United States or Tajikistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Chichikov, like the rest, had never before felt so gay, and, imagining himself really and truly to be a landowner of Kherson, spoke of various improvements in agriculture, of the three-field system of tillage , and of the beatific felicity of a union between two kindred souls. Also, he started to recite poetry to Sobakevitch, who blinked as he listened, for he greatly desired to go to sleep.
All those who frequented the yellow drawing-room were not, however, as heavy as this fat goose. A rich landowner, Monsieur Roudier, with a plump, insinuating face, used to discourse there for hours altogether, with all the passion of an Orleanist whose calculations had been upset by the fall of Louis Philippe.
With the Dutchmen were Brandenburgers and Swedes, and the most brilliant corps in the whole army was composed of French refugees. The landing seemed at first a failure. The country remained quiet. William's coming had been unexpected in the West, and no great landowner joined his forces.
Skins that the most perfect Saxon skin of milk and rose can scarcely rival are wedded to eyes of Eastern midnight and brown tresses filled with shining lights of red and gold. She had been born in the fierce, barren mountains lying behind Beirut, and at eight years old had drifted part of the spoils of a raid into the keeping of Ahmed Ali, the richest landowner and merchant of Damascus.
The landowner complained to the governor of the neglect on the part of the police, and the latter, without examining into the affair, gave the chief official of the police strict orders to carry out the instructions of the district commander without delay.
He had a very red, battered, clean-shaven face and very red hair and side whiskers; and he was a very honest gentleman, believing implicitly in God and the King and the House of Lords, and Foxes, and the Dutch School of Painting, and his responsibility as a great landowner toward the two or three thousand human beings with whom he had business relations. "Look here, Savelli.
He was a foreign prince against whom the Duke of the Normans might have led a Norman army. But he had also become an English landowner, and in that character he was accountable to the King and Witan of England. He suffered the traitor's punishment of confiscation of lands. Afterwards he contrived to win back William's favour, and he left great English possessions to his second wife and his son.
The landowner unmistakably spoke his own individual thought a thing that very rarely happens and a thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of finding some exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of his village, and had considered in every aspect.
The English aristocrat, male or female, cared only for cards, and no noble lady dreamed of remaining long in an assembly where piquet and écarté were not going on. The French seigneur gambled away an estate in an evening; the Russian landowner staked a hundred serfs and their lives and fortunes on the turn of a card; little German princelings would play quite cheerfully for regiments of soldiers.
For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless.
Word Of The Day