love their children; but she had loved him as a hard-working labourer, earning for herself and for him their daily pittance; not as a mighty General, courted and complimented by the rich and great of the land. She had begged him not to go out into the town on the morning when he had been so instrumental in saving his townsmen from the ignominy of being ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... said the labourer addressed, eyeing her up and down as an unexpected apparition. 'He is still alive, they say, but not sensible. He either fell or was pushed over the waterfall; 'tis thoughted he was pushed. He is the gentleman who ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... and more full of poetry. Yeast deals with the country—which Kingsley knew better and loved more than he did the town. It deals with real, permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson. Kingsley there speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul of a poet. The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village revel, are exquisite ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... from that strange quarter the mighty ocean, from Chancery Lane so distant! "Might as well," said a burly labourer (or, for all I know, burly receiver of unemployment dole)—"might as well be sardines ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... easy for Mr. Lever to show that since Socialism will give no more wealth, and since what he calls Labour, Capital and the Employer (i.e. Labour, Plant and Management) are necessary to production and must be maintained out of the total product, there will be little more, practically, for the Labourer under Socialist conditions than under the existing regime. Going on further to assume that the Owner is always enterprising and intelligent and public-spirited, and the State stupid (which is a quite unjustifiable ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... nor shoes, and salute no man by the way. And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house. And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again. And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the labourer ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... said Mamie. "I know a hero. And when I heard of you working all day like a common labourer, with your hands bleeding and your nails broken—and how you told the captain to 'crack on' (I think he said) in the storm, when he was terrified himself—and the danger of that horrid mutiny"—(Nares had been obligingly dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse)—"and how it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at two young men who were throwing rings on a stick that stood up from the floor: their failure was greeted with a good deal of hearty chaff from the rest of the company. Room was made for the new arrivals. Philip found himself sitting between an old labourer in corduroys, with string tied under his knees, and a shiny-faced lad of seventeen with a love-lock neatly plastered on his red forehead. Athelny insisted on trying his hand at the throwing of rings. He backed himself for half a ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... route brought me back to the south edge of the Common, the point most remote from the farm. There I met a labourer whom I knew by sight, a man named Hawke. He was carrying a stick, and prodding with it foolishly among the furze and gorse bushes. The ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... green, and Oh's wife was green and his children were green—in fact, everything there was green. And Oh had water-nixies for serving-maids, and they were all as green as rue. "Sit down now!" said Oh to his new labourer, "and have a bit of something to eat." The nixies then brought him some food, and that also was green, and he ate of it. "And now," said Oh, "take my labourer into the courtyard that he may chop wood and draw water." So they took him into the courtyard, ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... especially inconvenient just now," said Townshead querulously. "It has also been a sore point with me that a son of mine should hire himself out as a labourer. I am sorry I let him go, the more so because the work upon the ranch is getting ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... formed. And I am bound to say, that the social and moral condition of Japan has astonished me quite as much as its material beauty. Every man, from the Emperor (who never leaves his palace) to the humblest labourer, lives under a rigid rule, prescribed by law and custom combined; and the Government, through its numerous agents, among whom are hosts of spies, or more properly inspectors (for there is no secresy ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... workers, and these in their turn drag others down with them. "Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of labour, insanitary condition of workplaces"—what does all that mean? It means an industry essentially rotten and unsound. To say that the labourer is worthy of his hire is not only the expression of a natural instinct of justice, but it embodies an economic truth. One does not need to be a Socialist, not, at least, a Socialist in the sense in which the word is ordinarily ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... God! whence comes this fear, that he should shrink from a lonely girl, feeble and timid, simple and mild? It is as if I should see the dog flee before the hare, and the fish chase the beaver, the lamb the wolf, and the dove the eagle. In the same fashion the labourer would forsake his pick with which he strives to earn a livelihood, and the falcon would flee from the duck, and the gerfalcon from the heron, and the pike from the minnow, and the stag would chase the lion, and everything would be reversed. Now ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... personage, to whom hee would giue the delight of all strange contentment, either in his Parke, or other remote place of pleasure, neere vnto Ponds, Riuer, or other waters of cleerenesse, after hee hath made his arbors and Summer-bowers to feast in, the fashion whereof is so common that euery labourer can make them, hee shall then marke out his garden-plot, bestowing such sleight fence thereon as hee shall thinke fit: then hee shall cast forth his alleys, and deuide them from his quarters, by paring away ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... never knew how little or how much he had. He never would own horses lest he should give people reason to accuse him of being arrogantly rich. We drove a great deal, but he always insisted on hiring his carriages. If he accepted remuneration for his brain and heart labour, Scripture tells us, "The labourer is worthy of his hire." He was foremost in helping in any time of public calamity, not only in our own country but more than once in foreign lands. And when volumes of his sermons were pirated over the country, and he was urged to take legal steps to stop the injustice, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... are looking and waiting for such a man. A fellow with no capital and no profession had better not show his face in Melbourne. It is a thousand to one against him. Compared to his position that of a labourer is an enviable one; yet any respectable and intelligent man tolerably well educated, coming here with four or five hundred pounds in his pocket, may certainly, in a couple of years, and in twenty different ways, treble that capital. The best and most promising is the following:—Buy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... are bad that you say are bad. But they're so good as well! I mean—well, the other day I read one of those dreadful articles—at least, of course they're very useful I suppose—about the condition of the agricultural labourer. Well, then I took a ride in the country, and saw it all in its setting and complete, with everything the article had left out; and it wasn't so bad after all. I don't mean to say it was all good either, but it was just ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... a mission of charity, if you don't mind. I am the Rev Andrew Rowbottom. I am collecting subscriptions for the widow and family of the late William John Elphinston, a worthy member of my congregation, and a most estimable bricklayers labourer, killed, as you may remember, in the execution of his duty on the 14th ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... But for you, I should have gone without dinner many a day; but for you, I should most likely have had to chuck painting altogether, and turn clerk or dock-labourer. But let me stay in your debt a little longer, old man. I can't put off my marriage any longer, and just at first I shall want all the money I can lay my ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board—after flour had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone to eight per cent. a month. This work was very exhausting, and after a week Clemens asked his employer for an advance ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... servant; "the young gentlemen, my Lord's sons, are hopeful youths; but yet there is one who is thought to exceed them all, though he is the son of a poor labourer." ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... the doctor again. "I maintain, sir, that it is all a matter of education or training, and that you could make a gentleman's son a labourer, or a labourer's ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... be still carried on with vigour. As regards the general work to be done now in the garden, we may mention that in dry weather all walks and pathways should be swept and rolled, which latter operation, like that of digging, ought to be done by a labourer, although dragging a garden-roller has been described as an excellent gymnastic exercise. Grass should be mowed on every favourable opportunity; and where turf has been much worn away, or where it is uneven, the objectionable portions must ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... lasting gratitude for an act of kindness. The bird, which had long been the terror of children in the little Devonshire village near which it lived, managed one day to get wedged in a drain, and there it would eventually have died unseen if a passing labourer had not seen its plight and set it at liberty. Down to the day of its death the bird, though nowise relinquishing its spiteful attitude towards others, followed its rustic benefactor about the ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... comes, no labourer To cut his shaggy truss of hay, Along the road no traveller, Day after day, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... For I would just rise in my place, and say as a thing of course, and admitted on all hands, 'Gentlemen, it would be a very wrong thing of us, to let Mr Mucklewheel, (that is, supposing you were me,) who has so long been a fellow-labourer with us, to quit his place here without some mark of our own esteem for him as a man, and some testimony from the council to his merits as a magistrate. Every body knows that he has been for near to fifty years a distinguished character, and has thrice filled ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... in summer, Winter worked I with the pitchfork, Even as a labourer toiling, Even as a hired servant, And my mother-in-law for ever, Evermore for me selected, Worst of all the flails for threshing, Heaviest mallet from the bathroom, 620 From the beach the heaviest mallet, In the stall the largest pitchfork. Never did they think ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... In this place they were informed that much gold was to be found in all the brooks and rivulets, which they found to be the case. Likewise, by digging in several places, gold was found in such plenty, that a single labourer was able to get to the value of three pieces of eight every day. These new mines are now known by the name of the mines of St Christopher, from a fort of that name which the admiral left orders to build for their protection; but they were afterwards called the old mines. About this ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... upon receiving an additional salute, jumped over the railings, and re-saluted poor Pat with a muzzier,{2} which drew his claret in a moment. The Irishman endeavoured to rally, while the crowd cheered the Porter and hooted the Labourer. This was the signal for hostilities. The man who had plugg'd up the broken pipe let go his hold, and the fountain was playing away as briskly as ever—all was confusion, and the neighbourhood in alarm. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... pedlar in all England. Judging the "nigger" merely as a human being, irrespective of sentiment, colour, and so forth, I can only say that in my estimation he and his are far better off in every respect than the average white labourer and his family in England. These folk have plenty to eat, little to do, and are very jolly. They would be perfectly happy if they only had a sufficient number of rifles and a large enough supply of ammunition to enable them to drive every white man clean ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... came upon a group of three women and two children in the road, busy clearing out a labourer's cottage. They had got hold of a little hand truck, and were piling it up with unclean-looking bundles and shabby furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... themselves in some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told, of vital moment—vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and uneducated—the road to it cannot lie through any very profound enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion, under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... there was a busy and earnest, but indistinct hum of the two children's voices, as Violet and Peony wrought together with one happy consent. Violet still seemed to be the guiding spirit, while Peony acted rather as a labourer, and brought her the snow from far and near. And yet the little urchin evidently had a proper understanding of the ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... employment according to a fixed rate of wages. It was a difficult point, he said, to settle the scale of wages; and he could devise no better mode than that of compelling the planter to fix a price on the labourer at the time of his apprenticeship, and by enacting that the wages to be paid by the master should bear such a proportion to the price fixed by him, that for the whole of his spare time he should receive one-twelfth of his price annually. In this manner, he said, the slave and his master would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the waistband of the trunkhose, while those nether garments stopped short of his knees; the whole attire belonging to a smaller man than the unfortunate statesman. His delicate white hands, much exposed by the shortness of the sleeves, looked very unlike those of a day-labourer, and altogether the new mason presented a somewhat incongruous and wobegone aspect. Grotius was fearful too lest some of the preachers and professors frequenting the book-shop next door would recognize him through ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... write for the instruction, or even the amusement of the poor than for the amusement of the rich; and I would sooner raise a smile or create an interest in the honest mechanic or agricultural labourer who requires relaxation, than I would contribute to dispel the ennui of those who loll on their couches and wonder in their idleness what they shall do next. Is the rich man only to be amused? are mirth and laughter to be made ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... or three years to build and finish a good house. A wigwam is knocked up in an hour; and as you have to be your own architect, carpenter, mason, and labourer, it's just as well to be handy as not. A critter that can't do that, hante the gumption of a bear who makes a den, a fox who makes a hole, or a bird that makes a nest, let alone a beaver, who is a dab at house building. No man can enjoy the woods that ain't up to these ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... tombstone, wrapped in thought, and apparently quite unconscious of the moonlight which now fell upon his chest and legs. He was of middle stature, rather thick-set, with over-developed arms and a labourer's hands, already hardened by toil; his feet, shod with heavy laced boots, looked large and square-toed. His general appearance, more particularly the heaviness of his limbs, bespoke lowly origin. There was, however, something in him, in the upright bearing of his neck and the thoughtful gleams ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... glad to see the men of Fife thus taking the lead in creating new openings for the agricultural labourer. Of course the weather will have much influence upon the success of the new avocation. To sit out hatching eggs in one of such blizzards as we have had since Christmas would be exceedingly inconvenient, upon whatever "Liberal terms." But, given a fair summer day or a quiet autumn evening, there ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... said, every village is a self-contained little commune. All trades necessary to supplying the wants of the villagers are represented in it. Besides the profits from his actual calling, nearly every man except the daily labourer, has a little bit of land which he farms, so as to eke out his scanty income. All possess a cow or two, a few goats, and probably a ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the maintenance of the "pass" system necessary, but modifications were introduced into the working of the system sufficient to protect the educated native from unnecessary humiliation and the native labourer from excessive punishment. In addition to this departmental work two commissions had been appointed by Lord Milner to investigate two matters of direct and immediate concern to the gold industry. The first of these, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... son of Robert Douglas, a labourer in the village of Strathmiglo in Fife, where he was born on the 17th June 1771. Early discovering an aptitude for learning, he formed the intention of studying for the ministry,—a laudable aspiration, which was unfortunately checked ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... mathematics and calculations, mysterious as these generally seem to the feminine mind, that she was able to formulate with exactness the result of her brother's researches. She never failed to be his willing fellow-labourer in the workshop; she helped him to grind and polish his mirrors; she stood beside his telescope, in order to record his observations, during the dark and bitter mid-winter nights, when the very ink was frozen in the bottle. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... its seat and centre. The palace is built of imported wood upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron, the yard enclosed with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of lych-house. It cannot be called spacious; a labourer in the States is sometimes more commodiously lodged; but when we had the chance to see it within, we found it was enriched (beyond all island expectation) with coloured advertisements and cuts from the illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the treasures of the crown stand public: a ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... directions, in readily receiving the instructions of their masters; and reducing them to practice, is properly the virtue of scholars, as that of masters is to teach well. The one can do nothing without the other; and as it is not sufficient for a labourer to sow the seed, unless the earth, after having opened its bosom to receive it, in a manner hatches, warms, and moistens it; so likewise the whole fruit of instruction depends upon a good correspondence between the masters and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... nothing superfluous, nothing but what appertains to the earliest stages of civilization, and what every well-arranged society ought to be able to give in return for manual labour of the lowest kind. With inferior means the labourer must suffer the obloquy of being remunerated from the parish rates, to which all are forced to contribute as fully as though the employer paid the fair value of the labour in the first instance, and the amount were assessed on the price of his commodity, instead of being assessed ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... found great amusement in his retired manner of living, in collecting whatever was curious in the neighbourhood, said, he should much like to see this urn, and inquired of Mr. Scott if he thought it were possible to get a sight of the labourer who found it. "Oh yes, Sir," answered Mrs. Scott, "that you may easily do, for it was Archie Kerr who found it, and his mother lives only about a mile and a half from this place; but I think, if your honour wants to see it, you had better send up to him at once, ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... whom allusion is made in the verses, Abel, Fanny, and the Captive Maid, all that it is necessary to know is, that the first was one of his friends, the companion of his early happiness, and the fellow-labourer of his early studies—"Abel, doux confidant de mes jeunes mysteres;" the second, one of his mistresses; and the third, a young lady, Mlle. de Coigny, who was for some time his fellow-prisoner, and the person to whom the poet addressed the touching verses which we have mentioned above. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... was green; the walls were green and the benches were green, and Oh's wife was green and his children were green—in fact, everything there was green. And Oh had water-nixies for serving-maids, and they were all as green as rue. "Sit down now!" said Oh to his new labourer, "and have a bit of something to eat." The nixies then brought him some food, and that also was green, and he ate of it. "And now," said Oh, "take my labourer into the courtyard that he may chop wood and draw water." So they took him into the ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... abandoned by his mother, how he ran away from his grandmother, who starved and ill-used him, and so became a vagabond. "I pulled through it," he would say, "though nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner—Josiah ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... tended in Turin by the wife of an inn-keeper, had an epileptic seizure. At thirteen, he was seized by another fit, and in falling broke his arm. His restless and capricious character led him to change his occupation a great many times; he became, in turn, baker, carpenter, forester, and farm-labourer. He appeared to have little affection for his mother and still less for his father, with whom he had come to blows on one occasion. At the age of twenty, in a quarrel with some companions, one of them struck him with a sickle and fractured his skull. He had ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... collecting, and invented two new methods; I employed a labourer to scrape during the winter, moss off old trees and place it in a large bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds are brought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species. No poet ever felt ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... troublesome qualities, and a certain faculty for doing quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... Giotto passed the first ten years of his life, a shepherd-boy, among these hills; was found by Cimabue near his native village, drawing one of his sheep upon a smooth stone; was yielded up by his father, "a simple person, a labourer of the earth," to the guardianship of the painter, who, by his own work, had already made the streets of Florence ring with joy; attended him to Florence, and became ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... it; and she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately, encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed cottage and an agricultural labourer's widow for cook and housemaid; Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to praise him, Madge to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... your husband a fisherman?-He is a day labourer for the most part, and does land-work. He has been at the ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... We answer that Ireland comes first on grounds both of ethics and of expediency. Through all the blackness of dismal years we have laboured to preserve the twin ideas of nationality and autonomy, and the labourer is worthy of his hire. But a Home Rule assembly, functioning in Dublin, may well furnish the germ of a reorganisation of the Empire. If so, let it be remembered that it was not Mr Chamberlain but Daniel O'Connell who first in these countries gave ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... lives a labourer, Francisco Lozano, who presented a highly curious physiological phenomenon. This man has suckled a child with his own milk. The mother having fallen sick, the father, to quiet the infant, took it into his bed, and pressed it to his bosom. Lozano, then thirty-two years of age, had never before remarked ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... really help the sweated woman labourer would, of course, be to have the best intellect brought to bear, not specially upon the problem of indigent woman, but ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... five, Thomas Savage, a bricklayer's labourer employed by the Cubitt Town Construction Company, was making his way across Hyde Park en route to his work. He had crossed the main drive which runs parallel with the Bayswater Road, when his attention was attracted to a figure lying on ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... has lately seized Mr Dutton, that no servant or labourer shall sleep under the same roof with himself; and those new outhouses, where their bedrooms are placed are, you see, completely detached, and are indeed, as regards this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... that already appeared over-charged to the more fastidious taste of the day. Odo's curiosity centred chiefly in the persons peopling this scene, whose conflicting interests and passions formed, as it were, the framework of the social structure of Pianura, so that there was not a labourer in the mulberry-orchards or a weaver in the silk-looms but depended for his crust of black bread and the leaking roof over his head on the private whim of some member of that ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... and indefatigable advocate, Mr. Granville Sharp. This gentleman is to be distinguished from those who preceded him by this particular, that, whereas these were only writers, he was both a writer and an actor in the cause. In fact, he was the first labourer in it in England. By the words "actor" and "labourer," I mean that he determined upon a plan of action in behalf of the oppressed Africans, to the accomplishment of which he devoted a considerable portion of his time, talents, and substance. What Mr. Sharp has done ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... beehives to sell, and cane to mend chairs—a strong, respectable-looking man. Of all the north wind drove to the door, the outcasts were the best off—much better off than the cottager who was willing to break his spade to earn a shilling; much better off than the white-haired labourer, whose strength was spent, and who had not even a friend to watch with him in the dark hours of the winter evening—not even a fire to rest by. The gipsy nearest to the earth was the best off in every way; yet not even for primitive man and woman did the winds cease. Broad ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... earth; hardly (and I mean this as a compliment) will you close it without an instinctive impulse to wipe your boots. The brothers are Jim, the eldest, hereditary master of the great farm of Bodingmares; Clem, the youngest, living contentedly in the position of his brother's labourer; and Bob, the central character, whose dark and changing fortunes make the matter of the book, as his final crop of tragedy gives to it the at first puzzling title. There is too much variety of incident in Bob's uneasy life ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... his office about two o'clock after making a complete circuit of his leases. The crop looked fine—so everybody told him. He knew little about cotton, but Ah Sing was a wonderful farmer—he knew how to handle the Chinese labourer. ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... the following day. It was a badly-written and misspelt letter, which showed me that Mrs. Oliver must be a working woman (perhaps the wife of a gardener or farm-labourer, I thought), though that did not trouble me in the least, knowing by this time how poor ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Waiting to be hired by another man, almost like a beast of burden—what a trial is here for pride! Happily for the human race, pride, although it springs naturally in the breast of man, only becomes luxuriant with cultivation. The poor labourer does not feel it unless his instinctive sense of justice has ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... other two during the week." Now it happened that my venerable friend was of the Methodist persuasion, and when I heard the poor man talk in this manner, I said to him, "May I go with you next Sunday?" "Why not?" said he; so I went with the labourer on the ensuing Sabbath to the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... years he kairs, or 'houses,' more than of old, particularly during the winter, but his life at best requires great strength and endurance, and this must, of course, be supported by a generous diet. In fact, he lives well, much better than the agricultural labourer. Let me explain how this is generally done. The Gipsy year may be said to begin with the races. Thither the dark children of Chun-Gwin, whether pure blood, posh an' posh (half-and-half), or churedis, with hardly a ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the present situation of the people of England with that of their predecessors at the time of Caesar's invasion; if we contrast the warm and dry cottage of the present labourer, its chimney and glass windows, (luxuries not enjoyed by Caesar himself,) the linen and woollen clothing of himself and his family, the steel, and glass, and earthenware with which his table is furnished, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... what they should do during the voyage. Whatever be the result to those who go, there are indications that the labour-market is bettered for those who stay; in connection with which a noteworthy fact may be mentioned, which is, that in the southern, western, and midland counties, scarcely an Irish labourer is to be seen; and who is there that does not remember what troops of the ragged peasantry used to come over for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... nor (although my uncle Gervase groaned over the accounts) would an abatement of rent be denied, the appeal having been weighed and found to be reasonable. The rain—which falls alike upon the just and the unjust—beat through his own roof, but never through the labourer's thatch; and Mrs. Nance, the cook, who hated beggars, might not without art and secrecy dismiss a single beggar unfed. His religion he told to no man, but believed the practice of worship to be good for all men, and regularly ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... clear and level a fit foundation for the scientific edifice. In the present work, I look for the patient hearing and the impartiality of a judge; in the other, for the good-will and assistance of a co-labourer. For, however complete the list of principles for this system may be in the Critique, the correctness of the system requires that no deduced conceptions should be absent. These cannot be presented a ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... inference seems painfully clear; either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist, a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees and could give no description of a dwelling-place ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... sick, receiving the stranger, and, as the very title-deed of their existence, feeding the poor. In those uncomplicated times there was no such fear of pauperising the natives of the soil as holds our hands now, and everything had to be taught to the primitive labourer, who might have to leave the plough in the middle of the furrow and be off and away on his lord's commands at any moment, leaving his wife and children to struggle on with the help of the good fathers who taught the boys, or the gentle sisters who trained the girls to more delicate work, feeding ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... farming," moreover, has swallowed up most of the smaller holdings. Fifty years ago there were ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with its resident tenant; now the number is reduced to less than half. It seems a pity, for a twofold reason: first, because the farm-labourer thus loses all chance of advancement; and secondly, because the English yeoman will be soon as extinct ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... slew; Under the fifth rib of the one he drave His spear, the other stabbed he 'neath the throat Where a wound bringeth surest doom to man. Whomso he met besides he slew—the names What man could tell of all that by the hands Of Neoptolemus died? Never his limbs Waxed weary. As some brawny labourer, With strong hands toiling in a fruitful field The livelong day, rains down to earth the fruit Of olives, swiftly beating with his pole, And with the downfall covers all the ground, So fast fell 'neath his ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... and is assimilated to the body of the animal. It is obvious that animal life controls mechanical laws. Thus, the friction of two inert substances wears one of them away—the soft yields to the hard; but, on the contrary, the hand of the labourer who wields the spade or the pickaxe becomes thicker and harder ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... a common labourer," says Moll, disgusted to see him regaling himself in this fashion, as we returned to our room. "A pretty picture we are like to get for all ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... appearance in a blue livery with heraldic buttons, and begins, with cringing servility, drawing off one's boots, one feels that if his pale, lean figure could suddenly be replaced by the amazingly broad cheeks and incredibly thick nose of a stalwart young labourer fresh from the plough, who has yet had time in his ten months of service to tear his new nankin coat open at every seam, one would be unutterably overjoyed, and would gladly run the risk of having one's whole leg pulled off with ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... afterwards; and although these noblemen provided for their own safety by flight, they were degraded as outlaws, and in the order in Council were styled, according to the usual form of law, "James Butler, yeoman," and "Henry Bolingbroke, labourer," and the arms of Ormond were taken from Windsor Chapel, and torn in pieces ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... places, contributions of chiefs from ancient hoards as well as the cash received from I.D.B. I untied one or two of the little bags of stones and poured the contents into my hands. Most of the diamonds were small, such as a labourer might secrete on his person. The larger ones—and some were very large—were as a rule discoloured, looking more like big cairngorms. But one or two bags had big stones which even my inexperienced eye told me were of the purest water. There must be some new pipe, ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... vast, so was their rapacity enormous; they had been so long accustomed to have crowns and half-crowns rained upon them by their admirers and flatterers, that they would look at a shilling, for which many an honest labourer was happy to toil for ten hours under a broiling sun, with the utmost contempt; would blow upon it derisively, or fillip it into the air before they pocketed it; but when nothing was given them, as would occasionally happen—for how could they receive from those who had nothing? and nobody was bound ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... were my Lord Duke of Buckingham, the Earls of Derby and Lauderdale, and the Lords Wilmot and Talbot. During their journey it fell from my Lord Derby's lips, that when he had been defeated at Wigan, one Pendrell, an honest labourer and a Papist, had sheltered him in Boscobel House, not far distant from where they then rode. Hearing this, the king resolved to trust this same faithful fellow, and for the present seek such refuge as Pendrell could afford. It was not easy, however, for his majesty to escape the Scots; ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... dede it make. Verconius of cokerie Ferst made the delicacie. The craft Minerve of wolle fond And made cloth hire oghne hond; And Delbora made it of lyn: Tho wommen were of great engyn. Bot thing which yifth ous mete and drinke And doth the labourer to swinke 2440 To tile lond and sette vines, Wherof the cornes and the wynes Ben sustenance to mankinde, In olde bokes as I finde, Saturnus of his oghne wit Hath founde ferst, and more yit Of Chapmanhode he fond the weie, And ek to coigne the moneie Of sondri metall, as it is, He was the ferste ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... of enlisting, and then of earning an honest wage as a farm-labourer; but rejected both notions, because his training had not taught him that independence is better than respectability—yea, than much broadcloth. It was not that he hankered after the fleshpots, but that he had no conception of a world without ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... than that for which it was intended. It is degradation to a man to live on husks, because these are not his true food. We call it degradation when we see the members of an ancient family, decayed by extravagance, working for their bread. It is not degradation for a born labourer to work for an honest livelihood. It is degradation for them, for they are not what they might have been. And therefore, for a man to be degraded, it is not necessary that he should have given himself up to low and mean practices. It is quite enough that he is living ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... event, which was narrated to me by Lord Shaftesbury in 1882. One winter evening in 1867 he was sitting in his library in Grosvenor Square, when the servant told him that there was a poor man waiting to see him. The man was shown in, and proved to be a labourer from Clerkenwell, and one of the innumerable recipients of the old Earl's charity. He said, "My Lord, you have been very good to me, and I have come to tell you what I have heard." It appeared that at the public-house which he frequented he had overheard some Irishmen of desperate ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... no, sir! Why, it's a difficult matter to muster hands enough even to unload or load a ship, with labourer's wages up to a pound a day; and the men who are willing to work even at that figure are either the few long-headed ones who prefer a moderate certainty to the chance of ill luck at the gold-fields, or such poor delicate chaps as can't stand the hardships of camp life. But, as to sailors, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... laborema. Laboratory laborejo. Labour laboro. Labour labori. Labour, manual manlaboro. Labourer laboristo. Labyrinth labirinto. Lac (lacquer) lako. Lace lacxi. Lace pasamento. Lace (of shoe, etc.) lacxo. Lacerate dissxiri. Lack bezono. Lacker, lacquer laki. Lackey, lacquey lakeo. Laconic lakona. Laconism lakonismo. Lad knabo, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... "uneducated," but many such forms have been adapted by the language, e.g. sound, Fr. son, and we have the name Kitching for kitchen. The usual additions are -d, -t, or -g after n, e.g. Simmonds, Simon, Hammond, Hammant, Fr. Hamon, Hind, a farm labourer, of which the older form is Hine (Chapter XVII), Collings for Collins, Jennings, Fr. Jeannin, dim. of Jean, Aveling from the female name Avelina or Evelyn. Neill is for Neil, Nigel. We have epithetic -b in Plumb, the ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... watch the crowd as it passes. Here is a water-carrier, whose terra-cotta water-jars are slung from a bamboo carried on his shoulder, another man bears on his head a tray upon which a charcoal fire is cooking a strong-smelling "tit-bit" some hungry labourer will presently enjoy. Again, a Chinaman, perhaps wearing black skull-cap and loose jacket and trousers, endeavours to tempt you to purchase the fans or sunshades he is hawking. Huge baskets of coco-nuts or vegetables, gaudily printed calicoes and haberdashery, ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... is just the obverse of the Postulate implied in the Method of Abstractions, namely, that 'What is true of the Abstraction is true of concrete cases the more nearly they approach the Abstraction.' What is true of the 'Economic Man' is truer of a broker than of a farmer, of a farmer than of a labourer, of a labourer than of the artist of romance. Hence the Abstraction may be called a Limit or limiting case, in the sense that it stands to concrete individuals, as a curve does to the figures made up "by putting together many short straight lines." Correspondingly, the Proper Name ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... minutes. So I don't mind leaving him in the least; and indeed he is going to Sidmouth himself, probably at the end of the week. I have seen him every day without one exception, and have learnt a very great deal from him. He has studied very closely school work, condition of the labourer, boys' homes, best method of dispensing charity, &c., and on all these points his advice has been really invaluable. I feel now that I am quite to all intents working the district. People ask me about their children coming to school. I know almost ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... conspiracy of quiet which, for some reason or other, was imposed on the household; in that reign of silence the bang of a door, the fall of a plate, becomes a domestic tornado. But have you ever heard an agricultural labourer in clogs or heavy boots ascend a stair? The noise is terrible. The tramp of an army of them through the house and overhead, probably jabbering uncouthly together, would be insufferable. Yet Lord Pharanx seems to have made no objection; ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... mortgaged, by little and little, most of his lands, and nothing now remained to make money of, but the Castle itself and a few acres around it, with the exception only of a cottage and a small field, hitherto occupied by a labourer, which lay in a kind of hollow on the side of the knoll, where the entrance of the secret cavern was. This cottage was as remote from Dymock's Tower in one way, as Shanty's shed was in another; although the three dwellings formed ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... Portuguese) means a labourer, a serf. The Portuguese are supposed to have brought some Red Indians from this coast to be ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... offices; he puts on his black robe and a broad hat, takes the taper in his hand, and goes forth where the voice of misery has called him. If it is some wounded man, they bear him to the hospital; if the man is dead, to a chapel: the nobleman and the day labourer, clothed with the same robe, support together the same litter, and the link which unites these two extremes of society is some sick pauper, who, knowing neither, is praying equally for both. And when these brothers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... afraid he thought very little of the offer at the time. I don't intend him to know anything at all about my ownership now. He has discovered the mine—you and he together. If it is valueless, then you and he will be two of the sufferers; if it is all you think it is, then you will be the gainers. The labourer is worthy of his hire, and I am sure both you and Mr. Kenyon have laboured hard enough in this venture. Should he guess I bought it, the chances are that he will be stupidly and stubbornly conscientious, and decline to share the fruits ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... then, when I was a poor, broken-down day-labourer, lying in jail, rotting there; but I tell you fairly, I do not believe you now. You have some ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... enfant will be like this, but for fifty centimes I will save it, I guarantee. Pelt me with rotten apples, with addled eggs, if I fail. This plaster placed here (he applied it to the breast of the skeleton), and your child breathes thus (drew a long inhalation)—is well. Warts (a labourer held up a horny hand, the middle joint of the little finger disfigured with such excrescences)? Nothing easier! You take this bottle—warts are my speciality—you rub the wart with this. Thank you, fifty centimes. Come here ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... of the insurgents, and that the consignment was landed in the Laguna de Cortes; and I am fully aware that Senor Montijo is actively sympathetic with the insurgents—as is every member of his family and household, down to the meanest stable boy or labourer in ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... young ladies who attacked a labourer, under the form of cats, and were wounded by him. They were found bleeding in their ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... charge of his uncle's farm, when a ploughman passed him in full flight, crying out that a savage wolf had appeared and had killed the ass with which he had been ploughing. The man entreated Herve to fly, as the wolf was hard upon his heels; but the blind youth, undaunted, ordered the terrified labourer to seize the animal and harness it to the plough with the harness of the dead ass. From that time the wolf dwelt among the sheep and goats on the farm, and subsisted upon ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... contributed more than any other circumstance to her speedy improvement, was some small insight into the primer, which she had acquired at a day-school, during the life of her father, who was a day-labourer in the country. Upon this foundation did Peregrine build a most elegant superstructure; he culled out choice sentences from Shakespeare, Otway, and Pope, and taught her to repeat them with an emphasis and theatrical ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... first and most vehement assertors of the learning of Shakespeare was the Editor of his Poems, the well-known Mr. Gildon; and his steps were most punctually taken by a subsequent labourer in the ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Admiral, when they found that they also were obliged to labour with their hands. But Columbus was firm; there were absolutely no exceptions made; hidalgo and priest had to work alongside of sailor and labourer; and the curses of the living mingled with those of the dying on the man whose boastful words had brought them to such a ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... highways; all persons keeping draughts, or occupying lands, being obliged to send a team for every draught, and for every 50l. a year, which they keep or occupy; and all other persons to work or find a labourer. The work must be completed before harvest; as well for providing a good road for carrying in the corn, as also because all hands are then supposed to be employed in harvest work. And every cartway must be made eight feet wide at the least[i]; and may ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... begging that I would not take them away; a request to which, after some time, I assented. They then conducted me into the house, where I found an old man and three women, who entertained me with bread, cheese, and new milk. While I was sitting here, a third youth, in the dress of a labourer, entered, and whispered to one of the sailors, who immediately rose to go out, but I commanded him to sit still, declaring that I was not satisfied, and should certainly arrest him if he attempted to escape. ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... and aristocratic classes powerful engines to corrupt and subdue republican notions, relieve the wealthy stockholder from an equal share of contribution to the public service, and proportionally enhance the tax on the hard earnings of the farmer, mechanic and labourer." He spoke of the "intrigue and hollow pretences" of applicants, insisting that the gratification of politicians ought not to govern them, nor the "selfish and demoralising distribution of the stock." "Nor ought ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Cordial in two treatises, the first teaching how to be eased of the guilt of sin, the second, discovering advantages by Christs ascention: by that faithful labourer in the Lord's vineyard Mr. Christopher Love, late Parson of Laurance Jury: ...
— The Compleat Cook • Anonymous, given as "W. M."
... late. David Butts, whom they were about to visit, was a dock-labourer. In early youth he had been a footman, in which capacity he had made the acquaintance of the Westlakes' nursery-maid, and, having captivated her heart, had carried her off ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... the colonial offices of the two countries. There was no real control at all, and never had been. The beche de mer fishermen of the old days had passed it by. The sandalwood traders, after stern experiences, had given it up. The blackbirders had never succeeded in recruiting one labourer on the island, and, after the schooner Dorset had been cut off with all hands, they left the place severely alone. Later, a German company had attempted a cocoanut plantation, which was abandoned after several managers and a number of contract labourers had ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... confide, he now disguised himself, and travelled as one of their retinue. He first disclosed himself to the elector of Brandenburgh in Prussia, and afterwards to king William, with whom he conferred in private at Utrecht. He engaged himself as a common labourer with a ship-carpenter in Holland, whom he served for some months with wonderful patience and assiduity. He afterwards visited England, where he amused himself chiefly with the same kind of occupation. From thence he set out for Vienna, where receiving advices from his dominions, that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... stout active young fellow appeared as the labourer of the croft in question, Dumbiedikes began to think so broad a pair of shoulders might bear an additional burden. He regulated, indeed, his management of his dependants (who fortunately were but few in number) much upon the principle of the carters whom he observed loading ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... what the labourer is worthy of his hire,' went on Master Ratsey; 'so spile that little breaker of Schiedam, and send a rummer round ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... the labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... with C—-n last evening, to take a walk; when a man rushed by us in a state of great agitation, and on going further we met some workmen, who told us that an Indian labourer had stabbed a man in the next field, and that he had died before a padre could be procured. We heard the cries of his wife and children, and A——, crossing the ditch that bordered the field, went to see the man. He was a master-workman, or director, and had ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... me one of the highest, latest, and most refined Christian Graces in natures farthest removed from "the ape and tiger," and most at leisure for contemplative worship. I know there are exceptions. Rural contemplative saints among shepherds and ploughmen. But that the agricultural labourer as a type seeks "Nature's God" at the plough-tail and in the bosom of his family I fear is not the case—and it would be very odd if poverty and ignorance did lead to such results, even in the advantages of an "open-air" life. Perhaps Burns knew such ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... his horse and cantered down the Parade. The sun was setting; he would for a something miss his supper; but he meant to see Burley Wood that day, and he would have just daylight enough for his purpose. As he entered the village, he caught up a labourer returning from the fields. Sir Charles drew rein ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... for his large family. In his youth he had attended a secondary school in the neighbourhood for a couple of winters, but he never had his experiences enriched by foreign travel and was during the whole of his life anchored to his native region. Jn Trausti, the son of a farm labourer and his wife, who had been born on one of the northernmost farms in Iceland in a barren and outlying district, was brought up in dire poverty. From an early age he had had to fend for himself as a farmhand and fisherman, finally settling in Reykjavk as a printer. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... of the Roman population benefited by the fire. There was work for everyone, from the roughest labourer to the most skilled artisan and artist. Crowds of workmen were brought from all parts. Greece sent her most skilful architects and decorators, her sculptors and painters. Money was abundant, and Rome rose again from her ruins with ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... political economy, and disputable like some other branches of a science not yet matured. It is the great conquest of modern civilization; it is the indispensable condition to the full development of the activity and enterprise of man. The liberation of the artisan and the labourer, is the signal triumph of modern over ancient times whether we regard classic or Gothic antiquity. Viewing things on a large scale, it may be considered as a late triumph; and, without depreciating its value, we may easily admit that there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... accordingly notices, as one amongst the familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller; and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description, where it is ranked with the most familiar of all circumstances in all countries—that of the rural labourer going out to his morning tasks it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... double life, so wise and humane, uplifted and thoughtful, this side the threshold, and beyond it so callous, so instinctive and pitiless! For it is enough that we should feel the cold a little less than the labourer who passes by, that we should be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy any object that is not strictly indispensable, and we have unconsciously returned, through a thousand byways, to the ruthless act of primitive man despoiling his weaker brother. There is ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years, what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer a slave ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... and that society is bound in justice rather to make compensation to the less favoured, for this unmerited inequality of advantages, than to aggravate it. On the contrary side it is contended, that society receives more from the more efficient labourer; that his services being more useful, society owes him a larger return for them; that a greater share of the joint result is actually his work, and not to allow his claim to it is a kind of robbery; that if he is only to receive as ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... Socrates. 'Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of life!' 'Who is he?' 'My father.' 'Good heavens! you don't mean that. What is he accused of?' 'Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent to Athens to ask a diviner what should be done with him.' Before the answer of the diviner arrived, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... was reaped, And then the stubble by the roots was heaped, To satisfy the lordly devil's claim, Who thought the seed and root were just the same, And that the ear and stalk were useless parts, Which nothing made if carried to the marts: The labourer his produce housed with care; The other to the market brought his ware, Where ridicule and laughter he received; 'Twas nothing worth, which much ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... attempted it. Few men of genius ever did. Once at the sacred heat that opens regions beyond ordinary vision, imagination has its own laws; and where characters are so real as to be treated as existences, their creator himself cannot help them having their own wills and ways. Fern the farm-labourer is not here, nor yet his niece the little Lilian (at first called Jessie) who is to give to the tale its most tragical scene; and there are intimations of poetic fancy at the close of my sketch which the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and laugh when they speak of him. Ah, but he is such a good child, such a brave boy, such a generous spirit, that Monsieur Loyal! It is the honest truth. M. Loyal's nature is the nature of a gentleman. He cultivates his ground with his own hands (assisted by one little labourer, who falls into a fit now and then); and he digs and delves from morn to eve in prodigious perspirations - 'works always,' as he says - but, cover him with dust, mud, weeds, water, any stains you will, you never can cover the gentleman in M. Loyal. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... may enthral men— "The wages of sin are death"; And so death passed upon all men, For sin was born with man's breath. Then the labourer spent with sinning, His hire with his life shall spend; For it was so in the beginning, And shall ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... see numbers at work to repair the building and cultivate the garden and to observe that at length from this inhospitable mansion, 'health to himself, and to his children bread, the labourer bears.' Within it were all the biggest schoolgirls, with one of their mistresses to direct them in mending such furniture as was not quite destroyed; and I was pleased to see with how much art they repaired the decays of time, ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... sways and creaks beneath your feet; the air is heavy with strange odours; something,—probably a cat—scuttles past you and nearly upsets your balance; and putting out your hand to steady yourself your fingers touch something clammy and corpselike which turns out to be a Ghati labourer, naked save for a loin-cloth, asleep in the narrow niche between the walls of the ground-floor and the first storey. One wonders what he pays for this precarious accommodation, in which a sudden movement during ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... from him And from his heirs to issue. And that such He might be construed, as indeed he was, She was inspir'd to name him of his owner, Whose he was wholly, and so call'd him Dominic. And I speak of him, as the labourer, Whom Christ in his own garden chose to be His help-mate. Messenger he seem'd, and friend Fast-knit to Christ; and the first love he show'd, Was after the first counsel that Christ gave. Many a time his nurse, at entering found That ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... came nearer, stumbling up the dark, narrow staircase; then the door was pushed open and a man entered—a broad-chested, broad-faced rough-looking man with stubbly whiskers, wearing the dress and rusty boots of a labourer. ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... why such dayly Cast of Brazon Cannon [Sidenote: And with such dayly cost] And Forraigne Mart for Implements of warre: Why such impresse of Ship-wrights, whose sore Taske Do's not diuide the Sunday from the weeke, What might be toward, that this sweaty hast[3] Doth make the Night ioynt-Labourer with the day: Who is't that ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... son—there is lime in this sack, too— nothing but sophistication in this world! I do say it, in spite of Adam Smith and his followers, that a successful author is a productive labourer, and that his works constitute as effectual a part of the public wealth, as that which is created by any other manufacture. If a new commodity, having an actually intrinsic and commercial value, be the result of the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... be wondered—Augustin himself wonders—that she did not think of finding him a wife. They marry early in Africa. Even now any Arab labourer buys a wife for his son, hardly turned sixteen, so that the fires of a too warm youth may be quenched in marriage. But Monnica, who was not yet a saint, acted in this matter like a foreseeing and practical woman of the prosperous class. A wife would be a drag for a young man like Augustin, who ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... blue and dim above the low lines of trees; in the centre of the pastures lay the long brown line of the sedge-beds of Wicken Mere, almost the only untouched tract of fenland; slow herds of cattle grazed, more and more minute, in the unhedged pasture-land, and the solitary figure of a labourer moving homeward on the top of the green dyke, seemed in the long afternoon to draw no nearer. Here and there were the floodgates of a lode, with the clear water slowly spilling itself over the rim of the sluice, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... able helper in the work of bringing Boehme into English thought, holds the same fundamental ideas as his co-labourer, though he has his own peculiar style and his own unique way of uttering himself. The stress of his emphasis is always on first-hand experience—what he calls "an effectual, living, essential knowledge and real spiritual ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... plough was of the old Roman model, with an iron point. One of the chief productions of the island is rice, and as for it a constant supply of water is required, there is a very extensive system of irrigation. To prepare it for cultivation, the land is first overflowed, and the labourer hoes, and ploughs, and harrows, while he stands knee deep in mud and water. It is first grown in plots and then transplanted. The banyan-tree is very abundant, and so is the bamboo, which supplies them with food, lodging, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... it's done promised to help the farmer," put in Amos heavily, bringing his large red hand down upon the table. "Ain't it been helpin' the manufacturer all these years? Ain't it been lookin' arter the labourer, black an' white? Ain't it time for it to keep ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... to have some liberty and calm. We must not muzzle the mouth of the ox who treads the corn. Let thy people be responsible for what they do; hold them strictly to every tie of heart and honour; give them richly that which comes back to them. The labourer is worthy of his hire. But three or four times a year, and always unexpectedly, swoop down upon them like the Last Judgment; examine every corner and recess; make a noise like thunder, and strike right and left at the fitting moment—this clears ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the sunshine of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the formality of her conjugal existence, and seized the first opportunity of escape from it. A retainer of the Duke's, whose chivalry her position had aroused, connived at her escape, and tells the story ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the Gospel in Foreign Parts there is the pertinent comment "It is a Pity some Method—was not invented for the Propagation of the Gospel in Great Britain." After the deaths of a wealthy banker and factor, comes the obituary of "One Nowns a Labourer, most probably immensely poor, and yet as rich now as either of the two Preceeding"; beside which may be placed the very characteristic assertion in No. 6 that "Spleen and Vapours inhabit Palaces and are attired with Pomp and Splendor, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... prosperity of the country are around us on every side for those to see that have eyes to see—a higher standard of dress in every class of the community; better built and better furnished houses for artisan and labourer, as well as for millionaire; new public buildings, new libraries, new hospitals; improved paving, improved water-supply, improved drainage; more newspapers, more theatres, more lavish entertainments; in ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... half-convert, depended on his own perfect and transparent disinterestedness. Therefore, although he made no scruple of taking the Shunemite's gifts, and probably lived on similar offerings, he steadfastly refused the enormous sum proffered by Naaman. 'The labourer is worthy of his hire,' but if accepting it is likely to make people think that he did his work for the sake of it, he must refuse it. A hireling is not a man who is paid for his work, but one who works for the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Being is alone the Lord of Time, of Death, and of this Universe of mobile and immobile objects. That great ascetic Hari, though the Lord of the whole Universe, still betaketh himself to work, like a humble labourer that tilleth the fields. Indeed, Kesava beguileth all by the aid of His illusion. Those men, however, that have attained to Him ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the same time, the celebrated Father Kircher published his "Subterranean World," in which he called the alchymists a congregation of knaves and impostors, and their science a delusion. He admitted that he had himself been a diligent labourer in the field, and had only come to this conclusion after mature consideration and repeated fruitless experiments. All the alchymists were in arms immediately, to refute this formidable antagonist. One Solomon de Blauenstein was the first to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... are two drawings with their own special claim to consideration. These are the Ploughman and the Priest (Plates 14 and 15). The former has been cited by Ruskin as an example of a perfect design for wood-engraving; but even higher than its art, to my thinking, is its feeling. To the labourer of this sort,—poor, patient, toilworn,—Holbein's heart is very gentle. And so is Death—who muffles up his harsh features and speeds the heavy plough with a step like that of Hope. And at the end of the long, last uphill furrow, see how ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... moved the rejection of the Agriculture Bill. Adapting an old joke of Lord SPENCER'S, made in "another place" a generation ago, he observed that this was no more an agricultural Bill than he himself was an agricultural labourer. He knows however how to call a spade a spade, if not something more picturesque, and he treated the measure and its authors to all the resources of a varied vocabulary. Possibly his brother peers, while enjoying his invective, thought that it had been a little bit overdone, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... wages of the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It will be seen I have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist class. Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer; or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more important ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... artificer or daylabourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people, of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... the fan of suffering and death, the wheat of the harvest will shed its tares of discord and suspicion. The duke and the labourer will have stood side by side, and will have found one another—men. No longer self the only thing; no longer a ceaseless growse against everybody and everything; no longer an instinctive suspicion of the man one ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... borders, on the other side, by the edge of a great forest, lived a labourer with his wife and a great many children. One day Tricksey-Wee, as they called her, teased her brother Buffy-Bob, till he could not bear it any longer, and gave her a box on the ear. Tricksey-Wee cried; ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... bring forward a seductive statement of the case. Walker—the man who had made the money for Breslaw and his step-brother—had been a grand level-headed old labourer, and though his sons had been educated in the great English schools, they were not far removed from honest utilitarian folk, and owing to this, and in conjunction with Dawn, when her real name was divulged,—being a daughter of one of the "old families," to wit, the Mudeheepes ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... great adepts in the art of index reading. I, for my part, venerate the inventor of indexes; and I know not to whom to yield the preference, either to Hippocrates, who was the first great anatomiser of the human body, or to that unknown labourer in literature, who first laid open the nerves and arteries of a book. Watts advises the perusal of the prefaces and the index of a book, as they both give light ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... saved my father's life. If it had not been for you his dream would never have been carried into effect, and he would now be lying in the graveyard on the top of the hill, and I should be working hopelessly as a day labourer. I only want to say, that if at any time you want a friend, you can rely upon James Adams up to the last penny he has ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... mountains of fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board—after flour had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone to eight per cent. a month. This work was very exhausting, and ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... patriotism, may be combined in verse. It is scarcely necessary to add that the author of the following magnificent piece is Mr. A-FR-D A-ST-N. Like others who might be named, he has not the honour to be an agricultural labourer; but no living man has sung at greater length of rural life, and its simple joys. Many of his admirers have asserted that Britain ought to have more than one Laureate, and that Mr. A-FR-D A-ST-N ought ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... a minute a stout labourer was patting Dumple, and introducing him into the stable, while Mrs. Dinmont, a well-favoured buxom dame, welcomed her husband [*See Note II. Dandie Dinmont] with unfeigned rapture. "Eh, sirs! gudeman, ye hae ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... epigrammatist's for disliking Doctor Fell. May one whose time of life excuses perhaps a detachment from passion attempt to provide you with one? If so, first listen to this from Mr and Mrs Hammond's book "The Village Labourer," 1760-1832: ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... many curious sayings recorded of him. When speaking of the gentry around, he characterised them according to their occupations and activity of habits—thus:—"As to Mr. Russell of Blackha', he just works himsell like a paid labourer; Mr. Duncan's a' the day fish, fish; but Sir Robert's a perfect gentleman—he does naething, naething." Boaty was a first-rate salmon-fisher himself, and was much sought after by amateurs who came ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... what he achieved with so much success in the field," he continued. "I am thinking now of those two years he spent in the Pretoria Forts before the war, as a common labourer, doing menial work with other men, and secretly making plans and drawing charts of the Pretoria fortifications. Every detail was made known to our military ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... peopled and cultivated. In many countries, both soil and climate may be favourable for the cultivation of cotton; but such natural advantages may be neutralized either by the absence of population, or by the indolence of the natives. The Tokroori is a most industrious labourer; and, were he assured of protection and moderate taxation, he would quickly change the character of these fertile lands, that are now uninhabited, except by wild animals. If the emigration of Tokrooris from Darfur were ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... at least a thousand a-year; the community are looking and waiting for such a man. A fellow with no capital and no profession had better not show his face in Melbourne. It is a thousand to one against him. Compared to his position that of a labourer is an enviable one; yet any respectable and intelligent man tolerably well educated, coming here with four or five hundred pounds in his pocket, may certainly, in a couple of years, and in twenty different ways, treble that capital. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... short cut to the productions of nature, while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged to wind through the labyrinth of a very intricate state of society. They seize upon the fruit of the labour; they seize upon the labourer himself. Were France but half of what it is in population, in compactness, in applicability of its force, situated as it is, and being what it is, it would be too strong for most of the states of Europe, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... has his place in 'English Bards' (lines 765, 798) and 'Hints from Horace' (line 734). The son of a labourer, and himself by trade a cobbler, he wrote verses in which Pratt saw signs of genius. A volume of his poetry was published in 1809, under the title of 'Specimens', edited by Pratt. Among those who befriended him were Elliston the actor, Dallas, and Miss Milbanke, afterwards ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... the time the mines had first started up. He had been active in the great strike eight years ago, and had been black-listed, his four sons with him. The sons were scattered now to the four parts of the world, but the father had stayed nearby, working as a ranch-hand and railroad labourer, until a couple of years ago, during a rush season, he had got a chance to ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Office, having by private vows last night in prayer to God Almighty cleared my mind for the present of the thoughts of going to Deb. at Greenwich, which I did long after. I passed by Guildhall, which is almost finished, and saw a poor labourer carried by, I think, dead with a fall, as many there are, I hear. So home to dinner, and then to the office a little, and so to see my Lord Brouncker, who is a little ill of the gout; and there Madam Williams told me that she heard that my wife was going into France this year, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... what conditions, think you? The girl's father, an honest labouring man, paid the person whose house she entered one shilling a week for her instruction in the duties she wished to undertake. What a grinning stare would come to the face of any labourer nowadays, who should be asked to do the like! I no longer wonder that my housekeeper so little resembles ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... resolute, and upon receiving an additional salute, jumped over the railings, and re-saluted poor Pat with a muzzier,{2} which drew his claret in a moment. The Irishman endeavoured to rally, while the crowd cheered the Porter and hooted the Labourer. This was the signal for hostilities. The man who had plugg'd up the broken pipe let go his hold, and the fountain was playing away as briskly as ever—all was confusion, and the neighbourhood in alarm. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Buckingham and Lord Leviston were compelled to leave the high road, to alight from their horses, and to make their way to Bloore Park, near Newport, where Villiers found a shelter. He was soon, however, necessitated to depart: he put on a labourer's dress; he deposited his George, a gift from Henrietta Maria, with a companion, and set off for Billstrop, in Nottinghamshire, one Matthews, a carpenter, acting as his guide; at Billstrop he was welcomed by Mr. Hawley, a Cavalier; and from that place he went to Brookesby, in Leicestershire, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... man met me, the first I had seen since I started. He was a farm labourer, taking his oxen to the fields to plough, and on looking at my watch I found that I had been walking for about six hours, and that I must be at least twenty miles from home. The man touched his hat, although I was sure he did not know me. Evidently my dress was ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... those holidays; which, according to Stow, extended from All-hallows evening to the day after Candlemas Day. The Act of 33 Henry VIII. c. 9, enacts more particularly, "That no manner of Artificer or Craftsman of any handicraft or occupation, Husbandman, Apprentice, Labourer, Servant at husbandry, Journeyman, or Servant of Artificer, Mariners, Fishermen, Watermen, or any Serving-man, shall from the said feast of the Nativity of St. John Baptist, play at the Tables, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... renders human life superior to that of the rabbit in his burrow. No wife, no children, no niece, or any woman to see to his comforts; no comfort and no pleasure; a bare house and rheumatism. Bill, his principal labourer, Dolly's brother, slept with him in the same bed, master and man, a custom common in old ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... seen a nightingale On a sprig of thyme bewail, Seeing the dear nest that was Hers alone, borne off, alas! By a labourer: I heard, For this outrage, the poor bird Say a thousand mournful things To the wind, which on its wings From her to the guardian sky Bore her melancholy cry— Bore her tender tears. She spake As if her fond heart would break. One while in a sad, sweet note, Gurgled from her straining ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... position that he was dressed like a townsman, and "had learning," as the country people said. The boy was sound at heart, and the result of the slights he met with was that by degrees he left off his town dress and town speech, and began to work on his father's great farm as a simple labourer. His father understood—he had begun to understand before the lad did—and he told his wife to take no notice. So they said nothing about marriage, nor about the change in Endrid's ways; only his father was more and more friendly to him, and ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... is fomented. It makes him unstable as an employee, as the constant desertions from work show. The only way that the gold and diamond mines keep their thousands of recruited native workers is to confine them in compounds. The ordinary labourer has no such restrictions and he is ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... woods Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun, Faint from the west, emits his evening ray, Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill, Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... corner land; in the people who occupy the fastnesses of the Welsh mountains, as well as in the Gaels of the Scottish Highlands and the Erse of Ireland. Their very speech is blended with our own. Does the country labourer go to the Horncastle tailor to buy coat and breeches? His British forefather, though clad chiefly in skins, called his upper garment his "cotta," his nether covering his "brages," scotice "breeks." Brewer, Introduction to Beauties of England, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... itself was doing what he wished; scarcely had he secured the rope than Arthur was swept close up to the bank. He sprang on to help him. The bank, happily, shelved, and together they dragged the nearly drowned man to the shore. He was dressed as a labourer, and his rough hands showed that he was accustomed to hard work. It was too dark to distinguish his features. After they had rubbed him for some time, he gave signs of life; and on his further recovering ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... potatoes a settler would need the help of a labourer, to whom he would have to give one dollar per day and his board, or, if the labourer be a Chinaman, one dollar and a quarter per day without his board. If the potatoes occupied ten acres, and they produced say 200 sacks to the acre, and fetched 1 dollar per sack, that would yield ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... application of the story. One could settle with money for labour when the labourer was free, but when the labourer was not free, when he had used his breath and his muscle under a master, money could ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... to see if he were overheard. They were at some distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec's words reaching other ears. D'Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the labourer, turning his back ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... old man, Sir Ensor Doone, came out with a bill-hook in his hand, hedger's gloves going up his arms, as if he were no better than a labourer at ditch-work. Only in his mouth and eyes, his gait, and most of all his voice, even a child could know and feel that here was no ditch-labourer. Good cause he has found since then, perhaps, to wish that ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... seem to me specially noteworthy in this tale of cowardly and malignant tyranny. The victims of this vulgar Vehmgericht are neither landlords nor agents. They are a poor Irish labourer and his aged mother. The "crime" for which these poor creatures are thus persecuted is simply that one of them—the man—chose to obey the law of the land in which he lives, and to work for his livelihood and that of his mother. And the priest of the parish, instead of sheltering and ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... "I was a labourer, sir, and gained as much as to make me live: I never laid by indeed: for I was reckoned a piece of a wag, and your wags, I take it, are ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
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