Fallow

It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars.

He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top before him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky, and knew that he was face to face with death.

The ground from here to the Wall was grasslands, Bran knew; fallow fields and low rolling hills, high meadows and lowland bogs.

But all was dark there, dark like her skin, dark like the fallow earth that waits for the good seed.

They didn't have the luxury of even a single fallow night.

The family'd better not talk to the boy about looking round for a job till the autumn—just let him lie fallow through the hot months, somewhere by the sea if it could be managed.

That close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools, those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of battle, those hermits by day and cutthroats by night, that clumsy mill which turns in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of land inundated with sunshine and full of butterflies—all this attracted him.

An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

2 The flashing and golden pageant of California, The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands, The long and varied stretch from Puget sound to Colorado south, Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air, valleys and mountain cliffs, The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow, the silent, cyclic chemistry, The slow and steady ages plodding, the unoccupied surface ripening, the rich ores forming beneath; At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere, Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific, Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers, the railroads, with many a thrifty farm, with machinery, And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.

Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of a ploughshare?

"I'm perfectly well, thank you. I've done it often before, you know. I only want to lie fallow for a bit. It's good to see you and Archie. ... I feel as if I had come home."

He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow unworked earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red clay roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations—a lean farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby—the strangeness of destiny stabbed him with fear.

The wind snapped them off at the hollow root, and pitch-polled their branchy tops along the level ground, thistle blowing against thistle and interlocking spines, till in huge balls they careered like runaway haycocks across the fallow.

I took my way Sauntering the cloistered woods. Then came the herds, The roebuck and the fallow deer at play, Trooping to nose my hand. All this, you say, Was sweet?

And a homeless hungry man, driving the roads with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat, could look at the fallow fields which might produce food but not profit, and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children.

10:12 Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.

"You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of your child. That is an idea of Rousseau's, still rather new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like mothers nursing their own children and vaccination."

Now side by side, with like unwearied care, Each Ajax laboured through the field of war: So when two lordly bulls, with equal toil, Force the bright ploughshare through the fallow soil, Join'd to one yoke, the stubborn earth they tear, And trace large furrows with the shining share; O'er their huge limbs the foam descends in snow, And streams of sweat down their sour foreheads flow.

An acre of potatoes is cultivated with less expense than an acre of wheat; the fallow, which generally precedes the sowing of wheat, more than compensating the hoeing and other extraordinary culture which is always given to potatoes.