"Labourer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about 418, is characteristic. Electra has been compelled to marry a Mycenean labourer, a man of noble instincts who respects the princess and treats her as such. Both enter the scene; the man goes to labour for Electra, "for no lazy man by merely having God's name on his lips can make a livelihood without toil". Orestes ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... cultured Indian and Parsee merchants with large stakes in the State and well-appointed residences, people whose very religion exacted the most scrupulous cleanliness and who had all proved themselves obedient and law-abiding. These were classed under one rubric with the vastly inferior coolie labourer, with Kaffirs and Hottentots, and actually compelled to abandon their stores and residences to reside in one common ghetto upon the outskirts of the towns, a measure which entailed great losses apart from the gratuitous ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... backward. He has used only the broad-cast husbandry, and sowed two bushels per acre. The plough has never yet been tried here; all the ground is hoed, and (as Dod confesses) very incompetently turned up. Each convict labourer was obliged to hoe sixteen rods a day, so that in some places the earth was but just scratched over. The ground was left open for some months, to receive benefit from the sun and air; and on that newly cleared the trees were burnt, and the ashes dug in. I do not find that a succession of crops ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... the labourer addressed, eyeing her up and down as an unexpected apparition. 'He is still alive, they say, but not sensible. He either fell or was pushed over the waterfall; 'tis thoughted he was pushed. He is the gentleman who came here ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... felt, no apology offered. The men considered it as quite a normal and proper part of their life, while the women looked upon it as their whole life, to which they had been trained and educated and set apart by the Government; they accepted the role quite as did the scientist, labourer, soldier, or professional mother. The state had decreed it to be. They did not question its morality. Hence the life here was licentious and yet unashamed, much, as I fancy was the life in the groves of Athens or ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... might begin life afresh and succeed. The family went south in 1859, and entered on a period of struggle and hardship. The money realised by the sale of the furniture melted away, and the new house was bare and comfortless, Mr. Slessor continued his occupation as a shoemaker, and then became a labourer in one ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... side, and thanking her for the youth and freshness she still retained. On hearing her husband, the wife began to cry out, and by her terrible shrieks the man was awakened to the fact that he was not in the road to salvation, which made the poor labourer sorrowful beyond expression. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... nothing at all about digging, and also lacked the knowledge of how to get along comfortably under "camping-out" conditions, when every man has to be his own cook, his own washer-up, his own laundryman, as well as his own mining labourer. But the best of the men learned quickly how to look after themselves, to pitch a tent, to cook a meal, to drive a shaft, and to do without food for long spells when on the search for new goldfields. Thus they became resourceful and adventurous, and were of great value ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... over many things, his own great question ever and again, he heard a mower whetting his scythe somewhere in the neighbourhood. Pitt set about searching for the unseen labourer, and presently saw the man, who was cutting the grass in an adjoining field. Dismissing thought for action, in two minutes he had sprung over the fence and was beside the man; but the mower did not intermit the long sweeps of his scythe, until he heard Pitt's civil 'Good morning.' Then he ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board—after flour had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone to eight per cent. a month. This work was very exhausting, and after a week Clemens asked his employer for an ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the Act of Parliament laid down that no tradesman, labourer, or other person shall exercise his worldly calling on the Lord's day, it not being a work of necessity or charity. He would ask whether it was not a work of necessity for the vicar to proceed to church to preach. A dissenter ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... for as the insolence of these knights was vast, so was their rapacity enormous; they had been so long accustomed to have crowns and half-crowns rained upon them by their admirers and flatterers that they would look at a shilling, for which many an honest labourer was happy to toil for ten hours under a broiling sun, with the utmost contempt; would blow upon it derisively, or fillip it into the air before they pocketed it; but when nothing was given them, as would occasionally happen—for how ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... likewise touches the ideality and nobleness of life whether human aims can be realised satisfactorily only in the agent's singular person, so that the fruits of effort would be forth-with missed if the labourer himself should disappear. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... from quoting a further example. It is taken from the poet Burns. The original dialect being written in inverted hiccoughs, is rather difficult to reproduce. It describes the scene attendant upon the return of a cottage labourer to ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... deeper scholarship than many a man who holds a university chair; he knew the classics as lesser men know their party politics; and the woodlands, fields and brooks, with their countless inhabitants, held no mysteries for him. Yet he was content to be as Flamby had always known him—a manual labourer. The larder of Dovelands Cottage was well stocked, winter and summer alike, and Mrs. Duveen, who accepted what the gods offered unquestioningly, never troubled to inquire how folks so poor as they could procure game and fish at all proper seasons. Fawkes ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... with the ill-fated Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Achilles. The latter {315} bemoaned his shadowy and unreal existence, and plaintively assured his former companion-in-arms that rather would he be the poorest day-labourer on earth than reign supreme as king over the realm of shades. Ajax alone, who still brooded over his wrongs, held aloof, refusing to converse with Odysseus, and sullenly retired when the hero ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of the people. He gets together the working men in his parish on a Monday evening, and gives them a sort of conversational lecture on useful practical matters, telling them stories, or reading some select passages from an agreeable book, and commenting on them; and if you were to ask the first labourer or artisan in Tripplegate what sort of man the parson was, he would say,—'a uncommon knowin', sensable, free-spoken gentleman; very kind an' good-natur'd too'. Yet for all this, he is perhaps the best Grecian of the party, if we except Mr. Baird, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... moved the rejection of the Agriculture Bill. Adapting an old joke of Lord SPENCER'S, made in "another place" a generation ago, he observed that this was no more an agricultural Bill than he himself was an agricultural labourer. He knows however how to call a spade a spade, if not something more picturesque, and he treated the measure and its authors to all the resources of a varied vocabulary. Possibly his brother peers, while enjoying his invective, thought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... the hang-nails, —but, strange to say, the nail of the little finger has been spared, and suffered to grow to an unusual length. I ask myself why this particular nail has been so favoured, and can only answer, 'because it has some peculiar use.' It is clear this is not the hand of a manual labourer; the joints are too small, the fingers too delicate, the texture of the skin, which is clearly visible, much too fine—in short, wouldn't it pass anywhere for a woman's hand? Say a woman who bit her nails. If it were really such there ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... of them is imputed to him, as being free from the necessity or temptation; but his ministers only are accountable for all, and must answer it at their perils. He hath a vast revenue constantly arising from the hearth of the Householder, the sweat of the Labourer, the rent of the Farmer, the industry of the Merchant, and consequently out of the estate of the Gentleman: a large competence to defray the ordinary expense of the Crown, and maintain its lustre. And if any extraordinary occasion happen, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... one, and we shall nip him in the hills.' The Bishop of Beauvais lent a hand, so did Adhemar Viscount of Limoges, and Achard the lord of Chaluz, not because he desired, but because he was forced by Limoges his suzerain. Another forced labourer was Sir Gilles de Gurdun, who had been found by Saint-Pol doing work in Poictou and won over after a ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... really tiresome for a remarkably good and trained pedestrian like her husband to have to adapt his vigorous steps to ours. And comfort came from an unexpected quarter. The old peasant woman, strong and muscular as any English labourer, whom we had hired at Seeberg to carry our bags and shawls through the forest, overheard the discussion, and for the first time broke silence to assure "the gracious ladies" that Silberbach was at no great distance; in ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... to reflect that the beloved Republic has made him "the peer of any man." It has not made any other man his peer. He is separated far more widely by his wealth from the workmen, whom he patronises, than the meanest day-labourer in England from the dukes to whom he is supposed to bend the knee; and if Mr Carnegie's be the fine flower of American Liberty, we need hardly regret that ours ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to come out of the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his way homeward sadly, an hour later, he enters by chance the open door of a village church, half buried in the tangle of its churchyard. The rude coffin is lying there of a labourer who had but a hovel to live in. The enemy dogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to be flying, not from death simply, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... Welsh (i.e. British) for corner land; in the people who occupy the fastnesses of the Welsh mountains, as well as in the Gaels of the Scottish Highlands and the Erse of Ireland. Their very speech is blended with our own. Does the country labourer go to the Horncastle tailor to buy coat and breeches? His British forefather, though clad chiefly in skins, called his upper garment his "cotta," his nether covering his "brages," scotice "breeks." Brewer, Introduction to Beauties of ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... and civilisation. Instead of one ancient church, much despoiled and damaged, Anizy would now possess three such churches, each in its own way an object of interest to architects and artists, and it would be possible for an honest gendarme or a poor labourer on the highway to hear mass, if he liked, in any one of them, without incurring the wrath of his superiors and the loss of his ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... box for a moment, gazing about her as though in expectation of meeting someone. She saw me, but seeing only a labourer, took no heed of my presence. Then she glanced at the tiny gold watch in her bracelet, and noting that it was just upon nine, drew a long breath—a sigh as though ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... what is barely sufficient to support himself and his family, and knows that results will depend largely upon his own sagacity and industry, works with a steady zeal that it would be unreasonable to expect of the hired labourer, who, having his measured wage always in his mind's eye, has no incentive to do more than what is rigorously ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the other necessaries, at wholesale prices, of the importing merchant. The waste, also, made by the convicts in their meat, &c. is a serious consideration: the head and entrails of animals slaughtered for their use, and which an English labourer would be glad of, are thrown away as only fit for the dogs; nothing but the body and legs are deemed sufficiently good for these dainty characters. Taking all expenses into consideration, I think that from 25l. to 30l. per man may be estimated as the annual cost—Widowson's Present ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... say that conditions of the present life to which the great mass of mankind are {54} subject must be contributory to forming their spirits for their future existence? Leaving out of consideration who are the elect, and who not, which God only knows, can we think that the patience of the labourer and artisan, the endurance of the seafaring man, and the devotedness of the soldier, who at the call of duty, and in spite of the promptings of self-preservation, exposes himself to almost certain death on the field of battle, have no relation to their future destiny? As regards, especially, the ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... of the poem brought numbers to his house, and he sold a great deal. But his spirit could not brook the brutal taunts and jeers which every day he was obliged to bear from his customers. He left off business, and commenced labourer, at which he continued till he got an offer of a situation as overseer of hedges, on the large estate of Castle Semple, at that time belonging to William M'Dowall, Esq., M.P. for Renfrewshire, which he accepted. With short intervals, he remained there till ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... surveyors have been laying out all their skill on this slough. More cartloads than you could count of the best material for filling up a slough have been shot into it, and yet you would never know that so much as a single labourer had emptied his barrow here. True, excellent stepping-stones have been laid across the slough by skilful engineers, but they are always so slippery with the scum and slime of the slough, that it is only now and then that a traveller can keep his feet ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... of view he was perfectly correct, as peewits generally frequent wild and uncultivated places where the ploughman and the labourer are rarely seen. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... in Sartor Resartus which I have always held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so "hardly-entreated" as ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... perform their Work, and will also bring on Distempers, besides the loss of time, and a great waste of such Beer that is generally much thrown away; because Drink is certainly a Nourisher of the Body, as well as Meats, and the more substantial they both are, the better will the Labourer go through his Work, especially at Harvest; and in large Families the Doctor's Bills have proved the Evil of this bad Oeconomy, and far surmounted the Charge of that Malt that would have kept the Servants in good Health, and preserved the ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... to the prospect presented here, but turn back on the old States. At what period did philanthropy triumph there? why exactly at that point where interest joined issue with its dictates; the slave was, in fact, admitted as a hired labourer, when he ceased to be profitable as a bondsman: and that day will arrive here also, as surely as that the sun shines on Louisiana; and the lower valley of the Mississippi will yet be peopled by a free and hardy race, born on the soil made ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... The labourer was estimated to be paid at the rate of about two-thirds the quantity of corn he would get in England if paid in kind, and corn sells here at about one-third the price it fetches in average seasons in England. In Europe, therefore, these works, supposing the labour equally efficient, would ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... "roughing it," as the word is generally understood in England, would find even a trip as far as Yakutsk rather a trial. Of course, these establishments vary from the best, which are about on a par with the labourer's cottage in England, to the worst, which can only be described as dens of filth and squalor. All are built on the same plan. There is one guest-room, a bare carpetless apartment, with a rough wooden bench, a table, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... them down to their work in the early morning must be on their way up to the surface, and it is time to have the savoury messes ready for dishing up. Abundance is on the board, for the miner's wages are sufficient to supply him with what would be luxuries to an ordinary labourer above ground; but were they far higher, could they repay him for a life of constant danger, of hard incessant toil, and the deprivation for more than half the year of a sight of the blue sky, the warming rays of the sun, and the pure air of heaven, except on the one blessed ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... situation, the nearest house to it being a farm-house, which, though only a few hundred yards distant, was built in a hollow, so that what was going on outside the cottage would not be visible to persons about the farm premises. Mrs Williams was the wife of a respectable farm labourer, of better education and more intelligence than the generality of his class. They had no children of their own, so that Mrs Williams, who was a truly godly woman, was glad to give a home for a time and a motherly ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... conviction that Thurtell, when he first committed the murder, had removed his victim's principal treasure, notes to the value of three or four hundred pounds. Suspicion was aroused, and the hue and cry raised through the finding by a labourer of the pistol in the hedge, and the discovery of a pool of blood on the roadway. Probert promptly turned informer; Hunt also tried to save himself by a rambling confession, and it was he who revealed where the body was concealed, accompanying the officers to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... and mended shoes of the poor, who must wear them while upper and sole hang together. They betrayed the age and sex of the wearer as clearly as a photograph. The shoddy slipper, with the high, French heels, of the smart shop-girl; the heavy bluchers, studded with nails, of the labourer; the light tan boots, with elegant, pointed toes, of the clerk or counter-jumper; the shoes of a small child, with a thin rim of copper ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... (as at the universities); but he thought that children and the aged or infirm could not be tied by any rule. He condemns "bull's beef" as rank, unpleasant, and indigestible, and holds it best for the labourer; which seems to indicate more than anything else the low state of knowledge in the grazier, when Venner wrote: but there is something beyond friendly counsel where our author dissuades the poor from eating partridges, because ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... Henchard was often absent at such places the whole week long. When this was all done, and Henchard had become in a measure broken in, he came to work daily on the home premises like the rest. And thus the once flourishing merchant and Mayor and what not stood as a day-labourer in the barns and granaries ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... illustrating how essential to the humanising and civilising of man, and therefore of the whole race, was an increased sense of sexual and paternal responsibility, and an increased justice towards woman as a domestic labourer. In the last half of the same chapter I dealt at great length with what seems to me an even more pressing practical sex question at this moment—man's attitude towards those women who are not engaged in domestic labour; toward that vast and always increasing body of women, who as ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... well paid labourer even though he belongs to the unskilled class. The tapping of the rubber trees and the smoking of the milk pays from eight to ten dollars a day in American gold. This, to him, of course, is riches and the men labour here in order that they may go ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... necessary to purchase a farm. But they who want farms now, and they who will want votes next November, do not look quite so far ahead as that, while shouting "equal rights," they are, in fact, for preventing the poor husbandman from being anything but a day-labourer. ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... with a will, taking turns with the pickaxe and the two shovels. I must confess that our speed slowed down considerably after the first wild burst, but we kept at it steadily. It was hard work, and there is no denying it, just the sort of plain hard work the day labourer does when he digs sewer trenches in the city streets. Only worse, perhaps, owing to the nature of the soil. It has struck me since that those few years of hard labour in the diggings, from '49 to '53 or '54, saw more actual manual ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... a Cossack named Korzh, who had a labourer whom people called Peter the Orphan—perhaps because no one remembered either his father or mother. The church elder, it is true, said that they had died of the pest in his second year; but my grandfather's aunt would not ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... believing that the slave class was other than a small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father pressed by need ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... (in the role of a labourer behind a hedge on the Brighton road): "'Oo are you a-gettin' at? Do you see any mote in my eye? If you want to know the time, ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... was in his grave, and his wife was anxious to try if she and her hungry children could not live on less money in Belgium than they could in England. The good old post-captain had improved and beautified the place from a farm-labourer's cottage into a habitation which was the quintessence of picturesque inconvenience. Ceilings which you could touch with your hand; funny little fireplaces in angles of the rooms; a corkscrew staircase, which a stranger ascended or descended at peril of life or limb; no kitchen worth mentioning, ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... who had found great amusement in his retired manner of living, in collecting whatever was curious in the neighbourhood, said, he should much like to see this urn, and inquired of Mr. Scott if he thought it were possible to get a sight of the labourer who found it. "Oh yes, Sir," answered Mrs. Scott, "that you may easily do, for it was Archie Kerr who found it, and his mother lives only about a mile and a half from this place; but I think, if your honour wants to see it, you had better send up to him at once, for it ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... fruit, that was from him And from his heirs to issue. And that such He might be construed, as indeed he was, She was inspir'd to name him of his owner, Whose he was wholly, and so call'd him Dominic. And I speak of him, as the labourer, Whom Christ in his own garden chose to be His help-mate. Messenger he seem'd, and friend Fast-knit to Christ; and the first love he show'd, Was after the first counsel that Christ gave. Many a time his nurse, at entering found That ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... patient and unpretending. On this account I began to shun social life, which occasioned in me, still more and more, a moral weariness; yet, nevertheless, I was driven into it, to avoid the disquiet and discomfort which I experienced at home. I was a labourer who concealed his desire for labour, who had buried his talent in the earth, as was the hereditary custom of the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... those matters wherein I played a part. And, indeed, it may befall that, when the tale is put forth in print, the public may find it to their liking, and buy it with no sparing hand, so that, at the last, the payment shall be worthy of the labourer. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... forward, tied the culprit by the arms and legs to two horses, and himself whipped them to their work till it was duly accomplished. Was it strange that in Philip's reign such energy should be rewarded by wealth, rank, and honour? Was not such a labourer in the vineyard ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... savage wolf had appeared and had killed the ass with which he had been ploughing. The man entreated Herve to fly, as the wolf was hard upon his heels; but the blind youth, undaunted, ordered the terrified labourer to seize the animal and harness it to the plough with the harness of the dead ass. From that time the wolf dwelt among the sheep and goats on the farm, and subsisted upon hay ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... the people, as was formerly the case even in Japan and China, where a girl was not worthy to be counted beside the son. Of ancient Peru, Letourneau says: "Every male inherited his father's profession; he was not allowed to choose another employment. By right of birth a man was either labourer, miner, artisan, or soldier" (100. 486). Predestination of state and condition in another world is a common theological tenet, predestination of state and condition in this world is ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... inch to the foot from back to front, so as to insure drainage; let it also be close, hard, and perfectly smooth; so that it may be cleanly swept out. A capital plan is to mix a few bushels of chalk and dry earth, spread it over the floor, and pay a paviour's labourer a trifle to hammer it level with his rammer. The fowl-house should be seven feet high, and furnished with perches at least two feet apart. The perches must be level, and not one above the other, or unpleasant consequences may ensue to the undermost row. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... promised by the authorities, there were half a dozen llamas, four of which were harnessed to a couple of vehicles somewhat resembling hammocks suspended from long poles, these being intended for the accommodation of the Englishmen, while the other two were loaded with food for the expedition, each labourer carrying his own tools. Each llama had its own driver; the expedition therefore consisted of thirty-eight people, all told, including the two white men. Its route lay along the eastern side of the lake; and it covered a distance of twenty-five miles before camping ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... one else know anything of this sword? Does any one claim it? Who took it up into the citadel? The tyrant used this sword. Who had it before him? Who put it in his way?—Sword, fellow labourer, partner of my enterprise,—we have faced danger and shed blood to no purpose. We are slighted. Men say that we ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... said Lempriere. "The labourer is worthy of his hire, to give you Scripture for Scripture. But what will you say to the piracies by which the traffic of the seas is intercepted, and Mr. Lieutenant daily enriched by plunder from English vessels? Surely, even the charitable protecting of Mr. Prynne ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... are usually hired by the year - from Whitsunday to Whitsunday - and are paid mostly in kind, - so many bolls of oats, barley, and peas - so much flax and wheat - the keep of a cow, and the addition of a few pounds in money. Every hind or labourer is bound, in return for his house, to provide a woman labourer to the farmer, for so much a day throughout the year-which is usually tenpence a day in summer, and eightpence in winter; and as it often happens that he has none of his own ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... all. You see, you must get down beneath the gentleman or would-be gentleman-farmer, down to the man who never conceived the idea of ruffling it with gentlefolk. Also, you must not go down to the mere labourer. But they are desperate gossips—gossips not so much in matters local and insular, as in matters universal. The gossiping tone does proceed into the universal, does it not? The hilarity with which they will range the far ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... you, villains? What do you want here, interrupting a hired labourer? You shall have something to take with you, confound you all! These clods and stones shall provide you with a broken head ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... nine cases out of ten it acts as a narcotic. The blow that should rouse, stuns me." He plays another variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother: "Anxieties that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind.... Like some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have thought what a deal I have to do." His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... life was one of unqualified wretchedness. For the two or three initiatory months, uncouth in speech, and vulgar in mien, with no gilded toy, rich plum-cake, or mint-new shilling to conciliate, I was despised and ridiculed; and when it was ascertained by my own confession that I was the son of a day-labourer, I was shunned by the aristocratic progeny of butchers, linen-drapers, and hatters. It took, at least, a half-dozen floggings to cure me of the belief that Joseph Brandon and his wife were my parents. It was the shortest road to conviction, and Mr Root prided ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and cantered down the Parade. The sun was setting; he would for a something miss his supper; but he meant to see Burley Wood that day, and he would have just daylight enough for his purpose. As he entered the village, he caught up a labourer returning from the fields. Sir Charles drew rein ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... and a considerable collection of family legends, formed another quarry, so ample that it was much more likely that the strength of the labourer should be exhausted than that materials should fail. I may mention, for example's sake, that the terrible catastrophe of the Bride of Lammermoor actually occurred in a Scottish family of rank. The female relative, by whom the ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o' the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot casualties—our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... them such an awful phiz that I'm afraid of her. If I make her presentable, it'll be my greatest feat yet. But the labourer is worthy of his hire, you know, and this bit of beauty-making will ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... that, theoretically at least, there was no room in such a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity of labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place offering to employers the hire of their toil. Yet ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... the way I spoke of further back; but if he is in danger, if he must come to a decision in difficult circumstances, you will find him a hundredfold more stupid and silly than the son of the roughest labourer. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Cordial in two treatises, the first teaching how to be eased of the guilt of sin, the second, discovering advantages by Christs ascention: by that faithful labourer in the Lord's vineyard Mr. Christopher Love, late Parson of Laurance Jury: ...
— The Compleat Cook • Anonymous, given as "W. M."
... intended. It is degradation to a man to live on husks, because these are not his true food. We call it degradation when we see the members of an ancient family, decayed by extravagance, working for their bread. It is not degradation for a born labourer to work for an honest livelihood. It is degradation for them, for they are not what they might have been. And therefore, for a man to be degraded, it is not necessary that he should have given himself up to low and mean practices. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... already blanched and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food—these figures and types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. In London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been to her as a pawn in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh; and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk about him. Under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was very clear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... paintings. Scenes of inundation and civil life are ranged along the base of the wall, mountain subjects and hunting scenes being invariably placed high up. Sometimes, interposed between these two extremes, the artist has introduced subjects dealing with the pursuits of the herdsman, the field labourer, and the craftsman. Elsewhere, he suppresses these intermediary episodes, and passes abruptly from the watery to the sandy region. Thus, the mosaic of Palestrina and the tomb-paintings of Pharaonic Egypt reproduce the same group of subjects, treated after the conventional ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... came a pace nearer, and then paused; when, looking round, I beheld an old negro, with a withered monkey-like face, clad in the ordinary conventional costume of an African labourer in the West Indies. His dress consisted of a loose pair of trousers and shirt of blue cotton check; and, on the top of his white woolly head was fixed on in some mysterious fashion a battered fragment of a straw hat, just of the sort that would be used by an English farmer as a scarecrow ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... ignored by us? What dignity, what loyalty, can there be in this double life, so wise and humane, uplifted and thoughtful, this side the threshold, and beyond it so callous, so instinctive and pitiless! For it is enough that we should feel the cold a little less than the labourer who passes by, that we should be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy any object that is not strictly indispensable, and we have unconsciously returned, through a thousand byways, to the ruthless act of primitive man despoiling ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Jim and his fellow-labourer were soon bathed in sweat, while Douglas's hands, unaccustomed to such toil, grew red and raw and blistered under the friction; for the files, as is quite usual in engineering departments, were unprovided with wooden handles over the rat-tail shank. Moreover, the task ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... as the labourer's task was over, his scientific friends thought the best monument which they could raise to his memory was to complete his "Natural History." This duty was discharged by two men, who, both well qualified, worked, however, on independent lines. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Missing Word! Maiden Forlorn, 'tis a poser you put to the country, the cliques, and the classes, The Landlord, The Farmer, the Labourer! Say they agree, what response may you hope from "the Masses." Those tiresome "Consumers"? Old myths and new rumours are like the East wind, Maiden, mighty unfilling; Bucolic ideas and crude panaceas won't help you, though with them all Fad-dom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... lands that will not bear the price placed on them, so that the peasant thereby is ruined and undone. Our desire is that the Lord shall allow such land to be seen by honourable men, so that the price shall be fixed in such a manner that the peasant shall not have his labour in vain: for every labourer is worthy of his hire ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... irrevocable decision to sell only in blocks of ten thousand shares at five dollars per share; that he said good-bye to Mr. Webster at the end of his second day and departed—not for Chicago but, very cleverly disguised, to accept a job as an ordinary labourer with Jim Bagley, manager of ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... further task again, to dress the vine, Hath needs beyond exhausting; the whole soil Thrice, four times, yearly must be cleft, the sod With hoes reversed be crushed continually, The whole plantation lightened of its leaves. Round on the labourer spins the wheel of toil, As on its own track rolls the circling year. Soon as the vine her lingering leaves hath shed, And the chill north wind from the forests shook Their coronal, even then the careful swain Looks keenly forward to the coming year, With Saturn's curved fang pursues and ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... time the mines had first started up. He had been active in the great strike eight years ago, and had been black-listed, his four sons with him. The sons were scattered now to the four parts of the world, but the father had stayed nearby, working as a ranch-hand and railroad labourer, until a couple of years ago, during a rush season, he had got a chance to ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... for you, I should have gone without dinner many a day; but for you, I should most likely have had to chuck painting altogether, and turn clerk or dock-labourer. But let me stay in your debt a little longer, old man. I can't put off my marriage any longer, and just at first I shall want all the money I can lay ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... celebrated Father Kircher published his Subterranean World, in which he called the alchymists a congregation of knaves and impostors, and their science a delusion. He admitted that he had himself been a diligent labourer in the field, and had only come to this conclusion after mature consideration and repeated fruitless experiments. All the alchymists were in arms immediately, to refute this formidable antagonist. One Solomon de Blauenstein was the first to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... lot of poets. He remained in the condition of an agricultural labourer, and for many years held the office of beadle, or church-officer, of the parish. He died on the 22d of May 1839, in the eighty-second year of his age; and his remains were interred in the churchyard of Bowden, where his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... nought but a common labourer," says Moll, disgusted to see him regaling himself in this fashion, as we returned to our room. "A pretty picture we are like to get for all ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... of the constructions, the abbats voluntarily accepted the rle of labourers. During the building of the Abbey of Bee, in 1033, the founder and first abbat, grand-seigneur though he was, worked as a common mason's labourer, carrying on his back the lime, sand, and stones necessary for the builder. This was Herluin. Another Norman noble, Hugh, Abbat of Selby in Yorkshire, when, in 1096, he rebuilt in stone the whole of that important monastery, putting on the labourer's blouse, mixed with the other masons and shared ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... "there ought not to be much trouble in identifying those boots. He would seem to be a labourer, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... Eiterkveisa in Skaun, and took up their quarters there. Hakon asked Bjorn if he knew anything about Astrid, and he said some people had been there in the evening wanting lodgings; "but I drove them away, and I suppose they have gone to some of the neighbouring houses." Thorstein's labourer was coming from the forest, having left his work at nightfall, and called in at Bjorn's house because it was in his way; and finding there were guests come to the house, and learning their business, he comes to Thorstein and tells him of it. As ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... settlers promptly tendered their assistance to the government, to garrison the towns or scour the bush. Their assistance was chiefly valuable for the moral support it afforded, and its influence on the minds of the labourer in bondage. The exploits of the bushrangers properly belong to the history of transportation, and are related in Vol. ii. p. 194. The terrors they spread retarded the occupation of the country, and joined with the assaults of the natives made the life ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... father.' 'Good heavens! you don't mean that. What is he accused of?' 'Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent to Athens to ask a diviner what should be done with him.' Before the answer of the diviner arrived, the labourer ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... young, fresh, and merry, she looked beautiful, with gleaming white teeth and clear eyes; her footstep was light in the dance, and her mind was lighter still. And what came of it all? Her son was an ugly brat! Yes, he was not pretty; so he was put out to be nursed by the labourer's wife. Anne Lisbeth was taken into the count's castle, and sat there in the splendid room arrayed in silks and velvets; not a breath of wind might blow upon her, and no one was allowed to speak a harsh word to her. No, that might not be; for she was nurse to the count's child, which ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... this wholesale emigration, things had come to such a pass that the landed proprietor could procure a labourer at a franc a day, out of which he had to feed and clothe himself; it was little short of slavery. The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... fashioned and mounted by his comrades, and that he has but to push a lever to set it in motion or stop it. The machine, in spite of its miraculous power and productiveness, has no mystery for him. The labourer in the electrical works, who has but to turn a crank on a dial to send miles of motive power to tramways, or light the lamps of a city, has but to say, like the God of Genesis, "let there be light," and there is ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... was heard yesterday in the courts, when William Blogg, bricklayer's labourer, recovered twenty-five pounds damages from James Buskin Carruthers, artist, for injury done to the plaintiff's eight-cylinder car through defendant's culpable negligence in allowing himself to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... value in Spain but of great worth in the eyes of the Indians. The fifty men who were to adopt the white habit of the Knight of the Golden Spur had not been selected, but it was thought well to begin the settlement with labourer and perhaps to choose the candidates for the new knighthood from amongst the Spaniards already settled in the Indies. He sailed with his little company from San Lucar de Barrameda on November 11, 1520, and after an uneventful voyage reached the island of Puerto Rico, called by the Indians ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... invention, before the vulgar arts of reading and writing, which are banishing all poetry from the world, could clip his wings. He was an adventurous soldier in his boyhood; but, having addicted himself to matrimony and the muses, settled as a bricklayer's labourer at Windsor. His meditations on the house-tops soon grew into form and substance; and, about the year 1780, he aspired, with all the impudence of Shad well, and a little of the pride of Petrarch, to the laurel-crown of Eton. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... little brothers were allowed an interval for getting dry. The carriage passed; stones, hoops, and lollipops resumed their circulation, and by five o'clock in the afternoon the news of Chandrapal's arrival was waiting for the returning labourer in every ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... ever ascertain," Mrs Reichardt replied, "it was exactly the reverse. It was always thought so degrading to enter a workhouse, that the industrious labourer would endure any and every privation rather than live there. An honest hard-working man must be sorely driven indeed, to seek such a shelter ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... tell thee truly that glorious Being is alone the Lord of Time, of Death, and of this Universe of mobile and immobile objects. That great ascetic Hari, though the Lord of the whole Universe, still betaketh himself to work, like a humble labourer that tilleth the fields. Indeed, Kesava beguileth all by the aid of His illusion. Those men, however, that have attained to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Orleans, if I may, for the foul 'manants' and peasant dogs of this country have burned the castle of Alfonse Rodigo, a good knight that held them in right good order this year past. He was worthy, indeed, to ride with that excellent captain, Don Rodrigo de Villandradas. King's captain or village labourer, all was fish that came to his net, and but two days ago I was his honourable chaplain. But he made the people mad, and a great carouse that we kept gave them their opportunity. They have roasted the good knight Alfonse, and would have done as much for me, his almoner, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... means," his father returned with decision. "Girdlestone and Co. are not an insurance office. The labourer is worthy of his hire, but when his work in this world is over, his family must fall back upon what has been saved by his industry and thrift. It would be a dangerous precedent for us to allow pensions to the wives of these sailors, for it would ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... work on the plantations, as well as every other description of labour at Singapore, is performed by free labourers, I was told that it cost less than if it were done by slaves. The wages here are very trifling indeed; a common labourer receives three dollars a month, without either board or lodging; and yet with this, he is enabled not only to subsist himself, but to maintain a family. Their huts, which are composed of foliage, they build themselves; their food consists of small fish, roots, and a few vegetables. Nor is their ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Evidences of the prosperity of the country are around us on every side for those to see that have eyes to see—a higher standard of dress in every class of the community; better built and better furnished houses for artisan and labourer, as well as for millionaire; new public buildings, new libraries, new hospitals; improved paving, improved water-supply, improved drainage; more newspapers, more theatres, more lavish entertainments; in a word, a higher standard of comfort ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult, and almost impossible things. It is these two spirits that are fighting for the possession and control of our machine civilization. I watch the machines and the men beside them and see which side they are on. The labourer who is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the capitalist who is giving as little service as he dares for his money are on the one side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of employers and employees), and there may be seen standing on the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... man, Sir Ensor Doone, came out with a bill-hook in his hand, hedger's gloves going up his arms, as if he were no better than a labourer at ditch-work. Only in his mouth and eyes, his gait, and most of all his voice, even a child could know and feel that here was no ditch-labourer. Good cause he has found since then, perhaps, to wish that he ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... the miller's evidence; it was all he knew: and the next witness called was the boy David Ripper, popularly styled in the neighbourhood young Rip, in contradistinction to his father, a day-labourer. He was an urchin of ten or twelve, with a red, round face; quite ludicrous from its present expression of terrified consternation. The coroner sharply inquired what he was frightened at; and the boy burst into a roar by way of answer. He didn't know nothing, and hadn't seen nothing, ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... last of the cargo was dragged from her; hoist ropes, frayed and chafed to feather edges, swing from the yardarms; broken cargo slings lie rotting in a mess of grain refuse. The work is done. There is not a labourer's pay in her; ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... labourer gets a day's work, and people fond of drink, however poor they are, contrive to get it ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... and connecting situation of social life. One of the most proud, numerous, and fierce bodies of nobility and gentry ever known in the world, arranged only in the foremost rank of free and generous citizens. Not one man incurred loss, or suffered degradation. All, from the King to the day-labourer, were improved in their condition. Everything was kept in its place and order, but in that place and order everything was bettered. To add to this happy wonder (this unheard-of conjunction of wisdom and fortune) ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... sent for the postilion, to enquire of him how the man had fared, whose good-natured assistance in their distress had been so unfortunate to himself. He answered that he had turned out to be a day labourer, who lived about half a mile off. And then, partly to gratify her own humanity, and partly to find any other employment for herself and friends than uninteresting conversation, she proposed that they should all walk to the poor man's habitation, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... the son in the shop, who delights in no less melody then the tune of that song: letting slip no occasion that he can meet with to get out of the shop; and shew himself, with all diligence, willing to be a Labourer in the Tennis Court, or at the Bilyard Table; and is not ashamed, if there be hasty work, in the evening, to tarry there till it be past eleven of the clock. What a pleasure this vigilance is to the Father and Mother, those that have experience ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... stone, the size of a small watermelon and serving no purpose whatever save the questionable one of decoration. It was easily pried up with a stick; though getting it to the caldron tested the full strength of the ardent labourer. Instructed to perform such a task, he would have sincerely maintained its impossibility but now, as it was unbidden, and promised rather destructive results, he set about it with unconquerable energy, feeling certain that he would be rewarded with a mighty splash. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... in the west end of this house was the home of the Stephenson family; and there George Stephenson was born, the second of a family of six children, on the 9th of June, 1781. The apartment is now, what it was then, an ordinary labourer's dwelling,—its walls are unplastered, its floor is of clay, and the bare rafters ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... undertaken in large establishments by men specially trained, who receive a low rate of wages and who are rather a rough set. It was totally different work to anything I had ever had to do before, and I suffered as a man with soft hands would suffer who was suddenly called to be a blacksmith or a dock-labourer. ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... to his fellow-labourer, "let you be off with you and get the potatoes earthed up beyond in the garden. It's wonderful, so it is, the way you'd take a delight in sitting there all day and not ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... Sumner stayed and helped Bryce weed his carrots, and since as a voluntary labourer she was at least worth her board, at noon Bryce brought her in to Mrs. Tully with a request for luncheon. When he went to the mill to carry in the kindling for the cook, the young lady returned rather sorrowfully to the Hotel Sequoia, with a fervent ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... between the farmer and the labourer was exactly paralleled by the alienation which gradually crept in between the manufacturer and the workers. The growth of the factory system was indeed so rapid that only the keenest foresight could have provided against ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... Judging the "nigger" merely as a human being, irrespective of sentiment, colour, and so forth, I can only say that in my estimation he and his are far better off in every respect than the average white labourer and his family in England. These folk have plenty to eat, little to do, and are very jolly. They would be perfectly happy if they only had a sufficient number of rifles and a large enough supply of ammunition to enable them to drive every white man ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Catholic jurisdiction. The number of Roman Catholic priests in Ireland exceeds one thousand. The expenses of his peculiar worship are, to a substantial farmer or mechanic, five shillings per annum; to a labourer (where he is not entirely excused) one shilling per annum; this includes the contribution of the whole family, and for this the priest is bound to attend them when sick, and to confess them when they apply to him; he is also to keep his chapel ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... marriages, christenings, burials and fairs, leave only two hundred days in the year for the Russian labourer. The climate is so severe as to prevent out-of-door work for months, and the enforced idleness increases the natural disposition to do nothing. "We are a lethargic people," says Gogol, "and require a stimulus from without, either that of an officer, a master, a driver, the rod, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... would not have the reality of Cossethay and Ilkeston. There he sat stubbornly in his corner at the "Red Lion", smoking and musing and occasionally lifting his beer-pot, and saying nothing, for all the world like a gorping farm-labourer, as he said himself. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a house; for he was both contractor—in a small way, it is true, not undertaking to do anything without the advance of a good part of the estimate—and day-labourer at his own job. Having arrived at the point in the process where the assistance of a carpenter was necessary, he went to George Macwha, whom he found at his bench, planing. This bench was in a work-shop, with two or three more benches in it, some deals set up ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... have all the grades and conditions of society that are to be found in America, with the addition of two others, the highest and the lowest classes. There is no extensive class here equivalent to the English or Irish labourer; neither is there any class whose manners are stamped with that high polish and urbanity which characterises the aristocracy of England. The term gentleman is used here in a very different sense from that in which it is applied in Europe—it means simply, well-behaved ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... man I mean has more brains than Thompson. He's a man I never heard of before. His name is Conneally. He looks as if he came up from the wilds somewhere. He has hands like an agricultural labourer, and a brogue that I fancy comes from Galway. But he's a man to keep an eye on. He may do something by-and-by if he doesn't go off the lines. We must try and lick him into ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... "this it is to be leagued with one who knows not even so much of Scripture, as that the labourer is worthy of his hire. I must, as usual, take all the trouble ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... bare (see St. Paul much on this) and covered, so to say, only with the sun and stars, of which the crown is a symbol, which is an ornament but not a covering; it has an enormous hat or skullcap, the vault of heaven. The foot is the day- labourer, and this is armed with hobnail boots, because it has to wear and be worn by the ground; which again is symbolical; for it is navvies or day-labourers who, on the great scale or in gangs and millions, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... year the labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... continually exposed to every variety of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to him, either in the cornfield or ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the mosquito sings, and the village dogs bark at imaginary foes. The Rev. Hinton Knowles' collection was gathered in Cashmere apparently from men and boys only; but all classes contributed, from the governor and the pandit down to the barber and the day-labourer, the only qualification being that they should be entirely free ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... parents: her father too was only a labourer on the farm; and the hovel, the furniture, the clothing, all bore witness that their poverty was extreme. A dirty squinting musician followed the train, grinning and screaming and scratching his fiddle, which was patcht up of wood and pasteboard, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... Labourer shall not half-starve on "swankey." and thin pottage, With a prospect of the Workhouse when no longer he can work; But shall have a fragrant pigstye, and a sanitary cottage, And a voice in local business which the big-wigs cannot burke. The rural working-man shall superintend his children's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... need not be detained with any elaborate account of the funeral. Every tenant and every labourer about the place was there; as also were many of the people from Carmarthen. Llanfeare Church, which stands on a point of a little river just as it runs into a creek of the sea, is not more than four miles distant from the town; but such was the respect in which the ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... was accelerated by the vices of our land tenure. In France and Germany, where the agricultural workers had a stronger interest and property in their land, they were less easily detached for factory purposes. But in England, where the labourer had no property in the land, reformed methods of agriculture and the operation of the Poor Law combined to incite the large proprietors and farmers to rid themselves of all superfluous population in the rural parts and accelerated the migration into the towns. Here the population ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... Granville Sharp. This gentleman is to be distinguished from those who preceded him by this particular, that, whereas these were only writers, he was both a writer and an actor in the cause. In fact, he was the first labourer in it in England. By the words "actor" and "labourer," I mean that he determined upon a plan of action in behalf of the oppressed Africans, to the accomplishment of which he devoted a considerable portion ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... to win the fellow-servant, the labourer in the field has the welfare of his fellow-labourer at heart, and seeks to draw him to God. It was Cain who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" And the same isolating, selfish spirit is in those who take no interest in those they associate with, and do not ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... father, an honest labouring man, paid the person whose house she entered one shilling a week for her instruction in the duties she wished to undertake. What a grinning stare would come to the face of any labourer nowadays, who should be asked to do the like! I no longer wonder that my housekeeper so little resembles the average ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... came out of the church, my people crowded about me with outstretched hands and good wishes. One woman, the aged wife of a more aged labourer, who could not get near me, called from the ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... labour to a permanent standard, further than regards the convicts, must evidently be abortive; since labour, like merchandize, will rise and fall with the demand which may exist for it in the market where it is disposable;—and although the above order might prevent the labourer from recovering in the colonial courts, a greater price for his labour than is stipulated in the foregoing schedule, still the moment it becomes the interest of the employer to give higher wages, he will do so, and the discredit attached to the non-performance of a deliberate ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... and most vehement assertors of the learning of Shakespeare was the Editor of his Poems, the well-known Mr. Gildon; and his steps were most punctually taken by a subsequent labourer in the same department, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... willing labourer gets a day's work, and people fond of drink, however poor they are, contrive to get it some way ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... workmen, are certain of employment, and good wages, rather higher than with us; the average wages of a labourer throughout the Union is ten dollars a month, with lodging, boarding, washing, and mending; if he lives at his own expense he has a dollar a day. It appears to me that the necessaries of life, that is to say, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... in this hut everything was green; the walls were green and the benches were green, and Oh's wife was green and his children were green—in fact, everything there was green. And Oh had water-nixies for serving-maids, and they were all as green as rue. "Sit down now!" said Oh to his new labourer, "and have a bit of something to eat." The nixies then brought him some food, and that also was green, and he ate of it. "And now," said Oh, "take my labourer into the courtyard that he may chop wood and draw water." So they took him into the ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... arrived on the quay, and the black lines of the P. and O. stood out firmly before him against the pitiless blue of sea and sky. He wandered over the hot stone causeway, but found no one. The revenue officers were away, and not a labourer, not a sailor, was visible. Beyond the breakwater little tufts of silvery foam flashed on the rollers, and a solitary steamer steered steadily for the horizon. He could see the Greek flag at her stern, and his eyes filled with tears. Ah, how little his friends in Athens thought of the man ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... descend the Nile to support them. Their instructions were to spare none of the rebellious towns, but to "capture their men and their beasts, and their ships on the river; to allow none of the fellaheen to go out into the fields, nor any labourer to his labour, but to attack Hermopolis and harass it daily." They followed out these orders, though, it would seem, without result, until the reinforcements from Nubia came up: their movements then became more actively ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
