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"Oh," cried Grace, "that's just dreadful! I hope there will never be a war where such terrible guns will be used never any more at all; but that very soon, as the Bible says, the people 'shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
When he set up his anvil and with skilful blows hammered out the first plough-shares to compel the virgin soil of the Nashaway valley to its proper fruitfulness, he was all unwittingly helping to forge the destinies of this great republic; was in his humble sphere a true builder of the nation.
In the long ages, Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world "rose out of chaos," you have improved very little on the manners of those primeval monsters which "tare each other in the slime." Two thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your swords into plough-shares.
The present edifice is thought to stand approximately on the site of the earlier Saxon church restored by Ethelwold in 980, in which Queen Emma underwent the "fiery ordeal" by walking blindfold and barefooted over nine red-hot plough-shares, thus proving her innocence of the charges brought against her, and furnishing her accusers with an example of what female chastity is able to accomplish.
The animal-drawn plough seems to have been invented during this period, and from now on, some metal agricultural implements like iron sickles and iron plough-shares became more common. A fallow system was introduced so that cultivation became more intensive. Manuring of fields was already known in Shang time.
The noise of the artillery on both sides being heard, immediatly they drew to their fleet; where after a reasonable hot fight, the ship was entred and mastered, which they found freighted with all sorts of small yron-worke, as horse shoes, nailes, plough-shares, yron barres, spikes, boults, locks, gimbols, and such like, valued by vs at 6000 or 7000 li. but woorth to them treble the value.
I cannot say that I regret having missed this ordeal; I would as lief have walked among red-hot plough-shares; but I do regret one great treat, which I shall now miss. Next Wednesday is the anniversary dinner of the Royal Literary Fund Society, held in Freemasons' Hall. Octavian Blewitt, the secretary, offered me a ticket for the ladies' gallery.
When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood then it is that it breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless farther.
The business end is about two feet long and not more than three inches broad, with a sort of shoulder for the foot. The handles are about six feet long and end like a mop-stick, without any crossbar. A slight alteration would turn these tools into pikes, a much more likely operation than the beating of swords into plough-shares and spears into pruning-hooks.
In those days he would rather have walked over fiery plough-shares than visited any place where he had seen Lucina, and where she now was not. He never went near the wood, where they had sat together; he would not pass even, if he could help it, the Squire's house or Miss Camilla's.
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