Page:1880. A Tramp Abroad.djvu/505

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FARMERS AS HEROES.
485

with wee dwellings peeping over at us from velvety, green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high. It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois even, could climb those precipices. Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss through a spyglass, and correspond with a rifle.

FALLING OUT OF HIS FARM.

In Switzerland the farmer's plow is a wide shovel, which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his native rock—and there the man of the plow is a hero. Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and it had a tragic story. A plowman was skinning his farm one morning,—not the steepest part of it, but still a steep part—that is, he was not skinning the front of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves,—when he absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten his hands, in the usual way: he lost his balance and fell out of his farm backwards; poor fellow, he never touched anything till he struck bottom, 1500 feet below.[1] We throw a halo of heroism around the life of the soldier and the sailor, because of the deadly dangers they are facing all the time. But we are

  1. This was on a Sunday. M. T.