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Girls so often understand each other by traits we have no clue to; and it was Kate who asked her, almost in tone of entreaty, "to spare me," to save me from a hopeless passion, just as though I were some peasant-boy who had set his affection on a princess. Is that the way, then, the world would read our respective conditions?

A young girl who insulted her mother was publicly punished and kept on bread-and-water; and a peasant-boy who called his mother a devil was publicly whipped. A child who struck his mother was beheaded; adultery was punished with death; a woman was publicly scourged because she sang common songs to a psalm-tune; and another because she dressed herself, in a frolic, in man's attire.

Though he reads, or at least professes to read, books on agriculture, and is always ready to discourse on the best means of preventing the exhaustion of the soil, he knows less of farming than a peasant-boy of twelve, and when he goes into the fields he can hardly distinguish rye from oats.

No voice of the parson's, charmed he ever so wisely, could persuade the peasant-boy to go and ask pardon of the young gentleman, to whom, because he had done as he was bid, he owed an agonizing defeat and a shameful incarceration; and, to Mrs. Dale's vexation, the widow took the boy's part.

A poor peasant-boy one day heard the priest say in church that whosoever desired to enter into the kingdom of heaven must always go straight onward. So he set out, and walked continually straight onwards over hill and valley without ever turning aside. At length his way led him into a great town, and into the midst of a church, where just at that time God's service was being performed.

Going on his ways through the old city in the early days before the sun or the people had risen, Nello, who looked only a little peasant-boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door, was in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the god.

A girl friend often worked beside him in the fields, as was the custom in that locality. She was a beautiful songstress, or at least seemed so to the untutored peasant-boy, and Robert soon learned to put new words to many of her tunes, not forgetting to include in them due commendations of the young lady herself.

Being tolerably well educated for a peasant-boy, he imbibed a desire for the profession of an actor, and studied Alfieri closely. Some little notoriety that he gained by recitations led him, in an evil hour, to venture an appearance en grand role, in Florence, at a third-rate theatre.

Does it help the Bavarian peasant-boy to comprehend the fact of the sun's rising over his native hills, that ten consonants, in the poetic word morgenlandisch have to travel through his mind? These things may be considered by many of slight importance, and that if they are wrong, they are not very easily remedied; but in architecture and costume we have the remedy in our own hands.

Possibly they numbered among them fine and loveable natures: he was most attracted by the shabby clerk Klitzing, and by Vogt, the rough peasant-boy; but all these men, with their scanty words and awkward gestures, fought shy of him, fearing to be despised by an educated gentleman.