"Cottager" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the dress is invariable, and every inhabitant of the commune, from the wealthy farmer's wife to the poorest cottager who earns her black bread by labour in the fields, would as soon think of adopting male attire as of innovating on the immemorial mode du pays, yet the quality of the materials allows scope for wealth and female coquetry ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine danger that nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... picture of Sheila appearing as a sea-princess in a London drawing-room was all very beautiful in its way, but here she was discussing as to the quality given to broth by the addition of a certain vegetable which she offered to send down from her own garden if the cottager in question would try to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... her element here, in helping her; for flannel petticoats were to be given out, and stuff frocks, and pieces of homespun, and boots and shoes, as prizes for diligent and faithful service; or an order for coals for the coming winter for some poor cottager, or packages of tea, or some other little comfort. And before any of them quite realised it, the days flew by, and in two more of them the King party would ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... century that tea firmly and permanently established itself in the humbler households of England. Its economical prominence elicited from William Cobbett, the economist and pugnacious editor, a declaration that from eleven to twelve pounds of tea constituted the average annual indulgence of a cottager's family, at a cost of eight shilling for black and 12 shillings for green tea ($2 to $3) per pound, which was doubtless an over-estimate. And we must bear in mind that tea in those days was sold by the ounce, measured into the teapot by the grain, and ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... as he is more commonly called here, Teddy Band, is a poor, but honest and industrious cottager, but I am, nevertheless, disposed to think that "if ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... Toomer, the under-keeper, went with him to the place, accompanied by a bloodhound. The dog, when brought to the spot, was laid on the scent; and after following for about a mile the track which the depredator had taken, he came at last to a heap of furze fagots belonging to the family of a cottager. The woman of the house attempted to drive the dog away, but was prevented; and on the fagots being removed a hole was discovered in the ground, which contained the body of a sheep that had recently been killed, and also a considerable quantity of salted meat. The circumstance which ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... on Lilian's side, at all events, it was unfeigned enjoyment. The cosy little room put her at ease. Its furniture was quite in keeping with the simple appearance of the house, but books and pictures told that no ordinary cottager ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... for some time watching the scene, and destroyed Dahlia's single-mindedness. Like many days of gaiety, the Gods consenting, this one had its human shadow. There appeared on the borders of the festivity a young woman, the daughter of a Wrexby cottager, who had left her home and but lately returned to it, with a spotted name. No one addressed her, and she stood humbly apart. Dahlia, seeing that every one moved away from her, whispering with satisfied noddings, wished to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... husband came round with straw beehives to sell, and cane to mend chairs—a strong, respectable-looking man. Of all the north wind drove to the door, the outcasts were the best off—much better off than the cottager who was willing to break his spade to earn a shilling; much better off than the white-haired labourer, whose strength was spent, and who had not even a friend to watch with him in the dark hours of the winter evening—not even a fire ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... No wonder the Cottager Looks with Pride On the well-fed donkey That stands at his side; For he works, and he lives As hard as he, And a creature more useful There ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel, unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to say. But she IS a lady, nevertheless—in feeling ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... far down on the valley below me, Where lowly the lot of the cottager's cast, While the hues of the evening seem ling'ring to shew me How calmly the sun of this life may be pass'd, How oft have I wish'd that kind Heaven had granted My hours in such spot to have peacefully run, Where, if pleasures were few, they were all that I wanted, And Contentment ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Bible from the cottager and the artisan?— Heaven forfend! The fairest flower that ever clomb up a cottage window is not so fair a sight to my eyes as the Bible gleaming through the lower panes. Let it but be read as by such men it ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... The cottager's wife told Lionel how the children out at play had found a man lying in the dank grass near the pond, and how her husband, in his own strong arms, had brought him to their abode. He lay still for many hours, and then asked for pen and ink. He was writing, she said, nearly all night, ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... it?—I don't want what don't belong to me!" Moved by a recollection he took the watch to the maker's just opposite, sold it there and then for what the tradesman offered, and went with the proceeds to one among the smaller of his creditors, a cottager of Durnover in straitened circumstances, to whom ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... a time there was a poor cottager who had three sons. He had nothing to leave them when he died, and no money with which to put them to any trade, so that he did not know what to make of them. At last he said he would give them leave to take to anything each liked best, and to go whithersoever ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... indeed the sun by day and the moon by night, and learned the traditions and customs of their forefathers, such as had been handed down for generations. But now a new illumination has fallen upon these far-away places. The cottager is no longer ignorant, and his child is well grounded in rudimentary education, reads and writes with facility, and is not without knowledge of the higher sort. Thus there is now another moon with the figures of education all round it. In this book some notes have been made of the former state ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... 2. No poor cottager stood in need of comforts, which he was not ready to supply; no sick man or woman languished for want of his assistance; and not even a beggar, unless a known impostor, went empty-handed from the Hall. Like the village ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... photograph of Harriet in a plush frame, the one touch of modernity in a room which was otherwise severely 1845. Then, on a bookshelf which hung above the old tea-caddy and cut- glass sugar-bowl, Georgiana's library—'Line upon Line,' 'Precept upon Precept,' 'Jane the Cottager,' 'Pinnock's Scripture History,' and a few costly works bound in the style of the Albert Memorial. The drawing-room, just a trifle damp, must have contained Mr. Hunt's 'Light of the World,' which Mrs. Farrer never quite learned to love, though it was a ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... offered us a house; and one man even sent us a cask of cider as a present. In the afternoon we paid our respects to the governor — a quiet old man, who, in his appearance and manner of life, was scarcely superior to an English cottager. At night heavy rain set in, which was hardly sufficient to drive away from our tents the large circle of lookers-on. An Indian family, who had come to trade in a canoe from Caylen, bivouacked near us. They had no shelter during the rain. In the morning I asked a young Indian, who ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... you know how To spin, till Willy's eyes forget to wink, And good Aunt Mary, busy as she is, Lays down her knitting. Uncle John.—Listen to me, then. 'Twas in the olden time, long, long ago, And long before the great oak at our door Was yet an acorn, on a mountain's side Lived, with his wife, a cottager. They dwelt Beside a glen and near a clashing brook, A pleasant spot in spring, where first the wren Was heard to chatter, and, among the grass, Flowers opened earliest; but when winter came, That little brook was fringed with other flowers,— ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... but there lay the rich black furrows, all as barren as a desert of sand. The pastures looked as brown in the sweet month of June as ever they did in chill November. The rich man's broad acres and the cottager's small garden patch were equally blighted. Every little girl's flower bed showed nothing but dry stalks. The old people shook their white heads, and said that the earth had grown aged like themselves, and was no longer capable of wearing the warm smile of summer ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... famous Rapunzel, whose story is no doubt familiar to you.... No? Well, her father was a poor cottager who was caught by an old witch stealing radishes from her garden. She let him off on condition that he gave up to her the child his wife was expecting. Rapunzel was the child, and in due time was claimed by the witch, who shut her up in a lofty tower. However, she had ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... bards. Indeed, in 1529, bo linen was so famous that it was always used by the King of Sweden, therefore it is not surprising that weaving is still quite a pastime among Finnish ladies, and every cottager knows how to ply her shuttle. Where it has fallen into disuse women go about the country to teach and ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night. Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (to a new edition of which Chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and brewing. He puts ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... our eyes delighted stray, To mark the rustics on the market-day. Beneath the branches winds the long white road; Here peeps the rustic cottager's abode; There in the morning sun, the children play, Or the crone creeps along the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... tell a thousand tales, Sweet tales of olden time; And ring a thousand memories At vesper, and at prime! At bridal and at burial, For cottager and king, Those chimes, those glorious Christian chimes, How ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... known The passion, father? You have not: A cottager, I mark'd a throne Of half the world as all my own, And murmur'd at such lowly lot— But, just like any other dream, Upon the vapour of the dew My own had past, did not the beam Of beauty which did ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "No, Madame; my daughter died last winter, and left five small children upon my hands." "I will take this one, and provide for all the rest; do you consent?" "Ah, Madame, they are too fortunate," replied the cottager; "but Jacques is a bad boy. I hope he will stay with you!" The Queen, taking little Jacques upon her knee, said that she would make him used to her, and gave orders to proceed. It was necessary, however, to shorten the drive, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... on to those who were expecting him, and that this remembrance was stolen or kept back from nobody. The Princess made answer, Ah! But when the cottager died it would be discovered there. The tiny woman told her No; when that time came, it would sink quietly into her own grave, and would ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... was free, and it seemed that all he could do would be to strike inland at once, for that would be the safest plan. If he tried to reach the coast the chances were that he would encounter one of the gang, or at all events some cottager who would most probably be ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... persons will allow that intellectual licentiousness is the danger of this our intellectual age. For speculation indulges our pride. Faith is an inglorious thing; any one can believe, a cottager just as well as a philosopher: but not all can speculate. The privilege of an intellectually advanced person is that. And the more novel the view he offers, the more evident the proof it gives of an independent mind. Therefore the danger of a highly advanced state of society like our own, is Theory, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... hundred yards before he paused, a little bewildered. To the left could still be seen the cobalt lake with the terraced background; to the right the rugged mountains. He chose the latter. Luckily for him a cottager's garden lay in his path, and from a line supported by a single pole depended the homely linen of the cottager. To tear these garments from the line was the work of a moment (although it represented the whole week's washing), and hastily coiling the rope dexterously ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... indeed a haughty objection often stated against the people's choice: Shall a cottager, poor and unlearned, who pays not one farthing of the stipend, and at next term will perhaps remove from the congregation, have an equal choice of a minister with his master, a gentleman, a nobleman, of liberal ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... is supposed to be a transcript from an ancient manuscript. The period, we are assured, is that of the minority of Henry VI., but despite an elaborately described tournament, we never really leave eighteenth century England. Edmund Twyford, the reputed son of a cottager, is befriended by a benevolent baron Fitzowen, but, through his good fortune and estimable qualities, excites the envy of Fitzowen's nephews and his eldest son. To prove the courage of Edmund, who has been basely slandered ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able to answer all Dorothea's questions about the villagers and the other parishioners. Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw-plaiting at ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... he felt quite certain that it was not Mr. Ned Quince, and he trembled with anger as he saw the absurd situation into which the humorous Mr. Rose had led him. For years Little Haven had accepted his decisions as final and boasted of his sharpness to neighbouring hamlets, and many a cottager had brought his boots to be mended a whole week before their time for ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... day to this the town of La Roche Saint Christophe has been abandoned. No cottager has ventured to repair the ruined habitations for his own use; as the place is esteemed haunted, notably on the night of Passion Sunday, when a ghostly train of the dead is seen flickering in and out of the rocks and ruins by the ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Cowper's poems has, however, been less read than it deserved. The comparison in these poems of the proud and humble believer to the peacock and the pheasant, and the parallel between Voltaire and the poor cottager, are exquisite pieces of eloquence and poetry, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... main problems which have to be attacked in the attempt to realise the outline of the Great State. At the base of the whole order there must be some method of agricultural production, and if the agricultural labourer and cottager and the ancient life of the small householder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific, illiterate, limited, and in immediate contact with the land used, is to recede and disappear it must recede and disappear before methods ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... them unto us by His Spirit." When art, and poetry, and philosophy all pitiably fail, the Spirit unveils to us the bewildering feast. And so the unlearned has the same ultimate advantage as the learned, and the cottager has equal privilege with the monarch. The greatest things are not the perquisites of culture, but the endowments of humility and holy faith. The poor man has access to the "many mansions," and finds a place at the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... the solace of ordinary humanity; children love them; tender, contented, ordinary people love them. They are the cottager's treasure; and in the crowded town mark, as with a little fragment of rainbow, the windows of the workers in whose heart rests the covenant ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... to excel the boys in dancing had aroused much gaiety in the parish, and for some time past there had been dancing in every house where there was a floor fit to dance upon; and if the cottager had no money to pay for a barrel of beer, James Bryden, who had money, sent him a barrel, so that Margaret might get her dance. She told him that they sometimes crossed over into another parish where the priest was not so averse to dancing, and James wondered. ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... possession of many luxuries as well as comforts not known even to noble and royal persons in previous ages of our history. The 3,647,611 inhabited houses of Great Britain, from the palace of the monarch down to the humble dwelling of the cottager, presented a striking contrast to the miserable hovels of the poor, and the inconvenient magnificence of the great, in the bygone periods of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman history, and of the Plantagenets, the Tudors, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... young wife she, the poor humble cottager's daughter whose childhood was pinched by bitterest need, shed a wealth of love and joy upon all who dwelt about her. Yet now, "she, the friendly one, who had never caused suffering to any one, went in her fever delirium to every one in the ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... a likely woman, a cottager's wife, but she had very good clothes and linen, and everything well about her; and with a heavy heart and many a tear, I let her have my child. I had been down at Hertford, and looked at her and at her dwelling, ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... wife visited London. Dorothy, who was left with the children, wrote the poem called 'The Mother's Return,' as a welcome to Mrs. Wordsworth when she came back. This with two other poems, written by her for the children, one on 'The Wind,' the other called 'The Cottager to her Infant,' afterwards appeared in an edition of ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... so fond of celebrating? All is doubt and conjecture in this frail existence; and I might as well attempt proving to whom belonged the mouldering bones which lay dispersed around me, as venture to affirm that one age is more fortunate than another. Very likely the poor cottager, under whose roof I reposed, is happier than the luxurious Roman upon the remains of whose palace, perhaps, his shed is raised: and yet that Roman flourished in the purple days of the empire, when all was wealth and ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Australian bush any more a fair average specimen of that of the inhabitants of the colonies than the owner of a mud-hovel raised on some English heath would be of the inhabitants of the parish in which he happens to dwell. One strong difference may be seen in the two cases. In England the cottager must, in all likelihood, live and die a cottager, as his fathers have done before him, and his children will after him; whereas, in the Australian colonies, with prudence and the Divine blessing, (without which a man can do well nowhere) ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... belongs to the realm of the permanent resident; the summer cottager must be content to either accept the conditions of the garden as arranged by his landlord, or in a brief visit or two made before taking possession, do his own sowing where the plants are to stand. In this case let him choose his varieties ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... credit. The majority of the fortunes were composed of the conventional mixture of illnesses and love affairs which is the stock-in-trade of drawing-room magicians. I glanced at her face. Not a trace of enthusiasm was visible. She was telling fortunes as mechanically as a cottager knits stockings. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... This, coupled with my quiet look, and the care I took not to divulge names, made him disbelieve me; but I disclosed so many facts about women's nature, that he was somewhat astonished. He told me what he had done, about having had the clap, and what to do if I got it; then he had seduced a cottager's daughter on the estate; but his description of the taking, did not accord with my limited experience. One day he pointed the girl out to me at the cottage door, and said he now had ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... house was searched and it was discovered that a bureau had been rifled of several hundred dollars left there by Ransom, the young cottager placed the torn, blood-stained letter he had found in Bordines' possession, in the hand of ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... of laughter which brought a cottager to the nearest window to peep over the pots of fuchsias and geraniums blooming ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... also cannot be regarded as a separate faculty. Reason, will, and feeling are all involved even in the faith of a poor cottager; much more does reason enter into the faith of a ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... to grow them well, in a house of small dimensions—given the amount of sunlight and heat which are required by these plants. We sometimes see Cactuses—specimens, too, of choice and rare kinds—which have been reared in a cottager's window or in a small greenhouse, and which in health and beauty have at least equalled what has been accomplished in the most elaborately prepared houses. It may be said that these successes, under conditions of the most limited kind, are accidental rather than the result of ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... apparel; but is that more eligible than to see the shivering wretch clad in warm and comfortable attire? Can the greatest luxury of the table afford so true a pleasure as the reflection that instead of its being over-charged with superfluities, the homely board of the cottager is blessed with plenty? We might spend our time in going from place to place, where none wish to see us except they find a deficiency at the card-table, perpetually living among those whose vacant minds are ever seeking after pleasures foreign to their own tastes and pursue ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... married. She was always furnishing and refurnishing this cottage, building it up and pulling it down, as the caprice of the moment dictated. Now it had bow-windows and white stuccoed walls—now it was Elizabethan—now the simplest, quaintest, rose-embowered cottager's dwelling, with diamond-paned casements, and deep thatch on the old gray roof. This afternoon she amused herself by collecting a small library for Valentine, while waiting Mr. Sheldon's next observation. He was to have all her favourite books, of course; and they were to be bound in the prettiest, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... to Henry that he loved Agnes, the daughter of a cottager in the village, and hoped to make ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... Shadow of the Glen," Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep farmer, not an uncommon type, but the tramp and Nora, the one by his wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... AASMUND OLAFSEN VINJE. Vinje, the son of a poor cottager, was born on a farm in Telemarken, April 6, 1818, and died July 30, 1870. Poverty and his peculiar personality made life hard for him from first to last. Bent on testing all things for himself, he came into conflict ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Christmastide with his subjects, it is quite certain that the King won the hearts of his people by the great interest he took in their welfare. This good king—whose intimacy with his people we delight to associate with the homely incident of the burning of a cottager's cakes—kept the Christmas festival quite as heartily as any of the early English kings, but not so boisterously as some of them. Of the many beautiful stories told about him, one might very well belong to Christmastide. It is said that, wishing to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... favourably inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance, jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective control of land, for ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... shall die or lose its power a people endowed with such a noble fire of blood, with such feelings that inspire it to confront bereavement, sorrow, sickness, wounds; to march as friends, hand in hand, adored King and simple cottager, man and woman, poor and rich, weak and strong, aristocrat and laborer. Salutation and humblest reverence ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... or, while graciously mingling with his widely- established tenantry, or his equally regarded daily guests at this "holy festival," the virtuous, lowly peasantry, laborers on the land. Then smiled the cottager, with honest consciousness of yeoman worth, when seated in the great hall, under the eye of his munificent lord, who partook of the general feast. Then, too, did he smile when, at the head of his own little board, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... 14th.—Received a note from Theodosia [Lady Monson], and a whole cargo of delicious flowers from Cassiobury. She writes me that poor old Foster [an old cottager who lived in Lord Essex's park and whom my friend and I used to visit] is dying. The last I saw of that "Old Mortality" was sitting with him one bright sunset under his cottage porch, singing to him and dressing his hat with flowers, poor ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a little bag which hung fastened to her waist, the cottager drew from it a pair of blunt-pointed scissors and ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... down, made many excellent off-hand reflections with the old invalid, who was propped up in his chair, about the shortness of life, the certainty of death, and the necessity of preparing for "that awful change;" quoted several texts of scripture very incorrectly, but much to the edification of the cottager's wife; and on coming out, pinched the daughter's rosy cheek, and wondered what was in the young men that such a pretty face did not get ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... with greater energy and heightened beauty." There is indeed no alternative for us but to admit that these fireside tales have been handed down from parent to child for more than a hundred generations; that the primitive Aryan cottager, as he took his evening meal of yava and sipped his fermented mead, listened with his children to the stories of Boots and Cinderella and the Master Thief, in the days when the squat Laplander was master of Europe and ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... the churchyard of Wood Ditton, near Newmarket, and my attention was attracted by a headstone, having inlaid into its upper part a piece of iron, measuring about ten inches by six, and hollowed out into the shape of a dish. I inquired of a cottager residing on the spot what the thing meant? I was informed that the party whose ashes the grave covered was a man who, during a long life, had a strange taste for sopping a slice of bread in a dripping-pan (a pan over which meat has been roasted), and would relinquish ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... great trees grew now upon the causeways, and vast jungles of rush and water grasses choked the trickling overflows from one pond to the other. Once, it was said, when the earth of those parts had been rich in iron, these ponds had driven great hammers,—but long before the memory of the oldest cottager they had rested from their labours, and lived only the life of beauty and silence. Where iron had once been was now the wild rose, and the grim wounds of the earth had been healed by the kisses of five ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... the wearers of the White Cockade, rough riders after Lag and Sir James Dalzyell, and rebels after that, who had held with Derwentwater and the prince. Now there was quiet there. Only the Lady Elizabeth and her son Agnew Greatorix dwelt there, and the farmer's cow and the cottager's pig grazed and rooted unharmed—not always, however, it was whispered, the farmer's daughter, for of all serfdoms the droit du seignior is the last to die. Still, Greatorix Castle was a notable place, high set on its hill, shires and towns beneath, the blue ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... "you are become plural are you, rascals? How many are there of you, thieves? What, I warrant, you thought to rob and murder a poor harmless cottager and his wife, and did not dream of a garrison? You looked for no weapon of opposition but spit, poker, and basting ladle, wielded by unskilful hands: but, rascals, here is short sword and long cudgel in hands well tried in war, wherewith you shall ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... A cottager leaned whispering by her hives, Telling the bees some news, as they lit down, And entered one by one their waxen town. Larks passioning hung o'er their brooding wives, And all the sunny hills where heather thrives Lay satisfied with peace. A stately crown Of trees enringed the upper ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... themselves by sharing the most menial occupations. It is related of Roger de Warenne that when he retired to Evroul, he took up quite a serious rle of this kind in cleaning the shoes of the brethren, and performing other offices which a mere cottager ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... woman—gipsies they were said to be, but more likely they were only ordinary vagrants—who had been seen lately loitering about the neighbourhood, and whose appearance had given rise to the wildest and absurdest rumours. One cottager, it was said, had lost all her hens; another missed a young pig out of its sty, while the ailing infant of a third had died in convulsions soon after the dark-faced female was at the door demanding a draught of milk! Mrs. Grey had suggested that perhaps ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... area this morning, and as for nearly four hours now we have seen and heard nothing of him, there is no doubt that he has made his escape into the wide world of London, and I fear there is no chance of his finding his way back again. I should not have liked his being at Jenny Wade's [a cottager at Ardgillan, whom Miss S—— pensioned]. In the present condition of Ireland, I should scruple to quarter a dog in a poor person's cabin, giving them for his support what they must needs feel might go some way towards the support of some starving human being. In the stable or kennel of a rich ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... The cottager or peasant-proprietor has, I believe, an advantage in poultry of all kinds. When poultry are kept in very large numbers they are more liable to disease, and the diseases are more disastrous—sweeping off the whole large stock. Fowl and egg farming is one of the most ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... that they're going to change directly; on which the other inside wakes himself up, and determines to postpone his next nap until after the stoppage. Again the bugle sounds lustily forth, and rouses the cottager's wife and children, who peep out at the house door, and watch the coach till it turns the corner, when they once more crouch round the blazing fire, and throw on another log of wood against father comes home; while father himself, a full mile off, has just ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... men in their mood! Travel with the multitude: Never heed them; I aver 35 That they all are wanton wooers; But the thrifty cottager, Who stirs little out of doors, Joys to spy thee near her home; Spring is coming, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... a cottager at one end of the village occupied in chopping up a tough piece of wood or stump and accidentally letting fall his heavy sharp axe on to his foot, inflicting a grievous wound. The tidings of the accident would fly from mouth to mouth to the other extremity of the village, a mile distant; not only ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... to myself, I ought to have been the wife of a humble cottager," Josephine wrote in a fit of impatience at the restraints imposed upon an Empress. But she clung to the title desperately when she knew that it would be taken from her. She had been Napoleon's wife for fourteen years, but no heir had been born to inherit ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... of late. Before, she had belonged very definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative of a ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Memel timber, we'd take—if we could— All tax, 'cause 'tis used in the palace and hall; On the cottager's, tradesman's coarse Canada wood, We will clap such a tax as shall pay us for all. That's the "dodge" for your Whigs—your poor-loving, true Whigs! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... taken aback to see a developed young woman, evidently of gentle birth, where he had thought to find the mere prank-loving child of some neighboring cottager. Instantly his manner changed. Bowing courteously, he stepped forward and began in a ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the room and, taking a handle in each hand, began to skip, and skip, and skip, while Mary turned in her chair to stare at her, and the queer faces in the old portraits seemed to stare at her, too, and wonder what on earth this common little cottager had the impudence to be doing under their very noses. But Martha did not even see them. The interest and curiosity in Mistress Mary's face delighted her, and she went on skipping and counted as she skipped until she had reached ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the laborers on the estate. The object of Scott's visit was to inspect a relic which had been digged up in a Roman camp, and which, if I recollect right, he pronounced to have been a tongs. It was produced by the cottager's wife, a ruddy, healthy-looking dame, whom Scott addressed by the name of Ailie. As he stood regarding the relic, turning it round and round, and making comments upon it, half grave, half comic, with the cottage group around him, all ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... a cottager who had a row of skeps, and bought one of them, just as it was after the man had smothered the bees. This he carried to the foxes that they might taste the honey, for he had seen them dig out wild bees' nests often enough. The skep full was indeed a wonderful feast for them, they bit greedily ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... of acquaintances had vanished, but thanks to Klavs they found new friends. They were a cottager's family by the marsh—people whom no-one else would have anything to do with. There were about a dozen children, and though both the man and his wife went out as day laborers, they could not keep them, and the parish had to help. Lars Peter had frequently given them ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and diamonds. Those fires were the bulletins of the night, telling that around each of them men were sleeping, or thinking of other scenes, or wondering whether the fight to-morrow would be their last fight, and if so, what then? They were to the army like the candle in the home of the cottager. Those little groups of men sleeping around their fires were like a family, where men grow to serve each other as brother serves brother, knowing each other's foibles, but preserving each other's honour for the family's pride, risking life ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was not easy to obtain, and we further learn that (by April, 1801) "the state of the poor cottager is now truly deplorable, for though barley may still be had it is at an enormous price, and it is impossible for labourers to provide for their families at such prices. It is to corn merchants and dealers ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... be constructed on the model of Tintern Abbey. They must be obvious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors will examine them too closely. "An appendage evidently more modern than the principal structure will sometimes corroborate the effect; the shed of a cottager amidst the remains of a temple, is a contrast both to the former and the present state of the building." It seems almost impossible that this should have been offered as serious advice; but it was the admired usage of the time. Whately's book was ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... when his heart was at Oakwood; however, he was released at last, procured a horse, and galloped away. His disasters were not, however, over; his horse fell lame, as if, Edward said, he felt a seaman was not a fit master for him. He was necessitated to leave the poor animal to the care of a cottager, and proceed on foot, avoiding the village, for fear of being recognised before he desired; he exercised his memory by going through the lanes, and reached Oakwood by a private entrance. Astonished at seeing the rooms, by the windows ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... the cold winter nights, the lonely cottager will be awoke by a plaintive demand for "Water, good Christian! water for the love of God!" And if he looks out into the moonlight, he will see a venerable old man in antique raiment, with grey flowing ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the 'Reign of Law' in polemical science may be ushered in with the joyful acclamations of an enlightened and united people, and its benign influence extend from the throne of the monarch and the council-chamber of his ministers to the hearth of the cottager. Politicians will rule by law; policies be calculated by laws; people vote by law; and then methinks I see in my mind (to use the words of the blind old poet) a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A cottager's wife came running down, "Take care of the ladye," said the clown. He has donned his clothes, and away he has gone, His ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Every cottager takes a pride in his garden, for the flower shows which are held every year result in keen competition. A prize is always given for the prettiest garden among all the cottagers. This is an excellent plan; it brightens and beautifies the village street for eight months ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... seventy now, a day or two won't make a great deal of difference." This joke pleased both parties very much, and it was always followed by the production of enough tobacco to last Mary for a day—unless the fisher lads chanced to steal some. After that the cottager's children had to be seen, and those young persons looked at the basket with interest. The dainty visitor would say, "Now Jimmy, I saw you pelting the ducks this morning. How would you like some big ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... those Englishmen who, from a humble origin, have risen to an honourable position, Captain James Cook is especially worthy of record. His parents were of the peasant class—his father having commenced life as a farm-labourer, and his mother being a cottager's daughter. Probably, however, they were both superior to others of the same station, as the husband, in process of time, became farm-bailiff to his employer—a Mr Thomas Skottowe. This was about the year 1730, and the farm of which he had the management was called Airy-Holme, near Ayton, in Yorkshire. ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... lasts, but is soon spent, and he is in darkness again. The same use is made of the pine. It is no unusual circumstance, in the Scotch pine-woods, to come upon a tree with the trunk scooped out from each side and carried away: the cottager has been to fetch material for his candles. But this somewhat rough usage does not hurt the tree, and it continues green and healthy.' In our Southern States pine-fat with resin is called lightwood, and is ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for Hans, who was only the son of a poor and humbler cottager, to have kept out of the way of these noble youths, and he was far from being of a quarrelsome disposition; but it so happened that he was often mixed up in the quarrels of his friend Conrad, who being very generous and kind to him, Hans thought himself ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... an educated voice. He was smaller than Will but evidently older. Somewhat narrow of build and thin, he looked delicate, though in reality wiry and sound. He was dark of complexion, wore his hair long for a cottager, and kept both moustache and beard, though the latter was very scant and showed the outline of his small chin through it. A forehead remarkably lofty but not broad, mounted almost perpendicularly above the man's eyes; and these were large and dark and full of fire, though marred by a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... confident would have dissolved the spell that made the whole scene so attractive. It was occupied by a shoemaker, whom I recognized as an old acquaintance and a worthy man, who resided here with his wife and children. I asked them if they could live contented so far from other families. The wife of the cottager replied, that they suffered in the winter from their solitude, but in the spring and summer they preferred it to the town,—"for in this place we hear all the singing-birds, early and late, and the Whippoorwill sings here every night during May and June." It was the usual practice of these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... some sort, a rewarder, in the hands of Providence, of this its dear excellent agent; and then we shall look forward, all of us, with pleasure, indeed, to that state, where there is no distinction of degree, and where the humble cottager shall be upon a par with the ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... terms with Mr. Emmot, his landlord's agent, a typical and true Devonian. One day Mr. Emmot came to him in a condition of some perplexity. He had been asked an important question, and was anxious to know if the answer he had given to it was satisfactory. It appeared that a cottager who had a bit of land of his own had been saying to him, "Look here, Mr. Emmot: can you tell us rightly what the difference be between a Conservative and a Radical?" "Well, Mr. Froude," said Mr. Emmot, "I didn't rightly knaw the philosophy of the thing, so I just said to 'un this: ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock |
