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The snow, lying white here and there on the dark brown plough-land, is lightly flecked with gold by the sun. "This time last year I went stand-shooting in Zhivki," says Slyunka, after a long silence. "I brought back three snipe." Again there follows a silence. Both stand a long time and look towards the forest, and then lazily move and walk along the muddy road from the village.
You could not call the place a village, nor yet could it be called a town. Viewed from the bluff, on the English side of the river, it was a long stretch of small farmhouses some painted red, with green shutters, some painted white, with red shutters set upon long strips of land, green, yellow, and brown, as it chanced to be pasture land, fields of grain, or "plough-land."
'I've seen worse weather than any they can brew in the neighbourhood of Beacon Hargate, he panted to himself, 'but it's one thing to have a good tight craft under your feet, and it's another to be bogged in the dark, over half a mile of rotten plough-land. All right, my lads, you haven't got Jack Jervase under yet. Here goes.
She that would be a mother should marry in the very bosom of her mother, among the standing crops, on the fruitful plough-land, or she should lie beneath the elm that weds the vine, on the very lap of mother earth, among the springing herbage, the trailing vine-shoots and the budding trees. I may add that the metaphor in the line so well known in comedy That in the furrow children true be sown
On the left the red wet plough-land showed through the doorways between the elm-boles and their branches. On the right, looking down, they could see the tree-tops of elms growing far beneath them, hear occasionally the gurgle of the river. Sometimes there below they caught glimpses of the full, soft-sliding Trent, and of water-meadows dotted with small cattle.
I knew that behind them, lying by sections in the plough-land, thousands and thousands of infantrymen had their eyes fixed in the direction I was taking, and that hundreds and hundreds of guns were ready to pour out death. But that disciplined multitude was silent and, as it were, holding its breath, waiting for the order that was to hurl it forward. I felt in excellent spirits.
The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of the freemen, though even the plough-land was; subject to fresh division as the number of claimants grew greater or less. It was this sharing in the common land which marked off the freeman or ceorl from the unfree man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned.
Presently we reach Offenham Ferry, while a little beyond, set back behind willow trees and plough-land, is the village; and we soon catch sight of the old church tower peering over the bank. At the further extremity of the village, quite near the bank, is the "Court" farm, once protected by a moat fed by the river, and used by the Evesham Abbots as a country retreat.
The statistics of the seventeenth show that while there had been an increase of prosperity and population in Lower Provence, as well as in the correspondingly situated parts of the other two provinces I have mentioned, there was an alarming decrease both in the wealth and in the population of Upper Provence and Dauphiny, although, by the clearing of the forests, a great extent of plough-land and pasturage had been added to the soil before reduced to cultivation.
I will buy two ox-teams, and hire two more laborers. About a hundred and fifty acres shall be plough-land, and I will pasture cattle on the rest." Pahom lay awake all night, and dozed off only just before dawn. Hardly were his eyes closed when he had a dream. He thought he was lying in that same tent, and heard somebody chuckling outside.
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