At a little distance a small
plot of ground enclosed by a stone wall caught his attention.
The
plot of ground was in a high, dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.
As he had heard Boxtel's story, and was furious at having been the dupe of the pretended Jacob, he destroyed the sycamore behind which the envious Isaac had spied into the garden; for the
plot of ground belonging to him had been bought by Cornelius, and taken into his own garden.
I never knew, before visiting Holland, how much it was possible for people to get out of a small
plot of ground. It seemed to me that absolutely no land was wasted.
It has been experimentally proved, that if a
plot of ground be sown with several distinct genera of grasses, a greater number of plants and a greater weight of dry herbage can thus be raised.
This
plot of ground, turned now as I saw into a rockery, had been the scene of my most untiring labours.
"There," said she, when we had reached the centre of the middle alley, and when the foliage of shrubs and trees, now in their summer pride, closing behind end around us, shut out the view of the house, and thus imparted a sense of seclusion even to this little
plot of ground in the very core of a capital.
Some London houses have a melancholy little
plot of ground behind them, usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls, and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which there withers on, from year to year, a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few leaves late in autumn when other trees shed theirs, and, drooping in the effort, lingers on, all crackled and smoke-dried, till the following season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps, if the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup in its branches.
I agreed to this readily; and they had a little
plot of ground allotted to them, where they had three tents or houses set up, surrounded with a basket-work, palisadoed like Atkins's, adjoining to his plantation.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that
plot of ground which is given to him to till.
It also boasted of what in Languedoc is styled a garden, consisting of a small
plot of ground, on the side opposite to the main entrance reserved for the reception of guests.
He was possessed of some little money evidently, because he bought a
plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages run up very cheaply.