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Updated: May 13, 2025
And the fierce warriors of his nation would start at the sound; the ploughshare would be beaten into the sword, and the pruning-hook into the spear; and the nation, rushing to his call, learn war yet again indeed, a grand, holy war a crusade no; we should not have had that word; but a war against the tyrants of the race the best, as they called themselves who trod upon their brethren, and would not suffer them even to look to the heavens.
But no sooner did they convert the sword into a ploughshare, and the spear into a pruning-hook, than they unanimously returned to their more ancient form of society.
It has little or none of the lordly character of the American forest, for the axe has felled its oldest and its grandest trees; but in the close wood which survives, live all the wild and pleasing peculiarities of nature: its complete irregularity, its vistas, in whose perspective the quiet cattle are peacefully browsing; its refreshing glades, where the grey rocks arise from amid the nodding fern; the silvery shafts of the old birch trees; the knotted trunks of the hoary oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss all, all are beautiful alike in the green freshness of spring, or in the sadness and sere of autumn.
With a hay-band tied round him, one would think he had just come from turning over the grass. Sometimes he would have an ox-goad in his hand, and you would have said he had just unyoked his weary oxen. Now he bore a pruning-hook, and personated a vine-dresser; and again with a ladder on his shoulder, he seemed as if he was going to gather apples.
These then may be truly said to be the ends of these organs? They may. But you can cut off a vine-branch with a dagger or with a chisel, and in many other ways? Of course. And yet not so well as with a pruning-hook made for the purpose? True. May we not say that this is the end of a pruning-hook? We may.
The great object of this able financier is to cut down the expenses of the empire. No doubt that it would be unwise for Austria, an inland state, to reduce her military expenses; but the viel-schreiberei might be diminished, and the pruning-hook might safety be applied to the bureaucracy; but a powerful under-current places this region beyond the power of Baron Kubeck.
"A soldier," as the speaker from the town had observed, "is a bloodthirsty, unsettled sort of a rascal; that the peaceable, home-loving, bread-winning citizen can never conscientiously look on as a brother, till he has beaten his sword into a ploughshare, and his spear into a pruning-hook."
With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again. "Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. "On deck! Begone!"
"Then you think they will attack us, father?" I said. "Some one just now told me that all was quiet, and that the Indians had gone." "That is the very reason why I think they will attack us, my boy, and the sooner the better, George. It must come, and I should like them to get their sharp lesson and go; for I want to hang this up for an ornament or to turn it into a pruning-hook."
It was one of the surprising things, in a statistical way, to find that city-bred boys stood the marching and exposure of the Civil War campaigns better than their country brothers, and that the yard-stick turned into as effective a sword as the pruning-hook.
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