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Updated: May 31, 2025
A fight immediately ensued, but Jim made such play with his crutch that the ploughmen were driven back. Bill, too, who had been a London prize-fighter, unslung his left arm, and used it so vigorously that the rustics, after having had all their eyes blackened and all their noses bled, were fain to turn round and fly!
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen.
Railroads were unknown in the times in which our story occurred, and the village ale-house was still the rendezvous of the villagers of an evening; the parson still occasionally looked in and smoked his pipe with the lawyer, the exciseman, the sexton, and the parish-clerk; while the sturdy farmers, the smith, the butcher, and baker formed another circle; while the laborers and ploughmen, the butcher-boy and the tailor's apprentice lounged in to drink with greedy ears the news; to listen to the wise saws of the village politicians, and become in due time convinced that by some strange freak of fortune the only persons incompetent to rule the country were those in power at the time.
Some like to be one thing, some another. There is so much to be done, so many different things to do, so many trades! Shepherds, soldiers, sailors, ploughmen, carters one could go on all day naming without getting to the end of them.
After a flaming description of sunrise, on which the clouds attend in their very best liveries; the Bill of Fare for the day proceeds in the usual manner. Whistling Ploughmen, singing Milkmaids, and sentimental Shepherds are always to be had at a moment's notice; and, if well grouped, serve to fill up the landscape agreeably enough.
On the other hand, to balance that severity, if the fair-keepers have not done their business of the fair, and removed and cleared the field by another certain day in September, the ploughmen may come in again, with plough and cart, and overthrow all, and trample into the dirt; and as for the filth, dung, straw, etc. necessarily left by the fair- keepers, the quantity of which is very great, it is the farmers' fees, and makes them full amends for the trampling, riding, and carting upon, and hardening the ground.
He walked on rapidly, leaving the old horse and the ploughmen behind him, and around his energetic little figure the grey dust, as fine as powder, spun in swirls and eddies before the driving wind, which had grown boisterous.
Should they give him time he would profit by their negligence, and next morning when they reached Nieuport, the birds would be flown. Especially the leaders of the mutineers of Diest and Thionville were hoarse with indignation at the proposed delay. They had not left their brethren, they shouted, nor rallied to the archduke's banner in order to sit down and dig in the sand like ploughmen.
The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant-life fall into the same mistake as our English novelists: they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which they know nothing.
Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry could give a moment’s popularity to such a picture as “Cross Purposes,” where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew L. E. L.’s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose costume seems to indicate that they are meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that remind us of a handsome primo tenore.
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