I've been rereading Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Early in the novel, the eleven-year-old eponymous protagonist, Jude Frawley works for Farmer Troutham. Jude's job is to keep the rooks away from the farmer's corn by shaking a rattle or clacker.
" [Jude] sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length he grew sympathetic with the birds' thwarted desires. They seemed like him to be living in a world which did not want them. . .
'Poor little dears!' said Jude aloud. 'You shall have some dinner - - you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford to let you have some. Eat then my dear little birdies, and make a good meal.'
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. . .
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him . . . All at once he became conscious of a smart blow upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude's cowering frame, the clacker swinging in his hand.
'So it's " Eat, my dear birdies," is it young man? " Eat dear birdies," indeed! I'll tickle your breeches [That's a great expression which I plan to rob when I tickle dinge boy Jacko's boxers.], and see if you say, "Eat, dear birdies" again in a hurry!. . . '
While saluting Jude's ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim frame round him at arm's length, again struck Jude on the hind parts with the flat side of Jude's rattle, till the field echoed with the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.
'Don't 'ee sir - - please don't 'ee!' cried the whirling child, as helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an amazing circular race. 'I - - I- - sir- - only meant that - - there was good crop in the ground - - I saw em sow it- - and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner- - and you wouldn't miss it, sir- - and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to 'em - - O, O, O!' [Mr. Phillotson is the schoolmaster with whom Jude has been studying when he should be minding Troutham's field, so raising his name is particularly tactless on the boy's part.]
This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all; and he still smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant workers - - who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business of clacking with great assiduity - - and echoing from the brand new church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for God and man. [Hardy's heavy-handed irony seems manifestly unfair to me. Corporally chastising a boy who is not earning his pay does not mean that one necessarily hates humankind surely.]
Presently, Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the quivering boy [a phrase that I find a turn on] on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it to him in payment for his day's work, telling him to go home and never let him see him in one of those fields again. [Hardy's grammar is pretty awkward here, isn't it, with all those unclear pronoun "hes" and "hims." It's clear enough what he means from context, but he would have been in trouble if he submitted that sentence in a freshman English class.]