"Ploughing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their time. During these hostilities the English of Desmond, and O'Brien, a Thomond prince, assisted by the Sheriff of Cork, invaded the southern part of Connaught for the sake of plunder. In the previous year, 1224, "the corn remained unreaped until the festival of St. Brigid [1st Feb.], when the ploughing was going on." A famine also occurred, and was followed by severe sickness. Well might the friar historian exclaim: "Woeful was the misfortune which God permitted to fall upon the west province in Ireland at that time; for the young warriors ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... service, and did not dismiss me from his care until he had made a man of me. In my home his memory will ever be dear; each day do I pray God for his soul. If at his court I profited less than others, and since my return have been ploughing the fields at home, while others, more worthy of the regard of the Wojewoda, have since attained the highest offices in the land, at least this much I profited, that in my home no one will ever reproach me for failing to show respect or courtesy to all—and ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... well broken into her ways, had gone to the Klondike, leaving her to fill his place with the next best man; but the next best man was slow to appear, and meanwhile Miss Calista was looking about her warily. She could afford to wait a while, for the crop was all in and the fall ploughing done, so that the need of a successor to Caleb was not as pressing as it might otherwise have been. There was no lack of applicants, such as they were. Miss Calista was known to be a kind and generous mistress, although she had her "ways," and insisted ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... quite content with his kingdom and his little son Telemachus. Indeed, he was so unwilling to leave them that he feigned madness in order to escape service, appeared to forget his own kindred, and went ploughing the seashore and sowing salt in the furrows. But a messenger, Palamedes, who came with the summons to war, suspected that this sudden madness might be a stratagem, for the king was far famed as a man of many devices. He therefore stood by, one day (while Odysseus, pretending ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... crop, in terraces, and irrigated by a complicated net-work of channels, cut off from the mountain streams, and branching off in every direction to the different elevations. The ground was so saturated in these terraces that ploughing was carried on by means of a large scraper, like a fender, which was dragged along by bullocks, the ploughman standing up in the machine as it floundered and wallowed about, and guiding it ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... exclaimed, one day, as he was ploughing, after he had broken his trace chains for a second time; "they hev another kind er rocks in Calliforny. Jehosaphat! If I was only thar. There a fellur hez to dig; but he gets pretty good wages—five thousand dollars a month is middlin', not ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... render homage to our Holy Lady, the Virgin Mary." Let us offer to hope a like reverence. If we meet it in the shape of a blade of wheat piercing the furrow; a bird brooding on its nest; a poor wounded beast, recovering itself, rising and continuing its way; a peasant ploughing and sowing a field that has been ravaged by flood or hail; a nation slowly repairing its losses and healing its wounds—under whatever guise of humanity or suffering it appears to us, let us salute it! When we encounter it in legends, in untutored songs, in simple creeds, let us still salute ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... wood-road, now jolting along over ridges and hummocks, now ploughing through stretches of soft, sandy soil. Above and on either side, the great trees interlaced their branches, sometimes letting them droop till they brushed against Hilda's cheek, sometimes lifting them ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... daughter-in-law, Rose, and seven grandchildren. They live near White Oak, S.C., in a two-room frame house with a one-room box board annex. He works a one-horse farm for Mr. Cathcart and piddles a little at the planing mills at Adgers. His son does the ploughing. The daughter-in-law and grandchildren hoe and pick cotton and assist in the farm work. Henry is of medium height, dark brown complexion, and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... which he scraped away, was the large flat stone on which his pick had struck. It was a wide slab of red sandstone, and Randal soon saw that it was the lid of a great stone coffin, such as the ploughshare sometimes strikes against when men are ploughing the fields ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... eyes were glued to the teleview. Through clutching beds of seaweed the enemy submarine was ploughing. Her great, smooth bow lay straight ahead, metal hawser arm spanning the thirty feet between them. In another second, Keith thought grimly, two dynamite packed tubes of sudden death would ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... another day; I should never meet father, mother, sister again out on the hot plains of India; and the guns would never be recaptured; and yet they seemed so near, with the wheels sinking deeper, and ploughing those deep ruts which I was walking in with one foot, so as to keep to the track, for poor Brace was so set upon recovering them; and now he was dead, it was ten times my duty to keep on and get them, if the old Hindu would only spare my life. Poor old Brace! and I had thought him a ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... wolf in sheep's clothing," he said; "while Oakes admits the happiness he feels in seeing his ship ploughing through a raging sea, in a dark night, he maintains that my rapture is sought in a hurricane. I do not plead guilty to the accusation, but I will allow there is a sort of fierce delight in participating, as it might be, in a wild strife of the elements. To me, my very ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... MS. book written by Mrs. Heath of Newstead ('nee' Rebekah Beardall), it is stated that the elder Rushton had as his farm-servant Fletcher, afterwards Byron's valet. Byron watched Fletcher and young Robert Rushton ploughing, took a fancy to both, and engaged them as his servants. Rushton accompanied Byron to Geneva, but afterwards entered the service of James Wedderburn Webster (see p. 2, 'note' 1). In 1827 he married a woman of the name of Bagnall, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the east they could see the olive and fig trees around their own house. On the western horizon there was a glimpse of blue sea. In a field nearer they could barely make out two brown specks moving slowly back and forth. They were oxen, and Dromas was ploughing with them. It was so still that the children could plainly hear the breathing of the sheep as they cropped the grass, and the ripple of the little stream which spread out into a shallow river ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... have gone on for years upon years, collecting statistics and ploughing out conclusions. . . . I begin to believe in the calculated interposition of Providence. . . . On the critical moment of transference the bridge breaks behind me. I have lost all my baggage. But, on the other shore, I have ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... They lodged shell after shell just in front of the foremost rank of our men; in response to a message asking them to clear one of the gullies, one ship placed shell after shell up that gully, each about a hundred yards apart, and in as straight a line as if they were ploughing the ground for Johnny Turk, instead of making the place too hot to ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... cost of fencing it is much higher; and the open-land farmer must wait longer for returns such as will keep him. He has no bush-feed for cattle as we have, and it is cattle that the pioneer relies on for his support at first. It is eight or twelve years before the bush-farmer gets a chance of ploughing; but then his cattle keep him going from the outset. Also, our burnt clearings will yield us good grass for surface-sowing, which will feed sheep until the stumps have rotted and the plough can be used. The sum of it is that open-lands will pay a man with good capital quicker, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... old. The whole life of Florence was soon painted as it was: the face of the town, the streets, the churches, the towers, the winding river, the mountains round about it; the country, the fields and hills and hamlets, the peasants at work, ploughing, sowing, and gathering fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the trees and in the sky; nobles and rich burghers hunting, hawking; the magistrates, the citizens, the street-boys, the fine ladies, the tradesmen's wives, the heads of the guilds; the women visiting their friends; ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Silvanus, to the circling year Vertumnus, and so on to every object after its kind. In occupations the very steps of the process were spiritualized: thus, for example, in the prayer for the husbandman there was invoked the spirit of fallowing, of ploughing, of furrowing, sowing, covering-in, harrowing, and so forth down to that of the in-bringing, up-storing, and opening of the granaries. In like manner marriage, birth, and every other natural event were endowed with a sacred life. The larger the sphere embraced in the abstraction, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... bullets that nothing living might stand, Stewart works his way slowly and steadily forward on the enemy's left; driving him from line after line of works and holding every inch gained, by dogged valor and perseverance. Hays and Hoke (of Early's) advance into the ploughing fire of the rifled guns—march steadily on and charge over their own dead and dying, straight for Cemetery Heights. This is the key of the enemy's position. That once gained the day is won; and on the brave fellows go, great gaps tearing through their ranks—answering every fresh shock ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... savages, and having as yet no ambition to live in the towns; they are as strong as giants, simple as children, mystically superstitious by reason of their unexplained mystery." Russia is in fact 145 million peasants—ploughing and praying. And here once again one is reminded of the Middle Ages. Cross the Russian frontier and you enter the mediaeval world. Miracles are believed in, holy men are revered as saints, thousands of pilgrims journey on foot every year to Jerusalem, which is to every true believer the centre of ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... had driven thirteen miles. Pretty good progress this of a warm day, and with a full complement of passengers. We had watched the sun rise over Walpole hills, and the specks in the distance where the early farmers were ploughing and sowing. The breaking day, the bursting spring, and all the outward melodies with which the welcoming day rings as we toil on, are so many incentives to appetite, and we are all sharp for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... an avalanche the herd swept down on the water-hole, ploughing through a band of sheep that were bedded down between them and the ranch. The herder's tent was torn to ribbons. Wingle, trailing behind the herd, dismounted, and, stooping, disarmed the bruised and battered Mexican who had struggled to his feet as ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... sky is cloudy, the earth muddy, the rain has been falling for two weeks incessantly, as if by special command. There are inundations and submersions everywhere; rushes are growing instead of wheat, the stork is ploughing, the duck is fishing all over the precious sea-like expanse. "This judgment weather began on St. Medardus' Day, and will last now for forty days longer, but if it does last, I know not where we are to find the Noah to save man and beast ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... ambition, but they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come to a period of his life when he certainly did have an aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as soon as it was recognised. It was not a question of ploughing or poetry. There was no alternative. However insidiously inclination might whisper of poetry, duty's voice called him to the fields, and that voice he determined to obey. Reading farming books and calculating crops is not a likely road to perfection in poetry. ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... ye warlike men wielding bright weapons, Wearing grey corslets and boar-adorned helmets, Who o'er the water-paths come with your foaming keel Ploughing the ocean surge? I was appointed Warden of Denmark's shores; watch hold I by the wave That on this Danish coast no deadly enemy Leading troops over sea should land to injure. None have here landed yet more frankly ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... of a minute we could make it out as the second rhinoceros. He had run heaven knows how many miles away, and now he was returning; whether with some idea of rejoining his companion or from sheer chance, I do not know. At any rate, here he was, still ploughing along at his swinging trot. His course led him along a side hill about four hundred yards from where the oryx lay. When he was directly opposite I took the Springfield and fired, not at him, but at a spot five or six feet in front of his nose. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... we started for the farm land a little way back from the house. We mustered twenty-two in all and had a good days' work—chopping down trees and brush-wood, grubbing up roots, and making huge fires to burn all up. About twelve acres were cleared sufficiently for ploughing, and this will be fenced round. In the evening, when the men all came in for supper, I showed then my plans for the new buildings, and they seemed very much pleased with them. Later in the evening I was asked to come in to Bubkwujjenene's ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... You can't have the omelette without breaking eggs." And the grenadier of the Garde urged on the horses over the prostrate bodies, and upset the bivouacs; the blood-stained wheels ploughing that field of faces left a double furrow of dead. But in justice it should be said that he never ceased to thunder out his warning ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... was ploughing a vanishing furrow upon the circle of the sea that had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating piece of gray silk. The sun, pale and without rays, poured down leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinamen were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched, ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... strength his limbs no longer was controlling, The noble creature, with affliction bent, Fell to the ground, and in the dust lay rolling. "Accursed beast!" at length with fury mad Hans shouted, while he soundly plied the lash,— "Even for ploughing, then, thou art too bad!— That fellow was a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... pale the following morning; a shadow crept rapidly over the blue; bolts darted about the skies like maddened redbirds; the thunder, ploughing its way down the dome as along zigzag cracks in the stony street, filled the caverns of the horizon with reverberations that shook the earth; and the rain was whirled across the landscape in long, white, wavering sheets. Then all day quiet and silence throughout Nature except for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... alone improving his lands and selling vegetables to the Yankee traders who came up the river in their little schooners; he was always busy ploughing and dressing the gardens or ...
— A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters • Charles A. Gunnison
... the steamship "Hungarian," on which the wretched pair had embarked, was ploughing the waters of Lake St. Louis. After a time they passed through the Beauharnois and Cornwall canals, and entered the labyrinth of beautiful patches known as the "Thousands Islands." As they emerged from this lovely spot the saloon became suddenly filled with smoke, and ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... wife the imposture he has practised on them. She urges him to fly, or his head would be forfeited, and procures him a disguise to flee the country. He does so, and, whilst journeying through a village, he sees a man ploughing in a field, whom he asks for food. Whilst the latter is away, Maruf continues the ploughing, where the man had left off, and the ploughshare strikes against something hard in the ground, which turns ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... adventurers together, there was less than on land to remind me that for me to dream myself her lover went far to prove me lunatic. So I was blithe to be afloat again. As for Cornelys Jensen, we were to learn soon enough in what direction lay his pleasure to be ploughing the high ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... truth," shouted Stephen Anerley, who had been ploughing through his brow into his brain, while he kept his eyes fixed upon his daughter's, and there found abashment, but no abasement; "naught have I to do with any little goings on, or whether an action was a gentleman's ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... in this manner. But they were not always destined to be wasted upon dull and inattentive ears. An incident occurred which brought him into notice, and established his fame as a prophet of the first calibre. He was ploughing in a field when he suddenly stopped from his labour, and, with a wild look and strange gestures, exclaimed, "Now, Dick! now, Harry! O, ill done, Dick! O, well done, Harry! Harry has gained the day!" His fellow ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... for the other half of the plough, only that vexed my grandfather, for he was too proud to borrow, and, of course, every day he felt less and less able to pay on account of him having to hire a man to be doing the spring ploughing and seeding ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... itself abroad, in a fan shape, shouting and leaping to and fro. About the centre, and a good way behind the rest, Silver and I followed—I tethered by my rope, he ploughing, with deep pants, among the sliding gravel. From time to time, indeed, I had to lend him a hand, or he must have missed his footing and fallen backward ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is full of marching columns of men, of changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses, herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling at the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges, preaching in all the churches; of men ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... justice, it must be said that in some parts of his exegesis the strong sense which was one of his most striking characteristics crops out in a way very refreshing. Thus, referring to a passage in the first chapter of Job, regarding the oxen which were ploughing and the asses which were feeding beside them, he tells us pithily that these typify two classes of Christians: the oxen, the energetic Christians who do the work of the Church; the asses, the lazy Christians who ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... extraordinary fertility of the soil, the harvest, on an average, is forty-fold, notwithstanding the roughness of their mode of cultivation. The field is first broken up with a very clumsy plough, then sown, and a second ploughing completes the work. Under the hard clods of earth thus left undisturbed, a great part of the seed perishes of course. How unexampled would be the harvest, if assisted by the capital and industry of an ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... herds, one is apt to forget that for centuries—perhaps for thousands of years—the system of agriculture that grew up, still possessed much of the elasticity of the old pastoral methods. Under the open field system, such a custom as that described by Tacitus and in the Welsh Laws, viz. of ploughing up out of the pasture or waste sufficient to admit of each tribesman having his due allotment, and letting it lie waste again the next year, admitted of considerable readjustment to meet the exigencies of declining population, as well as providing an easy means whereby any stranger ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... mind how larned she is, so much the better—she can teach me to parlyvoo, and dance solos and duets, and such elegant things, when I've done ploughing. ...
— She Would Be a Soldier - The Plains of Chippewa • Mordecai Manuel Noah
... chickens do the hen that hatched them. They breed very few horses, but those they have are full of mettle, and are kept only for exercising their youth in the art of sitting and riding them; for they do not put them to any work, either of ploughing or carriage, in which they employ oxen. For though their horses are stronger, yet they find oxen can hold out longer; and as they are not subject to so many diseases, so they are kept upon a less charge and with less trouble. And even when they are so worn out that they are no more fit for ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... German lines northwards towards Contich. Our road lay across the open country, between the farms which mean so much of Belgium's wealth. In one field a man was ploughing with three big horses. He was too old to fight, but he could do this much for his country. Surely that man deserves a place in his country's Roll of Honour. Shells were falling not four fields away, but he never even looked up. It must take more nerve to plough a straight furrow when the shells ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... country. It was rather a revelation to pass from between the hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a great coming and going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in every second field, lusty horses and stout country-folk a- ploughing. The way I followed took me through many fields thus occupied, and through many strips of plantation, and then over a little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making ready for the winter, and so back again ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the tenant was bound to keep the land in good condition. His duties included the ploughing or trenching, sowing the seed, snaring or driving off the birds and stray beasts, weeding, watering, and harvesting. Gardens he had to fence. The watering-machines were of great importance and had to ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... to watch the small steamers ploughing behind. Sometimes the waves wash right over their decks. As the sea is not smooth enough for them to be coaled from the large steamer, they have had to be taken in tow. This will delay our passage, but the captain expects to be in Table ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of the Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on the other. At sunrise next morning our ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... ringed in by combes, the noise of the horses, the sputtering of the fires of green wood, the many men passing about aimlessly, wondering at the ease of a soldier's life after the labour of spring ploughing. It was a wonderful sight, that first camp of ours; but the men for the most part grumbled at not fighting; they wanted to be pushing on, to seize the city of Bristol, instead of camping there. How did they know, they ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... mind, at once practical and theoretic, artist, man of science, inventor, poet:—and on many more valiant workers whose names are not registered where every day we turn the leaf to read them, but whose labours make a part, though an unrecognised part, of our inheritance, like the ploughing and sowing ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... unpicturesque, consisting almost entirely of a succession of flat uncultivated downs, with nothing to break the dull monotony of the scene, except here and there, where the tall slender minaret of a mosque, or a single tree, rises against the horizon, and resembles the mast of some solitary vessel ploughing its course through the boundless waste ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... every thing," cried out the Brooks, as they saw the Mountain-Torrent come rushing nearer on, sweeping away the fences, and ploughing out a path more fitting for his travels than the brookside ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... be the Earth I was looking at. Then, when once I had got my sight properly focused, the whole human race was clear to me, not merely in the shape of nations and cities, but the individuals, sailing, fighting, ploughing, going to law; the women, the beasts, and in short every breed 'that feedeth ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... are in trouble, I remember nothing. I will come to see you next Sunday evening, and bring you some nice little present. Keep up a stout heart, and a stiff upper lip; you are not used to work, and at first it will come very hard; ploughing is not quite so easy as playing cat's cradle, and backgammon in the parlor. You will have no dancing, unless a mad bull gallops after you, when, no doubt, you will practise double quickstep to perfection. All the gay pleasures you have now, will be lost to you; but there is ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... for as we sat we could look under the boughs of the great trees, and down between the gardens to Jaffa and the Mediterranean. After leaving the gardens, we came upon the great plain of Sharon, on which we could see the husbandmen at work far and near, ploughing and sowing their grain. In some instances, the two operations were made simultaneously, by having a sort of funnel attached to the plough-handle, running into a tube which entered the earth just behind the share. The man held the plough with one hand, while with the other he dropped the requisite ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... upon the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... hair standing up like barbed-wire, leaned sadly over the fence and gazed up at the green lucerne. Joe went about shivering in an old coat of Dad's with only one sleeve to it—a calf had fancied the other one day that Dad hung it on a post as a mark to go by while ploughing. ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... in spring when the desire mastered the fear that was in her. It was a perfect afternoon, the air a-lilt with bird-songs, and full of the perfume of early flowers. Her husband was ploughing in a distant field, and surely would not return for an hour or two; what might one not do in an hour? She called her little friend, Petie, who was hovering about the door, watching for her. Quickly, ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... were hidden, a boy worked in a field with a fine team of horses, ploughing stubble. We tried to listen to what he said to his team, to see if there was any change from the German "Burrrrrrsh," but he was a silent youth, and so far as we could make out, said never a word all day. So we could not prove ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... occasional exercise of well-timed authority, he has succeeded in converting them into a peaceable and industrious people. The ditches around his extensive wheat-fields; the making of the sun-dried bricks, of which his fort is constructed; the ploughing, harrowing, and other agricultural operations, are entirely the work of these Indians, for which they receive a very moderate compensation—principally in shirts, blankets, and other articles of clothing. In the same manner, on application ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... the vision fair Sent forth to meet him, when at eve he went Home from his first day's ploughing? Oft she passed Slowly on horseback, in all kinds of dreams; For much he dreamed, and loved his dreaming well. Nor woke he from such dreams with vain regret; But, saying, "I have seen that face once more," He smiled with his eyes, and rose to work. Nor did he turn aside ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... the reefs in the sails, seemed to make no great attempt to elude the enemy. But soon the crew noticed that the skipper was taking his schooner rather dangerously close to the shore; and a cry came from a sailor on the bow, that the "Sally" was ploughing through the kelp, and would soon be on ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... to furnish timbers for vessels, nor had men built fortifications round their towns. There were no such things as swords, spears, or helmets. The earth brought forth all things necessary for man, without his labor in ploughing or sowing. Perpetual spring reigned, flowers sprang up without seed, the rivers flowed with milk and wine, and yellow ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... year's cotton-plants, desolately bowing, Tremble in the March-wind, ragged and forlorn; Red are the hillsides of the early ploughing, Gray are the lowlands, waiting for the corn. Earth seems asleep, but she is only feigning; Deep in her bosom thrills a sweet unrest; Look where the jasmine lavishly is raining Jove's ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... The bull was ploughing along in the dust, fifty yards behind, rolling in his run, and smiling as bull-terriers will. I heard Vixen squeal; half a dozen of the curs closed in on her; a white streak came up behind me; a cloud of dust rose near Vixen, and, when it cleared, I saw one tall pariah ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... or by word of mouth; and yet I have been much at Love's school, and have often been flattered; but always have I kept aloof from him, and now he makes me pay dear for it; for now I know more of it than an ox does of ploughing. But of this I despair—that he never loved, perhaps, and if he does not love, and has not loved; then have I been sowing in the sea where no seed can take root; and there is nothing for it but to wait for him and to suffer till I see whether I can bring him into the right way by hints ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... little farther, and depict ten thousand, a hundred thousand homes in England saddened by the thought of the coming calamity, and oppressed by the pervading gloom. My next-door neighbor perhaps has parted with her son. Now the ship in which he is, with a thousand brave comrades, is ploughing through the stormy midnight ocean. Presently (under the flag we know of) the thin red line in which her boy forms a speck, is winding its way through the vast Canadian snows. Another neighbor's boy is not gone, but is expecting orders to sail; and some one else, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the direction indicated. Ross, in his eagerness, made his engine hum and came first in sight of a cove that opened out beyond the rock, and a shout went up that thrilled the hearts of those in the Ariel ploughing ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... mares, 30 plough-horses, 13 horses, besides food and drink to support the assailants for six weeks. They were guilty of many other extortions, the country being extremely poor after the wars, and 17 of the earl's tenants were hindered from ploughing that season. A certain horse-boy, who was sentenced to be hanged for killing one Cusack, was promised his life by Sir George Carew, if he accused Tyrconnel as having employed him to commit the murder. The boy ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... frightened widow could ask a question or utter a word he was gone, ploughing down the hill in the direction of the Back Harbor. When he reached the foot of that hill where the road should have been, he found that it had disappeared. The tide had ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... ploughing, And behind that plough is the Lord Himself. The holy Peter helps Him to drive, And the Mother of God carries the seed corn, Carries the seed corn, prays to the Lord God, 'Make, O Lord, the strong wheat to ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... a nasty raw specimen of March weather, not exactly raining, but trying to all the time, and altogether grey and dismal. The spring ploughing was proceeding apace, and as the fields grew brown, there was less and less trace of colour left in the landscape. In fact it was a day when something evil could scarcely help happening; or at least it ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... Grand Canal in Venice; and the second was a Spanish peso struck under Philip II. at Potosi, which he had found in a stall on the embankment of the Quay Voltaire, in Paris; and the third was a York shilling, which he had bought from the man who had turned it up in ploughing a field that sloped to ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the high road yesterday, I stopp'd to watch a man near by, ploughing a rough stony field with a yoke of oxen. Usually there is much geeing and hawing, excitement, and continual noise and expletives, about a job of this kind. But I noticed how different, how easy and wordless, yet firm and sufficient, the work of this young ploughman. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... up the lower door of the sideboard and got out some flint arrow-heads picked up in the ploughing, the teeth of a Beaver dating from the early days of the settlement, and an Owl very badly stuffed. The sight of these precious things set Yan all ablaze. "Oh!" was all he could say. Sam was gratified to see such effect produced by the family possessions ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of the inevitable fate of the godless and disobedient, that much of our present-day preaching is so powerless and ephemeral. You cannot get crops out of the land merely by summer showers and sunshine; there must be the subsoil ploughing, the pulverizing frost, the wild March wind. And only when we modern preachers have seen sin as God sees it, and begin to apply the divine standard to the human conscience; only when our eagerness and ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... beef-eating population, is one of the spectacles best worth seeing. The strength of the horse as compared to that of the bullock is quite astonishing: a man on horseback having thrown his lazo round the horns of a beast, can drag it anywhere he chooses. The animal ploughing up the ground with outstretched legs, in vain efforts to resist the force, generally dashes at full speed to one side; but the horse immediately turning to receive the shock, stands so firmly that the bullock ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... always been the fond father to Art! and had never rightly overed the boy's quitting off the way he did! Oh, if only they had Art there again! To have him going off with the father of a morning, cutting turf, or making hay, or doing a bit of ploughing! and the two of them in to their dinners and off again!... Why, to have that good time back, she'd even welcome the poor-lookin' little scollop of a thing, and give her share of the ...
— Candle and Crib • K. F. Purdon
... says the Abbe, "the animation of the beluga hunt when a hundred of them are in the weir, when twenty-five or thirty men are pursuing them, when five or six boats dragged by the creatures are ploughing the enclosed waters in every direction, when the spears are hurled from all sides and the men are covered with the blood which gushes out in streams. Some years ago the passengers of a passing steamer from Europe were witnesses of such a scene and showed their keen interest by firing ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... of this event in M. B., p. 150. The account of it reminds me of the ploughing by the sovereign, which has been an institution in China from the earliest times. But there we have no magic and ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... into the box all the quilts and robes they had, and bundling little Flaxen in, started across the trackless plain toward the low line of hills to the east, twenty-five or thirty miles. From four o'clock in the morning till nearly noon they toiled across the sod, now ploughing through the deep snow where the unburned grass had held it, now scraping across the bare, burned earth, now wandering up or down the swales, seeking the shallowest places, now shovelling a ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... the desert. Sometimes they seem to be endless. When the wind would permit, Seth endeavored to find comfort in digging in the soil into which we must all descend, in getting near to it, in ploughing it, often with apparent aimlessness, never being able to count upon the harvest, but buoying up his soul with hope ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... architects were behemoth wind and cloud, That, laboring loud, Mountained thy world foundations and uplifted Thy skyey bastions drifted Of piled eternities of ice and snow; Where storms, like ploughmen, go, Ploughing the deeps with awful hurricane; Where, spouting icy rain, The huge whale wallows; and through furious hail Th' explorer's tattered sail Drives like the wing of some terrific bird, Where wreck and famine herd.— Home of the red Auroras and the gods! He who profanes thy perilous threshold,—where ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Nobility is not an army. To form an army of half a million, at least a hundred and fifty regiments are needed, and we, as Thou thyself sayest, have forty. How could those men who today are herding cattle, ploughing land, making pots, or drinking and idling on their lands, learn the art of warfare? Egyptians are poor materials for an army. I know that, for I see them daily. A Libyan, a Greek, a Hittite, in boyhood even uses a bow and arrows and a sling; he handles a club perfectly; in a year he learns ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... mentioned elsewhere, a man's rise in caste is marked on every occasion by the receipt of new fire, rubbed on a special stick ornamented with flowers. Fire is lighted here, as in all Melanesia, by "ploughing," a small stick being rubbed lengthwise in a larger one. If the wood is not damp, it will burn in less than two minutes: it is not necessary, as is often stated, to use two different kinds of wood. To-day matches are used ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... if Jerry knew his old driver, with such good will did he set forth, with such little snorts of high spirit and tossings of head and mane. Down the old farm road, among fields of fresh grain and fresh ploughing, where blue birds sat on the fences, and jocund dandelions sunned themselves by the wayside. The breeze came fresh into Faith's face, tossing back her hair; and presently with the scent of buds and flowers and ploughed land came a mingling of the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... off in a cab that I don't feel she has thrown herself away," observed Mrs. Fowler, yawning, while she turned to the staircase. "Archibald, I hope you had a really good time with the judge. I must say it is like ploughing to ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... side, interested him. He meant to stay below and watch the events of the morning. Piloted by the Duke, the strong English girl and the wiry old Scotch lady made their way up the companion, not without difficulty, for the skipper's prediction was already fulfilled, and the Streak was ploughing her way through all sorts ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... to you, Clavey, and your little disappointments have been so purely romantic that only your facile emotions have played about like amiable puppies on the roof of your passions. It's time the lava began to boil and the lid blew off. Your creative tract would get a ploughing up and a fertilizing as a natural sequence. Your plays would no longer be mere models of architecture. I am not an amiable altruist. I don't long to see you happy. I'm rather inclined to hate this woman who will end by infatuating you, for of course that would be the last ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... edge of the park, at a turn in the road. She paused a moment to look at the trees by the roadside, at the neighboring meadows sleeping in the bright sunlight. Over yonder the reapers were gathering the last sheaves. Farther on they were ploughing. But all the melancholy of the silent toil had vanished, so far as the girl was concerned, so delighted was she at the thought of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... United States had no requirement for the horses of Lee's army and that the men might find these convenient for "spring ploughing" was received by Lee with full appreciation. The first matter in order after the completion of the surrender was the issue of rations to the starving Southern troops. "General Grant," said Lee, "a train was ordered by way of Danville ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... fact, seagulls do fly far inland in fine weather, and especially during ploughing-time. And also, as a matter of fact, the petrel lives at sea both in fine weather and foul, because he is uncomfortable on land. It is only the breeding season that he spends on shore; while the seagull is just as much at home on the land ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... have brought a common pair any day," he said, "but I promised the best, and there they are. Oh, Squire!" said Verty, smiling, "what a chase I had! and what a fight with him! He nearly had me under him once, and the antlers you see there came near ploughing up my breast and letting out my heart's blood! They just grazed—he tried to bite me—but I had him by the horn with my left hand, and before a swallow could flap his wings, my knife was in ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... counsel that the greater part of my success was due. He taught me the folly of ploughing with a fluke,—a custom to which the Eastern Shore was wedded, pointing out that a double surface was thus exposed to the sun's rays; and explained at length why there was more profit in small grain in that district than heavy tobacco. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... impression is left, and the details forgotten, or only brought to light by those who explore the few remote parts of England where the custom still lingers. The idea of the mistress and her maidens spinning at the great wheels while the master was abroad ploughing his fields, or seeing after his flocks on the purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, and we can hear particulars from the lips of those now living, there come out details ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and his army. When this took place General Grant showed clearly his great kindness of heart and his delicate feeling. He issued orders that all the Confederates who owned horses and mules should be allowed to take them home. "They will need them for the spring ploughing," he said. He also had abundant food at once sent to the hungry Confederate soldiers. Never did General Grant appear more truly great than on the occasion of ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... that as one dashes from side to side, holding on to the bars above and the edge of the berth, one is led to pity a wakeful baby rocked wickedly by the big brother impatient to go to play. The tune changes, and it is "Ploughing the Raging Main," and the nose of the plough goes down too deep; then one is fastened to the walking beam of an engine and sways up and down with it. A gigantic churn is being churned by an ogre just under our head, and the awful dasher plunges and creaks. Above ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... a good deal of thinking over. It had got about the station that Red Mick had at last been caught in flagrante delicto; the house-cook had told the cook at the men's hut, and he had told the mailman, who stopped on the road to tell the teamsters ploughing along with their huge waggons to Kiley's Crossing; they told the publican at Kiley's, and he told everybody he saw. The children made a sort of play out of it, the eldest boy personating Red Mick, while two of the younger ones hid in a fallen tree, and were ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... The masts and Hut, with a dark riband of smoke floating from the chimney, lay just below, and two of the men were walking out to the harbour-ice where a seal had just landed, while round them scampered the dogs in high spirits. That was sufficient to set us sliding downhill, ploughing deep furrows through the soft drift and reaching the Hut ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... furled mizzen and foresails. The men had now plenty to do, and there was no time for brooding or lamenting over lost hopes. It is mostly during a calm, when the ship rides motionless upon a painted sea, that mutinous and rebellious thoughts arise among seamen. When the vessel is ploughing her way through storm and stress, each man seems a part of the ship and to have an interest in her voyage. It is then, too, that the word of command carries weight and meaning, and the knowledge of common dependence upon the captain ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... rustics mechanical improvements forced their way, and gradually attained, in the implements for ploughing, sowing, mowing, reaping, thrashing, the perfection of our ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... diverted from their natural direction by a crowd of preposterous regulations. There was a monopoly of coffee, a monopoly of tobacco, a monopoly of refined sugar. The public money, of which the King was generally so sparing, was lavishly spent in ploughing bogs, in planting mulberry trees amidst the sand, in bringing sheep from Spain to improve the Saxon wool, in bestowing prizes for fine yarn, in building manufactories of porcelain, manufactories of carpets, manufactories of hardware, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
