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The ice, meanwhile, had become so strong that a cannon-ball would have made no impression upon it. Crop-Ear simply threw down a stone heavier than himself, and, as it bounced and slid along the solid floor, said to Prince Alexis, "Am I to go back, Highness, or stay here?" "Here, my son. Thou'rt a man. Come hither to me." Taking the serf's head in his hands, he kissed him on both cheeks.
Their wives and children are their own: the master cannot claim the tyrannous marriage-rights of the baron; no "wedding-dish" is carried up to the castle; nor is the eldest born "accounted the son of the serf's lord, for he perchance it was who begat him." The brutality of slavery, I must repeat, is mainly the effect of civilization.
The bailiff accepted my offer gladly, seeing that the mason, who was killed during the last war against the castle of Mont-Ferrier, had not yet been replaced, and besides I furnished ample evidence of knowing how to build. The bailiff assigned us to a hut where we were to receive a serf's pittance.
It was this that made the freedom-loving peasant detest the military conscription imposed by the Austrians in 1849, an innovation the more obnoxious because enforced with every species of official brutality. The poor Czigany had not been so fortunate as to preserve even the Hungarian serf's modicum of liberty. There are a great many "settled gipsies" in Transylvania.
Marry, Mistress Sibyll, there is a north country and pithy proverb, 'Happy is the man whose father went to the devil. Had some old Hastings been a robber and extortioner, and left to brave William the heirship of his wickedness in lordships and lands, Lord Warwick had not called him 'a new man. Master Hastings was dragged, like a serf's son, before the earl on his dais; and be sure he was rated soundly, for his bold blood was up, and he defied the earl, as a gentleman born, to single battle.
Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Hélène, fascinatingly ugly in her serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria's jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs.
Then proceeded to Ballingray or Bingray, and so by Kirkness, where late ravages are supplied by the force of vegetation down to the shores of Lochleven. We embarked and went upon Saint Serf's Island, supposed to have been anciently a cell of the Culdees. An old pinfold, or rather a modern pinfold, constructed out of the ancient chapel, is all that attests its former sanctity.
Marry, Mistress Sibyll, there is a north country and pithy proverb, 'Happy is the man whose father went to the devil. Had some old Hastings been a robber and extortioner, and left to brave William the heirship of his wickedness in lordships and lands, Lord Warwick had not called him 'a new man. Master Hastings was dragged, like a serf's son, before the earl on his dais; and be sure he was rated soundly, for his bold blood was up, and he defied the earl, as a gentleman born, to single battle.
Ranges of Greek columns are reared as crossings in the midst of broad marshes, lions' heads in bronzed iron stare out upon vast wastes where never rose even the smoke from a serf's kennel. All this seems good; and a ride of four hundred miles through such glories rarely fails to set the traveller at chanting the praises of the Emperor who conceived them.
One horse went down, lamed for life; another staggered backwards into the further lode, and was drowned. But an arrow went through the brave serf's heart, and Ivo rode on, cursing more bitterly than ever, and comforted himself by flying his hawks at a covey of patridges.
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