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But facts remain facts in spite of prejudice, and the Woman's Land Army, with faith and enthusiasm in lieu of a national treasury, are endeavoring to bring woman-power and the untilled fields together.
The fields lay waste and untilled; the cattle, few in number, were mere bundles of skin and bone; the villages were half-emptied of their inhabitants, while those who remained resembled skeletons rather than human beings. "And all this," exclaimed my companion bitterly, "is the work of the Italian woman and her friends.
Journeying along, great was their surprise to find every town and village desolate of people; the fields untilled; and fields overgrown with weeds: nor man, nor woman, nor child was to be seen. Scarcely food even from the berries in the woods could they procure to satisfy their hunger.
Half the houses in the villages were unroofed; large tracts of land were untilled; the landscape was almost entirely destitute of animal life; travellers were nowhere to be seen; round the villages the little stacks of straw and fuel were not to be seen; the lanes were silent; no dogs, no cocks and hens, no pigs; no groups of children playing or running after the foreigner as he passed by; and the words of Scripture came to my mind, "the land desolate without inhabitant."
As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service; and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination
They had been compelled to bring their own tools, and to feed and clothe and house themselves, without pay or reward, having left behind them their own fields untilled, their own dourha unreaped, their date-palms, which the tax-gatherer confiscated.
But above all they are a contented race if but the oppression were lifted from their shoulders. They are an untilled soil none knows what they might produce, but the confidence of their leader, who is a wondrous man, bespeaks them a capable people. To my mind they are mistreated beyond their deserts. I would have the powers of Egypt use them better."
Instead of this, Italy presents to the traveller's eye a deplorable spectacle of wretched cabins, untilled fields, and a population oppressed by sloth and covered with rags. The towns are filled mostly with idlers and beggars. With all my inquiries, I could never get a clear idea of how they live.
On the summit of the cliff I had everything I wanted and had come to seek the wildness and freedom of untilled earth; an unobstructed prospect, hills beyond hills of malachite, stretching away along the coast into infinitude, long leagues of red sea-wall and the wide expanse and everlasting freshness of ocean.
There is virgin land in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone yet untilled; there are buildings in the town yet unfinished; there are roads for commerce yet to be made; the trade of the African interior yet waits to be admitted into the capacious harbour of Sierra Leone for the enrichment of the fond nursing-mother of races who sits dreamily teaching her children how to cackle instead of how to work.
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