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ONE:Reuben faced his adversity with set teeth and a dogged countenance. He had not been farming thirty odd years to be beaten casually by the weather. Scorching heat and blighting cold, the still blanker doom of the trickling, pouring rain��the wind that seeded his corn, and beat down his hay, and flung his hop-bines together in muddled heaps��the pests that Nature breeds by the ten million out of her own putrefyings and misbegettings��all things in life from the lowest maggot to the fiercest storm��he was out to fight them. In challenging Boarzell he had challenged them all."Alas! alas!" exclaimed a solitary wanderer among the multitude, as he turned away sorrowfully from the gaudy display, "alas, for this great city, which was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearl��for in one hour will she be made desolate: and, instead of a stomacher, have only a girding of sackcloth, and burning instead of beauty." But he had hardly repeated these words, ere a full stream of music, swelling in the air, overpowered the hum that arose from the multitude, and John Ball��for it was the degraded priest who had spoken��imagining this to be a prelude to the appearance of the young king, mounted upon a door-step, and, from this slight elevation, and favoured by his stature, he obtained a full view of the procession, which almost immediately passed.

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ONE:Chapter 5

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ONE:The son sprang to his feet, and helped his mother, whose stoutness and stiffness made it a difficult matter, to rise too."'O why, because sickness hath wasted my body,

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ONE:She saw them go out of the tent, still linked and in their dream, then watched their dark shapes stoop against the sky.Leaving his mother to attend to the visitors who crowded in to drink success to the new proprietor in a cup of ale, Stephen Holgrave stole unobserved out of the cottage towards nightfall.