"Arable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me,' said the swallow. 'I fly over Hal-land's mountain ridges, where the beeches cease. I soar farther toward the north than the stork. I will show you where the arable land retires before rocky valleys. You shall see friendly towns, old churches, solitary court yards, within which it is cosy and pleasant to dwell, where the family stands in circle around the table with the smoking platters, and asks a blessing through the mouth of the youngest ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... reference will tell on that it is a "chapelry, in the parish of Broadwell, Union of Faringdon, hundred of Bampton, county of Oxford;" that it is "two miles east of Lechlade and contains 179 inhabitants;" and that "by measurement it contains 1,020 acres, of which 876 are arable and 153 meadow and pasture." It is unlikely that the population has increased since the above description; the best authority claims that it has actually decreased, like so many of the small towns and villages of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... summer season, when the lower districts are parched with drought, tens of thousands of sheep may be seen covering the roads leading to the Upper Cevennes, whither they are driven for pasture. There is a comparatively small breadth of arable land in the district. The mountains in many places contain only soil enough to grow juniper-bushes. There is very little verdure to relieve the eye—few turf-clad slopes or earth-covered ledges to repay the tillage of the farmer. Even the mountains of lower elevation are for the most part ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... strongest Indication that can be of national Waste and Decay, in respect of Inhabitants. What could a Foreigner, travelling among us, particularly in the western Counties, some Summers past, judge of our national Wisdom and Oeconomy? Would he not start even at our Humanity, on seeing the best arable Grounds in the Kingdom, in immense Tracts, wantonly enjoyed by the Cattle of a few petulant Individuals; and at the same Juncture, our high Ways and Streets crowded with Shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures! reduced, through ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... half-outlaw, the charcoal-burner; while in early spring added curls of vapor show that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work. But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here. At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... not only retarded progress but were positively injurious to both man and material, as it had to do with the introduction of rational ideas. The rapid increase of the world's population and the very general occupancy of arable lands throughout the world, presupposes that the maximum of food production will soon be reached. A liberal and general diffusion of scientific information among agriculturists alone can augment the productive power ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... those instruments of agriculture which are called inarticulate, Saserna says that two yokes of oxen will be enough for two hundred jugera of arable land, while Cato prescribes three yokes for two hundred and forty jugera in olives: thus if Saserna is correct, one yoke of oxen is required for every hundred jugera, but if Cato is correct a yoke is needed for every eighty jugera. My opinion ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... he had been at in their education, that he resolved to be at a still greater: for as he had till then been content only with his lodge at the entrance of the garden, and kept no country house, he purchased a country seat at a short distance from the city, surrounded by a large tract of arable land, meadows, and woods. As the house was not sufficiently handsome nor convenient, he pulled it down, and spared no expense in building a mansion more magnificent. He went every day to hasten, by his presence, the great number ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... the course of the railway-line coming from the direction of Paris, you notice several pine woods, planted on former heaths. Still looking eastward, is the village of Champagne, where the slopes are studded with vines, whilst the plain is arable land, dotted over with clumps of chestnut trees. North-east of Champagne is Montfort, where Chanzy at first stationed the bulk of the 21st Army Corps under Jaures, this (leaving his flying columns on one side) being the most eastern position of ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... are uncertain, while fish are almost as sure as the season; and so the surplus agricultural population either emigrates or removes to the fishing grounds on the coast. There is, undoubtedly, a considerable quantity of wild land which could be made arable, but the same means, applied to the improvement of that which is at present under cultivation, would accomplish ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... rare attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land, stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed, hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... flowing from the limpid lakes and thousand springs of this region, the numerous sources of the Susquehanna meander through the valleys, until, uniting their streams, they form one of the proudest rivers of the United States. The mountains are generally arable to the tops, altho instances are not wanting where the sides are jutted with rocks, that aid greatly in giving to the country that romantic and picturesque character ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... is ignorant of the difficulties that are met with in the conversion of untilled land into arable and productive land. These difficulties are so great, that usually an isolated man would perish before he could put the soil in a condition to yield him even the most meagre living. To that end are needed ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... bless it. But it was not made complete and final—a veritable Kentucky home—until the all-round, all-night work which had kept my nose to the grindstone had been shifted to younger shoulders I was able to buy a few acres of arable land far out in the county—the County of Jefferson!—and some ancient brick walls, which the feminine genius to which I owe so much could convert to itself and tear apart and make over again. Here "the sun shines bright" as in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... more repulsive customs is passing from savagery to a state of semi-civilization. Still the situation has its anxieties. The very prosperity of the country has drawn into it a larger population than the arable and pastoral land may prove able to support. The Free State people are not friendly to it, and many politicians in Cape Colony would like to recover it for the Colony, while many white adventurers would like to prospect for mines, or to oust the natives ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... architecture, except its rusty vanes and twisted chimneys. A few out-houses, for the accommodation of the negroes, were nigh; and nearer to the river, there were barns and stables, of dimensions and materials altogether superior to those that the appearance of the arable land, or the condition of the small farm, would seem to render necessary. The periagua, in which the proprietor had made his passage across the outer bay, lay at a small wooden ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the General Councils, and of the old church laws as a whole. At least half of the confiscated church property was to be given back, two abbeys at least were to remain in each county. But this movement owed its peculiar character to yet another motive. The enclosures of the arable land for purposes of pasture, of which the peasantry had been long complaining, did not merely continue; the nobility, which took part in the secularisation of the church-lands in an increasing degree, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... the Rosewarnes had since converted the lawn into a farmyard and the shrine into a cow-byre. Above it ran a line of tall elms screening a lane used by the farm-carts, and above this again a great field of arable rounded ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a country lot of fifty acres or more. Under this system, a population of a superior order was led out into the forest. Farms quickly spread into the interior, seeking the meadows, occupying the arable land, and especially following ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Others, as for example Schweinfurth, are more moderate in their views, and think "that it must have taken about twenty thousand years for that alluvial deposit which now forms the arable soil of Egypt to have attained to its present ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... write, history preserves no record of any bishop as exercising his pastoral functions in that city. In matter of fact there was none. The last bishop, an amiable old man, had in the course of years acquired a considerable extent of arable land, and employed himself principally, for lack of more spiritual occupation, in reaping, stacking, selling, and sending off his wheat for the Roman market. His deacon had been celebrated in early ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... engineers have just completed plans for tapping the Rio Grande with a canal and thus bringing under irrigation a tract some ten miles wide and a hundred and fifty long, containing nearly a million acres. The addition of so vast an area to the arable land of the Territory means, of course, a large increase in the productive resources of that section. Other canals may possibly do as much. The work of sinking artesian wells is also going on there extensively, while the project of constructing great ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... and depart with some tangible gain before another revolution resulted in a new redistribution. Such suspicions could hardly beget the patience essential for the development of agriculture. And yet this was the very time when farming must be encouraged. Large parts of the arable land had been abandoned to grazing during the preceding century because of the importation of the provincial stipendiary grain, and Italy had lost the custom of raising the amount of food that her population ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... loomingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard. In the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales, were reddened by the sunset: while the distant little windows in windmills and farm homesteads, shone, patches of bright beaten gold. In the Cathedral, all became gray, murky, and sepulchral, and the cracked ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... the Levitical cities, the princes of tribes, the heads of families, and other public uses. Assuming this estate of 21-1/2 acres, assigned to each household, of course a larger proportion of pasture must have been given to those tribes who subsisted on their herds and flocks, than of arable to those who lived by tillage, the portions of the latter, therefore, must be considerably reduced. On the other hand, the extraordinary fertility of the whole country must be taken into the account. No part was waste; very little was occupied ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... of an English maegth (or kindred) consisted first of the large arable fields divided up into narrow strips, of which each household possessed several, next of the almost equally prized meadow, which was hedged off into appropriated lots in summer, but thrown back into common in winter, and lastly of the undistributed waste, from which the whole community ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... which, though imperceptibly, yet rapidly approaches our increasing colony, and that is the imperious necessity of a separation; for so very limited are the available portions of the island, that some families who number ten or twelve persons, have not five acres of arable land to divide ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... and almost simultaneously, in the year 1815, discovered the law of rent. Suddenly it struck them that all manufactured products of human industry must necessarily obey one law; whilst the products of land obey another and opposite law. Let us for a moment consider arable land as a natural machine for manufacturing bread. Now, in all manufactures depending upon machinery of human invention, the natural progress is from the worse machines to the better. No man lays aside a glove-making ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Kylang, the route through Lahul to Central Asia is finding increasing favour with the Panjabi traders, and the Moravian missionaries, by a bolder system of irrigation and the provision of storage for water, have largely increased the quantity of arable land. The Lahulis are chiefly Tibetans, but Hinduism is largely mixed up with Buddhism in the lower villages. All the gonpos, however, have been restored and enlarged during the last twenty years. In winter the snow lies fifteen ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... father and sons were talking indirectly at each other, through Mr. Jago and through me. When old Mr. Meadowcroft spoke disparagingly to his overlooker of some past mistake made in the cultivation of the arable land of the farm, old Mr. Meadowcroft's eyes pointed the application of his hostile criticism straight in the direction of his two sons When the two sons seized a stray remark of mine about animals in general, and applied it satirically to the mismanagement of ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... Marysville. The ranch consisted of several hundred acres of high land, which, at its western terminus, fell away about one hundred feet to the river bottom. There were a couple of hundred acres of this river bottom land which was arable. It was exceedingly rich and productive. Still west of this land was a well-wooded pasture, separated from the cultivated lands by a good board fence. The river bounded this pasture on the north ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... was fast descending behind it to the west, and the Black Hill was cast into deep shade, whilst the sun's rays shooting down two valleys on either side gave the grass the appearance of young wheat. The extent of arable land in the valley of the Inman is very considerable, but in point of scenery bears no comparison with the first. I do not know whether I have made it sufficiently clear that there is a high range at the back of the coast hereabouts. If not, I would observe that it runs uninterruptedly from Mount ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... obsequious swain has been rewarded for his attentions though they have been continued through so many weary months; but we shall never be able entirely to solve these mysteries till we become possessed of the rare ring sent to the King of Sarra by the King of Arable, 'by the vertue whereof' his daughter understood 'the language of all ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... his tour. "Tall cedars replaced the oak and beech; the scanty herbage was covered with hoar-frost; the clear brooks murmured chillingly down the unshaded gullies; and a grand line of sterile peaks to the south showed me that I was approaching the backbone of the Balkan. There is a total want of arable land in this part of Servia, and the pasture is neither good nor abundant; but the Ybar is the most celebrated stream in Servia for large quantities of trout." Still ascending the steep mountain-paths, while the scenery became wilder and wilder, they at length reached the convent of Studenitza, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Czernowitz being 46.9 deg. F. No less than 43.17% of the total area is occupied by woodland, and the very name of the country is derived from the abundance of beech trees. Of the remainder 27.59% is occupied by arable land, 12.68% by meadows, 10.09% by pastures and 0.78% by gardens. The soil of Bukovina is fertile, and agriculture has made great progress, the principal products being wheat, maize, rye, oats, barley, potatoes, flax and hemp. Cattle-rearing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... up on the inner side of the moat, on which cannons were mounted. Between the encampment and the river there remained a strip only 24 ft. wide; and behind, on the side of the mountain, there was a plot of arable land a little more than 100 ft. long and 60 ft. wide, where Champlain had corn ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... time, began to be more frequent, whereby arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived) were turned ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... few cat-fish from the river, plenty of a vegetable called meholakea; some limes, a few melons, cucumbers, dried barmea, a vegetable common in Egypt; beans, durra, duchan, tobacco of the country, plenty of gum arable, with which, by the way, Sennaar abounds, (the natives use it in their cookery;) drugs and spices brought from Gidda, among which I observed ginger, pepper, and cloves; and great quantities of dried odoriferous herbs found in Sennaar, with which the natives season ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... gas, iron ore, lead, zinc, gold, tin, limestone, salt, clay, chalk, gypsum, potash, silica sand, slate, arable land ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... But it was enough for the present. The remaining acres would do for spring-sowing, or as fallows, or for pasture. On the whole estate of thirty thousand acres there were only a few hundred acres of meadow-land, all the rest was arable and of the first class. If the next year should be favorable, the harvest would ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... Romans under Agricola (81 A.D.) crossed the Border, we should recognise little but the familiar hills and mountains. The rivers, in the plains, overflowed their present banks; dense forests of oak and pine, haunted by great red deer, elks, and boars, covered land that has long been arable. There were lakes and lagoons where for centuries there have been fields of corn. On the oldest sites of our towns were groups of huts made of clay and wattle, and dominated, perhaps, by the large stockaded house ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... they proceeded to view the entire property. It consisted of the mansion-house, with the lands and buildings adjacent, and of three farms. About half the land was arable, a small part laid down in meadow; about half was wood, bordered with barren sand. The castle and the village lay about the middle of the great clearing; two of the farms were at opposite points of the compass, east and ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... is that of luxuriant fertility. It would be difficult to find another portion of the world, of the same extent, which has so little useless land as the inhabited parts of the American Union. Most of the mountains are arable, and even the prairies, in this section of the republic, are of deep alluvion. The same is true between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Between the two lies the broad belt, of comparative desert, which is the scene of this tale, appearing ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... cherished habits of a hardy, natural-minded, and primitive people, they had little by little been left a prey to their own faults in order that their unworthy mistress might plead their disorders as an excuse for her tyranny. Agriculture languished, and the minute subdivision of arable land finally rendered its ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... On the arable land which lay outside of the forest, and which really belonged to him, there were the houses of the men who farmed his fields, and on the outskirts of the woods were scattered here and there the cabins of the hunters and guides he employed, and these men knew ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... supply the Burton breweries. A large part of the Trent valley is under permanent pasture, being devoted to cattle-feeding and dairy-farming. This industry has prospered greatly, and the area of permanent pasture encroaches continually upon that of arable land. Derbyshire cheeses are exported or sent to London in considerable quantities; and cheese fairs are held in various parts of the county, as at Ashbourne and Derby. A feature of the upland districts is the total absence of hedges, and the substitution of limestone ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... began to tell me about himself and his wealth, Rosset backing him up and putting in the most telling parts. He had very extensive property, and the more level parts of it were certainly valuable, consisting of 200 journaux of good arable land: the forests through which we walked were his, and he possessed three montagnes and chalets higher up on the mountain. The glaciere was his own property; and two years ago he had discovered another in the neighbourhood, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... too late—too late. Don't let us talk any more of my marrying. Is not this the five-acre field?' And soon he was discussing the relative values of meadow, arable and pasture land with his father, as heartily as if he had never known Molly, or loved Cynthia. But the squire was not in such good spirits, and went but heavily into the discussion. At the end of it ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... present in a much less interesting country. One single walk over the undulatory turf plain shows everything which is to be seen. It is not at all unlike Cambridgeshire, only that every hedge, tree and hill must be leveled, and arable land turned into pasture. All South America is in such an unsettled state that we have not entered one port without some sort of disturbance. At Buenos Ayres a shot came whistling over our heads; it is a noise I had never ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... payment of 10 marks a year for a priest to celebrate at his altar, and 50s. a year for the special keeping of the anniversary of his death, December 3rd. There was a very fine image of the B.V.M. beside this tomb. Barnet, Bishop of Bath and Wells, gave a water mill, ninety acres of arable and pasture, and eight acres of wood, all lying at Navestock, in Essex, to the Dean and Chapter for the saying of certain prayers and a de profundis beside this image for the souls of the faithful; and there were constant ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... is the zone of arable steppes, or prairies, once the home of the Cossack, the nomad who led here the life of a shepherd king, moving about as the condition of pasture and flock required. Most of this land is now under cultivation, and with careful farming produces ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... translated by Mr. Ralston from the German of Von Schiefner, we have what appears to be a very much garbled form of an old Buddhist version of our story. The heroine is married to a young merchant, whose father gives him some arable land in a hill district, where he resides with ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... freed from the ruins of the Welshman's castle might be cultivated. He remembered commandeering the fisherman's boat, and rowing himself out, taking a tape to measure, and how, after much application of the tape, he had satisfied himself that there was enough arable land in the island for a garden; he had walked down the island certain that a quarter of an acre could grow enough vegetables to support a hermit, and that a goat would be able to pick a living among the bushes and the tussocked grass: even a hermit ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... down which the South Branch flows is similar on its scale, as are many other arable strips and patches of the upper Basin that remember Shawnee days and Civil War guerillas. Near Washington, farms are waging a losing rearguard action against speculation and sprawl, but in the Piedmont to the north and west of the city lie some of the most pleasant rural ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... Quintin, "this farm contains two hundred and two acres of arable land, good land, no better, in fact, in the country. Besides, we have twenty acres of wooded land and a tenant house. This machinery is the best that we could find. We have two men—Giles and Ephraim; they are the best hands we know of, for Mr. Rixey trained them from their ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... cough, the hives, and the rash? but she does not mind leonine leprosy and elephantiasis any more than a great and enlightened civilisation minds freckles. Soap would soon remove her anxious distress about foreign distempers. The reason arable land is so scarce in Spain is because the people squander so much of it on their persons, and then when they die it is improvidently buried ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of every dell we found little homesteads embosomed in wild brush and vines wherever the recession of the hills left patches of arable ground. These secluded flats are settled mostly by Italians and Germans, who plant a few vegetables and grape-vines at odd times, while their main business is mining and prospecting. In spite of all the natural beauty of these dell cabins, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... substantial ridders, spankers, and rose-nobles; then with them purchases a good number of farms, barns, houses, out-houses, thatched houses, stables, meadows, orchards, fields, vineyards, woods, arable lands, pastures, ponds, mills, gardens, nurseries, oxen, cows, sheep, goats, swine, hogs, asses, horses, hens, cocks, capons, chickens, geese, ganders, ducks, drakes, and a world of all other necessaries, and in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... about the world of men if less about gas engines. Especially did the new sport put him into closer contact with old Sharon Whipple. Having first denounced the golf project as a criminal waste of one hundred and seventy-five acres of prime arable land, Sharon had loitered about the scene of the crime to watch the offenders make a certain kind of fools of themselves. From the white bench back of the first tee this cynic would rejoice mirthfully at topped or sliced drives or the wild swing that spends all its vicious ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... give me your best legal advice, having no professional friend besides but Robinson and Talfourd, with neither of whom at present I am on the best terms. My brother's widow left a will, made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named sole Executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which it seems she held under Covert Baron, unknown to my Brother, to the heirs of the body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by her first husband, in fee simple, recoverable by fine—invested property, mind, for there is the difficulty—subject to leet ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... seem to be as rationally economic as one for the Labrador children. I never see a cliff face from which an avalanche has removed the supersoil and herbage without thinking in pity of the crowded sections of China, where tearing up even the roots of trees for fuel has permitted so much arable land to be denuded by rains that the food supply gets smaller while the population ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... selecting the highest ground in this region, had a sense of this excellence of the climatic effect we do not know; but their descendants believe that such was their reason for settling the highest arable land on the Hill before the valleys or the lower slopes ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... of the same color as the general surface about them, they are not easily distinguishable at a distance. There seems to be a decided propensity among the natives for choosing the hills as an habitation, even when their arable lands are miles away in the valley; the salubrity of the more elevated location may be the chief consideration, but a swiftly flowing mountain rivulet near his habitation is to the Mohammedan a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... were glad to escape from Paris to their villas at Chelles or Compiegne. But the civil power of the Church grew apace. In the early sixth century the abbots of St. Germain des Pres at Paris held possession of nearly 90,000 acres of land, mostly arable, in various provinces: their annual revenue amounted to about L34,000 of our money: they ruled over more than 10,000 serfs. From a list of the lands held in Paris in the ninth century by the abbey of St. Pierre ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... they placed upon their own shoulders as they approached the bridge. Amongst them were fishermen from Eyemouth and Coldingham, shepherds from the hills with slaughtered sheep, millers, and the cultivators of the patches of arable ground beyond the moor. With them, also, were a few women carrying eggs, butter, cheese, and poultry; and at the head of the procession (for the narrowness of the drawbridge over the frightful chasm, beyond which the castle ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... metal—good enough for swords and scissors—but not for food. You think, perhaps, that your iron is wonderfully useful in a pure form, but how would you like the world, if all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire—if all your arable ground, instead of being made of sand and clay, were suddenly turned into flat surfaces of steel—if the whole earth, instead of its green and glowing sphere, rich with forest and flower, showed nothing but the image of the vast furnace of a ghastly engine—a globe of black, lifeless, excoriated ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... amount of water, great tides, rocks and shoals outside as well as within. But it has a good channel, if it were well marked out. The land, so far as I have seen it along the shores of the river, is very poor, for there are only rocks on all sides. There are a great many small oaks, and very little arable land. Fish abound here, as in the other rivers which I have mentioned. The people live like those in the neighborhood of our settlement; and they told us that the savages, who plant the Indian corn, dwelt very far in the interior, and that ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... found in his "Flores Paradise." Another work, entitled "Dyuers Soyles for manuring pasture & arable land," enumerates, in addition to the usual odorous galaxy, such extraordinarily new matters (in that day) as "salt, street-dirt, clay, Fullers earth, moorish earth, fern, hair, calcination of all vegetables, malt dust, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... skirted by a country road, bordered with majestic trees, and with farm-houses standing all along its winding course. Beyond, the land rises, and the slope is checkered, to the foot of the hills, with arable fields. The view is bounded by the craggy sides of the great hills which separate this quiet vale from the broad valley of the Connecticut. Here, all is soft and tranquil beauty. But just beyond the rugged barrier of those western hills ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... infertile gully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese peasant once cultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is now able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock in heaps and saving a few intervening arable remnants from ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... re-establishment of slavery, the recrudescence of piracy, [58] the reincarnation of barbarism. How great a pity this would be may be inferred from the fact that Mindanao forms nearly one-third of the Archipelago in area, and exceeds Java in arable land. Now, Java supports a ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... had disappeared in the spring of the year 1629, Champlain caused all the arable land to be sown. By the end of May his stock of provisions was nearly exhausted, and he therefore decided to send Desdames to Gaspe with a group of the inhabitants. Hubou, Desportes and Pivert took passage on Desdames' barque, hoping ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... the King's troops were committed to the lead of Walpole, who had also two six-pounders and a howitzer. After an hour-and-a-half's march he found the country changed its character near the village of Clogh (clo'), where the road descending from the level arable land, dips suddenly into the narrow and winding pass of Tubberneering. The sides of the pass were lined with a bushy shrubbery, and the roadway at the bottom embanked with ditch and dike. On came the confident Walpole, never dreaming that these silent thickets were so soon to re-echo the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... both. If a family cultivated a patch of land, the neighbors did not trespass. Among the Indians of the Southwest the village owned the agricultural land and "periodically its governor, elected by popular vote, would distribute or redistribute the arable acres among his constituents who were able to care for them."[7] The Indians believed that the land, like the sunlight, was a gift of the Great Spirit to his children, and they were as willing to part with the ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... a kindly river did the work of a million men and made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... of Deux-Sevres, which is primarily an agricultural department, consists of arable land. Wheat and oats are the main cereals. Potatoes and mangold-wurzels are the chief root-crops. Niort is a centre for the growing Of vegetables (onions, asparagus, artichokes, &c.) and of angelica. Considerable quantities of beetroot are raised ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the most valuable in the State, I may say, with perfect confidence, in the whole Union; unrivalled water power, magnificent pastures and arable land capable of producing crops of corn such as the world has never seen. All that is required to develop their resources is capital and labour, and labour will always follow where capital leads the way. When once the country is opened up, we shall drain Canada of her population, and the inhabitants ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... of our landed estates is the enrichment of the kingdom; for, without this, how could we carry on our manufactures, or prosecute our commerce? We should look upon the English farmer as the most useful member of society. His arable grounds not only supply his fellow-subjects with all kinds of the best grain, but his industry enables him to export great quantities to other kingdoms, which might otherwise starve; particularly Spain and Portugal; for, in one year, there have been exported 51,520 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... peasantry of the eighteenth century. This was the conversion of the best land from tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land. Lecky quotes a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the "best arable land in the kingdom in immense tracts wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few individuals, and at the same time the junctions of our highways and streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures." This change from arable to pasture has been a ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... extravagant fondness herein arrived at that pitch, that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books of knight-errantry, and carried home all he could lay hands ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... nomad tribes whose numerous fields of pasturage, and give and incomparable horsemen form the birth to those nomad tribes, in chief defence of the empire. whose numerous and incomparable horsemen the chief defence of the empire,[39] as of all Oriental states, (15 a) is to be found. The rich arable lands in the heart The rich arable lands in the of the (54) empire produce an interior produce grain enough to (2) incalculable quantity of support four times the present grain, capable not only of ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... gave notice of an association for the purpose of enabling persons of all ranks to enjoy the pleasures of the chase. A park of great extent is to be taken on lease near Paris; its extent is about six thousand acres, partly arable, and partly forest ground. The plan is, to open it to subscribers during six months—viz. from September 1 to March 1, an ample stock of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... little known. These bodies have received the collective names Humus and Geine. We shall employ the term humus to designate this mixture, whether occurring in peat, swamp-muck, salt-mud, in composts, or in the arable soil. Its chemical characters are much the same, whatever its appearance or mode of occurrence; and this is to be expected since it is always formed from the same materials ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... Ezra is one of the principal villages of the Haouran; it contains about one hundred and fifty Turkish and Druse families, and about fifty of Greek Christians. It lies within the precincts of the Ledja, at half an hour from the arable ground: it has no spring water, but numerous cisterns. Its inhabitants make cotton stuffs, and a great number of millstones, the blocks for forming which, are brought from the interior of the Ledja; ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... features. Not that there be not sweet things to interest in such a landscape, for a mind free enough and eyes unspoiled. There are tints of colouring in a flat pasture field, to feed the eye that can find them; there are forms and shadows in a rolling arable country, sweet and changing and satisfying. There are effects in tufts of spared woodland, and colours in wild vegetation, and in the upturned brown and umber of fields of ploughed earth, and in the grey lichened rocks and the clear tints of their broken edges. There are the associations ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... castle is very beautiful; the country round about it pleasant and fruitful, and distinguished into meadows, pastures, and arable fields, and the river Sale passing through them, which loseth itself about half a league from thence into a great lake. The river is navigable with boats of about twenty or thirty tons, many leagues together, going through the lake also; it is not muddy, ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... for the construction of ships, difficult communication by land, all tempted the inhabitants to a seafaring life. While the sea drew, the land drove in the same direction. There a hilly or mountainous interior putting obstacles in the way of landward expansion, sterile slopes, a paucity of level, arable land, an excessive or deficient rainfall withholding from agriculture the reward of tillage—some or all of these factors combined to compel the inhabitants to seek on the sea the livelihood denied by the land. Here both forces worked in ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... place now occupied by the park of Saint Cloud. When we turn up the pages in the estate book dealing with Villaris, we find that there was a man called Bodo living there.[1] He had a wife called Ermentrude and three children called Wido and Gerbert and Hildegard; and he owned a little farm of arable and meadow land, with a few vines. And we know very nearly as much about Bodo's work as we know about that of a smallholder in France today. Let us try and imagine a day in his life. On a fine spring morning towards the end of Charlemagne's reign Bodo gets up early, because ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... those little bits of woods and copses which one finds in a country-side that has long been subdued and replenished, turned into arable land and pasture, with all the wildness and the irregularity ploughed and combed out of it; but still one comes upon some piece of dingle, where there is perhaps an awkward tilt in the ground, or some ancient excavation, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... land of vast forests, of fertile soil, of rich minerals, of navigable rivers. The very fact that it has so long sustained such a vast population suggests the richness of its resources. There are said to be 600,000,000 acres of arable soil, and so thriftily is it cultivated that many parts of the Empire are almost continuous gardens and fields. Four hundred and nineteen thousand square miles are believed to be underlaid with coal. Baron von Richthofen thinks that 600,000,000,000 tons of it are anthracite, and that ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... our country was enabled, by its vast extent of arable land, as well as by its cheap conveyance and skilful handling of freights, to sweep into the German markets agricultural products of various sorts, especially meats, and to undersell the native German producers. This naturally vexed the landed proprietors, so that we finally ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... very little. Her protege would be much better married to a spirited woman who had seen the world, than to a mere farmer's daughter who had never looked beyond her cheese. Old Gardon would be an admirable adviser, and if he were taken into the menage she would add to the endowment another arable field, and grass for two more cows. If she liked the young woman on inspection, the marriage should take place in ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... capital equipment and food must be imported. Bermuda's industrial sector is small, although construction continues to be important; the average cost of a house in June 2003 had risen to $976,000. Agriculture is limited, only 20% of the land being arable. ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... ten miles distant from the Massanuttons, and the space between them, the Luray or the South Fork Valley, through which a single road leads northward, is clothed by continuous forest. West of the great mountain, a broad expanse of green pasture and rich arable extends to the foothills of the Alleghanies, dotted with woods and homesteads, and here, in the Valley of the North Fork, is freer air ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... was granted to the Catholics, by which they were allowed to take a lease of fifty acres of bog, and half an acre of arable land for a house; but this holding should not be within a mile of any town. In 1773 an attempt was made to tax absentees; but as they were the principal landowners, they easily defeated the measure. A pamphlet was published ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... pursuing the course of the river, a short distance below, on the opposite bank, it will be seen that a large quantity of the earth introduced into the current by the falling of the banks, has been thrown up in large masses, forming new land, which, in a few seasons, becomes arable. That which is not thus deposited, as already stated, is transported below, dropping here and there on the way, until what is left reaches the Gulf, and is precipitated upon the 'bars' and 'delta,' at the mouth. It not unfrequently happens that planters along the river ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pressing did it require to induce Mr. Weller, the long gamekeeper, and the two boys, to station themselves on the grass, at a little distance, and do good execution upon a decent proportion of the viands. An old oak afforded a pleasant shelter to the group, and a rich prospect of arable and meadow land, intersected with luxuriant hedges, and richly ornamented with wood, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... century, Scotland was a very poor country. It consisted mostly of mountain and moorland; and the little arable land it contained was badly cultivated. Agriculture was almost a lost art. "Except in a few instances," says a writer in the 'Farmers' Magazine' of 1803, "Scotland was little better than a barren waste." Cattle could with difficulty be kept alive; and the people in some ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Of the arable land of the manor the lord reserved as much as needful for his own use. The lord's land was called his "demesne," or domain. The rest of the land he allotted to the peasants who were his tenants, They cultivated their holdings in common. A farmer, instead of having his land ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the verb to earland is still a living expression; and a Yorkshireman, who has more Saxon than Latin in him, will not write "arable land," but "earable land." A Yorkshire clergyman tells me that this orthography has been perpetuated in a local act of parliament of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... holdings and the fact that they were hemmed in by the master's land, Nekhludoff grew only more determined to put an end to his ownership, and give the land to the peasants. From the books and his conversations with the clerk he learned that, as before, two-thirds of the best arable land was cultivated by his own men, and the rest by peasants who were paid five rubles per acre—that is to say, for five rubles the peasant undertook to plow, harrow and sow an acre of land three times, then mow it, bind or press it, and ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... means we were enabled last winter to keep 1,500 sheep on about 650 acres of arable, and 350 acres of dry upland pasture—chiefly park surrounding a mansion. The arable land does not very well bear folding in winter, as a preparation for spring corn. Neither climate nor soil are favorable to turnips, ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... parable, Are false, but may he render'd also true, By those who sow them in a land that 's arable. 'T is wonderful what fable will not do! 'T is said it makes reality more bearable: But what 's reality? Who has its clue? Philosophy? No: she too much rejects. Religion? Yes; but which of ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... no bread, but only boil those kinds of grain with milk or meat for their victual. Their wheat, indeed, does not render so much, but this they use only to make vermicelli, and pastes of that description. No spot of arable land is left untilled; and their cattle are infinitely prolific, so that when they take the field every man is followed by six, eight, or more horses for his own use. Thus you may clearly perceive how the population of those parts ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... as Smith realized and admitted, were not all arable but many of them had considerable timber. Such property today would be considered valuable, but in those days of plentitude it passed as undesirable. Some of his enemies accused him of making for himself a reputation for generosity by giving ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... taking flight at those words, he went on in a voice calculated to reach the great assembly of farmers which he now saw before him with their backs turned—"and never shall we take it away till we have reduced every acre in the country to an arable condition. In the future not only must we feed ourselves, but our dogs, our horses, and our children, and restore the land to its pristine glory in the front rank of the world's premier industry. But me no ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
