United States or Somalia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They lay in the edge of a wood, with a thick curtain of timber in their front, a battery of field-pieces to the right, mounted in a bastioned earthwork, and on the left the woods drew near, encircling a little farm-land and negro-buildings. General Ayres's skirmish-line being fired upon, did not stand, but fell back upon his main column, which advanced at the order.
The numerous toy villages, with tiny spires projecting out of them, were just as the children might have left them when done with play the day before; the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss; one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller ones to puddles though they did not look like puddles, but like blue teardrops which had fallen and lodged in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes, among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along, as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart; and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling across it and finding the distance a tedious one.
Of course rent of farm-land in our present sense each owner of the land letting out his property to a tenant and, in return, exacting as large a monetary payment as possible was then unknown. But there was a growing class of peasants who were spoken of as free-tenants to distinguish them from serf- tenants.
Up and down the pleasant plain country of the Mesogia to southward, to the rolling highlands beyond Pentelicus and Parnes, to the slumbering villages by Marathon, to the fertile farm-land by Eleusis, went the proclaimers of ill-tidings. “Quit your homes, hasten to Athens, take with you what you can, but hasten, or stay as Xerxes’s slaves.”
And thus the slaughter of the wooers shall not be noised abroad through the town before we go forth to our well-wooded farm-land. Thereafter shall we consider what gainful counsel the Olympian may vouchsafe us. So he spake, and they gave good ear and hearkened to him.
Sometimes, however, the tenant received only a third, a fourth, or even a tenth part of the produce, two-thirds of the annual crop of dates being also assigned to the owner of the land. The tenant had to keep the farm-buildings in order, and to build any that were required. House-property seems to have been even more valuable than farm-land.
The farm-land which Barnum had purchased only a few years before was rapidly becoming a city. It was characteristic of Barnum to place himself in the forefront in this city-building movement, and in the double role of speculator and public benefactor.
That Christmas-day came to an end at last, after a long evening in the oak parlour enlivened by a solemn game at whist and a ponderous supper of cold sirloin and mince pies; and looking out at the wintry moonlight, and the shadowy garden and flat waste of farm-land from the narrow casement in her own room.
For those who believe that live-stock farming must be adopted for the maintenance of fertility on all farms, attention should be called to the fact that there are 900,000,000 acres of farm-land in the United States and only 90,000,000 head of live-stock equivalent to cows, including all farm animals. Will the manure from one cow serve to enrich 10 acres of land?
The southern and eastern shores have been settled for twenty or thirty years; and the rich farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat and oats and potatoes to a community of industrious habitants, who live in little modern villages, named after the saints and gathered as closely as possible around big gray stone churches, and thank the good Lord that he has given them a climate at least four or five degrees milder than Quebec.
Word Of The Day