Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 2, 2025
Little machinery is used, and much of the work is done after primitive fashions; but the land is productive, and it is worked to the top of its bent. The peasant-farmer soils his cows, his sheep, his swine, in a way that is economical of space and food, if not of labor, and manages to make a living and to pay rent for his twenty-acre strip of land.
I came to a seventeenth century country-house, large enough to be termed a chateau, but now the dwelling of some peasant-farmer. It was a dilapidated, apparently owl-haunted building, with a dovecote tower over grown with ivy, and was half surrounded by a wall, whose tottering, ornamental pinnacles told a story of comparative grandeur that had come to grief in this remote spot.
Rich fruitful soil it was, that scarcely needed the manure he gave it. Pride awoke in the heart of the young peasant-farmer. Oh no, it was not so simple as the lord of the manor thought! It might be a good while yet before the big estate was "rounded off." Franz Vogt opened the mouth of the sack and shook out a portion of the seed-corn. The two cows stood chewing the cud by the wayside.
The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to bend their heads in prayer. And in our ears, louder than the vibrations of the hamlet bell, louder than the bird-notes and the tumult of the voluptuous insect whirr, there rang the thud, thud of cruel blows falling on quivering human flesh. The curtain that hid the life of the peasant-farmer had indeed been lifted.
Steeps clothed from top to bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone; slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus; olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and southward over a hundred miles of sea this is Capri.
"Why do ye this most un-Christian thing?" and to the crowd: "Do you call yourselves men to stand by and witness this?" At my words one sturdy young fellow, of the better, peasant-farmer class, broke from those who held him and would have thrown himself unarmed against the mail-clad guard. Many strong arms kept him back.
A peasant-farmer who had a daughter of suitable age for betrothal would see the youths of the district and others from all over the island offer themselves, for every Ivizan deemed it his privilege to court her. The father of the girl would count the suitors ten, fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking