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Updated: May 20, 2025
'Do leave me in peace! I bled myself with my knife, I tell you. It's all over, now. Who was the fool of a peasant who disturbed you? The doctor here, and the priest as well, why not the mutes too! Well, it can't be helped, people will be fools. It won't prevent us from having a drink, eh? He fetched a bottle and three glasses, and stood them on an old table which he brought out into the shade.
I remember a friend of mine telling me that once in Italy, when he declined to hire a carriage from a peasant at a perfectly exorbitant price, and said he preferred walking, the fellow called after him, saying, "We all know you English are mad enough for anything!"
In the middle of the field stood a rustic building, with a ground-floor used for store-rooms and cow-sheds and on the right a rough hut made of branches and a cart with some harness lying in it. A peasant wearing dark trousers, with a black felt hat on his head, came forward to meet him, asked him to follow him and took him round behind the house.
We are often told that the poorest peasant in our own time has aids to existence that had not been dreamt of for princes in the Middle Ages. Thirty years ago the world was mostly of opinion that the balance was entirely on our side, and that in everything we were so much better off than our fathers, that comparison was impossible.
Then he used to go on tip-toe to his room and fetch down his books on physics, in which the construction of steam-engines was so learnedly and unintelligibly set forth. His head, tired with watching and unaccustomed to any mental work, with difficulty grasped the sense of the mysterious words; but he had time, and indefatigably he worked on, page by page, as a peasant ploughs a stony field.
The provincial schools recently established may be trusted to do their work, however slowly; and the "educated Russia" dreamed of by Alexander I. may yet crown the age of Alexander II. Those who, like the writer, have lived in the villages of the interior, and have seen the Russian peasant as he really is, cannot but have hopes of his future, in the teeth of the hasty and one-sided observers who love to depict him as a brute with the single human attribute of dishonesty.
They were at the Salon, standing in silent worship before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish sunset, when they heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things they were thinking to one they knew must be the cher maître himself, and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no higher happiness. The worship of the young is pleasant to the old.
The German to the Southern Negro has been and is what the Jew is to the Russian peasant the storekeeper, the barterer. The German citizen has never been a manufacturer or a farmer; he is in no business that gives extensive employment to wage earners.
Jessie willingly danced with them, and showed them how to move with grace and spirit, and handle their partners less like dolls and more like peasant maidens with whom the martial Hungarians were supposed to be disporting themselves at the fair. Merry meetings were these; and all enjoyed them, as young people do whatever is lively, dramatic, and social.
Or place a Russian peasant at a concert where is displayed all the creative luxury and all the brilliant difficulties of foreign music. The child of nature listens with indifference to the incomprehensible sounds; but suddenly Voróbieva with her nightingale voice trills out The cuckóo from out the fírs so dánk hath not cúckooed. Look what a change comes over the half-asleep listener.
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