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More "Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books



... understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... I,' cried the master of the ship: 'is he not sprung from the loins of a peasant? Has not the camp been his home? Was not a shield his cradle? Such power as his will craze him. Born to it, and the chance were better. Mark a sailor's word: he will sooner play the part of Maximin, than that of Antonine or Severus, or of our late ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... broad plain the ploughman's conquering share Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew, And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre The peasant's team ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... not, or what is practically the same thing, if a numerical majority of your fellow-citizens think you are not, making the most beneficial use of your property; if it be generally considered that it would be for the greater good of the greater number to divide your park and garden into peasant properties and cottage allotments, to double the wages of the workmen in your employment, or to subject you and the likes of you to a graduated income tax for the purpose of setting up national workshops to compete with you in your own trade; and, if you do not readily enter into ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... his own hard lot, and envied the riches of some persons who actually had cows and cornfields. Bonaparte inquired if some fairy were to offer to gratify all his wishes what he would ask? The poor peasant expressed, in his own opinion, some very extravagant desires, such as a dozen of cows and a good farmhouse. Bonaparte afterwards recollected the incident, and astonished the goatherd by the fulfilment of all ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who will read his Wanderer,—the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near Cuma,—may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek power to that power which is, as ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... an open sky To peasant, tyrant, priest, Bowing in fear with a dazzled eye Towards ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves

... of the poor family: Francois Derblay was a peasant, born and brought up in Picardy, and the son of poor parents, who, at dying, had left him little to add to what Nature had given him—a pair of strong arms and a sound, honest mind. With this fortune Francois had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... the town he met a rough-looking peasant who was dragging a cat after him by a string which was fastened round ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang

... following: A peasant of Vatan (Indre), the paternal uncle and guardian of Mlle. Flore Brazier, known as "La Rabouilleuse." In 1799 he placed her in the house of Dr. Rouget on very satisfactory conditions for himself, Brazier. Rendered comparatively ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... events. Pearl was a sweet, comely-looking damsel, who would have made a model wife to one of her own station in life, but who was utterly unsuited for the new dignity which would be thrust upon her as soon as she crossed the threshold of the wealthy family of Yin. She was simply a peasant girl, without education and without refinement. Her days had been passed amidst scenes of poverty, and though she was a thoroughly good girl, with the high ideals that the commonest people in China everywhere have, her proper position was after all amongst the kind of people ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan

... rioting and drunkenness in the village came to her knowledge, and she wondered yet more whence her clansmen obtained the means for their excesses, for she felt instinctively that the origin of all this rioting must be evil. Cathleen therefore called to her an old peasant, whose wife had died of hunger in the early days of the famine, so that he himself had longed to die and join her; but when he came to her she was horror-struck by the change in him. Now he came ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... put to him; for Paddy is conscientious. Then is the science displayed on both sides. The one, a veteran, trained in all the technicalities of legal puzzles, irony, blarney, sarcasm, impudence, stock jokes, quirks, rigmarolery, brow-beating, ridicule, and subtlety; the other a poor peasant, relying only upon the justice of a good cause and the gifts of nature; without either experience, or learning, and with nothing but his native modesty to meet the forensic effrontery of ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton

... Robert Burns: high duchesses were captivated with the chivalrous ways of the man; recognized that here was the true chivalry, and divine nobleness of bearing,—as indeed they well might, now when the Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down among them again! Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in Drury Lane or West-End drawing-rooms, yet as they do it in Valhalla and the General Assembly of ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness, even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living. Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously congratulate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the white Provence roses which climbed over ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... but not impersonally," she cried. "You feel it intellectually but not with your heart. You cannot see that a kindred soul lives in the Russian peasant and the German labourer, the British toiler and the French artificer. They are all pouring out their blood for the sake of their dream, a politician's dream. Freedom isn't won by wars. It must be won, if ever, by moral sacrifice ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... performance of duty stamps with a nobility which is not confined to great men—a nobility which kings can neither give nor take away—a nobility which is very, very difficult to attain unto, but which is open alike to the prince and the peasant, and must be wrought hard for and won—or lost with shame,—for, as ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the true cross. The priests manufacture little crosses of wax, on which, as they assure the faithful, they stick splinters of the real one. These little crosses, wrapped up in paper and packed in baskets, are placed ready for distribution, that is, for sale. Every peasant generally takes three: one to put in his room, one in his stable, and another in his barn. The most wonderful portion of the business is that these crosses must be renewed every year, as in that period they lose their ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... when kings ascended their thrones, princes died, artists painted their masterpieces, that will bring us to our finest opportunities of success? To the soul there is little greater or less chance of success offered by the degree of "polish" in the education we have the money to procure: the peasant who cannot read or write may achieve the purpose of life before the savant: we know it without caring to acknowledge it to ourselves: the education that we really require is the education of daily conduct, the education of character, the education by which we say to ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley

... 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 ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards

... and short-breathed phrases of Liszt; no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts; his ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... occurs frequently in the case of sensitive children. How she was restored to herself and reinstated in her father's affection forms a narrative of unusual interest and truth to life. Whereas in Heidi there is only one other childish figure—if we except the droll peasant boy Peter—we have here a lively and varied array of children. Manly, generous Dino; Mux, the irrepressible; and the two girls form a truly lovable group. The grown-ups, too, are contrasted with much humor and genuine feeling. The story of Cornelli, ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri

... glad," answered Richter, with a note of sadness, in his voice. "Do not despise us before you know more of us. We are still feudal in Germany—of the Middle Ages. The peasant is a serf. He is compelled to serve the lord of the land every year with so much labor of his hands. The small farmers, the 'Gross' and 'Mittel Bauern', we call them, are also mortgaged to the nobles who tyrannize our ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... would it have been," cried the soul of the old Florentine, "had my countrymen still kept it as it was, and not brought upon themselves the stench of the peasant knave out of Aguglione, and that other from Signa, with his eye to a bribe! Had Rome done its duty to the emperor, and so prevented the factions that have ruined us, Simifonte would have kept its beggarly upstart ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... wearing an odd costume, a long frock made like a peasant's smock with an insignia of two crossed logs and a flame embroidered upon one sleeve. With her dark eyes, her dark, rather coarse hair, which she wore parted in the middle over a low forehead, and her white, unusually colorless skin, she suggested a foreigner. Nevertheless, although her mother and ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook

... twenty yards below, on a similar natural platform, sat a circle of peasant children, their eyes large with wonderment and interest. In their center, also seated on the earth, was the Queen of Galavia. She was dressed in a short walking skirt and a blue jersey, and as the man gripped the pine root to which he ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... those Pontoons at Seligenstadt, is near eight miles westward [NORTHwestward, but let us use the briefer term] from Aschaffenburg: Dettingen is a poor peasant Village, of some size, close on the Mayn, and on our side of it. A Brook, coming down from the Spessart Mountains, falls into the Mayn there; having formed for itself, there and upwards, a considerable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... was a peasant house: and on a little loggia in the sun two peasants in white shirtsleeves and black Sunday suits were sitting drinking wine, and talking, talking. Peasant youths in black hats, their sweethearts in dark stuff dresses, wearing no hat, but a black silk or a white silk scarf, passed slowly ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... of Euripides is not in Mycenae, in the open country, but on the borders of Argolis, and before a solitary and miserable cottage. The owner, an old peasant, comes out and in a prologue tells the audience how matters stand in the royal house, with this addition, however, to the incidents related in the two plays already considered, that not content to treat Electra with ignominy, and to leave her in a state of celibacy, they had forced her to marry ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... them 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 above it, but it frets at Richard ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally minded; there was nothing to suggest national unity to their imagination. They could not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of crowned sovereigns, not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those symbols which bring home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to a national entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the "best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, but anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of an outside world ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing, approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if you knew you were to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... toward the speaker, coloring with embarrassment to hear himself lectured by this young peasant girl, whose ideas, however, had much more virility ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... a peasant whom he thought rude, "You are better fed than taught." "Shud think I was," replied the clodhopper, "as I feeds myself and you ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... incident. An aged peasant, in a sudden fit of weakness, had stumbled on the road, and, in falling, had struck his head on a stone and had lost consciousness. He was an old peasant of the usual Irish type, coarsely but cleanly dressed. Lying beside him was a leather bag, within which were odds and ends of food and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... apple-trees planted in the stubble here and there, and brown mud walls of hamlets; a church-top, a copse, an avenue of dwarf limes leading to the three-parts farm, quarter residence of an enriched peasant striking new roots, or decayed proprietor pinching not to be severed from ancient. Descending on the deep green valley in Summer is like a change of climes. The chateau stood square at a branch of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Confederation of National Chambers of Commerce or CONCANACO; Coordinator for Foreign Trade Business Organizations or COECE; Federation of Unions Providing Goods and Services or FESEBES; National Chamber of Transformation Industries or CANACINTRA; National Peasant Confederation or CNC; National Union of Workers or UNT; Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers or CROM; Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants or CROC; Roman ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... his stay in Edinburgh, his "irascible humour" never went so far as this, "the contumely of condescension" must have entered pretty deeply into the soul of the proud peasant when he made the following memorable entry in his diary, on the 9th April, 1787. After some remarks on the difficulty of true friendship, and the hazard of losing men's respect by being too confidential ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... delight, His day of mercy is the day of fight. But when the field is fought, the battle won, Though drenched with gore, his woes are but begun: His deeper deeds as yet ye know by name; The slaughtered peasant and the ravished dame, 300 The rifled mansion and the foe-reaped field, Ill suit with souls at home, untaught to yield. Say with what eye along the distant down Would flying burghers mark the blazing town? How view the column of ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... Rope-dancers performed the most dangerous dances and salti-mortali. In Rome even elephants were trained to mount the rope. Flying-machines of a construction unknown to us are also mentioned, on which bold aeronauts traversed the air. Alkiphron tells a story about a peasant who, on seeing a juggler pulling little bullets from the noses, ears, and heads of the spectators, exclaimed: "Let such a beast never enter my yard, or else everything would soon disappear." Descriptions of these tricks are frequent in ancient writers, particularly in the indignant ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... Ivn Mosvitch? Well, I've been to him too. I went there the other day. I had something else to settle, you know. Well, so I sat and chatted awhile and then came to the point. "Tell me, Ivn Mosvitch," says I, "how's one to manage an affair of this kind? Supposing," says I, "a peasant as is a widower married a second wife, and supposing all the children he has is a daughter by the first wife, and a daughter by the second. Then," says I, "when that peasant dies, could an outsider get hold of the ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... men, with whom one can do business—instead of the peasant saloon keepers and blatherskite labor leaders whom they choose ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... Except the Fergusons', hers was the only house in the city with rooms large enough to dance in, and that ball is still the most dazzling I can remember. I wore a rose-colored tulle skirt with a peasant waist of rose-colored satin, and father, for a great surprise, had given me a pair of pink silk stockings. No other girl in town had such a beautiful thing, and in the dressing-room they would not ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain

... brief records in Scripture, is felt by every thoughtful man to contain within its narrow compass adequate direction for, and to set forth the ideal of, human life. That is not because He went through all varieties of earthly experience, for He did not. The life of a Jewish peasant nineteen centuries ago was extremely unlike the life of a Manchester merchant, of a college professor, of a successful barrister, of a struggling mother, in this present day. But in the narrow compass of that life ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... know, but what does knowledge signify without the fear of God? The humble peasant who serves God is far better than the proud philosopher who neglects himself and considers the courses of the stars. Whoever knows himself well contemns himself, and takes no delight in human praise. If I should know all things in the world, and yet ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... thatched building, not very different from a peasant's hut; but near it there stood all sorts of long ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann

... patriotism in other countries is blind impulse, growing out of mere attachment to the soil, or the power of custom, or a helpless feeling of dependence on things as they are. "If my father in his grave could hear of this war," said a Spanish peasant, "his bones would not rest." Yet what earthly interest, what intelligible concern had Spanish peasants in the rivalships and struggles of princes who thought of nothing but their own or their family aggrandizement. ...
— The Spirit Proper to the Times. - A Sermon preached in King's Chapel, Boston, Sunday, May 12, 1861. • James Walker

... the Bavarians and French until they run away terror-stricken, and restore us to our dear Emperor Francis. But I am unversed in negotiations and devising shrewd tricks and stratagems. I am only a plain peasant, who has a great deal of love and fidelity in his heart, but only few thoughts in his head. Baron von Hormayr and the archduke may do the thinking for me. They shall be the head, and I the arm and heart. Speckbacher and Wallner yonder have good heads too, though I do not wish to say ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring success, as one might watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When she was talking ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key. But boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule. Denny and Birch followed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... fairly on the road. Persons whom he met—and they were not all of the peasant class—seeing a traveller jaunty in plumed cap, light blue camail, pointed buskins, and close-fitting hose the color of the camail, sword at his side, and javelin in hand, stayed to observe him long as he was in sight, never dreaming they were permitted to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded. Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction against Republicanism provoked by ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... notable or distinct figure than Giotto is in all the history of Florence. He was born a peasant, in the village of Vespignano in the Mugello, the same district which afterward gave birth to Fra Angelico. Giotto had at least part of his professional training in the great cathedral at Assisi built over the bones of St. Francis, was one of those homely, vigorous ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... stillness of the moon. Well for him that, in reparation for those hours stolen from night, the hardy physical labor commenced with dawn. Students would not be the sad dyspeptics they are if they worked as many hours in the open air as my scholar-peasant. But even in him you could see that the mind had begun a little to affect the frame. They who task the intellect must pay the penalty with the body. Ill, believe me, would this work-day world get on if all within it were hard-reading, studious animals, playing the deuce ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... remain enlocked in each other's arms, murmuring words of mutual consolation. Love levels all ranks, but not more than misery—perhaps not so much. In the hour of despair there is no difference between prince and peasant, between the high-born dame and the lowly damsel accustomed to serve her caprices and wait upon ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... 1815, and the gradual exhaustion of the best lands since then, have brought about a decline of the industry, which is now confined to a few estates in the Blue Mountains and to scattered "settler" or peasant cultivation in the same districts ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... the king and M. Guizot, ended in ruin. The latter saved himself by ignominious flight. He clothed himself as a peasant, and in this manner crossed the frontier. He afterward gave an eloquent description of his escape. So hurried was his departure from Paris, that he could not even bid his mother good-bye. He loved her fondly; ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... comparative ideal. The Russian peasant enjoys frugal life with his family and few humble friends. Is it likely that such feel the autocratic pressure of their Tsar? Perhaps there may be many cases wherein private rights have been ruthlessly invaded, but are not such results usually due to insolent perversions by minor officials? Doubtless ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... the confusion, the whoop, the holla, the hallos, the hurrah, the abrasion, the snort of the hunter, the concussion, the sward, the open, the earth stopper, the strangulated hernia, the glad cry of the hound as he brings home the quivering seat of the peasant's pantaloons, the yelp of joy as he lays at his master's feet, the strawberry mark of the rustic, all, all are exhilarating to the sons of our ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... gomes to see Mina wunst more already," said Mrs. Schulenberg, whom Phillida encountered on the second flight of stairs, descending with a market-basket on her arm. She was not the strong-framed peasant, but of lighter build and somewhat finer fiber than the average immigrant, and her dark hair and eyes seemed to point to South Germany ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... eighteen thousand dollars in English sovereigns for them. He wanted gold to carry back with him for the jewels that he had brought out of the kingdom of Rumania. He seemed a simple, anxious person. He wished to carry his treasures with him like a peasant. The sapphires looked better in the daylight. There ought to have been seven thousand dollars' profit in them, perhaps more; seven thousand dollars, at any rate, that very day in the London market. Hargrave took them to the Empire Club and put them ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... security is at an end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the mercy of some blind elemental force. The earthquake burying an entire population under its falling houses; the flood that carries away the drowned body of the peasant with the carcasses of his cattle and the beams torn from his roof-tree; or the victorious army massacring those who defend their lives, and making prisoners of the rest—pillaging in the name of the sword, and thanking God to the roar of cannon—are ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... early manufacturers. The art of wine-growing, however, is now followed with more brains, more experience, and more capital, and the result is in many instances excellent. The vin ordinaire of California, largely made from the Zinfandel grape, has been described as a "peasant's wine," but when drunk on the spot compares fairly with the cheaper wines of Europe. Some of the finest brands of Californian red wine (such as that known as Las Palmas), generally to be had from the producers only, are sound and well-flavoured ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... nations. Napoleon did not understand the power of such explosions when he invaded Spain and Russia. One may easily disaggregate the facile mind of a crowd, but one can do nothing before the permanent soul of a race. Certainly the Russian peasant is a very indifferent being, gross and narrow by nature, yet at the first news of invasion he was transformed. One may judge of this fact on reading a letter written by Elizabeth, wife of the Emperor ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... When first the peasant, long inclined to roam, Forsakes his rural sports and peaceful home, Pleased with the scene the smiling ocean yields, He scorns the verdant meads and flowery fields: Then dances jocund o'er the watery way, While the breeze whispers, and the streamers play: Unbounded prospects in his bosom ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... Most bulbuls are pretty birds and are most particular about their personal appearance. Black bulbuls are as untidy as it is possible for a bird to be. The two types of bulbul stand to one another in much the same relationship as does the honest Breton peasant to the inhabitant of the Quartier Latin ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar

... is striding across a field in the twilight shadow of a hill. Beyond, where the fold of the hill dips down into the field, another peasant is driving a team of oxen at a plow. The distant figures are aglow with golden mellow light, the last light of day, which deepens the gloom of the shadowing hillside. The sower's cap is pulled tight about his head, hiding under its shade the unseeing eyes. The mouth is brutal and ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... met them," Ruth added. "They told him that Little Poland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a 'Man with the Hoe' around ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... furnished peasant fashion, in the basement of the "Grey Swan" hotel. Through two windows set high in the left wall, the gloomy light of a late winter afternoon sickers in. Under the windows there stands a bed of soft wood, varnished yellow, in ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann

... virtues to the vervain—found growing on Mount Calvary, and therefore possessing every sort of miraculous power, according to the logic of simple peasant folk—the Druids had counted it among their sacred plants. "When the dog-star arose from unsunned spots" the priests gathered it. Did not Shakespeare's witches learn some of their uncanny rites from these ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... picture to the disgraced clerk is that of "the noble peasant Isaac Ashford[40]," who won from Crabbe's pen a gracious panegyric. He says ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... was a natural enough mistake. To her, Monsieur Covington was still the husband of madame. She had stood in the little chapel in Paris when madame was married. When one was married, one was married; and that was all there was to it for all time. So, doubtless, Marie reasoned. It was the simple peasant way—the old, honest, ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... the same words we need not inquire. Certain it is that accuracy would be likely to generate the love of accuracy, and that again to react so as to compel adherence to the form of words which the ear had been led to expect. Readers of Grimm will remember the anxiety betrayed by a peasant woman of Niederzwehr, near Cassel, that her very words and expressions should be taken down. They who have studied the records collectors have made of the methods they have adopted, and the assistance they ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church, either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It was originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit was ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and heart of the most memorable movement of modern times,—the German peasant, Martin Luther. With a nature originally rougher, more earth-born, and of less genial goodness than that of Joan of Arc, but with a shaping imagination of the same realizing intensity, the beautiful myths of Romish superstition, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... and unrestrained life at Bratvold, and so at first she always dreaded the slightest allusion to it. She had at the same time quite made up her mind to confess openly how matters stood, and to say plainly that although he was nothing but a simple peasant and fisherman, she, Madeleine Garman, would be true to him. But in the course of conversation she could not discover even the most distant hint at her adventure; it did not even appear that anything really was known about it; her past life was, in fact, never mentioned in any way, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland

... of the day to lay great stress upon what they call "imagination" and "invention," the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... gathered about a puppet-show, somewhat like the English Punch and Judy, shrieking with laughter like so many children; a group of girls consulting an old fortune-teller; pretty peasant girls from the hills slily listening to compliments from the town gallants, evidently to the great indignation of their country swains; in short, every way we turned, some picture that would have ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... conditions of men came together to dwell upon considerations interesting to all equally, is not adapted to modern society, wherein one man differs from another in knowledge even more than a king once differed from a peasant in rank. When all were ignorant, a mass chanted in an unknown tongue, and a short address warning against the only vices known to ignorant people, sufficed for the whole community. But what form of service can be even imagined, that could satisfy Bridget, who cannot ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... the man as it tugs at the woman; the smirk of the well-fitted prince is no different from the smirk of the Sunday-clad peasant; and the veins of the elders tingle with the same thrill that sets their fresh-frocked grandchildren skipping. Never trust people who pretend that they have no joy in ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... with himself for having taken the cap and stick away from Jan; it looked as if he had at the same time relieved the peasant of ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof

... every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various

... solemn, unsmiling droop. Her best feature was her brown, melancholy, imaginative eyes. She looked like the American-born daughter of Swedish or Norwegian emigrants and her large-knuckled hands, too, bespoke the peasant strain. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... the peasants stolidly resisted the socialization of the country, but this did not discourage the bolshevist leaders. "We have never spoken of liberty," said Lenin early in 1921. "We are exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat in the name of the minority because the peasant class in Russia is not yet with us. We shall continue to exercise it until they submit. I estimate the dictatorship ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson

... lips breathed forth a psalm. The congregation began to assemble, and Flemming went up with them to the house of the Lord. In the body of the church he found the pews all filled or locked; they seemed to belong to families. He went up into the gallery, and looked over the psalm-book of a peasant, while the congregation sang the sublime old hymn of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... forgot all the perils, and cares, and pompous irksomeness of a royal life; and was as happy, while playing with his child, as the humblest peasant in the realm of Sweden. How gayly did they dance along the marble floor of the palace, this valiant king, with his upright, martial figure, his war-worn visage, and commanding aspect, and the small, round form of Christina, with her rosy face of childish ...
— Biographical Stories - (From: "True Stories of History and Biography") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... how he would take it when he saw me and recognized me for the peasant girl he had insulted. Would he be abashed, confused? I thought he must be; and the one pleasant thing in what was going to befall me was that I should see ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan

... honourable and learned gentleman who now represents the county of Waterford, was a Protestant freeholder in Louth to be punished for the crime of a Catholic freeholder in Clare? If the principle of the honourable and learned Member for Newport be sound, the franchise of the Irish peasant was property. That franchise the Ministers under whom the honourable and learned Member held office did not scruple to take away. Will he accuse those Ministers of robbery? If not, how can he bring such an accusation against ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Heaven and earth! Her large, meaning eyes, glow beneath her arched brows, while her auburn hair, laid in smooth folds over her ears and braided into a heavy circle at the back of her head, gives her the fascinating beauty of a Norman peasant. Annette plays around her, is dressed in her very best,—for Marston is proud of the child's beauty, and nothing is withheld that can gratify the ambition of the mother, so characteristic, to dress with fantastic colours: the child gambols at her feet, views its many-coloured dress, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... own French uniform beneath it. In front of him, his white moustache bristling with fury, and murder in every line of his wolf-like face, the old forester lifted a hatchet in both hands, while his wife, no longer the trembling servile old peasant of half an hour before, was tightening the knots of the rope she had thrown round Laval's body, binding him tightly to ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry

... the storm-beaten party sat before a blazing fire in the cottage of the German peasant. Their clothing was dry, and they were quite comfortable. The only thing that disturbed them was the anxiety of their friends at Friedrichshafen. Possibly something else disturbed the young baronet, for the lady, ingenuous enough to talk and act as she felt, seemed ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic

... he spent in land-surveying he obtained a more practical knowledge of the laws pertaining to public and private property as they affected the lives and habits of both squire and peasant. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... from actual observation. I look out of the windows of my house in Fukui. Here is a peasant who comes back after the winter to prepare his field for cultivation. The man's horizon of ideas, like his vocabulary, is very limited. His view of actual life is bounded by a few rice-fields, a ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... 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 it is my ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... renunciation of all worldly goods. He lived on what was given to him to eat from day to day; he nursed the lepers and the sick. Ever described as a most lovable person, he won by his preaching the hearts of people of all classes, from the King of France to the humblest peasant. He wrote beautiful hymns in praise of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and had a great love for every living thing. The birds were said to have flocked around him because they loved him, and we read that he talked to them and called them his 'little sisters.' An old writer tells this story ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway

... 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 in which they are ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very far away from ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... a big man of thirty-five; a type of the strong-limbed, quick-witted peasant, who is by nature active as a squirrel and industrious as a beaver; and who, if once fired with ambition, soon learns to direct all his energies to a chosen end, and infallibly wins his way from the cart-tracks and the muck-wagons to office stools and black coats. Not yet dressed ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... the Negroes as peasant proprietors the Bureau was severely handicapped, as I have shown. Nevertheless, something was done. Abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of $400,000 derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... purple pane.] And see, my signal rises, Mildred's star! I never saw it lovelier than now It rises for the last time. If it sets, 'Tis that the re-assuring sun may dawn. [As he prepares to ascend the last tree of the avenue, TRESHAM arrests his arm.] Unhand me—peasant, by your grasp! Here's gold. 'Twas a mad freak of mine. I said I'd pluck A branch from the white-blossomed shrub beneath The casement there. Take this, and hold ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning

... your wond'ring eyes A race of beings that must 'cite surprise; The strangest compound truth and contradiction Owe to dame Nature, or the pen of Action; Where wit and folly, pride and modest worth, Go hand in hand, or jostle at a birth; Where prince, peer, peasant, politician meet, And beard each other in the public street; 6 Where ancient forms, though still admired, Are phantoms that have long expired; Where science droops 'fore sovereign folly, And arts are sick with melancholy; Where knaves gain ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... children, and devouring them. "The official records frequently speak of the mail-bag being carried off by wild beasts." So great was the damage done by these depredations, that "the company offered a reward for each tiger's head, sufficient to maintain a peasant's family in comfort for three months; an item of expenditure it deemed so necessary, that, when under extraordinary pressure it had to suspend all payments, the tiger-money and diet allowance for prisoners were the sole exceptions to the rule." Still more formidable ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... that I would look upon every Prussian peasant child as a being who could complain of me before God if I did not provide for him the best education, as a man and a Christian, which it was possible for me to ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... I've made,' thought Gudbrand, when, just at that moment, he descried a peasant driving along a hog so fine and fat that ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... has to keep in concealment and travels from town to town as best he may. He has heard of our airship, I suppose from inquiries the revolutionists have been making in our behalf, and when he unexpectedly came upon us just now he was not frightened, as an ordinary peasant would have been. But he did not know ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton

... Chinaman, in the robes of a mandarin, lectured on Confucius. The Armenian, in fez and baggy trousers, spoke of the Unspeakable Turk. The mandolin player, dressed like a bull fighter, held musical conversaziones, interpreting the peasant songs of Andalusia. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... hour's walk from the hamlet, out on the point, lived Soeren Man. In his young days he had roamed the seas like all the others, but according to custom had later on settled himself down as a fisherman. Otherwise, he was really more of a peasant and belonged to that branch of the family which had devoted itself to the soil, and for this had won much respect. Soeren Man was the son of a farmer, but on reaching man's estate, he married a fisher girl and gave himself up to fishing ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... outraged and then strangled in the woods a peasant woman, the mother of a family. On this occasion there could be no question of a miscarriage of justice or even of any suggestion of such a thing, because the prisoner pleaded guilty. That is a ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... Wicklow, some five or six miles from Dublin, there lived, not many years ago, a humble peasant family, by the name of O'Shaughnessy. Michael O'Shaughnessy worked in the bog—that is, he cut up the turf of the bogs, and piled it in stacks for drying—so making the peat which is the common fuel of Ireland. He was very poor, and ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... eyes looked into the garden. One moment the figure rested upon the wall, as if exhausted by the exertion, or listening for some sound. It was a young man, in the garb of a peasant, who sat upon the wall; but the heavy, black mustache little suited this peaceful dress, and his bold air, verging on insolence, seemed to challenge ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... by a comfortable English or American farmer would represent wicked waste and shameful indulgence to a much richer French peasant. I, myself, know a laborer on wages of less than twenty shillings a week, who by thrift has bought ten acres of the magnificent garden land between Fontainebleau and the Seine, worth many thousand pounds, ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various

... The toil-worn peasant looked with eager eyes O'er the blue waters, to those distant skies; Where no one groaned 'neath unrequited toil, Where the strong laborer might own the soil On which he stood; and, in his manhood's strength, Smile to behold his growing fields at length;— Where his brave sons might easily ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)

... when she emerged, "she is just a simple peasant girl, and only needs to be told. It is very ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... I will disguise myself." Hiding his royal hat under the bench, he put on Happy Toko's broad-rimmed peasant hat. It turned down all 'round and almost hid his face. Then he turned his robe inside out and ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... history. Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman's Crede (1394), and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was {32} appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... The soldier, a peasant from Nijni Novgorod, with a red, pock-marked face, put the paper into the sleeve of his coat, winked to his companion, a broad-shouldered Tchouvash, and then the prisoner and the soldiers went to the front entrance, out of the prison yard, and through the town ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... Europe, I know of none, save Italy, in which the characters are the same in every class and gradation. The appeal you would make to the Italian noble must be the same you would address to the humble peasant on his property. The point of view is invariably identical; the sympathies are always alike. No matter what differences education may have instituted and habits implanted, the nobleman and his lackey think and feel and reason alike. Separate ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... A young peasant girl, one Jeanne d'Arc, had been brought up in the village of Domremy, hard by the Lorraine border. The district, always French in feeling, had lately suffered much from Burgundian raids; and this young damsel, brooding over the treatment ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... the French sense does not well distinguish, and has no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which remains with the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and has so long disappeared from those of the younger civilisations of France and England—a paradox. The peasant's gravity, directness, and carelessness—a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor, in any intolerable ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... the fold from within. Like them, as they re-echoed Colet—the saintly Dean of St. Paul's,—he passionately favoured the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular and placing them in the hands, or at any rate bringing them to the familiar knowledge, of peasant as well as prelate. But surely one must know very little of the teachings of the stoutest Churchmen of Holbein's day and acquaintance not to know also that they encouraged if they did not plant these opinions ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... the motley variety of human types gathered under Wallenstein's banner, while giving to each of his figures a fairly distinct individuality. With a little study of costume a painter could paint them all. There is the wretched Peasant, who has been reduced to beggary and is willing to retrieve his fortunes by gambling with loaded dice; the sagacious Sergeant, who always knows more than other people, and prides himself upon 'the fine touch and the right tone' that can only be acquired ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... which has no national institutions must show its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams of what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier, the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, possessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell said 'had the ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though she could not come at the world's other ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas and images ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats

... Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black

... was out of the palace, he looked round him on all sides, and perceiving a peasant going into the country, hastened after him; and when he had overtaken him, made a proposal to him to change habits, which the man agreed to. When they had made the exchange, the countryman went about his business, and Aladdin to the city. ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown

... consideration. Julia Cloud looked at them almost with awe, recognizing by instinct the priceless worth of them, and almost afraid at the idea of living a common, daily life on them. For Julia Cloud had read about rugs. She knew that in far lands poor peasant people, whole families, sometimes wove their history into them for a mere pittance; and they had come to mean something almost ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... a strange individual, this Gaucho Juan. Born in a hut built of mud and maize-stalks somewhere on the superficies of these limitless plains, he differs little, in the first two years of his existence, from peasant babies all the world over; but so soon as he can walk, he becomes an equestrian. By the time he is four years old there is scarcely a colt in all the Argentine that he will not fearlessly mount; at six, he whirls a miniature lasso around the horns of every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... have least Blood) But thou art still that Bird of Paradise Which hath no feet and ever nobly flies: Rich, lusty Sence, such as the Poet ought, For Poems if not Excellent, are Naught; Low wit in Scenes? in state a Peasant goes; If meane and flat, let it foot Yeoman Prose, That such may spell as are not Readers grown, To whom He that writes Wit, shews he hath none. Brave Shakespeare flow'd, yet had his Ebbings too, Often above Himselfe, ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher

... separated, and both capable of saying the sweetest and most affectionate things by letter, which they could not for the life of them utter in talk. They did, as a matter of fact, spend an immense amount of time apart; and when they were together, Carlyle, having been trained as a peasant and one of a large family, roughly neglected Mrs. Carlyle, while Mrs. Carlyle, with a middle-class training, and moreover indulged as an only daughter, was too proud to complain, but not proud enough not to resent the neglect deeply. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of the Court played this pleader a trick by appointing him to defend at the Assizes a half-witted peasant accused of forgery. But Monsieur Savaron procured the poor man's acquittal by proving his innocence and showing that he had been a tool in the hands of the real culprits. Not only did his line of defence succeed, but ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac

... he had said to himself, "but I suppose it was all well meant." He could no longer see the betrothed couple, nor the cheerful old people; but for a long time he could hear them rejoicing and singing. At length there came by two peasant boys, who peeped in among the reeds and spied out the bottle. Then they took it up and carried it home with them, so that once more it was provided for. At home in their wooden cottage these boys had an elder brother, a sailor, who was about to start on a long voyage. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... 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 city ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... the palace of fatigue and dulness. To these, that black swarm, slow and serried—coming, going, winding, turning, returning, mounting, descending, comparable only to ants on a pile of wood—is no more intelligible than the Bourse to a Breton peasant who has never ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... important consequences of these foreign wars, two exercised an especial influence upon the future fate of the Republic. The nobles became enormously rich, and the peasant proprietors almost entirely disappeared. The wealthy nobles now combined together to keep in their own families the public offices of the state, which afforded the means of making such enormous fortunes. Thus a new Nobility was formed, resting ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence

... 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. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... from the spires and towers of the town made a beacon of hope to the peasant as he laboured on the seigneuries leagues and leagues away. Far down the Cote de Beaupre, beyond the Mont Ste. Anne, from the rich farms of Orleans, and across on the Levi shore, the glistening light on the city roofs by day, and at night the twinkling candles in the windows, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... into fire-crackers. With the introduction of "villainous saltpeter" war ceased to be the vocation of the nobleman and since the nobleman had no other vocation he began to become extinct. A bullet fired from a mile away is no respecter of persons. It is just as likely to kill a knight as a peasant, and a brave man as a coward. You cannot fence with a cannon ball nor overawe it with a plumed hat. The only thing you can do is to hide and shoot back. Now you cannot hide if you send up a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night—the most conspicuous ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... at once affiliated with. She knew the excellence of her type as it had revealed itself to her in the best peasant class. Trustworthy, simple, but of kindly, shrewd good sense and with the power to observe. Dowson was not a chatterer or given to gossip, but, as a silent observer, she would know many things and, in time, when they ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... said the young soldier, whose intelligence and native dignity made him, despite his peasant origin, one with whom a gentleman might converse. "Some day they will learn in France of what stuff the little Bearnaise King is made. I have stood watching him when he little supposed that a common soldier might take note of such things, ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... had actually used the coupon to buy firewood from the peasant Ivan Mironov, who had thought of setting up in business on the seventeen roubles he possessed. He hoped in this way to earn another eight roubles, and with the twenty-five roubles thus amassed he intended to ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... and Isal had now been married nearly five years, so that Isal was then eighteen years old and even more beautiful than when the prince found her in the garden. The royal family was at first displeased that the Prince should marry a peasant maiden, but Isal was so good that one could not help loving her, and soon every one said that there never had been such a Queen in Percan. As for the Prince, he loved her more than the whole of his kingdom; he always called ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder

... scene and thought, she certainly only set a sensible example. As it was, she had ample matter of interest in the stirring scenes around her—she with a heart to feel the woes of all: the miseries however real and terrible of the prince did not blind her to those of the peasant; the cold and calculating torture of centuries was not to be passed over because a maddened people, having gained for a time the right of power by might, brought to judgment the representatives, even then vacillating ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... this sad tendency in the clergy to imitate you, you will mend them; if you do not find that after all, it is they who will have to mend you. 'As with the people, so with the priest,' is the everlasting law. When, fifty years ago, all classes were drunkards, from the statesman to the peasant, the clergy were drunken also, but not half so bad as the laity. Now the laity are eaten up with covetousness and ambition; and the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but not half so bad as the laity. The laity, and you working men especially, are the dupes of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... II. The peasant hears upon his field the trumpet of the knight, He quits his team for spear and shield, and garniture of might, The shepherd hears it 'mid the mist—he flingeth down his crook, And rushes from the mountain like a ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... Construction Industry, Similar Transport and other activities, or FESINCONTRANS; National Confederation of Salvadoran Workers or CNTS; National Union of Salvadoran Workers or UNTS; Port Industry Union of El Salvador or SIPES; Salvadoran Union of Ex-Petrolleros and Peasant Workers or USEPOC; Salvadoran Workers Central or CTS; Workers Union of Electrical Corporation or STCEL; business organizations - National Association of Small Enterprise or ANEP; Salvadoran Assembly Industry Association or ASIC; Salvadoran ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... barricade. Gamins and blouses worked at it. The respectables looked on and did not trouble the workers. Suddenly there was a general stampede among them. A squadron of about fifty dragoons charged up the Champs Elysees. One old peasant-woman in a scanty yellow-and-black skirt, which she twitched above her knees, led the retreat. But soon they stopped and turned again, while the dragoons rode slowly back, breathing their horses. Nobody was angry, for nobody had been hurt, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... the road is the canal, covered at all times with barges and boats decked with flags and streamers. At the cabarets are benches and tables in the open air under the trees; and here are to be seen the artisan, the bargeman and the peasant taking their afternoon delassement, and groups of men, women and children drinking beer and smoking. These groups reminded me much of those one sees so often in the old Flemish pictures, with this difference, that the old costume of the people is almost entirely ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... imprisonment. The Americans protested vigorously but ineffectually against this practice. Indeed, they exaggerated its evils, for many of the "criminals" were only mild offenders against unduly harsh and cruel laws. A peasant caught shooting a rabbit on a lord's estate or a luckless servant girl who purloined a pocket handkerchief was branded as a criminal along with sturdy thieves and incorrigible rascals. Other transported ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... The Count smiled. "It would be the same if she were a peasant girl. We shall be so happy—oh, there is no expressing ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had "seen service in the ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... All the guests are in their places— Lilies with pale, high-bred faces— Hawthorns in white wedding favours, Scented with celestial savours— Daisies, like sweet country maidens, Wear white scolloped frills to-day; 'Neath her hat of straw the Peasant Primrose sitteth, Nor permitteth Any of her kindred present, Specially the milk-sweet cowslip, E'er to leave the tranquil shade; By the hedges, Or the edges Of some stream or grassy glade, They look upon the scene ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... ten minutes when another peasant came, asserting that the dog was really his, and he had been on the point of regaining his possession by arbitration of the neighbours when we shot the animal. He thus considered himself doubly injured—in his expectations and his property. He came ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall

... impression in his work "Pictures from Italy." "In the foreground was a group of silent peasant girls, leaning over the parapet of the little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the distance a deep dell; the shadow of an approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could not have ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove from the volor station outside the People's Gate, of the old peasant dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and horses—strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest of the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... in a red petticoat; Ursule, in a blue blouse and a big hat was a most comical fellow; Casimir, got up as a beggar, had some halfpence given him in all good faith; Stephane, whom I think you know, as a spruce peasant, made believe to have been drinking, stumbled against our sous-prefet and accosted him—he is a nice fellow, and was just going to depart when all of a sudden he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... then the influence of the Christian upon others becomes a great missionary factor. The beauty of the Gospel story lies in its wonderful adaptability. It is the same in its power to a Pascal, a Butler, a Liddon, as it is to the unlettered peasant, who can ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter

... delighted and mightily strengthened when they heard that with all the strength and art which our opponents were then called upon to display, they were capable of producing nothing but this flimsy rebuttal, which now, praise God! a woman, a child, a layman, a peasant are fully able to refute with good arguments taken from the Scriptures, the Word of Truth. And that is also the true and ultimate reason why they refused to deliver [to the Lutherans a copy of] their refutation. Those fugitive evil consciences were filled with horror at themselves, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... of mine told me that a little Russian peasant, whom he had visited often in a military hospital, told him, at their last interview, that he would tell him a prayer that was always effective, and had never failed of being answered. "But you must not use it," he ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... I've hung On every tuneful accent! proud to feel. That notes like mine should have the fate to steal, As o'er thy hallowing lip they sighed along. Such breath of passion and such soul of song. Yes,—I have wondered, like some peasant boy Who sings, on Sabbath-eve, his strains of joy, And when he hears the wild, untutored note Back to his ear on softening echoes float, Believes it still some answering spirit's tone, And thinks it all too sweet to be ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... naked, searching for papers. She at once saw that to see me would be attended with danger; but she wrote a hurried note, and despatched it by another messenger, as well as a large packet of letters from home. In these letters I was adjured to continue the disguise of a peasant in whatever attempts I made. She, too, strongly objected to my proposed plan, and communicated to me a project of escaping which was suggested by a friend of hers at Cork, whither she had gone in her anxiety. His plan was that I should proceed to Cork, that very night, and take ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... The townsman spits at their garments, the shepherd quits his flock, the peasant his plow, to pelt with curses and stones; the villager sets on their trail ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... dutiful child, till her father had told her she might love, it would have been another thing! But this headstrong girl seemed to think she had as good a right to be happy in her own way as a peasant! True, the man of her choice was not a reprobate: he was not even a low-born, unmannerly churl: Don Fernando de Velasquez stood foremost among the young cavaliers of Spain, in gallantry and in that nobility of mind which, should ever accompany ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... my tenants, incited by the choice examples set them by other tenantry, made a descent on my Chateau one night, and did themselves the pleasure of burning it to the ground. By a miracle I escaped with my life and lay hidden for three weeks in the house of an old peasant who had remained faithful. In that time I let my beard grow, and trained my hair into a patriotic unkemptness. Then, in filthy garments, like any true Republican, I set out to cross the frontier. As I approached ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... the last of my strength, I ran on to the place where he had turned out of my sight, and, turning also, I saw him again. But alas! I could not touch him. He was in the act of lifting a girl down from her horse; doubtless it was her scream that I heard. She looked like a small farmer's or a peasant's daughter, and she carried a basket on her arm. Probably she was on her way to the early market at Zenda. Her horse was a stout, well shaped animal. Master Rupert lifted her down amid her shrieks—the sight of him frightened her; but he treated her gently, ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope

... money and freedom to 'live your own lives'? You are sexless; you haven't nature's great apology for the animal,—desire. Such women sin, when they sin, with their minds. Great God! I had rather those broad-hipped Italian peasant women of Calabria, with solid red-brown flesh, bred bastards for the country than have these thin, anaemic, nervous, sexless creatures, with their 'souls' and their 'charm,' marry and become mothers! What have you done to the race? The race of blond ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... of the term, but Miss Chislett had a certain perfection of courteous grace and dignified refinement, in every word, and gesture, and attitude, as utterly natural to her as the vigorous tread of any barefooted peasant girl, and which one does meet with (but by no means invariably) among women of the highest class in England. Her dignity fell short of haughtiness (which is not high breeding, and is very easy of assumption); her grace and courtesy were the simple results of constant and ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... which have detained me from my rest till the morning hour, and repair unto a couch often baffled of slumber by the pains and discomforts of this worn and feeble frame, I almost wish I could purchase the rude health of the peasant by the exchange of an idle and imperfect learning for the ignorance, content with the narrow world it possesses, because unconscious of the limitless creation beyond. Yet, my dear and esteemed friend, there is a dignified and tranquillizing philosophy in the writings of the ancients which ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... associations of an opposite description; but most of them, he should hope, from terror on the one hand, and the expectation of impunity on the other." There was the point, which no man comprehended better in theory than this clever law-officer, and none better in practice than the Popish peasant. "This expectation, however," he observes, "must now be effectually removed, and the terror of the law, I trust, be substituted in place of the terror of the conspirators." Adding, "your Excellency will observe with regret, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... Sclavonian race of peasant slaves, they pay tributes to their lords, not under the name of duty work, duty geese, duty turkeys, &c., but under the name of righteousnesses. The following ballad is a curious ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... until the Vienna Exhibition of 1890, when his opera, 'Die verkaufte Braut,' was produced for the first time in the Austrian capital. Since then it has been played in many German opera-houses, and was performed in London in 1895, and again in 1907. The story is simplicity itself. Jenik, a young peasant, and Marenka, the daughter of the rich farmer Krusina, love each other dearly; but Kezal, a kind of go-between in the Bohemian marriage-market, tells Krusina that he can produce a rich husband ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... not! To the unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural. If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as composed the mind of the tenth century biographers of Declan and Mochuda. Dreamers and visionaries were of as frequent occurrence in Erin of ages ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous

... which he rode a good hour longer at full gallop. When he felt pretty sure of having shaken the police off his track, and that their bad horses could not overtake him, he determined to slacken to recruit his horse; he was walking him along a hollow lane, when he saw a peasant approaching; he asked him the road to the Bourbonnais, and flung him a crown. The man took the crown and pointed out the road, but he seemed hardly to know what he was saying, and stared at the marquis in a strange manner. The marquis shouted to him to get out of the way; ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE COUNTESS DE SAINT-GERAN—1639 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... 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 ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... assumed its entertaining aspect; about the wind, the trees, the people who had gone to the Cheniere; about the children playing croquet under the oaks, and the Farival twins, who were now performing the overture to "The Poet and the Peasant." ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... own legitimate purposes, but then that ugliness must be humorous, grotesque, or sublime, and not flat, prosy, or revolting. A blemish is by no means necessarily an ugliness. A leaf nibbled by insects and consequently discolored, a lad with ragged jacket and soiled trowsers, a peasant girl with bent hat and tattered gown, are often more picturesque objects than the perfect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... lamented his own hard lot, and envied the riches of some persons who actually had cows and cornfields. Bonaparte inquired if some fairy were to offer to gratify all his wishes what he would ask? The poor peasant expressed, in his own opinion, some very extravagant desires, such as a dozen of cows and a good farmhouse. Bonaparte afterwards recollected the incident, and astonished the goatherd by the fulfilment of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... 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 ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... good peasant," said I; "do you know this country? Can you lead us to a shelter for ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin

... out and developed, and his newest device was a dinner in the cage, an actual dinner, in which Madame Marve, bewitchingly dressed in a costume that was a cross between the uniform of a hospital nurse and the garb of a French peasant girl, acted as waitress, and the Missing Link figured as the diner. Actual edibles were used, and a "practicable" bottle ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... were circulated as to intended massacres of Catholics by Orangemen. The Celt is highly susceptible to personal influence; and, just as that of the Fitzgeralds largely accounts for the rising in Kildare, so does the personality of Father John Murphy explain the riddle of Wexford. The son of a peasant of that county, he was trained for the priesthood at Bordeaux, and ardently embraced the principles of the French Revolution and the aims of United Ireland. His huge frame, ready wit, and natural shrewdness brought him to the front in Wexford; and he concerted the plan of establishing ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... with trial on a capital charge of fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; Prime Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another's heels ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... China are continually quoted in support of subdivision. In the case of France, let us ask whether any of our stalwart labourers would for a single week consent to live as the French peasant does? Would they forego their white, wheaten bread, and eat rye bread in its place? Would they take kindly to bread which contained a large proportion of meal ground from the edible chestnut? Would ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... vair) as opposed to the ermine(Mus Armenius, or mustela erminia.) I never visit England without being surprised at the vile furs worn by the rich, and the folly of the poor in not adopting the sheepskin with the wool inside and the leather well tanned which keeps the peasant warm and comfortable between Croatia ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... retorted the captain, "and am bound to accommodate myself to them. I suppose this is the prince you spoke of," he added, turning to the towering youth already referred to, with the air of a man who had as little—or as much—regard for a prince as a peasant. ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne

... castle: it has a round-headed arch, with six pilasters, in the intervals of which are three half-length human figures and two horses' heads. On the southern slope of the hill, three miles beyond the walls, a number of Etruscan tombs were accidentally discovered by a peasant a few years ago. The outer entrance alone had suffered, buried under the rubbish of two millenniums: the burial-place of the Volumnii has been restored externally after ancient Etruscan models, but within it has been left untouched. Descending ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... coming on this stage, some having just landed from the different steamers that had just arrived, and some about to embark in others that were going away. Small boats were coming, too, over the water, with passengers in them, among whom were many peasant girls, whose foreheads and temples were adorned with a profusion of golden ornaments, such as are worn by the ladies of North Holland. Rollo looked this way and that as he passed along the stage, and he wished for time to stop and examine what ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott

... of abstinence and toil by a week of merriment and convivial indulgence. Persons in middle life at this day, who can afford a good dinner every day, do not look forward to it as any particular subject of exultation: the poor peasant, who can only contrive to treat himself to a joint of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event in the week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy of the Return from Parnassus, we find this indignant description of the progress of luxury ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... knitting in hand, was telling in low tones, scarcely hearing or understanding her own words, what she had told hundreds of times before: how the late princess had given birth to Princess Mary in Kishenev with only a Moldavian peasant woman to help ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... then a young soldier, twenty-four years of age. He was the son of the Emperor Charles V and his mistress, Barbara Blomberg of Ratisbon. His boyhood had been passed, unknown and unacknowledged by his father, in a peasant household in Castille. As a youth he had been adopted by a noble family of Valladolid. Then Philip II had acknowledged him as his half-brother, and given him the rank of a Spanish Prince. He studied at Alcala, having for ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... A peasant told us, if we understood rightly, that he saw the Spanish withdraw, and the enemy place ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... length, while others do not exceed two to three inches. There are specimens in gold of all sizes, single, double, and triple, with large or small links, some thick and heavy, while others are as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian lace. The poorest peasant woman, alike with the lady of the court, could boast of the possession of a chain, and she must have been in dire poverty who had not some other ornament in her jewel-case. The jewellery of Queen Ahhotpu shows to what degree of excellence the work of the Egyptian goldsmiths had attained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... say, 'here's the chance of your life to win life's chief prize. Now you are peasant soldiers. You have the opportunity to become citizen kings. We are all kings here. Here the least of you can take a rank much higher than that of any General in your army. He can become ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... distant treatment, had not won her to different evenings, or to a new mode of life. But her feeling for Julian led her to ignore now the fact of this fate of hers. She chose to set him aside from it, to keep him for a friend, as an innocent peasant-girl might keep some recluse wandering after peace into her solitude. Julian was to be the one man who looked on her with quiet, habitual eyes, who touched her with calm, gentle hand, who spoke to her with the voice of friendship, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... reign of Tiberius, that he may have been a religious reformer, that he may have been put to death by Pontius Pilate for sedition. All this is perfectly likely, and to allow it in no way endorses the mass of legend and myth encrusted round this tiny nucleus of possible fact. This obscure peasant is not the Christian Jesus, who is—as we shall later urge—only a new presentation of the ancient Sun-God, with unmistakeable family likeness to his elder brothers. The Reverend Robert Taylor very rightly remarks, concerning this ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... which had deserted him for a moment, he tried to draw out the old steward, who was waiting on him. He strove to glean from him some information of the Des Rameures; but the old servant, like every Norman peasant, held it as a tenet of faith that he who gave a plain answer to any question was a dishonored man. With all possible respect he let Camors understand plainly that he was not to be deceived by his affected ignorance into any belief ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... wife of Jean Macquart, to whom she was married in 1871. She was the only daughter of a peasant in easy circumstances, and was of a fine robust physique. She had three healthy children in as many ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... It seems a superstition had come along with the stones, from India to Persia, from there to Russia. A maid fortunate enough to see the drums would marry and be happy. The old fellow confessed that occasionally he secretly admitted a peasant maid to gaze upon the stones. But he never let the male inmates of the palace find this out. He knew them a little too intimately. A ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... derived his dignity from the Supreme Majesty of heaven: that, admitting those extravagant principles which levelled all orders of men, the court could plead no power delegated by the people; unless the consent of every individual, down to the meanest and most ignorant peasant, had been previously asked and obtained: that he acknowledged, without scruple, that he had a trust committed to him, and one most sacred and inviolable; he was intrusted with the liberties of his people, and would not now betray them by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... such stress on my maxim of never believing in anything bad before it forces itself upon me as incontestable? We adhere firmly to our maxims only so long as they are not put to the test; when that happens we throw them away, as the peasant did his slippers, and run off on the legs that nature gave us. If you have the disposition to try the virtue of my maxims, then I shall never again give utterance to any of them, lest I be caught lying; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all the odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings of yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony rail in perusal ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights, and neither by night nor day have the fear of picnics before our eyes. We were observing the other day that we never met anybody except a monk girt with a rope, now and then, or a barefooted peasant. The sight of a pink parasol never startles us into unpleasant theories of comparative anatomy. One cause, perhaps, may be that on account of political matters it is a delightfully 'bad season,' but, also, we are ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... servants, who, from the big chasseur who stood at the back of the minister's sledge to the boy who blew the organ on which I practised, were serfs, and all, without exception, docile, gentle, and kindly. But there was one standing enemy —vodka. The feeling of the Russian peasant toward the rough corn-brandy of his own country is characteristic. The Russian language is full of diminutives expressive of affection. The peasant addresses his superior as Batushka, the affectionate ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... Abyssinia, and was converted by the Abbot of Antinoe, never ceased to weep. There was also Flavian, the deacon, who knew the Scriptures, and spoke well; but the disciple of Paphnutius who surpassed all the others in holiness was a young peasant named Paul, and surnamed the Fool, because of his extreme simplicity. Men laughed at his childishness, but God favoured him with visions, and by bestowing upon him the ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... condition, and perhaps some improvement in the condition of the shopkeepers with whom they dealt, in India it means the creation of a social and ever wide-spreading revolution. For when in India capital is introduced, and employment on a large scale is afforded to the people, the poorer of the peasant classes are at once able to free themselves from debt, and the labourers soon save enough money to enable them to start in agriculture, coffee culture, or any culture within, their reach. The result ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... concluded by announcing from his platform a special dance in honor of the family of Dr. Mayor. In this dance the family with some of their friends and neighbors took part,—the young ladies dancing with the peasant lads and the young gentlemen with the girls of the village,—while the rest formed a ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... the first I see, and you shall hear him." He who chanced to present himself, was a venerable old man. The General shook him by the hand, and bid him good day, with an easy kindness that gave the aged peasant full encouragement to talk to his Excellency with freedom. Paoli bid him not mind me, but say on. The old man then told him that there had been an unlucky tumult in the village where he lived, and that two of his sons were ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... peasant looked with eager eyes O'er the blue waters, to those distant skies; Where no one groaned 'neath unrequited toil, Where the strong laborer might own the soil On which he stood; and, in his manhood's strength, Smile to behold his growing fields at length;— Where his brave ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)

... no one so bitter, so arrogant, so proud as your son of a peasant who has got the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... image of love-scenes between them: he could only fancy and wish wildly—what he knew was impossible—that Romola would some day tell him that she loved him. One day in Greece, as he was leaning over a wall in the sunshine, a little black-eyed peasant girl, who had rested her water-pot on the wall, crept gradually nearer and nearer to him, and at last shyly asked him to kiss her, putting up her round olive cheek very innocently. Tito was used to ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... Lucerne. He plants a small decorated pine-tree before her house at dawn, and if he is accepted a right royal feast is prepared for him. The little tree is {69} treasured till the first baby appears. A Swiss peasant girl is often compelled to take the lover who lives nearest to her home, as the introduction of an outsider is resented by the ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux

... novelette written about 1250 by a man who calls himself Wernher the Gardner. The locus of the story, which is interesting as a picture of the times, is the region about the junction of the Inn and the Salzach. Its hero is a depraved young peasant, who gets the idea that the life of a robber knight would be preferable to hard work upon his father's farm. So he dresses himself in fine clothes to ape the gentry, becomes a robber and commits all manner of outrages ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... 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 through Tarbes on their way to Lourdes, and the joyful return of many, must have been ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... shining as a consoler. I hasten to add that this resolve was only sub-conscious in the good woman. Her grief was perfectly sincere. And it was not the less so because with it was mingled a certain joy in the greatness of the calamity. She came of good sound peasant stock. Abiding in her was the spirit of those old songs and ballads in which daisies and daffodillies and lovers' vows and smiles are so strangely inwoven with tombs and ghosts, with murders and all manner of grim things. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... carouse on one side, and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when his master's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot have cabinets of ebony and cedar, I may just as well have plain deal, with common glass doors to keep the dust out. I detest ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... games of their neighbours, and all these games—bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their physical health and vigour. They were, for the most part, strong, well- built people, in whose physique little or no difference from that of their peasant neighbours was discoverable. Their children grew up in the fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... Orleanist), I have left my master, and have no intention of returning as an apprentice. But I might be stopped and questioned at every place I pass through on my way home did I travel in this 'prentice dress, and I would, therefore, fain buy the attire of a young peasant." ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty

... was to be abolished, and the kingdom of God to be introduced by the levelling of all social ranks; and he produced miracles to certify his divine calling. There had also been two risings, closely connected, the first, in 1513, deriving its name of "Bundschuh" from the peasant's tied shoe, a class emblem, and the {88} second, in 1514, called "Poor Conrad" after the peasant's nickname. If the memory of the suppression of all these revolts might dampen the hopes of the poor, on the other hand the successful rise of the Swiss democracy was a perpetual ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... I-talian peasant, hey! Fifth Avenue peasant with diamonds in her hair. Becomin' to ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln

... of tuberculosis will live for weeks and even months in dark, damp, unventilated quarters, just precisely such surroundings as are provided for them in the inside bedrooms of our tenements, and the dark, cellar-like rooms of many a peasant's cottage or farmhouse. In bright sunlight they will perish in from three to six hours; in bright daylight in less than half a day. This is one of the factors that helps to explain the apparent paradox, that the dust collected from the floors and walls of tents and cottages ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... the east of the Dnieper and Moscow the war is hardly felt at all. This is particularly true of the principal foundations of our life—the peasant country parts numbering their hundred millions. The villages have sent to the war millions of young men, and even fathers of families, heads of households. Many tears have already been shed in the country, and there are many orphans, many cripples. But the peasant countryside has not suffered ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... we get our book learning, we are made heirs to thoughts that breathe and words that burn, we enter into the life, the acts, the arts, the loves, the lore of the wise, the witty, the cunning, and the worthy of all ages and all places; we learn, as says the peasant ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... heavenly: they have not the ideality of Raffaelle's, nor the tender sweetness of Correggio's; nor the glowing loveliness of Titian's; but they have an individual reality about them, which gives them the air of portraits. That chef-d'oeuvre, in the Pitti Palace, for instance, call it a beautiful peasant girl and her baby, and it is faultless: but when I am told it is the "Vergine gloriosa, del Re Eterno Madre, Figliuola, e Sposa," I look instantly for something far beyond what I see expressed. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... importance mingled with rustic gallantry. Frida's manner was also conscious with gratified vanity; and although they believed themselves alone, her voice was already pitched into a high key of nervous affectation, indicative of the peasant. But there was nothing to suggest that Chris had disturbed them in their privacy and confidences. Yet he had evidently seen enough to satisfy himself of her faithlessness. Had he ever ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious. Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and industrious ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... pedantry; and Dr. Keynes has shown, in his Scope and Method of Political Economy, that Mill has himself sometimes solved economic problems by the Historical Method. With an analysis of his treatment of Peasant Proprietorship (Political Economy, B. II., cc. 7 and 8) we may close this section. Mill first shows inductively, by collecting evidence from Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Belgium, and France (countries differing in race, government, climate and situation), ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... lady's eyes! The servile suitors watch her various face, She smiles preferment, or she frowns disgrace, Curtsies a pension here—there nods a place. Nor with less awe, in scenes of humbler life, Is view'd the mistress, or is heard the wife. The poorest peasant of the poorest soil, The child of poverty, and heir to toil, Early from radiant Love's impartial light Steals one small spark to cheer this world of night: Dear spark! that oft through winter's chilling ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... the peculiarities of rudimentary art—of the art of the early Renaissance as well as of that of Persia and India, of Constantinople, of every peasant potter all through the world: that, not knowing very well its own aims, it fills its imperfect work with suggestion of all manner of things which it loves, and tries to gain in general pleasurableness what it loses in actual achievement; and lays hold of us, like fragments ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... Volante (now quite rare) A Village Street, Calvario, Havana Province Street and Church, Camaguey Cobre, Oriente Province Hoisting the Cuban Flag over the Palace, May 20,1902 A Spanish Block House Along the Harbor Wall, Havana Country Road, Havana Province Street in Camaguey Palm-Thatched Roofs A Peasant's Home ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... Meuse, at some distance from the town, stands the village of Bouge, fortified by Don John; to attain which by land, hamlets and thickets were to be traversed; and it was pleasant to see the Walloon peasant children run forth from the cottages to salute the royal train, making their heavy Flemish chargers swerve aside and perform their lumbering cabrioles far more deftly than the cannonading of the rebels, to which they were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... we 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 ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... trash; profanum vulgus[Lat], ignobile vulgus[Lat]; vermin, riffraff, ragtag and bobtail; small fry. commoner, one of the people, democrat, plebeian, republican, proletary[obs3], proletaire[obs3], roturier[obs3], Mr. Snooks, bourgeois, epicier[Fr], Philistine, cockney; grisette[obs3], demimonde. peasant, countryman, boor, carle[obs3], churl; villain, villein; terrae filius[Latin: son of the land]; serf, kern[obs3], tyke, tike, chuff[obs3], ryot[obs3], fellah; longshoreman; swain, clown, hind; clod, clodhopper; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... man of royal and peasant blood," harshly answered the free-booter. "Ambition, arrogance, are the kingly inheritance; strength, a constitution of iron, the low-born legacy. What think ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... short trip and others subsequent many a little village showed us the Madeiran peasant pure and simple. Both sexes are distressingly plain; I saw only one pretty girl amongst them. Froggy faces, dark skins, and wiry hair are the rule; the reason being that in the good old days a gentleman would own some eighty slaves. [Footnote: As early as 1552 the total of African imports ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... chief of rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to the voice of the soul or the voice of God, he would not have minded much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," said one peasant of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding its highest joy of art and pleasure only in noble communion with other souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... room, full of all kinds of curious objects of "vertu", stood a handsome peasant girl, with her eyes fixed as though ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... had bowed in silence beneath two galling burdens—a selfish and corrupt monarchy, and a multitudinous, privileged, lazy, and oppressive aristocracy, by whom the peasant was handled like a Russian serf. [Said peasant is now the principal proprietor of ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... James," the constable said calmly. "We know our duty, and do it whether a man is a peer or a peasant; you are accused of card ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have failed to have felt their force—so unusual in such a place; but he had not the courage, and that sermon of the pavement remains unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the courtier. The passion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that, though our modern society has invented new callings, those ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... THERE was once a peasant who owned a faithful dog called Sultan, now grown so old that he had lost all his teeth, and could lay hold of nothing. One day the man was standing at the door of his house with his wife, and ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

... labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... "My cousin can wait a year, but it's I who cannot wait! You see, it's on my own account I'm acting, I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my cousin hasn't a rouble to spare. I'm forced to ride about and collect debts. I've just been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I'm now calling on you; from here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that until I get together five thousand roubles. I need ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... into which he went was large and very hot, and smelt of freshly washed floors. A short, lean peasant of about forty, with a small, fair beard, wearing a dark blue shirt, was sitting at the table under the holy images. It was Kalashnikov, an arrant scoundrel and horse-stealer, whose father and uncle kept a tavern in Bogalyovka, and disposed of the stolen horses where they could. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... about seventeen years old, there was a rebellion in a kingdom not far from her father's. Wicked nobles murdered the king of the country and stole his throne, and would have murdered the young prince, too, if he had not escaped, dressed in peasant's clothes. ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant

... IN ITALY" is a vivid picture of Italian peasant-life on the plain of Sorrento: the occasion being an outbreak of the well-known hot wind—the "scirocco"—which, in this case, has brought with it a storm of rain. A little frightened peasant girl has taken refuge by the side of the Englishman, who ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... or roasted apples. On Sundays they always put the pot-au-feu, as they call it, which means that they make soup, or literally translated, that they put the pot on the fire. Henry IV declared that he should not feel satisfied until he had so ameliorated the condition of the poor, that every peasant should be able to have a fowl in his pot every Sunday; had he not suddenly been cut off by assassination, he might have lived to have seen his benevolent wish accomplished. Many of the wives of the ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... effectual and earnest performance of duty stamps with a nobility which is not confined to great men—a nobility which kings can neither give nor take away—a nobility which is very, very difficult to attain unto, but which is open alike to the prince and the peasant, and must be wrought hard for and won—or lost with shame,—for, as ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... will be much more surprised at my having had the decency to write at all. We have got rid of our young, pretty, and incompetent maid; and now we have a fine, canny, twinkling, shrewd, auld-farrant peasant body, who gives us good food and keeps us in good spirits. If we could only understand what she says! But she speaks Davos language, which is to German what Aberdeen-awa' is to English, so it ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... actual bloodshed—such are but a few of the methods which preserve a political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities. Small wonder, then, if the non-Magyar races of Hungary, who on a basis of population would have had 198 deputies, never were allowed to elect more than 25, and if even this scanty number was at the infamous elections of 1910 reduced by terrorism ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... Problem.—An increasing proportion of the city's population is foreign born or of foreign parentage. For a hundred years America has been the goal of the European peasant's ambition, the magnet that has drawn him from interior hamlet and ocean port. Migration has been one of the mighty forces that have been reshaping society. The American people are being altered by it, and it is a question whether America will maintain its ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... our host, the Duke of Devonshire, was a man whose like we shall never see again; he stood by himself and could have come from no country in the world but England. He had the figure and appearance of an artisan, with the brevity of a peasant, the courtesy of a king and the noisy sense of humour of a Falstaff. He gave a great, wheezy guffaw at all the right things, and was possessed of endless wisdom. He was perfectly disengaged from himself, fearlessly truthful and without ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... and preach, you ignorant peasant! What do you come here for, spoiling our enjoyment, and keeping us awake at nights? Don't you know this is no common conventicle? It is the place where the king says his prayers! Away with you, or we will take off your head!" So said Amaziah, the priest, and so says many a one to-day. Cannot ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness

... 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 dark ruby-red oleanders flouted the sky with fragrant banners; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... New Armies is full of strange and noble surprises. Now it is an ex-shop boy converted into an R.H.A. driver. Or again it is a Tommy learning to appreciate the heroism of a French peasant woman: ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... is not favourable to the operations of the brain; and the leisure which follows the daily labour of the peasant and manufacturer, will, even if no other demands are made upon it, afford but little scope for the over acquisition of knowledge. Long will it be ere the English husbandman renounces for study the pleasures of his weekly holiday, and long may it be ere the Scottish peasant be withdrawn ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various

... with each tumultuous sound Each voice of fear or triumph, woe or pleasure, That rings Mondego's ravaged shores around; The thundering cry of hosts with conquest crowned, The female shriek, the ruined peasant's moan, The shout of captives from their chains unbound, The foiled oppressor's deep and sullen groan, A Nation's choral ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott

... put into literary form, or edited, by Alexander Amphiteatrof of St. Petersburg. It originally appeared as a feuilleton in the St. Petersburg "Gazette" of December 13, 1901. As a characteristic specimen of Russian peasant folk-lore, it seems to me to have more than ordinary interest and value. The treatment of the supernatural may seem, to Occidental readers, rather daring and irreverent, but it is perfectly in harmony with the Russian peasant's anthropomorphic conception of ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof

... to-day; he cannot walk two steps, without being out of breath. However, I load the guns myself; and, with the peasant I brought from Caserta, and another I hire here, I do very well. I fear, poor Vincenzo will not hold long. If he chooses it, I mean to send him to ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson

... cashiered, denounced, and imprisoned, not escaping until after the fall of Robespierre. It is told that as he fled through a pass of the Alps he heard his own song. "'What is the name of that hymn?' he asked his guide. 'The Marseillaise,' was the peasant's reply. It was then that he learned the name of his own work. He was pursued by the enthusiasm which he had scattered behind him, and escaped death with difficulty. The weapon recoiled against the hand which ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands

... was passing through Afanasievskaya Lane, I saw a policeman putting a ragged peasant, all swollen with dropsy, into a cab. I inquired: "What ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... place where he had turned out of my sight, and, turning also, I saw him again. But alas! I could not touch him. He was in the act of lifting a girl down from her horse; doubtless it was her scream that I heard. She looked like a small farmer's or a peasant's daughter, and she carried a basket on her arm. Probably she was on her way to the early market at Zenda. Her horse was a stout, well shaped animal. Master Rupert lifted her down amid her shrieks—the sight of him frightened her; but he treated ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope

... ineligible to office, possesses all the political rights of the Russian man—a privilege, however, that is of little value in a country where liberty is crushed under the iron heel of autocracy. The position of the Russian peasant women is not as good as that of the women of the upper classes. They find some comfort, however, in the doctrines of the rapidly spreading religious sects, which resemble somewhat the American Revivalists or Anabaptists. In fact, the subject condition of Russian women is one ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... a book of ringing Irish ballads that will stir the heart of every lover of true poetry. "Here and there a verse may be as frankly unadorned as the peasant cabins themselves in their homely cloaks of thatch, but every line rings true to life and home and with the tone, as heartmoving as the Angelus which holds Millet's peasants in its ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder

... in a certain government, there lived a peasant whose wife bore him a son who had the ear of a bear, on which account he was called Yvashka, or Jack with ...
— The Story of Yvashka with the Bear's Ear • Anonymous

... panel, let into the wall in a corner of the room, is a portrait of Burns, copied from the original picture by Nasmyth. The floor of this apartment is of boards, which are probably a recent substitute for the ordinary flag-stones of a peasant's cottage. There is but one other room pertaining to the genuine birthplace of Robert Burns: it is the kitchen, into which we now went. It has a floor of flag-stones, even ruder than those of Shakespeare's ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to consult the village festival and legend (as has been done by Mannhardt in his Wald- und Feld-kulte and Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough, and many a student of folklore), which, though now apparently meaningless, were once the serious religious observance and doctrine of the peasantry. The peasant carried his wishes and prayers to the familiar wishing-well, and presented offerings to the spirit of the well by throwing them into the water or hanging them on the surrounding trees. The fairy rather than far-off Wodan was ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... human mind. If we could know the exact circumstances which affect it, we could foretell what now seems to us only caprice of thought, as well as what now seems to us only caprice of crystal: nay, so far as our knowledge reaches, it is on the whole easier to find some reason why the peasant girls of Berne should wear their caps in the shape of butterflies; and the peasant girls of Munich theirs in the shape of shells, than to say why the rock-crystals of Dauphine should all have their summits of the shape of lip-pieces of flageolets, while those of St. Gothard ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the white Provence roses which climbed ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... answered Sir Piercie Shafton. "Here then we part.—Many will say, that in thus indulging the right of a gentleman to the son of a clod-breaking peasant, I derogate from my sphere, even as the blessed sun would derogate should he condescend to compare and match his golden beams with the twinkle of a pale, blinking, expiring, gross-fed taper. But no consideration of rank shall ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... a great, heavy, iron-bound oak chest, which she permitted no one but herself to open. Here she treasured all the things she had inherited from her mother, and of these she was especially careful. Here lay a couple of old-time peasant dresses, of red homespun cloth, with short bodice and plaited shirt, and a pearl-bedecked breast pin. There were starched white-linen head-dresses, and heavy silver ornaments and chains. Folks don't care to go about dressed like that in these days, and several times his mother ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... northerly extension of tropical Hackbau, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a poor man. For the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... Franco-German War crowded to his tongue, and when difficulties delayed the car he struck up wayside intimacies—once with an old non-commissioned officer now transformed into a Garde Champetre, anon with a peasant couple from whose cottage he begged hot water to make tea. In one such household, arriving with beard and moustache frozen white, he announced himself to the children of the family group as Father Christmas, and made good his claim with distribution ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... alder! Haste to the still, the peace-accustom'd valley, Where lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover. There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses, Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours, With tears! There sigh and moan, and the tired peasant Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting, Shall wonder at ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... the court made living dear, and the consequent expense of labor was a heavy drawback to the export trade, which, by its nature, called for a good deal of manual exertion. According to a Dutch resident of that period, a wooden cottage, very inferior to that inhabited by a peasant in the Low Countries, cost from eight hundred to one thousand florins a year at St. Petersburg. A shopkeeper at Archangel could live comfortably on a quarter of that sum. The cost of transport, which amounted to between nine ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... what does it all matter? Her pride is to be wounded, her self-love humiliated, and every other consideration must yield to that. She is ready to commit perjury, to swear to love and honour a man who is no more to her than that peasant walking along the road. She is ready to degrade herself and risk her soul by a mercenary marriage sooner than bear ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... the Malleus Maleficorum, relates, that in Suabia, a peasant who was walking in his fields with his little girl, a child about eight years of age, complained of the drought, saying, "Alas! when will God give us some rain?" Immediately the little girl told him that she could bring him some down whenever he wished it. He answered,—"And ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... the manner of him that sent thee, give his message even as he hath said it. Beware of making enmity by thy words, setting one noble against the other by perverting truth. Overstep it not, neither repeat that which any man, be he prince or peasant, saith in opening the heart; it is abhorrent ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn

... draw a picture from actual observation. I look out of the windows of my house in Fukui. Here is a peasant who comes back after the winter to prepare his field for cultivation. The man's horizon of ideas, like his vocabulary, is very limited. His view of actual life is bounded by a few rice-fields, a range of hills, and the village near by. Possibly one visit to a city ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... 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, with a little shiver of joy or of fear, I don't know which, I guessed that it was The Comrade in White. And at that very moment the enemy's rifles began to shoot. The bullets could scarcely miss such a target, for he flung out his arms ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem

... VILLEBOIS, Tuesday noon. Good morning, sweetheart. Night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows and calves—also several rabbits.—[His word for fleas.]—The latter had a ball, and I was the ball-room; but they were very friendly and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 30. The British Peasant on the Right Hon. J. Lowther's Proposition—that he should pay "a farthing a week" on his Bread to benefit ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox

... little miss with a new gown at a dancing school ball, a general at the head of a victorious army, and an orator, after having made an eloquent speech in a great assembly. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.' I remember this very question very happily illustrated in opposition to Hume, by the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... chain; hammering, closing the link; and; without a second's 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... tempted one day to follow up a most romantic glen in search of a sketch, when I came upon a remarkably handsome peasant girl, driving a donkey before her loaded with wood. My sudden appearance on the narrow path made the animal shy against a projecting piece of rock, off which he rebounded to the edge of the path, which, giving way, precipitated him and his load down the ravine. He was brought up unhurt against ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... lighted a lantern and went round to the stable to get a trap out. Driving through the dark country, seeing village lights shining out of the distant solitudes, was a thrilling adventure. A peasant came like a ghost out of the darkness; he stepped aside and called, "Good-night!" which the old farmer answered somewhat gruffly, while Fred answered in a ringing, cheery tone. Never had Esther spent so long and happy a day. Everything had combined to produce a strange exaltation of the spirit ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore

... trimmed with purple velvet, peeped forth blue silk stockings with red tops; shoes with high red heels, ornamented with gold buckles, covered the neat little feet. It was altogether quite the costume of a Dutch peasant girl, only the cap was wanting on the head, and in its stead the hair, which fell in long fair ringlets over the child's shoulders, was adorned by a thick wreath of the tendrils of the wild grape, into which, in front just over the brow, were woven two beautiful purple ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... unaccustomed boy, they climbed the last hill, crossed the threshold of Robert Grant's cottage, and were both clasped in the embrace of Janet. For Davie rushed into the arms of Donal's mother, and she took him to the same heart to which she had taken wee sir Gibbie: the bosom of the peasant woman was ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... Huguenot descent; to which he was wont to reply prudently that he had never taken much interest in genealogy. Just why it is thought more creditable for a resident of New York to have descended from a Huguenot peasant or artisan than from an English colonist, those may tell who fancy that social pretenses have ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... That clever young man, Eric Darrow, composed the libretto and thought out the plot. It's about a princess who grew tired of staying at home in her father's castle and going to state dinners and receptions, so she put on the dress of a peasant girl and ran away from the castle to see the world. She took some gold with her, but it was stolen from her the very first thing. No one paid any attention to her because she was poor, and she had a dreadfully ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... memories this afternoon when a tall black-bearded peasant told the doctors that his father, who accompanied him, and who had been insane, a violent neurasthenic, shut up in an asylum for four years, had been restored by the blessed waters to perfect health and had shown no ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... elections, moreover, were not all held on one day, as with us, but consuls, praetors, and other magistrates were chosen on different days, while meetings of the assemblies might be held at any time of the year. A country peasant who really tried to fulfill his duties as a citizen would have had little time for anything else. In practice, therefore, the city populace at Rome had the controlling voice in ordinary legislation. The Romans were never able to remedy ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... the astrologer by saying: Of two children who were born in the same minute, one has been king, the other has been only churchwarden of his parish; for the astrologer could very well have defended himself by pointing out that the peasant made his fortune when he became churchwarden, as the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... as he was able. War seemed inevitable, the air was thick with portents; and was this, then, an appropriate time, the judicious demanded of high Heaven, for the Queen of imperilled England to concern herself about a peasant's toothache? ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... town of Villefranche, I perceived a movement of men and women like that of bees around a hive. I chanced to arrive on the day of the local fair, when everybody expects to make some money, from the peasant proprietor or the mtayer who brings in his corn or cattle, to the small shopkeeper who lives upon the agriculturist. I felt disposed to lunch at the grandest hotel in Villefranche, and a good woman whom I consulted on the subject led ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... harden'd to crystal. Yet harsh if he were, His severity seem'd to be trebly severe In the rule of his own rigid life, which, at least, Was benignant to others. The poor parish priest, Who lived on his largess, his piety praised. The peasant was fed, and the chapel was raised, And the cottage was built, by his liberal hand. Yet he seem'd in the midst of his good deeds to stand A lone, and unloved, and unlovable man. There appear'd some inscrutable flaw in the plan Of his life, that love fail'd to pass over. That ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... began to launch out in praise of that country for which they were bound. He observed, that France was the land of politeness and hospitality, which were conspicuous in the behaviour of all ranks and degrees, from the peer to the peasant; that a gentleman and a foreigner, far from being insulted and imposed upon by the lower class of people, as in England, was treated with the utmost reverence, candour, and respect; and their fields were fertile, their climate pure healthy, their farmers rich and industrious, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... be observed that the rules for the interpretation of dreams are far from being universal. The cheeks of the peasant girl of England glow with pleasure in the morning after she has dreamed of a rose, while the paysanne of Normandy dreads disappointment and vexation for the very same reason. The Switzer who dreams of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... through from the Arno to the sea. Next, he set to work to afforest the newly recovered ground, to carve it out in allotments suitable for agricultural pursuits, and to encourage the settlement of vigorous working peasant-tenants. A certain portion of the estates he set apart to his own use for the preservation of wild game. He rebuilt and enlarged the ruined castle of Rosignano, ten miles from Livorno, for the occupation of himself and his family ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley

... left the door of the palace, the Emperor, pressing his forehead with his hand, said to Caulaincourt, who accompanied him, "I envy the lot of the meanest peasant of my empire. At my age he has discharged his debts to his country, and may remain at home enjoying the society of his wife and children, while I—I must fly to the camp and engage in the strife of war. Such is the mandate ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... An old peasant in a German village had to leave his children alone in the house for the day. "If a thief comes," he said to them, "do not cry 'Thief!' For everybody will be afraid and will say to himself: 'After all, it's not my property that's ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson

... when—on a country expedition we had made together—she had insisted on running after the game when I had called her back. I had had to hunt after her for ten hours the next day, finding her—by the merest chance—at a peasant's house. She had settled down there alongside of a sheep-dog to watch the sheep, and seemed by no means pleased to see me; usually she is delighted! Her reply on this occasion was—"Lola went in wood, also lay down and was hungry." I returned to the question later in the ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... gathering on the side towards Catania, and hung in a dark mass about half-way down the mountain. Groups of the villagers were gathered in the streets which looked upwards to Etna, and discussing the chances of an eruption. "Ah," said an old peasant, "the Mountain knows how to make himself respected. When he talks, everybody listens." The sound was the most awful that ever met my ears. It was a hard, painful moan, now and then fluttering like a suppressed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... 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 ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... with such certainty, had come in his path. He had performed his duty as a brave soldier, but he had not accomplished such an heroic act as that of Krauel, in the past year, which had raised the common soldier to the title of Baron Krauel von Ziskaberg, and had given to the unknown peasant a name whose fame would extend over centuries. He had not astonished the whole world with a daring, unheard-of undertaking, such as that of Ziethen, who had passed with his hussars, unknown, through ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... of them,' she cried; 'they belong to you. Let me never see them again, but I have learned the lesson that they taught me. Others may have riches, beauty and wit, but as for me I desire nothing but to be the poor peasant girl I always was, working hard for ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang

... The poor woman, who without doubt had 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, and not thinking of going away, when Michael Arout ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... and less vulgarly ostentatious than the inflated garment of the early sixties? Or if we compare the pictures of Modjeska and Miss Marlowe in Shakespearian roles, or that of the former in the neat and graceful gathered gown, and Miss Mather in the simple peasant dress, are they not one and all far more chaste, artistic, sensible, and healthful than the hoop-skirt, bustle, and train, or the tie-back? Do not, however, understand that I advocate the introduction of any ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... and currant bushes, and then a low wall about three feet above the ground, covered with stone-cress. Outside, a corn-field, with its green ears glistening in the sun, and a field path through it, just past the garden gate. From my window I could see every peasant of the village who passed that way, with basket on arm for market, or spade on shoulder for field. When I was inclined for society, I could lean over my wall, and talk to anybody; when I was inclined for science, I could botanize all along the top of my wall— there were ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... at, and to make such excursions into the interior as time permitted. In fact, except in the capital, there is not a really good hotel to be met with, although primitive accommodation may be found in the peasant ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... office-quarters. Their playfulness fell again and again into wild excesses, which forced the magistrate to pass prohibitive laws, in order to protect citizens from injury and damage. Add to this the great number of beggars, peasant-people, many of them, impoverished by the wars, bohemians, highwaymen, remnants of army-trains, all flocking to the great centre in the hope of finding assistance, strolling musicians, quacksalvers and mountebanks at market ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt

... venture from our hiding-place till the duke was out of sight, and by the delay we lost a good half-league in our race. I asked Yolanda if she knew how far it was to the next point of contact, She did not know, but I learned from a peasant that the river made a great bend, and that our road gained nearly a league over the other before each again touched the river. This was ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major

... these moods can the Ordinary Reader sympathize! Again and again as the Ordinary Reader turns the pages he finds the great man under the thralldom of the same insect cares and annoyances which rule us all, until he realizes as perhaps never before that poet and peasant, genius and scribe, are indeed one in a common humanity, and sighs, with a lurking smile of satisfaction, "So nigh is ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... the subject he was painting, Murillo used three distinct styles of work, known as the cold, the warm, and the aerial. The first, in which the line or drawing is marked by strength, he used in his studies of peasant life. The second he used in his visions, while the third he reserved for his Conceptions—his heavenly effects. So fine a colorist was he, however, and so indispensable a part of his art did he consider the coloring that even ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor

... no woman save an old peasant had ever placed foot within this house. If so, what do these Eastern things mean?" holding out as she spoke a feminine something which seemed to be composed ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or in the great ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... experienced every form of despotism, they had now enjoyed that exemption near five hundred years; nor could they patiently brook the insolence of an Illyrian peasant, who, from his distant residence in Asia, presumed to number Rome among the tributary cities of his empire. The rising fury of the people was encouraged by the authority, or at least the connivance, of the senate; and the feeble remains of the Praetorian guards, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... taken an active part in politics. That was when the Union Jack was threatened, when British regiments were melting away before the rifles of a peasant people at Magersfontein, Colenso and Graspan, when Ladysmith was being besieged, and Downing Street trembled for the safety of the empire. Then, in the hour of dire need, a cry for help went out to all the ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... Vandeloup, satirically, dropping into a seat beside Kitty, 'she is a maypole, and he's a merry peasant dancing round it. By the way, Bebe, why isn't Madame ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... deluded peasant, Merlin leads Through fragrant bowers, and through delicious meads; While here enchanted gardens to him rise, And airy fabrics there attract his eyes, His wandering feet the magic paths pursue; And while he thinks the fair illusion true, The trackless ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... the spires and towers of the town made a beacon of hope to the peasant as he laboured on the seigneuries leagues and leagues away. Far down the Cote de Beaupre, beyond the Mont Ste. Anne, from the rich farms of Orleans, and across on the Levi shore, the glistening light on the city roofs by day, and at night the twinkling candles in the windows, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... cheerfully and as perfectly as she had performed her chosen tasks in the convent years before. Women doctors were not known in those days, but the genius of Madame Roland embraced a knowledge of medicine with other things; and she often went three leagues to relieve a sick peasant, and was ever ready to sacrifice herself for the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... 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

... Garin of Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of unknown birth, purchased from the Saracens, who proves to be daughter of the King of Carthage, and in the end the lovers are united. In one remarkable passage unusual sympathy is shown with the hard lot of the peasant, whose trials and sufferings are contrasted with the lighter troubles of the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... his sojourn in that taking, happy region of silver lake and green mountain slope. He had many congenial neighbours. Of Wordsworth he saw little. The poet was, in external manner and habit, too much of the peasant for Greg's intellectual fastidiousness. He called on one occasion at Rydal Mount, and Wordsworth, who had been regravelling his little garden-walks, would talk of nothing but gravel, its various qualities, and their respective virtues. The fine and subtle understanding of Hartley Coleridge, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley

... countryman prosecutes a tradesman named Auguier for about twenty thousand francs, said to have been lent to the tradesman. It was pretended, that the loan was to account of the proceeds of a treasure which Mirabel, the peasant, had discovered by means of a ghost or spirit, and had transferred to the said Auguier, that he might convert it into cash for him. The case had some resemblance to that of Fanny the Phantom. The defendant urged the impossibility of the original discovery of the treasure by the spirit to the prosecutor; ...
— Trial of Duncan Terig, alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald • Sir Walter Scott

... way back to Petrograd that night, for next evening there was to be one of the famous "Bals des Palmiers" at the Winter Palace which we neither of us wished to miss. So it came about that one evening we were sitting in a two-roomed peasant's house, thigh-booted and flannel-shirted, in the roughest of clothes, devouring sustenance for our night's sledge journey out of pieces of newspaper by the light of a little smoky oil-lamp, whilst around us ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... And his daughter, God knows what is in store for her. Prince Frederick is dallying with his peasant girl. The day for the wedding has come and gone, unless he turned up ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid no attention to it, quite ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... for Carlyle, who was a Scotch peasant, offering him the title of nobleman, which he declined, feeling that he had always been a nobleman in his own right. He understood so little of the manners at court that, when presented to the Queen, after speaking to her a few minutes, being tired, he said, "Let us sit down, madam;" ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... and soon the shameless rioting and drunkenness in the village came to her knowledge, and she wondered yet more whence her clansmen obtained the means for their excesses, for she felt instinctively that the origin of all this rioting must be evil. Cathleen therefore called to her an old peasant, whose wife had died of hunger in the early days of the famine, so that he himself had longed to die and join her; but when he came to her she was horror-struck by the change in him. Now he came flushed with wine, with defiant ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... ancient rites are still practiced as part and parcel of modern religious observances is not realized by those who have given no special attention to the subject. As spring advances, all ranks of Russians from the Czar to the humblest peasant proceed with their clergy to the Neva, where with solemn pomp the ice is broken and the water, which is held to be of virgin purity, is sprinkled upon the heads of Czar, nobles, and other dignitaries. The following is an account given of the worship of Hea not many years ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... sincere, lurks beneath it—that unhappy, hopeless love, which unkind nature often sets between poor souls of very different ranks in life. On the one hand is the grief of the peasant maid at not being able to make herself fair enough to win the cavalier's fancy; on the other the smothered sighs of the serf, when along his furrow he sees passing, on a white horse, too exquisite a glory, the beautiful, the majestic Lady of the Castle. So in the East arises ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... flocks shall shepherds lead By Babel's silver stream and fertile mead; Or peasant girls at summer's eve repair, To wreathe with wilding flowers their flowing hair; Or pour their plaintive ditties to the wave, That rolls its sullen murmurs o'er thy grave. The wandering Arab there no rest ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie

... Kate entered. It was a long, narrow, whitewashed room, smelling strongly of violet-powder and clothes. Nobody had arrived yet, and the dresses lay spread out on chairs awaiting the wearers. One was a peasant-girl's dress—a short calico skirt trimmed with wreaths of wild flowers, and she regretted that she could not exchange the page's attire ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... Amos as "rusticus" and "imperitus sermone," but modern writers are generally agreed that in putting forward this view he was influenced by the statement as to the peasant origin ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... excited by the exercise and the bracing effects of the frosty air. He whistled as he went along, not "from want of thought," but to give vent to those buoyant feelings which he had no other mode of expressing. For each peasant whom he chanced to meet, he had a kind greeting or a good-humoured jest; the hardy Cumbrians grinned as they passed, and said, "that's a kind heart, God bless un!" and the market-girl looked more than once over her shoulder at the athletic form, which corresponded ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... once a poor peasant, Hans by name. He lived with his wife and children in a valley at the foot ...
— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie

... however, is now followed with more brains, more experience, and more capital, and the result is in many instances excellent. The vin ordinaire of California, largely made from the Zinfandel grape, has been described as a "peasant's wine," but when drunk on the spot compares fairly with the cheaper wines of Europe. Some of the finest brands of Californian red wine (such as that known as Las Palmas), generally to be had from the producers ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... not his favours,' he said in a peasant's mutter. 'Maybe I should know him if I saw him again. I am main good at ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford

... tree,' and that he had gone off to the Black Forest directly the Ascot week was over, and at Rippoldsau he had met his old friend and fellow traveller, Hammond, and they had gone for a walking tour together among the homely villages, the watchmakers, the timber cutters, the pretty peasant girls. They had danced at fairs—and shot at village sports—and had altogether enjoyed the thing. Hammond, who was something of an artist, had sketched a good deal. Maulevrier had done nothing but smoke his German pipe ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... him with something sharp. Then you carried him away, and laid him down under a lilac bush for a short time. After resting awhile and considering, you carried him across the fence. Then you entered the road. After that comes the dam. Near the dam, a peasant frightened you. Well, what is the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... always drawn down, and Bertha remained invisible. During the second week, however, she relented, and they had many a pleasant chat together. He now volunteered to write all her exercises, and she made no objections. He learned that she was the daughter of a well-to-do peasant in the sea-districts of Norway (and it gave him quite a shock to hear it), and that she was going to school in the city, and boarded with an old lady who kept a pension in the house adjoining the one in ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... page of a newspaper, or carries to the doorkeeper some goods that have been delayed. Every other day, at six, he is faithful to his post. A permanent bass for the chorus, he betakes himself to the opera, prepared to become a soldier or an arab, prisoner, savage, peasant, spirit, camel's leg or lion, a devil or a genie, a slave or a eunuch, black or white; always ready to feign joy or sorrow, pity or astonishment, to utter cries that never vary, to hold his tongue, ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... candle shone like the heads of St. Cecilias and Madonnas in an antique stained-glass window. At last Laure [Laure Aglae Rose de Beaurepaire,—would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?] observed the door open, and another candle glowed upon Jacintha's comely peasant-face in the doorway; she dived into the shadow, and emerged into light again close to the table, with napkins ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... complexity of every form of speech spoken by a highly civilised nation, and discover that the grammatical rules and the inflections which denote number, time, and equality are usually the product of a rude state of society—that the savage and the sage, the peasant and man of letters, the child and the philosopher, have worked together, in the course of many generations, to build up a fabric which has been truly described as a wonderful instrument of thought, a machine, the several parts of which are so well adjusted to each other ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... of their habitations which, contrasted with the solemn gloom of the forest, carried a momentary and indefinable consolation to his spirit. Then there was the ripe and teeming orchard, and the low whitewashed cabin of the Canadian peasant, to whom the offices of charity, and the duties of humanity, were no strangers; and who, although the secret enemies of his country, had no motive for personal hostility towards himself. Then, on the river itself, even at that early hour, was to be seen, fastened ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... I heard made yesterday by a poor and very old peasant woman as she stopped work for a moment in a field above Montretout to look at the Fort firing. She followed up this admirable summary of recent military operations by asking me whether it was not amazing ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... same time when Brahma-datta was reigning in Benares, the future Buddha was born one of a peasant family; and when he grew up he gained his ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... was in deep meditation. Although a fanatical admirer of illustrious generals, the common sense of that peasant woman made him think of the opulence that would bring to a country so many hands now idle and necessarily ruinous, so many forces kept unproductive, if they were employed for the great industrial ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... and grounds for your benefit, and let you admire our mansions, and you knocked down the ornaments, and smudged the tapestry and the antimacassars, and trod on the flower-beds, and pulled up the young trees, and threw orange-peel into the fountains, and ridiculed the statuary. Then you asked us for peasant proprietorship.' ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... with the equine head listened with an air of respectful obedience, while her faint smile expressed the cunning of a Norman peasant who had been five years in Paris already and was hardened to service, and well knew what was done with children when the master ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... of the three men who accompanied them they recognized the peasant who had spoken to the muleteer when he refused to accept their first offer, and they had no doubt that he had arranged with the man to lead them to a certain spot, to which he had proceeded direct, while their guide had conducted them ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty

... a handsome and important manufacturing town with 60,000 inhabitants; and here the beautiful and magnificently fertile table lands of Belgium spread out like a vast prairie before the traveler. In fact, the peasant cultivators are so commonly located in villages, leaving long stretches of the rarely fenced though well cultivated plain without a habitation, that the resemblance to level prairies which have been ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... flirtation is generally seasoned with more Attic salt, whether it is not allowed to exceed certain limits, or whether it leads to free liaisons after the manner of the Greek hetaira. In the country, among peasant girls and boys it takes a grosser form, if not more sensual, than among the cultivated classes; in the latter, language takes the principal part. Among rich idlers in watering places, large hotels, and even in some sanatoriums, flirtation takes a dominant place ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... of her children almost wrung poor Madame Dort's heart in twain; but, like the majority of German mothers at the time, she sent off her son, with a blessing, "to fight for his country, his Fatherland"; for, noble and peasant alike, every wife and mother throughout the length and breadth of the land seemed to be infected with the patriotism of a Roman matron. Madame Dort would be ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... highly developed societies have always presented under a 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, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... 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 ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... ought to have urged his suit with greater earnestness. I am speaking now like a man of the world, Miss Goodwin; and I am certain that he would have done so but for one fact, of which I am aware: he has got into a low intrigue with a peasant's daughter, who possesses an influence over him such as I have never witnessed. She certainly is very beautiful, it is said; but of that I cannot speak, as I have not yet seen her; but I am afraid, Miss Goodwin, from all I hear, that a very little time ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... Plunged in these melancholy reflections, he lost his way, having passed the place where he should have quitted the main road to ascend the steep hill of which the castle formed the crown. By good luck he met a peasant who put him again upon the right track. The night had already fallen when he entered the court of the vast building. This great assemblage of incongruous structures appeared to him but a somber mass whose weight ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... cotonnade, the ordinary clothing of both sexes. Their little cabanes dotted the broad prairie in all directions, and it was pleasant to see the smoke curling from their chimneys, while herds of cattle and ponies grazed at will. Here, unchanged, was the French peasant of Fenelon and Bossuet, of Louis le Grand and his successor le Bien-Aime. Tender and true were his traditions of la belle France, but of France before Voltaire and the encyclopaedists, the Convention and the Jacobins—ere she had lost faith in all things, divine and human, save the bourgeoisie ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor

... not in love with Froken Helga; but yet this simple Jutland peasant had divined what might occur, and had forewarned him. The explanation of Helga's conduct towards him was clear. He saw that she daily visited the people in the parish, and told the Pastor what was necessary to tell him, and ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary

... our Manila men were as brave as Caesar; they were anxious to be landed instantly, to fight these Indians at once. They felt as much superior, no doubt, to these ignorant savages as the philosopher does to the peasant. This the captain would not permit; he knew his superiority while on board his vessel, and he also knew that this superiority must be, in a manner, lost to him as soon ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... namely, writes a Note addressed to his Brother Henri: "Austrians totally beaten this day; now for the Russians, dear Brother; and swift, do what we have agreed on!" [OEuvres de Frederic, v. 67.] Friedrich hands this to a Peasant, with instructions to let himself be taken by the Russians, and give it up to save his life. Czernichef, it is thought, got this Letter; and perhaps rumor itself, and the delays of Daun, would, at any rate, have sent him across. Across he at once ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... part of which it has, from time immemorial, been cultivated. In warm climates it is found to be less acrid and much sweeter than in colder latitudes; and in Spain it is not at all unusual to see a peasant munching an onion, as an Englishman would an apple. Spanish onions, which are imported to this country during the winter months, are, when properly roasted, perfectly sweet, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... delight in hatching its offspring in by-corners. The walls of its squalid chambers are covered with names and inscriptions in every language, by pilgrims of all nations, ranks, and conditions, from the prince to the peasant; and present a striking instance of the spontaneous and universal homage of mankind to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... book may help to correct a prevailing misconception as to the morals and mind of the typical English peasantry. It is certain that the conventional peasant of literature, the broad-mouthed rustic in a smock-frock, dull-eyed, mulish, beetle-headed, doddering, too vacant to be vicious, too doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in England. What does exist in every corner of the country is a peasantry speaking a patois that ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... days 85 Build up the spirit's dwelling-place! A temple of so Parian stone Would brook a marble god alone, The statue of a perfect life, Far-shrined from earth's bestaining strife. 90 Alas! though such felicity In our vext world here may not be, Yet, as sometimes the peasant's hut Shows stones which old religion cut With text inspired, or mystic sign 95 Of the Eternal and Divine, Torn from the consecration deep Of some fallen nunnery's mossy sleep, So, from the ruins of this day Crumbling in golden dust ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell









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