"Tilled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves have organized communism in capital. Joint stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return to individual properties as the basis of our production would smash civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to you the particular length of rail, the particular seat in the railway carriage, the particular lever in the engine that is his very own and nobody else's; and he will shun you ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... need of this people she, in connection with her daughter, Caroline DeGreen, are untiring in their efforts to establish a permanent or systematized work. They have established this much needed institution on four hundred acres of good land, which is tilled by colored people, who receive pay for their work in provision, clothing, or money until they can purchase cheap land for ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... cabbage, and vere a leek, answered the merchant. But, rr, rrr, rrrr, rrrrr, hoh Robin, rr, rrrrrrr, you don't understand that gibberish, do you? Now I think on't, over all the fields where they piss, corn grows as fast as if the Lord had pissed there; they need neither be tilled nor dunged. Besides, man, your chemists extract the best saltpetre in the world out of their urine. Nay, with their very dung (with reverence be it spoken) the doctors in our country make pills that cure seventy-eight kinds of diseases, the least of which ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... happy all through the long morning for nothing!... Of course!... I rushed with hurried strides up Ullavold-sveien, past St. Han's Hill, until I came to the open fields; on through the narrow quaint lanes in Sagene, past waste plots and small tilled fields, and found myself at last on a country road, the end of which I could ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... of as wild and mischievous a band of crows as you ever heard tell of. There was one particular farm in our territory we loved to visit. The owner's name was Silas Whimple and he was the grouchiest, most miserly man in the county. He lived alone and what part of the ground that was tilled, he did it himself. As much to tease as to eat, we would pay him an occasional flying visit, digging up his newly planted seeds, nibbling at the young green shoots, or, later on, scratching up his potatoes. All his shouting and screaming did not scare ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... peaks of Aidzu scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the sunlight. The plain of Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in the south, and the frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is a perfect garden of Eden, "tilled with a pencil instead of a plough," growing in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants, walnuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates; a smiling and plenteous ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... approached a shrine with greater earnestness. So eager was he that he did not fully appreciate the glorious beauties of the landscape. The Rivanna River looked like a ribbon of silvery satin laid on green velvet, all in striking contrast with the red soil of the tilled fields. The Blue Ridge mountains, nearly fifty miles distant, were, in the clear air, a massive and misty blue background for the picturesque Ragged Mountains ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... wages. 'You couldn't have said anything more hurtful to my feelings,' Josh told him, and knocked him down. There was a hole in one of his orchards where they'd been rooting up an old apple-tree. He put the fellow in that, tilled him up to his neck in earth, and kept him there till he apologised. Not at all an easy thing for a Justice of the Peace to pass off: but, bless you, folks said that he came of a clever county family, ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back from the town—called in derision by river men "Mudcat Landing"—was almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the town were in the same state. The ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... founded on a denial of human rights, and under whose sway south of the Potomac more than half of the territory of the old Thirteen Colonies—soil once fertilized by the best blood of the Revolution—should, for generations to come, continue to be tilled by the unrequited toil ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... twenty Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes, Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned Pasture into Tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday in the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still." It seems not improbable that Birnam wood should come ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... too swift for them. [Sidenote: High mountaines. Manured grounds.] Vpon the 7. day there appeared to the South of vs huge high mountaines, and we entred into a place which was well watered, and fresh as a garden, and found land tilled and manured. [Sidenote: Kenchat a village of the Saracens.] The eight day after the feast of All Saints, we arriued at a certain towne of the Saracens, named Kenchat, the gouernour whereof met our guide ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... villages of Atchefur are large and well built; some, such as Limju, can rank with small towns; but the people had a poor and miserable appearance. The small amount of cultivation indicated but too plainly that they expected another plunder, and just tilled the soil enough to meet ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... its raids on north and south. The dark, massy pine-woods on the left side of the glen are broken at intervals by fields as they threaten to come down upon the river, and their shelter lends an air of comfort and warmth to the glen. On the right the sloping land is tilled from the bank above the river up to the edge of the moor that swells in green and purple to the foot of the northern rampart of mountains, but on this side also the glen here and there breaks into belts of fir, which fling their kindly ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... worth a ton of cure. The most effectual way to eliminate germ diseases is to remove the cause—the food supply of disease germs. The fact that many germs are plants, not animals, does not weaken the analogy, for weeds do not get a chance in well-tilled soil. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... guides indicating when the vineyard needs to be tilled. The vineyardist who is but a casual observer of the relation of vineyard operations to the life events and the welfare of his vines will take the crop of weeds as his guide. It is, of course, necessary to keep ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... perceptible wind, rather by the pulse of the sun's rays, the froth shook and parted: and then behold, deep in the crevasses, vignetted and shining, an acre or two of the earth of man's business and fret—tilled slopes of the Lothians, ships dotted on the Forth, the capital like a hive that some child had smoked—the ear of fancy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... energetically, while a lad sat literally between a pair of native bellows, one of which he blew with his left hand, the other with his right and, beyond these, groups of men and women wrought at their primitive looms or tilled their vegetable ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... in their heads. At this thought the squire raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked good to him—the small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flower beds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... pursued without regard to the particular form of government established in Boston. In Massachusetts the election of deputies stopped, but in other respects the town meetings carried on their usual business. In other colonies no changes whatever took place. Men tilled the soil, went to church, gathered in town meetings, and ordered their ordinary affairs as they had done for half a century. The seaports felt the change more than did the inland towns, for the enforcement of the ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... ascended a long valley, that of the Esaro, where along the deep watercourse trickled a scarce perceptible stream. On either hand were hills of pleasant outline, tilled on the lower slopes, and often set with olives. Here and there came a grassy slope, where shepherds or goatherds idled amid their flocks. Above the ascent a long tunnel, after which the line falls again towards the sea. The landscape took a nobler beauty; mountains ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... behind a friendly paper, and distracted myself with an impartial view of the surrounding country. It was early in the afternoon, and the full sunshine lay hot and strong upon the tilled and furrowed fields that stretched away as far as the eye could see on either side. Picturesque little farm houses skirted the road here and there, and stalwart men with their bronzed arms bared to the ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... three hours and a half, and back again towards night in the same length of time. The road is mostly located along the sea-coast, or rather in sight of it, so that in many places the ocean comes in to give additional interest and beauty to the scenery of green valleys, well-wooded hills, and richly tilled land, Fujiyama, the one volcanic mountain of Japan, nearly always in sight. Rarely is such rich and varied vegetation to be seen, combined with beautiful outlines of hill-side and mountain top, here covered with an infinite variety of firs. The ancient town of Kamakura ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... was a world distracted with conflict. On one side there is an agricultural community bent on industry, and, like the Hindus, even at this day, valuing as most sacred the cattle which form their chief substance. On the other hand, there are men who dwell on the outskirts between the tilled land and the wilderness, who are constantly making raids on the farms, driving off and killing the cattle for sacrifice and for food, and ruining the fields by destroying the irrigating works on which their fertility depends. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Atoua, who, though I knew it not as yet, had offered up her flesh and blood that I might be saved alive. For she had been gathering simples, in which she had great skill, by the water's edge, not knowing that there was a lion near (and, indeed, the lions, for the most part, are not found in the tilled land, but rather in the desert and the Libyan mountains), and had seen from a distance that which I have set down. Now, when she was come, she knew me for Harmachis, and, bending herself, she made obeisance to me, and saluted me, calling me Royal, and ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... The old farmers, and only a very little time ago, would as soon have thought of flying as of opening their doors to strangers, and indeed their rooms were scarcely furnished in a way to receive them. On the other hand, many farmhouses are empty altogether, and the land is un-tilled, because it cannot be let at any price, and lapsing backwards into barbarism. Everything used to be so fixed: there was a sort of caste of farmers. A man born in a farmhouse never thought of anything else but farming, and waited and waited, perhaps till he was grey, to get a farm; now there ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... their land as you desired?" And the Chaldaeans said they would, if only they could rely on being fairly treated. [19] "Now," said Cyrus, turning to the Armenian king, "would you like that land of yours which is now lying idle to be tilled and made productive, supposing the workers paid you the customary dues?" "I would, indeed," said the king, "so much so that I am ready to pay a large sum for it. It would mean a great increase to my revenue." [20] ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... spake Menelaus, being come Into assembly last, and taken in hand The spokesman's staff: "Ye princes of our land, Adventurous Achaians, stout of heart, Good news I bring, that now we may depart Each to his home and kindred, each to his hearth And wife and children dear and well-tilled garth, Contented with the honour he has brought To me and mine, since I have what we've sought With bitter pain and loss. Yea, even now Hath Here crowned your strife and earned my vow Made these ten years come harvest, having drawn The veil from off those eyes than which ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward, Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired AEthiop people, Skilful with needle and loom, and the arts of the dyer and carver, Skilful, but feeble of heart; for they know not the lords of Olympus, Lovers of men; neither broad-browed Zeus, nor Pallas Athene, Teacher of ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... attraction. Father Bonnecamp stopped here for a day on his way back from the expedition of Celoron. "The situation," he says, "is charming. A fine river flows at the foot of the fortifications; vast meadows, asking only to be tilled, extend beyond the sight. Nothing can be more agreeable than the climate. Winter lasts hardly two months. European grains and fruits grow here far better than in many parts of France. It is the Touraine and Beauce of Canada."[43] ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... bought him a small share in a fishing-boat, besides enabling him to rent the tenement in the Doctor's House, and to make it habitable with a few sticks of furniture. Also he rented a potato-patch, beyond the coastguard's hut, around the eastward cliff, and tilled it assiduously. Being a man who could do with a very little sleep, he would often be found hard at work there by nine in the morning, after ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... bear hardships and fatigues in the shape of long journeys on horseback, but the severe, monotonous labour of the plough and the sickle was not to their taste. At first, therefore, they adopted a compromise. They had a portion of their land tilled by Russian peasants, and ceded to these a part of the produce in return for the labour expended; in other words, they assumed the position of landed proprietors, and farmed part of their land on ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... hands on board; and they say that at night you can hear the drowned men hailing their names. But my grandfather was the boldest man in Port Loe, and said he didn't care. So one Christmas Eve by daylight he and his mates went out and tilled the trammel; and then they came back and spent the fore-part of the evening over the eggy-hot, down to Oliver's tiddly-wink, to keep my grandfather's spirits up and also to show that the bet was made ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sell their lands and even themselves to the king for bread, and become from henceforth a population of royal slaves. The lands of Egypt were divided between the king and the priests; the peasantry tilled them for the state and for the temples, while the upper classes owed their wealth and position to the offices which ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... the prospect becomes more plainly rural. The Mineola trolley zooms along, between wide fields of tilled brown earth. There is an occasional cow; here and there a really old barn and farmhouse standing, incongruously, among the settlements of modern kindling-wood cottages; and a mysterious agricultural engine at work with a spinning fly-wheel. Against ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... summer evening. He was the most powerful man in all the Alf-thal, and few could lift the iron sledge-hammer he wielded as though it were a toy. Arras had twelve sons scarce less stalwart than himself, some of whom helped him in his occupation of blacksmith and armourer, while the others tilled the ground near by, earning from the rich soil of the valley such sustenance as the ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... Selden says, in places where twenty pounds a year had been distributed formerly, not a handful of meal was given away in his time, for the wedded clergy could not afford it. The confiscation of the lands where thousands had tilled the soil under the shadow of the monastery or the Church, was followed by a new system of cultivation, which deprived the peasants of their homes. The sheep, men said, were the cause of all the woe; and whole towns were pulled down to make room for them. The prelates of the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... truth of the influence of education upon the district in which I live. We have, thank heaven, free schools, or schools with some endowment, almost everywhere; and almost every one can read. But not because we have free or endowed schools, but because our land is, far more than elsewhere, tilled by men who are the owners of it; and as the population is not over crowded, and the vices which are quickened and cherished in a crowded population do not therefore prevail, parents have more ability and inclination to send their children to school; much more than in manufacturing districts, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and herds to clients and slaves. [Sidenote: This irregular system the germ of latifundia.] So originated those 'latifundia,' or large farms, which greatly contributed to the ruin of Rome and Italy. The tilled land grew less and with it dwindled the free population and the recruiting field for the army. Gangs of slaves became more numerous, and were treated with increased brutality; and as men who do not work for their ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... to bring the community to a common meal. Even now this habit, well known in this country as the "harvest supper," is the last to disappear. On the other hand, even when the fields had long since ceased to be tilled and sown in common, a variety of agricultural work continued, and continues still, to be performed by the community. Some part of the communal land is still cultivated in many cases in common, either for the use of the destitute, or for refilling the communal stores, or for using the produce ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... eminence is the Rocciola, the castle-crowned hillock to the north-east of the island, but as this hill must first have caught the expectant eye of Aeneas' steersman, perhaps the epithet is after all not so misplaced as would appear at first sight. Carefully tilled and densely populated, the island produces a large proportion of the fruit, vegetables, and olive oil, that are sold in the Naples market, and as it possesses no remains of antiquity, no medieval churches, no works of art, and but few beauties of nature ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... which their course lay is now dotted with mining-fields and townships, and fertile spaces of tilled tropical plantations. The coast-line rich in harbours is the busy haunt of steamers, and the narrow waterway between the mainland and the great barrier reef the home of many lightships. But when Kennedy and his party made ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... tilled the field. The stems grew strong, and the broad leaves gleamed in the sunshine. Still he kept the secret, spending many hours in watching ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... be remembered that when Ward Glazier left the Homestead, he removed to a neighboring farm known as the Goodrich Place,—a fine, comfortable, well-stocked and well-tilled farm, presenting an appearance of prosperity to the eye of the observer and calculated to make the impression that its owner must be well-to-do in the world. As we have heretofore hinted, however, Ward Glazier failed to prosper there. Why this was the case it is ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... imposed no tax on his villeins; these were mere chattels, ascripti gleboe, who tilled the land for their masters, and, as good serfs, could own nothing but the few utensils of their miserable hovels. They were just allowed what sufficed to support their own life and that of their families, and consequently they could bear no additional tax. But, in the complicated state of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... small beginnings. With the primitive stone-hammer and chisel very little could be done. The felling of a tree would occupy a workman a month, unless helped by the destructive action of fire. Dwellings could not be built, the soil could not be tilled, clothes could not be fashioned and made, and the hewing out of a boat was so tedious a process that the wood must have been far gone in decay before it could be launched. It was a great step in advance to discover the art of working in metals, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... conclusions with the overgrown and untrustworthy cucumber; so bidding the khan-jee adieu, I wheel off down the valley. I find a fair proportion of good road along this valley; the land is rich, and though but rudely tilled, it produces wonderfully heavy crops of grain when irrigated. Small villages, surrounded by neglected-looking orchards and vineyards, abound at frequent intervals. Wherever one finds an orchard, vineyard, or melon-patch, there is also almost certain to be seen a human being ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Mazdak were distributed to necessitous cultivators. The water system was carefully attended to; river and torrent courses were cleared of obstructions and straightened; the superfluous water of the rainy season was stored, and meted out with a wise economy to those who tilled the soil, in the spring ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... where the happiest half-year of all my boyhood's days was passed, is now dotted with several pleasant summer residences; its acres are marked off by fences and walls, and variegated with the diverse crops of well-tilled fields, and on its bay-side are occasional small wharves for pleasure-boats. Fifty years ago it was very different, and, (though, perhaps, I may be an old fogey and have that grey-hair fashion of thinking, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... after the other, by the horns, and forced them to the yoke. Near the plough was a helmet full of dragon's teeth, which he sowed as he ploughed the field, whilst with sharp pricks from his lance he compelled the monstrous creatures to draw the plough over the stony ground, which was thus speedily tilled. ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... as far south as the long, hook-shaped cape that is now known in all parts of the world as the famous Cape Cod. In a few years, the settlement began to assume a smiling aspect; houses were erected, and lands were tilled; the settlers planted seeds and gathered the increase thereof; gardens sprang out of the wilderness, peace and order reigned everywhere, and the savage tribes around viewed the kind, light-hearted colonists with admiration and fraternal good-will. It is pleasant to read this part of the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... big as Ruppin is in our time, and much more pleasantly situated. The country about is of comfortable, not unpicturesque character; to be distinguished almost as beautiful, in that region of sand and moor. Lakes abound in it; tilled fields; heights called "hills;" and wood of fair growth,—one reads of "beech-avenues" of "high linden-avenues:"—a country rather of the ornamented sort, before the Prince with his improvements settled there. Many lakes and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... any railroad and consists wholly of plantations. These plantations were formerly tilled by slaves, but since freedom came to those who gave their unrequited labor, the rich white planters have become poor and many of their sons now may be seen themselves following their plows, tilling the ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various
... the pirates that they were not to leave the village save in companies of 100 together. "One party of English soldiers stickled not to contravene these commands, being tempted with the desire of finding victuals." While they straggled in the tilled ground outside Venta Cruz they were attacked "with great fury" by a number of Spaniards and Indians, "who snatched up" one of them, and carried him off. What was done to this one so snatched up we are not told. Probably he was tortured ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... or eastward into the Jordan, Many of these hills are too dry and stony to be cultivated; but the slopes of some have fine grassy pastures, and the soil of the valleys is exceedingly rich, bearing figs, vines, olive trees, and corn in plenty, wherever it is properly tilled. With such hills, rivers, valleys, and pastures, it was truly a goodly land, and when God's blessing was on it, it was the fairest spot where man could live. When the Israelites entered it, every hill ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... thy land," said he, "and thou wilt see it all tilled and peopled as it was in its best estate." And he rose up and looked forth. And when he looked he saw all the lands tilled, and full of herds ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... the roadside benefits mankind and himself alike. A dirty and shabby dwelling gives a traveller a mean idea of its inmates. A cosey and clean house always speaks well for its inmates. Every homestead should be adorned with trees. The beauty and utility of trees. They are inseparable from well-tilled land and beautiful scenery. Wayside shrubbery: its use and abuse; it should be allowed where green grass ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... power of the lord was more absolute. From the most ancient times the German nobility considered themselves as the natural judges of those who were employed in the cultivation of their lands, looking on husbandmen with contempt, and only as a parcel of the soil which they tilled: to these the Saxons commonly allotted some part of their outlands to hold as tenants at will, and to perform very low services for them. The differences of these inferior tenants were decided in the lord's court, in which his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the country of the very tall men—that in which the traveller, after wandering amid grass that rose twenty feet over his head, lost himself in a vast thicket of barley forty feet high. I became the owner, in fancy, of a colony of Liliputians, that manned my eighteen-inch canoe, or tilled my apron-breadth of a garden; and, coupling with the men of Liliput the scene in Brobdignag, I had often set myself to imagine, when playing truant on the green slopes of the Hill, or among the swamps of the "Willows," how some of the vignette-like scenes by ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... end of the fourteenth century the ordinary wheat crop at Hawsted was in favourable years about a quarter to the acre, but it was often not more than 6 bushels; and this was on demesne land, usually better tilled than non-demesne land.[175] As for the labourer, it is well known that Thorold Rogers calls the fifteenth century his golden age, and seeing that his days' wages, if he 'found himself', were now 4d. and prices were hardly ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... They possessed great flocks of goats or sheep, but the horse and camel were unknown to them, as well as to their African neighbours. They lived chiefly upon the milk of their flocks, and the fruit of the date-palm. A section of them tilled the soil: settled around springs or wells, they managed by industrious labour to cultivate moderately sized but fertile fields, flourishing orchards, groups of palms, fig and olive trees, and vines. In spite of all this their resources were insufficient, and their position would ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... any man's land he can take it from him on payment—or without. Don't let any one tell you that I exaggerate; I have known it happen: I mean the without, and the man received feddan for feddan of desert, in return for his good land which he had tilled and watered. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... straight and regular. For so large a tree it is astonishing how many find nourishment and space to grow on any given area. The magnificent shafts push their spires into the sky close together with as regular a growth as that of a well-tilled field of grain. And no ground has been better tilled for the growth of trees than that on which these forests are growing. For it has been thoroughly ploughed and rolled by the mighty glaciers from the mountains, and sifted and mellowed and outspread in beds hundreds of ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... standing on the hillside, as if it had economically crept up there among the pines, so as to leave available for cultivation every inch of the wonderful soil of the plain. Below, the vast fertile plateau, tilled like a garden, lies to the westward, while to the east the rising undulations terminate in the bare uplands of Inca. Olive-trees cover the plain like an army, trees that were planted by the Moors a ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... the sixteenth century, their estate was about 1400l. a year; great for that time, but is now, exclusive of a few pepper-corns and red roses, long since withered, reduced to one little farm, tilled for bread by the owner. This setting glympse of a shining family, is as indifferent about the matter, and almost as ignorant, as the ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... laves The Latian coast where sprung the Epic war, 'Arms and the Man,' whose reascending star Rose o'er an empire,—but beneath thy right Tully reposed from Rome;—and where yon bar Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight, The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary bard's delight. ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... psychology is such an indispensable help to physiology, whose fault it only in small part is that she has hitherto made such little use of this assistance; for psychology has been late in beginning to till her fertile field with the plough of the inductive method, and it is only from ground so tilled that fruits can spring which can be of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... required a light soil, and the cultivation of this additional tract, which only stood in need of proper irrigation to become highly productive, had the advantage of increasing considerably the extent of the arable land of Egypt. In many places we still find evidence of its having been tilled by the ancient inhabitants, even to the late time of the Roman empire; and in some parts of the Fyoom the vestiges of beds and channels for irrigation, as well as the roots of vines, are found in sites lying far above the level of the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... as peasant proprietors. Wills still preserved show the existence at this period of many little farms of five or six hundred acres, scattered among the great plantations of the wealthy. They were tilled, not by servants or by slaves, but by the freemen that owned them. Depending for food upon their own cattle, hogs, corn, fruit and vegetables, and for the other necessities of life upon their little tobacco crops, the poor farmers of Virginia were ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... our aim must be to develop the Territory on the traditional American lines. We do not wish a region of large estates tilled by cheap labor; we wish a healthy American community of men who themselves till the farms they own. All our legislation for the islands should be shaped with this end in view; the well-being of the average home-maker must afford the true test of the healthy development of the ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... lean, overworked man, with knotted hands the colour of the soil he tilled and an inanely honest face, over which the freckles showed like splashes of mud freshly dried. As he spoke he gave his blue jean trousers an abrupt hitch ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... clear sky, and the sunset was still shining faintly in the west. Dark woods stood all about the old Hilton farmhouse, save down the hill, westward, where lay the shadowy fields which John Hilton, and his father before him, had cleared and tilled with much toil,—the small fields to which they had given the industry and even ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... hilltop and watched the light spread magically over a wide, wild landscape. Up to the morning of the previous day, his three years of life had been passed in protected, green-hedged valley pastures, amid tilled fields and well-stocked barns, beside a lilied water. This rugged, lonely, wide-visioned world into which fortune had so unexpectedly projected him filled him with wonder. Yet he felt strangely at ease therein. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... flowers, of every variety of loveliness, bloomed over the wide meadows and the broad savannahs, which the forest had not yet invaded. Berries and fruits were abundant. In many places the soil was surpassingly rich, and easily tilled; and all this was open, without money and without ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... such violence our thoughts intend, Such pride suits not the vanquished. Far away There lies a place—Greeks style the land to-day Hesperia—fruitful and of ancient fame And strong in arms. OEnotrian folk, they say, First tilled the soil. Italian is the name Borne by the later ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... gravely explained that the law said so and so and was such and such and that the law was incontestible in support of Astor's claim. The hard-working farmers listened with mystification and consternation. They could not make out how land which they or their fathers had paid for, and which they had tilled and improved, could belong to an absentee who had never turned a spade on it, had never seen it, all simply because he had the advantage of a legal technicality and a document emblazoned ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... find our way back;" and as the sailor slackened his grasp and gave his head a jerk in the direction of the well-tilled fields, the black made a bound and dashed off, turning sharply before reaching the edge of the trees which backed up the house and seemed to shelter a range of buildings, to raise his hoe and shake ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... the country parts) was growing steadily more cultured, serious, and dignified; and in all remote regions was assimilating its standards to the best in Italy. From the Scottish Lowlands to the Cataracts of the Nile a single people was coming into being; it was a wide and well-tilled field in which incarnate souls might grow. The satirists make lurid pictures of the evils Rome; and the evils were there, with perhaps not much to counter-balance them, in Rome. Paris has been latterly the capital of civilization; and one of its phases as such has been ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the little boy had been wont to visit the house of the next neighbor, to play with a child of some five summers, who had no other playmate. The next neighbor was a prosperous pioneer, being master of a substantial frame-house in the midst of a large and well-tilled clearing. At times, though rarely, because it was forbidden, the younger child would make his way by a rough wood road to visit his poor little disreputable playmate. At length it had appeared that the five-year-old was learning unsavory language ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... stretched lazily on the sward in front of his cave. The view from that point was a magnificent one. To the right and left, the bare and billowy leagues of Downs; in front, the vale, with its clustered homesteads, its threads of white roads running through orchards and well-tilled acreage, and, far away, a hint of grey old cities on the horizon. A cool breeze played over the surface of the grass and the silver shoulder of a large moon was showing above distant junipers. No wonder the ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... it should be. It is a holy feeling which makes a man cling to the bit of land which he has inherited from his parents, even to the cottage, though it be only a hired one, where he has lived for many a year, and where he has planted and tilled, perhaps with some that he loved, who are now dead and gone, or grown up and gone out into the world, till the little old cottage-garden is full of remembrances to him of past joys and past sorrows. The feeling which makes a man cling ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... wedding-suit, and his blackthorn cudgel, which we may suppose him to keep in reserve for the bailiff. However, he commences his farm; and then follow the shiftings, the scramblings, and the fruitless struggles to succeed, where success is impossible. His farm is not half tilled; his crops are miserable; the gale-day has already passed; yet, he can pay nothing until he takes it out of the land. Perhaps he runs away—makes a moonlight flitting—and, by the aid of his friends, succeeds in bringing the crop with him. The landlord, or agent, declares he is a knave; ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... feverish socialism of the French artisan. His love was for the soil—a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in it. Of Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast continually draining and devouring. Of all forms of government he was alike ignorant. So long as he tilled his little angle of land in peace, so long as the sun ripened his fruits and corn, so long as famine was away from his door and his neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with him, so long he was happy, and cared not whether he was thus happy under a monarchy, an ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... journey entirely across the forest without seeing the sun. The district consists of two lines of irregular ridgy hills, rising three hundred to four hundred feet above the neighboring country. These ridges are separated by a sort of valley like a Norwegian fjord, tilled with red marl. The rocks are generally volcanic products, with much slate, which is extensively quarried. Granite and sienite are also quarried, and at the chief granite-quarry—Mount Sorrel, an eminence which projects into the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... kindle fire, where the ship saileth, where shields blink, sun shineth, snow lieth, Finn glideth, fir-tree groweth, falcon flieth the live-long day and the fair wind bloweth straight under both her wings, where Heaven rolleth and earth is tilled, where the breezes waft mists to the sea, where corn is sown. Far shall he dwell from church and Christian men, from the sons of the heathen, from house and cave and from every home, in the torments of Hel. At PEACE we shall be, in ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... would have to be turned to the best advantage, poor soils enriched, and rich soils, which yet, under the present system, do not yield a quarter, no, nor a tenth of what they might produce, would be submitted to intensive culture, and tilled with as much care as a market garden or a flower pot. It is impossible to imagine any other practical solution of the problem; and, whether we like it or not, sheer force of circumstances ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... have no stockings to empty. The misery is frightful, I must admit it. Those who have any money prefer to spend it in the towns in a petty way rather than to risk it in agricultural or manufacturing enterprise. Factories are but slowly built, and the land is almost everywhere tilled in the same primitive manner as it was two thousand years ago. And then, too, take Rome—Rome, which didn't make Italy, but which Italy made its capital to satisfy an ardent, overpowering desire—Rome, which is still but a splendid bit ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... result of these last few years was, that one-third of the estate of which the fief consisted fell under "direct management;" the plain meaning of which is that they were, more or less, abandoned by their owners, and by the better class of the peasantry, and tilled by a ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... earth had a perfectly smooth surface the same everywhere, and if it were all tilled and cultivated in exactly the same way, there would be no such thing as rent." Examine ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... longer conducted to the temple of Victory amid the shouts of his grateful and admiring countrymen, but to the Freemason's, the Crown and Anchor, or the Town Hall, there to have his plate heaped with the choicest viands, his glass tilled from the best bins, and "his health drank with three times three, and a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Tartar sway, rude, vacillating and awfully cruel, extended from remote China to the shores of the Baltic. The Roman, Grecian and Russian empires thus crumbling, the world was threatened with an universal inundation of barbarism. Russian princes, with more or less power ruled over the serfs who tilled their lands, but there was no recognized head of the once powerful kingdom, and no Russian prince ventured to disobey the commands even of the humblest captain ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... was not easy for them to leave their homes and settle in a new, uncivilized country. There, as they knew, the winters were much longer and harder; the woods were filled with Indians, who at times were hostile, and before the soil could be tilled, trees had to be cut down and stones had to be removed. The future, therefore, was not promising. The life that awaited them, was not one of ease. Yet they were resolved to carry out their plan and secure a home in inhospitable America, where at ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... villainous intention, and bade him heal the incurable wounds of his mind with the drugs of repentance, he immediately returned to his former evil-doing, and leaving Samaria, since it had received the seeds of salvation, ran off to those who had not yet been tilled by the apostles, in order that, having deceived with his magic arts those who were easy to capture, and having enslaved them in the bonds of their own legendary lore,[59] he might make the teachings of the ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... could not join in the sacrificial feast of another, though the gods and sacrificial animals might be as a matter of fact the same. And the earth-goddess of each village was a separate form or part of the goddess, so that her land should only be tilled by the descendants of the cultivators who were in communion with her. The severe caste penalties attached to getting vermin in a wound, involving a long period of complete ostracism and the most ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... profligate members of the mendicant orders, unable to live any longer on the alms of the public, sunk, probably, into vicious penury. The frightful misgovernment of this country during the minority of Edward the Sixth, especially the conversion of tilled lands into pasture, had probably the effect of driving the surplus agricultural population into the great towns. But the social history of this whole period is as yet obscure, and I have no right to give an opinion on it. Another element, and a more potent ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... (now Liberty street); the Dutch Church in Nassau street, the Scotch Church in Little Queen street (now Cedar street), and also the Friends' Meeting House in Queen street (now Pearl street), near Cherry street, all tilled with the wretched victims of tyranny. He interceded in their behalf with the German General Heister, and with Henry Clinton, the British commander. He became acquainted with Knyphausen, William Smith the historian of New-York, Lord Howe, and others, and he has described, as an eye-witness, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... came to America in 1830, having been induced by the representations of my father's uncle, Thomas Gainor, then living in Albany, N. Y., to try their fortunes in the New World: They were born and reared in the County Cavan, Ireland, where from early manhood my father had tilled a leasehold on the estate of Cherrymoult; and the sale of this leasehold provided him with means to seek a new home across the sea. My parents were blood relations—cousins in the second degree—my mother, whose maiden name was Minor, having descended from a collateral branch ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... given up to market-gardening. There are whole fields of begonias out here, brilliant and vivid in the sun. They will never be sold, never gathered, never shown in the Palais des Fetes. It is the peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields, and their children that are being shown here, in the splendid and wonderful place where ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... procurators of the provinces of Philipinas—who by having taken the habit were not divested of human passions, for they considered it [i.e., the Recollect mission] as a grievance, instead of being moved by a just and charitable zeal—interested themselves in that report. There was much that had to be tilled and cleared. Whole provinces were begging for spiritual aid. But now, since their zeal was mitigated, they were excusing themselves from labors, and were contenting themselves with tranquillity. To say that new missions ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... the funeral guests, who came in families, companies, and crowds. That so well-to-do a farmer as Jake Getz, one who owned his farm "clear," should make a practice of hiring out as a funeral hostler, with the humbler farmers who only rented the land they tilled, was one of the facts which gave him his reputation for ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... few indeed would have dreamed of sharing with him. The labourers on the land were serfs, and had no feelings,—that is, none that could be recognised by the upper classes. They were liable to be sold with the land which they tilled; nor could they leave their "hundred" without a passport. Their sons might not be educated to anything but agriculture; their daughters could not be married without paying a fine to the master. Worse things than these are told of some, for ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... influence and the prestige of his name penetrated to every nook of that vast yet undeveloped kingdom was the phenomenon which slowly but surely impressed me. I was but a passing traveller, surveying from a distance and at large that vast plain of humanity; but I could see that it was systematically tilled by ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... northern shore is subject to frequent and disastrous gales from the N. and N.W. Only about two-fifths of the arable land is good. In spite of this and the cold, wet and windy climate, progressive landlords and tenants keep a considerable part of the acreage of large farms successfully tilled. In 1824 James Traill of Ratter, near Dunnet, recognizing that it was impossible to expect tenants to reclaim and improve the land on a system of short leases, advocated large holdings on long terms, so ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... de Monts and Champlain received visits from many Indians, differing entirely from either the Etchemins or the Armouchiquois. They found the soil tilled and cultivated, and the corn in the gardens was about two feet in height. Beans, pumpkins and squash were also in flower. The place was very pleasant and agreeable at the time, but Champlain believed the weather was very severe ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... Rutton Singh and Attar Singh were the elder of four brothers. These four held land in—what was the village's name?—oh, Pishapur, near Thori, in the Banalu Tehsil of Patiala State, where men can still recognise right behaviour when they see it. The two younger brothers tilled the land, while Rutton Singh and Attar Singh took service with the Regiment, according to the custom ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... taken from Pipart, loc. cit., is the Mexican pictograph for soil cultivated, i.e., tilled and planted. Fig. 221, from the same authority, shows the sprouts coming from the cultivated soil, and may be compared with the signs for grass and grow on ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... Event and circumstance upon the earth, Though favours fall on those who none esteem, And insult and indifference greet worth, Though poverty repays a life of toil, And riches spring where idle feet have trod, And storms lay waste the patiently tilled soil - Yet Justice sways the ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the wood ENONCH-BALSE, and the fruit, the which is as cubebs, they clepe ABEBISSAM, and the liquor that droppeth from the branches they clepe GUYBALSE. And men make always that balm to be tilled of the Christian men, or else it would not fructify; as the Saracens say themselves, for it hath been often-time proved. Men say also, that the balm groweth in Ind the more, in that desert where Alexander spake to the trees of the sun and of the moon, but I have not seen it; for I have not been ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... nearness of the borders of Savoy, where it is very common. The valley is wide at this particular point, and a fair number of houses pleasantly situated, either in the little plain or along the side of the mountain stream, lend human interest to the well-tilled spot, a stronghold with no apparent outlet among the ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... is supposed to dim the eye, seemed to improve the ocular views of Joel Newschool amazingly, for he had been enabled in his late years to see that a vast difference of caste existed between those that tilled the soil, wielded the sledge hammer, or drove the jack-plane, and those that were merely the idle spectators of such operations. He no longer groped in the darkness of men who believed in such fallacies as that wealth gave ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... and plant species added to our living collections, so that our plant and animal gardens now contain a large share of the more attractive forms which are to be found in the various geographical realms. Our tilled fields yield perhaps a hundred times as many varieties of plants as they did in the earliest historic agriculture. The advance in the process of domestication is not so rapid as regards the animal kingdom as it is with the realm of plants, and this mainly for the reason that animals have ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... under the French, amounted to one-fifth of the rent, or 20 per cent. The wages of labour were from 15 sous to one franc a-day; but the labourer dined with the farmer, his employer. Most of the land was laid out in garden cultivation, and every where tilled with the utmost care. The soil appeared rich and friable; and the crops, both of agricultural and garden produce, were extremely heavy. The rent was stated as varying from 60 to 150 francs journatier, which appeared to be about three-fourths of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... town at the end of steel Ben and Ezram ended the first lap of their journey. They had had good traveling these past days. Steadily they had gone north, through the tilled lands of Northern Washington, through the fertile valleys of lower British Columbia, traversing great mountain ranges and penetrating gloomy forests, and now had come to the bank of a north-flowing river,—a veritable flood and one of the monarch rivers of the North. ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... tribute to the king—military service in times of war and, at a later period, money. In turn, the barons divide the land among the lesser nobility, receiving tribute from them. By these divided among the freemen, who also pay tribute, the land is tilled by the serfs, who pay service to the freeman, the lord of the manor. The serf pays no tribute directly to the king, only to his liege lord; the liege lord pays to his superior, and so on, up to the king. This is the economic framework of feudalism; with its ecclesiastical ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... man is worth more than a horse.... One man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannahs—in the Curragh of Kildare? Let there be an Emigration Service, ... so that every honest willing workman who found England ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... My Aunt Patience, who tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had a favorite cow. This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one, for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of kicking. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... midst of those fields is the city of Hochelaga, placed near and, as it were, joined to a very great mountain, that is tilled round about, very fertile, on the top of which you may see very far. We named it Mount Royal. The city of Hochelaga is round compassed about with timber, with three courses of rampires [stockades], one within another, framed like a sharp spire, but ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... through the village below this Fort. There I saw many well-built houses, and many well-tilled fields with wheat and barley and potatoes growing, and giving promise of plenty for the winter to come. The people who till these fields and live in these houses are men of your own race, and they shew that you can live and prosper and ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... down among the 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... his companion that at one time the piece of thirty-year-old timber they were walking through had been tilled—after a fashion. But it had never been properly cleared, as the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... ye them with your own hands to Jupiter, all-bountiful, all-powerful, and to the other immortal gods and goddesses. All the booty is retaken, and, further, we have made fresh captures, more considerable than our first losses; the fields of Gaul are tilled by the oxen of the barbarians, and German teams bend their necks in slavery to our husbandmen; divers nations raise cattle for our consumption, and horses to remount our cavalry; our stores are full ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... be transferred as scutelnici to officials and other favoured nobles; and that eventually a democratic government and the increasing power of the people secured for them not only actual liberty but a real ownership of the soil which they had for centuries tilled for landlords who ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... numerous as might have been wished. But, certainly, if the qualities of it be such as to deserve future cultivation, no impediment of surface, but that of cutting down and burning the trees, exists, to prevent its being tilled. ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... the hammer in his hands became a ploughshare; and thus, through each province, beginning at the foot and leaving at the head, until there was not an acre in that vast domain which he did not know better than those who tilled it; no forge or furnace at which his arm had not proved the strongest; no art or craft that did not own him master. Then the sword returned to its sheath, and he said, 'I have served my apprenticeship; now let ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles of all sorts congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no purpose. He is everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a faculty which might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the definite and tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on under ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... gisarme, and while my own cousin and namesake, the head of my House, was winning laurels and wasting blood—I, thy quarrelsome, fighting friend—lived at home in peace with my wife and child (for I was now married, and wife and child were dear to me), and tilled my lands. But in peace I was active and astir, for my words inflamed the bosoms of labourers and peasants, and many of them, benighted as they were, thought with me. One day—I was absent from home, selling my grain in the marts ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was in a little neighborhood consisting of farmers, who tilled their own grounds, and were equal strangers to opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primeval simplicity of manners; and frugal by habit, ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... had little doubt. All their lives had been spent close to the soil, and they were not to be deceived, when they came over the mountains in search of a land richer than any that they had tilled before. They had seen its blackness, and, plowing down with the spade, they had tested its depth. They knew that for ages and ages leaf and bough, falling upon it, had decayed there and increased its fertility, and so they awaited ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not fighting, he was laboring for his living, or he shut himself up in a solitary island, and tilled the soil. He was teacher, sailor, workman, trader, soldier, general, dictator. He was simple, great, and good. He hated all oppressors, he loved all peoples, he protected all the weak; he had no other aspiration ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... there's no more for me Now, but to dwell alone in my still soul's Hoarding of ecstasies, a great place of lusts Achieved and shining fixt; for every man Is mine, and every soil is mine, from here Round to the furthest cliffs that steadfast are To keep the hoofs of the sea from murdering The tilled leagues of the land. And by the coasts I am not kept. Far into the room of waters, Into the blue middle of ocean's summer, The white gait of my sea-going war invades. I have a man here, one who makes with words, And he shall be my messenger to your ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... being double that for a daughter. The division of the soil was renewed every year, and the possession of the tenant increased or diminished according to the number of his family. The country was wholly cultivated by the people. First the lands of the Sun were tilled; then those of the old or sick, the widow and orphan, and soldiers on active service; after this each man was free to attend to his own, though he was still obliged to help any neighbour who might require it. Lastly, they ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... of a farm are tilled for profit; a park is an uncultivated enclosure kept merely for men and women and deer to take ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... on a large number of western New York orchards showing the results of cultivation and other methods of soil management. These data are overwhelmingly in the favor of cultivation. In Wayne County the average yield of orchards tilled for five years or more was 271 bushels per acre, as compared with 200 bushels per acre for those in sod five years or more but otherwise well cared for,—an increase of thirty-five per cent. in favor of good tillage. In ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... abound in nearly all parts of the State, were often strong enough to overcome the domestic forces, and were guilty of many outrages. They brought back to Kentucky the evils of its struggle with the Indians. Men again tilled their fields with their muskets by their sides, and slept in expectation of combat. During this and the following year these parties were hunted down, and, when captured, hanged without mercy. Still ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... highway cometh into this road from out of the tilled country and Appleham, a good town, and goeth through it toward the tillage, and the City of the Bridges and the liberties thereof; and all the land is much builded and plentiful; but, if thou wilt, we will not take either highway, but wend over the downland which lieth north-east of Upham, and ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... their shores; the thousands of acres which formerly produced rice for a dense population are now matted over by a thorny and impenetrable jungle. The wild buffalo, descendant from the ancient stock which tilled the ground of a great nation, now roams through a barren forest, which in olden times was a soil glistening with fertility. The ruins of the mighty cities tower high above the trees, sad monuments of desolation, where all was ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... precepts, they found, by the good that came from them, that it was truly so. They bore in mind the tribulation and persecution of their forefathers for righteousness' sake, and were thankful for the quiet and protection of the government in their day and generation. Their land was tilled with industry, and they ate the bread of carefulness with a contented spirit, and, verily, they had the reward of well-doing even in this world; for they beheld on all sides the blessing of God upon the nation, ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... proprietors of land, dignified as J.P.'s, and sometimes sheriffs, throwing off branches into the clerical and legal professions. The real ancestor was the sturdy yeoman who accumulated the money to purchase the farm he tilled, and whose successors had the good sense to go on adding acre to acre till they finally expanded into the wide domains of the modern squire. Not the knight whose effigy in brass paves the aisle of the parish church laid the corner-stone of the wealth and power of to-day, but the shrewd ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... in all things. We wanted to walk in His ways; we wanted instruction in His wisdom; and in His mercy He answered our prayers." They would rather, they said, spend weeks in gaol than take the oath as councillors. They built cottages, tilled the land, opened workshops, and passed their time in peace and quietness. For a law and a testimony they had the Bible and the writings of Peter of Chelcic. In Michael Bradacius, a Utraquist priest, they found a faithful pastor. They made their ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... prosper when a large part of its citizenship is in ignorance and poverty, and has no interest in the government. I beg of you that you do not treat us as an alien people. We are not aliens. You know us. You know that we have cleared your forests, tilled your fields, nursed your children, and protected your families. There is an attachment between us that few understand. While I do not presume to be able to advise you, yet it is in my heart to say that, if your convention would do something that would prevent for all ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... blind side of this expensive King. Toland, on entering his country, was struck rather with the signs of good administration everywhere. No sooner have you crossed the Prussian Border, out of Westphalia, says Toland, than smooth highways, well-tilled fields, and a general air of industry and regularity, are evident: solid milestones, brass-bound, and with brass inscription, tell the traveller where he is; who finds due guidance of finger-posts, too, and the blessing of habitable inns. The people seem all to be busy, diligently ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... Syrian villagers perform their farm labours in common we shall see best if we watch them ploughing the land, and sowing corn. They go forth in a band from the village, and make their way to the plot which is to be tilled. Every man is armed, for beyond the cultivated land there is a great waste, or desert, over which bands of robbers roam at will, or there are rocky mountains in which they may hide, and set all ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... empresses, 46 kings, 41 queens, 3600 canonized saints, and 15,700 authors, and that prior to the French Revolution it possessed 37,000 cloisters. There have been times when the wealth of this order in some states comprised more than half of all the property. The Benedictine monks tilled the soil of the country surrounding their monasteries, literally making the "desert blossom as the rose." They were untiring in zeal for the Church and in deeds of mercy. They established cloister schools in Italy, France, Spain, England, Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland. Monte Cassino (529), Italy; ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... ever did heathen men do worse than they did; for oftentimes they forbore neither church nor churchyard, but took all the property that was therein and then burned the church and all together.... However a man tilled, the earth bare no corn; for the land was all fordone by such deeds; and they said openly that Christ and ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... like manner sow the ground, allotted for their neighbours, as diligently as that of the King's, by whom they are also feasted; and so continue to work in a body for the public benefit, till every man's ground is tilled and sowed. None but the King, and a few great men, are exempted from this labour. Their grain soon sprouts out of the ground. When it is about a man's height, and begins to ear, they raise a wooden house in the centre of the field, covered with straw, in which ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT (1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of French citizenship; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The villanelle J'ai perdu ma tourterelle and the ode on May-day show Passerat's art in ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden |
