"Plough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... On every side were evidences of poor farming and neglect. The untrimmed hedges had been broken down in many places by cattle. A plough which seemed as though it had been embedded there for ages, stood in the middle of a half-ploughed field. Several tracts of land which seemed prepared for winter sowing were covered with stones. The farmhouse yard, into which ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... effect of a monster extinguisher. At the rows of pale, wheat stacks, raised on granite straddles; at the prosperous barns, yards, and stables, built of wood on brick foundations, that surround it, presenting a mass of rich, solid colour and of noisy, crowded, animal life. At the fields, plough and pasture, marked out by long lines of hedgerow trees, broken by coppices—these dashed with tenderest green—stretching up and back to the dark purple-blue range of the moorland. At scattered cottages, over ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... general public education was the question of its influence upon the negro. The apparent effects of negro education were not likely to make the average white man feel that the experiment had been successful. The phrase that "an educated negro was a good plough-hand spoiled" seemed to meet with general acceptance. The smattering of an education which the negroes had received—it would be difficult to call it more—seemed to have improved neither their efficiency nor their morals. As a result there were many white people so shortsighted that they would starve ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... disposed at will of the country and its people. He fixed a system for the cultivation of the fields, and when hands were needed for the harvest he enlisted them forcibly. Yet agriculture made little progress under the primitive methods employed, a broad board serving for a plough, while the wheat was ground in mortars, and a piece of wood moved by oxen formed the sugar-mill. The cotton, as soon as picked from the pods, was spun on the spinning-wheel, and then woven by a travelling weaver, whose rude apparatus was carried on the back of an ox or a mule, and, when ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... the question. The usages of the small farmers, however, enabled him to remedy this inconvenience. Peter made a bargain with a neighbor, in which he undertook to repay him by an exchange of labor, for the use of his plough and horses in getting down his crop. He engaged to give him, for a stated period in the slack season, so many days' mowing as would cover the expenses of ploughing and harrowing his land. There was, however, a considerable portion of his holding potato-ground; ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the surley Ocean float, And furious Storms and threat'ning Blasts, Both tore our Sails and sprung our Masts; Wearied, yet pleas'd we did escape Such Ills, we anchor'd at the (a) Cape; But weighing soon, we plough'd the Bay, To (b) Cove it in (c) Piscato-way, Intending there to open Store, I put myself and Goods a-shoar: Where soon repair'd a numerous Crew, In Shirts and Drawers of (d) Scotch-cloth Blue With neither Stockings, Hat nor Shooe. These Sot-weed Planters ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... representatives in this assembly, though all had closely assimilated themselves to the Americans in dress and appearance, except the English man. He, indeed, not only adhered to his native customs in attire and living, but usually drove his plough among the stumps in the same manner as he had before done on the plains of Norfolk, until dear-bought experience taught him the useful lesson that a sagacious people knew what was suited to their circumstances better than a casual observer, or a sojourner who was, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... which cannot be adequately measured by their poetical pretensions. The very defects of art with which they are chargeable, constitute their highest claim to consideration as authentic specimens of country lore. The songs in praise of the dairy, or the plough; or in celebration of the harvest-home, or the churn-supper; or descriptive of the pleasures of the milk-maid, or the courtship in the farm-house; or those that give us glimpses of the ways of life of the waggoner, the poacher, the horse-dealer, and ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... of sordid intrigues two or three facts challenge our attention. Both Bonaparte and Charles IV. regarded the most fertile waste lands then calling for the plough as fairly exchanged against half a million of Tuscans; but the former feared the resentment of the United States, and sought to postpone a rupture until he could coerce them by overwhelming force. It is equally ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... many respects more beautiful than silk. I brought some of this hair to Venice as a rarity. Many of these oxen are tamed and broke in for labour, for which they are better adapted, by their strength, than any other creatures, as they bear very heavy burdens, and when yoked in the plough will do twice the work of others. The best musk in the world is found in this province, and is procured from a beautiful animal, the size of a goat, having hair like a stag, the feet and tail resembling an antelope, but has no horns; it has two teeth ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... out the form of the city with the plough, and made it almost a square. He called the name of it Rome, and lived in the midst of it in a mud-hovel, covered with thatch, in the midst of about fifty families of the old Trojan race, and a great many young men, outlaws ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... came a ploughman with his plough; From early until late, Across the field and back again, He ploughed the ...
— Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten • Emilie Poulsson
... resolved to withdraw our ships from the ocean, and to export nothing from New York, or any other seaport; that it requires the merchant to dismantle his ships and leave them to decay at the wharves; that it calls upon two hundred thousand masters and mariners, who now plough the main, to seek their bread ashore; that it forbids even the fisherman to launch his chebacco-boat or follow his gigantic prey upon the deep; that it subjects the whole coastwise trade to onerous bonds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... of his own good will except for a lawful king, and thou wilt not be able to compel him." "It will be easy for me to compass this." "Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get; the two dun oxen of Gwlwlyd, {87} both yoked together, to plough the wild land yonder stoutly. He will not give them of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him." "It will be easy for me to compass this." "Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get; the yellow and the brindled ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 2 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... with mimic diamonds. As he looked harbourwards, the radiance of sky mingling with the glitter of water dazzled and bewildered his sight: below, and at the foot of the steep woods opposite, the river lay cool and shadowy, or vanished for a space beneath a cliff, where the red plough-land broke abruptly away with no more warning than a crazy hurdle. Distinct above the dreamy hum of the little town, the ear caught the rattle of anchor-chains, the cries of an outward-bound crew at the windlass, the clanking of trucks beside the jetties; the creaking of oars in ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... observation and reflection; in contrast to you, the profound philologist, he stands not much higher than the Silesian countryman. And to complete the contrast, he adds, that he has long been a severe sufferer. So that instead of guiding the plough on the field of science with a strong hand, he must remain idly at home, and modestly whittle pine shavings for the enlightenment of his ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... force of fire, Let me transfixed with thunderbolts expire. See, whilst I speak, my breath the vapours choke, 330 (For now her face lay wrapt in clouds of smoke,) See my singed hair, behold my faded eye And withered face, where heaps of cinders lie! And does the plough for this my body tear? This the reward for all the fruits I bear, Tortured with rakes, and harassed all the year? That herbs for cattle daily I renew, And food for man, and frankincense for you? But grant me guilty; what has Neptune done? Why ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... ride in a sleigh. Once we seemed lost in a drift full fifteen feet deep. The driver went on ahead to a house, and there we sat shivering. When he returned we found he had gone over a fence into a field, so we had to dismount and plough through the snow after the sleigh; then we reseated ourselves, but ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... ground was in splendid condition for planting, also for sticking to clothes. The sandy road to Halgrave dried quickly, but the garden, of heavier soil, did not, as was testified by Julia's boots—she had bought a small pair of plough-boy's boots that spring and was wearing them now, very pleased with the investment. By and by the sound of a motor broke the silence; the Captain and Johnny left off work to listen; at least, Johnny did; the Captain was hardly ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... should have been led to death and fame by an alumnus of Harvard; and I remembered, with additional pride of race and college, that the first regiment of black troops raised on South Carolina soil were taught to drill, to fight, to plough, and to read by a brave, eloquent, and scholarly descendant of the Puritans and of Harvard, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. [Great applause ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... at work; it will seem to you that they are resting. The laborer, the harvester, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in glory like the blessed spirits in paradise. What radiance surrounds the forge! To guide the plough, to bind the sheaves, is joy. The bark at liberty in the wind, what delight! Do you, lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march! Drag your halter. You are a beast of burden in the team of hell! Ah! To do nothing is your object. Well, not a week, not a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The cold sharp interval between night and morning—the distant streak of light widening and spreading, and turning from grey to white, and from white to yellow, and from yellow to burning red—the presence of day, with all its cheerfulness and life—men and horses at the plough—birds in the trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields, frightening them away with rattles. The coming to a town—people busy in the markets; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard; tradesmen standing at their doors; men running horses up and down the street for sale; pigs plunging and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... although receiving there but few friends. By his simplicity and frugality, his contempt for worldly distinction, and his uniformity of conduct, he recalled the memory of those great men who, after the best-merited triumphs, peacefully returned to the plough, still loving their country and but little offended by the ingratitude of the Rome they had so well served. Catinat placed his philosophy at the service of his piety. He had intelligence, good sense, ripe reflection; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... farmers of Europe whom we are wont to call peasants; that the prices of our products of agriculture are too often dependent on speculation by non-farming groups; and that foreign nations, eager to become self-sustaining or ready to put virgin land under the plough are no longer buying our surpluses of cotton and wheat and lard and tobacco and fruit as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in search of the necessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil as makes it wonderful that all of them did not—as some of them doubtless did—die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses for the paternal shop or plough. ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of Arthur, the total absence of armed men and soldiers in this peaceful country. In England, no man stirred without his long bow, sword, and buckler. In France, the hind wore armour even when he was betwixt the stilts of his plough. In Germany, you could not look along a mile of highway, but the eye was encountered by clouds of dust out of which were seen, by fits, waving feathers and flashing armour. Even in Switzerland, the peasant, if he had a journey to make, though but of a mile or two, cared ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... sweating tub, inspired with nothing holier than the venereal pox,—can draw one way, under Monarchy, to the establishing of Church-Discipline with these new-disgorged Atheisms. Yet shall they not have the honour to yoke with these, but shall be yoked under them: these shall plough on their backs. And do they among them who are so forward to bring in the Single Person think to be by him trusted or long regarded? So trusted they shall be and so regarded as by Kings are wont reconciled enemies,—neglected and soon after ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... long ago, before the gods Had left this earth, by stream and forest glade, Where the first plough upturned the clinging sods, Or ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... tiger!" thought the artist, "well worth painting. Ugly—with deep lines—looking as if the plough and the harrow had gone over his heart. A fine contrast to my bland and smiling Messer Greco— my Bacco trionfante, who has married the fair Antigone in contradiction to all history and fitness. Aha! his scholar's blood curdled uncomfortably ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... it a barley-corn, how then be your bread like unto barley?" Quoth he, "I know not." He remained in such case for a while of time whilst his wife fed her playmate with all the good food and served to her husband the vilest of diet, until one chance day of the days the Fellah took his plough and went off at early dawn to work and wrought till midday when his wife sent him his dinner of dirty bread. Hereupon he and his neighhours, who were earing in the same field, took seat and each one set before him white bread and seeing the Fellah's scones brown as barley-meal they marvelled thereat. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... and broken, you stay by him. He is your man. So with the land of your birth, the village where you are one with the soil. You stay and suffer, and meantime you live. Still you plant and plough, though the guns are loud in the night, and Les Bosches just over the meadow. And here was one of these women in the wrecked, charred village of Pervyse carrying on the great, natural process of life as unperturbed as if her home was in a valley ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... seemed to stir it up again. This was due to the restless activity of Mrs. Pett, who held it to be the duty of a good hostess to keep her guests moving. From the moment when the room began to fill till the moment when it began to empty she did not cease to plough her way to and fro, in a manner equally reminiscent of a hawk swooping on chickens and an earnest collegian bucking the line. Her guests were as a result perpetually forming new ententes and combinations, finding ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... position is really almost that described in a Bystander cartoon, depicting a peasant standing above a line of our trenches amid a hell of shot and bursting shrapnel, and saying, "Messieurs, I am desolated to trouble you, but I must request you to fight in my other field, as I plough this one to-day." By the way, The Bystander has succeeded, as no other paper save perhaps Punch has done, in catching the atmosphere that exists ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... of this community has one unfaithful thought of going back to the outer world, I charge him to come to this altar now. But woe to him through whom the offence cometh! Woe to him who turns back after taking up the golden plough!" ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... with what is truly stated by my predecessor in the New Statistical Account, that "the inhabitants of Muthill, until very lately (i.e., about 1835), held S. Patrick's name in so high veneration that on his day (March 17) neither the clap of the mill was heard nor the plough seen to move in the furrow." Across the Earn from Strageath is a farm called Dalpatrick, and a ford ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... Recovering herself, with scornful bitterness she requested to know to what tempter he had been giving ear—for tempted he must have been ere son of hers would have been guilty of backsliding from the cause; of taking his hand from the plough and looking behind him. The youth returned such answers as, while they satisfied his father he was right, served only to convince his mother, where yet conviction was hardly needed, that she had to thank the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Antichrist to afflict God's church any more. 'Tis Antichrist, antichristians, and antichristianism, that is the cause of the troubles of Christians, for being Christians. And therefore 'tis from the consideration of this that it is said, men 'shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,' and that they 'shall learn war no more' (Isa 2:4): Yea it is from the consideration of this, that it is said the child shall play with venomous and destroying beasts, and that a little child shall lead the wolf, the leopard, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the vessel up, Once dreaded by our foes, And mingle with your cup The tears that England owes; Her timbers yet are sound, And she may float again, Full charg'd with England's thunder, And plough the distant main; But Kempenfelt is gone, His victories are o'er; And he and his eight hundred Must plough the wave ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... kiss thy royal finger, and take leave. I am a votary: I have vowed to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three yeasr. But, most esteemed greatness, will you hear the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo? It should have followed in the ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... its circumference, smash that to atoms, and then go working inwards. The most conservative and stable elements are the last and least affected. The peasant is killed, knocked about, transported, enclaved; but when the storm is over, and he gets back to his plough and hoe and rice-field again, sun and wind and rain and the earth-breath soothe him back to and confirm in what he was of old: only some new definite spiritual impulse or the sweep of the major cycles can change him much,—and then the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... near them full of thorns of a white thorn tree on a circular board. And there seems to me somewhat like a slender stream of water on which the sun is shining, and its trickle down from it, and a hide arranged behind it, and a palace house-post shaped like a great lance above it. A good weight of a plough-yoke is the shaft that is therein. Liken thou that, O ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... topics and subjects to the students, that there was nothing that a student was compelled to learn, while from its own presses in its own press-building it sent out a shower of bulletins and monographs like driven snow from a rotary plough. ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... later Joe entered the company store, and addressed himself to Gilbert Beattie concerning a plough he said he was thinking of importing. Beattie, seeing a disposition in the other man to linger and talk, encouraged it. This was new business. In any case, up north no man declines the offer of a gossip. Strolling outside, they sat on a bench at the ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... the killing of Abel, and is opened by Cain's ploughboy with a sort of prologue in which he warns the spectators to be silent. Cain then enters with a plough and team, and quarrels with the boy for refusing to drive the team. Presently Abel comes in, and wishes Cain good-speed, who meets his kind word with an unmentionable request. The murder then proceeds, and is followed ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... where every spot had been familiar to me as a child and youth (1825-'40.) Then stood there a long rambling, dark-gray, shingle-sided house, with sheds, pens, a great barn, and much open road-space. Now of all those not a vestige left; all had been pull'd down, erased, and the plough and harrow pass'd over foundations, road-spaces and everything, for many summers; fenced in at present, and grain and clover growing like any other fine fields. Only a big hole from the cellar, with some little heaps of broken stone, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... sown in the latter end of August, and the seed made use of was one bushel of Meadow-fescue, and one of Meadow fox-tail-grass, with a mixture of fifteen pounds of white Clover and Trefoil per acre; the land was previously cleaned as far as possible with the plough and harrows, and the seeds sown and covered in the usual way. In the month of October following, a most prodigious crop of annual weeds of many kinds having grown up, were in bloom, and covered the ground and the sown grasses; the ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... of a work is thoroughly well-known. The ploughing-scene in the opening—ploughing as she had witnessed it sometimes in her own neighborhood, fresh, rough ground broken up for tillage, the plough drawn by four yoke of young white oxen new to their work and but half-tamed, has a simplicity and grandeur of effect not easy to parallel in modern art. The motif of the tale is that you often go far ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, who in those countries overthrew a wonderful civilization, in many respects superior to their own—a civilization that had been accomplished without iron and gunpowder—a civilization resting on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor ox, nor plough. The Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no obstruction whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the aboriginal children of America had accomplished. Millions of those unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for many centuries ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... I plough my way through the sand, in the darkness, encompassed by tepid exhalations of earth and sea. Another spirit has fallen upon me—a spirit of biblical calm. Here, then, stood the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... yeoman life throve well with us. Our faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe, the scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak with only a little stiffness ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... continually increased by those who were impatient of the slow method of obtaining a livelihood from the tillage of the soil, when the husbandman was frequently driven from the plough by the sudden attack of Indian foes, or interrupted in his hasty and anxious harvesting by their war-whoop, or perhaps was compelled to leave his farm to take up arms, if the occasion arose, so that in many instances ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... sent Gefjun across the sound to the north to discover new countries, and she came to King Gylfe, who gave her a ploughland. Then she went to Jotunheim and bore four sons to a giant, and transformed them into a yoke of oxen, and yoked them to a plough and broke out the land into the ocean, right opposite to Odinse, which was called Seeland, where she afterward settled and dwelt.[119] Skjold, a son of Odin, married her, and they dwelt at Leidre.[120] Where the ploughed land was, is a lake or sea called Laage.[121] In the Swedish ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... would have need of them, for she had to cross a high glass mountain, three cutting swords, and a great lake. When she had passed these she would find her lover again. So she was given three large needles, a plough-wheel, and three nuts, which she was to take great care of. She set out with these things, and when she came to the glass mountain which was so slippery she stuck the three needles behind her feet and then in front, ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... of buckets; finally, the funnel rusted off and a wooden one was put up—a merry joke! But while they laughed the contractor pushed ahead in Yankee style, using any and every expedient, and making money while they sighed over the slow plough. They must have everything perfect, else they could do nothing; he could do much with very imperfect materials. He would make a cucumber frame out of a church window, or a church window out of a cucumber frame. One of ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... together, they made a strong team; laboring together, they could do miracles; but break the circuit, and both were impotent. It has remained so to this day: they must travel together, hoe, and plant, and plough, and reap, and sell their public together, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to ask the abatement of a feather's weight. What doth the Jew owe the Roman? What hath the Roman done to the Jew? He hath laid waste his country with fire and sword. Her towns and villages he hath levelled with the ground. The holy Jerusalem he hath spoiled and defiled, and then driven the plough over its ruins. My people are scattered abroad among all nations—subject every where to persecution and death. This thou knowest is what the Roman hath done. And what then owe I, a Jew—a Jew—to the Roman? I bear thee, Piso, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... fragment of one of those vast sylvan tracts wherein Norman kings once hunted, and Saxon outlaws plundered; and although the plough had for centuries successfully invaded brake and bower, the relics retained all their original character of wildness and seclusion. Sometimes the green earth was thickly studded with groves of huge and ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yea, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plough has passed over the remains of mighty cities, the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... Hundred." In January, 1620, he advised "not onely the Adventurers for Smythes hundred, but the generall Company also, to send hither husbandmen truly bred (whereof here is a great scarcity, or none at all) both to manage the plough and breake our oxen and horses to that busines." In the same period John Rolfe wrote that the Smith's Hundred people had seen much sickness even though they were seated "at Dauncing Point, the most convenyent place within their lymittes." ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... those who dare!—how you envy the spruce apprentice, and the lout in the smock who cracks his whip, and whistles with as much nonchalance as if he was between the handles of his plough! as though the awe of that fair presence should not freeze his lips to stone! Gauche that he is, how you envy him his opportunities! how you could slaughter him for those sweet smiles that appear to be ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet dead in the kirkyard—some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts, among the graves, where the fervent voice of the preacher comes to me, thin and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... "young folk that could turn night into day," Dr Thorpe took up his candle and trudged up-stairs also. Robin sat on; and Isoult had not the heart to say anything to him; for she saw that his thoughts were at Bow Church, not occupied with the copy of Latimer's sermon on the Plough, which lay ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... through the Wolds it is impossible to forget the existence of Early Man, for on the sky-line just above the road will appear a row of two or three rounded projections from the regular line of turf or stubble. They are burial-mounds that the plough has never levelled—heaps of earth that have resisted the disintegrating action of weather and man for thousands of years. If such relics of the primitive inhabitants of this island fail to stir the imagination, then the mustiness must exist in the unresponsive mind ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... sword of ours is no plough or spade, You cannot delve or reap with the iron blade; For us there falls no seed, no corn-field grows, Neither home nor kindred the soldier knows: Wandering over the face of the earth, Warming his hands at another's ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Consequently, on every day of our journey—and the days were ten—not once, but always, we had the same deadly conflict to repeat; and this being always unavailing, found its solution uniformly in the following ultimate resource. Two large-boned horses, usually taken from the plough, were harnessed on as leaders. By main force they hauled our wicked wheelers into the right direction, and forced them, by pure physical superiority, into working. We furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to every town and village through which we passed. The whole community, men and children, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... they are gone, gone as thy setting blaze Goes down the west, while night is pressing on, And with them the old tale of better days, And trophies of remembered power, are gone. Yon field that gives the harvest, where the plough Strikes the white bone, is all ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... eventually found intolerable by more mature minds. It may, perhaps, be said—and it may be said with justice—that the reflections even of the immature mind are not all, of necessity, erroneous, for it is from them that the whole of modern knowledge has been evolved or developed, just as the steam-plough may be traced back to the primitive digging-stick: reflection upon anything may lead to better knowledge of the thing, as well as to false notions about it. But the nations, which have outgrown mythology, have cast it aside because in the long run they became ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... their day is o'er, Their fires are out from shore to shore, No more for them the wild deer bounds— The plough is on ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... is right or agreeable with God's will, while men are perishing round about us, while grief, and pain, and wrath, and impiety, and death, and all the powers of the air, are working wildly and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that any of us should take hand from the plough; but this we know, that there will come a time when the service of God shall be the beholding of him; and though in these stormy seas, where we are now driven up and down, his Spirit is dimly seen on the face of the waters, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... miraculous evidence coming with full force upon the senses of mankind: but I much doubt whether, if this state of mind had been universal, or long-continued, the business of the world could have gone on. The necessary art of social life would have been little cultivated. The plough and the loom would have stood still. Agriculture, manufactures, trade, and navigation, would not, I think, have flourished, if they could have been exercised at all. Men would have addicted themselves to contemplative and ascetic lives, instead ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... kept steadily to his work and seemingly to his own thoughts. The beautiful scene below them, which they were alternately facing and turning their backs upon, was too well known even to delay their attention; and for the greater part of the day probably neither of them saw much beyond his plough ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... dance. He has also described the dance of the Magnesians, in which they represented their tilling the ground, in an attitude, and in readiness for defence, against expected moroders. They put themselves in a posture of protecting their plough, with other motions expressive of their resolution and courage, all adapted to the sound of the flute. The moroders arrive, prevail, and bind the husbandmen to their plough, and this terminates the dance. Sometimes the dance ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... drive as straight a furrow as any man in Gloucestershire. I've told my father that. He detests me; but he'd say you ought to work up from the plough-tail, if you must farm. He turned all of us through his workshops before he took us into the business. He liked to see us soaked in dirt and oil, crawling on our stomachs under his engines. He'd simply love to see me here standing up to my knees ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... drop had to be brought from the Quarantine Station, three miles away, on the shores of the Gulf of Suez; and twice daily did the water-cart plough a laborious way through the sand. I think it was the very worst water we ever had, all but undrinkable, in fact. It was so heavily chlorinated and nauseous that one drank it as medicine. It tasted the tea, it spoilt the lime-juice, and even the onions failed to disguise ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... went on without mishap, and with no hardship greater than that of living solely upon the meat victual provided by the hunter's rifle; and you who know this plough-dressed region at this later day will wonder when I write it down that in all that long faring, or rather to the last day's stage of it, we saw never a face of any of our kind, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce are many specimens of the ironwork of the San Fernando neophytes. The work of this Mission was long and favorably known as that of superior artisans. The collection includes plough-points, anvils, bells, hoes, chains, locks and keys, spurs, hinges, scissors, cattle-brands, and other articles of use in the Mission communities. There are also fine specimens of hammered copper, showing their ability in this branch of the craftsman's art. As there was ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... vine that climbs the tree, Is just as great in Nature's plan As every mount and every sea Displayed below for little man. And every ant and busy bee Shall teach us how to build and toil If we would mingle with the free, Who plough the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... the front through the Venetian blind, she saw the footprints of cats alone on the snow in the road, and of the milk alone along the pavement. For the milk had preferred to come by hand, rather than plough its tricycle through the unknown depths and drifts of Glenmoira Road, W., to which it had found its way over tracks already palliated by the courage of the early 'bus—not plying for hire at that hour, but only seeking its equivalent of the carceres of ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... he would brandish. Banquets, too, and all the rough but plentiful appliances of the feast are taken as part of the henchman's pay; and the means of supplying all this prodigality must be sought by war and rapine. You would not so easily persuade them to plough the fields and wait in patience for a year's harvest, as to challenge an enemy and earn honourable wounds; since to them it seems always a slow and lazy process to accumulate by the sweat of your brow what you might win at once by the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... begun this life-long labour which, though not wholly vain, was never really crowned to the degree it merited: while others living in more fertile lands reaped what they had not sown, he could only plough and scatter seed. As Raphael is supposed to have said, all that was lacking to him ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... about these distinctions. Some time ago the Daily Telegraph reproached a collector because his books were "uncut," whence, argued the journalist, it was clear that he had never read them. "Uncut," of course, only means that the margins have not been curtailed by the binders' plough. It is a point of sentiment to like books just as they left the hands of the old printers,—of Estienne, Aldus, or ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... got a summons to go to Rolt at his farm just outside Sainte Marguerite; and a most unpleasing journey it was for Weatherby and me. We separated, going across the open plough and cabbage fields, but snipers were on us the whole time, and several times missed us by only a few inches. We must have offered very sporting targets to the Germans on the hill, for we ran all the way, and—I speak for myself—we got ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... that of the mulberry and of the Irish potato; and by word and example is endeavouring to prevail on the people in the adjacent plain to cultivate the sweet potato.... In the court-yard we observed an English plough of improved construction." ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... brown, very young green, and maturer green, and each section was dotted with people. They seemed small people even from a distance, and, as Sarah Brown advanced at the tail of the dragon, she saw that the workers were all indeed under ordinary human size. The tallest, a man guiding a miniature plough behind a tall horse, might have reached Sarah Brown's shoulder. None of them seemed hard at work, they stood talking in little groups. One group as they passed it was trafficking in cigarette cards. "I want to get my Gold Scale set of English Kings complete," a voice ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... rising Dawn shows forth her fairer face than thine, O Night, or as the bright Spring, when Winter relaxes his hold, even so amongst us still she shone, the golden Helen. Even as the crops spring up, the glory of the rich plough land; or, as is the cypress in the garden; or, in a chariot, a horse of Thessalian breed, even so is rose-red Helen the glory of Lacedaemon. No other in her basket of wool winds forth such goodly work, and none cuts out, from ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... of the railway from Hughenden to Winton were constructed by the late Mr. G. C. Willcocks, and in a record time. He had to carry ballast and water along the whole construction of 132 miles from the Flinders River at Hughenden. His system was to plough and scoop the bed for the permanent way. This being done, a temporary line was laid down alongside, upon which trucks were run to carry on the advance work, leaving permanent work to follow up. As a consequence he was two months ahead of his time, and the line being available to carry traffic on ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... trebled the population of Nova Scotia; and the resources of the province were inadequate to meet the demand on them. 'Nova Scarcity' was the nickname for the province invented by a New England wit. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that some who had set their hand to the plough turned back. Some of them went to Upper Canada; some to England; some to the states from which they had come; for within a few years the fury of the anti-Loyalist feeling died down, and not a few Loyalists took advantage of this to return to ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... wood-lots, and our present consumption of coal, rapid enough to exhaust the entire supply in about seventy-seven thousand years, is sure to increase the aggregate cordage of the forests. By the time we have brought our locomotive steam-cultivators to such perfection as to plough up and pulverize the great central deserts, we may see trees flourish where it would have been useless to plant the seed before we had converted so much of the earth's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... tale of Jason. He seeks the golden fleece in Colchis: AEetes offers it to him as a prize for success in certain labours. By the aid of Medea, the daughter of AEetes, the wizard-king, Jason tames the fire-breathing oxen, yokes them to the plough, and drives a furrow. By Medea's help he conquers the children of the teeth of the dragon, subdues the snake that guards the fleece of gold, and escapes, but is pursued by AEetes. To detain AEetes, Medea throws behind the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... endeavouring to work. I only trust it is not manual labour—it is so injurious to the finger-nails. I have no sympathy with a gentleman who imagines that manual labour is compatible with his position, provided that he does not put his hand to the plough in England. Is not there something in the Scriptures about a man putting his hand to the plough and looking back? If Jack undertakes any work of that description, I trust that he will recognise the fact that he forfeits ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... out with all our ships that plough the deadly sea, But the ship that brought us safely back the only ARTHUR B. Was freighted with good wishes in a very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... Monsignor?" laughingly said a lady well disposed to the Jansenists; "God is just; it is the stones of Port-Royal tumbling upon your head." The tombs were destroyed; some coffins were carried to a distance, others left and profaned; the plough passed over the ruins; the hatred of the enemies of Port-Royal was satiated. A few of the faithful, preserving in their hearts the ardent faith of M. de St. Cyran, narrowed, however, and absorbed by obstinate resistance, a few theologians dying in exile, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the modern appliances of steam and electricity, and the new inventions in machinery, the cultivation of the soil is fast coming to be a recreation and amusement. The farmer now sits at ease on his plough, while his steed turns up the furrows at his will. With machinery the sons of Adam now sow and reap their harvests, keep the wheels of their great manufactories in motion, and with daily increasing speed carry ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... there is nothing to prevent his being taken from any rank or order of the faithful. The sons of peasants and mechanics have sat upon the Papal throne, and the thunderbolts of the Vatican have been launched by hands familiar with the pruning-knife and the plough. But in practice these bounds were effectually narrowed, when the college of cardinals tacitly restricted the choice to the members of their own body,—and still more effectually, when, by the same silent usurpation, they resolved that Adrian of Utrecht should ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... life. I still be doing it. I do all I can. It is the young boys' place to take the plough handle—the making a man out of their young strength. They don't want to do it. Some do and some won't stay on the farm. Go to town is the cry. I got a wife and two boys. They got families. They are on the farm. I tell them ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... treeless and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of Salt ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... wil kisse thy royal finger, and take leaue. I am a Votarie, I haue vow'd to Iaquenetta to holde the Plough for her sweet loue three yeares. But most esteemed greatnesse, wil you heare the Dialogue that the two Learned men haue compiled, in praise of the Owle and the Cuckow? It should haue followed in the end ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... much of that," said the Duck, "as I cannot see what use it is to any one. Now, if you could plough the fields like the ox, or draw a cart like the horse, or look after the sheep like the collie-dog, ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... Good-day to you. I was just wanting to ask you about that slip of pasture-land on the Home Farm. John Brickkill wants to plough it up and crop it. It's not ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... ADAM lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree, The Angel of the Earth came down, and offered Earth in fee. But Adam did not need it, Nor the plough he would not speed it, Singing:—"Earth and Water, Air and Fire, What more can mortal man desire?" ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... that those famous recruiting-officers were playing their pranks in Shrewsbury) were occupied very much in the same manner with Farquhar's heroes. They roamed from Warwick to Stratford, and from Stratford to Birmingham, persuading the swains of Warwickshire to leave the plough for the Pike, and despatching, from time to time, small detachments of recruits to extend Marlborough's lines, and to act as food for the hungry cannon at Ramillies ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... into competition, and one has finally got the better of the other, so that in England the distribution is often singularly uniform. Agricultural districts have their towns at about eight miles, and where grazing takes the place of the plough, the town distances increase to fifteen.[14] And so it is, entirely as a multiple of horse and foot strides, that all the villages and towns of the world's ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... nor will I grant it. Only thus far I'll go with you, that twice or thrice in a month, when res est angusta domi, the bottom of my purse is turned downward, and my conduit of ink will no longer flow for want of reparations, I am fain to let my plough stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these newfangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous villanellas and quipassas, I prostitute my pen in hope of gain.... Many a fair day ago have I proclaimed myself to the ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... their voyage back to France. All this were quite inconsiderable for so fine a country, were it better peopled; since the land is so extraordinarily fertile, were it well cultivated, that they only scratch it for the most part, by means of a plough made of a crooked stick, and drawn by two oxen; and, though the seed be scarcely covered, it produces seldom less than an hundred fold. Neither are they at any more pains in procuring their vines, in order to make good wine. Besides which, as they have not the art ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... load of household utensils and farming implements, bedsteads walling up the sides, a wash-tub turned up to serve as a seat for the driver, a broom and hoe-handle sticking out behind with the handles of a plough, pots and kettles dangling below, bundles of beds and bedding enthroning children of all the smaller sizes, stopping at last "for good," and the whole cortege of men, women, and boys, cattle, horses, and hogs, resting after ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... digested, and made a part of the pupil's own intellectual stores, is worth more to him than any amount of facts loosely and indiscriminately brought together. In intellectual, as in other tillage, the true secret of thrift is to plough deep, not to skim over a large surface. The prevailing tendency at this time, in systems of education, is unduly to multiply studies. So many new sciences are being brought within the pale of popular knowledge, that it is no longer possible, in a school like this, to embrace within ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... merchants, but rather like one of our wealthy yeomen: a man who would not disdain to work in his field with his own slaves, after the wholesome fashion of those old times, when a royal prince and mighty warrior would sow the corn with his own hands, while his man opened the furrow with the plough before him. There Boaz dwelt, with other yeomen, up among the limestone hills, in the little walled village of Bethlehem, which was afterwards to become so famous and so holy; and had, we may suppose, ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... said Enoch. 'These straps plough my shoulder like a zull. If 'tis much further to your lady's home, Maister Darton, I shall ask to be let carry half of these good things in ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... spear, of needless worth, Shall prune the tree and plough the earth; And Peace shall smile from shore to shore And Nations learn to war ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... methods he sees with those with which he is already familiar; he tries to find the reasons for any differences; if he thinks other methods better than those of the locality, he introduces them to the farmers' notice; if he suggests a better kind of plough, he has one made from his own drawings; if he finds a lime pit he teaches them how to use the lime on the land, a process new to them; he often lends a hand himself; they are surprised to find him handling all manner of tools more easily ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... many of your acquaintances among the old buildings; brand-new buildings, stores, and houses are taking the place of the good, staid, modest houses of the early settlers. Improvement is all the rage, and houses and churchyards must be overthrown and upturned whenever the Corporation plough is set to work for the widening of a narrow, or the making of a ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse |
