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More "Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... natural enough mistake. To her, Monsieur Covington was still the husband of madame. She had stood in the little chapel in Paris when madame was married. When one was married, one was married; and that was all there was to it for all time. So, doubtless, Marie reasoned. It was the simple peasant way—the ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... gold, Wide he displays; the spangled dew Reflects his eyes and various hue. His now forgotten friend, a snail, Beneath his house, with slimy trail, Crawls o'er the grass, whom when he spies, In wrath he to the gardener cries: 'What means yon peasant's daily toil, From choking weeds to rid the soil? Why wake you to the morning's care? Why with new arts correct the year? Why grows the peach's crimson hue? And why the plum's inviting blue? Were they to feast his taste design'd, That vermin of voracious kind! Crush then the slow, the pilfering ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... no man could live if he took his neighbour's pack on his shoulders. (Enter VERA in peasant's dress.) Well, my girl, you've been long ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... I suppose looked maliciously, for she hastily added—"He has entirely cured me of those horrid eruptions in the face, that made my complexion like a peasant's." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... peasant pay cheerfully his share of the public taxes, and I on my part will guarantee him the administration of justice in ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... had never crossed. The Brents were accorded by the whole section of the country a unique social dominance, and had ever held themselves as high above the yeoman class to which Margaret Delandre belonged, as a blue-blooded Spanish hidalgo out-tops his peasant tenantry. ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... says Bismark, "so much in my life, As Gladstone has done in fomenting sad strife, I could not at this day have looked in the face Of king, prince or peasant of my noble race." ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... apathetically waiting. Poor John, the days of his whips and spurs, and Yeomanry dinners, were quite over; and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a peasant. The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road and ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... become hysterical, and the Capuchin Father Aurelian tried to exorcise him, and charged a peasant's wife, Frau Herz, with bewitching him, on evidence that would have cost the woman her life at any time during the seventeenth century. Thereupon the woman's husband brought suit against Father Aurelian for slander. The latter urged in his defence that the boy was possessed of ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... in green swathes, or tedded, or in the luxuriously-scented quiles. The lane was quite populous with waggons and hay-makers—the men in their corduroys and blue hose—the women in their trim jackets and bright calamanco petticoats. There were more women than men, by far, for the flower of the peasant youth of England had been drafted off to fight against "Bonyparty." Still hay-time was a glorious season, when half our little town turned out and made holiday in ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... digressing on this possibility, I happen to become an ear-witness of a conversation between two old patriots—they were evidently both hard of hearing and consequently spoke all the louder. "HE has as much, and knows as much, philosophy as a peasant or a corps-student," said the one—"he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politicis. A statesman who rears up for ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... you ignorant peasant! What do you come here for, spoiling our enjoyment, and keeping us awake at nights? Don't you know this is no common conventicle? It is the place where the king says his prayers! Away with you, or we will take off your head!" So ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... [To ARKEL.]—They have just found another peasant dead of hunger, along by the sea. You would say they all meant to die under our eyes.—[To MELISANDE.] Well, my sword?—Why do you tremble so?—I am not going to kill you. I would simply examine the blade. I do not employ the sword ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... so. And in line with it, and in addition to it, prices are high because the working class is no longer thrifty. If our working class saved as the French peasant does, we would sell more in the world ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... a legend about a hermit who lived long ago. He lived high up on the mountainside in a tiny cave; his food was roots and acorns, a bit of bread given by a peasant, or a cheese brought by a woman who wanted his prayers; his work was praying, and thinking about God. For forty years he lived so, preaching to the people, praying for them, comforting them in trouble, and, most of all, worshipping in his heart. ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... the most distant sense, could be construed opposite to the doctrines of the supreme authority of this council of Trent; where it seems to have been enacted, that all men, literate and illiterate, prince and peasant, the Italian, the Spaniard and the Netherlander, should take the mint-stamp of their thoughts from the council of Trent, and millions of souls be struck off at one blow, out of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... humanity of all shades, from the haughty aristocrat of the Pullman, to the peasant of ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the partition; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas of to-day stand out in English words like telegraph posts in ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the introduction of elaborate forms of legal procedure produced results more unfortunate and less foreseen by their authors than in the Punjab. The conversion of the occupants of the land into full proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian rayat and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... throng gathered about a puppet-show, somewhat like the English Punch and Judy, shrieking with laughter like so many children; a group of girls consulting an old fortune-teller; pretty peasant girls from the hills slily listening to compliments from the town gallants, evidently to the great indignation of their country swains; in short, every way we turned, some picture that would have been a treasure to any great artist, met the eye, and all ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... maid of sixteen in those far-off days, the child of humble peasant-folk, and she had gone uncomplaining to the arms of her swarthy ravisher. To-day, at thirty-four, she was still beautiful, more beautiful indeed than when first she had fired the passion of Asad-Reis—as he then was, one of the captains of the famous Ali-Basha. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... outraged and then strangled in the woods a peasant woman, the mother of a family. On this occasion there could be no question of a miscarriage of justice or even of any suggestion of such a thing, because the prisoner pleaded guilty. That is a great point. In France every conviction that is not based upon ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... himself to break the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant morality—moralizing rather—his provincialism, and the grossness of his method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure thought nor pure feeling—nothing but a point of view which is now perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... It will be about a quarter of a dollar, in the Yankee currency. A quarter of a dollar, mind. My honest friend, in pecuniary matters always be exact as a second-hand; never mind with whom it is, father or stranger, peasant or king, be exact to ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... brave man, Sir Priest," the peasant responded, "to lie down here! This place has a bad name,—a very bad name. But, as the proverb has it, Kunshi ayayuki ni chikayorazu ['The superior man does not needlessly expose himself to peril']; ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... would ye like 'em to stop?' whispered a great hulking peasant who had been looking on; 'for if ye would, I'll do it while ye'd be taking a ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Christmas to us no holy-days; When with the oyster-sauce and chine We roast that aldermen may dine. They call us 'alderman in chains,' With sausages—the stupid swains! Ah! gluttony is sure the first Of all the seven sins—the worst! I'd choke mankind, had I the power, From peasant's hut to ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... Dutchman answered, 'And my father was a shepherd!' It was not pride rebuking pride; it was the ever-present fact which would not have been worth mentioning but for the suggestion of the antithesis. He, too, was a shepherd, and is—a peasant. It may be that he knows what would be right and good for his people, and it may be not; but it is sure that he realises that to educate would be to emancipate; to broaden their views would be to break down the defences of their prejudices; to let in ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... monthly stage, The yearly march doth mete and guage And rustic peasant's messuage, Dost brim with ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... is shown us as feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them with the pastorals—Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a live peasant in the face—of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, —as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of the antique epics. It is moreover extremely the likely that these ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... down the Somme in the morning to Amiens, or the Parisian clerk, business man and workman—they are France and the French Army. But the heart-strength and character-strength of France, I think, is her stubborn, conservative, smiling peasant. It is repeating a commonplace to say that he always has a few gold pieces in his stocking. He yields one only on a critical occasion and then a little grumblingly, with the thrift of the bargainer who means that it ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... interesting description of his life at this period, which elucidates his methods and his motives in writing "The Prince." After describing his daily occupations with his family and neighbours, he writes: "The evening being come, I return home and go to my study; at the entrance I pull off my peasant-clothes, covered with dust and dirt, and put on my noble court dress, and thus becomingly re-clothed I pass into the ancient courts of the men of old, where, being lovingly received by them, I am fed with that food which is mine alone; where I do not ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... wel vsurpe the grace, Voice, gate, and action of a Gentlewoman: I long to heare him call the drunkard husband, And how my men will stay themselues from laughter, When they do homage to this simple peasant, Ile in to counsell them: haply my presence May well abate the ouer-merrie spleene, Which otherwise would grow into extreames. Enter aloft the drunkard with attendants, some with apparel, Bason and Ewer, & ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... built. We remarked that the water was kept in large earthen jars—like those used in the Holy Land, I conclude. The sleeping-places were neatly arranged round the rooms, and there was a general air of comfort and respectability perceptible in most of them. Very different was a peasant's hut when we entered. It was not more than twenty feet square, divided into two compartments. In the outer were calves, lambs, and fowls. In the inner, at one end was a bed, and at the foot of it a fireplace, over which a man was cooking a pot ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... die for it!" cried West. "You cowardly cur!" And turning as the Boers closed him in, he continued, with bitter contempt, and speaking in their own tongue: "I suppose you are a specimen of the brave peasant farmers making ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... seized during the Revolution. The country population of France heard with indifference of the fall of Louis Philippe, and possibly approved the proclamation of the second Republic. But the communism of 1848 roused every landowner against Paris. The peasant proprietors filled the benches of the National Assembly with Conservatives or Reactionists who would save them from plunder; fear became for once the cause of courage, and dread of loss of property sent thousands of peasant proprietors to Paris, that ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... is not a creature from England's king To the peasant that delves the soil, Who knows half the pleasures the seasons bring If he had ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... get voila as the French say for over there itll come handy to be able to sit down and have a dosy dos with them poilus. (That means chew the rag in English.) A poilus Mable is a French peasant girl an they say that they are very belle. (Now don't mispronounce things an get sore till you know. You pronounce that like the bell in push button. It means good lookers.) There crazy about us fellos. They call us Sammies. They named one of there rivers for us. You have heard of the battle ...
— Dere Mable - Love Letters Of A Rookie • Edward Streeter
... a book of ringing Irish ballads that will stir the heart of every lover of true poetry. "Here and there a verse may be as frankly unadorned as the peasant cabins themselves in their homely cloaks of thatch, but every line rings true to life and home and with the tone, as heartmoving as the Angelus which holds Millet's peasants in its ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... crisp upon the rough stone paving of the disappointing road which is all that is left of the most famous highway of the world. A peasant or two going home from the wine-shop, and a few carts of country produce coming up to Rome, were the only things which they met. They swung along, with the huge tombs looming up through the darkness upon each ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very different type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age. For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant, and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... occasion, Queen Victoria sent for Thomas Carlyle, who was a Scotch peasant, offering him the title of nobleman, which he declined, feeling that he had always been a nobleman in his own right. He understood so little of the manners at court that, when presented to the ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... outside the Cabinet than the rest of them, inside, will do. But suddenly I've a feeling the work would be barren. [His eyes shift beyond her; beyond the room.] What is it in your thoughts and actions which makes them bear fruit? Something that the roughest peasant may have in common with the best of us intellectual men ... something that a dog might have. ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... a law-giver, Daniel was a prince, Isaiah a courtier, and David a king; but Amos, the author of my text, was a peasant, and, as might be supposed, nearly all his parallelisms are pastoral, his prophecy full of the odor of new-mown hay, and the rattle of locusts, and the rumble of carts with sheaves, and the roar of wild beasts devouring the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... people is, in a great measure, the thermometer of its physical sensitiveness and its moral sentiments; and the reason of this is evident. The shepherd tending his flock, the fisherman mending his nets, the soldier on the march, the peasant at the plough, has no inducement to sing unless his heart's emotion incite him to it. A true national music is, then, what the Germans call Volksmusik, and, springing from the hearts of the people, it is psychologically one of their best interpreters. For this reason the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... dyes and the least known are to be found among the Lichens. They seem to have been used among peasant dyers from remote ages, but apparently none of the great French dyers used them, nor are they mentioned in any of the old books on dyeing. The only Lichen dyes that are known generally among dyers are Orchil ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... the enchantress. And she is an enchantress. She is a woman of about thirty, tall, fair, with striking features, lovely eyes, and the most superb complexion I have ever seen. The best complexion I ever recollect was that of a peasant girl's at Ivy Bridge in Devonshire, but hers was nothing to compare with Mrs. Tenterden's. It is perfect. I ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... disarranging their plans and delaying their journey. He urged them to go on and leave him, but they would not consent. Sometimes the Little Colonel slipped into the room with a bunch of Alpine roses or a cluster of edelweiss that she had bought from some peasant. Sometimes she sat beside him for a few minutes, but most of her time was spent with Hero, wandering up and down beside the lake, feeding the swans or watching the little ...
— The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... could mention another interesting fact. Long before England dreamt of the simplest justice for women, it was not an uncommon thing for a Russian peasant who had appropriated money earned by his wife, to be punished with a flogging ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... which I hope, hereafter, to mould into a consistent form; but it is a gross perversion of the truth, in Socinians, to declare that we believe in three gods; and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice affirm that we believe in three suns. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first rudiments of christianity, would shrink back from a thing so monstrous. Still the Trinity has its difficulties. It would be strange if otherwise. A Revelation that revealed nothing, not within the grasp of human reason!—no religation, no binding ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... she repeated, in the patois of the Normand peasant, lifting her riding crop in warning to the ball of fluff who had refused to get on his chair and ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... been slowly emerging from medieval ways throughout the fifteenth century. With the beginning of the sixteenth the rate of emergence had greatly quickened. The soil-bound peasant who produced enough food for his family from his thirty acres was being gradually replaced by the well-to-do yeoman who tilled a hundred acres and upwards. Such holdings produced a substantial surplus for the market. This increased the national wealth, which, in its ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... in a cold iron case Tears harden'd to crystal. Yet harsh if he were, His severity seem'd to be trebly severe In the rule of his own rigid life, which, at least, Was benignant to others. The poor parish priest, Who lived on his largess, his piety praised. The peasant was fed, and the chapel was raised, And the cottage was built, by his liberal hand. Yet he seem'd in the midst of his good deeds to stand A lone, and unloved, and unlovable man. There appear'd some inscrutable flaw in the plan Of his life, that love fail'd to pass over. ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... are, in their relations to each other, by no means as unconstrained as one often represents them, but hold closely to a ceremonious behavior. There is in one of Immerman's stories, "The Village Justice," a very excellent picture of the conventional forms with which the peasant loves to surround himself. The scene in which the townsman who thinks that he can dispense with forms among the peasants is very entertainingly taught better, is exceedingly valuable in an educational point of view. The feeling ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Monsieur Honore de Gabry, his uncle, had been on very bad terms with some poachers, whom he used to shoot at like rabbits. One of them, a vindictive peasant, who had received a whole charge of shot in his face, lay in wait for the Seigneur one evening behind the trees of the mall, and very nearly succeeded in killing him, for the ball took off ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... shade of the temple and amused themselves by gathering underneath the familiar jar and calling out, "Sibyl, what do you wish?" a hollow voice, like an echo, used to answer from the urn, "I wish to die."[251] A story, taken down from the lips of a German peasant at Thomsdorf, relates that once upon a time there was a girl in London who wished to live for ever, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... interested in cooking and eating. Those countries in which music plays the greater part in the national life are precisely those which are the most interested in the culinary art. The food of Italy, the cooking, is celebrated; every peasant in that sunny land sings, and the voices of some Italians have reverberated around the world. The very melodies of Verdi and Rossini are inextricably twined in our minds around memories of ravioli and zabaglione. Vesti la Giubba is spaghetti. The composers of these melodies and their interpreters ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... enchanting man! what does not the world owe to thee and to the great Being who could produce such as thee? Teacher alike of the infant and of the aged; who canst direct the first thought and remove the last doubt of man; property alike of the peasant and the prince; welcomed by the ignorant and honoured by the wise; thou hast translated Christianity into a new language, and that a universal one! Thou art the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... daily bread, the freedom from daily care, all the vulgar temptations of such a life in hard times—the career of a monk opened no mean path to the ambitious spirit. The offices of the monastery alone might well seem prizes to be contended for by the son of the peasant or burgess, and the highest of these placed its holder on a level with ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... dastard coward!" Stutely cried, "Faint-hearted peasant slave! If ever my master do thee meet, Thou shalt thy ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... two lengths of cloth of gold, which were hung in the courtyard, as prizes to be given to the victor in the tournament. That evening two hundred Milanese ladies of high rank were invited to the great ball, or festa per le donne, given in the Sala della palla. On this occasion peasant girls from all parts of Italy, clad in the red, white, and blue of the Sforza colours, danced before the court, and "the palm of Terpsichore," we are told, was ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... Modern German, the word for "sun" is feminine, and in mythology the orb of day often appears as a woman. The German peasant was wont to address the sun and the moon familiarly as "Frau Sonne" and "Herr Mond," and in a Russian folk-song a fair maiden sings ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... in proud earnest," she answered, quietly resuming her work, "and I am not English, but a Swiss peasant's daughter." ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... fesse azure. The noblesse of the family was later scrutinised by the famous d'Hozier and pronounced authentic. Jeanne, with bare feet, and straws in her hair, is said to have herded the cows, a discontented indolent child, often beaten by her peasant mother. When her father had eaten up his last acre, he and the family tramped to Paris in 1760. As Jeanne was then but four years old, I doubt if she ever 'drove the cattle home,' as M. Funck-Brentano finds recorded ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... who wrote forty volumes, was of peasant origin. [The relative clause is non-restrictive; it is not inseparably connected with the noun it modifies, and to omit it would not change the thought of the main clause. Thus: Thomas Carlyle was ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... absurd notions as to what the Talmud was, given credence in the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! The mediaeval priest or peasant was perhaps wiser than he knew. Almost, might we say, the Talmud was Man, for it is a record of the doings, the beliefs, the usages, the hopes, the sufferings, the patience, the humor, the mentality, and the morality of the Jewish ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... know how long a time passed in this manner before I was aroused by the appearance of an old peasant around the corner of my rock, bending under a huge bundle of faggots. I addressed myself to him in the best Italian I could then command, and asked whether it were possible to enter the city—entrare la citta. He rung a bell by pulling a rope that hung ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... been ever since. That broad face, the clear eyes, the bold, clean-cut mouth, the audacity—only, the live face was English, not Italian, had more humour, more "breeding," less poetry—something "old Georgian" about it. How he would laugh if she told him he was like that peasant acolyte with fluffed-out hair, and a little ruching round his neck! And, smiling, Gyp plaited her own hair and got ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gallant with the wit of Propertius, or damn his eyes like any trooper, amused herself with the overdressed youth, and ate many expensive chocolates. Mistaking the situation, and used to the complaisance of the French peasant, M. le Petit-Maitre presented himself at Dovelands Cottage and made certain overtures of a financial nature to Mrs. Duveen. Between his imperfect English, his delicate mode of expressing the indelicate, and his great charm, poor Mrs. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... of Lucerne was in the utmost danger, the Landamman was slain, and sixty of his men, and not an Austrian had been wounded. The flanks of the Austrian host began to advance so as to enclose the small peasant force, and involve it in irremediable destruction. A moment of dismay and stillness ensued. Then Arnold von Winkelried of Unterwalden, with an eagle glance saw the only means of saving his country, and, with the decision of a man who dares by dying to do all things, shouted ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... believing their chattels were threatened with an execution and their cows seized, deceived in their turn the poor priest with their innocent tears. He would then manage with great difficulty to provide the seven or eight hundred francs demanded of him—with which the peasant bought himself a morsel of land. When pious persons and vestrymen denounced the fraud, begging the abbe to consult them in future before lending himself to such ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Her pride is to be wounded, her self-love humiliated, and every other consideration must yield to that. She is ready to commit perjury, to swear to love and honour a man who is no more to her than that peasant walking along the road. She is ready to degrade herself and risk her soul by a mercenary marriage sooner than bear that ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... hill-side, Willie Ferrars was holding the hand of the chestnut-curled, black-eyed fairy, 'little Awk,' who was impressing him by her fluency in two languages at once, according as she chattered to him in English, or in French to a picturesque peasant, her great ally, who was mowing his flowery crop of hay, glancing like an illumination, with an under-current of ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I have studied still, To root abuses from the commonwealth, That may infect the king or commonalty. Therefore, base peasant, wilful as thou art, I tell thee troth, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... until, impatient at this trickery, he sprang boldly upon it. A moment later a rain of sharp spears and daggers fell upon his couch, but did him no harm, for he had not removed his heavy armor. When the rain of weapons was over, a gigantic peasant, armed with a huge club, stalked into the room, closely followed by a fierce lion. When the peasant perceived that the knight was not dead, as he expected, he beat a hasty retreat, leaving the lion to attack ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... period is found in the curious novel, "The Adventurous Simplicissimus," written by Grimmelshausen, and published in 1669, which describes the adventures of a wise peasant who finally leaves his native Germany and betakes himself to a desert island which he refuses to leave when offered an opportunity to go back to the Fatherland. He answers those who wish to persuade him to go back with words which seem quite appropriate to-day: "My God, where do you want ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... her to a remote part of the hospital he continued: "Of course greater love hath no man than this, that he gave his life for that which he loves. Considered relatively to the person the peasant who falls in the defense of his country gives just as much as the Emperor who may die by his side. In either case the measure of devotion is brim-full. Nothing more can be added to it. But there are accessories and surroundings ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... believe that her sham elegance born of the shop, her pretentious manners, pursed up mouth, and affectedly uplifted little finger, fascinated him and appeared to him the height, of Parisian refinement; for he was born a peasant and in spite of his intelligence remained one to the end ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... Frances Chislett making her feel "rough." My cousins were ladies in every sense of the term, but Miss Chislett had a certain perfection of courteous grace and dignified refinement, in every word, and gesture, and attitude, as utterly natural to her as the vigorous tread of any barefooted peasant girl, and which one does meet with (but by no means invariably) among women of the highest class in England. Her dignity fell short of haughtiness (which is not high breeding, and is very easy of assumption); her grace and courtesy were the simple results of constant ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... liberal-minded Englishmen to move along reasonable lines and to confine itself within the bounds of moderation. The excesses and outrages that followed immediately upon the first upheaval, the murders of Foulon and Berthier in Paris, the peasant war upon the castles, were regarded as the unavoidable, deplorable ebullitions of a long dormant force which, under the guidance of capable and honorable men, would be directed henceforward solely to the establishment of a stable and popular system ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... eager, how dependent, yet how commanding! As I mount to the top of the pile, if I ever feel myself a royal personage it is then; I ascend my throne; I am king of the corn; and there is not a brute peasant in my domain that does not worship me as ruler of heaven ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... contiguity of books. There was only man and space and one unceasing library, and the men neither ate nor slept nor spoke. Nature was transformed into the processes and products of writing, and man was now no longer lover, friend, peasant, merchant, naturalist, traveller, gourmet, mechanic, warrior, worshipper, but only an author. All other faculties had been lost to him, and all resources for anything else had fled from his universe. Anon some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... all sit about the kitchen or in the alley-way, chatting, smoking. She who has been lucky in her sales basks in Sorel's favor. The unfortunate peasant from the Brie country feels the little bullet in his heart, and nurses a desperate resolution to redeem himself on ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... seriously she took it all—how much she was in love with him—he tried hard to break it off, he tried hard to put matters to her in their proper light; he tried to show her that an officer and a gentleman, a Kelmscott of Tilgate, could never really have dreamed of marrying the half-educated, half-peasant daughter of a Devonshire farmer. Though, to be sure, she was a lady in her way, too, poor Lucy; as much of a lady in manner and in heart as Emily herself, whose father was an earl, and whose mother was a marquis's ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... centuries of serfdom, when they were accustomed to say: "We are yours, but the land is ours." Instead of twenty-five million people rejoicing with grateful hearts, there was a ferment of discontent and in some places uprisings—one peasant leader telling ten thousand who rose at his call that the Emancipation Law was a forgery, they were being deceived and not permitted to enjoy what the Tsar, their "Little Father," had intended for their happiness. But considering the intricate difficulties attending such a tremendous ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... never seen more regular or more ingenuous features. Imagine, my lady, a picture of the Virgin. What gave still more to her appearance a most modest expression was, that when she came here she was dressed like a peasant girl ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... some the word 'refuge' suggests the occasional rather than the constant need of life. But the refuge some day and the faith every day are linked together. A thing is no use to you if you cannot find it when you want it. And you cannot find it easily if it be not at hand. The peasant built his cottage under the shadow of his lord's castle walls. In the hour of peril it was but a step to the strong fortress. 'Trust in Him at all times.' Build your house under the walls of the Eternal Help. Live in the Presence. Find the attitude ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... he told me, that he lost contact for good and all with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns in the foothills of his country. They would arrive on market days driving in a peasant's cart, and would set up an office in an inn or some other Jew's house. There were three of them, of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government officials. They sat ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... of the storm that rumbled in the financial world. It was a thing which he thought of with wonder in future times—that he should have had so little idea of what was coming. He seemed to himself like some peasant who digs with bent head in a field, while armies are marshalling for battle all around him; and who is startled suddenly by the crash of conflict, and the bursting ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... eyes had a worried, puzzled expression, and his voice bespoke puzzled wrath. It was evident his slow moving peasant's mind was grappling with the bloody fact of a hell-ship. It was something new in his experience. He was trying to fathom it. Why were he and his mates thumped, when they willingly did their work? What for? "Nils iss goot boy," he said to ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... day upon his pathway pressed, Beaming with splendor, toward the shining west, Cast one long, lingering glance upon the scene, Lit up the river and the forest green, Left his last rays upon the lordly dome, And deigned to smile upon the peasant's home; Then 'neath the western hills he sought repose, And sank to rest as calmly as he rose: Bright at the dawn of day, but brighter now, When day had almost passed, and round her brow Hung the expiring beams of dazzling light, The certain presage of approaching ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... duties on tea, tobacco, and alcohol—articles which form a larger part of the family budget of the Irish peasant than of the English labourer—are the causes of this burden. The reasons for the larger consumption of what may be roughly called stimulants by the Irishman is undoubtedly to be found in climatic conditions, and also in the smaller amount of nourishing food ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... higher artistic level of colour and glaze, it still, to my mind, continues mediocre, and has neither the highly finished beauty of such work as the Ruskin pottery, nor the genuinely simple lines or colouring of "peasant pottery," such as that from Quimperle in Brittany. The Barum ware has a sort of bourgeois mediocrity between these two different types, and there is room for a bold innovator to reform the present models and methods. It is a pity, perhaps, that he ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... whom all the Fenians mocked and yet endured. They are a very human band of fighting men, and though many of them, like Oisin and Finn and Dermot, have adventures in fairyland, they preserve in these their ordinary human nature. The Connacht peasant has no difficulty in following Finn into the cave of Slieve Cullinn, where the witch turned him into a withered old man, for the village where he lives has traditions of the same kind; the love affairs of Finn, ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... hunters of the forests, that darken the mountain-tops with verdure! these be thy charge, and their destinies thy care. Nor deem thou, O star of the sullen beams, that thy duties are less glorious than the duties of thy brethren; for the peasant is not less to thy master and mine than the monarch; nor doth the doom of empires rest more upon the sovereign than on the herd. The passions and the heart are the dominion of the stars—a mighty realm; nor less mighty beneath the hide ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... no other than the peasant Whom thou didst seek before to see: but this Could best be told by ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Calpurnia's monument I fell into a dream, and saw her whole story unfolded before me. Caius Marius was a rough-mannered man, of peasant origin, but he had a wife Julia, of patrician rank, and who, I have not a shadow of doubt, flourished her noble origin before him, and talked very big of her grand relations. When little missie was born: "I'll ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... railway in Turkey, came on board at Trebizond; there were one or two light women on their way home from Baku, and the attache of a foreign embassy from Teheran. But the Irishman felt more in touch with the hundred peasant-folk who joined the ship at Ineboli from the interior of Asia Minor and were bound as third-class emigrants for Marseilles and far America. Dark-skinned, wild-eyed, ragged, very dirty, they had never seen the sea ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... inherited a small property from his wife's father, and the toll on the highway being at the same time abolished, he bought the now superfluous house cheap from the State, and set up as a peasant proprietor. He had now a new source of pride: that this land, which he watered with his sweat, should bring forth abundantly; that his cattle, whom no strange hand might touch, should be the sleekest and fattest of all. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... not withdrawn from the world. She travelled incessantly from one end of Spain to the other, establishing new foundations, visiting her convents, and dealing with all classes of men, from the soldier to the priest, from the prince to the peasant. The severity of her discipline was tempered by a tolerant and half-amused insight into the pardonable foibles of humanity. She held back her nuns with one hand from "the frenzy of self-mortification," which is the mainstay of spiritual ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... would leave this dull and heavy sense. Let me grow mad; perhaps, I then may gain Some joy, by kind imagination form'd, Beyond reality.—O! my Evanthe! Why was I curs'd with empire? born to rule?— Would I had been some humble Peasant's son, And thou some Shepherd's daughter on the plain; My throne some hillock, and my flock my subjects, My crook my sceptre, and my faithful dog My only guard; nor curs'd with dreams of greatness. ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... almost amounted to insanity, conceived the project to which he determined to devote the remainder of his life. He imagined that he had discovered a means by which he could restore the ancient house of Champdoce to all its former splendor and position. "I can," said he, "by living like a peasant and resorting to no unnecessary expense, treble my capital in twenty years; and if my son and my grandson will only follow my example, the race of Champdoce will again recover the proud position that it formerly held." Faithful to this ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... the mountain-top, alone, I dwell, as one who holds a throne; Or prince, or peasant, him I count My peer, who stands upon a mount, Sees farther than the tribes below, And knows the joys they cannot know; And, though beyond the sound of speech They reign, my soul goes out to reach, Far on their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... one of you, what we are going through! Only a few weeks ago all of us were peacefully following our several vocations. The peasant was gathering in this Summer's plentiful crop, the factory hand was working with accustomed vigor. Not one human being among us dreamed of war. We are a nation that wishes to lead a quiet and industrious life. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... few moments Girasole came back and entered Minnie's room. He was followed by a woman who was dressed in the garb of an Italian peasant girl. Over her head she wore a hood to protect her from the night air, the limp folds of which hung over her face. Minnie looked carelessly at this ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... cows and sheep, cheeses and butter firkins, doublets and petticoats, guns and pistols, everything that could serve the city and country-side for months to come—and displayed them in temporary booths or on the ground, in every street and along every canal. The town was one vast bazaar. The peasant-women from the country, with their gold and silver tiaras and the year's rent of a comfortable farm in their earrings and necklaces, and the sturdy Frisian peasants, many of whom had borne their matchlocks in the great wars which had lasted through their own and their fathers' lifetime, trudged ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... supplications night and day; and the guileless Nathanael, an Israelite indeed, who had perhaps already commenced to sit at the foot of the ladder which bound his fig-tree to the highest heaven; and the peasant maiden Mary, the descendant of a noble house, though with fallen fortunes, who, like some vestal virgin, clad in snowy white, watched through the dark hours beside the flickering flame; and last, but not least, Zacharias and his wife Elisabeth, "who ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... thought worth making could not be unworthy of representation. Hence he had willingly undertaken a likeness of her, to be finished within a certain time, and was now working at it as conscientiously as if it had been the portrait of a lovely young duchess or peasant-girl. I was only afraid he would make it too like to please the lady herself. His time was now getting short, and he could not leave ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... sight in the midst of the luxurious people of Rome. A peasant he was, dwelling in a cave far out on the Roman Campagna, remote from the splendid villas and gardens lining the wide ways leading out of the city to North and South and West. This cave was in a mass of tufa rock rising abruptly from the flat, green fields, ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... simple peasant married to a nice, pleasant woman, who did much as she liked, and who in order that she might be alone with her lover, shut up her husband in the pigeon-house in the manner you ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... be a faith, not of sorrow, but of joy." Now, the deepest sorrow of the race is not physical, neither is it bound up with material and social conditions. As the Scotch say, "The king sighs as often as the peasant"; and this proverb anticipates the fact that those who participate in the richest civilization that will ever flower will sigh as men sigh now. When the problem of poverty is mastered, when disease is extirpated, when a period is put to all ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... callouses of toil are no indications that you are not a gentleman. The soul of gentlemanliness is a kindly feeling toward others, that prompts one to secure their comfort. That is why the thoughtful peasant lover is always so gentlemanly, and in his love ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the same kind of pride that an Englishman may feel in belonging to a country that has produced Shakspeare and Bacon. I have never, I hope, felt the vulgar pride that disdains want of birth in others; and I care not three straws whether my friend or my wife be descended from a king or a peasant. It is myself, and not my connections, who alone can disgrace my lineage; therefore, however humble Lady Vargrave's parentage, do not scruple to inform me, should you learn any intelligence that bears ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and without the sense of their pain we would never amend from this affliction. From the desire of {104}being approved and noticed, arises every effort which constitutes the variety of employments and excellencies the world possesses. It actuates the prince and the beggar, the peasant and the politician, the labourer and the scholar, the mechanic and the soldier, the player and the divine. In a word, there is not an individual in the community whose conduct is not influenced by its ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... legislation presented to the whites-only parliament of South Africa was the Natives' Land Act, eventually passed in 1913, which was designed to entrench white power and property rights in the countryside — as well as to solve the "native problem" of African peasant farmers working for themselves and denying their ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Landlady and Washerwoman. The Einsiedlerstein. Its Dungeons and Hall. Its History. Inscription over the Hermit's Grave. Lose our Way. Guided by a Peasant. His Conversation. Mistaken for ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... the natives. An Indian servant, who had been with us during our journey to Caripe and the Orinoco, and whom I brought to France, was so much struck, on landing, when he saw the ground tilled by a peasant with his hat on, that he thought himself in a miserable country, where even the nobles (los mismos caballeros) followed the plough. The Chayma women are not handsome, according to the ideas we annex to beauty; yet ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... not at all repugnant to the haughty spirit of chivalry, which, reserving its courtesies exclusively for those of gentle blood and high degree, cared little for the inferior orders, whether soldier or peasant, whom it abandoned without remorse to all the caprices ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... when the peasant tossed his sheep-skin mantle to the ground and, without troubling to remove his leathern tunic, advanced towards the two wrestlers; but it became uproarious when with a quick spring he seized the Greek under one arm and the Roman under the other, holding them as in a vice. ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... village near the junction of the British and French armies, two guards with loaded rifles kept watch at the doors of a hut. The warm sunlight of May was bathing the fields in gold, where here and there a peasant woman could be seen sprinkling seed into the furrows. Across a field, cutting its way through a farmyard, a light railway carried its occasional wobbling, narrow-gauged traffic; and outside half-a-dozen huts soldiers were lolling in the warmth of early afternoon, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... pass for holy birds. There is a tradition that their forefathers helped the Lord Almighty to build the firmament, but how and in what manner popular tradition does not tell us. Being blessed by God and dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the simple peasant often leaves his doors and windows open to attract such valued inmates, seeing that peace and happiness enter with them, and lightning never strikes the roof where swallows build. Should they forsake a house in the course of the summer, it is a sign of coining misfortune. He who kills a swallow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... was not devoid of truth. Its great offensiveness lay in its boldness: that a negro should publish in a newspaper what white people would scarcely acknowledge to themselves in secret was much as though a Russian moujik or a German peasant should rush into print to question the divine right of the Lord's Anointed. The article was racial lese-majeste in the most aggravated form. A peg was needed upon which to hang a coup d'etat, and this editorial offered the requisite opportunity. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... while she was standing just at Wych Hazel's shoulder, touching her head with a slight touch; in her face and voice the utmost soothing charm of tender tranquillity. She had been doubtless a Norwegian peasant woman, and had known little of what we call refining advantages in outward things; but love and peace and sympathy had made her wonderfully delicate and quick to divine the needs of those with whom she dealt. It was a hard little hand, but a very soft touch upon Wych ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... laughter came from the direction of the officers' wing. He stood still and drew in his head as if from a blow on the back of his neck, and a gleam of ungovernable hatred flitted over his broad, good-natured peasant face. He spat out again, to soothe his feelings, then took a fresh start and passed the merry company ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!" This was the peasant's last Good-night, A voice replied, far up the ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... The breeze became slightly stronger, and the fruit shower from the trees increased so much, that a soft muffled sound rang through the whole wood. It was literally raining food. Some millions of nuts must have fallen that day in the Val Lucerna. I saw the young peasant girls coming from the chalets and farm-houses, to glean beneath the boughs; and a short time sufficed to fill their sacks, and send them back laden with the produce of the chestnut-tree. These nuts are roasted and eaten as food; and very nutritious food they are. In all the towns ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... handsome, gentle face of the peasant type, a light, pointed beard, great wistful eyes and a mass of curly black hair. He was shockingly young for such a sacrifice, and looked more like a Neapolitan than a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting on the quay at Naples or Genoa, lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth when ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... on thine image once The gaze alike of prince and peasant rested— As if, unsated of thy thrilling glance, They never until then of beauty tasted: So I, by lonely contemplation led To muse awhile amid the silent dead— Turn me from all around I hear or see— From all of Shakspeare and of great to thee: And think on all thy wrongs—on all the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... It was very affectionate—full of longings to be coming home again, even though she allowed that their present life was very bright and interesting. I was just laughing at a description of Pert and Quick going to market on their own account, and how they bargained with the old peasant women, when a slight sound—was it a sound or only a sort of feeling in the air?—made me look up from the open sheet before me, and glance ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... in the first months of the War than the rally of the manhood of Great Britain to the call of the country in its time of need. All classes, rich and poor, patrician and peasant, employer and workman, were uplifted by the great occasion. Through the influence of patriotism, the recognition by all sorts and conditions of our people of the honourable obligation of fidelity to ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... make the journey in his uniform, and in those boots?" (The last words were especially emphasised.) "If I might be so bold, I would suggest a peasant's coat like mine, and a pair of ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... he now wears trousers instead of breeches, while his world has become more and more assimilated to that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, with the result of losing all those really very notable and stiff and sturdy virtues which differentiated the Breton peasant, when I first knew him, while it would be difficult indeed to say what it has gained. At all events the progress which can be stated is mainly to be stated in negatives. The Breton, as I first knew him, believed in all sorts of superstitious ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... which I viewed the afternoon's battle was literally carpeted with the corpses of Germans who had been killed during the morning. One of them had died clasping a woman's picture. He was buried with it still clenched in his hand. I saw peasants throw twelve bodies into one grave. One peasant would grasp a corpse by the shoulders and another would take its feet and they would give it a swing as though it were a sack of meal. As I watched these inanimate forms being carelessly tossed into the trench it was hard to make myself believe that only a few ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... disorder of her appearance. Over her rough peasant's clothes, some article of cast-off apparel cuts a strange and lamentable figure: a muslin morning-wrap, once white and covered with filmy lace; long, faded ribbons, which fasten a showy Watteau pleat to the back, with ravelled ends spreading over the thick red-cotton skirt; old pink-satin ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... shackles. There was much to do and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later which left the English peasant the freest ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... others in their turn have since had. Society was organized on the feudal hierarchy of status. In the first place, a noble class, spiritual and temporal, was opposed to a peasantry either wholly servile or but nominally free. In addition to this opposition of noble and peasant there was that of the township, which, in its corporate capacity, stood in the relation of lord to ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... Wood, A Female Voice pierc'd, thro' my Ears, Crying, You Rogue drive home the Steirs. I listen'd to th' attractive sound, And straight a Herd of Cattel found Drove by a Youth, and homeward bound; Cheer'd with the fight, I straight thought fit, To ask where I a Bed might get. The surley Peasant bid me stay, And ask'd from whom (g) I'de run away. Surprized at such a saucy Word, I instantly lugg'd out my Sword; Swearing I was no Fugitive, But from Great-Britain did arrive, In hopes I better there might Thrive. ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... which you had recklessly plunged. Lady, had you known the dangers of travel in these wild and lawless days, you never would have left the shelter of your father's house with but one attendant to protect you. Think you that those peerless charms could ever have been hidden beneath the dress of a peasant lad? Well was it for you, lady, that your true love was first to follow and find you, ere some rude fellow had betrayed the secret to his fellows, and striven to turn it to their advantage. Here ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... France had bowed in silence beneath two galling burdens—a selfish and corrupt monarchy, and a multitudinous, privileged, lazy, and oppressive aristocracy, by whom the peasant was handled like a Russian serf. [Said peasant is now the principal proprietor ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... Poor-law. True enough:—and yet, human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms; valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,—which all the metal of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of Potosi, and all you can buy with ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... which paid six hundred dollars for letter-postage will pay hereafter only four hundred; it will add, then, a net profit of two hundred dollars to the ten thousand which its business brings it, and it will owe this to the munificence of the treasury. On the other hand, the peasant, the laborer, who shall write twice a year to his son in the army, and shall receive a like number of replies, will have saved ten cents. Is it not true that the postal reform acts in direct opposition to the equitable distribution of the tax? that if, according ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... with water, and was returning to the place he came from, when his eye fell on me. He started on seeing me, and then, putting down his water-pitcher, advanced towards where I was sitting. I rose to receive him, as I should have done had he been the poorest peasant; but from the dignity of his air and the gravity of his countenance, he seemed to be much above that rank. He salaamed, and so did I, imitating his action; but it appeared that here our power of intercourse must cease, for I soon discovered that he did not understand a word of my language ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman's Crede (1394), and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was {32} appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... might well have answered in the affirmative had she considered personal beauty a merit of high order; for few palaces in this world could boast a princess so superbly beautiful as this peasant girl that this poor hut contained. Beneath those rich sable tresses was a high broad forehead as white as snow; slender black eyebrows so well defined and so perfectly arched that they gave a singularly open and elevated character to the whole countenance; large dark ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the 17th of April, 1774, at Eisleben, in Saxony, the birthplace also of a still more famous person, Martin Luther. His father was a respectable peasant proprietor, described by Herr Goebel as Anspanner. But this word has now gone out of use. In feudal times it described the farmer who was obliged to keep draught cattle to perform service due to the landlord. The boy received a solid education at the Gymnasium, or public school of the town. At a ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... of a peasant Deputy and a Polish representative were particularly impressive and well received. The Socialist leader's demand for peace called forth a smart rejoinder from a member ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was famed of old, The British wool is growing gold; No mines can more of wealth supply; It keeps the peasant from the cold, And takes ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... according to the specialists, Limnophilus flavicornis, whose work has earned for the whole corporation the pretty name of Phryganea, a Greek term meaning a bit of wood, a stick. In a no less expressive fashion, the Provencal peasant calls it lou portofais, lou porto-caneu. This is the little grub that carries through the still waters a faggot of tiny fragments ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... great crowd assembled to see the heretic, and his conductors, Pappenheim and Deutschland, were obliged to take him to the hall of audience in the Bishop's Palace through gardens and by back ways. There he was introduced into the presence of the Estates. He was a peasant and a peasant's son, who, though he had written bold letters to Pope and Prelate, had never spoken face to face with the great ones of the land, not even with his own Elector, of whose good-will he was assured. Now he was bidden to answer, less for himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... . You will believe me. I the father of Cosette! before God, no. Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant of Faverolles. I earned my living by pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean. I am not related to Cosette. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... present themselves in the different provinces in forms as diverse as the past history and local conditions of each province, long before it was brought under British administration, had combined to make them. Whereas in the Bombay Presidency, for instance, land is chiefly held by small landlords and peasant proprietors, it was held in Agra and Oudh before they became British by a great landed aristocracy whose rights, like all established rights, it was a principle of British policy to respect, and the talukdars of Oudh and the zemindars of Agra stood for the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... incident of that sort, it is that incident itself which I know, which leads me to combat—" he turned with a deep bow—"the position of the Sena-torr that the great war did not make for democracy. Gentlemen, my compatriot was a peasant, a person of ignorance, yet with a desire of fulfilling his possibilities. He had been born in social chains and tied to most sordid life, beyond hope, in old Russia. To try to shake free he had gone to America. But it was that caldron of fire, the war, which freed him, which fused his life and ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... ye pitying bosoms, cease to bleed! Such scenes no more demand the tear humane; I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed With every patriot virtue in her train! And mark yon peasant's raptur'd eyes; 25 Secure he views his harvests rise; No fetter vile the mind shall know, And Eloquence shall fearless glow. Yes! Liberty the soul of Life shall reign, Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro' every ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... well understood the meaning of this relationship, though I cannot make it plain to you. You can ill comprehend the horrid feeling. Talk of a mesalliance of the aristocratic lord with the daughter of his peasant retainer, of the high-born dame with her plebeian groom—talk of the scandal and scorn to which such rare events give rise! All this is little—is mild, when compared with the positive disgust and horror ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... under which the peasant proprietary was formed in Roumania, as communicated to us by Prince Jon Ghika, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... if necessary, will protect. Corn, and perhaps the bean, ye shall have; perhaps oven some of those little roots that the savages dig and eat; but, look you, this is but because you are with one who is brave. Enfin, I go. I bend me to the hoe, here in this place, like any peasant." ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... classification. Though she was chopping wood, and chopping it very well, though she wore what is sometimes called a Mother Hubbard wrapper and a stiff, clean blue-checked apron, she was not in the least a peasant. Her figure was tall and spare, her hair gray and drawn into an uncompromising knot, her face wrinkled and shrewd, her eyes soft, and full of the experience that middle-age brings to the native American woman who ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... I thought that he might be asleep when I returned. The Captain Diaz had his quarters at the other end of the palace, some two hundred paces away. Presently we stood before him. He was a rough-looking, thick-set man well on in years, with bright eyes and an ugly honest face, like the face of a peasant who has toiled a lifetime in all weathers, only the fields that Diaz tilled were fields of war, and his harvest had been the lives of men. Just then he was joking with some common soldiers in a strain scarcely suited to nice ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... dreams, rushes with bloody hands to give his blood for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He will not live to see, except in vision, the new world he gives his bones to build—even his spinning word-whipped head knows that. But the children! they shall live sweeter lives. The peasant leaves his fireside to die upon the battle-field. What is it to him, a grain in the human sand, that Russia should conquer the East, that Germany should be united, that the English flag should wave above new lands? the heritage his ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed—a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It was a room with which she had never been able to establish any closer relation than ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... traveler was duly installed in the best chamber, where, after removing his cloak, he proceeded to warm himself before the fire he had ordered lighted. In the meantime, Hulda, to satisfy this exacting guest, bade the piga (a sturdy peasant-girl, who helped in the kitchen, and did the rough work of the inn during the summer) ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... a little village in the valley of the Seine. As a lark drops its nest among the grasses, so a few peasant people had dropped their little farms and cottages amid the great green woods on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose thatch a cloud of white and gray pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... had he not seen? And how he had been preserved—for her? And his image seemed to her utterly beautiful and glorious, clothed as it was in the beauty and glory of all that he had seen, and done, and suffered. Oh Love, Love, Love, the same in peasant and in peer! The more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which is common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind; a dreamer, an exaggerator—a liar, in short. They know just nothing ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... her in the contemplation of the personal pulchritude of her music master (somewhat enhanced by the extirpation of the Hellion triplet in her own behalf) it was Peter Nicholaevitch who made the task of Peter Nichols difficult. It was the Grand Duke Peter who wanted to take this peasant woman in his arms and teach her what other peasant girls had been taught by Grand Dukes since the beginning of the autocratic system of which he had been a part—but it was Peter Nichols who restrained him. Peter Nicholaevitch feared ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... chorus. Lyddy, she called her. The girl seldom spoke. She was extremely stupid, but a marvellous mimic, and pretty beyond belief; fragile, and yet with something common about her even in her fragility. Her wrists had a certain flat angularity that bespoke a peasant ancestry, but she had a singular freshness and youthful bloom. The line of her side face from the eye socket to the chin was a delicious thing that curved with the grace of a wing. The high cheekbone sloped down so that the outline was heart-shaped. There were little ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the Inward Rule and Guide, Scholar and peasant, lord and serf, allied, The polished Penn and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of all the little carvings in wood he sold at Rome, were expended in ear-rings, necklaces, and gold hairpins. So that, thanks to her friend's generosity, Teresa was the most beautiful and the best-attired peasant near Rome. The two children grew up together, passing all their time with each other, and giving themselves up to the wild ideas of their different characters. Thus, in all their dreams, their wishes, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... master Squarcione of Padua is not known. The shepherd lad may have strayed in on a summer's day, when the door was open, and attracted the painter's attention and interest. One of the greatest living painters today was a Bavarian peasant boy, who used to walk ten miles barefoot to the city and back on Sundays, carrying his shoes to save them, in order to go into the free galleries and look at the pictures; and somehow, without money, nor credit, nor introduction, he got into the studio of a good ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Hugo; Rene sitting on the cliff-side, and looking farewell to the white home of his childhood;—of lines from 'Childe Harold' and from Shelley. His mind was in a ferment of youth and poetry, and the France he saw was not the workaday France of peasant and high road and factory, but the creation of poetic intelligence, of ignorance ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... certificate of the refusal of burial; but then the peasant threshers began to make a fuss. "What! bury a corpse within our boundaries which has not been blessed? Why, then, as certain as the Amen to the Pater Noster, the hail would destroy our crops. And you need not ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... him. Had he been there at night the smugglers might have suspected him of keeping watch for them; but smugglers never attempted to run their cargoes in broad daylight, and he never came down there after dark. One day a peasant came strolling along. He was a powerful-looking man and carried a heavy stick. Ralph was lying on his back looking up at the clouds and did not hear the man approach till he was close to him, then with a quick movement ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... in finding out the direction he had taken. A miserable-looking peasant announcing the way; and there it was plainly enough. There could be no doubt of it, for the dust was trampled, and plenty of traces lay about, showing that the little army must have been in ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... Richard's reign the poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and in English, from his conservative point of view, against the corruption and sinfulness of society at large. But by this time the great peasant insurrection had added its warning, to which it was ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... with the old Italian peasant woman, bowed beneath a bundle, who was the next he would have to confront, being out of the question, he resolved to side-step destiny by slipping out of the main path and following a branch one. Doing so, he came into less frequented regions, while his steps took him up a low ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... With a common peasant girl, vigorous and sensual, like this dancer at the fair, he would have gratified the only low permissible to a priest; for it was the most unpardonable folly, he recognized ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... lady, "go with you to one of your castles, to see how the richness of your dwelling will correspond with your peasant habit?" ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... have here mentioned the three different classes that existed in Norway, it may be well to explain that the masters were peasants or "bonders", but not by any means similar to peasants in other lands; on the contrary, they were the udal-born proprietors of the soil—the peasant-nobility, so to speak, the Udallers, or freeholders, without any superior lord, and were entitled to attend and have a voice in the "Things" or assemblies where the laws were enacted and public affairs regulated. The next class was that of the "unfreemen". These were freed slaves who had wrought ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... Pillist? Ar, these Boys—they little know how the old folks worrit about 'em. But my father he never had no occasion to worrit about me. You know, Betsy, that when I fust commenced my career as a moral exhibitor with a six-legged cat and a Bass drum, I was only a simple peasant child—skurce 15 Summers had flow'd over my yoothful hed. But I had sum mind of my own. My father understood this. "Go," he sed—"go, my son, and hog the public!" (he ment, "knock em," but the old man was allus a little given to slang). He put his ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... The poor peasant lad had been so unfortunate as to bring down a hare with a heavy stick. The animal had risen just before him; the weapon was ready; the temptation too great. Forgetful of all but the impulse of the moment, he had flung the stick, and the hare fell. He was just rushing ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... they were waiting for something. The same atmosphere of lethargy seemed to pervade their surroundings. The innkeeper sat and dozed; the youths in the college opposite lounged at the door; pedestrians on the high road went by without greeting anyone; the peasant in the field sat on his plough, and wiped the sweat from ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... as she rode out of the trees one of the yokels fled at once, but the other, seeing it was a woman, held his ground. A moment after they were in converse, and I saw a broad grin on the man's face. Then mademoiselle beckoned to us, and we came forth. On our appearance the peasant seemed inclined to follow his friend's example; but we somehow managed to reassure him, and gathered that, except for a small party of harmless travellers who were at the Green ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded. Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction against Republicanism provoked by the fanaticism and the financial ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... cousins were ladies in every sense of the term, but Miss Chislett had a certain perfection of courteous grace and dignified refinement, in every word, and gesture, and attitude, as utterly natural to her as the vigorous tread of any barefooted peasant girl, and which one does meet with (but by no means invariably) among women of the highest class in England. Her dignity fell short of haughtiness (which is not high breeding, and is very easy of assumption); ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... politeness. Wherever I have met with Brazilians, from the greatest to the meanest, I must say I have always experienced the greatest politeness: from the fidalgo who calls on me in full court costume, to the peasant, or the common soldier, I have had occasion to admire, and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... group built on the French philosophers, who were taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... ... he worships Dolores, like a mother.... But no, my house has simply got to be a brothel, for those chatter-boxes.... Tonet! God!" And the Rector laughed one of those hearty laughs of pitying superiority at the stupidity of people, the kind of laugh the Spanish peasant gives when he hears some benighted ignoramus questioning the authenticity ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... shattered, of our castles torn down, of our cairns sacrilegiously pierced, of our urns broken up, and of our coins melted down. All classes, creeds and politics are to blame in this. The peasant lugs down a pillar for his sty, the farmer for his gate, the priest for his chapel, the minister for his glebe. A mill-stream runs through Lord Moore's Castle,[32] and the Commissioners of Galway have shaken and threatened to remove the Warden's ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... chamberlain, and ordered his guards to take him away to the donjon cell; then, with pretended friendship, he embraced the fisherman and led him to his own apartments. All the while he was thinking and thinking what he could do to get rid of him. The idea of having him, a mere peasant and one of his own subjects, for a son-in-law was most repugnant to him, and hurt his kingly pride. At last he said, "The chamberlain will most certainly be punished for his crime. As for you, who have twice been my saviour, you shall be my son-in-law. Now the customs observed at court ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... families in the country feel proud of the surveillance of that mysterious being. Neither is she influenced by the circumstances of rank or fortune, as she is oftener found frequenting the cabin of the peasant than the baronial mansion of the lord of thousands. Even the humble family to which the writer of this tale belongs has long claimed the honourable appendage of a banshee; and it may, perhaps, excite an additional interest in my readers ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... a young soldier, twenty-four years of age. He was the son of the Emperor Charles V and his mistress, Barbara Blomberg of Ratisbon. His boyhood had been passed, unknown and unacknowledged by his father, in a peasant household in Castille. As a youth he had been adopted by a noble family of Valladolid. Then Philip II had acknowledged him as his half-brother, and given him the rank of a Spanish Prince. He studied at Alcala, having for his friends and companions Alexander Farnese, the "Great Captain" ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... is overthrown, when public security is at an end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the mercy of some blind elemental force. The earthquake burying an entire population under its falling houses; the flood that carries away the drowned body of the peasant with the carcasses of his cattle and the beams torn from his roof-tree; or the victorious army massacring those who defend their lives, and making prisoners of the rest—pillaging in the name of the sword, and thanking God to the roar ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... franklin and the English peasant who come here usually weigh their allegiance a little before they make up their minds; but, if they have been persuaded that Queen Victoria's reign is a "baneful domination," they either go to the United States at once, or to those ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had "seen ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Francisco. His mother, who was not married to his father—indeed not married to anybody at any time so far as I can find out—was a peasant woman named Francisca Gonzales. Francisco was born about the year 1471. His advent was not of sufficient importance to have been recorded, apparently, and the exact date of his terrestrial appearance is a matter of conjecture, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of history at all points. Thus I think it is important, if we can, to obtain independent testimony of the attitude of the surrounding people to the builders of London Bridge. We can do this by reference to the peasant beliefs concerning bridges, as, for instance, in Ireland, where on passing over a bridge they invariably pulled off their hats and prayed for the soul of the builder of the bridge,[27] and to the fact that the Romans themselves ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... circulated as to intended massacres of Catholics by Orangemen. The Celt is highly susceptible to personal influence; and, just as that of the Fitzgeralds largely accounts for the rising in Kildare, so does the personality of Father John Murphy explain the riddle of Wexford. The son of a peasant of that county, he was trained for the priesthood at Bordeaux, and ardently embraced the principles of the French Revolution and the aims of United Ireland. His huge frame, ready wit, and natural shrewdness brought him to the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... her at the thought of meeting some rough peasant, or some rollicking student, to whom she could make no ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... but from seemingly minor incidents that have nevertheless marked new eras and changed the channels of history. Precedents sustain us in this. A startled goose rousing the sleeping sentinels on the ramparts; a dull peasant sending an army in the wrong direction; the mischievous phrase uttered by an inconspicuous minister of the gospel to a few auditors,—such unconsidered trifles play havoc with Fame's calculations. And so in our calendar the disbanding of the volunteer fire department ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... certainly does not rob the sacred Scriptures, the perennial source of spiritual comfort, of their exalted character and divine worth to assume that legend, myth, and history have combined to produce the perfect harmony which is their imperishable distinction. The peasant dwelling on inaccessible mountain-heights, next to the record of Abraham's shepherd life, inscribes the main events of his own career, the anniversary dates sacred to his family. The young count among their first impressions that of "the brown ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... cities, glittering with the pomp Of spire and pennon, laugh their joyance up In the deep flood of light. Sweet comes the tone Of the touch'd lute from yonder orange bow'rs, And the shrill cymbal pours its elfin spell Into the peasant's being! A sublime And fervid mind was his, whose pencil trac'd The grandeur of this scene! Oh! matchless Claude! Around the painter's mastery thou hast thrown An halo of surpassing loveliness! Gazing on thy proud works, we mourn the curse Which 'reft our race ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... county of Waterford, was a Protestant freeholder in Louth to be punished for the crime of a Catholic freeholder in Clare? If the principle of the honourable and learned Member for Newport be sound, the franchise of the Irish peasant was property. That franchise the Ministers under whom the honourable and learned Member held office did not scruple to take away. Will he accuse those Ministers of robbery? If not, how can he bring such an accusation against ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... found true idealism in the toiling peasant who believed in God, rather than in his intellectual superior who believed in himself in the first place, and gave a conventional assent to the existence of a deity in the second. For the peasant was still religious at heart with a naive ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... So I,—rejoicing once again to stand Where Siloa's brook flows softly, and the meads Are all enamell'd o'er with deathless flowers, And Angel voices fill the dewy air. Strife is so hateful to me! most of all A strife of words about the things of GOD. Better by far the peasant's uncouth speech Meant for the heart's confession of its hope. Sweeter by far in village-school the words But half remembered from the Book of Life, Or scarce articulate lispings ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... little World within himself, and every Heart is a new World. We cannot therefore attain to a perfect Knowledge of human Nature, by studying others or our selves alone, but by studying both. 'Tis this Knowledge which sets the Philosopher above the Peasant, and gives the Preference to one Author above another. This Knowledge has a Force, something like to that of Magic Charms: by the help of it one, who is Master of the Science, can turn Men inside outwards, and expose them to ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... the poor family: Francois Derblay was a peasant, born and brought up in Picardy, and the son of poor parents, who, at dying, had left him little to add to what Nature had given him—a pair of strong arms and a sound, honest mind. With this fortune Francois had begun early to till ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... but far from making herself known to him, she took the name of Bridget, and said that she was the daughter of a gardener in the Bay of Divers. When regretfully she left his arms she walked across the smoking fields towards the Coast of Shadows, and if she happened to meet some belated peasant she immediately spread out her garments like great ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name she was unable to pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a woman of very few ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted. She was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city did not fail to bless the baby before every picture of the Madonna. She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently aimed to supply it with playthings ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... keep, afterward. And they must be brought home alive — or as nearly alive as is consistent with being shut up in a close, round, green tin box, full of water which becomes tepid as it is carried along by a peasant boy in the heat. They usually die of suffocation. But to the German mind that is all right. It is only not right when one kills them instantly and lays them in a cool creel, on fresh wet ferns ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... peered, and down, down below in the dizzy depths he saw the hard gray rocks, where the black swine, looking no larger than ants in the distance, fed upon the refuse thrown out over the walls of the castle. There lay the moving tree-tops like a billowy green sea, and the coarse thatched roofs of the peasant cottages, round which crawled the little children ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... discussing, a few years ago, a lurid book on the "Mysteries of Modern London," Punch remarked that the existence of a villa seemed to be proof presumptive of that of a villain. This is etymologically true. An Old French vilain, "a villaine, slave, bondman, servile tenant" (Cotgrave), was a peasant attached to his lord's ville or domain, Lat. villa. For the degeneration in meaning we may compare Eng. boor and churl (p. 84), and Fr. manant, a clodhopper, lit. a dweller (see manor, p. 9). A butcher, Fr. boucher, must originally have dealt in goat's flesh, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... grew reckless more and more, Until the humblest peasant closed his door, And where she passed, fair dames, in scorn and pride, Shuddered, and drew their rustling robes aside. At last a yearning seemed to fill her soul, A longing that was stronger than control: Once more, just once again, to see the place That knew her young and ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... distinguished himself in the Imperial service, was the son of a poor Piedmontese peasant, but he never forgot his humble extraction. While the army was in Piedmont, he invited his principal officers to an entertainment, when his father happened to arrive just as they were sitting down to table. This being announced to the general, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... Fenians mocked and yet endured. They are a very human band of fighting men, and though many of them, like Oisin and Finn and Dermot, have adventures in fairyland, they preserve in these their ordinary human nature. The Connacht peasant has no difficulty in following Finn into the cave of Slieve Cullinn, where the witch turned him into a withered old man, for the village where he lives has traditions of the same kind; the love affairs of Finn, of Dermot and Grania, and of many others, are quite in harmony with a hundred stories, ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... painters. They are worthy successors of the father of Rodolphe Toepffer, who was peculiarly happy in rendering the mountain-scenes of Savoy, and in portraying those picturesque and attractive episodes of peasant-life entitled "The Village Wedding," "The Fair in Winter," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... strongly he might to himself deny it, he had arrived in Russia with what Nikitin called "his romantic notions." He had read his Dostoevski and Turgenev; he had looked at those books of Russian impressions that deal in nothing but snow, ikons, and the sublime simplicity of the Russian peasant. He was a man whose circumstances had led him to believe profoundly in his own incapacity, unpopularity, ignorance. For a moment his love had given him a new confidence but now how was that same ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... that of a wealthy peasant; and she wore one of the long gowns with hanging sleeves which were in fashion in the sixteenth century. The house in front of which she sat belonged to her, so also the immense field which adjoined ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... hour's walking brought them to the hut of a peasant. The owner came to the door as they approached. He was a rough-looking man in a long jacket made of goat-skin, coarse trousers reaching down to the knee, and his legs bound with long strips of wadding. "Who are you," he asked ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... painter, was the son of a peasant residing in the village of Breughel near Breda. After receiving instruction in painting from Koek, whose daughter he married, he spent some time in France and Italy, and then went to Antwerp, where he was elected into the Academy in 1551. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... tenderness, the common-sense or the humour, which must all have been part of Knox's natural character before it was moulded from without. His father was of the 'simple,' not of the gentle, sort; possibly a peasant, or frugal cultivator of the soil. But he saved enough to send one of his two sons, John, now in the eighteenth year of his age, and having, no doubt, received his earlier education in the excellent grammar school of Haddington, to the University of Glasgow. ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... change our nature, it will be good if we take over for good and all a number—a very considerable number,—of these European pike. That will occupy the German peasant and give an outlet to his superfluous energies. There will be no leisure-energy to discharge itself in party strife. Further, we must build Europe up again. It stood on rotten foundations, and now it has fallen to pieces. We shall erect it ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... woke in me, remembering the burden of ignoble years this hag had suffered me to bear; yet my so young gentility bade me avoid reproach of the dying peasant woman, who, when all was said, had been but ill-used by our house. Death hath a strange potency: commanding as he doth, unquestioned and unchidden, the emperor to have done with slaying, the poet to rise from his unfinished rhyme, the tender and gracious lady to cease ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... her first to a peasant's cottage, and afterwards to her father's villa. He knew nothing of the feeling of hatred that existed between their families; and when Mr. Sim heard his name, though for a moment it caused a glow to pass over his face, every ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... one so bitter, so arrogant, so proud as your son of a peasant who has got the upper ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... though it was the old teaching of the Apostles, was as new to the peasants who came to hear him, as it had been to the citizens of Athens who came to hear St. Paul. The saying of St Chrysostom that Christianity had turned many a peasant into a philosopher, came true again in the time of Eckhart and Tauler. Men who called themselves Christians had been taught, and had brought themselves to believe, that to read the writings of the Apostles was a deadly sin. Yet in secret they were yearning after that forbidden Bible. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... principles on the altar of patriotism. Whereas the Catholic party in Belgium has for twenty-eight years refused the means of national defence, and has made the Belgian Army into a byword on the plea that barrack life is dangerous to the religious faith of the peasant, the German Catholics have voted with exemplary docility every increase of the army and navy. Only once did they dare to propose a small reduction in the estimates for the expenditure on the war ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... the mere idea that the manager should have thought she would drink out of the glass he had just used. Even the Italian peasant, who had been a goatherd in Calabria, and could hardly write his name, showed more delicacy, according to his lights, which were certainly not dazzling. A faint ray of Roman civilisation had reached him through generations of slaves and serfs and shepherds. But no such traditions of forgotten ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... sphere one solitary wife who in her manners and appearance owned to being a mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world—which does not go far towards the realization of the name of mother—there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up; and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... trudger on a heavy road!) Comes it of title-deeds which fools may boast? Or coffers vilest hands may hold the keys of? Or that ethereal lamp that lights the eyes To shed the sparkling lustre o'er the face, Gives to the velvet skin its blushing glow, And burns as bright beneath the peasant's roof As roof of palaced prince? Yes, Love should seek Its match—then give my love its match in thine, Its match which in thy gentle breast doth lodge So rich—so earthly, heavenly fair and rich, As monarchs have no thought of on their thrones, ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... falling silent. "I own it makes us seem pretty small—us, not them." He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the side spitting into the river. "And that, I think, is what my wife feels, the essential superiority of the peasant—" Under cover of Mr. Flushing's words, which continued now gently reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... a fine pair of earrings, as she begged hard for them; and as soon as I had ordered the needful from the cordwainer we set out on our way homewards, as it began to grow very dark; but we could not carry nearly all we had bought. Wherefore we were forced to get a peasant from Bannemin to help us, who likewise was come into the town; and as I found out from him that the fellow who gave me the piece of bread was a poor cotter called Pantermehl, who dwelt in the village by the roadside, I shoved a couple of loaves in at his house-door without ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... them. "Do I trust to my pigeon, my sling-stone?" he said jovially to the thickbrowed, splendidly ruddy young woman, who was his wife; "do I trust her? Not half a morsel of her!" This young woman, a peasant woman of remarkable personal attractions, served him with the fidelity of a fascinated animal, and the dumbness of a wooden vessel. She could have hanged him, had it pleased her. She had all his secrets: but it was not vain speaking on Barto Rizzo's part; he was master of her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... book of ringing Irish ballads that will stir the heart of every lover of true poetry. "Here and there a verse may be as frankly unadorned as the peasant cabins themselves in their homely cloaks of thatch, but every line rings true to life and home and with the tone, as heartmoving as the Angelus which holds Millet's peasants in its spell," from ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... down, all bathed in perspiration, during the ascent without a guide of a mountain in Switzerland, I was accosted by a woman, who feared I had come to some harm. I walked on up with her. She turned out to be a young peasant woman from Normandy, who lived half-way up the mountain. She had accompanied her husband to Switzerland, but cursed her lot, and was always longing to be back in France. When I remarked that it must ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and if that is under his control, or in any way affected by his whims and wishes? Would not Louis XVI. have been the son of a goldsmith, if he could have had his way? Would Burns have been born a slaving, starving peasant, if he had been consulted beforehand? Would not the children of vice be the children of virtue, if they could have had their choice? and would not the whole tenor of their lives have been changed thereby? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Onions, which are imported into this country in the winter, are sweet and mucilaginous. A peasant in Spain will munch an onion just as an English labourer ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... that he did not reply to the man even by a look. "Now, my lads, now: one, two, three, and a —-." Obedient to the call of the officer, with a simultaneous jerk at the sail, the holdfast of the stupid peasant was plucked from his cracking fingers; he fell back with a loud shriek from the yard, struck midway on the main rigging, and thence bounding far to leeward in the sea, disappeared, and for ever, amid the white froth of the curling wave, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the Government of the Russian Republic, chosen by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies with participation of peasant deputies, the Council of People's ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... for great occasions, and made the best amends they could, for a year of abstinence and toil by a week of merriment and convivial indulgence. Persons in middle life at this day, who can afford a good dinner every day, do not look forward to it as any particular subject of exultation: the poor peasant, who can only contrive to treat himself to a joint of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event in the week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy of the Return from Parnassus, we find this indignant description of the progress ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... holding, earning literally his bread in the sweat of his brow, and educating himself how he could, for his people were too poor to pay for his schooling. His indomitable perseverance and his thirst for knowledge overcame the formidable obstacles of fortune, and at thirty years of age the poor peasant boy had become a barrister of reputation for ability and fearlessness. He returned to his native county to become the most popular and trusted of its "counsellors"—the advocate who did not fear to face and beard Influence and Ascendancy in its courts. The city of Cashel had had much ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... truest sense of the word, illustrating in a graphic and natural style the manners and customs, trials and sorrows, sins and backslidings, of the men and women of whom they treat. The heroes and heroines of these admirable stories belong to every rank of life, from the king and noble to the humble peasant. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... FESINCONTRANS; National Confederation of Salvadoran Workers or CNTS; National Union of Salvadoran Workers or UNTS; Port Industry Union of El Salvador or SIPES; Salvadoran Union of Ex-Petrolleros and Peasant Workers or USEPOC; Salvadoran Workers Central or CTS; Workers Union of Electrical Corporation or STCEL; business organizations - National Association of Small Enterprise or ANEP; Salvadoran Assembly Industry Association or ASIC; Salvadoran Industrial ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... at the bottom of the hill. I saw the old man a long way off and I understood how it was. I dismounted at once and met him on foot. We had half an hour together walking up and down the road. He is a peasant priest, he didn't know how to treat me. And of course I was uncomfortable, too. There wasn't a single goat about to keep me in countenance. I ought to have embraced him. I was always fond of the stern, simple old man. But he drew himself up when I approached him and actually ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... noon that strangely-assorted pair, the sordid old man and the gentle child, set out in a peasant's waggon, which he had hired for a few pence, to ride across the meadows to Boston. The morning was very fair. In the night the mist had flown, and now the sun shone out warm and cheerful, giving the necessary brightness to the scene. It lay tenderly on the quaint fen village, and the little ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... birds to be seen and heard! But of late years the free Negro, like the French peasant during the first half of this century, has held it to be one of the indefeasible rights of a free man to carry a rusty gun, and to shoot every winged thing. He has been tempted, too, by orders from London shops ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... decked with jewels, gilded, drest, Would rather be a peasant with her baby at her breast, For all I shine so like the sun, and am ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... vexed that her husband should have decided so unjustly, and when the court was over she went to the other peasant and told him how he could convince the King that he had made a rash judgment. So the next day he took a stool outside the King's window and commenced fishing with ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... led by a comfortable English or American farmer would represent wicked waste and shameful indulgence to a much richer French peasant. I, myself, know a laborer on wages of less than twenty shillings a week, who by thrift has bought ten acres of the magnificent garden land between Fontainebleau and the Seine, worth many thousand pounds, on which grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and the famous dessert grapes; ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... oatmeal in payment. However, duty, you know, before everything: a fellow-creature may be dying. I hand over my cards at once to Kalliopin, the member of the provincial commission, and return home. I look; a wretched little trap was standing at the steps, with peasant's horses, fat—too fat—and their coat as shaggy as felt; and the coachman sitting with his cap off out of respect. Well, I think to myself, 'It's clear, my friend, these patients aren't rolling in riches.'... You smile; but I tell you, a poor man like me ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... the clerk of the parish had at fourteen received an education from parents, nature, and books which, with his habits of observation, love of reading, and perseverance, made him better instructed than most boys of fourteen far above the peasant class to which ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... scene at Tolstoi's table! The countess and her daughter in full evening dress with the display of jewels, and at the other end Tolstoi in the roughest sort of peasant dress and with bare feet. At dinner Count Tolstoi said to Mr. MacQueen: "If I had travelled as much as you have, I should today have ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... if at the head of a battalion, though his lungs pumped hard at every step, holding back his square shoulders, protruding his tight broadcloth, swinging his stick airily, Jerome at his side, burdened like a peasant, with his sheaf of cut leather, but holding up his ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... been encouraged to increase and multiply in the most reckless manner, while 'war prices' were obtained for agricultural produce, and the votes of the forty-shilling freeholders were wanted by the landlords. When, by the Emancipation Act in 1829, the forty-shilling franchise was abolished, the peasant lost his political value. After the war, when the price of corn fell very low, and, consequently, tillage gave place to grazing, labourers became to the middleman an encumbrance and a nuisance that must be cleared off the land, just as weeds are plucked up and ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As a man I am a ruin"—better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that beastly peasant blouse ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... of Europe are upon us; the monarch, from his throne, watches us with an angry countenance; the peasant turns his gaze on us with joyful faith; the writers on politics quote our condition as a proof of the possibility of popular government; the heroes of freedom animate their followers by reminding them of our success. At no moment of the last half century has it been so important ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... deer gently from all parts into Dallington yonder, and there to hold them till the King came. Next, we must choose some three hundred beaters to drive the deer to the stands within bowshot of the King. Here was our trouble! In the mellay of a deer-drive a Saxon peasant and a Norman King may come over-close to each other. The conquered do not love their conquerors all at once. So we needed sure men, for whom their village or kindred would answer in life, cattle, and land if any harm come ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... but the flush which touched its usual sallowness was not caused by heat. A wedding was a diversion of her exile which Lady Dorinda had never hoped for. There had been some mating in the fort below among soldiers and peasant women, to which she did not lower her thoughts. The noise of resulting merrymakings sufficiently sought out and annoyed her ear. But the wedding of the guest to a man of consequence in the Dutch colony was something to which she might ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... much, for instance, has been made of the fact that Millet was born a peasant. He was so, but so were half the artists and poets who come up to Paris and fill the schools and the cafes of the student quarters. To any one who has known these young rapins, and wondered at the grave and distinguished members of the Institute ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... two roads met: ancient and beautiful; and throwing, as we have remarked, a religious tone and atmosphere over the country. It was wonderfully picturesque to see, as we occasionally did, a Brittany peasant kneeling at the foot of one of these old crosses, the pure white Brittany cap standing out conspicuously against the dark grey stone: a figure wrapped in devotion, apparently lost to the sense of all outward things. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She wondered what manner ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... gown at a dancing school ball, a general at the head of a victorious army, and an orator, after having made an eloquent speech in a great assembly. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.' I remember this very question very happily illustrated in opposition to Hume, by the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... representation of the people. It was reserved for the untitled Quaker of Birmingham to take the lead in the great and good work of uniting, for the first time, the middle and the working classes of his countrymen, and in so doing, to infuse hope and newness of life into the dark dwellings of the English peasant and artisan. The Editor of the London Non-Conformist, speaking of this movement of Mr. Sturge, says: "The Declaration is put forth by a man, who, perhaps, in a higher degree than any other individual, has the confidence of both the middle class and the working men. The former can trust ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... predecessors in prodigal hospitality. He delighted in the neighbourhood of Eltham, and spent much of his time in feasting with his favourites at the royal palace there. In 1386 (notwithstanding the still prevalent distress, which had continued from the time of the peasant revolt) Richard kept the Christmas festivities at Eltham with great extravagance, at the same time entertaining Leon, King of Armenia, in a manner utterly unjustified by the state of the royal exchequer, which had been replenished by illegal methods. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... not altogether, as well as myself. And so far I am convinced of this, that I believe were I to publish the Canongate Chronicles without my name (nom de guerre, I mean) the event would be a corollary to the fable of the peasant who made the real pig squeak against the imitator, while the sapient audience hissed the poor grunter as if inferior to the biped in his own language. The peasant could, indeed, confute the long-eared multitude by showing piggy; ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... recollect that Christianity had made much way among this particular class, the class of slaves. No wonder that men cursed with slavery embraced with joy a religion which was perpetually teaching the worth and dignity of the human soul, and declaring that rich and poor, peer and peasant, master and slave, were equal in the sight of God. And yet, great as this growth was, it contained within it elements of danger. It was to be feared, lest men, hearing for ever of brotherhood and Christian equality, should be tempted and excited to throw off the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... for their peculiar sandals, which give them an awkward manner in walking, they would be graceful. Their hair is bound up into thick masses at the back of the head, through which a number of gold and silver or ivory arrows are placed, much in the manner of the peasant girls in some parts of Germany. The unmarried women have good eyebrows and beautiful teeth; but when they marry they blacken their teeth and shave off their eyebrows, to show their affection for their husbands, and that they no ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... this moment a peasant approached San Martin on horseback, the General with most unparalleled composure lending an attentive ear to his communications as to where the enemy was the day before! The Admiral, exasperated at so unnecessary a waste of time, bade the peasant 'begone,' adding—'The General's ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... The speeches of a peasant Deputy and a Polish representative were particularly impressive and well received. The Socialist leader's demand for peace called forth a smart rejoinder from a member of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... descending the slope. I never see a Sussex hill crowned by a camp, as at Wolstonbury, without seeing also in imagination a flash of steel. Perhaps one never realises the new terror which the Romans must have brought into the life of the Sussex peasant—a terror which utterly changed the Downs from ramparts of peace into coigns of minatory advantage, and transformed the gaze of security, with which their grassy contours had once been contemplated, into anxious glances of dismay and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... distance. But the spell of human hearts is excitement, and war is all excitement. All round us was new, and from the colonel to the rank and file, the "general camp, pioneers and all," enjoyed the quaint novelty of Dutch life. The little villages, so unlike our own, and yet so admirably fitted for peasant comfort, the homesteads embedded in plantations of willows, the neatness of every thing round the farm-houses, and even the sleekness of the cattle, which seemed by their tameness to form a part of the habitancy—all were objects of constant remark on our march; and we could easily comprehend ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... carpentry, and underground places the sun never penetrates, which haunts the working part of every theatre. Poppy smiled as she snuffed it, with a queer mingling of enjoyment and repulsion. For as is the smell of ocean to the seafarer, of mother- earth to the peasant, of incense to the priest, so is the smell of the theatre to the player. Nature may revolt; but the spell holds. Once an actor always an actor. The mark of the calling is indelible. Even to the third and fourth generation there ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... that, you must, like the apostles, know men. You must be able to enter into the life of every one—here a peasant, there a mechanic. If you can not, do not hope for success; your influence will ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... had his own? Thus Philip reasoned with himself while he ordered the man to be put in possession of the property which he asked for. However, the other, when driven out of his estate, did not, like a peasant, endure his wrongs in silence, thankful that he himself was not given away also, but sent a sharp and outspoken letter to Philip, who, on reading it, was so much enraged that he straightway ordered Pausanias to restore the property to its former owner, and to ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... daunted most Romanists desirous of effecting a death-bed conversion. It did not daunt Isabel. No sooner did she perceive that her husband's life was in danger, than she sent messengers in every direction for a priest. Mercifully, even the first to arrive, a man of peasant extraction, who had just been appointed to the parrish, came too late to molest one then far beyond the reach of human folly and superstition. But Isabel had been too well trained by the Society of Jesus not see that a chance yet ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... his mind off. The costooms of the peasant wimmen are very pretty, a black bodice over a white chemise with short full sleeves and bright colored shirts, and hat trimmed with long ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... would appear overstrained, except from the demonstration of superior force which accompanies the display of it; for it must be granted that the air of punctilious deference and rigid etiquette which would seem ridiculous in an ordinary peasant, has, like the salute of a corps-de-garde, a propriety when tendered by a Highlander completely armed. There was, accordingly, a good deal of formality in our ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... him in great content. Things seemed so much as he desired them to be—the roses, the old furniture, the spinning-wheel, the coiffed peasant woman—that he waited for Katrine's coming, fearing that she should be less ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... he who told me Maternus is really Sextus, son of Maximus. His knowledge of that secret gives me a certain hold on Pertinax! Caesar would have his head off at a word from me. But the best way with Pertinax is to stroke the honest side of him —the charcoal-burner side of him—the peasant side, if that can be done without making him too diffident. He is perfectly capable of offering the throne to some one else at ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... me?" said Hartmut with great excitement. "My mother has marked me with a brand as of seething iron, and that mark closes every door to atonement, to salvation. I am alone, condemned, thrust out from my own countrymen. Why, even the poorest peasant can fight; that right is denied only to the criminal without honor, and such I am in Egon's eyes. He fears that I would only join with my own countrymen to betray them, to—be a spy!" He put his hands over his face, and his last words died ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... into each other of forms and colours does the one offer to a mind at once attentive and active; and how insipid and lifeless, compared with it, appear those parts of the former exhibition with which a child, a peasant perhaps, or a citizen unfamiliar with natural imagery, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in the farmhouses beside the road, but could not find so much as a crust of bread; for the suspicious peasant invariably hid his stores for fear of being pillaged by the soldiers, who, being entirely without food, would take violent possession of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... off slantwise a part of the view. He reined in on a knoll and peered. There were slender gleams of steel here and there in that cloud, and it contained moving forms which revealed themselves at last as a long line of peasant carts full of soldiers, moving slowly in double file under the escort of ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... every thoughtful man to contain within its narrow compass adequate direction for, and to set forth the ideal of, human life. That is not because He went through all varieties of earthly experience, for He did not. The life of a Jewish peasant nineteen centuries ago was extremely unlike the life of a Manchester merchant, of a college professor, of a successful barrister, of a struggling mother, in this present day. But in the narrow compass of that life there are set forth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... now perfectly safe; our Manila men were as brave as Caesar; they were anxious to be landed instantly, to fight these Indians at once. They felt as much superior, no doubt, to these ignorant savages as the philosopher does to the peasant. This the captain would not permit; he knew his superiority while on board his vessel, and he also knew that this superiority must be, in a manner, lost to him as ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... radiance, and all her costume arranged to show her comely proportions to the best advantage,—her great pearl ear-rings shaking as she tossed her head, and showing the flash of the emerald in the middle of them. An Italian peasant-woman may trust Providence for her gown, but ear-rings she attends to herself,—for what is life without them? The great pearl ear-rings of the Sorrento women are accumulated, pearl by pearl, as the price of years of labor. Giulietta, however, had come into the world, so to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... citizens to warfare; short, it is true, but none the less warfare. Military despotism is the tocsin. When the King presses an unwilling subject into the army, upon his discharge the unwilling subject, usually a peasant, becomes a socialist. These Rousseaus and Voltaires have a certain amount of education, but they lack daring. If a man like Hillars, who had not only brains but daring, should get mixed up in one of these ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... known to be Gabriel's most devoted friend and his sister's warmest admirer, and, in the second, he had been seen to land at Torre during the same hour in which he had affirmed that he was near to Nisida. As for the prince's passion for the poor peasant girl, the magistrates simply shrugged their shoulders at the ridiculous assertion of that, and especially at the young girl's alleged resistance and the extreme measures to which the prince was supposed to have resorted ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... It was glossy, silken, and long as when she was a girl. I do not think that she took pride in it. How could she take pride in personal beauty, when she was never seen by any man younger than Father Marty or the old peasant who brought turf to her door in creels on a donkey's back? But she wore it always without any cap, tied in a simple knot behind her head. Whether chignons had been invented then the author does not remember,—but they certainly had not become common on the ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... observers as characteristic of the change in spirit which had come over the institution since the departure of the German artists: Miss Eames wore a perfectly exquisite accordion-pleated skirt as the distraught Sicilian peasant, and Signor Valero sang the siciliano on the open stage, the overture being stopped and the curtain raised so that he might sing his serenade to Lola with greater effect. He sang behind Lola's house, and winning ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... child," said he, "the baron, my father, is a noble lord, accustomed to be treated with respect. I cannot introduce you to him in this gipsy dress; neither is it fitting that you should enter our great castle on foot like a peasant. Wait for me a few moments, and I will bring you a horse and one of my sister's dresses. I wish you to be received like a lady of high degree. I wish my father himself to meet you on your arrival, and hold it an honor to give ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... Hunyadi, according to tradition, was the son of King Sigmond, by a peasant's daughter. The king saw and fell in love with her, whilst marching against the vaivode of Wallachia. He had some difficulty in persuading her to consent to his wishes, and she only yielded at last, on the king making her a solemn promise that, in the event of her ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... claimed to leave man a detailed guide for conduct or for happiness. It was to a simple society that he taught the laws of purity and love, he did not extend the range of their application beyond the needs of the Pharisee, the Sadducee, the Scribe, the peasant and the dweller in the little towns through which he shed the light of his presence. These laws sanctify the whole of life because they dominate the heart, from which all life must spring, but they do not ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the ill-will which he bore to Martinon, attacked his mental capacity, his character, his false elegance, his entire personality. He was a perfect specimen of an upstart peasant! The new aristocracy, the mercantile class, was not as good as the old—the nobility. He maintained this, and the democrats expressed their approval, as if he were a member of the one class, and they were in the habit ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... man of deep study and science most pleasure in giving, all manner of information. He saw, he said, that she was very fond of the heroes of freedom, and asked if she had ever heard of Andrew Hofer, the Tyrolese peasant, who had led on his brethren in their noble endeavours to rid themselves of French and Bavarian oppression. Ellen had never ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... gentleman. She was lovely to me. It was at her house that I went to my first ball. Except the Fergusons', hers was the only house in the city with rooms large enough to dance in, and that ball is still the most dazzling I can remember. I wore a rose-colored tulle skirt with a peasant waist of rose-colored satin, and father, for a great surprise, had given me a pair of pink silk stockings. No other girl in town had such a beautiful thing, and in the dressing-room they would not let me go down until I had shown them. The lighted dancing-rooms, ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... frame to himself no probable image of love-scenes between them: he could only fancy and wish wildly—what he knew was impossible—that Romola would some day tell him that she loved him. One day in Greece, as he was leaning over a wall in the sunshine, a little black-eyed peasant girl, who had rested her water-pot on the wall, crept gradually nearer and nearer to him, and at last shyly asked him to kiss her, putting up her round olive cheek very innocently. Tito was used to love that came in this unsought fashion. But Romola's love would never come in that way: would ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... brought over all his coast-guards except the two that were on duty at the station, and they formed a noble guard of honor around the canopy; and it was difficult to say which was the more beautiful and picturesque—the demonstrative love of the peasant women, who flung up their hands in a paroxysm of devotion, whilst they murmured in the soft Gaelic: "Ten thousand, thousand thanks to you, O white and ruddy Saviour!" or the calm, deep, silent tenderness of these rough men, whose faces were red ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the Hindoos. But he would observe that the Hindoo, miserable as his hovel was, had sources of pride and happiness, to which not only the West Indian slave, but even his master, was a stranger. He was to be sure a peasant; and his industry was subservient to the gratifications of an European lord. But he was, in his own belief, vastly superior to him. He viewed him as one of the lowest cast. He would not on any consideration eat from the same plate. He would not suffer ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... and clever,' said Anne. 'I get my cleverness from my father, and my economy from my mother. My father's a clergyman, but his wife was a little country girl—a sort of Merry Peasant; like Schumann's piece, you ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... I noticed a scuffling on the cellar steps, then into the room came four soldiers with a man in peasant's clothes. He turned out to be a spy caught signalling in the dunes. They brought him in to have a cup of coffee before taking him out to be shot. He was asked if he would take sugar; his ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... 307 higher institutions. There are also thousands of young men and women, in many institutions, undergoing careful preparation as teachers and preachers. There is also the medical host who treated 2,000,000 patients last year; there are industrial institutions under well-trained men, peasant settlements for the poor oppressed ryots, and schools for the blind and the deaf-mute. There is hardly an agency which can bring light, comfort, life, and inspiration to men which is not utilized by ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... bouncing on the floor. O for the heart of Homer's mice, Or gods to save them in a trice! (It was by Providence they think, For your damn'd stucco has no chink.) 'An't please your honour, quoth the peasant, This same dessert is not so pleasant: Give me again my hollow tree, 220 A crust of ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... vodkhi, an ardent spirit beloved by the Russian peasant, half-a-dozen drops of which McKay managed to gulp down, but they nearly burned ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... of Euripides is not in Mycenae, in the open country, but on the borders of Argolis, and before a solitary and miserable cottage. The owner, an old peasant, comes out and in a prologue tells the audience how matters stand in the royal house, with this addition, however, to the incidents related in the two plays already considered, that not content to treat Electra with ignominy, and to leave her in a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... notes flowed to and fro in tenderest music, and fainted in distant reverberations more and more exquisite, more and more exquisitely low. Can it be a mere echo of those rude blasts? It seemed as though some choir of spirits had caught each tone as it came from the peasant's horn, and had deified it there among the clouds, and had repeated it over and over with divinest variations, to show man how crabbed were the sounds which he produced, and yet how ravishing they might one day become, when to the symphony of silver strings they rang out ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... Alsace, zis will find you friends and shelter. Ah, but you must be careful. You see? You must watch for zis button and when you see—zen you can show zis. You will know ze person who wears ze button is French—man, woman, peasant, child. Ze Zhermans do not know. Zey are fine spies, fine sneaks! But zis zey ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... birthday, the Doctor had asked a few friends to share his mid-day meal, and when he returned from his morning stroll he sent for his housekeeper to give her a few final instructions. The housekeeper, who was a voluble Italian peasant-woman, after receiving his orders, handed him a piece of paper on which a few words were scrawled in reddish-brown ink, saying it had been ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... the short round jacket which is the trade-mark of the Italian waiter, and one, a diamond merchant from Hatton Garden, carried so much of his own stock in trade in open evidence about him that he would have been a fortune to a dozen of the poorer brethren. But whether they were prince or peasant, lean tutor, fat padrone, coarse stockbroker, or polished noble, they were all at one in patriotism, and there was not a man there who had not proved himself up to the hilt, and who was not given, body ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... that the operation of the tithe system has resulted in a loss of revenue to the State. It has impoverished the peasant, involving him in the toils of the money-lender as well as of the tithe-farmer. It has checked the productiveness of the island, the area now under cultivation being less than a third of all the culturable lands of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... remarked that the water was kept in large earthen jars—like those used in the Holy Land, I conclude. The sleeping-places were neatly arranged round the rooms, and there was a general air of comfort and respectability perceptible in most of them. Very different was a peasant's hut when we entered. It was not more than twenty feet square, divided into two compartments. In the outer were calves, lambs, and fowls. In the inner, at one end was a bed, and at the foot of it a fireplace, over ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... succession to the throne, for almost any citizen of the Empire, if not of barbarian blood or heretical creed, to aspire. Diocletian, the second founder of the Empire, was the son of a slave; Justinian—an even greater name—was the nephew of a Macedonian peasant, who with a sheepskin bag containing a week's store of biscuit, his only property, tramped down from his native highlands to seek his fortune in the capital Zeno, as we have seen, though perhaps better born than either Diocletian ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... is now thirty-five years of age. Unlike so many great Italian tenors, he is not of peasant parentage. His father was a skilled mechanic who had been put in charge of the warehouses of a large banking and importing concern. As a lad Enrico used to frequent the docks in the vicinity of these warehouses and became ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... and it may well be that Albert would be like to gain rank and honour more quickly in this way than by doughty deeds in the field. It is good that each man should stick to his last. As for me, I would rather delve as a peasant than mix in the intrigues of a Court. But there must be courtiers as well as fighters, and I say ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... number of MSS. which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman's Crede (1394), and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was {32} appealed to as such by the Protestant ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... there is folks in this here world, From peasant up to king, Who want to be so awful nice They overdo the thing. That's jest the thing that makes me sick, An' quicker 'n a wink I set it down that them same folks Ain't half so ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Geraint rode through the gate of the village and approached the group. He saw where the four knights stood cruelly torturing a poor old man whom they had tied to a post, and the sweat stood upon the peasant's white face, and the fear of death was ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... nearly of the same opinion as Zeno; and the Athletæ, that their strength might be unimpaired, never married. The Rabbis, in their anxiety to preserve their nation, are said to have ordered, with a view of preventing a loss of vigour, that a peasant should indulge but once a week, and a merchant but once a month, a sailor but twice a year, and a studious man but once in two years; and for the same reason, Moses ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... remained wanting—a lady-love for whose sake he might do battle and whose affections might inspire him to endure all sorts of dangers and hardships. So Don Quixote straightway searched through his recollection to find one that might answer, and hit at last upon a peasant girl named Aldonza Lorenzo, with whom it is supposed he had been in love when he was a young man. And though Aldonza Lorenzo was more used to winnowing wheat and caring for the live-stock than to fine phrases and courtly manners, ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... billets scores of times before. The walls were covered with the names of men and regiments, and there were many penciled suggestions as to the best place to go for a basin of "coffay oh lay," as Tommy called it. Every roadside cottage was, in fact, Tommy's tavern. The thrifty French peasant women kept open house for soldiers. They served us with delicious coffee and thick slices of French bread, for the very reasonable sum of twopence. They were always friendly and hospitable, and the men, in turn, treated them with courteous and kindly respect. Tommy was a great favorite ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... innocent, expectant, with the old ballads of old France on their lips. For the story is full of those artless, lisping numbers of the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that Gerard collected and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl. ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... and the child, falling into the fire, was burned to death, whereupon the wife fled to the sea and was never seen again. This was told me in all seriousness as of a contemporary event, and was evidently held as history. I bought from a peasant one of the well-known three-sided prisms with archaic intaglios of animals on the faces, and had the curiosity to inquire the virtues of it, for I was told that it was greatly valued and had been worn by his wife, who reluctantly ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... stone-floor,—a huge blunder, by the way, for Fougeres had painted greenish tones suggestive of mildew along the base of the walls. "Madame" finally bought the picture for a thousand francs, and the Dauphin ordered another like it. Charles X. gave the cross of the Legion of honor to this son of a peasant who had fought for the royal cause in 1799. (Joseph Bridau, the great painter, was not yet decorated.) The minister of the Interior ordered two church ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... the long refinements of exalted ancestry; the child of kings or scholars; the delicate flower of life, in whom the elements were so subtly mixed that we should recognize them as special and miraculous—so we might think of God manifest in man. But God chooses for the habitation of His Spirit a peasant woman of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... get up, but, in doing so, he received a heavy blow from a hedge-stake, wielded by the herculean arm of a peasant. The sound of the blow was heard by those immediately around, and the man fell dead. There was a pause, and those nearest, apparently fearful of the consequences, and hardly expecting the catastrophe, began to disperse, and the remainder ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... by a comfortable English or American farmer would represent wicked waste and shameful indulgence to a much richer French peasant. I, myself, know a laborer on wages of less than twenty shillings a week, who by thrift has bought ten acres of the magnificent garden land between Fontainebleau and the Seine, worth many thousand pounds, ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... silver pins for the hair, suspended between two long ornaments resembling an elongated corkscrew—all linked together with a narrow black ribbon tied in a bow. The wearing of this latter head ornament was very grotesque, and I bought one taken from the hair of a peasant, besides purchasing some other articles which now serve as a reminder of the quaint scene. The dress of the men, women, and children was peculiar, and varied according to their province, such as Bhutias, Tibetans, Nepalese, Pelaris, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... the man's brain, so to speak, wars with the other half. He is intelligent, he is thoughtful, he is a sound artist—but there come moments when a dead hand falls upon him, and he is once more the Indiana peasant, snuffing absurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear to quackeries, snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. One generation spans too short a time to free the soul of man. Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds a Puritan; ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the mind of a maid of low degree with that of becoming the wife of a husband; and to make the journey to Constantinople for the purpose of being bought by a wealthy Turk, was looked forward to by many a one as a settlement in life preferable to remaining at home the wife of a poor peasant. This sentiment was encouraged by the sight, not uncommon in Circassia, of females who after having obtained an education and a competency in Constantinople have returned to reside in their own country. It is also well known to the humblest maiden that the high officers ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... the hasty preparations which had been made inadequate for the occasion. The torches went out, the guides lost their way, and the future conqueror of the world wandered about bewildered and lost, until, just after break of day, the party met with a peasant who undertook to guide them. Under his direction they made their way to the main road again, and advanced then without further difficulty to the banks of the river, where they found that portion of the army which had been sent forward encamped and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... quotations in Bunsen's Dissertation, it may be suspected that this slow but continual process of destruction was the most fatal. Ancient Rome eas considered a quarry from which the church, the castle of the baron, or even the hovel of the peasant, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... rustled. Little Tuk saw all, heard all. "Do not forget the diet," said King Hroar.[1] Again all suddenly disappeared. Yes, and whither? It seemed to him just as if one turned over a leaf in a book. And now stood there an old peasant-woman, who came from Soroe,[2] where grass ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... women, and children wore sabots, or wooden shoes, which Paul compared to canal boats, and went clumping and clattering along the streets like champion clog-dancers. The Flemish cap, worn by some of the peasant women, also amused Paul very much. From each side of the wearer's head, near the eye, projected a brass ornament, in the shape of a spiral spring, but each circle diminishing in size till the wire ended in a point, like ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... ineffaceable spot in her memory. They were dark, strong-faced men of medium height, with fierce, black eyes and long black hair. As no two were dressed alike, it was impossible to recognize characteristic styles of attire. Some were in the rude, baggy costumes of the peasant as she had imagined him; others were dressed in the tight-fitting but dilapidated uniforms of the soldiery, while several were in clothes partly European and partly Oriental. There were hats and fezzes and caps, some with feathers In the bands, others ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... a wastrel and a boaster, but for all that Isak could bear him no grudge; he himself was too relieved at finding his neighbour in the house that evening instead of a stranger. Isak had the peasant's coolness of mind, his few feelings, stability, stubbornness; he chatted with Brede and nodded at his shallowness. "Another cup for Brede," said he. And ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... dog-cart, there came a roar, a shriek of a locomotive, a rush, and a train swept by towards the east, leaving a blear of scarlet in his eyes, and his ears ringing with the soldiers' cheers: "Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur! A Berlin! A Berlin! A Berlin!" A furtive-eyed young peasant ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... districts, like the Swiss Cantons, but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom were in a very different position from the peasant communities of Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the Norman Conquest, offered ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... is made so neat; the very life of the people seems to have retired; I no longer hear the tamborines in the streets, no longer see the young girls dancing their Saltarella, even in the Campagna intelligence has entered by invisible railroads; the peasant no longer believes as he used to do. At the Easter festival I saw great numbers of the people from the Campagna standing before St. Peters whilst the Pope distributed his blessing, just as though they had been Protestant strangers. This was repulsive to my feelings, I felt an impulse ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... who now represents the county of Waterford, was a Protestant freeholder in Louth to be punished for the crime of a Catholic freeholder in Clare? If the principle of the honourable and learned Member for Newport be sound, the franchise of the Irish peasant was property. That franchise the Ministers under whom the honourable and learned Member held office did not scruple to take away. Will he accuse those Ministers of robbery? If not, how can he bring such ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... contentment," said a fifth; and so on, until all the gifts of Fairyland had been given to the baby in the nurse's arms. Then, when they had quite finished speaking, the poor, flurried little fairies discovered that the baby was the daughter of a poor peasant and his wife, while Prince Charming lived in quite another country, a very long way off. It was a great calamity, no doubt, but nothing could be done, for the fairies had no more gifts left; so they returned very sadly to Fairyland, and hoped ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... lawyer, my banker and the neighbouring peasants. Also by all the guards and waiters along our journey on November 21. Friends, peasants, and my lawyer are still looking after my property in Germany, and I have left everything in the hands of a neighbouring peasant, who sends me accounts of it. I would like to be able to do some kind acts here in return, and for the furtherance of better relationships later on." Yet it can never be pleasant to be in an "enemy" country. Miss H. writes further: "In spite of having ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... of the bonds which tie us to home, to England, and a tightening of those which bind us to this land in which we have cast our lot. We put our hand to the plough, but we turn our heads and look to our Egypt and its fleshpots. 'T is children and wife—be that wife princess or peasant—that make home of a desert, that bind a man with chains of gold to the country where they abide. Wherefore, when at midday I met good Master Wickham rowing down from Henricus to Jamestown, to offer his aid to Master Bucke in his press of business ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... was riding Dora's pony from Rydal to Cambridge, I got off, as I occasionally did, to walk. I fell in with a sweet-looking peasant girl of nine or ten years old. She had been to carry her father's dinner, who was working in the fields, and she was wheeling a little wheelbarrow, in which she collected manure from the roads for her garden at home. After some talk I gave her a penny, for which she thanked me in ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... invasion, a parcel of rapscallions raked up from the docks and the prisons; for colonists some mechanics and laborers, priests and volunteers, with the usual proportion of "broken gentlemen," some peasant families looking for homes in the New World, and even some wretched girls who expected to find husbands in the land of promise. This ill-assorted little mob to seize and colonize the mouth of the Mississippi and to ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... afterwards relaxed its hold on his imagination. The Inquisition, the duke, the multitude of secret enemies plotting murder, haunted him day and night like furies. He escaped, and made his way, disguised in a peasant's costume, avoiding cities, harboring ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... 1847. In this period of little more than two years there was an interval of six months during which the work was laid aside, while I was writing articles in the Morning Chronicle (which unexpectedly entered warmly into my purpose) urging the formation of peasant properties on the waste lands of Ireland. This was during the period of the Famine, the winter of 1846-47, when the stern necessities of the time seemed to afford a chance of gaining attention for what appeared to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate destitution with permanent ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... car—and had to be left at a village and picked up by the party on its way back. They found him better, but still shaky. I cross-examined the particular officer in charge about that halt, and learned that Gresson had been left alone in a peasant's cottage, for he said he only needed to lie down. The place was ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Blackwater, they were justified in feeling a certain interest in the welfare of the tenants around them. There was something to be done, and something of which they could talk. Lord George, who couldn't hunt, and wouldn't dance, and didn't care for mountains, could enquire with some zeal how much wages a peasant might earn, and what he would do with it when earned. It interested him to learn that whereas an English labourer will certainly eat and drink his wages from week to week,—so that he could not be trusted ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... anecdote is equally ludicrous. Before tobacco was much known in Germany, some soldiers belonging to a cavalry regiment were quartered in a German village. One of them, a trumpeter, happened to be a negro. A peasant, who had never seen a black man before, and who knew nothing about tobacco, watched, though at a safe distance, the trumpeter, while the latter groomed and fed his horse. As soon as this business was dispatched, the negro filled his pipe and began to smoke it. Great had been the peasant's ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... hands, a sentry-box, some benches and the tree, formed the barricade. Gamins and blouses worked at it. The respectables looked on and did not trouble the workers. Suddenly there was a general stampede among them. A squadron of about fifty dragoons charged up the Champs Elysees. One old peasant-woman in a scanty yellow-and-black skirt, which she twitched above her knees, led the retreat. But soon they stopped and turned again, while the dragoons rode slowly back, breathing their horses. Nobody was angry, for nobody had been hurt, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... corals; the snow crackled under foot, as if one had new boots on; and one falling star after the other was seen in the sky. The Christmas-tree was lighted in the room; presents were there, and good-humor reigned. In the country the violin sounded in the room of the peasant; the newly-baked cakes were attacked; even the poorest child said, "It is ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... passes leading thither were by now in the hands of the enemy, as Guidobaldo discovered at dawn. Thereupon, changing his plans, he sent the boy and his few attendants to Bagno, and, himself, disguised as a peasant, took to the hills, despite the gout by which he was tormented. Thus he won to Ravenna, which was fast becoming ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... fortunes and characters in the same truthful natural vein in which she commences it, an excellent, even an original, book might have been the result. As for Lilias and Ronald, they are mere romantic figments, with nothing of the genuine Scottish peasant about them; they do not even speak the Caledonian dialect; they palaver like a fine lady ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid no attention to it, quite carried away ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was sweeping the world. From the peasant toiling in Russia, the lady lolling in London, the chieftain burning in Africa, and the Esquimaux freezing in Alaska; from long lines of hungry men, from patient sad-eyed women, from old folk and creeping children went up the cry, "Clothes, clothes!" Far away the wide black ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to Cook's office, where we get our letters, and stand for a while on the little terrace with the iron railing, looking at the motley crowd which fills the place in front of the citadel. Groups of blue-robed peasant women sit on the curbstone, selling firewood and grass and vegetables. Their faces are bare and brown, wrinkled with the sun and the wind. Turkish soldiers in dark-green uniform, Greek priests in black robes and stove-pipe hats, Bedouins in flowing cloaks of brown and ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... doctor bent forward, with head perilously near her own, and whispered: "There she is, between that harlequin and the Norman peasant maiden! You can see the pins gleaming in her hair. She ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... in the whole world, my dear. Think of all the stories of little peasant-boys who have thus risen to be the companions of kings, whereby the kings were the parties most honoured. Remember the stories of Francis I. and Titian, of Henry VII. and Hans Holbein, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... debut in 1889 with the tragedy of a peasant parvenu. The play was fashioned according to old formulas, but of charming local color and with more than a touch of the new type in one of the characters. This was followed in 1890 by Free Love, the hero of which is one of those individuals unable to reconcile ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... drew the bolt. I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice brought up before me our student years in ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... her by with only a gracious bow, as any courtier might, for he was in a hurry to reach the side of his beloved Gretchen. She was only a peasant maid, but in his eyes she was more ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... must call to view the simple Acadian peasant, Papist or Protestant, just as it happened; ignorant of the great events of the world; a mere offshoot of rural Normandy; without a thought of other possessions than those he might reclaim from the sea by his dykes; credulous, pure-minded, patient of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Sultan was Emir; as soon as Soleiman was in possession of Damascus, Sultan was obliged to fly, and in August, 1810, his brother Djahdjah returned to his seat, which he had already once occupied. He pays a certain annual sum to the Pasha, and extorts double its amount from the peasant. The Emir Beshir has, since the reign of Soleiman Pasha, likewise acquired a certain influence over Baalbec, and is now entitled to the yearly sum of fifteen purses from this district. The Emir Djahdjah resides at Baalbec, and keeps there about 200 Metaweli horsemen, whom he equips ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... M. Combe drove us in his car to Scherli. We alighted at the house of one of the peasant-farmers, situated quite among the mountains, with the Alps fair in view. They received us in the name of disciples with every mark of love and respect. They were more disposed to sit in silence than to ask questions. On my asking if they ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... dignitaries of the church are of course not uncommon; not only priests, however, but every Russian man, woman or child carries a small cross, more or less ornamental. They are various in form and richness of decoration; from the simple bronze cross, rudely stamped, of the peasant, to the enamelled and jewelled one of the metropolitan or noble. Nearly always the plain three-armed cross is set in the centre of another more elaborate or conventional. Almost invariably also the sacred monograms and invocations in Sclavonic characters are ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... add here, that in all conquered countries the descendants of royal families have been found among the dregs of the populace. An Irish prince has been discovered in the person of a miserable peasant; and in Mexico, its faithful historian Clavigero notices, that he has known a locksmith, who was a descendant of its ancient kings, and a tailor, the representative of one of its ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... portion was written by Alexander, was published in 1838; their joint-treatise on "Practical Economy" in the year following. In 1843, Alexander published a small volume of tales, entitled "The Scottish Peasant's Fireside," which was favourably received. During the same year he was offered the editorship of the Dumfries Standard newspaper, with a salary of L100 a-year, but he was unable to accept the appointment from impaired health. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... butter firkins, doublets and petticoats, guns and pistols, everything that could serve the city and country-side for months to come—and displayed them in temporary booths or on the ground, in every street and along every canal. The town was one vast bazaar. The peasant-women from the country, with their gold and silver tiaras and the year's rent of a comfortable farm in their earrings and necklaces, and the sturdy Frisian peasants, many of whom had borne their matchlocks in the great wars which had lasted through their own ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a young peasant woman of the better class and yourself as a small cultivator, I will mention to my servant that I am expecting my newly-married niece and her husband to stay with me for a few days. The old woman will have no idea that I, an Irishman, would not have a Spanish niece, and indeed I do not suppose ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... we do not find ourselves in a midnight forest, nor in a dimly-lighted cavern or mysterious vault, as peasant traditions would tell us, but in the hall of some ancient castle, or on a hill-top, under the shade of lime-trees, and with an open view of the country for miles around. Here, on the seat of justice, presides the graf or count of the district, before him the sword, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... rendered by Valsesian artists, is that St. Anne always has eggs immediately after the infant is born, and usually a good deal more, whereas the Madonna never has anything to eat or drink. The eggs are in accordance with a custom that still prevails among the peasant classes in the Valsesia, where women on giving birth to a child generally are given a sabaglione—an egg beaten up with a little wine, or rum, and sugar. East of Milan the Virgin's mother does not have eggs, and I suppose, from the absence of the eggs at Oropa, that the custom above referred ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... nothing. You know Ivan Mosevitch? Well, I've been to him too. I went there the other day. I had something else to settle, you know. Well, so I sat and chatted awhile and then came to the point. "Tell me, Ivan Mosevitch," says I, "how's one to manage an affair of this kind? Supposing," says I, "a peasant as is a widower married a second wife, and supposing all the children he has is a daughter by the first wife, and a daughter by the second. Then," says I, "when that peasant dies, could an outsider get hold of the homestead by marrying the widow? Could he," says I, "give ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... went by. The lonely isle In Rhine's impetuous flood Has ta'en another name from those Who bought it with their blood: And though the legend does not live, For legends lightly die, The peasant, as he sees the stream In winter rolling by, And foaming o'er its channel-bed Between him and the spot Won by the warriors of the sword, Still calls that deep and dangerous ford The Passage ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... but quiet and firm, as if neither darkness nor death could check those untroubled feet. So little did I guess what was coming that, even when I saw the gleam of white in the darkness, I thought it was a peasant in a white smock, or perhaps a woman deranged. Suddenly, with a little shiver of joy or of fear, I don't know which, I guessed that it was The Comrade in White. And at that very moment the enemy's rifles began to shoot. The bullets could scarcely miss such a target, for he flung out his arms as ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... to weasels and otters that I shall confine myself in this work, for about their intellectual powers do we know most. The first is a very courageous beast, not fearing to attack animals much larger than himself—even man. A labouring peasant at Glencairn, in Dumfrieshire, was attacked by six of them, who rushed upon him when he was at work in a field. Being frightened at such a furious onset, he fled, but they pursued him, although he dealt some back-handed ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... rich in its eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful and elastic temperament colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan sent out even from the precincts of his prison. With a style sinewy as Cobbett's, and simple and clear as Swift's; with his sturdy, peasant nature showing itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance, how little has he of their coarseness. He was not, on the one hand, like Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... drunkenness exist also dirtiness, idleness, dishonesty, and untruthfulness. And as yet little has been done to ameliorate this degradation. Ignorance prevails everywhere. Even of the young people of the peasant class more than eighty per cent. can neither read nor write. There is no middle class. The gulf between the upper class and the lower is so wide as to be absolutely impassable. And for the most part the upper class is quite content to have ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... and most affectionate things by letter, which they could not for the life of them utter in talk. They did, as a matter of fact, spend an immense amount of time apart; and when they were together, Carlyle, having been trained as a peasant and one of a large family, roughly neglected Mrs. Carlyle, while Mrs. Carlyle, with a middle-class training, and moreover indulged as an only daughter, was too proud to complain, but not proud enough not to resent the neglect deeply. What could have ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... elbow. The Atra cura of the poet is nothing to it, friend! It is a fiend which will not be driven away. It grins, and gibbers, and utters its gibes, day and night. Believe me, Surry,—I speak from experience—it is better for this world, as well as the next, to be a boor, a peasant, a clodhopper with a clear conscience, than to hold in your hand the means of all luxury, and so-called enjoyment, and, with it, the consciousness that you are blood guilty under ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... arose between Cyrus and the son of Artembaris. The latter would not obey, and Cyrus beat him. He went home and complained bitterly to his father. The father went to Astyages to protest against such an indignity offered to his son by a peasant boy, and demanded that the little tyrant should be punished. Probably far the larger portion of intelligent readers of history consider the whole story as a romance; but if we look upon it as in any respect true, we must conclude that the Median monarchy must have been, at that ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... vaguely familiar. It seems a superstition had come along with the stones, from India to Persia, from there to Russia. A maid fortunate enough to see the drums would marry and be happy. The old fellow confessed that occasionally he secretly admitted a peasant maid to gaze upon the stones. But he never let the male inmates of the palace find this out. He knew them a little ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... deplored the influence exerted on the soul-life of modern man by the world-conception of science. He illustrated this by showing how much less inspiration a man trained in the science of optics receives from the sight of a rainbow than does a 'simple peasant'. One lesson of our studies is that training in optics, if it proceeds on Goethean lines, has no such detrimental effect. There is, however, a further problem, outside Ruskin's scope, which we are now able to approach in ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... in his parish, and in his residence he dispensed with that stern severity of conventual discipline to which he had been accustomed in the Peninsula. Hence it was really here that his mental capacity was developed, his manners improved, and that the raw sacerdotal peasant was converted into the man of thought, study, and talent—occasionally into a gentleman. In his own vicinity, when isolated from European residents, he was practically the representative of the Government and of the white race as well as of social order. His theological knowledge ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... his favours,' he said in a peasant's mutter. 'Maybe I should know him if I saw him again. I am ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... not a peasant, in blouse and sabots, with a grinning idiot face, have put the picture out? But he did not. He was walking, or rather waddling, toward us, between two green walls that rose to be arched by elms that hid the blue of the sky. This lane was the kind of lane one sees only in Devonshire and in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a Wood, A Female Voice pierc'd, thro' my Ears, Crying, You Rogue drive home the Steirs. I listen'd to th' attractive sound, And straight a Herd of Cattel found Drove by a Youth, and homeward bound; Cheer'd with the fight, I straight thought fit, To ask where I a Bed might get. The surley Peasant bid me stay, And ask'd from whom (g) I'de run away. Surprized at such a saucy Word, I instantly lugg'd out my Sword; Swearing I was no Fugitive, But from Great-Britain did arrive, In hopes I better there might Thrive. To which he mildly made reply, I ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... student, after tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be his more ordinary course to Athens, at last casting anchor at Piraeus. He is of any condition or rank of life you please, and may be made to order, from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some Cleanthes, who has been a boxer in the public games. How did it ever cross his brain to betake himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he came thither by accident, how did the love of it ever ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... to a peasant's cottage, and afterwards to her father's villa. He knew nothing of the feeling of hatred that existed between their families; and when Mr. Sim heard his name, though for a moment it caused a glow to pass over his face, every other emotion was speedily swallowed up ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... of the brow is not favourable to the operations of the brain; and the leisure which follows the daily labour of the peasant and manufacturer, will, even if no other demands are made upon it, afford but little scope for the over acquisition of knowledge. Long will it be ere the English husbandman renounces for study the pleasures of his weekly holiday, and long may it be ere the Scottish peasant be withdrawn ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... been crossed you are in the country of good soups, of good fowl, of good vegetables, of good sweets, of good wine. The hors-d'oeuvre are a Russian innovation; but since the days when Henry IV. vowed that every peasant should have a fowl in his pot, soup from the simplest bouillon to the most lordly consommes and splendid bisques has been better made in France than anywhere else in the world. Every great cook of France ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... a plunge from light and life into the underworld, —rather than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers, in the "Odusseia," that it would prefer to be the hireling and drudge of some poor earthly peasant. Elysium was only for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
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