"Tilling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rural affairs, concerning which the learned Hesiod has not said a single word, tho he has written about the cultivation of the land. But Homer, who, as appears to me, lived many ages before, introduces Laertes soothing the regret which he felt for his son by tilling the land and manuring it. Nor indeed is rural life delightful by reason of corn-fields only and meadows and vineyards and groves, but also for its gardens and orchards; also for the feeding of cattle, the swarms of bees, and the variety of all kinds of flowers. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... deacon, and an attendant upon the head of our church, the patriarch at Etchmiazin; and another uncle, by my mother's side, was the priest of our village: therefore my family, being well in the church, determined that I should follow the sacred profession. My father himself, who subsisted by tilling the ground, and by his own labour had cleared away a considerable tract near the village, having two sons besides me, expected to receive sufficient help from them in the field, and therefore agreed to spare me for the church. Accordingly, when about ten years ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... fit part for food, part for tilling the ground, others for carrying us, or for clothing us; and man himself, made, as it were, on purpose to contemplate the heavens and the Gods, and to pay adoration to them: lastly, the whole earth, and wide extending seas, given to man's use. When we view these and numberless ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... not come when, apart from every man having to do some useful thing, something perchance like tending flocks, tilling the ground, mowing and forestering—the mere love of beauty, the desire for peace and harmony, the craving for renewal by communion with the life outside our own, will lead men, without dogs or guns or rods, into the woods, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... trapper from the beginning. He had slept under the canopy of the forest more often than in a bed and beneath a roof made by men's hands. From early youth he had hunted all through the northern wilderness, and had been no more able to tie himself to a farm, and earn his bread by tilling the soil, than an Indian. Indeed, he was more of an Indian than a white man in habits, tastes, and feelings; he lacked only that marvelous appreciation of signs and sounds in the forest, in which the white can never hope to equal ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... adventurers found only two or three thousand Indians at the most; and the people who built those forts and temples and tombs, and shaped from the earth the mighty images of their strange bird-gods and reptile-gods, could have lived only by tilling the soil. Their mounds are found everywhere in the west between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, but they are found mostly in Ohio, where their farms and gardens once bordered the Muskingum, the Scioto, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... of his life, all agree that he removed with his father to a very thinly settled section of North Carolina, where he spent his time in hunting—thereby supplying the family with meat and destroying the wild beasts, while his brothers assisted the father in tilling the farm—and where he afterwards, in a romantic manner, became acquainted with a settler's daughter, whom he married; and whence, in the spring of 1769, in company with five others, he set out on an expedition of danger ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... beyond our control (though not entirely so), whereas we can directly, and to a considerable degree, provide the plant with the minerals it more particularly requires; first, by choosing the ground for it, and next by tilling and manuring in a suitable manner. A clay soil, in which, in addition to the predominating alumina, there is a fair proportion of lime, may be regarded as the most fertile for all purposes; but we have few such in Britain, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... recommended and enjoined measures the most harsh and severe for the suppression of the Gypsy sect; the palmy days of Gitanismo were those in which the caste was proscribed, and its members, in the event of renouncing their Gypsy habits, had nothing farther to expect than the occupation of tilling the earth, a dull hopeless toil; then it was that the Gitanos paid tribute to the inferior ministers of justice, and were engaged in illicit connection with those of higher station, and by such means baffled the law, whose vengeance rarely fell upon their heads; and then it was that they bid ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... of other things in the future than of tilling the little rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas by neighbors, a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... mankind came from a warm country—a country all of sunshine and joy. Adam in the garden of Eden was in no cold or severe climate, he had no need of clothes, not even of the trouble of tilling the ground. The bountiful earth gave him all he wanted. The trees over his head stretched out the luscious fruits to him—the shady glades were his only house, the mossy banks his only bed. He was bred up the child of sunshine and joy. But he was not meant ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... will be better off this summer than she was two years ago, have more food on hand. There are no more men in Germany outside of the Army. Practically every one has been called out who could carry a gun, but the women are running the mills and the prisoners are tilling the farms. Von Hindenburg will come down upon Italy, when he has lured the Italians up into some pass and given them a sample of what the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... name Ukjaendt i Lon, Is unknown to fame, Men som sine Faedre But his acre tilling, Kraftig og stor, Strong-armed and tall, Dyrkende sin Jord, Like his forefathers all, Ham vil vi haedre, Him to honour we're willing, Han skal atter finde!" He shall find the second token!" Saa syngende de ...
— The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... or west, inexorably huddles himself immediately upon the highway, whether his possessions embrace both sides of it or not, disregarding the facilities of access to his fields, the convenience of tilling his crops, or the character of the ground which his buildings may occupy, seeming to have no other object than proximity to the road—as if his chief business was upon that, instead of its being simply a ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... what do we serve these aristocrats? For the privilege of remaining ignorant! For the privilege of tilling their fields, which were once ours! For the privilege of digging our gold and silver and precious stones out of their mines to make them rich! For the privilege of living in huts while they live in palaces! For the privilege of being robbed and beaten in the ...
— The Mexican Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... that nation are spread over the country, one or two only in each village, as the lords of the land. They all have lordship over great numbers of subjected tribes, who pass by the general name Makalaka, and who are forced to render certain services, and to aid in tilling the soil; but each has his own land under cultivation, and otherwise lives nearly independent. They are proud to be called Makololo, but the other term is often used in reproach, as betokening inferiority. This species of servitude may be termed serfdom, as it has to be rendered in consequence ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... musket to the guard-house, And its lead to furlough send— To the tilling of the meadows Every gallant ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... coming to us from France undergo a sort of apprenticeship, by distribution among the inhabitants; yet there is nothing more necessary, first, because the men brought to us are not accustomed to the tilling of the soil; secondly, a man who is not accustomed to work, unless he is urged, has difficulty in adapting himself to it; thirdly, the tasks of this country are very different from those of France, and experience shows us that a ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... choked with the thorns of conservatism. It required many years of labor as hard as that endured by the forefathers in wresting their lands from undisturbed nature, before the ground was even broken to receive the seed. Then followed the long period of persistent tilling and sowing which brought no reaping until the last quarter of the century, when the scanty harvest began to be gathered. The yield has seemed small indeed at the end of each twelvemonth and it is only when viewed in the aggregate that its size can be appreciated. The condition of woman to-day ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... of advocate had terrified him, and he shuddered at the idea of tilling the soil. He had plunged into art, hoping to find therein a calling suitable to an idle man. The paint-brush struck him as being an instrument light to handle, and he fancied success easy. His dream was a life of cheap sensuality, a beautiful existence full of houris, of repose on divans, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... prisoners, had a companion attached to him. He was fastened by the arm to a peasant of Poujols named Mourgue, a man about fifty, who had been brutified by the scorching sun and the hard labour of tilling the ground. Crooked-backed already, his hands hardened, his face coarse and heavy, he blinked his eyes in a stupid manner, with the stubborn, distrustful expression of an animal subject to the lash. He had set out armed with a pitchfork, because his fellow villagers had done ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... true," thought he. "Busy as we are from childhood tilling Mother Earth, we peasants have no time to let any nonsense settle in our heads. Our only trouble is that we haven't land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... writes the name "Adam-on-Diamond") expresses the belief, which Smith instilled into his followers, that it "was at the point where Adam came and settled and blessed his posterity, after being driven from the Garden of Eden. There Adam and Eve tarried for several years, and engaged in tilling the soil." By order of the Presidency, another town was started in Carroll County, where the Saints had been living in peace. Immediately the new settlement was looked upon as a possible rival of Gallatin, the county seat, and the non-Mormons ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the sure results of honest industry with the folly of speculation. The Revised Version margin 'vain things' is better than the text 'vain persons,' which would give no antithesis to the patient tilling of the first clause. That verse would make an admirable motto to be stretched across the Stock Exchange, and like places on both sides of the Atlantic. How many ruined homes and heart-broken wives witness in America and England to its truth! The vulgar English ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an atmosphere of sobriety, for even at that early date the fad of temperance had fastened itself upon Kansas, he became by and by of necessity a hard working farmer, tilling the soil from morning till night in the struggle to ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... known; if it be new land, and considered by the Sub-Deputy Agent as eligible, then the cultivator, in addition to the usual advances, receives an advance of so much per biggah to enable him to bestow a certain amount of extra care in tilling and dressing the soil. The first advance is made on the completion of the agreement or bundobust, and this takes place in September and October. The second advance is made on the completion of the sowings in November, and the final or Chook payment is made ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... should always make gifts of kine. No one should kick at kine or proceed through the midst of kine. Kine are goddesses and homes of auspiciousness. For this reason, they always deserve worship. Formerly, the deities, while tilling the earth whereon they performed a sacrifice, used the goad for striking the bullocks yoked to the plough. Hence, in tilling earth for such a purpose, one may, without incurring censure or sin, apply the goad to bullocks. In other acts, however, bullocks should never be ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... so mild and happy, that the poets have given it the name of the golden age. The people, who before wandered about like beasts, were then reduced to civil society; laws were enacted, and the art of tilling and sowing the ground introduced; whence Varro tells us, that Saturn had his name a satu, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... Arms. The autobiography of Martha von Tilling." By Bertha von Suttner. Authorized Translation. By T. Holmes. Longmans, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "how disastrous is ambition! how unsatisfying its rewards! how terrible its disappointments! Behold yonder peasant tilling his field in peace and contentment! He rises with the lark, passes the day in wholesome toil, and lies down at night to pleasant dreams. In the mad struggle for place and power he has no part; the roar of the strife reaches his ear like ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... of exceedingly great importance because of its necessity to the race.... Your forefathers, Mrs. Davis, got their own living from the farm of which this piece of land—Clark's Field—was a part; a meager living for themselves and their families they got by tilling the poor soil. They were content with taking a living out of it for themselves and their families. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, your own grandfather was anxious to sell this same field, which was all that was left to him of the ancestral farm, for ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... am I truly your brother. Life-Maker am I, tilling the soil in the sweat of my brow from the beginning of time, planting all manner of good seeds ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... clearing the soil, tilling the arable land, raising corn, rye, wheat, oats, and flax, of gathering iron ore from bogs and turpentine from pine trees, and in other ways of providing the means of existence, rendered life essentially stationary and isolated, and the mind was ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... it only your good luck? If so, you are a true child of fortune.' 'Ah, no!' answered the gardener, 'I am no child of fortune; I am a poor soldier, who never could get enough to live upon; so I laid aside my red coat, and set to work, tilling the ground. I have a brother, who is rich, and your majesty knows him well, and all the world knows him; but because I am poor, ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... time before he had married an Indian girl, and, with her, lived in a little adobe house, a few paces from the mission church. Pomponio and Rosa had lived the regular life of the neophytes, working at various occupations of the community—Pomponio tilling the ground and caring for the crops, and helping in the making of bricks for the houses; Rosa spinning and weaving and cooking. After they were married they continued with their customary labors, still under the tutelage of the fathers. But about this time, Father Altimira had begun to notice ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... be limited in ploughing is very reasonable, and practised in England, and might have easily been done here by penal clauses in their leases; but to deprive them, in a manner, altogether from tilling their lands, was a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... extended into the territory covered by him. I made a study of his tactics and was preparing to counteract him. His men were at home in the district; it was, in fact, their home. They were, or many of them were, farmers, who might be innocently tilling the soil as our scouting parties passed, but who, at Colonel Mosby's whistle, if the chance was propitious, would jump on horse and surprise us before long. Small bodies of troops were taken unawares. They never offered a front to large ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... battle—the peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew no one was making war on them. They trusted Gandiva, the goodly bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and sacred to the tilling of the soil. Megasthenes notes it with wonder. War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction of crops, no battering down of buildings, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... she were flayed? Once married to Chiltern, once embarked upon that life of usefulness, once firmly established on ground of her own tilling, and she was immune. And this led her to a consideration of those she knew who had been flayed. They were not few, and a surfeit of publicity is a sufficient reason for not enumerating them here. And during this process of exorcism Notoriety became a bogey, too: ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and other necessities. Those Indians are shrewd, and will know how to keep their contracts with the farmers, especially if the latter are simple men, as has been said. You shall be very careful to procure the introduction of tilling and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... Algonquin Indians helped Champlain gain a victory over the hostile and warlike Iroquois, who afterwards hated the French. The French occupants of the country of the St. Lawrence devoted themselves too exclusively to trading, and too little to the tilling of the ground and to ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in its several branches: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; he who is to be a good husbandman, at tilling the ground; and those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. They should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply ...
— Laws • Plato
... coming of October, the pressure began again. The thought of the coming frost and of all those greedy mouths of cattle, sheep, and horses to be filled through the winter, drove and hunted the workers on Great End Farm, as they have driven and hunted the children of earth since tilling and stock-keeping began. Under the hedges near the house, the long potato caves had been filled and covered in; the sheep were in the turnips, and every two or three days, often under torrents of rain, Rachel and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... deed. The purity required was inward as well as outward, mental as well as bodily. The industry was to be of a peculiar character. Man was placed upon the earth to preserve the good creation; and this could only be done by careful tilling of the soil, eradication of thorns and weeds, and reclamation of the tracts over which Angro-mainyus had spread the curse of barrenness. To cultivate the soil was thus a religious duty; the whole community was required to be agricultural; and either as proprietor, as farmer, or as laboring ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... of yore, O Rama, Kuru was engaged in perseveringly tilling the soil of this field. Shakra, coming down from heaven, asked him the reason, saying, "Why O king, art thou employed (in this task) with such perseverance? What is thy purpose, O royal sage, for the accomplishment of which ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... inertness that always misleads the stranger to the type. Insignificant looking, perhaps, but they will be found, on later acquaintance, to be worming themselves into general regard without effort. The law claims many of them and occasionally the raising of stock and the tilling of soil, though usually as proprietors only, it is true. Sometimes they are swept into strange waters where, if they float about long enough, they manage by some inherent mordant capacity to colour the entire complexion to their own. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... the labor when the roses start to bloom; You don't recall the dreary days that won you their perfume; You don't recall a single care You spent upon the garden there; And all the toil Of tilling soil Is quite forgot the day the first Pink rosebuds ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... all of us which go much further and deeper than our mere personal feelings. Such are the emotions roused in us by contact with the mysterious forces of life and death and birth and the movements of the seasons; with the rising and setting of the sun, and the primordial labour of tilling the earth and gathering in the harvest. These things have been so long associated with our human hopes and fears, with the nerves and fibres of our inmost being, that any powerful presentment of them brings ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... their means of livelihood. They were strangers in a strange land, among a people of different language and customs. They were forced to resort to new and untried occupations to earn their bread. Middle-aged men, who had spent their lives in tilling the soil, had now to learn mechanical trades. But they cheerfully accepted the situation, and lost no time in idleness or repining. Though often pinched with poverty, they thanked God for the blessings which were still ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... would be a good foundation to build upon. He told himself that the Hallams ought to have built upon it generations ago. He almost despised his ancestors for the simple lives they had led. He could not endure to think of himself sitting down as squire Hallam and ruling a few cottagers and tilling a few hundred acres. In George Eltham he found a kindred spirit. They might work for different motives, but gold was the aim ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... natural advantages of the locality and desirous to unite the whole city with the sea, and to reverse, in a manner, the policy of ancient Athenian kings, who, endeavoring to withdraw their subjects from the sea, and to accustom them to live, not by sailing about, but by planting and tilling the earth, spread the story of the dispute between Minerva and Neptune for the sovereignty of Athens, in which Minerva, by producing to the judges an olive tree, was declared to have won; whereas ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... English court of being in league with the Americans. At another time he was accused by the Americans of being in league with the English. At length the thunderbolt fell. As the Christian Indians of Gnadenhtten were engaged one day in tilling the soil, the American troops of Colonel Williamson appeared upon the scene, asked for quarters, were comfortably, lodged, and then, disarming the innocent victims, accused them of having sided with the British. For that accusation the only ground was that the Indians had shown hospitality ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... last formed of the three sister colonies. In 1834 an act of colonization was obtained; and land, both in town and country, sold rapidly. The colonists, however, were most unfortunately more engaged in speculating with the land, than grazing upon or tilling it; and the consequence was, that in a few years the South Australians were only saved from a famine by the unexpected arrival overland of herds and flocks from Victoria. As it was, horses and cows of a very indifferent kind were sold for more than a hundred pounds a-piece, ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... ports of the United States to the offending frigates and ordering the arrest of the captain of the Leander wherever found. After all, the death of a common seaman did not fire the hearts of farmers peacefully tilling their fields far beyond hearing of ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... proven—on good testimony according to existing laws, by affidavits of fictitious or unscrupulous persons—to have been sustained on small farms and plantations are not only far beyond the possible yield of those places for any one year, but, as everyone knows who has had experience in tilling the soil and who has visited the scenes of these spoliations, are in many instances more than the individual claimants were ever worth, including ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... teaching me more about himself. So with these locusts, and still more so; for Joel did not know, could not know, that these locusts could be prevented. But even if he had known that, it was not his fault or folly, or his countrymen's which had brought the locusts. Most probably they were tilling the ground to the best of their knowledge. Most probably, too, these locusts were not bred in Palestine at all; but came down upon the north-wind (as they are said to do now), from some land hundreds of miles away; and therefore Joel could say—Whatever ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... cultivation of a garden. Warner had become the owner of a small place then almost on the outskirts of the city. With the dwelling-house went the possession of three acres of land. The opportunity thus presented itself of turning into a blessing the primeval curse of tilling the soil, in this instance not with a hoe, but with a pen. These articles detailing his experiences excited so much amusement and so much admiration that a general desire was manifested that they should receive a more permanent life than that accorded to articles appearing ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he now (save when with the King) made his chief abode. He gave as the reasons for his selection, the charm it took, in his eyes, from that signal mark of affection which his ceorls had rendered him, in purchasing the house and tilling the ground in his absence; and more especially the convenience of its vicinity to the new palace at Westminster; for, by Edward's special desire, while the other brothers repaired to their different domains, Harold remained near his royal person. To use the words of the great Norwegian chronicler, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... From the history of our first parents—Adam tilling the ground; Cain ploughing the earth, and Abel attending sheep; Adam and Eve discovering the body of Abel—by Mr. Cottingham: presented by Mr. Bacon, Clerk of the Works to the Dean and Chapter, as a ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... lesson! Hard was his life amongst them, for their thralls be not so well entreated as their draught-beasts, so many do they take in battle; for they are a mighty folk; and these thralls and those aforesaid unhappy freemen do all tilling and herding and all deeds of craftsmanship: and above these are men whom they call masters and lords who do nought, nay not so much as smithy their own edge-weapons, but linger out their days in their dwellings and out of their dwellings, lying about in the ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... State of Mississippi are attracting many hundreds and thousands of new settlers. Perhaps there is no better place to which they can go, for there are no better lands in the South. The great point is whether these people shall be herded together in rude homes, tilling the soil without skill, and rearing their children in ignorance and vice. It is the part of Christian wisdom and the duty of the Christian churches of this land to see that the people in this densely-packed and fertile region shall be promptly met with ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various
... ranged over the continent slaughtering, in their rage, those that resisted, and those that submitted, in their mirth. Of those that remained, some were buried in caverns, and condemned to dig metals for their masters; some were employed in tilling the ground, of which foreign tyrants devour the produce; and, when the sword and the mines have destroyed the natives, they supply their place by human beings of another colour, brought from some distant country to perish here ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... on to one argument after another, on geology, geography, and all the natural sciences, and ended by Rumanika showing me an iron much the shape and size of a carrot. This he said was found by one of his villagers whilst tilling the ground, buried some way down below the surface; but dig as he would, he could not remove it, and therefore called some men to his help. Still the whole of them united could not lift the iron, which induced them, considering there must be some magic in it, to inform ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... go no more to Grenoble, you will remain with me; I will make my child a son of the soil, a peasant who shall live gaily whilst tilling the fields. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... must be seen to be realised. Language fails in this case! Their houses are simply mud huts consisting, generally, of only one room, in which the whole family live! During the day strong healthy men sit about outside, while the women do all the work, even to the toilsome labour of tilling the ground! A search for water in such places is not a very hopeful matter; at the most there might be two wells, from which water could be got up, a bucketful at a time—a hopeless look out, when there are thousands of thirsty men and horses! Nothing was seen of ...
— Through Palestine with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron • Unknown
... was finding the needle in the hay stack—the pebble in the brook. Again the Emperor urged, and the Cytherian Cohort plied their cunning and perseverance. That friend of the poor author was found—he was tilling his garden, surrounded by his flower pots and children, on the outskirts of Prague, Bohemia. It was in vain he questioned his captors. He dropped his gardening implements—blessed his children—kissed them, and was hurried off, he knew not whither or wherefore! ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... not force the introduction of manufactures by extravagant encouragements and to the prejudice of agriculture, yet I conceive much might be done in that way by women, children, and others, without taking one really necessary hand from tilling the earth. Certain it is, great savings are already made in many articles of apparel, furniture, and consumption. Equally certain it is, that no diminution in agriculture has taken place at this time, when greater and more substantial improvements in manufactures are making than were ever ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... to suppose the progress in welfare indicated by these and the foregoing statements to be true of every district at the South. The merely agricultural regions were still far behind. Methods of tilling the soil were the same as prevailed forty years earlier, and it was not unlikely that the colored people, who for the most part had the immediate charge of this work, prosecuted it, as yet, with less ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the land by the military governor, the civil authority still presents a territory sparse in population and untilled, it is the commandant's turn to accuse the civil ruler. For you may take it as a rule, a population tilling their territory badly will fail to support their garrisons and be quite unequal to paying their tribute. Where a satrap is appointed he has ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... That at their co[m]ing ther, they chose out such a number of fitt persons, as may furnish their ships and boats for fishing upon y^e sea; imploying the rest in their severall faculties upon y^e land; as building houses, tilling, and planting y^e ground, & makeing shuch co[m]odities as shall be most usefull for ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... storm this morning. It has been so hot here, that even the peasant in the field says, "Non porro piu resistere," and slumbers in the shade, rather than the sun. I love to see their patriarchal ways of guarding the sheep and tilling the fields. They are a simple race. Remote from the corruptions of foreign travel, they do not ask for money, but smile upon and bless me as I pass,—for the Italians love me; they say I am so "simpatica." I never see any English ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... join the host a hardy band Of Cappadocians, tilling now the soil, Once pirates of the main: nor those who dwell Where steep Niphates hurls the avalanche, And where on Median Coatra's sides The giant forest rises to the sky. And you, Arabians, from your distant home Came to a world ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... pleasure which I do from whatever comes from you, and especially from a subject so deservedly dear to you. He found me in a retirement I doat on, living like an antediluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil. As he had lately come from Philadelphia, Boston, &c. he was able to give me a great deal of information of what is passing in the world, and I pestered him with questions pretty much as our friends Lynch, Nelson, &c. will us, when we step across the Styx, for they will ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of immemorial association hangs, it is true, about such masculine labours as are connected with the tilling of the earth and the sailing of the sea. Certain ancient and eternally necessary handicrafts, such as cannot be superseded by machinery, take their place with these. But since man's particular power of separating himself ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Boccadoro the Fool had placed her, it could interest you but little to read in detail, nor could it interest you to know of the gentle patience with which she cheered and humoured me during the period that I sojourned there, tilling the little plot she owned, reaping and garnering like any born villano. With a woman's quick intuition she guessed perhaps the canker that was eating at my heart, and with a mother's blessed charity she sought to soothe and mitigate ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... owned by six families. This process was helped by the fact that all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmed overseas to explore and plunder America or went into the church, so that the tilling of the land was left to the humblest and least vigorous. And immigration to America has continued the safety valve of the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... a brilliant and active career, has withdrawn to the communion of nature and become a philosopher. He insists that all men should be retired by law at forty-five and condemned to spend the rest of their days tilling the soil gratis for women and the rising generation. The outdoor life would restore a measure of their dissipated ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... But an old man tilling his flowering vineyard saw him as he was hurrying down the plain through grassy Onchestus. So the Son of Maia began ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... were accomplished by this law. 1st. To permit the Hebrews to obtain that assistance in tilling the land, which otherwise they would not have been allowed to do. 2d. To increase the numbers of the commonwealth, since the Hebrews, in obedience to the Abrahamic covenant, Gen. 17:10-14; Ex. 12:44-49, were bound to circumcise these indented servants "bought ...
— Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible? • Isaac Allen
... for Ormuzd in aiding his efforts and in overcoming Ahriman's. He wars against darkness in supplying the fire with dry wood and perfumes; against the desert in tilling the soil and in building houses; against the animals of Ahriman in killing serpents, lizards, parasites, and beasts of prey. He battles against impurity in keeping himself clean, in banishing from himself everything that is dead, especially the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... the knowledge, and still more by its application; but this disciplining of the mind, and accumulation of knowledge, were evidently a secondary object, and not the primary one. Health and cheerfulness are gained by tilling the ground; yet the ground is not tilled for the purpose of securing health and cheerfulness. It is for the produce of the harvest. So, in like manner, the cultivation of the child's mind, and the reception of the seeds of knowledge, are merely means employed ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... California, will not be over fifty feet long by ten or fifteen feet wide. Between the rows of fruit trees are vegetables or corn or sorghum. The farmers live in little villages and apparently go home every night after tilling their fields. There are none of the scattered farmhouses, with trees around them, which are so characteristic a feature of any American ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... order of San Francisco. At the present time their number is twenty-seven, most of them of an advanced age. Each mission has one of these fathers for its administrator, and he holds absolute authority. The tilling of the ground, the gathering of the harvest, the slaughtering of cattle, the weaving, and everything that concerns the mission, is under the direction of the fathers, without any other person interfering in any way whatever, so that, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... "Knew not of my coming," Atli replied. "Of friends and kinsmen I had few left in the land, but I had long had other thoughts for myself than the tilling of fields and the emptying of horns at Yule. Often at night had I sat out. [Footnote: To "sit out" was a method of reading the future practised by sorcerers, in which the magician spent the night under the open sky, and summoned the dead to converse with him.] I had ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... scholasticism; next to him came Erasmus, 'that the poet should not be wanting at the banquet'. The discussion was about Cain's guilt by which he displeased the Lord. Colet defended the opinion that Cain had injured God by doubting the Creator's goodness, and, in reliance on his own industry, tilling the earth, whereas Abel tended the sheep and was content with what grew of itself. The divine contended with syllogisms, Erasmus with arguments of 'rhetoric'. But Colet kindled, and got the better of both. After a while, when the dispute had lasted long enough and had ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... up the entire subject in a systematic way and consecutive sequence. The importance of clover in the economy of the farm is so great that an exhaustive work on this subject will no doubt be welcomed by students in agriculture, as well as by all who are interested in the tilling of the soil. Illustrated. 5 x 7 inches. ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... of Oki and Hinomisaki rarely exceed twelve inches and have a reddish tinge. The fisheries of Mionoseki and Hinomisaki are scarcely known; but the fisheries of Oki are famed not only throughout Japan, but also in Korea and China. It is only through the tilling of the sea that the islands have become prosperous and capable of supporting thirty thousand souls upon a coast of which but a very small portion can be cultivated at all. Enormous quantities of cuttlefish are shipped to the mainland; but ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... and harder hops are packed, the longer and better they will keep; but they should be kept dry. In most parts of Great Britain where hops are cultivated, they estimate the charge of cultivating one acre of hops at forty-two dollars, for manuring and tilling, exclusive of poles and rent of land; poles they estimate at sixteen dollars per annum, but in this country they would not amount to half that sum; one acre is computed to require three thousand poles, which will last from eight to twelve years, according to the quality of the wood ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... 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 living by tilling the ground. ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... ceases to operate. The change to pasture, however, continued, partly owing to a great rise in the price of cattle, and partly because the increase in wages made it less profitable to employ the greater number of men necessary for tilling ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... land. As the Tudor policy of money payments extended, the greed for pelf led to an alteration in the law, and the act of William and Mary allowed the landlord to sell the goods he had distrained. The tenant remained in possession of the land without the means of tilling it, which was opposed to public policy. This power of distraint was, however, confined to holdings in which there were leases by which the tenant covenanted to allow the landlord to distrain his stock and goods in default of payment ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... master to pay a heavy ransom, but the Paynim's daughter, who loved him and was fain to bring him to the end she desired, over-persuaded her father not to let him go at any price. Reduced to the necessity of trusting to himself alone for release, he filed his irons with the tools given him for tilling the ground, made good his escape to the Nile and threw himself into a boat. Casting loose, he got to the sea, which was not far off, and when on the point of death from thirst and hunger, was rescued by a Spanish vessel bound for Genoa. But, after keeping her course a week, the ship ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... to the curvatures of the brief margin left it for occupancy. Wherever along the front of the heights and on the top there was room for a field the advantage had been seized. So the Prince had offered him the sight of all others most significant of peace among men—sight of farmers tilling the soil. With the lucid sky above him summer-laden, the water under and about him a liquid atmosphere, the broken mountain-face changing from lovely to lovelier, and occasionally awakening him with a superlative splendor, the abodes ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... to remain here, tilling the land in silence and inaction until, one day without notice, I shall see a crowd of labourers at work upon the river, and shall see appraisers measuring my fields! You know that is how things are done. You ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... starvation is, in fact, the cause of the transition—probably in all cases, and certainly in the case of the Bashkirs. So long as they had abundance of pasturage they never thought of tilling the soil. Their flocks and herds supplied them with all that they required, and enabled them to lead a tranquil, indolent existence. No great legislator arose among them to teach them the use of the plough ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the passion of his life; the passion of a man whose soul was in the clearing, not the tilling of the earth. Five times since boyhood had he taken up wild land, built a house, a stable and a barn, wrested from the unbroken forest a comfortable farm; and five times he had sold out to begin it all again farther north, suddenly losing interest; energy and ambition vanishing once the ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... plunder. In these raids it was his wont always to be first in the attack, and last in the retreat. In time of peace he would exercise his body, and make it both swift and strong, either by hunting or by tilling the ground. He possessed a fine estate about twenty furlongs from the city: to this he would walk after his morning or evening meal, and sleep there on any bed he could find, like one of the farm labourers. Then he would rise early, help the vine-dressers or cattle-herds ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... the natives at work tilling the soil. The technique used here was very crude but mildly interesting. They used plows and harrows for loosening the soil, devices that were pulled ...
— Be It Ever Thus • Robert Moore Williams
... of the present appearance of France, we must describe the effects, by presenting to our readers the picture which was every where before our eyes in traversing the country. The improvement in agriculture, or to speak literally, in the method of tilling the soil, is by no means great. The description of the methods pursued, and of the routine of crops, given by Arthur Young, corresponds very exactly with what we saw. It may be observed, however, that the ploughing is rather more neat, and the ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Durand, Arnaud, Brunel, and Rouviere or Crotte, who all went about from place to place, convoking assemblies and preaching. There were also some local preachers, as they might be called—old men who could not move far from home—who worked at their looms or trades, sometimes tilling the ground by day, and preaching at night. Amongst these were Monteil, Guillot, and Bonnard, all more than sixty ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... roam; who takes delight in the riches, Heaping in generous abundance about himself and his children. Yet not unprized by me is the quiet citizen also, Making the noiseless round of his own inherited acres, Tilling the ground as the ever-returning seasons command him. Not with every year is the soil transfigured about him; Not in haste does the tree stretch forth, as soon as 'tis planted, Full-grown arms toward heaven and decked with plenteous blossoms. No: man has need of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... continued, "while I grew to manhood, living happily in peace, hunting the buffalo and deer, and tilling our cornlands. Then the time came when the Great Spirit called for my father, and I was left with the kingship of the tribe. Strange things meantime had befallen our nation in the West. Broken clans had come down from the north, and there had been ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... to acquaint you, that by the receipt of a despatch from the Rt. Hon. Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, bearing date 8th April 1842, his Lordship states that he cannot sanction a compliance with your request to have a number of liberated Africans, as apprentices, in tilling your grounds; and further, that he could not recognize the purchase of Cape Mount, as placing that district under the protection and sovereignty of the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Solomon's lesson: and be sure it holds good, not only of tilling the ground, but of all other labours, all other duties, to which God may call us. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do,' says Solomon, 'do it with all thy might.' God has set thee thy work; then fulfil it. Fill it full. Throw thy whole heart and soul into it. Do it carefully, ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... of agriculture on the seigneurial lands did not, however, keep pace with growth in population. It was hard to keep settlers to the prosaic task of tilling the soil. There were too many distractions, chief among them the lure of the Indian trade. The traffic in furs offered large profits and equally large risks; but it always yielded a full dividend of adventure and hair-raising experience. The fascination of the forest life gripped the young ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... twenty-five acres for a commoner. But these limits were not enforced, and in the year 767 it became necessary to issue a decree prohibiting further reclamation, which was followed, seventeen years later, by a rescript forbidding provincial governors to exact forced labour for tilling their manors. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi |
