Surely love, if there was any such thing, should be ease and tenderness...

The round-backed cottages clung to the earth like long animals whose folded heads were always to the mountain. Lying thus to the slopes they were part of the rhythm of the land itself... There were little herds of these cottages at long intervals, and every now and then a cottage by itself like a wandered beast...

And whenever the prime concern in life is money-making, then you have trickery and brutality and wrong. I’m saying that, not from what I have heard, but from what I have observed in a long life among our own folk.

We have to combine, certainly, but if we combine to fight on the idea of each man making more money for himself, then we end by fighting one another. And that’s the trouble now... human dealings are founded – founded – not on money but on what is fair and just all round.

It all comes back to one thing... brutality. Compel people into a position where they have to use the brute that’s in them in order to live and the brute will waken all right. When the brute is naturally strong in a man – that’s the man who becomes the leader of the pressgang. And there you have it. Where all is compulsion and enforcement, it’s the bully that rules.

We have to combine, certainly, but if we combine to fight on the idea of each man making more money for himself, then we end by fighting one another. And that's the trouble now... human dealings are founded - founded - not on money but on what is fair and just all round.

It all comes back to one thing... brutality. Compel people into a position where they have to use the brute that's in them in order to live and the brute will waken all right. When the brute is naturally strong in a man - that's the man who becomes the leader of the pressgang. And there you have it. Where all is compulsion and enforcement, it's the bully that rules.

We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.

You would think," added Art, "that a wedding was a great thing.""Well," replied Old Hector, "it's not a small thing, as a rule. They contrive, one way or another, to make a lot of it.

What a great and happy place the world was! But you had to be big and grown-up before you could do just what you liked.