"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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. It ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... 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
... peasant, skilled in taking birds with nets, chanced to come to the place where he was; when perceiving so fine a bird, the like of which he had never seen, though he had followed that employment for a long while, he began greatly to rejoice. He employed all his art to ensnare him; and at length ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... 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 a peasant, rather heavy in gait, with an arched back, with movements that were slow and precise, and an obstinate tranquil manner. One felt that his apparel concealed round and well-developed muscles, and a body of thick hard flesh. Therese examined him with curiosity, glancing from his fists to ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... 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 |
