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Updated: June 27, 2025
In spite of the loathing I had for this place and its owners, I could not repress a feeling very much like consternation on hearing that the hereditary manor which bore my own name had apparently been taken and set on fire. It meant disgrace, defeat; and this fire was as a seal of vassalage affixed to my arms by those I called clodhoppers and serfs.
Whenever I asked him any question about the present time, he used to answer that times had sadly changed, that all Frenchmen had become traitors and felons, that they had frightened their kings, and that these, like cravens, had deserted the nobles, who in their turn had been cowardly enough to renounce their privileges and let laws be made for them by clodhoppers.
The City had enrolled ten thousand men. Everywhere there was mustering and marching to succour the flower of the English army, which was already in Somersetshire. And all for the purpose of crushing some five or six thousand clodhoppers and fishermen, half-armed and penniless, who were ready to throw their lives away for a man and for an idea.
They are used in pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.
He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of God as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of bumpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superstitions and ceremonies.
I had a wretched time yesterday, speechifying and trying to rouse up clodhoppers to the interests of their country, and all the time my darling at home was alone, and breaking her heart about me! By Jove! if I'd only known! When I came back this morning to all this misery I told Neville to send in my resignation. I repeated the same thing to him the last thing before I left the house."
"Take the position of soldiers, you slouching clodhoppers," he said, with an assortment of oaths, as the squad entered the office. "One'd think you a passel o' hawbucks half-drunk at a log-rollin', instead o' soldiers in the presence o' your superior officer.
"The farmer he sleeps in a cosy cot, With a roof above his head; The lumberman lies out under the stars, With the dew to soften his bed. But we'd not change our life so free For all the farmer's gold, Let clodhoppers snore at their ease o'nights, But we be lumbermen bold!" The river woke from its dreams. The river-guard, seated on piles of baulks by the waterside, shifted a little.
When this matter was brought to the knowledge of Commodore Waugh, as he strode up and down his hall, the indignant old sailor thumped his heavy stick upon the ground, thrust forward his great head, and swore furiously by the whole Pandemonial Hierarchy that his grandnephews should not be brought up like clodhoppers.
"I hope it is not that vulgar scene you have just had with those clodhoppers which depresses you?" she said. She got no answer; the marquis, absorbed in thought, was listening in fancy to the prophetic reasons which Marie had given him in the midst of the same chiefs at La Vivetiere, urging him to abandon the struggle of kings against peoples.
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