"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comment, but was struck dumb with astonishment on hearing McKean's voice: it seemed he could talk. He was telling of an old Scotch peasant farmer. A mean, cantankerous old cuss whose curious pride it was that he had never given anything away. Not a crust, nor a sixpence, nor a rag; and never would. Many had been the attempts to make him break his boast: some for the joke of the thing and some ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... replied at last, "there was a Jose Medina. He was a young peasant of Mallorca. He ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... into Justinus. The Amal knew well how he had entered the Emperor's guard; how he had intrigued and fought his way up (for the man did not lack courage and conduct) to his general's commission; and now, by a crowning act of roguery, to the Empire. He had known too, most probably, the man's vulgar peasant wife, who, in her efforts to ape royalty, was making herself the laughing-stock of the people, and who was urging on her already willing husband to persecute. And this man he saw ready to convulse his own Empire by beginning a violent persecution against the Arians. He was dangerous enough ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... is so short that the whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... of applause from the pit and the galleries; and a politician should not be inattentive to the public feelings expressed in theatres. Mr. Perceval thinks he has disarmed the Irish: he has no more disarmed the Irish than he has resigned a shilling of his own public emoluments. An Irish peasant fills the barrel of his gun full of tow dipped in oil, butters up the lock, buries it in a bog, and allows the Orange bloodhound to ransack his cottage at pleasure. Be just and kind to the Irish, and you will indeed disarm them; rescue them from the degraded servitude ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... traditionary sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant poet's life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... results, of a free people, governed by education, occupied by industry, and maintaining our connection with the world by commerce. Thus we are to disarm the armies of Europe, when they dare not disarm them themselves. [Cheers.] We present to mankind the simple, yet the wonderful evidence that a peasant in Germany, or France, or Ireland, or England carrying a soldier on his back, cannot compete in their own markets with a peasant in America who has no soldier on his back, though there be 5,000 miles distance between their ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... exhausted every explanation and every excuse, was crying in silence, and one of her neighbors was trying in vain to appease the countrywoman. Excited by that love of money which the evils of a hard peasant life but too well excuse, and disappointed by the refusal of her expected wages, the nurse was launching forth in recriminations, threats, and abuse. In spite of myself, I listened to the quarrel, not daring to interfere, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... dormant; the clergyman is no longer supported and aided in his important duties; the family pew in the church is closed; and the village churchyard ceases to be a place of pleasant meeting, where the peasant's heart is gladdened by the kindly notice ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... angrily, as he interrupted the intruder—a tall, gaunt figure wrapped in a shepherd's plaid, with the bonnet set upon the grizzled head in that sturdy independence—nay, more than independence—rudeness, rough and thorny as his own thistle, which is the characteristic of the Scotch peasant externally, till you get below the surface to the ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... preferred solitude to a club; a fair man, with the face of a student and not over robust, but nevertheless energetic and determined where his duty was concerned. He lived alone in the little house, with his orderly, a clever Sicilian, who cooked for him; a peasant woman from a neighbouring farm-house came every morning to sweep the rooms, make the two beds, and scrub the two stone steps before the door and clean ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... It galls you:—well, you are his equal, as 290 You think; but that you are not, nor would be, Were he a peasant:—well, then, you're a Prince, A princely noble; and what ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... we began to change this tenure into another equally defective, though far more favourable to the tenant. A little later, but only eight years ago, on a thorough and systematic scale, we began the parallel policy of Land Purchase. Even now, having transferred half the land to peasant ownership, and placed the other half under judicial rents, many of our statesmen are unwilling to give Ireland the control of its own affairs. On the contrary, step by step with the economic enfranchisement of the farmers, has gone the policy of destroying their ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... as to what the Talmud was, given credence in the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! The mediaeval priest or peasant was perhaps wiser than he knew. Almost, might we say, the Talmud was Man, for it is a record of the doings, the beliefs, the usages, the hopes, the sufferings, the patience, the humor, the mentality, and the morality of the Jewish people for ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... A1 A peasant with the name of Crab (Cricket, Rat), who buys a physician's costume and calls himself Dr. Knowall, or (A2) who would like to satiate himself once with three days' eating, (B) discovers the thieves who have stolen from a distinguished gentleman a ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... soul, in the full extent of their Idea, and therefore truly and really; although they may not manifest themselves in it in extenso and are not applied to fully developed relations. The religion, the morality of a limited sphere of life, for instance that of a shepherd or a peasant, in its intensive concentration and limitation to a few perfectly simple relations of life has infinite worth—the same worth as the religion and morality of extensive knowledge and of an existence rich ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... paragraphs under the head of "Miscellaneous News." One of these paragraphs tells about a quarrel between the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one and a half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of a peasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth of the total of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... red roofs, while in front the Luzzara Tower rose majestically in the twilight. As the hour got later the colours deepened, and the lower end of the immense curtain gradually disappeared, while the stars and the planets began shining high above. A peasant was singing in a field near by, and the bells of a church were chiming in the distance. Both seemed to harmonise wonderfully. It was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... efficiency, but before we had time to turn it into French, we had passed to the right of the quaint old town of Nay, and were entering Coarraze (10 1/2 miles). As we bore off to the right across the river, the old castle—where Henry IV. spent a great part of his childhood like any peasant child—towered above us, and the scenery around became considerably more picturesque than any we had passed through that morning. The banks of the river were more shapely, and the alternation of bushes and meadow, with the varying lights and shades on the distant ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... some long since forgotten ballad; and industriously twisting and twirling about her long knitting needles, that promised soon to produce a pair of formidable winter hose. Their son, a stout, healthy young peasant of three-and-twenty, was sitting in the spacious chimney corner, sharing his frugal supper of bread and cheese with a large, shaggy sheep dog, who sat on his haunches wistfully watching every mouthful, and snap, snap, snapping, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... refuse out of doors in heaps so high that you cannot see their houses'.[141] Diseased animals were constantly eaten, vegetables were few, and in the winter there was no fresh meat for any one, except game and rabbits and, for the well-to-do, fish, but we may doubt if the peasant got any but salt fish. The consequence was that leprosy and kindred ailments were common; and we do not wonder that plagues were frequent and slew the people like flies. The peasants' food consisted largely of corn. In ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... vengeance against the households of Rome. The forager, on his late return past the farm-house to the camp, heard the harsh, droning accents of her voice, and quickened his onward step. The venturesome peasant from the country beyond, approaching under cover of the night to look from afar on the Gothic camp, beheld her form, shadowy and threatening, as he neared the garden, and fled affrighted from the place. Neither stranger nor friend intruded on her dread solitude. The foul presence of cruelty and ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... excavated a resting-place for the two bodies. While they were working the Boers gathered round us to the number of a couple of hundred. They were very silent, eyeing us with an absorbed interest that embraced every article of our equipment. Men of the humblest peasant class, poorly—in many respects wretchedly—clad, they presented, in their ragged and shabby apparel, a sharp contrast to our Yeomanry soldiers, who seemed, by comparison, trim and well cared for. The Boers wore their ordinary clothes, ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... isolated wayside cabaret. It presently transpired that St. Bonnet, where we expected to pass the Sunday, was some half mile or more off the high-road on which this was the nearest station. While we waited in a long, low, dimly-lighted room for the guide we had bespoken, two gendarmes and a peasant sat listening to, or rather looking at, a vivid account of some shooting adventure given in extraordinary pantomime by a deaf and dumb huntsman. In time a withered gnome trundling a wheelbarrow took possession of us and our light ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom were in a very different position from the peasant communities of Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the Norman Conquest, offered a serious obstacle; and though the Regno might ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... had rather a rough time always. He had a peculiar disposition, and all his life probably liked only a few people very deeply. His wasted youth—nearly twenty years of idling rather than study or work—and his mixed parentage—the Italian peasant mother and his New England father—would make his struggle in the world a long and an uphill one even if he should finally succeed. Among the first things he meant to learn was not to show his emotions too easily, to hide his feelings whenever he could, so that he might ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... the unmeritedness of being despised. For just as the higher a man's position is, the more undeservedly he is despised; so the lower it is, the less reason he has for despising. Thus a nobleman is angry if he be insulted by a peasant; a wise man, if by a fool; a master, if ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... turning handsprings on an amateur night. One great matinee favorite made his debut on a generous Friday evening singing coon songs of his own composition. A tragedian famous on two continents and an island first attracted attention by an amateur impersonation of a newly landed Scandinavian peasant girl. One Broadway comedian that turns 'em away got a booking on a Friday night by reciting (seriously) the graveyard scene ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Our chief, whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipped almost, had this of the godlike in him, that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court or a cottage table, where his plans were laid, or an enemy's battery, vomiting flame and death, and strewing corpses round about him;—he was always cold, calm, resolute, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... authoritatively controlled his disciples' movements. On the boy's return to Serampore in a few months, a change was unpleasantly apparent. Gone was the stately Kumar with serenely glowing face. Only an undistinguished peasant stood before us, one who had lately acquired a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the gross, as well as more equally distributed by the partition of the large freeholds, the tax should be progressive, i.e. increasing in percentage according to the value of the property, so as to compel the large owners to sell, and establish something answering to a peasant proprietary, or, more strictly speaking, a yeomanry tilling its own soil. The Conservatives look upon such a tax as nothing better than legalized robbery, and hold the most pronounced views on the sacred rights of property. A juste ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... You would pass the gates disguised as a peasant or as a woman—no matter how. Will you do less to save all that makes life dear to an honourable man? Be gone, be ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... gamekeeper, unwound one from his waist. It was too often needed, and had our Martin been a peasant lad, he would have speedily swung from a branch of the oak ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... the tears that had been shed for his glory. I thought of the only woman who ever loved him, who had been pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition; and as I looked at the sarcophagus, I said, "I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Africa was the Natives' Land Act, eventually passed in 1913, which was designed to entrench white power and property rights in the countryside — as well as to solve the "native problem" of African peasant farmers working for themselves and denying their labour power ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... lips, Bland words, and specious, vulgar eloquence, And large oaths, with the tongue thrust in the cheek, And promises, as if they were as gods, And no God held the forked bolt above! Turning all ignorance, disaffection, hatred, Religion, and the peasant's moody want, To glut themselves with hard-wrung copper coins, Verjuic'd with hot tears, thin and watery blood; Brazening the conscious lie unto the world That it was done for hallowing Freedom's sake, Until the names of "Freedom," "Patriot," stank, Blown on and poison'd by these beggar lips; ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is lost.[45] No one will ever win men who does not believe in them. The true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a revelation of the whole of human nature; and in the peasant in the field, and even the infant in the cradle, connections which reach forth high as heaven and far as eternity. All that is greatest in king or kaiser exists in the poorest of his subjects; and the elements out of which the most delicate and even saintly womanhood is made exist in the ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Peter stood up amongst that congregation of wondering strangers and scowling Pharisees, and said, 'The Man that died on the Cross, the Rabbi-peasant from half-heathen Galilee, is the Person to whom Law and Prophets have been pointing,'—no wonder that no one believed him except those whose hearts were touched, for it is never possible for the common mind, at any epoch, to believe that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... wreath. If, at such times, any one of her family came into the room, she would shun them and look shy. One day she ran out in the rain to meet Katya, and made her frock muddy; her father saw her, and called her a slut and a peasant-wench. She grew hot all over, and there was something of terror and rapture in her heart Katya often sang some half-brutal soldier's song. Elena learnt this song from her.... Anna Vassilyevna overheard her singing it, ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... odd scene at Tolstoi's table! The countess and her daughter in full evening dress with the display of jewels, and at the other end Tolstoi in the roughest sort of peasant dress and with bare feet. At dinner Count Tolstoi said to Mr. MacQueen: "If I had travelled as much as you have, I should today have had a ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... preservation of the public peace; but permanently to live at free quarters on all the inhabitants of those counties which were in what was called a disturbed state. Under this measure, excesses were committed which Ireland, much as she had suffered, had not yet witnessed. It was not the burning of a peasant's house, or the strangulation of one or two individuals in a village, which struck the eye of a spectator—but the houses of the most respectable farmers in the country, nay, houses of gentlemen of large fortune, and, in many instances, of the most approved loyalty, converted into ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... seen more regular or more ingenuous features. Imagine, my lady, a picture of the Virgin. What gave still more to her appearance a most modest expression was, that when she came here she was dressed like a peasant girl of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... I looked up after having my ticket clipped and saw the perfect youthful mother of the Cinquecento painters sitting opposite me. A more exquisitely harmonious face and expression were never vouchsafed to my eyes. She was a countrywoman of the richer peasant class, and was apparently making her first visit to the city accompanied by her husband. One would gladly have taken oath at first sight that she was the perfect wife and mother, and yet there was no sentimental ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... stay here? That is what I want to do—to keep out of the city with its horrible clatter of ambitions, to return to the soil, and live like the primitive peasant without ambition." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of the gods and living to a great age. History is abundantly supplied with examples, from Methuselah to Old Parr, but some notable instances of longevity are less well known. A Calabrian peasant named Coloni, born in 1753, lived so long that he had what he considered a glimpse of the dawn of universal peace. Scanavius relates that he knew an archbishop who was so old that he could remember a time when he did not deserve hanging. In 1566 a linen draper of Bristol, England, declared ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... frieze coats hanging loose about them. The chill mist which clung to the hillsides, and the atmosphere of doubt which overhung all, were a poor exchange for the roaring bonfires, the good cheer, the enthusiasm, the merriment of the previous evening. But the Irish peasant, if he be less staunch at the waiting—even as he is more forward in the hand-to-hand than his Scottish cousins—has the peasant's gift of endurance; and in the most trying hours—in ignorance, in doubt, in danger—has often held his ground in dependence on his betters, with a result pitiful in ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland: Titans, male and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift, prone on floods of sentiment. The blue-flocked peasant swinging behind his oxen of a morning, the gaily-kerchiefed fruit-woman, the jackass-driver, even the doctor of those regions, have done more for their fellows. Horrible reflection! Lady Judith is serene ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... so-called. When bands of citizens set out to found colonies in strange lands, they took with them glowing embers from the tribal or national hearth, as AEneas brought with him to Italy the sacred fire of Troy. Until lately, we are told, the German peasant just married would take to his new home a burning ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... them into a neat rustic cot, and called up his wife to set refreshments before the travellers. As this man conversed, rather apart, with Bertrand, Emily anxiously surveyed him. He was a tall, but not robust, peasant, of a sallow complexion, and had a shrewd and cunning eye; his countenance was not of a character to win the ready confidence of youth, and there was nothing in his manner, that ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... tells a tale of wrong, and leads the knight to champion her cause; again, he encounters some old companion in arms, breaks a lance upon him by way of friendly salutation, and wanders with him in search of adventures, inquiring of a chance peasant or dwarf, of a wrong to be avenged, or a danger to be incurred. The reader attends tournaments, of which every blow and every fall are chronicled. He becomes familiar with the respective merits and prowess of a hundred different champions. He learns the laws of judicial combat, and ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... a miniature reproduction of a very distant scene, that had gladdened her childish heart in the blessed by-gone. Far away from the beaten track of travel, in a sunny cleft of the Pistoian Apennines, she saw the white fleeces grouped under vast chestnuts, the flash of copper buckets plunged by two peasant women into a gurgling fountain, the curly head of Bertie bowed over the rude stone basin, as he gayly coaxed the bearers to let him drink from the beautiful burnished copper; the rocky terraces cut in the beetling cliffs above, where ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... calling me. I returned to her side. I found her still seated before the fire. She had refused to be put into the bed that had been prepared for her. When she saw me—singular womanly preoccupation!—her first thought was for the coarse peasant's dress she had just exchanged for her own water-soaked and mud-stained garments. She laughed as she called my attention to it; but her laughter soon turned into convulsions which I had much ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... pause, thrusting the iron rod again into the glow. And while they worked they chattered, laughed sometimes, now and then sighed. They seemed of all ages and all types; from her who looked like a peasant of Provence, broad, brown, and strong, to the weariest white consumptive wisp; from old women of seventy, with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. In the cottage forges there would be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... A peasant of Samara sent to a Russian editor, together with three colored eggs, a letter which he asked to have forwarded to America. The following is ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... plans and delaying their journey. He urged them to go on and leave him, but they would not consent. Sometimes the Little Colonel slipped into the room with a bunch of Alpine roses or a cluster of edelweiss that she had bought from some peasant. Sometimes she sat beside him for a few minutes, but most of her time was spent with Hero, wandering up and down beside the lake, feeding the swans or watching the little steamboats come ...
— The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... penetration, brilliancy in association of ideas—such mental qualities, like the qualities of the apparition of the externally armed head in Macbeth, will not be commanded; but attention, after due term of submissive service, always will. Like certain plants which the poorest peasant may grow in the poorest soil, it can be cultivated by any one, and it is certain in its own good season to bring forth flowers and fruit. I can most truthfully assure you by-the-by, that this eulogium on attention is so far quite disinterested on my part as that ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... and a suggestion offered to a star is generally considered an impertinence. In studying my part of Rosalia, the convict's wife, a very pretty bit of "business" occurred to my mind. I was to wear the black cross so commonly seen on the breast of the Roman peasant women, and once at an outbreak of Conrad's, I thought if I raised that cross without speaking, and he drooped before it, it would be effective and quite appropriate, as he was supposed to be superstitiously devout. I mentioned it to young Salvini, who cried eagerly, "Did you tell my father—did ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... Assembly alone, but with all classes of the people. No matter whether the feeling proceeded from the acts and calumnies of designing demagogues, it existed. It was indeed believed in the Palace of the Roman Catholic Bishop, and in the cottage of the humblest peasant, that Chief Justice Sewell had outraged their feelings of loyalty and religion. When Attorney-General, Mr. Sewell had maintained doctrines and supported measures that clashed with the religious opinions of the Canadians. A dislike, amounting to infatuation, had ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... clean as that of a Quakeress, was quite as plain and far from the latest style. A stranger meeting her in a stage coach mistook her for a servant until she began to talk. "Who is that woman who dresses like a peasant, and speaks like a scholar?" he asked on leaving the coach. Naturally, it was thought Mrs. Child did not know how to dress, or, more likely, did not care for pretty things. "You accuse me," she writes to Miss Lucy Osgood, "you ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... a man that knew the world, To have been long a peasant. But the rack Will teach him other language. Hence with him! [As the Guards are carrying him away, his peruke falls off. Sure I have seen that face before. Hermogenes! 'Tis he, 'tis he, who fled away with Eubulus, And with my ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... I heard a step, not stealthy, as I expected, but quiet and firm, as if neither darkness nor death could check those untroubled feet. So little did I guess what was coming that, even when I saw the gleam of white in the darkness I thought it was a peasant in a white smock, or perhaps a woman deranged. Suddenly I guessed that it was 'The Comrade ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... was shaded by trees, from between which I had beautiful peeps at the ancient towers of Honfleur below, the varied scenery of the opposite shore, the white buildings of Havre in the distance, and the wide sea beyond. The road was enlivened by groups of peasant girls, in their bright crimson dresses and tall caps; and I found all the flower of the neighbourhood assembled on the green that crowns the summit ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... in which he escaped had been soiled during the hours that he and my mother had been in the sea, and had also suffered from neglect during the years of his poverty; but he wished to pass himself off as a common peasant or working-man, so he preferred to have it set in order as might best ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... furtive eye of a tramp looking out for gendarmes? The atmosphere was burning, though the season was late, and the watermelon which he bought of a marketman seemed to him delicious as he ate it in the scanty shade of the barrow, while the peasant exhaled his wrath against the housekeepers of Tarascon, all of them absent from market that morning "on account of a black mass being sung for a man of the town who was lost in a hole, over there in the Swiss mountains... Te! how the bells rang... You ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... and, seizing the pen, signed her receipt for wages due, in silence. She defiantly gathered up her withheld letters and papers. She returned in a few moments with the maid, whose ox-like eyes glowed in the sudden joy of a return to Switzerland. For the ranz des vaches was now ringing in the stout peasant girl's ears. "There, that's all, now!" rasped the old man, when the maid had gathered up her dole. "The butler will go down to town with ye and see ye safe, and he will leave word at the bank to pay yere checks. I keep no siller here. It's a lonely house." And the dead tyrant ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... managed with great beauty. As in Helene, as in Novalis, I recognized, with delight, the eye that gazed, the ear that listened, till the spectres came, as they do to the Highlander on his rocky couch, to the German peasant on his mountain. How different from the vulgar eye which looks, but never sees! Here the beautiful apparition advances from the solar ray, or returns to the fountain of light and truth, as it should, when eagle eyes ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... had the manhood to leave— But he had delayed, because of a lusty peasant wench and a hope that Svearek's coffers would open wider; and now he was dragged along over the Wolf's Throat to a midwinter feast which would have to be celebrated ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... who amused himself by exciting that cupidity which any but a peasant would have concealed; "we will make ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... a member of the house of Barbarelli and a peasant girl of Vedelago, came down to Venice, we gather that he had nothing of the provincial. Vasari, who must often have heard of him from Titian, describes him as handsome, engaging, of distinguished appearance, beloved by his friends, a favourite ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... their corporate wealth their personal vows of poverty. He found them less pleasant to meet and look at than the country people of their suburb on festa-days, with the Indulgences that gave them the right to make merry stuck in their hats like turnpike-tickets. He did not think the peasant girls in general good-looking, though they carried themselves daintily and walked remarkably well: but the ugliness of the old women, begotten of hard work and a burning sun, with porters' knots of coarse grey hair grubbed up ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... array of starveling teachers in the train of any one denomination—itself, mayhap, sufficiently attenuated by the demands of purely ecclesiastical objects—must be likened to that other waking dream of the belated German peasant, who sees from some deep glade of his native forests a spectral hunt sweep through the clouds,—skeleton stags pursued by skeleton huntsmen, mounted on skeleton horses, and surrounded by skeleton beagles; and who hears, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... escape from death. Separated from you in the battle, and attended only by my standard-bearer, I was surrounded by the Saracens. I should doubtless have cleft my way through the infidel dogs, but a foul peasant stabbed my charger from below, and the poor brute fell with me. My standard-bearer was killed, and in another moment my nephew Arthur would have been your king, had it not been that my good lord here, attended by this brave lad, appeared. I have seen a good deal of fighting, ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... which were propagated at the time of the French revolution, to stir up the peasants against their feudal superiors. It was pretended that some feudal seigneurs asserted their right to kill and disembowel a peasant, in order to put their own feet within the expiring body, and so recover ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... and Mill. But this group built on the French philosophers, who were taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... more ready and marketable knowledge. But all these avail nothing against habits of industry, and being taught to expect nothing from others, but to depend all on one's own powers. With this single, but signal, advantage, the sons of the wealthy citizens are always yielding to the son of the peasant; they are one by one giving way, and their places are filled by a new race; while their descendants are sinking into poverty, and filling prisons, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... the lake in a coracle: she was proceeding from the vicinity of the point he had quitted, towards the upper end of the lake. Her apparel was rustic, but there was in its style something more recherchee, in its arrangement something more of elegance and precision, than was common to the mountain peasant girl. It had more of the contadina of the opera, than of the genuine mountaineer; so at least thought Mr. Chainmail; but she passed so rapidly, and took him so much by surprise, that he had little opportunity for accurate observation. He saw her ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Armenian, or African, or Italian, or Gallic student, after tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be his more ordinary course to Athens, at last casting anchor at Piraeus. He is of any condition or rank of life you please, and may be made to order, from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some Cleanthes, who has been a boxer in the public games. How did it ever cross his brain to betake himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he came thither by accident, how did the love of it ever touch his heart? But so it was, to Athens ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... had often heard his mother expatiate. On the road, he feasted his eyesight with the verdant hills covered with flocks of sheep, the fruitful vales parcelled out into cultivated enclosures; the very cattle seemed to profit by the wealth of their masters, being large, sturdy, and sleek, and every peasant breathed the insolence of liberty and independence. In a word, he viewed the wide-extended plains of Kent with a lover's eye, and, his ambition becoming romantic, could not help fancying himself another ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... nobles were sadly shorn by the progressive spirit of modern civilization. With a total disregard of the immunities of chivalry, modern legislators declared that it was as great a crime for a baron to seize on a herd of cattle as for a peasant to steal a sheep. Hence the great families along the Rhine went into decay. The castles were dismantled, many noble names died out, very few remained, the representatives of the ancestral glory of ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... have not heard the story of the 'Woman of Stenay'?" said a Lorraine peasant. "It was in war-time, and she offered a barrel of wine to a ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... according to tradition, was the son of King Sigmond, by a peasant's daughter. The king saw and fell in love with her, whilst marching against the vaivode of Wallachia. He had some difficulty in persuading her to consent to his wishes, and she only yielded at last on the king making her a solemn promise that, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... probability that they grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be allowed that make a discovery of art. . . The taste of the citizen and of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms; valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,—which all the metal of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of Potosi, and all you can buy with it, is ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of wood, and so beautifully made to imitate nature, that the slightest touch with the point of a knife or a needle, makes the leaves move and quiver without spoiling the flower. This was made by a Swiss peasant. The people of Switzerland are very remarkable for their industry, ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... ambition which had for a short time diverted him from his more serene aspirations. He had no longer to win a rank which might equal Helen's. He had no longer a parent, whose affections might be best won through pride. The memories of his earlier peasant life, and his love for retirement,—in which habit confirmed the constitutional tendency,—made him shrink from what a more worldly nature would have considered the enviable advantages of a name that secured the entrance ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cross roads she noticed a still more formal avenue, trees planted in single line and curving like a regiment of soldiers marching across country. The whitewashed stead and the lonely peasant scratching like an insect in the long tilth were painful impressions. She missed the familiar hedgerows which make England like a garden; and she noticed that there were trees everywhere except about the dwellings; and that there were neither hollybush or sunflowers in the white ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... courteously offered me a share of his beverage; but I found it so intolerably sour, that I was forced to swear by all the gods of the Indians, I would not have any connexion with it.—He then pointed to the stream where the girl was angling, and said, with a peasant countenance that had brightened up for a moment, 'Go; you are a sober man; the clear waters are good for you; for my own part, this juice of the apple shall be sufficient.'—Two hours now elapsed, without any one uttering a word.—The Indian had by ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... trade, two-thirds fall to the workman and one-third to the masters of the shop), yet inconsiderate envy had more power in him than avarice: it ought indeed to have worked quite the other way, he being a peasant's son from Iesi. He cursed his art and those who taught it him, vowing that thenceforth he would never work at large plate, but give his whole attention to those brothel gewgaws, since they were so well paid. Equally ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... a great difference between a clergyman and a layman. The clergyman was educated; the peasant was ignorant. The tables have been turned. The thought of the world is with the laymen. They are the intellectual pioneers, the mental leaders, and the ministers are following on behind, predicting failure and disaster, sighing for the good old ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... persecuted as petty official and hated Jew. The brutality of forced conscription ever stood before her eyes: she beheld the young men, often the sole supporter of a large family, brutally dragged to the barracks to lead the miserable life of a soldier. She heard the weeping of the poor peasant women, and witnessed the shameful scenes of official venality which relieved the rich from military service at the expense of the poor. She was outraged by the terrible treatment to which the female servants were subjected: maltreated and ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... appointed king. But he refused the crown, and pressed to accept it, finally asked for a night's delay to consider the proposal. Two days and two nights passed, still the Jew did not come forth from his room. The Poles were very much excited, and a peasant, Piast by name, raising his voice, cried out: "No, no, this will not do! The land cannot be without a head, and as Abraham does not come out, I will bring him out." Swinging his axe, he rushed into the house, and ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... in the farmhouses beside the road, but could not find so much as a crust of bread; for the suspicious peasant invariably hid his stores for fear of being pillaged by the soldiers, who, being entirely without food, would take violent possession of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... and think afterwards! Your iron bands remind me of the man in the dear old fairy-tale who was under the spell of a wicked magician, and had iron straps bound round his heart. There was only one way in which they could be broken, and no one knew what it was, but one day a peasant woman took pity on his sufferings and tried to nurse him, and snap! one of the bands broke off and fell to the ground. Another time a little child brought him some food, and snap again! another disappeared. Last of all the beautiful princess chose him ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... me say! Will Satan care whether you be a peasant, or a star-and-garter gentleman? Tut, tut! in my office I know nothing about gentlemen. There are plenty of gentlemen with Beelzebub; and they will ring all eternity for a drop of water, and never find ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Pickled French beans or gherkins cut fine, may be added, or a little grated horseradish. This sauce is much esteemed in France, where people of taste, weary of rich dishes, occasionally order the fare of the peasant. ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... he, "the baron, my father, is a noble lord, accustomed to be treated with respect. I cannot introduce you to him in this gipsy dress; neither is it fitting that you should enter our great castle on foot like a peasant. Wait for me a few moments, and I will bring you a horse and one of my sister's dresses. I wish you to be received like a lady of high degree. I wish my father himself to meet you on your arrival, and hold it an honor to ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... considerable variety of superficial differences certain features in common. Always at the base of the edifice, supporting all, subordinate to all, and the most necessary of all, there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf, or slave. Save for a little water-power, a little use of windmills, the traction of a horse or mule, this class has been the source of all the work upon which the community depends. And, moreover, whatever labour town developments have demanded has been supplied by the muscle of its ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... something new. It chanced in this disastrous case, One morn betimes he join'd the chase: Swift o'er the plain the hunters fly, Each echoing out a joyous cry; A forest next before them lay; He, left behind, mistook his way, And long alone bewildered rode, He found a peasant's poor abode; But fasting kept, from six to four, Felt hunger, long unfelt before; The friendly swain this want supplied, And Joan some eggs and bacon fried. Not dainty now, the squire in haste Fell to, and praised their ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... details which the king had sent him respecting the force of the enemy were entirely incorrect. Charles had written that they were two thousand strong, and that sixteen thousand peasants were in arms against them, whereas Las Torres had with him seven thousand good troops, and not a single peasant had taken up arms. ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... made a eunuch. Upon his appearing in this noble character, all the husbands in town flock to him with their wives, and now poor Homer is only puzzled about his choice. However, he gives the preference particularly to a little female peasant, a very harmless, innocent creature, who enjoys a fine flush of health, and cuckolds her husband with a simplicity that has infinitely more merit than the witty malice of the most experienced ladies. This play cannot indeed be called the school ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... conditions of each province, long before it was brought under British administration, had combined to make them. Whereas in the Bombay Presidency, for instance, land is chiefly held by small landlords and peasant proprietors, it was held in Agra and Oudh before they became British by a great landed aristocracy whose rights, like all established rights, it was a principle of British policy to respect, and the talukdars of Oudh and the zemindars of Agra stood for the most part very loyally ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... meant the rehabilitation of the ancient name, the restoration of the Chateau de Keragouil, half the year at Paris, in the Cercle Royale, in the regions of art, and among the great minds that were still young in the Quartier—and all that was in the possession of a plump Gascony peasant, whose ideas of comfort and pleasure were satisfied by one hundred and ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... come to be the faith in which a large number of people are trained is a totally different business, and affects a very different kind of sentiments. Personal and independent conviction has no more to do with it than it has to do with the ardour of a Breton peasant trained in deepest zeal of Romanism, or the unbounded certainty of any other traditionary believer. For this reason we may be allowed to discuss the changes of feeling which manifested themselves in Mr. and Mrs. Beecham without anything disrespectful ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... value of biblical literature. It certainly does not rob the sacred Scriptures, the perennial source of spiritual comfort, of their exalted character and divine worth to assume that legend, myth, and history have combined to produce the perfect harmony which is their imperishable distinction. The peasant dwelling on inaccessible mountain-heights, next to the record of Abraham's shepherd life, inscribes the main events of his own career, the anniversary dates sacred to his family. The young count among their first impressions ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... and women who are dependent upon what they can wrest from the soil for their existence. Their plough, an heirloom from remote antiquity, merely scratches the earth. The use of superior implements would result in superior tillage and augmented crops; but it would be as simple to induce the peasant to change his religion as to get him to forsake the plough used by his ancestors. The implements of daily life mostly belong to the barbarous ages. Attempt to introduce any other and you are rebuked by the reply: "It is not the custom; my father used this article, and therefore ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... wept too in sympathy with her. Curiously enough, this woman was not only attractive, as I have said, and anxious to please, and thoroughly feminine, but she had had ample opportunities of meeting men. I suppose she lacked what the Scotch peasant-woman called the 'come hither in the 'ee'—some subtle sex-magnetism which had been possessed by those 'plain, penniless, and horrid women' whom she talked about. Or perhaps it was that the 'will to live' was absent and therefore no mate came to ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... with rank and beauty, witnessing the gambols of the merry children or the boisterous recreations of the populace. The streets themselves afforded a quaint and curious spectacle, for in promiscuous and gay confusion were seen the splendid apparel of the noble, and the modest garb of the peasant; the shining armour and waving plumes of the Christian warrior, and the gaudy fantastic habiliments of the Moslem. With them appeared the solemn and lugubrious vestments of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the coarse habit and shaven crown ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... wore—their only uniform. Others say that it arose from their wearing a white shirt, or camise, over their dress, to enable them to distinguish each other in their night attacks; and that this was not the case, is partly countenanced by the fact that in the course of the insurrection a body of peasant royalists took the field, who designated themselves the "White Camisards," in contradistinction from the others. Others say the word is derived from camis, signifying a roadrunner. But whatever the origin of the word may be, the Camisards was the name most ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... then, my dear parents, endeavour to judge of one another, as God, at the last day, will judge of us all: and then the honest peasant will stand fairer in our esteem than ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... annum. The merchant may travel without a guard or protection from one frontier to another, an unheard-of circumstance in the time of the kings. The justice of this chief affords a constant theme of praise to all classes. The peasant rejoices at the absence of tyranny, the citizen at the safety of his home, the merchant at the equity of his decisions and the protection of his property, and the soldier at the regular manner in which his arrears are discharged." "One is struck with the intelligence, ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... the "Hex" murder case near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1930! This is scarcely different from an incident which had occurred in 1892 in Wemding, Germany: An hysterical woman was "exorcised" by the Capuchin Father Aurelian, who accused a peasant woman of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... most probable estimate, quite two hundred thousand Irishmen. The next generation helps to illustrate not only the indestructibility of Ireland, but her all but miraculous power of recuperation. So abundant are the resources of his own vitality that, as Dr Moritz Bonn declares, an Irish peasant can live where a continental goat would starve. And not having read Malthus—Mr Malthus at that time being even less readable than since—the Irish remnant proceeded to develop anew into a nation. In forty years it was marching behind that beau chevalier Owen Roe O'Neill ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound battles such as these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in this ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to take a victim annually; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get off with merely the loss of his shadow; and many a Morayshire peasant has testified to having seen him riding forth on a sunny day, the shadow of his horse visible, with those of his spurs and his whip, but his body offering no impediment to the rays of the sun. He enriched the library with books on necromancy, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... green, Gazing at the sunset scene, Now the vintage toil is o'er, But the gleaner comes no more Through the fields of burnished corn; Lo! a peasant's bier is borne By the sparkling river's brim, Thou hast dreamt ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... of a peasant Deputy and a Polish representative were particularly impressive and well received. The Socialist leader's demand for peace called forth a smart rejoinder from a ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of refugees streaming back from the battle-fields; pitiful peasant-people with horse-carts and dog-carts and even wheelbarrows, toothless old men and women trudging alongside, children and babies stuck in amidst bedding and furniture and saucepans and bird-cages. This was war, as the common people saw it; but Jimmie could not ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... the southern section of beautiful Bohemia near the Bavarian border of poor peasant parents was born a boy and called Jan—Hus was added from Husinec, his birthplace; some say he saw the light of day on July 6, 1373, but that is ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann
... miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thankless labor were annually transmitted to him. Out of 1289 benefited clergymen in Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending in Bath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, the wealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter by the bayonets of the military. Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm of Grattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompous priesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of false zeal, full of worldly pride, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... looked straight and long into the gifted Russian's pale blue ones. According to all rules he should have started a dramatic speech, beginning with "Madame!" hand on heart. But Schabelitz the great had sprung from Schabelitz the peasant boy, and in the process he had managed, somehow, to retain the simplicity which was his charm. Still, there was something queer and foreign in the way he bent over Mrs. Brandeis's hand. We do not bow like ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... tea and were meaning to go to bed in the same room. But one had noticed during those last two days that the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief; he was an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant's standard by no means poor. But he was so taken with that watch and so fascinated by it that at last he could not restrain himself. He took a knife, and when his friend had turned away, he approached him cautiously from behind, took aim, turned his eyes heavenwards, crossed himself, and praying ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... The preserver was a peasant lad. Under the white dust his cheeks were burned a brown-red, his eyes, honest and blue, through much staring at the skies and at horizon lines, were puckered and encircled with tiny wrinkles. Responsibility had made him older than his years, and in speech brief. With the beautiful ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... him, and her heart was moved to tenderness for his weariness and solitude. She cast a spell of sleep upon him, with eternal youth, white and untroubled as moonlight. And there, night after night, she watched his sheep for him, like any peasant maid who wanders slowly through the pastures after the flocks, spinning white flax from her distaff as she ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... prosperity. Frescoes on the walls of the houses here and there, paintings of saints and angels, bear witness to a love of beauty and to the prevalence of a religious spirit. These pictures, still bright after more than a century's wear, go back to the time when the peasant boy, Franz Zwink, of Oberammergau, mixed paints for a famous artist who painted the interior of the Ettal Monastery and the village church. The boy learned the art as well as the process, and when his master was gone, he covered the walls of his native town with pictures such as ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... told me that you had died years ago, but I knew better. Now that I have found you, we'd better start for France at once. Have you your court robes with you? And what have you done with your crown? You are dressed like a peasant." He was disdainfully eyeing ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... attend to the voice of principle and self-denial, instead of that of precipitate passion. I could not, indeed, hope or expect to represent my prudent and benevolent citizen in a point of view so interesting as that of the peasant girl, who nobly sacrificed her family affections to the integrity of her moral character. Still however, something I hoped might be done not altogether unworthy the fame which George Heriot has secured by the lasting benefits he ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... nobody knew where swept artists to the Scriptures for motives and sent them for a background, not with Holman Hunt to Palestine, but to their own surroundings, their own country, to the light and atmosphere each knew best—Lhermitte's Christ suffered little children to come unto Him in a French peasant's cottage; Edelfelt's Christ walked in the sunlight of the North; Jean Beraud's Christ found Simon the Pharisee at home in a Parisian club; and no landscape, realistic, impressionistic, decorative, was complete unless a familiar figure or group came straying into it ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... was cleared at about eleven, and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical; picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two equally forlorn hedgehogs. Each moment the concourse increased, for it is a fateful day and every one wants to know the issue: because, you see, if the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... now, in 1843, having ceased to attend his duty in Parliament, Mr. O'Connell could no longer claim in that senatorial character. Such a pretension would be too gross for the understanding even of a Connaught peasant. And in that there was a great loss. For the allegation of a Parliamentary warfare, under the vague idea of pushing forward good bills for Ireland, or retarding bad ones, had been a pleasant and easy labour to the parish priests. It was not necessary to horsewhip[19] ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... accursed! In Christ's name the Pope was sovereign—supreme sovereign over the bodies and souls of men—acknowledging no superior, holding the right to make and depose kings, and claiming to be supreme judge over the consciences and crimes of all—the peasant that tills the soil, and the prince ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... by my lawyer, my banker and the neighbouring peasants. Also by all the guards and waiters along our journey on November 21. Friends, peasants, and my lawyer are still looking after my property in Germany, and I have left everything in the hands of a neighbouring peasant, who sends me accounts of it. I would like to be able to do some kind acts here in return, and for the furtherance of better relationships later on." Yet it can never be pleasant to be in an "enemy" country. ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... being for the moment safe, I pondered the question and determined to make my way to Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, where I was sure a warm welcome would await me from my cousin, Sir George Vernon. How I found a peasant's cottage, purchased a poor horse and a few coarse garments, and how in the disguise of a peasant I rode southward to the English border, avoiding the cities and the main highways, might interest you; but I am eager to come to my story, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... parliamentary socialists led by Jaures,—though the insurrectional socialists also use parliamentary methods,—may be regarded as the most conspicuous champion of anti-militarism, and many of his followers have suffered imprisonment as the penalty of their convictions. In France the peasant proprietors in the country and the organized workers in the town are alike sympathetic to anti-militarism. The syndicalists, or labour unionists with the Confederation Generale du Travail as their central organization, are not usually anxious to imitate what ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... was willing to learn. And this limit is sufficient for the topic I am proposing to treat. I do not intend to consider education of any other sort, than that which has something in it of a liberal and ingenuous nature. I am not here discussing the education of a peasant, an artisan, or ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... have heard many soul-stirring tales about little Bernadette, the peasant girl to whom the grotto's miraculous qualities were revealed by the Virgin, and whose stories were weighed by the Bishop of Tarbes before the Catholic Church sponsored them. The procession of sufferers ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... sinister elements came continuously and more strongly into play. Measured sound grew racket, camaraderie turned into impudence. Came at last pandemonium. All without Rome—Campagna and mountains—were in Rome. Peasant men and women slept, when they slept, in and beneath carts and huge wine-wagons camped and parked in stone forests of imperial ruins. Artisan, mechanic, and merchant Rome lightened toil and went upon the hunt for pleasure, dropping servility in the first ditch. ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... bad example; they eagerly sought to acquire suitable harbours, and in company or in competition with the Syrians entered upon large commercial transactions. The extortions of the corn-market, the formation of large estates, the frequency of mortgages, all show that the small peasant proprietorship was unable to hold its own against the accumulations of wealth. The wage-receiving class increased, and cases in which free Hebrews sold themselves into ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... to me before the time, while I was carrying on some investigations with aid afforded by the Smithsonian Institution. Of course, when I took charge of the Nautical Almanac Office, he was speedily given employment on its work. His name was John Meier, a Swiss by birth, evidently from the peasant class, but who had nevertheless been a pupil of Professor Rudolph Wolf at Zurich. Emigrating to this country, he was, during the civil war, an engineer's mate or something of that grade in the navy. He was the most perfect example ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... world counts of no value, and He recognises as precious. There is an old story about some great emperor making a progress through his dominions, where he had been receiving precious gifts from cities and nobles, and as the gay cortege was passing a poor cottage, the peasant-owner came out with a coarse earthenware cup filled with spring water in his hand, and offered it to his overlord as the only gift that he could give. The king accepted it, and ennobled him on the spot. Take your ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... for the race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people, except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact that even during the comparatively brief period of her written history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which the greater number have completely disappeared, it may be broadly stated that every Japanese ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Saints" we behold the prince and the peasant, the warrior and the sage, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the peasant and the mechanic, the shepherd and the statesman, the wife and the widow, the prelate, the priest, and the recluse,—men and women of every class, and age, and degree, and condition, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... await the universal winding-sheet of winter. Climate varied with the varying altitude of the route. Here, on a last patch of mountain ground, were a man or two and a woman or two and odd children, reaping and binding; there, after a few minutes' ascent, on another sloping patch, a solitary peasant ploughed with his team of oxen. Everywhere on the declivitous waysides, tow-haired, blue-eyed children guarded herds of goats, as their forbears had done in the days of Vercingetorix, the Gaul. Nowhere, save in the dimly seen remotenesses of the valleys, ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... again, even though she allowed that their present life was very bright and interesting. I was just laughing at a description of Pert and Quick going to market on their own account, and how they bargained with the old peasant women, when a slight sound—was it a sound or only a sort of feeling in the air?—made me look up from the open sheet before me, and glance over ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... as I do, you would understand that an old woman of that peasant type, ignorant of the meaning of war, would hardly be likely to leave her house, no matter how many times she was ordered out, until shells began to fall about her. Even then, as she was rather deaf, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... at all points. Thus I think it is important, if we can, to obtain independent testimony of the attitude of the surrounding people to the builders of London Bridge. We can do this by reference to the peasant beliefs concerning bridges, as, for instance, in Ireland, where on passing over a bridge they invariably pulled off their hats and prayed for the soul of the builder of the bridge,[27] and to the fact that the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... dress—perhaps a steel watch-chain to a gold watch—not a sham gold chain to no watch! Then they looked so clean and wholesome—is it right, wholesome?—not their hair dripping with grease, as the peasant-girls love it. And then," she added, with a laugh, for her face had quickly resumed its usual happy brightness of expression, "then I grow sentimental. I say to myself, 'These are English people—they are going away back to England, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... But when every peasant's hut and every little wine-shop for twenty leagues round was papered with these legends, a fresh speculation must be discovered; the Alsacien could not go beyond the limits of the department. Eve, turning over everything in the whole printing house, had found a ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... received. Foreigners were evidently not then excluded from Japan, and no objection whatever was made to the Christian propaganda in any part of the country. The efforts of the Jesuit missionaries were crowned with remarkable success. All ranks and classes, from priest to peasant, embraced the Catholic faith. Churches, schools, convents, and monasteries sprang up all over the country. The only opposition came from the Bonzes, or native priests, who felt their influence and power declining. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... officer. She had been taken prisoner when the town she lived in was captured. Nobody knows, even to this day, exactly who she was, except that she was a poor orphan girl who had been brought up by a village clergyman; but it is generally believed that her father was a Livonian peasant. ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston
... now, however, no more alone, for round them circled and echoed the crying of many packs of wolves. In the forest of Machecoul the guardian demons of its lord had been let loose, and throughout all its borders poor peasant folk shivered in their beds, or crouched behind the weak defences of their twice barred doors. For they knew that the full pack never hunted in the Pays de Retz without bringing death to some wanderer found defenceless within the borders ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett |
