It appears that a cottager, who lived in the village of Badesly, two miles from Lymington, frequently heard a strange noise behind his house, like a person in extreme agony.

You seem to be taking up splendid schemes of fortune only to lay them down again; and your fortunes are an ignis fatuus that has been conducting you in thought from Lancaster Court, Strand, to somewhere near Matlock; then jumping across to Dr. Somebody's, whose son's tutor you were likely to be; and would to God the dancing demon may conduct you at last in peace and comfort to the "life and labours of a cottager"!

One evening he went to a cottager who had a row of skeps, and bought one of them, just as it was after the man had smothered the bees.

A cottager grows old over his oaten cakes like a citizen at a turtle feast.

Every cottager takes a pride in his garden, for the flower shows which are held every year result in keen competition.

It would have been easy for Hans, who was only the son of a poor and humbler cottager, to have kept out of the way of these noble youths, and he was far from being of a quarrelsome disposition; but it so happened that he was often mixed up in the quarrels of his friend Conrad, who being very generous and kind to him, Hans thought himself obliged to take his part and defend him when any strife arose.

Wonder whether some cottager in Surrey would house and feed me for fifteen shillings a week?...

He was childless, and adopted a cottager's child he and his wife heard singing at its father's door one day.

It is no unusual circumstance, in the Scotch pine-woods, to come upon a tree with the trunk scooped out from each side and carried away: the cottager has been to fetch material for his candles.

They livedindeed, harder than their own labourers, and it sometimes happened that the food they thought good enough was refused by a cottager.

At the cross roads they part with mutual goodwill towards each other, and a shilling, easily earned, pays that night for the cottager's pipe and glass of ale.

No doubt, if the fashion for teaching cooking presently penetrates into the parish, they will take a leading part, and with much show and blowing of trumpets instruct the cottager how to boil the pot.

The cottager spells over prints advocating the disestablishment of the Church, the division of great estates, and the general subversion of the present order of things.

But sometimes the cottager, as he approaches the chapel door, finds upon it (as in the church porch) a small printed notice affixed there by the overseers.

It is strange that such men as this should choose to throw in their lot with so many who are idlewhom they must know to be idlethus jeopardising their own position for the sake of those who are not worth one-fifth the sacrifice the agricultural cottager must be called upon to make in a strike.

The price paid for boys' labour now is such that it becomes a very important addition to the aggregate income of the cottager.

With the exception of vegetables the cottager now buys almost everything and produces nothing for home use; no home-spun clothingnot even a home-baked loaf.

That was the sum of the cottager's creedhis own genuine aspirations.

But if such a consummation depends upon the action of the cottager it will be a long time coming.

He is not the only example of an extravagant estimate being put upon the possible product of land: it is a fallacy that has been fondly believed in by more logical minds than the poor cottager.

How hard is it, that the ambition of the Chiefs, and the wickedness of faction, should thus fall upon the innocent cottager, who perhaps is equally a stranger to the names of the one, and the principles of the other!

Had I been born A cottager, my homely bowl had flow'd Secure from pois'nous drugs; but not my wife! Let me, good heav'n!

For years Little Haven had accepted his decisions as final and boasted of his sharpness to neighbouring hamlets, and many a cottager had brought his boots to be mended a whole week before their time for the sake of an interview.

They had engaged an old cottager on the moor to give them an hour's work every evening, and for this they paid him with a stoup of milk, or some other small product of their dairy; money they had not to spare, and this he knew,nor did he require any; he would have given his aid to the fallen family for nothing, had it been asked of him.

"But though the form of the dress is invariable, and every inhabitant of the commune, from the wealthy farmer's wife to the poorest cottager who earns her black bread by labour in the fields, would as soon think of adopting male attire as of innovating on the immemorial mode du pays, yet the quality of the materials allows scope for wealth and female coquetry to show themselves.