"Rural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indicate clearly the necessity for differentiating our work for the group of children who are classified as belonging to one grade. Under the older and simpler form of school organization, the one-room rural school, it was not uncommon for children to recite in one class in arithmetic, in another in geography or history, and in possibly still another in English. In our more highly organized school systems, with the attempt to have children pass regularly from grade ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... a burial ground, upon whose green mounds and leaning headstones the great square tower cast a protecting shadow that was like a silent benediction. A rural graveyard this, very far removed from the strife and bustle of cities, and, therefore, a good ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... terms is what is here intended by the phrase the Normal Social Life. It is still the substantial part of the rural life of all Europe and most Asia and Africa, and it has been the life of the great majority of human beings for immemorial years. It is the root life. It rests upon the soil, and from that soil below and its reaction to the seasons and the moods of the sky ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... says Lord Stanley, "has fared no better: its rural population amounts to 18,000. Of these, 12,000 have withdrawn from the estates, and mostly from the neighbourhood of the white man, to enjoy a savage freedom of ignorance and idleness, beyond the reach of example and sometimes of control. But, on the condition ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... are built and formulated after the same model. Aeneas, of Greek myths and fables, is reputed to be the son of Venus by a MORTAL father, upon the plane of reality. As that of actual PARENT and CHILD, of course this is an utter falsehood. To the rural population of long, long ago, and their simple, rustic ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... it over a wide plain, where the river turned and shone, and moved on from city to city on its voyage towards the sea. It chanced that over this valley there lay a pass into a neighbouring kingdom; so that, quiet and rural as it was, the road that ran along beside the river was a high thoroughfare between two splendid and powerful societies. All through the summer, travelling-carriages came crawling up, or went plunging briskly downwards past the mill; and as it happened that the other ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a vast shambles. Year by year, and decade after decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous strong life, that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by the third generation. Competent authorities aver that the London workman whose parents and grand-parents ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... ill-cut, his trousers bagged, he wore white stockings at all seasons of the year, a hat with a narrow brim and laced shoes. He was always complaining of his digestion. His principal vice was a mania for proposing rural parties during the summer season, excursions to Montmorency, picnics on the grass, and visits to creameries on the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse. For the last six months Dutocq had taken to visiting Mademoiselle Godard from time to time, with certain views of his own, ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... The rural class itself, forming the majority of the nation, began to feel the influence of the revolutionary propaganda. The lot of the peasants was wretched. They were obliged, by the system of the mir, to cultivate soil which they could not acquire. The ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... with this vast hostile array, if only the city will determine to sally out en masse to protect her rural districts, the prospect is fair. Under God, our troopers, if properly cared for, are the finer men; our infantry of the line are no less numerous, and as regards physique, if it comes to that, not one whit ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... books, sine nota, which Mr. Quaritch assigns to Beck's press, of the date 1490, are remarkable for the large number of woodcuts which they contain, relating principally to plants, animals, gardening operations, rural architecture, so that the Mark of "ein wilder Mann" is so far in keeping with the nature of his publications. Fourteen or fifteen Marks, several of which are only variations of one type, have been identified ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... exterior of the Castle, or Preceptory, of Templestowe, about the hour when the bloody die was to be cast for the life or death of Rebecca. It was a scene of bustle and life, as if the whole vicinity had poured forth its inhabitants to a village wake, or rural feast. But the earnest desire to look on blood and death, is not peculiar to those dark ages; though in the gladiatorial exercise of single combat and general tourney, they were habituated to the bloody spectacle of brave men falling by each ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... attention to its neighbor, each German state stood off by itself; each princeling had his army, in some instances only 25 men; each ruler had his castle, in imitation of Versailles; each state its custom house, its distinct court and rural costumes. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... and both together heard What time the grey-fly winds her sultry horn Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till the star that rose at evening bright Towards heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel. Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute, Tempered to the oaten flute; Rough satyrs danced, and fauns with cloven heel From the glad sound would not be absent long; And old Damoetas loved to hear our song. But O the heavy change, now thou ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... went out alone, and walked in the dark self-communing. He knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind. Yet, such being the custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who had drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences. For his own ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... bestowed on the Hellespont. [17a] But our ideas of greatness are of a relative nature: the traveller, and especially the poet, who sailed along the Hellespont, who pursued the windings of the stream, and contemplated the rural scenery, which appeared on every side to terminate the prospect, insensibly lost the remembrance of the sea; and his fancy painted those celebrated straits, with all the attributes of a mighty river flowing with a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... straight forward, public, open course. In private life, I have relaxed into all the delightful enjoyments of domestic happiness, where I have very seldom suffered politics and her boisterous train to interfere with my rural felicity; but whenever I have come before the public, I have always, with an inflexible resolution, cast all selfish considerations behind me, and given a loose to that "amor patria" with which my bosom ever glows, when I am in the presence of my fellow-countrymen. I have ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... haven of rest and simplicity, innocent as yet of steam, machinery, or trolleys, for the sweet lady and the angular man with the pained gait which spoke in loud tones of the unbroken store-shoe could belong in no other than a rural place. But the image of the New Hampshire village only flitted across my mind's film, for my truant senses seized on a message over memory's telephone: "Russell Sage has $100,000,000." One hundred millions, and I was back on earth again, but as I walked ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... magnificent square of ten acres in the centre, and in the middle of each quarter there shall be another square, each of eight acres, for the recreation of the people, and we will have many detached buildings covered with trailing plants, green and rural, to remind us of the country towns of England. Already many houses have been put up, and the people show a commendable energy in erecting more, as fast as materials can be procured. To-morrow I have appointed for a meeting with the native chiefs, to hold a ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... other countries gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Dick had noticed three girls standing near them. They were evidently from the rural district, but pretty and well dressed. The boys took seats near the bow of the boat, on the upper deck, and presently the girls ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... delicate rose. There was something pastoral about Peggy, smacking of meadow lands and milking time. She should have been a shepherdess looking after her flock rather than a girl toiling in a dingy office. How such a rural flower ever sprung up amongst London houses was a mystery Jennings could not make out. And according to her own tale, Peggy had never lived in the country. What with the noise of fiddling which came from the large hall, and the fact of being absorbed ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... to skin, white as winter as to clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical 'working-man'—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... deities are enumerated together with little regard to the positions they occupy in the sacerdotal pantheon. The enquirer finds a similar difficulty when he tries in the twentieth century to identify rural deities, or even the tutelaries of many great temples, with any personages ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... is not shouted yet By the young peasantry, with rural gifts And nightly fires along the pointed hills, Yet do thy temples glitter with grey hair Scattered not thinly: ah, what sudden change! Only thy voice and heart remain the same: No! that voice trembles, and that heart (I feel), While it would comfort ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... twict a week when it comes to Slauson's, and that's only twenty miles," he assured her. "Used to be seventy-two, but the Government got busy with its rural free delivery, and now we get it right at ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... an imported type of art. Sicilian shepherds, Roman literati, sometimes under a rustic disguise, sometimes in their own person; a landscape drawn, now from the vales round Syracuse, now from the poet's own district round Mantua; playful contests between rural bards interspersed with panegyrics on Julius Caesar and the patrons or benefactors of the poet; a continual mingling of allegory with fiction, of genuine rusticity with assumed courtliness; such are the incongruities which lie on the very surface of the Eclogues. Add to these the continual ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... my termes comon and rural And I for rude peple moche more conuenient Than for estates, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... in at all points, rural and metropolitan, breathless, austere, and, of course, too late. Bertie turned to them, with a slight wave of his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... confessor. dignitaries of the church; ecclesiarch^, hierarch^; ebdomarius [Lat.]; eminence, reverence, elder, primate, metropolitan, archbishop, bishop, prelate, diocesan, suffragan^, dean, subdean^, archdeacon, prebendary, canon, rural dean, rector, parson, vicar, perpetual curate, residentiary^, beneficiary, incumbent, chaplain, curate; deacon, deaconess; preacher, reader, lecturer; capitular^; missionary, propagandist, Jesuit, revivalist, field preacher. churchwarden, sidesman^; clerk, precentor^, choir; almoner, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... believed in my soul, to be that of my future wife.* Sweet was the song of the thrush, and mellow the whistle of the blackbird, as they rose in the stillness of evening over the "hirken shaws" and green dells of this secluded spot of rural beauty. Far, too, could the rich voice of Owen M'Carthy be heard along the hills and meadows, as, with a little chubby urchin at his knee, and another in his arms, he sat on a bench beside his own door, singing the "Trouglia". in his native Irish; whilst Kathleen his wife, with her two maids, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... hurdle-maker in our company, so I gave him a brace of light-duty men as apprentices and they built a little hut of wattle and daub. It had a nice rural appearance and was warm, but it leaked in wet weather, and the more I thought of Chaucer lying dry under his felt roofs the worse I felt about it. So I had a chat with my sergeant at the wharf, and the long and short of it was that two walls and one roof got delivered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... woods for two or three hours, impatient for the return of the little rural goddess who had taken possession of his thoughts, and filled his soul with admiration. She came at last, and glad was the welcome which ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... march in force to Padstow to prevent the exportation of corn from that little harbour; otherwise they are law-abiding, though a magistrate warns Dundas that local malcontents are setting them against the Government. Multiply these typical cases a thousand fold, and it will be seen that the old rural system is strained to breaking point. The amenities of the rule of the squires are now paid back, and that, too, at a time when England needs one mind, one heart, one soul. At and near Sheffield serious riots break ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... showed the best schools, such as "Luz y Caballero," of Habana, and the "Eseulen Modelo," of Santiago de Cuba, and the least advanced rural schools located in thatched-roof huts 20 or more miles from the ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... waiting for her in the parlor—respectable, in a frock-coat, a stiff summer cravat, and a high white hat; specklessly and cheerfully rural, in a buff waistcoat, gray trousers, and gaiters to match. His collars were higher than ever, and he carried a brand-new camp-stool in his hand. Any tradesman in England who had seen him at that moment would have trusted ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... must be remembered that at that time there was in the backwoods country, and in the out-of-the-way places, far off from the great highways, much of antagonism between the various religious denominations. At times much of the sermons of the rural preachers consisted of denunciations of other churches. By a perusal of the autobiography of the Rev. Peter Cartwright, it will be seen that western North Carolina was only in line with other portions of the great moral vineyard. The doctrines peculiar to the particular denomination were preached ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... I was born in Wattleborough, and my people have always lived here. But I am not very rural in temperament. I have really no friends here; either they have lost interest in me, or I in them. What do you think of the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... this book is to describe, in simple language, the holiday festivals as they occurred in each month of the year; and the sports, games, pastimes, and customs associated with these rural feasts. It is hoped that such a description may not be without interest to our English villagers, and perhaps to others who love the study of the past. Possibly it may help forward the revival of the best features of old village life, and the restoration ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... mentioned the police of New York, and Dart asked him reproachfully if he delighted in wounding him in his most sensitive part; wanted to know if his Noble Benefactor was the sort to drive a man back into the mire he had just emerged from, to thwart all effort to lead a pure, sweet, rural existence. Finally Shandon contented himself by forbidding Dart to meddle in the future with anything not in any way a part of his own business; and nourished the secret hope that a few weeks of the humdrum ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live! Compare the rate of mortality among them with that of the manufacturing districts. Incendiarism indeed! If there had been a proper rural police, such a thing as incendiarism would never ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... me to do anything for my sake alone. Your sympathy would act as a stimulus to keep me to my resolution." He drew from his pocket a letter from Peter Schmidt, saying that near Meriden there was a frame house that would be suitable for Frederick. Evidently his plan to retire to rural solitude was by no means a recent one. "When I come to myself in the quiet of the country, and I have reason to hope I will come to myself, you will hear from me. From time to time the world learns of a man of about thirty who suddenly disappears, leaving ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... baneful influence has indeed penetrated to the country and corrupted many there, the fountain-head was amongst crowded houses where nature is scarcely known. I am not one of those who look for perfection amongst the rural population of any country; perfection is not to be found amongst the children of the fall, be their abode where it may; but until the heart disbelieve the existence of a God, there is still hope for the possessor, however ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... with such a list of notes of interrogation. There are some very strange things going on here in this place, country-town as it is. Country-life is apt to be dull; but when it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because it gives its whole mind to what it is about. These rural sinners make terrible work with the middle of the Decalogue, when they get started. However, I hope I shall live through my year's school-keeping without catastrophes, though there are queer doings about ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the color of stubble and earth he seemed like a god of the fields. In the midst of the wintry waste he was like a clod of earth of the summer time. He made one think of a road-mender or a rural postman. Tucked up in the windings of his flapping ears he carried with himself the agitation of all sounds. One of the ears, extended toward the ground, listened to the crackling of the frost, while the other, open to the distance, gathered in the blows of an axe with ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... garrison very small. It fell chiefly on Rutowsky; who met it with creditable vigor, till relieved by the others. Comte Maurice, too, did a shifty thing. Circling round by the outside of the Wischerad, by rural roads in the bright moonshine, he had got to the Wall at last, hollow slope and sheer wall; and was putting-to his scaling-ladders,—when, by ill luck, they proved too short! Ten feet or so; hopelessly too short. Casting his head round, Maurice notices the Gallows hard by: "There, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... their cigarettes in much worse company, morally speaking, than she ever tolerated. And, so far as manners are concerned, I am bound to say that the worst cases of rudeness and ill-breeding that have ever come to my knowledge have not occurred in the "rural districts," or among the lower ten thousand, but in those circles of America where the whole aim in life might seem to be ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... irregularities, was well adapted to the state of England in their time. But a great revolution took place. The character of the old corporations changed. New forms of property came into existence. New portions of society rose into importance. There were in our rural districts rich cultivators, who were not freeholders. There were in our capital rich traders, who were not liverymen. Towns shrank into villages. Villages swelled into cities larger than the London of the Plantagenets. Unhappily while the natural growth of society went on, the artificial polity ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... years the American farmhouse is not so well built as it might be, the farm not so well worked, rural life in America not so attractive as it might be, the farmer's wife burdened with a little more labor than she might otherwise have, and if she grows old earlier than she might otherwise, it will be in part because we are paying our share of the war ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... east end of London. The "cry and complaint" of the anti-Irish was, as Walpole described the matter, that they were underworked and starved by Irishmen. Numbers of Irishmen, it would seem, were beginning to come over to this country, not merely to labor in harvesting in the rural districts, as they had long been accustomed to do, but undertaking work of all kinds at lower wages than English workmen were accustomed to receive. "The cry is, Down with the Irish," Walpole says; and Dr. Sheridan, Swift's correspondent, proclaiming in terms of humorous ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... county we took a just pride in the well-kept homes with their broad and sunny acres, stretching away in one vast expanse of billowy grain or corn fields lying green and fair beneath the summer sky. We found a restful charm in these pleasant rural homes that recalled "A Song," written ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... rustic product. The great orators have always been country-bred, and their appeal has been made to rural people. Those who live in a big place think they are bigger on that account. They acquire glibness of speech and polish of manner; but they purchase these things at a price. They lack the power to weigh mighty questions, the courage ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... civilization, more regular industry, and more wealth. They were much more highly skilled in the arts of civilized life. They had cities and large towns; and dwelling-houses, built of timber and covered with thatch, like those common in England, were scattered over all the rural districts. Some of the cities now found in ruins were then inhabited. This peninsula had been the seat of an important feudal monarchy, which arose probably after the Toltecs overthrew the very ancient kingdom of Xibalba. It was broken up by a rebellion of the feudal ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... he, in a measured tone, "I do not blame you for being fascinated by a pretty, amiable girl like Annunziata Solara, far from it. She is certainly a paragon of beauty, a model of rustic grace, a very tempting morsel of rural virtue and innocence. She is well fitted to turn the head of almost any young man—I freely acknowledge that. It is pardonable to wish to enjoy her society—nay, a harmless flirtation with her is, perhaps, not censurable; but that is the utmost length to which a man of ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... Wordsworth's "Excursion," the best purely didactic poem in the English language. The "Sofa" stands only as a point of departure:—it suits a gouty limb; but as the poet is not gouty, he is up and off. He is off for a walk with Mrs. Unwin in the country about Olney. He dwells on the rural sights and rural sounds, taking first the inanimate sounds, then the animate. In muddy winter weather he walks alone, finds a solitary cottage, and draws from it comment upon the false sentiment of solitude. He describes ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... pal," said De Gollyer with a well-bred shrug of his shoulders, "you'll do nothing of the sort. We are men of the world, my boy, men of the world. Shooting is archaic—for the rural districts. We've progressed way beyond that—men of the world ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... slightest set-back would be disastrous. He asked if we intended remaining at Bancroft's indefinitely. I had no intentions—those I had had were wiped off my mental slate—so I said I did not know, our future plans were vague. He suggested a sojourn in the country, in some pleasant retired spot in the rural districts. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the struggle, or well-nigh destroyed by the raids of the British and Tories. In the larger communities of Savannah and Augusta, the citizens had the resources of trade and commerce to fall back on, but in the smaller settlements and rural districts the condition of the ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... left the young man, who got up and looked around in the house, the yard, the orchard, and the meadow. He spent several hours in this inspection, since everything he saw attracted him. The rural stillness, the green of the meadows, the prosperity which beamed upon him from the whole estate, all made a most pleasant impression, and aroused in him a desire to spend the one or two weeks that might elapse before he received news from old Jochem there in the open country ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the present moment, County Councils are trying to push rural education and to awaken the intelligence of country children by interesting them in their surroundings. It is, therefore, a favourable opportunity to offer these pages as a concrete suggestion in model lessons and object lessons, showing ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... little Fleda, you're too wise for anything!" said Constance, with a rather significant arching of her eye-brows. "You mustn't expect other people to be as rural in their acquirements as yourself. I don't pretend to know any rose by sight but the Queechy," she said, with a change of expression, meant ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of being ready for a turn-up with any Novice who might happen to be on hand, that Mr. Crisparkle well remembered in the circles of the Fancy. Preparations were in progress for a moral little Mill somewhere on the rural circuit, and other Professors were backing this or that Heavy-Weight as good for such or such speech-making hits, so very much after the manner of the sporting publicans, that the intended Resolutions might have been Rounds. In an official manager of these displays ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... world that even the event which his father so deprecated did not much disturb his easy-going assurance. He doubted, in his thoughts, whether the city girls would "turn up their noses" at him, and if they did, they might, for all that he cared, for there were plenty of rural beauties with whom he could console himself. But, like his father, he felt that the careless undress and freedom of their farm life would be criticised by the new-comers. He proposed, however, to make as little change ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... had peopled the woods and dells with gay and harmless spirits, fairies and imps. These were sometimes mischievous, but might always be propitiated, and excited in the rural mind curiosity and amusement rather than fear. But the clergy, who shared in the popular superstitions, and gave as ready a belief as the peasantry to the existence of these supernatural beings, were unable from ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... some facts which will speak for themselves, and he claims for his personal impressions on points concerning which he cannot give particular facts the degree of confidence deserved by one who has resided five years and a half in a rural district, who has lived familiarly conversant with negroes and with whites of all classes, who has heard all sides of the question from valued personal friends, and who neither carried to Jamaica nor brought away from it any peculiar disposition to an apotheosis ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... apprentice at least to discover that any thread in them was not quite new. There was an anxious peep through the blind at the sky at daybreak by Georgina and Myrtle, and the perplexity of these rural children was great at the weather-signs of the town, where atmospheric effects had nothing to do with clouds, and fair days and foul came apparently quite by chance. Punctually at the hour appointed two friendly human shadows descended across the kitchen window, followed by Sol ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... whip of which he said nothing, but for which he revenged himself. The old steward became, nevertheless, a person of importance. In 1820 he was mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, and supplied one-third of the Paris wood. Being general agent of this rural industry, he managed the forests, lumber and guards. Gaubertin was related throughout a whole district, like a "boa-constrictor twisted around a gigantic tree"; the church, the magistracy, the municipality, the government—all did his bidding. Even the peasantry served his interests ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... as he scurried about. But that was all the fault he found, and presently the hole in the dungeon wall, caused by the removal of the safe with a painted canvas on it to represent stones, was filled by some boards taken from a fence used in a rural love drama. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... made his daily report at 2:15. He used a dinky telephone that should have been in a museum, and a rural Central put him on the Area Officer's tight beam. The Area Officer listened drearily as the Sergeant said in a ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... the country; but rural entertaining was not a very costly business. The "three square meals and a snack," which represent the minimum requirements of the present day, are a huge development of the system which prevailed in my youth. Breakfast had already grown from the tea and coffee, and rolls and ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the rites of Ceres: and the general character of this Goddess is so innocent, and rural, that one would imagine nothing cruel could proceed from her shrine. But there was a time, when some of her temples were as much dreaded, as those of Scylla, and the Cyclops. They were courts of justice; whence she is often spoken of as ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... fifteen miles from Murfreesboro in North Carolina, and about twenty-five from the Great Dismal Swamp. Up to Sunday, the twenty-first of August, 1831, there was nothing to distinguish it from any other rural, lethargic, slipshod Virginia neighborhood, with the due allotment of mansion-houses and log-huts, tobacco-fields and "old-fields", horses, dogs, negroes, "poor white folks", so called, and other white folks, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Among wild beasts. They at his sight grew mild, 310 Nor sleeping him nor waking harmed; his walk The fiery serpent fled and noxious worm; The lion and fierce tiger glared aloof. But now an aged man in rural weeds, Following, as seemed, the quest of some stray eye, Or withered sticks to gather, which might serve Against a winter's day, when winds blow keen, To warm him wet returned from field at eve, He saw approach; who first with curious eye Perused him, then with words ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... train was at a standstill, drawn up at the platform of the station. It was very quiet, and even the train coming in hardly seemed to disturb the sleepy stillness that hung over the strips of asphalt, the beds of hollyhocks and lilac bushes against the whitewashed walls, where the rural fancy of the stationmaster had gone so far as to range ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... to her sire's he sent his wife, To taste the sweets of country life, To dance at will the country jigs, And feed the turkeys, geese, and pigs. In course of time, he hoped his bride Might have her temper mollified; Which hope he duly put to test. His wife recall'd, said he, 'How went with you your rural rest, From vexing cares and fashions free? Its peace and quiet did you gain,— Its innocence without a stain?' 'Enough of all,' said she; 'but then To see those idle, worthless men Neglect the flocks, it gave me pain. I told them, plainly, what I thought, And thus their hatred ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... aimless disquisition, had been drawn from his meal to the speaker. He saw an elderly gentleman, clothed in the black frock-coat and black tie of the rural lawyer of the old school. His eyes shot keen and kindly glances from the deep ambush of great white brows, and his mouth was hidden under a snowy mustache. His features made up for a somewhat marked poverty ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... be said to have marked him out for such a life. He was born in one of the remotest districts of a rural county. The village of Somersby lies in a hollow among the Lincolnshire wolds, twenty miles east of Lincoln, midway between the small towns of Spilsby, Horncastle, and Louth. There are no railways to disturb its peace; no high ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... next time a lightning flash showed him a turn-off beside a rural free delivery mailbox. There was a house at the end of a lane. There was a barn. He got out and was soaked instantly, but he explored the open space behind the wide, open doors. He ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... exiled my native home, Resign'd, though injured, hither I have come. Here, groves and streams, delights of rural ease; Yet, where the associates, wont to serve and please; The aspect bland, that bade the heart confide? Absent from these, ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... be careful about what you are doing. If you make this place look like a vast cemetery, all laid out in smooth grass and gravelled driveways, my wife won't like it. She wants to live in a cot, and she wants everything to be cottish and naturally rural.' ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... at the beginning, Sir Walter, who created the Scottish character novel, had made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in the history of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish rural idiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly local aspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gave a classic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly. The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudest rusticities, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... He never considered himself carefully dressed unless all the buttons of his vest were unfastened, except one at the top and one at the bottom. The gap between the two buttons was considered quite a touch of rural style. He held the reins, but a little negro boy sat on the seat beside him. He was taking the boy to hold his horse while he went into the hotel after Harriet. That, too, was considered quite the proper thing—a custom which had come down from slavery days—and as there was a scarcity of ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... of the square, the Court House rises proudly in all the majesty of its columned front and clapboarded sides; farther along there's the Methodist Church, very severe, with its rows of sheds to one side for the teams of the more rural members. Behind them all bulk our hills, dim and purple against the overwhelming blue of the sky. It's very quiet: there are few sounds, and those few most familiar: the raucous war-cry of a rooster somewhere on the outskirts of town; an intermittent thudding of hoofs in the ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... primary, secondary, and advanced schools. But amid strifes and bankruptcy their aims remained unfulfilled. In 1799 there were only twenty-four elementary schools open in Paris, with a total attendance of less than 1,000 pupils; and in rural districts matters were equally bad. Indeed, Lucien Bonaparte asserted that scarcely any education was to be found in France. Exaggerated though this statement was, in relation to secondary and advanced education, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... been honored with this supreme event in the history of the Jews. But an ancient prophet, while noting its comparative insignificance, had yet put his finger on this tiny point on the map and pronounced upon it a blessing that caused it to blaze out like a star amidst its rural hills. "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting." ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... the great mass of the rural population of these countries subsist almost exclusively upon vegetable aliment—a diet which poverty, and not inclination, prescribes for them. Were the flesh of animals the staple food of the British peasantry, their numbers would not be nearly so large as they now are, for a given ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... greatly surprised at the neatness and skill displayed in the construction of the buildings in this important town; for while they were insignificant in size, as compared with the dwellings of a civilised race, being about the size of a small two-roomed cottage, such as may be found in almost any rural district in England, they were very considerably larger and more carefully and substantially-built than the huts that we had noticed in King Plenty's town, when we made our disastrous attack upon ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... together—hived, as it were, in towns and villages? Herdsmen—one would expect to find them scattered by reason of their occupation. Besides, a sky continually bright, a genial clime, a picturesqueness of scene—all seem to invite to rural life; and yet I have ridden for hours, a succession of lovely landscapes rising before my eyes, all of them wild, wanting in that one feature which makes the rural picture perfect—the house, the dwelling of man! Towns there are; and at long intervals the huge hacienda of the landed lord, walled ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... the foxglove will poison them. The common turkey is a native of North America, and, in the reign of Henry VIII., was introduced into England. According to Tusser's "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry," it began about the year 1585 to form a dish at our rural Christmas feasts:— ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... their usual labors. In the North, the case is different; the men who join the army of subjugation are the laborers, the producers, and the factory operatives. Nearly every man from that section, especially those from the rural districts, leaves some branch of industry to suffer during his absence. The institution of slavery in the South alone enables her to place in the field a force much larger in proportion to her white population than the North, or indeed any country which ...
— The Abolition Of Slavery The Right Of The Government Under The War Power • Various
... rural pursuits should fail to satisfy my beloved's mind, I have advised him to finish, in the quiet of this retreat, some plays which were begun in his starvation days, and which are really very fine. This is the only kind of literary ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... arithmetic and writing, and in India a "sand box" consisting of a surface of sand laid on a board the finger being utilized to trace forms, was the method followed by the natives to teach their children. It is said that such methods still obtain even in this age, in some rural ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... excitements being the blooming of a new flower, the digging of a well, or perhaps the trying out of an electric pump. The hurly-burly of the world was far away from that quiet spot, and only the arrival of the daily mail by rural carrier, or an infrequent visitor from some one of the country houses in the neighbourhood, broke the sweet monotony of existence. Of the simple pleasures of her life here she writes to her husband's cousin, Graham ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... loveliest of this race of goddesses, had the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman born a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once seen her, the Commissariat officer made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer his wife as quickly as the law would permit, to the great ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... "For rural simplicity he's perfection," whispered Peabody to Stevens as they left the planter. "He's a living picture of innocence. We'll push him forward and let him do the talking for the naval affairs committee. Hiding behind him, ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... acquaintance of my four fellow-countrymen. Two were medical and two were law students, but all impartially endured the landlady's despotic yoke. They were as frightened of her as a boy robbing an orchard would be of a rural policeman. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of the Mother-instinct. Recognized Essentials in Child-care. The Protective Function. Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children. Women's Leadership in Social Protection. The Provision of Food, Clothing and Shelter. The Woman in Rural Life. Modern Demand for Standardization. The Apartment House and the Family. New Uses of Electric Power. Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate. The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... interesting of this tribe of birds is the little Acadian Owl, (Strix Acadica,) whose note has formerly excited a great deal of curiosity. In "The Canadian Naturalist," an account is given of a rural excursion in April, in the course of which the attention of one of the party is called by his companion, just after sunset, to a peculiar sound proceeding from a cedar swamp. It was compared to the measured tinkling of a cow-bell, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... city was, therefore, indivisible, and it mattered little, practically, whether there were one deputy or several. The nobles represented not only their own order, but were supposed to act also in behalf of the rural population. On the whole, there was a tolerably fair representation of the whole nation. The people were well and worthily represented in the government of each city, and therefore equally so in the assembly of the estates. It was not till later that the corporations, by the extinction ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... indicating some of the more important. Pre-eminent among them stands the sabbath, the elevated tendency of which has been already explained in the Sinaitic revelation; next come the three Festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, which, besides being linked to, and combined with, rural events and circumstances, are also designed to commemorate luminous epochs in the national history; the great day of atonement, as a highly important act of reconciliation with God; the circumcision, as an ineffaceable mark of the adoption of Israel; ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... and drouth, of toil and death, in all his hardy wrestlings with old Sylvester, has not been able to bend. The old man's form is erect and tall, and lifting up his head to its height, he looks afar, down the country road which leads from his rural door, towards the city. He has kept his gaze in that direction for better than an hour, and a mist has gradually crept upon his vision; objects begin to lose their distinctness; they grow dim or soften away like ghosts or spirits; the whole landscape melts gently into ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... stormy world Hereine in rest; of all ungrateful cares Absolv'd, and sacred from the selfish crowd. Happiest of men I if the same soil invites A chosen few, companions of his youth, Once fellow-rakes perhaps now rural friends; With whom in easy commerce to pursue Nature's free charms, and vie for Sylvan fame A fair ambition; void of strife, or guile, Or jealousy, or pain to be outdone. Who plans th'enchanted garden, who directs The visto best, and best conducts the stream; Whose groves the fastest ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... with boats. The plain is covered with tents full of merrymakers. The different guilds are continually arriving. A livelier or more stirring scene can hardly be imagined than Wagner has here pictured, with its accompaniment of choruses by the various handicraftsmen, their pompous marches, and the rural strains of town pipers. At last the contest begins. Beckmesser attempts to get through his song and dismally fails. Walter follows him with the beautiful prize-song, "Morgenlich leuchtend in rosigem Schein." He wins the day and the hand of Eva. Exultant Sachs trolls out a lusty ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... considerable population, and of improved cultivation, were very conspicuous. For we met here with very large plantations, inclosed in such a manner that the fences, running parallel to each other, form fine spacious public roads, that would appear ornamental in countries where rural conveniences have been carried to the greatest perfection. We observed large spots covered with the paper mulberry-trees; and the plantations, in general, were well stocked with such roots and fruits as are the natural produce of the island. To these I ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... prison, and would to-day or to-morrow he taken to Siberia with a gang of other prisoners, while I accepted congratulations and made calls with my young wife; or while I count the votes at the meetings, for and against the motion brought forward by the rural inspection, etc., together with the Marechal de Noblesse, whom I abominably deceive, and afterwards make appointments with his wife (how abominable!) or while I continue to work at my picture, which will certainly never get finished? Besides, I have no business to waste time on ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... trivial miscalculation, the most insignificant mistake, seemingly, may prove to be of the most vital importance. Dick went to the telephone. It was one of the old-fashioned sort, still in almost universal use in the rural parts of England, that require the use of a bell to call the central office. Dick turned the crank, then took down the receiver. At once he heard a confused buzzing sound ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... the industrial prosperity of this section during the last twenty years, the most crying need now is the rehabilitation of the South's agricultural life? The present aggressive movement in the direction of the improvement of the rural schools is a confirmation of Lanier's vision of "the village library, the neighborhood farmers'-club, the amateur Thespian Society, the improvement of the public schools, the village orchestra, all manner ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... myself properly certified by the police department at home before venturing into unknown and perhaps unfriendly communities. This, in a word, is a guarantee of good citizenship, good intentions and-good health. I was once taken up by a rural Sherlock on suspicion of being connected with the theft of a horse and buggy, although all the evidence seemed to indicate that I was absolutely afoot and weary at the time, and didn't have the outfit concealed about my person. I languished in the calaboose ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... meaning in them. Chigwell, my dear fellow, is the greatest place in the world. Name your day for going. Such a delicious old inn opposite the churchyard,—such a lovely ride,—such beautiful forest scenery,—such an out-of-the-way, rural place,—such a sexton! I say again, name your day." The day was named at once; and the whitest of stones marks it, in now sorrowful memory. His promise was exceeded by our enjoyment; and his delight ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... traditions of York secured for it a second archbishop, great London could not be passed over, but small villages in some places, insignificant boroughs in others, were the sites of cathedrals. Selsey, a rural manor or fishing hamlet, was the episcopal centre of St. Wilfrid and his successors in their government of Sussex; Dorchester, as we have seen, was the episcopal town, or rather village, for something like half England. In the names of ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... was sent out to the country about for all to come and partake of the fatted calf. Fair damsels flocked from the vicinity about to partake in the joy over victory; but lo! in the meantime, the Yankees cut the Macon railroad so that the birdies from the rural districts could not get to their homes, and aged mothers cried in vain for their affectionate daughters, wishing the Yankees many a curse for interfering in their jubilee. Ah! their day of rejoicing had too soon ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... is a dry, landlocked country of which 10% consists of intensely cultivated, irrigated river valleys. It was one of the poorest areas of the former Soviet Union with more than 60% of its population living in densely populated rural communities. Uzbekistan is now the world's third largest cotton exporter, a major producer of gold and natural gas, and a regionally significant producer of chemicals and machinery. Following independence in December ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... entrance to that deep gorge the Vallon des Gaumates, they descended the steep, narrow path which runs beside the mountain torrent and were soon alone in the beautiful little valley where the grey-green olives overhang the rippling stream. The little valley was delightfully quiet and rural after the garish scenes in Monte Carlo, the cosmopolitan chatter, and the vulgar display of the war-rich. The old habitue of pre-war days lifts his hands as he watches the post-war life around the Casino and listens to the loud uneducated chatter of ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... union under the leadership of Rome and was at the same time extending its territory on the east and south, Rome itself, by the favour of fortune and the energy of its citizens, had been converted from a stirring commercial and rural town into the powerful capital of a flourishing country. The remodelling of the Roman military system and the political reform of which it contained the germ, known to us by the name of the Servian constitution, stand in intimate connection with this internal change in the character ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of nine-tenths of the family secrets of the inhabitants. Being thus ignorant generally, and few of them ever having been twenty miles from the place, I may consider the parish fifty years behind the rest of the world when I went there, so that it now furnishes recollection of rural people, of manners and intelligence, dating back a hundred years from the present time. It was indeed a very primitive race; and it is curious to recall the many indications afforded in that obscure village of unmitigated ignorance. With all this were found in full exercise also ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of which, if the fate of London and Liverpool were to-morrow as that of Herculaneum and Pompeii, we should be able to reconstruct the gutters of our Imperial cities (little changed in essentials since the days of Domitian), Gissing turned his sketch-book to the scenery of rural England. He makes no attempt at the rich colouring of Kingsley or Blackmore, but, as page after page of Ryecroft testifies twelve years later, he is a ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... we spent before the fire, played music, and I performed sleights of hand, much to the wonderment of the rural audience that gathered to see the strangers who expected to kill bears with bows and arrows. After numerous coin tricks, card passes, mysterious disappearances, productions of wearing apparel and cabbages from a hat, and many other incredible feats of prestidigitation, ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... significant to the college—or to herself. They went for moonlight straw-rides, on moonlight and starlight skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks over the hills—all invariably with others, but they were often practically alone. He rapidly dropped his rural manners and mannerisms—Fred Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical of the surface ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... pretty view. At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed. I sat in the drawing-room till after eight, and then went and read the Chief Justice's summing up, and thought Bernard (Simon Bernard was tried in April 1858 as an accessory to Orsini's attempt on ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... that morning. "Primus ego in patriam mecum {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} deducam Musas"; "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country." Cleric had explained to us that "patria" here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... majesty. I said to myself, 'He is an enviable man to be able, in the midst of an artificial life, to enjoy the sweets of rural intercourse.' I foresaw what must inevitably happen; and pitied the innocent Eve, who will, ere long, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... either, the simplicity, the beauty, the tenderness of her wedded and family life, her love of rural quiet, and of wholesome communion with Nature, and her eagerness to take her people into her confidence, as set forth in the book which, whatever its literary merits, speaks of her earnest appreciation of Nature and her wish for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... has the practical insight of Dickens and Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralise over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of fashionable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... politico-theological animus formed an eddy in the main current of the Babington conspiracy. For some years before that plot had taken definite shape, seminary priests had been swarming into England from the continent, and were sedulously engaged in preaching rebellion in the rural districts, sheltered and protected by the more powerful of the disaffected nobles and gentry—modern apostles, preparing the way before the future regenerator of England, Cardinal Allen, the would-be Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. Among these was one Weston, who, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... upon the subject passing across the mind's screen. Before Loisette was thought of this was known. In the old times in England, in order to impress upon the minds of the rising generation the parish boundaries in the rural districts, the boys were taken to each of the landmarks in succession, the position and bearings of each pointed out carefully, and, in order to deepen the impression, the young people were then and there vigorously thrashed, a mechanical ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... enough to try the efficacy of a tax on bothies. It is long since Goldsmith wrote regarding a state of society in which "wealth accumulates and men decay," and since Burns looked with his accustomed sagacity on that change for the worse in the character of our rural people which the large-farm system has introduced. "A fertile improved country is West Lothian," we find the latter poet remarking, in one of his journals, "but the more elegance and luxury among the farmers, I always observe in equal proportion the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... scene, barring the concertina and the navvies' clothes, might have been transformed straight from a Greek vase of the best period. Here, in this green corner of rural England on a workaday afternoon (a Wednesday, to be precise), in full sunlight, I saw this company of the early gods sitting, naked and unabashed, and piping, while twelve British navvies danced to their music. . . . I saw it; and a derisive whistle from the engine told me that ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... afflicted, and then a shoddy new religion is based on the phenomenon. The latest revival among old beliefs is faith in the divining rod. 'Our liberal shepherds give it a shorter name,' and so do our conservative peasants, calling the 'rod of Jacob' the 'twig.' To 'work the twig' is rural English for the craft of Dousterswivel in the 'Antiquary,' and perhaps from this comes our slang expression to 'twig,' or divine, the hidden meaning of another. Recent correspondence in the newspapers has proved that, whatever may be the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... abjured all the society which it had been the joy of his wealth to purchase; buried himself and his wife in a remote corner of the provinces; and there he still lives. He seeks in vain to occupy his days with rural pursuits,—he to whom the excitements of a metropolis, with all its corruption and its vices, were the sole sources of the torpid stream that he called "pleasure." There, too, the fiend of jealousy ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the saintly woman that the spirit of Puritanism bred in rural New England. Such women are the living embodiment of the power which has inspired whatever is best in the nation; the power which has been a living force amid the worldliness, the materialism, the crudity ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... wish rural walks to do our children any good, we must give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk; we must teach them - and we can teach them - to find wonder in every insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... up immediately, and holding his black and red boating-cap in his hand, he politely offered the ladies the only shady place in the garden. With many excuses they accepted, and so that it might be more rural, they sat on the grass, without ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... have found time from the more heavy duties of his busy life, he doubtless would have turned to some use the practical workings of his wonderful cure. But Death, with that old fondness for a shining mark, has seen fit to remove him from this, the scene of his earthly labors (See rural ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley
... corner of Horsemonger Lane was carried out in a rural establishment one story high, which had the benefit of the air from the yards of Horsemonger Lane jail, and the advantage of a retired walk under the wall of that pleasant establishment. The business was of too modest a character to support a life-size Highlander, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... a man in a blouse appeared on the threshold carrying a lamp. He was a powerful young fellow, with bewildered hair and beard, wearing his neck open; his blouse was stained with oil-colours in a harlequinesque disorder; and there was something rural in the droop and bagginess ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... panting with their heavy wool when within the folds, and the shorn and shivering creatures running around outside and bleating for their old long-wooled companions, added to the excitement of the scene. Perhaps the maritime occupation of the Islanders made them enjoy with the zest of unwontedness this rural "shore-holiday." But it exists no longer; the island is not now one vast sheep-pasture, and there are no ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... very complicated. And the Britannic Majesty, much plagued with Spanish War and Parliamentary noises in that unquiet Island, is doubtless glad to get away to Hanover for a little; and would fain be on holiday in these fine rural months. Which is not well possible either. Jenkins's Ear, rising at last like a fiery portent, has kindled the London Fog over yonder, in a strange way, and the murky stagnancy is all getting on fire; the English intent, as seldom ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... across the Channel had long since come to an end with the Roman civilization of which it was a part. In Saxon England cities scarcely existed except as fortified places of defence. The products of each rural district sufficed for its needs in food and in materials for clothing, so that internal trade was but slight. Manufactures were few, partly from lack of skill, partly from lack of demand or appreciation; but weaving, the construction ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... interested him. He observed for one thing that the largest proportion of the names marked in the directory were either ladies or clergymen, and most of them residing in the south of England. Very few of them appeared to reside in any large town, but to prefer rural retreats "far from the madding crowd," where doubtless a letter, even on the business of the Corporation, would be a welcome diversion to the monotony of existence. As to the clergy, doubtless their names had been suggested by the good ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to hear, without questioning anybody, without appearing to notice that he was stared at (as indeed all strangers are in rural England), as if he were walking about among a breeched and petticoated people in the character of a savage with nothing but war paint on him, Mat steadily and rapidly pursued his way down the lane to ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... saw". This was something like the crosscut saws of today and was operated by a crank that gave the saw an alternating up and down motion. Wheat was ground into flour and corn into meal in mills with stone burrs similar to those used in the rural districts today, and power for this operation was obtained through the use of a treadmill that was given its motion by horses or mules walking on an inclined, endless belt constructed of heavy ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... parties of young and old, the timid and the bold, nay even of the most delicate valetudinarians, now first tempted to lay aside their wintry clothing together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural environs of our vast city, the woodlands, and the interminable meadows began daily to re-echo the glad voices of the young and jovial awaking once again, like the birds and the flowers, and universal nature, to the luxurious happiness of this most ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the Bubble and tried to give an imitation of a torpedo destroyer, with the result that a Reub constable pinched him and the whole outfit and threw him in a rural Bastile ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh
... swarms of pretty faces in my eyes and a chorus of high voices in my ears. Geoffrey Dawling had on his return to England written me two or three letters: his last information had been that he was going into the figures of rural illiteracy. I was delighted to receive it and had no doubt that if he should go into figures they would, as they are said to be able to prove anything, prove at least that my advice was sound and that he had wasted time enough. This quickened on ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... sea. You can smell salt and fish. We shall be lost, possibly for a long time. There will be no hot mash for you to-night. You will eat what goats eat and be very grateful. Perhaps you will meet some rural donkey during our adventures, and I must ask you to use the poor little beast's rustic ignorance with the greatest tact and forbearance. You will tell her tales of cities and travels; but do not lie to excess, or appear condescending, lest you find ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... mysterious, which seemed to spring from the bosom of the waves, added still more to the magic of the picture and the charms of the illusion. To this spectacle succeeded scenes of another kind, taken from rural life,—a Flemish living picture, with its pleasant-faced, jolly people, and its rustic ease; and groups of inhabitants from every province of France, giving an impression that all parts of the Empire were convened ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... head is at this moment in a state of confusion, from various causes, which I can neither describe nor explain—but let that pass. My employments have been very rural—fishing, shooting, bathing, and boating. Books I have but few here, and those I have read ten times over, till sick of them. So, I have taken to breaking soda-water bottles with my pistols, and jumping into the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... mother's restless, unwise overcare. When Hortense was five she was sharply ill for several weeks with scarlatina. During these days she was isolated with Mrs. Place, her nurse, in a wing of the home. As fortune would have it, Mrs. Place was the daughter of a rural English clergyman. After the death of her husband, who left her limited in means, she came to America, where she trained. Her wholesome influence over Hortense, her general demeanor in the home, and her many excellent qualifications ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... his examination drew near Malcolm Malcolmson made up his mind to go somewhere to read by himself. He feared the attractions of the seaside, and also he feared completely rural isolation, for of old he knew it charms, and so he determined to find some unpretentious little town where there would be nothing to distract him. He refrained from asking suggestions from any of his friends, for he argued that each would recommend some place of which ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... told story of rural and child-life in Wales, and most tenderly, imaginatively, simply, it is done ... has humor, pathos, fancy, courage, deep human feeling, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... what they will, unless they become suffragettes and smash windows or smack fat policemen, their life drifts one way. Charity?—it ends in a charity ball. Politics?—it means just garden-parties or stodgy week-ends at country houses, with a little absurd canvassing of rural labourers at election times. Sometimes I used to consider it, and with that bus-driver of Stevenson's who drove to the station and then drove back, cry 'My God is this life!' There was nothing real anywhere. Nobody ever expected a woman in our set to do anything worth ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns |
