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Updated: June 12, 2025
Phelim O'Toole, who had the honor of being that interesting personage, an only son, was heir to a snug estate of half an acre, which had been the family patrimony since the time of his grandfather, Tyrrell O'Toole, who won it from the Sassenah at the point of his reaping-hook, during a descent once made upon England by a body of "spalpeens," in the month of August.
He was a short, thin, bald man, with a sharp nose curved like a reaping-hook, iron-grey whiskers and hair, and fierce pale blue eyes.
Battle and slaughter they promised me, and enemies like ripe maize for the reaping-hook. I would have had them in thick to my hands. I would have washed my hands at night, and eaten and drunk and slept, and sung again to work in the morning. They promised me a sword and a sea to plunge it in, and our mother Italy to bless me. I would have toiled: I would have done good in my life.
The limbs totter, the back is bowed, the dimmed sight can no longer guide the plough in a straight furrow, nor the weak hands wield the reaping-hook, Hodge, who, Atlas-like, supported upon his shoulders the agricultural world, comes in his old age under the dominion of his last masters at the workhouse. There, indeed, he finds almost the whole array of his rulers assembled.
The greater number carry their burdens on their backs, trudging afoot. A gang of ten or twelve once gathered round me to inquire the direction of some spot they desired to reach. A powerful-looking woman, with reaping-hook in her hand and cooking implements over her shoulder, was the speaker.
They had horns of very irregular shape, roughly knotted each curved into something of the shape of a reaping-hook, and rising directly from the top of one of the straightest and longest heads ever carried by an animal. These animals were far from being gracefully formed.
In one which was opened was found a round pillar seven feet high and eighteen inches across, which was standing upright in the centre of the tomb. There was a hand-mill for grinding corn in shape like those still in use in the country a knife ten inches long, a hatchet like a reaping-hook, and a tiger's head of natural size, all of stone.
I am no believer in that era of happiness which some divines imagine to be so near at hand; nor do I imagine that the next two or three hundred years will witness the sword turned into the reaping-hook of peaceful industry; but what I do believe in, and what I hope for, is that nations will know each other better than they did of old.
It is only occasionally when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle, and fights savagely for his home and his bit of a field.
Those months are the months of harvest, when the peasant-women are forced by necessity to leave their newborn infants to be nursed by children four or five years old, or by old women whose hands can no longer grasp the reaping-hook.
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