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Hugh Miller, when working as a stone-mason near Edinburgh, was served by a hodman, who was one of the numerous claimants for the earldom of Crauford all that was wanted to establish his claim being a missing marriage certificate; and while the work was going on, the cry resounded from the walls many times in the day, of "John, Yearl Crauford, bring us anither hod o'lime."
Another month of walking before I get home." He was indeed returning home then, for he saw that he should more easily find work in his native town, where he was known and he did not mind what he did than on the highroads, where everybody suspected him. As the carpentering business was not prosperous, he would turn day laborer, be a mason's hodman, a ditcher, break stones on the road.
It is sufficiently trying to grow hot and perspire so freely that the driving dust, the scavenger drift of chaos and the ages, caught by the moisture, courses down the features and trickles from the hands in so many miniature turbid streamlets. During a dust-storm everybody has the appearance of a toiling hodman.
"Well, you might walk as far as Melbourne," said the hairy man, "and then you could get fourteen bob a day as a hodman; or you might take a job at stone breaking; the Government are giving 7s. 6d. a yard for road metal. Ain't you got any trade to work at?" "No, I never learned a trade, I am only a gentleman." He felt mean enough to cry. "Well, that's bad.
How greater the difficulty to express in visible types, the soft, subduing, humanizing graces of the female disposition, than to imprint the coarse outline of masculine strength! How rough the contour of an Irish hodman to the sweet flexibilities of the Venus of Canova!" "Canova was by no means equal to Stickleback," said Mr Bristles magisterially.
As one of those candidates, I may be permitted to say, that I feel much in the frame of mind of the Irish bricklayer's labourer, who bet another that he could not carry him to the top of the ladder in his hod. The challenged hodman won his wager, but as the stakes were handed over, the challenger wistfully remarked, "I'd great hopes of falling at the third round from the top."
The house stood alone. Monk Grange, the hamlet to which it geographically belonged a place as bleak and bare as itself, and which seemed to have been flung against the fell-foot as if a brick-layer's hodman had pitched the hovels at haphazard anyhow was two good miles away, and the market-town, to be got at only by crossing a dangerous moor, was nine miles off as far as Sherrington from North Aston.
Boys and girls of a younger age than that know why Slidell and Mason were arrested, and will tell you why they should have been given up, or why they should have been held in durance. The question of the war with England is debated by every native pavior and hodman of New York. I know what Englishmen will say in answer to this.
After four days new red bricks began to arrive, carried by a quite guiltless hodman who had not visited the house before. The hodman met the full storm of Constance's wrath. It was not a vicious wrath, rather a good-humoured wrath; but it impressed the hodman. "My house hasn't been fit to live in for a month," she said in fine.
Rippenger receiving them like a pliant hodman; for the result of it was that two days later, without seeing my kings of England, my home again, or London, I was Julia Rippenger's intimate friend and the youngest pupil of the school. My father told me subsequently that we slept at an hotel those two nights intervening.
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