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"Yes, will you do any thing or not?" repeated the peasants, penetrating with furious gestures into the room. "If you do not want to do any thing," cried the peasant, raising his rifle menacingly, "my rifle is loaded for you as well as for any Frenchman. "But you know, countrymen, that I cannot!" cried Hofer. "The emperor has made peace with Bonaparte and abandoned us.
The deep soil of many provinces gives ample return to the labor of the husbandman. If the inhabitants of such a country are not prosperous, surely the fault lies rather with man than with nature. It has been the fashion to represent the French peasant before the Revolution as a miserable and starving creature.
Of what import to them was the question of Teutonic domination, or the political future of other races? It is much the same with the peasant class. The partition of the land is their most sacred dogma, and they can scarcely imagine salvation without it. This materialistic demand, embellished by the dream of social equality, has become a religion.
"Thou canst proceed," he said, turning the indulgence to account, with a ready knowledge of his duty; "and when thou gettest again among thy burghers, do us of Geneva the grace to say^ we treat our allies fairly." "I thought thy question hasty!" exclaimed the wealthy peasant, swelling like one who gets justice, though tardily. "Now let us to this knotty affair of the headsman."
Instead of hope in it there is anxiety; instead of striking deeper root in the valley, the people's hold grows shallower. The agreeable peasant arts have faded out accordingly. The whole peasant mode of life is all but forgotten.
"Art thou sure that thou didst see the Jomsvikings?" asked Hakon, when he had listened to the man's tidings. For answer, the peasant stretched out the arm from which the hand had been sundered, saying, "Here is the token that the Jomsvikings are in the land." It was then that Hakon sent the war-arrow throughout the land and speedily gathered together a great force.
"In the poultry-yard." "I will come down directly." In fact, in less time than it takes to say "Amen!" the peasant came down. He rushed into the poultry-yard, caught the polecats, and, having put them into a sack, he said to them in a tone of great satisfaction: "At last you have fallen into my hands! I might punish you, but I am not so cruel.
I know not whence he could derive his love of knowledge or the means of acquiring it. The family were totally illiterate. The father was a Scotch peasant, whose ignorance was so great that he could not sign his name. His wife, I believe, could read, and might sometimes decipher the figures in an almanac; but that was all. I am apt to think that the son's ability was not much greater.
For quite thirty years great discontent with government had been felt by the peasants and lower classes in some of the central provinces of the empire, and a long while before the war with England broke out a peasant emperor had been proclaimed.
"What are you doing with that peasant? Don't you know that the orders are positive against molesting the inhabitants? Who is in command of this party?" McKay stood forth and saluted. "You? A sergeant-major? Of the Royal Picts, too! You ought to know better. Let the man go!" "I beg your pardon, Sir Colin," began McKay; "but " "Don't argue with me, sir; do as I tell you.
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