"Ploughman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... character as a drover or a ploughman or a carter or a dairyman or a housemaid or a curate or anything you like except a looker. Why should I give you eighteen shillun a week as my looker—twenty shillun, as I've made it now—when my best ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... now the cock, the ploughman's horn, Calls forth the lily-wristed morn, Then to thy cornfields thou dost go, Which, though well-soil'd, yet thou dost know That the best compost for the lands Is the wise master's feet and ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... ploughman his dun oxen turns, Unyoked, afield, mid dewy grass to stray, While over all the village church spire burns— A shaft of flame in the last beams ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the notes from Ploughman?" asked Mr. Clamp. "He is perfectly good; and he will pay the interest till we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... touch of Zephyr and of Spring has loosen'd Winter's thrall; The well-dried keels are wheel'd again to sea: The ploughman cares not for his fire, nor cattle for their stall, And frost no more is whitening all the lea. Now Cytherea leads the dance, the bright moon overhead; The Graces and the Nymphs, together knit, With rhythmic feet the meadow ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... Literally the ploughers.) which get under the skin. We could distinguish with a lens nothing but streaks, or parallel and whitish furrows. It is the form of these furrows, that has obtained for the insect the name of ploughman. A mulatto woman was sent for, who professed to be thoroughly acquainted with all the little insects that burrow in the human skin; the chego, the nuche, the coya, and the arador; she was the curandera, or surgeon of the place. She promised to extirpate, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to the West with the intention of working hard and using his hands as well as his brains; he had not been squeamish; he had, in fact, laboured like a ploughman; and to be obliged to give in had been galling and bitter. There are human beings into whose consciousness of themselves the possibility of being beaten does not enter. This man was one ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... existence in a state of nature, because the very first step towards such inferior forms would have led to the rapid extinction of the race; still less could they now exist in competition with their wild allies. The great speed but slight endurance of the race horse, the unwieldy strength of the ploughman's team, would both be useless in a state of nature. If turned wild on the pampas, such animals would probably soon become extinct, or under favourable circumstances might each lose those extreme qualities which would ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... I'm the monkey that has seen the world, and I'm going to tell you all about it. First, there's a gentleman who takes a rifle for a fowling-piece. Next, there's a farmer who warns everybody, gentleman and beggar, off his premises. Next, there's a tinker and a ploughman, who think that God is always fighting with the devil which shall command the kingdoms of the earth. The tinker's for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft, white sleep ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... plate, and he was always careful to set his hat, his riding-whip and his gloves and cape behind the door. Then, bareheaded, he took his place on the right hand of his host at the long oaken table, to which in due order came son, daughter, house-maiden, out-lass, ploughman and herd. The only difference was that when it came to the blessing upon the food to be partaken of, Adam the Laird stood up, while the others sat still with bowed heads. Why this was, no one knew, not even Adam or Diarmid. But so it had been in the time of their fathers, and ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... degrees of frost by day were what Thrums began to accept as a revised order of nature. Vainly the Thrums doctor, whose practice extends into the glens, made repeated attempts to reach his distant patients, twice driving so far into the dreary waste that he could neither go on nor turn back. A ploughman who contrived to gallop ten miles for him did not get home for a week. Between the town, which is nowadays an agricultural centre of some importance, and the outlying farms communication was cut off for a month; and I heard subsequently of one farmer who did not see a human being, unconnected ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... cleared the feathery tops Of the fir-thicket on the eastward hill, His horses leaned and laboured. His great hands Held both the reins and plough-stilts: he was proud; Proud with a ploughman's pride; nobler, may be, Than statesman's, ay, or poet's pride sometimes, For little praise would come that he ploughed well, And yet he did it well; proud of his work, And not of what would follow. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... amid the fields of Ayr A ploughman, who, in foul and fair, Sings at his task So clear, we know not if it is The laverock's song we hear, or his, Nor ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings. The writings of Sterne, particularly, form the best ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... loved the Muses, and would pay Due honours even to the ploughman's lay; Would cheer the feebler bard, and with the strong Soar to the noblest energies of song; Catch the rib-shaking laugh, or from his eye Dash silently the tear of sympathy. Happy old man!—with feelings such as these The seasons all ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... she said, "have come from the very lowest ranks of life. There was Burns, a ploughman; and Hugh Miller, a stonemason; and plenty of others. Dodsley was ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... can't. But I am quite ready to admit that there are all sorts of inconsistencies in me. Now, the other day I was reading Burns, and I couldn't describe what exaltation all at once possessed me in the thought that a ploughman had so glorified a servant-girl that together they shine in the highest heaven, far above all the monarchs of earth. This came upon me with a rush—a very rare emotion. Wasn't ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... what stirs the heart of man is his religion, whether he calls it religion or not. That which makes the heart beat and the breath come quicker, love and hate, and joy and sorrow—that has been to me as worthy of record as his hopes of a future life. The thoughts that come into the mind of the ploughman while he leads his team afield in the golden glory of the dawn; the dreams that swell and move in the heart of the woman when she knows the great mystery of a new life; whither the dying man's hopes and fears are led—these ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... and branching off in every direction to the different elevations. The ground was so saturated in these terraces that ploughing was carried on by means of a large scraper, like a fender, which was dragged along by bullocks, the ploughman standing up in the machine as it floundered and wallowed about, and guiding it through ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... who could take any form he pleased, was travelling about as a poor beggar, and being very tired he stopped at the cottage of a Ploughman to rest himself, and asked for ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... beasts, Robbers and robb'd by turns, the dreamer sees:— Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests, Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease 'Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries; Times out of joint, a universe of lies, Till Love divine appear in Ploughman's guise ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Burns,—the very same that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before this monument was built. Displayed against the surrounding wall is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, with the Genius of Caledonia summoning the ploughman to turn poet. Methought it was not a very successful piece of work; for the plough was better sculptured than the man, and the man, though heavy and cloddish, was more effective than the goddess. Our guide informed us that an old man of ninety, who knew Burns, certifies ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... away. Far off on the brown Ottawa, beyond the Cascades of Carillon and the Chute a Blondeau, the keen-eyed voyageur catches its gleam, and, for gladness to be nearing the familiar mountain, more cheerily raises the chanson he loves. Near St. Placide the early ploughman—while yet mist wreathes the fields and before the native Rossignol has fairly begun his plaintive flourishes—watches the high cross of Rigaud for the first glint that shall tell him of the yet unrisen sun. The wayfarer marks his progress by ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... "I had no idea I could seem clumsy! I feel like a great ploughman. I wish I were ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... we say. The humblest does his share. There's fear in that thought, but more of hope. Nothing perishes. The private, who falls, bravely fighting, does his part like the general. The ploughman's honest life gives its contribution to the Nation's greatness as the life of Webster does. All is telling in 'the long results of time,' helping to decide what style of manhood shall be fashioned in America ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... "Though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad-plodding son of daybook and ledger." Where are the letters which brought to the ploughman at Lochlie such a constant and copious stream of replies? The circumstances of his position will explain why they perished: he was then "a youth and all unknown to fame." It is even doubtful if the five hundred and forty published letters include all the letters ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... The Ploughman—of whom Chaucer remarked, "A worker true and very good was he, Living in perfect peace and charity"—protested that riddles were not for simple minds like his, but he would show the good pilgrims, if they willed it, ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... be devised by the ingenuity of man.[11] It has been supposed by some theorists, who are practically unacquainted with agriculture in this or any other country, that all who have any interest in land above the rank of cultivator or ploughman are mere drones, or useless consumers of that rent which, under judicious management, might be added to the revenues of Government—that all which they get might, and ought to be, either left with the cultivators or taken by the Government. At the head of these is the justly ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... become the yoke-fellow of the Egyptian crocodile; and a farm which, ploughed by such a pair, should extend from the upper cataract to the Pillars of Hercules, might have charms even for a philosopher. But while the ploughman is without a nymph, Arcadia is imperfect. What were Dionusos without his Ariadne, Ares without Aphrodite, Zeus without Hera? Even Artemis has her Endymion; Athens alone remains unwedded; but only because Hephaestus was too rough a wooer. Such is not he who now offers to the representative of Athene ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... his own—pride is surely the maddest state of mind that any of us can allow ourselves in. The first king of Bohemia kept his clouted old shoes ever in his sight, that he might never forget that he had once been a ploughman. And another wise king used to drink out of a coarse cup at table, and excused himself to his guests that he had made the rude thing in his rude potter days. Look with Primislaus and Agathocles at the hole of the pit out of which you also have been dug; look ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... another as if in utter ignorance. "Have I said anything wrong? I only meant that I was present at Mrs. Brand's first wedding—when she married your father, Mr. Wyvis—not your adopted father, of course, but John Wyvis, the ploughman." ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... issue, we need say but little. Suffice it to know, that Jane and her ploughman William had four children, three sons and one daughter; of whom William, the second son, married an honest man's daughter, whose name was Alice Gryse, and whose children were living in 1490, when ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... meaning by an example. A man—I do not say a geologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman—sees a small valley, say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in the Windsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... of Paris, a great theologian, who died in 1429. Be that as it may, I can assure your correspondent A. B. C. that the saying in question did not originate with the author of that work. In Piers Ploughman's Vision, written A.D. 1362, it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground? No—but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... slimness of his daughter's stockinged legs, and thought what a real little man his son seemed already, so sturdy on his pins. In his blue overalls he looked like a miniature ploughman in a smock-frock. Dale laughed when Billy scampered away resolutely, and Norah had to run ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... my part of the story. As I was coming home from the burial, I overtook Roger our ploughman. Said he, What think you of this burying?—'What should I think,' said I, 'but that we have lost the best Master and Lady that we shall ever know?' 'God, He knows,' quoth Roger, 'whether they be living or dead; but if ever I saw my Lady in my life, I saw her alive ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... than half a century ago the whole country—at least the whole educated country—was still Swedish at heart and Swedish in language. From Sweden Finland had borrowed its literature and its laws until Russia stepped in, when the Finn began to assert himself. The ploughman is now educated and raising his voice with no uncertain sound on behalf of his own country and his language, and to-day the greatest party in the Parliament are ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... ploughman, fretting, Homeward plods his weary way Ere his time? He's after getting Shorter ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... sciences with critical exactness, pursue an extended course of inquiry into physical phenomena, note and digest the results of Italian, Spanish, English, French, German, Dutch, and American naturalists, ply every guide and ploughman, every driver and forester, every fisherman and miner, every lumberman and carpenter, for the results which men attain by observing within the narrow circle of their occupation,—and weave all into a copious work which subordinates all results ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or a child and an old woman looked from a doorway; but many of the fields were fallow and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts driven by peasants, a stray wood-cutter in a copse, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... dawn, when they went about their respective avocations for a couple of hours before breakfast. As soon as the cows were milked, they and the heifers and calves were driven off to the pastures, while the ploughman yoked a span of ten oxen to the plough, and set out to break up some new land, and very hard work it was. Although the soil was tolerably rich, it was baked by the sun, and as hard as a rock, and in some places the whole strength of the oxen was required to draw the share through it. Two of ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... ballads, which may possibly be placed within these limits) no mention whatever is made of him in literature before the latter half of the reign of Edward the Third. "Rhymes of Robin Hood" are then spoken of by the author of "Piers Ploughman" (assigned to about 1362) as better known to idle fellows than pious songs, and from the manner of the allusion it is a just inference that such rhymes were at that time no novelties. The next notice is in Wyntown's Scottish Chronicle, written about 1420, where the following lines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads," especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of real life—the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... ancient days of faith the doors of the churches used to be opened with the first glimmer of the dawn in summer, and long before the moon had set in winter; and many a ditcher and woodcutter and ploughman on his way to work used to enter and say a short prayer before beginning the labour of the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... Tom Thumb as we know it today, opens with a visit of the magician Merlin at the cottage of an honest and hospitable ploughman. Merlin rewarded the Goodman and his Wife for their hospitality by calling on the Queen of the fairies, who brought to the home, Tom Thumb, a boy no bigger than ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... worthy Giroudeau, with a skull as polished as my knee, forty-eight years, a big stomach, a face like a ploughman, and a nose like a potato, can get a ballet-girl, I ought to be the lover of the first actress in Paris. Where does one find ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... more than he can use so he will not ask for more, and will not take it: it is true that his work may be more special than another's, but it is not more necessary if you have organized labour properly; the ploughman and the fisherman are as necessary to society as the scientist or the artist, I will not say more necessary: neither is the difficulty of producing the more special and excellent work at all proportionate ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in the road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the future would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly recall ancient tales ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... herself cross and stupefied, and quite enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor on a winter's morning, yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at sitting, like Honoria, beside the bed of the ploughman's consumptive daughter, in a reeking, stifling, lean-to garret, in which had slept the night before, the father, mother, and two grown-up boys, not to mention a new-married couple, the sick girl, and, alas! her baby. And of such bedchambers there ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of the Croft, "man, dominie, since he converted Jock, my ploughman, he hasna been drunk yince, and I get twice the work oot o' the craitur ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... native land 'Tally-ho!' is shouted and welcomed in due season by all conditions of men; by the ploughman, holding hard his startled colt; by the woodman, leaning on his axe before the half-felled oak; by bird-boys from the tops of leafless trees; even Dolly Dumpling, as she sees the white-tipped brush flash before her market-cart in a deep-banked lane, stops, points ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... and women cooking meals, The mothering girl-child with her doll in arms, The ploughman trudging at his horse's heels, The fires we lay, our chill at war's alarms:— These epic, ancient gestures of the race Have still the greatness of those great who wrought In other days than ours, who keep their place Along our ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... beheld a ploughman, bricklayer, gardener, weaver, or blacksmith, begin his work in the morning, I have envied him the readiness and willingness with which he took to it. The plough-man, after he has got his horses harnessed to the plough, does not delay a minute: into the turf the shining share enters, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... mountains, whose grand rocky buttresses advanced from the haze almost to the river. Here, in the windings of the Forth, our steamer went many times backward and forward, first towards the mountains and then towards the level country to the south, in almost parallel courses, like the track of a ploughman in a field. At length we passed a ruined tower and some fragments of massy wall which once formed a part of Cambus Kenneth Abbey, seated on the rich lands of the Forth, for the monks, in Great Britain at least, seem always to have chosen for the site of their monasteries, the banks ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... along its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Music unite in song. From the earliest ages song has been the sweet companion of labor. The rude chant of the boatman floats upon the water, the shepherd sings upon the hill, the milkmaid in the dairy, the ploughman at the plough. Every trade, every occupation, every act and scene of life, has long had its own especial music. The bride went to her marriage, the laborer to his work, the old man to his last long rest, each with ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... god, doth deface, Doth deface Lady Ceres' crown, And the tillage doth go to decay, To decay in every town; Landlords their rents so highly enhance, That Pierce, the ploughman, barefoot may dance; Well a day! Farmers that Christmas would still entertain, Scarce have wherewith themselves to ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... pieces of split sticks, like laths, with chalk-marks on them, all as unintelligible as the signs of the zodiac are to an old school-mistress that teaches the horn-book and primer, or as Arabic or Greek is to a ploughman. Every stick had notches on one side for single pounds, on the other side for tens of pounds, and so higher; and the length and breadth also had its signification, and the colour too; for they were painted in some places with one colour, and in some places with anther; ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... farmers still plough with them; and may it be long before the old custom is abandoned! There is no pleasanter or more peaceful sight than—looking up—that of a wide-horned team of black oxen, smoking a little in the morning air, drawing the plough through the earth, while the ploughman whistles, and the ox-herd, goad in hand, utters his Saxon grunts of incitement or reproof. The black oxen of the hills are of Welsh stock, the true Sussex ox being red. The "kews," as their shoes are called, may still be seen on the walls of a smithy here ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the low fence between the garden and the cornfield, and started down one of the long rows leading directly away from the house. Old Needham was a good ploughman, and straight as an arrow ran the furrow between the rows of corn, until it vanished in the distant perspective. The peas were planted beside alternate hills of corn, the cornstalks serving as supports for ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... wait until my absence caused anxiety, when some one would surely come after me. Not a very alarming plight if one were well, but I felt one of my old cruel attacks was at hand, which was not encouraging. No one was within sight, but in case there should be a ploughman over a rise within hearing, I coo-eed long and well. My voice had been trained. I coo-eed three times, allowing an interval to elapse, and then settled into the bottom of the boat to await developments. Soon I was disturbed by the plunk! plunk! of a swimmer, and saw ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... huge greatcoat threadbare and patched itself, yet carefully so disposed and secured by what buttons remain, and many supplementary pins, as to conceal the still more infirm state of his under garments. The shoes and stockings of a ploughman were, however, seen to meet at his knees with a pair of brownish, blackish breeches; a rusty-coloured handkerchief, that has been black in its day, surrounded his throat, and was an apology for linen. His hair, half grey, half black, escaped in elf-locks ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... walking, not unseen, By hedgerow elms on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great sun begins his state, Robed in flames and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight; While the ploughman, near at hand, Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, And the milkmaid singeth blithe, And the mower whets his sithe, And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... friends left now. I hardly recognized the farm any more. All these new people had made themselves quite at home there, and I seemed to myself to be a new-comer. The serving-woman looked at me with distrust, and the ploughman avoided talking to me. The servant's name was Adele. All day long you could hear her grumbling and dragging her wooden shoes after her as she walked. She made a noise even when she was walking on straw. She used to eat her meals standing, and ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... and our grindstones passed from us long ago, when the ploughman and the miller took our place; but for a time we kept fast possession of the kneading-trough and the brewing-vat. Today, steam often shapes our bread, and the loaves are set down at our very door—it may be by a man-driven motor-car! The history ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in which Mr. Gosse is at his best. A favourite motive, he has treated it even more melodiously in "Lying in ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... them, inasmuch as there was a great plenty of hay in the neighbourhood, seeing that all the cattle had been killed or driven away (as related above). I therefore made up my mind to go in God's name with my new ploughman to Guetzkow, whither a great many Mecklenburg horses were brought to the fair, seeing that times were not yet so bad there as with us. Meanwhile I went a few more times up the Streckelberg with my daughter at night, and by moonlight, ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... Old World,—that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... large plantation, about which I secreted myself, until the darkness of the next night began to disappear. The morning larks commenced to chirp and sing merrily—pretty soon I heard the whip crack, and the voice of the ploughman driving in the corn field. About breakfast time, I heard the sound of a horn; saw a number of slaves in the field with a white man, who I supposed to be their overseer. He started to the house before the slaves, which gave me an opportunity to get the attention of one of the slaves, whom I ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... with those around her. When her father took it into his head to grow angry and cry, "You must!" she would burst out laughing; whereupon he would laugh also, and say: "I'm not the master here; in fact, I am placed in the position of a ploughman arguing ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... him, and repose there as safely as if he were in a palace. Fearless of damps, and unmolested by noxious insects, his sleep is as sound as it is refreshing, and he rises with renewed spirits to pursue his journey. Equally so may the ploughman or the labourer seek repose beside his team, and allow them to graze quietly around him. The delicious coolness of the morning and the mild temperature of the evening air, in that luxurious climate, are beyond the power of description. It appears to have ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... sunny morning in early January— a day that was Nature's breathing space after a week of sleet and boisterous winds. The gulls were back again from their inland shelters. Across the upland above the cliff a ploughman drove leisurably forth and back, and always close behind his heels the earth was white with these birds inspecting the fresh-turned furrow. The furze-bushes below him were braided with cobwebs, and ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in all ages, especially in this last century of years, by people of all sorts, though never so mean and mechanical; every man strains his fortune to keep his children at school; the cobbler will clout it till midnight, the porter will carry burdens till his bones crack again, the ploughman will pinch both back and belly to give his son learning, and I find that this ambition reigns no where so much as in this island. But, under favour, this word, learning, is taken in a narrower sense among us than among ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... heifer of the corn am I, Kara! Kara![5] Yoked with the kine we gayly fly, Kara! Kara! The ploughman's hand is strong and drives The glowing soil, the meadow thrives! ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... To be talked of—how poor a desire! Does it matter whether it be by the gossips of this age or the next? Some men are urged on to fame by poverty—that is an excuse for their trouble; but there is no more nobleness in the motive than in that which makes yon poor ploughman sweat in the eye of Phoebus. In fact, the larger part of eminent men, instead of being inspired by any lofty desire to benefit their species or enrich the human mind, have acted or composed, without any definite object beyond the satisfying a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Halifax to Point de Bute. His mother was a widow. He married Miriam Smith, from Sackville, and the ceremony took place at the "Brick House," Prospect. Isaac settled at Hall's Hill, but afterward moved back to Point de Bute. He was an excellent ploughman, and was one of the drovers north when the Richibucto and Miramichi markets were supplied with beef from the Westmoreland marshes. He contracted consumption and died comparatively young. Mrs. Edward Jones, ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... this brief sketch of my experiences in the war, I would ask my readers to go back of the war a little with me. I want to show them a few of the dark pictures of the slave system. Hark! I hear the clanking of the ploughman's chains in the fields; I hear the tramping of the feet of the hoe-hands. I hear the coarse and harsh voice of the negro driver and the shrill voice of the white overseer swearing at the slaves. I hear the swash of the lash upon the backs of the unfortunates; ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... for the night. Labour used to be so dear and wages so high, especially in the back country of New Zealand, that the couple of men,—one for indoor work, to saw wood, milk, cook, sweep, wash, etc., and the other to act as gardener, groom, ploughman, and do all the numerous odd jobs about a place a hundred miles and more from the nearest shop,—represented a wage-expenditure of at least 200 pounds a year. Every gentleman therefore as a matter of course sees to his own horse when he arrives ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... uncle? Nay, nay, in any king, Christian or heathen, you may strike off a third part of that well enough—and, as far as I know, half of the rest, too. In far fewer years than three thousand it may well fortune that a poor ploughman's blood may come up to a kingdom, and a king's right royal kin on the other hand fall down to the plough and cart, and neither that king know that ever he came from the cart, nor that carter know that ever he came ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... helpless, she caught at the side of the little carriage, which was being dragged violently at the pony's heels. She had need of all her spirit. Fortunately, the road was a straight one, but there was not a soul in sight to help her, not a sower in the fields, not a ploughman, not even a boy herding cattle along the road. Her right hand still grasped the useless rein. She stared before her, while the rocking of the little carriage grew more and more violent, and the hedges ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... a moving dot, a ploughman turned a belated furrow; or a sweating ditcher leaned upon his reluctant spade and longed for night; or a shepherd, quite as silly as his sheep, gawked up the morning hills. But not a sign of help ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Towler was the queerest. Tom in his person furnished an apt illustration of the right appropriation of talent and the fitness of things, for he would neither have made a groom, nor a coachman, nor a postillion, nor a footman, nor a ploughman, nor a mechanic, nor anything we know of, and yet he was first-rate as a huntsman. He was too weak for a groom too small for a coachman, too ugly for a postillion, too stunted for a footman, too light for a ploughman, too ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... Englishman.—Alas! the soldiers who fell under the sword of the Britons are not yet reduced to dust: the labourer in turning up his field, still draws from the bosom of the earth their whitened bones; while the ploughman, with tears of tenderness and gratitude, still recollects that his fields, now covered with rich harvests, have been moistened with French blood. While every thing around the inhabitants of this country animates them to speak of the tyranny of Great Britain, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... our early settlers from the Continent elected to live on the downland rather than in the valleys. Go where you may over the Plain, its turfy surface is scored by terraces or "lynchets," telling the tale of the ancient ploughman's furrows on the slopes, and side by side with them lie the scars of what were once cattle enclosures, farms, and stockaded villages. Nor is the explanation far to seek, for the valleys afforded shelter to the wolves, and ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... lover's vows, What time the blue mist round the patient cows Dim rises from the grass and half conceals Their dappled hides. I hear the nightingale, That from the little blackthorn spinney steals To the old hazel hedge that skirts the vale, And still unseen sings sweet. The ploughman feels The thrilling music as he goes along, And imitates and listens; while the fields Lose all their paths in dusk to lead him wrong, Still sings the nightingale her soft ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... within. Or whiles, beside the sobbing stream, he breathed, In his clutched pipe unformed and wizard strains Divine yet brutal; which the forest heard, And thou, with awe; and far upon the plain The unthinking ploughman started and gave ear. ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tremble all Before things far more vile and trivial— Even a glow-worm can confound their might. The earth that lies bare to the sun, and breeds A thousand germs that burgeon and decay— This earth is wounded by the ploughman's share: But only darkness serves for human seeds; Night therefore is more sacred far than day, Since man excels all fruits ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... of midges. The people gather these minute insects by night, and boil them into thick cakes, to be used as a relish—millions of midges in a cake. A kungo cake, an inch thick, and as large as the blue bonnet of a Scotch ploughman, was offered to us; it was very dark in colour, and tasted not unlike ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... the cool and dark-lipped furrow breathes a dim delight Through the woodland's purple plumage to the diamond night. Aureoles of joy encircle every blade of grass Where the dew-fed creatures silent and enraptured pass. And the restless ploughman pauses, turns, and wondering, Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king; For a fiery moment looking with the eyes of God Over fields a slave at morning bowed him to the sod. Blind and dense with revelation every moment flies. And unto the mighty mother, gay, eternal, rise All the ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... the wonder of things, a sense of eternity, a swift, inexplicable compassion, a longing for service to the needs of men. His ears thrilled to the song of the earth and the whistle of the ploughman turning up the fresh brown earth. He filled his lungs with the wind of the open country, drank in the enchantment of the morning and the dusk, his nostrils joyously alive to the smell of the furrowed ground and a ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... family is full of it, it takes hold almost of all sorts of men, from the prince to the ploughman, even amongst gossips it is to be seen, scarce three in a company but there is siding, faction, emulation, between two of them, some simultas, jar, private grudge, heart-burning in the midst of them. Scarce two gentlemen ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... who with thy tush held'st high The world, that mortals might not die; Lion! who hast giants torn; Dwarf! who laugh'dst a king to scorn; Sole Subduer of the Dreaded! Slayer of the many-headed! Mighty Ploughman! Teacher tender! Of thine own the sure Defender! Under all thy ten disguises Endless praise to ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon; Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, All with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the scritch owl, scritching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the churchway paths ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... ploughman plods his homeward way, The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way, His homeward way the weary ploughman plods, His homeward way the ploughman weary plods, The weary ploughman homeward plods his way, The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way, His way, the weary ploughman ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... never seen and could not imagine). Or else he wished he were the abbot's huntsman, hunting in the forest; or a monk of St Germain, singing sweetly in the abbey church; or a merchant, taking bales of cloaks and girdles along the high road to Paris; anything, in fact, but a poor ploughman ploughing other people's land. An Anglo-Saxon writer has imagined a dialogue ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... ["Now the old ploughman, shaking his head, sighs, and compares present times with past, often praises his parents' happiness, and talks of the old race as full of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... good, and the work hard, nobody who starts with the hounds is likely to be in at the death, except the huntsmen. We are all mad for the sport, and off we go, over the hills and far away, picking up a fresh field as we go. The ploughman leaves his plough, and the shepherd leaves his flock, and the farmer leaves his thrashing, to follow us; in every field we cross we get fresh blood, while those who join us at the start fall off by degrees. Well, it happened one day late in October, when there were ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... most. In his view it was 'the most loved of all the Ocean's sons,' and he commended it especially for its freedom from sudden and impetuous wave, from the unexpected inundations which spoil the mower's hopes and mock the ploughman's toil. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... works that Mr. Morris had some thought of printing may also be mentioned The Bible, Gesta Romanorum, Malory's Morte Darthur, The High History of the San Graal (translated by Dr. Sebastian Evans), Piers Ploughman, Huon of Bordeaux, Caxton's Jason, a Latin Psalter, The Prymer or Lay Folk's Prayer-Book, Some Mediaeval English Songs and Music, The Pilgrim's Progress, and a Book of Romantic Ballads. He was engaged on the selection of the Ballads, which he spoke of ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... A Ploughman yoked his Ox and his Ass together, and set to work to plough his field. It was a poor makeshift of a team, but it was the best he could do, as he had but a single Ox. At the end of the day, when the beasts ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... lower end of Ayton village. The family were of that "strict, not strictest species of Presbyterian Dissenter," and John attended also the Bible-class and Fellowship Meeting. The family of John Murray, a ploughman or "hind" from the Duns district, and now settled at Bastleridge, the next farm to Ayton Hill, also attended Mr. Ure's church. An intimacy sprang up between the two families. It ripened into affection between John Cairns and Alison, John Murray's only daughter, and ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... remember. Life within convent walls would have been scarcely more tranquil or more monotonous. Sir John rode with his hounds three or four times a week, or was about the fields superintending the farming operations, walking beside the ploughman as he drove his furrow, or watching the scattering of the seed. Or he was in the narrow woodlands which still belonged to him, and Angela, taking her solitary walk at the close of day, heard his axe ringing through ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... beneath his feet teeming with the tangible memories of grisly conflict, or of an old civilization that had been blotted out long ago—the swords of Roman legionaries, the bones of British heroes, coins with legends that few could read turned up by the ploughman's share. Yonder, men said, away there at Redburn, the heathen pursuers had come upon England's proto-martyr and slain the saint of God, whose bones since then had been gathered up, and were now resting in their sumptuous ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... lies crouched the lordly stag, The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag; And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker, As broadening casements light them on toward home, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the window, the better to look in, and clenching the other, shook it at them, crying out, "Wait, ye accursed peasant boors, I, too, will judge ye for your sins!" But seeing her cousin, Jobst Bork, present, she screamed yet louder—"Eh! thou thick ploughman, hath the devil brought thee here too? Art thou not ashamed to accuse thy own kinswoman? Wait, I will give thee something to make thee ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... purse-proud tenant, never known to fail? The farm which never yet was left on hand? The marsh reclaimed to most improving land? The impatient hope of the expiring lease? The doubling rental? What an evil's peace! In vain the prize excites the ploughman's skill, In vain the Commons pass their patriot bill;[334] The Landed Interest—(you may understand The phrase much better leaving out the land)— The land self-interest groans from shore to shore, 600 For ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... rains sometimes continued for days together; the fields for miles around were under water, and the ducks and buffaloes enjoyed themselves amazingly. All along the road to Macassar, ploughing was daily going on in the mud and water, through which the wooden plough easily makes its way, the ploughman holding the plough-handle with one hand while a long bamboo in the other serves to guide the buffaloes. These animals require an immense deal of driving to get them on at all; a continual shower of exclamations is kept ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate, physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance. One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a wood. Another, the Duchess, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... to be fed as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Polyeuka mine, from which he was receiving large monthly dividends. If that went on prosperously, perhaps he need not return to the colony at all. 'Poor Dick Shand!' he said. 'He is a shepherd far away in the west, hardly earning better wages than an English ploughman, and I am coming home with a pocket full of money! A few glasses of whisky have made all ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... disregard of conventionalities and externalisms. Just as the lower gift of what we call 'genius' is above all limits of culture or education or position, and falls on a wool-stapler in Stratford-on-Avon, or on a ploughman in Ayrshire, so, in a similar manner, the altogether different gift of the divine, life-giving Spirit follows no lines that Churches or institutions draw. It falls upon an Augustinian monk in a convent, and he shakes Europe. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren |
