Word: peasant
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Since they both come from poor peasant families, Robert and Yvette consider their present lifestyle, hard as it is, an improvement over what they knew as children. They have a television set, a washing machine and a secondhand Peugeot station wagon, and Robert, like all French workers, gets a generous five-week vacation every year. One week of the five is usually spent on camping trips with the family, while Robert uses the other four to earn extra money at odd jobs in the village...
...descended of peasant Irish and large-boned Teutonic stock. Round-faced and broad-hipped, doubtless some day I will be able to drop babies in the field like peas from a pod, and return to the plow before the sun is high in the sky. Right now, being young, basically healthy, and female, I recognize the almost overwhelming potential of my body for conception. At this stage, however, I wonder whether the fertility I am burdened with must necessarily cloud every doctor's perceptions of my illnesses. I go to UHS when I think I have a sore throat...
There were other intimations, too. A thousand demonstrators, mostly Tocsin people demanding American disengagement from Vietnam, greeted Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu when she came to Ringe Tech in October 1963. "At Columbia they threw eggs at me like I was a peasant," Nhu complained, "but Harvard was incredible." And in May 1964, Harvard saw its first semi-political riot in years: police used dogs and clubs to break up 1500 demonstrators trying to save 70 sycamore trees, slated for replacement by a Mem Drive underpass at Boylston Street (the plans were later revised). Of course, it was only semi-political...
Maybe the Sasquatch is only the pipedream of Patterson, Napier, and other researchers including Rene Dahinden and Boris Porshnev (who was better known as a historian of peasant uprisings in France). Yet other missing links have been found: The gorilla, a shy creature not at all like King Kong, was a legendary jungle man until authenticated in the middle of the 19th century, and only in the last decade were reports of proto-pygmies in Tanzania born out by the discovery of the Gombe stream chimp. Napier estimates that a population of 500-1000 Bigfoot could explain all the footprints...
...dominates things whenever he's on stage, as the profane and bribe-demanding judge whose tenure is remembered as a brief golden age of justice because he's willing to fine for atheism the rich farmers who don't like miraculous explanations for their provisions' presence in a poor peasant's larder--"I ask Your Honor," the woman, a bit overplayed by someone the program lists as Alison C., explains, "was there ever a time when a poor old woman could get a ham without a miracle...