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More "Pastime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pleydell was a lively, sharp-looking gentleman, with a professional shrewdness in his eye, and, generally speaking, a professional formality in his manner; but this he could slip off on a Saturday evening, when ... he joined in the ancient pastime of High Jinks.—Sir W. Scott, Guy ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... creoles make the negroes who surround them the play-things of their whims: they flog, for pastime, those of their own age, just as their fathers flog others at their will. These young creoles, arrived at the age in which the passions are impetuous, do not know how to bear contradiction; they will have every thing done ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... in its accustomed way: school in the morning, with recess; school in the afternoon, followed by play, games of all sorts, and many another delightful pastime. Betty went for a walk with her two sisters; and presently, almost before they knew, they found themselves surveying their three little plots of ground in the gardens, which they had hitherto neglected. While they were so employed, Mrs. Haddo quite ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... in 1567, and is described in the title-page, as "not only godly, learned, and fruitful, but also well furnished with pleasant mirth and pastime, very delectable for those which shall hear or read the same: Made by the learned clerk, Lewis Wager." It bears clear internal evidence of having been written after the Reformation; and the prologue shows that it was acted by itinerant ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... although the little boys and Rumple were in a state of simmering rebellion against the dictates of the kindly but rather autocratic commander, Rupert and Nealie were so well amused that they had no room for grumbling, while Sylvia had taken to drawing as a pastime, and spent the hours in making an ambitious sketch of the scene. It was a little out in drawing, naturally as she had had no lessons, and it was difficult to determine whether the ships were sailing up Table Mountain, or the houses taking short voyages across the bay; but she was ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... your favourite pastime? Shall I put down shooting? I know you don't know one end of a gun from the other, but it doesn't matter; and it reads rather well - something unique about ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... citizens of London, of all estates, lightlie in every parish, or sometimes two or three parishes joyning together, had their severall Mayinges, and did fetch in Maypoles, with divers warlike showes, with good archers, morrice-dancers, and other devices for pastime all the day long, and towards the evening they had stage-playes and bone-fires in the streetes. These greate Mayinges and Maygames, made by governors and masters of this citie, with the triumphant setting up of the greate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... by the same impulse which forces the un-found-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence, although he knows that the act is likely, even almost certain, to lead to his undoing. I know that I am playing with fire, and I feel the thrill which accompanies that most fascinating pastime; and, back of it all, I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into a practical ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... smoke-house, where it found abundant nourishment. It grew to great size. In time I became a grafter of trees for the neighborhood, and often as I returned at night would have cions of different kinds in my pockets. It became a pastime to graft these cions in the old tree. More than thirty varieties were placed there. It was with keen anticipation, as the years came, that I looked for the annual crop, to see what strange inhabitants would appear in the great tree-top. I do not ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... the vicar and Robin into the church at an unaccustomed time, without which sermon-book they would never have met Priscilla in the churchyard and driven her out of it. Thus are all our doings ruled by Chance; and it is a pleasant pastime for an idle hour to trace back big events to their original and sometimes absurd beginnings. For myself I know that the larger lines of my life were laid down once for all by—but what has this to do with Priscilla? Thus, I say, are all our doings ruled by Chance, who ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... I am thy Pastime. Let me be to thee A daily refuge from the haunting fears That bind thee, choke thee, fill thy soul with woe. Seek thou my hand, ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the little house, which was visited by few guests except during the fair, well merited its good reputation. Opportunity and inclination were found for various kinds of amusement. But, as she neither could nor dared go much out of the house, the pastime was somewhat limited. We sang the songs of Zachariae; played the "Duke Michael" of Krueger, in which a knotted handkerchief had to take the place of the nightingale; and so, for a while, it went on quite tolerably. But since such connections, the more innocent they are, afford the less ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... world, both pure and good, Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... castles, while I lie on the beach and read the paper. In the evening we will listen to the band, or stroll on the esplanade, not so much because we want to, as to give the natives a treat. Possibly, if the weather continues warm, we may even paddle. A vastly exhilarating pastime, I am led to believe, and so strengthening for the ankles. And on Monday morning we will return, bronzed and bursting with health, to our toil ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... by name, as the sun sank behind the western hills, informed me that I was again to be disappointed, the fact that he stands six feet two in his stockings, when he wears them, and has a pleasing way of bending crowbars as a pastime, led me to conceal the irritation which ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... for here was I, mounted by the stalest of catamites, involuntarily and almost unconsciously responding with as rapid a cadence to him as Quartilla did in her wriggling under me. While this was going on, Pannychis, unaccustomed at her tender years to the pastime of Venus, raised an outcry and attracted the attention of the soldier, by this unexpected howl of consternation, for this slip of a girl was being ravished, and Giton the victor, had won a not bloodless victory. Aroused by what he saw, the soldier rushed upon them, seizing Pannychis, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the tour of his town according to his laudable official habit, Beauvisage from the top of the bridge chanced to catch sight of the fair Parisian who with outstretched arms and gracefully bent body was pursuing her favorite pastime. A slight movement, the charming impatience with which the pretty fisher twitched her line from the water when the fish had not bitten, was perhaps the electric shock which struck upon the heart of the magistrate, hitherto irreproachable. No ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... at least one pastime which could be shared with none, and which bade fair to recompense him for all the childish sports he was denied. With a small block of wood and a few simple tools his skilful fingers wrought such wonders that Kala and Sigmund, and the very children ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... playing the lyre, and the light issues round him from twinkling feet and fair-woven raiment. But all they are glad, seeing him so high of heart, Leto of the golden tresses, and Zeus the Counsellor, beholding their dear son as he takes his pastime among the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... waters. In fact, so low were these villainous wretches in their degradation that only the most cruel and cunningly devised torture could satiate their bloodthirsty cravings—human hyenas, who found rest only in the pains and shrieks of other mortals. By far the most favorite pastime was to make the victim "walk the plank" or hang him to the yardarm—a suggestion of the retribution suffered by the pirates when captured. No word picture can present the awful orgies indulged in by these social outcasts, who continued their carnage, ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... he declaimed, striking an attitude. "Wounded on the field of battle! Glory! Triumph! Paeans! My word, old top, but I certainly am proud to be the chum of such a hero! I'm so sot-up I could scream for joy. Football's a wonderful pastime, isn't it?" ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... know," responded her brother, who was beginning to feel that all this turtle business was a rather youthful pastime for a ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... passes and the exile sleeps, And well his tongue the solemn secret keeps Of the great peace he found afar, until, Death's writ of extradition to fulfill, They brought him, helpless, from that friendly zone To be a show and pastime in his own— A final opportunity to those Who fling with equal aim the stone and rose; That at the living till his soul is freed, This at the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Upon these occasions one's only chance of salvation is to make a rapid calculation as to the bay into which the sausage is going to fall, and then double speedily round a traverse—or, if possible, two traverses—into another. It is an exhilarating pastime, but presents complications when played by a large number of persons in a restricted space, especially when the persons aforesaid are not unanimous as to the ultimate landing-place ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... gazed with horror upon the lifeless body of the otter and cried out, "This creature which you mistook for an otter, and which you have robbed and killed, is my son, Oddar, who for mere pastime had taken the form of the furry beast. You are ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... offices Gillian might be meditating on her conquest, picked up the first cheap book that looked innocently sensational, and left her to study it on various sofas. And when daylight failed for inspections, Gillian still had reason to rejoice in the pastime devised for her, since there was an endless discussion at the agent's, over the only two abodes that could be made available, as to prices, repairs, time, and terms. They did not get away till it was quite dark and the gas lighted, and Miss Mohun did not think the ascent of the steps ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot's languorous mood, Made answer, "Ay, but wherefore toss me this Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound? Let be thy fair Queen's fantasy. Strength of heart And might of limb, but mainly use and skill, Are winners in this pastime of our King. My hand—belike the lance hath dript upon it— No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight, Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield, Great brother, thou nor I have made the world; Be happy in thy ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... primitive pastime," observed OLD MORALITY, when, later, we sat down to dinner; "but remarkably refreshing; a great stimulant for the appetite. Indeed," he added, as he transferred a whole grouse to his plate, "I do not know anything that more forcibly brings home ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... an amusement of the Duchess of Queensberry and of Gay to write joint letters. They thoroughly loved fooling, and frequently indulged together in that pleasant pastime. ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... yet a frequent pastime, nor dancing, save in cities and large towns. Balls every pious New Englander abhorred as sinful. The theatre was similarly tabooed—in Massachusetts, so late as 1784, by law. New York and Philadelphia frowned upon it then, though ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... him who is free to slide. "Blessed is he who has to do things." Responsibility is the great force that builds character. Compare the relative development of the person who spends Tuesday evening at home with the evening paper, or at some other pastime, and of the person who, having accepted fully the call to teach, leads a class of truth-seekers through an hour's discussion of some vital subject. Follow the development through the Tuesday evenings of ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... boisterous sport. At a little distance, among the lodges, some children and half-grown squaws were playfully tossing up one of their number in a buffalo robe, an exact counterpart of the ancient pastime from which Sancho Panza suffered so much. Farther out on the prairie, a host of little naked boys were roaming about, engaged in various rough games, or pursuing birds and ground-squirrels with their bows and arrows; and woe to the unhappy little animals ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Quire with choicest sports, All pastime fit for Phoebus Courts; And Thou great Master of the Revels, joyne The Graces, to thy Daughters nine; Witt pure and quaint, with rich conceits and free From all obscaene scurrilitie: Here free from care, nimbly let's dance a round Upon Bracciano's ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... and, indeed, would go far out of his way to do even a total stranger a service; but there could be no two opinions upon the matter, he told himself—these savages must be made to understand that raiding expeditions to this particular island were too dangerous and unprofitable a pastime to be indulged in. He therefore once more opened fire upon them, and now in deadly earnest, his first three shots missing, while his fourth struck the hull of the canoe and made the splinters fly. Then he scored two more misses, followed by a hit that extorted a shriek from one of the crew. This ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... pins about him. What a shouting joke! She must take it back to his friends at the shore, who would kid him unmercifully about it. The thing had never been known in his life before. Perhaps, too, she would amuse herself a little, just as a pastime, by opening the eyes of this village maiden to the opportunity she was missing? Why not? Just on the verge ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... racing-sheets and the multitudinous data of the track. A greater part of his time went to the cultivation of his one hobby—the track and horses—for by reason of his financial standing, having large cotton and real-estate holdings in the State, he could afford to use business as a pastime. ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems, for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... nothing about their slavery when afloat, nothing about the tyranny they are frequently subjected to; and in his days, a man-o'-war was too often literally a floating pandemonium. He makes landsmen believe that Jack is the happiest, most enviable fellow in the world: storms and battles are mere pastime; lopped limbs and wounds are nothing more than jokes; there is the flowing can to 'sweethearts and wives' every Saturday night; and whenever the ship comes to port, the crew have guineas galore to spend on lasses and fiddles. In fine, both at sea and ashore, according to his theory, jolly Jack has ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... the mountains for some hours. I had lately been thinking of writing some children's verses, addressed to a certain little girl, but nothing had come of it. Now as I walked on the mountainside, I felt again a desire for this pastime, and worked at it on several occasions, but could not get it into shape. The night, when one has slept an hour or two, is the time when ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... of a deathless lay The pastime of a drowsy summer day. But gather all thy powers, and wreck them on the verse That thou dost weave. . . . The secret wouldst thou know To touch the heart or fire the blood at will? Let thine eyes overflow, Let thy lips quiver ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... made it a point of duty to get off at San Pasqual and eat whether they were hungry or not; information clerk for rates and methods of transportation for all desert points north, south, east and west. She was the recipient of confidences from waitresses engaged in the innocent pastime of across- the-counter flirtations with conductors and brakemen. She was the joy of the men and the envy of the women. In fact, Donna was an exemplified copy of that distinctive personality with which we unconsciously invest any young woman upon whose ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... spoken of his boyhood for years, but he never ceased to think of those happy days. And although he tried hard, he could not believe that it was all a dream. Whenever he played a game of chess, which was his one pastime, he seemed to see himself in his old room at Mayence, and he sighed. His fellow priests wondered why he did this, and he laughingly told them it was because he had no idea ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... with the war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even these will appreciate the remark of a diplomatist of a certain weak country in contact with European powers, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... I passed the winter in the wilderness of northern Maine. I was passionately fond of skating, and the numerous lakes and rivers, frozen by the intense cold, offered an ample field to the lover of this pastime. ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... department of art, the earliest stage of development seems to be the very most perfect. Pyramid building was a pastime of the earliest Pharaos; [tr. note: sic] the later did not attempt to rival these structures with any of their own. No finer jewelry can be produced to-day than the gold ornaments found in the oldest tombs of Egypt. The finest examples of East Indian architecture are the oldest. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... which would be unspeakably wearisome to her if played with people of her own age; indeed, the chances are she will thoroughly enjoy such evenings, and be as interested in capping verses or asking twenty questions as any of the youngsters, while if she is a worn and anxious mother, such simple pastime may be the best refreshment. I believe there is less to be said in favor of cards than of other games, but I often think of the words of a friend, "We are strict people," she said, "but when the boys were growing ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... as the croakers had it, as soon as a week's consecutive skating had made everyone proficient enough to enjoy the pastime, the snow descended, and fell in a persistent shower which made the ice impossibly rough. The girls looked out from their windows on a wonderful white world, whose beauty was for the time hidden from ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... tried to drive an eel? No? Well, let me assure you that pig-driving is a pleasant pastime in comparison. We have it on good authority that if you want to drive a pig in a particular direction all you have to do is to point his nose straight and then try to pull him back by the ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... the sport, though loudly demanded, does not begin. The Americains grow derisive and find pastime in gibes and raillery. They mock the various Latins with their national inflections, and answer their scowls with laughter. Some of the more aggressive shout pretty French greetings to the women of Gascony, and one bargeman, amid peals of applause, stands on ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... made, notably by John Adams, to exploit it against him. Taney, a Catholic, was raised without objection on that score to the first judicial post in America, at a date when such an appointment would have raised a serious tumult in England. At a later date Ingersoll was able to vary the pastime of "Bible-smashing" with the profession of an active Republican wire-puller, without any of the embarrassments which that much better and honester man, Charles Bradlaugh, had to encounter. The American Republic has not escaped the difficulties ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... girls, unfortunately, are forced to care for him, and such as him, because, while their minds are mostly unemployed, their sensations are all unworn, and, consequently, fresh and green; and he, on the contrary, has had his fill of pleasure, and can with impunity make a mere pastime of other people's torments. This is an unfair state of things; the match is not equal. I only wish I had the power to infuse into the souls of the persecuted a little of the quiet strength of pride—of the supporting consciousness of superiority (for they are superior to him ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... admirable rule; and if the excellent Captain had never uttered another word, he might have passed for a profound philosopher. It is a rule which should shine in gilt letters on the gingerbread of youth, and the spectacle-case of age. Every man who reads with any view beyond mere pastime, knows the value of it. Every one, more or less, acts upon it. Every one regrets and suffers who neglects it. There is some trouble in it, to be sure; but in what good thing is there not? and what trouble does it save! Nay, what mischief! ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... did take me up and so to Greenwich, and after sitting with them a while at their house, home, thinking to get Mrs. Knipp, but could not, she being busy with company, but sent me a pleasant letter, writing herself "Barbary Allen." I went therefore to Mr. Boreman's for pastime, and there staid an houre or two talking with him, and reading a discourse about the River of Thames, the reason of its being choked up in several places with shelfes; which is plain is, by the encroachments ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... believe if she saw me kill some one on the spot she would think it all my generosity; or, if she could not, she would take and die. Oh no! I'll not fail her. No, I won't; not if I have to spend seven years after the model of old Bill, whose liveliest pastime is a good long sermon, when it is not ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... permitted for all indifferently to hunt, clergymen are decharged it, Peasants also. Its confessed also by al that Kings may discharge their subjects the pastime and pleasure of hunting, especially thess who holds their lands in fief immediatly of the King, which he called fiefs royalles, whom he may hinder to hunt in their oune ground, ower which they have ful power otherwise to sel ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... doubt if it will do any good. People devour books but, when they have finished one, they never ask themselves what is to be done. It is immediately followed by another on a different subject, and reading becomes nothing but a pastime or a narcotic. Judith may be admired, but it is by those who will not undergo the fatigue of a penny journey in an omnibus to see their own Judith, perhaps nearly related to them, and will excuse themselves because she ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... thus in the Spectator, Addison, in order to oppose the Italian opera, by what he regarded as a more rational pastime, produced his English opera of Rosamond, which was acted in 1706, and proved a failure on the stage. The music is said to have been bad, and the poetry is the work of a writer destitute of lyrical genius. Lord Macaulay, who finds a merit in almost everything produced by Addison, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... emotions, when natural sentiments could no longer soar. The entrance to the Coliseum is by two doors, one consecrated to the victors, and by the other were carried out the dead: strange contempt for the human race, which made the life or death of man dependent upon the pastime of a public spectacle! Titus, the best of emperors, dedicated the Coliseum to the Roman people,—and these admirable ruins bear such fine traits of magnificence and genius, that we are led into an illusion ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... the village train, from labor free, Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree; While many a pastime circled in the shade, The young contending as the old surveyed; And many a gambol frolicked o'er the ground, And sleights of art and feats of ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... life. Nevertheless, it may not be amiss to call attention here to the value of such training given almost in play, and without question in such attractive forms as to make character building through its influence an ideal pastime, a valuable investment, and a complete program, for growing girls, who may emerge from the "bundle of habits" as strong members of society, progressive business women, or nicely trained little helpers for the home, or for the more sheltering conditions ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... place of his own, a small, nondescript joint called "Louie's Crab House" up the Choptank River, near the town of Denton. There, on wooden trestle tables covered with brown wrapping paper, he introduced them to a favorite Chesapeake Bay pastime known as ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... from every joint, and filling it from a bag, or rather sack, of coarse and vile-smelling tobacco, puffs forth volumes of smoke, expectorating ad nauseam at intervals of a minute or less. No considerations of place or person hinder him from indulging in his favourite pastime. In steam-boats, in diligences, in the public walks and promenades, into the dining-rooms of hotels, every where does the pipe intrude itself; carried as habitually as a walking-cane; and even when not in actual use, emitting the most evil odour from the bowl and tube, saturated as they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... cost; but when the sketch and estimate are made, you shall see them; and if the cost exceeds your views, there will be no harm done; on the contrary, I shall have had the pleasure of scheming a little for you by way of pastime. ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... thought without her. Man, you don't know what it is to love my Jessie. You can't, 'cos your love's not honest. You've taken her same as you'd take any woman for your pleasure. If I was dead, would you marry her? No, never, never, never. She's a pastime to you, and when you've done with her you'd turn her right out on this prairie to herd with the cattle, if ther' wasn't anywher' else for her to go." Then his voice suddenly rose and his fury supervened again. "God!" he cried fiercely. "Give me back my wife. You're ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... lectures are exhibitors of imitations only. However, I have the general resemblance to Prometheus, as I said before—a resemblance which I share with the dollmakers—, that my modelling is in clay; but then there is no motion, as with him, not a sign of life; entertainment and pastime is the beginning and the end of my work. So I must look for light elsewhere; possibly the title is a sort of lucus a non lucendo, applied to me as to Cleon ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... in one or two boards too many, hoping that he would give him what was over, or, at least, something for the suggestion. He is said to have followed a man who was chewing mastic (a sort of gum, chewed, like betel, by Orientals as a pastime) for a whole mile, thinking he was perhaps eating food, intending, if so, to ask him for some. When the youths of the town jeered and taunted him, he told them there was a wedding at such a house, in order to get rid of them (because they would go to get a share ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... a little longer listening outside the sick bay, but soon gave up the pastime, nothing occurring to interest us during the medical examination of the new hands, a fresh batch of whom came aft, by the way, at Four Bells; for all of them were quickly passed by the doctor and were detailed for duty aloft and below, where many jobs were at ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... recovered, for the next moment a servant came rushing into the room with the information that a number of the ingenuous peasantry of the neighborhood were about to indulge that evening in the national pastime of burning a farmhouse and shooting a landlord. Guy smiled a fearful smile, without, however, altering his stern and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... King's wife laughed her rippling laughter that had in it all the music of falling waters. "Shed no tears over that, ladybird! Would I be apt to let such an odious bear as Rothgar Lodbroksson rob me of my newest plaything? Whence to my dulness a pastime but for your help? Though he were the King's blood-brother, he should tell for naught. You do not guess half the entertainment your wild ways will be to me. I expect it will be more pleasant for me to have ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... They were met at the Head of the Stairs by the General's Women, who with a great deal of Respect conducted them into the House. Captain Swan, and we that were with him followed after. It was not long before the General caused his dancing Women to enter the Room, and divert the Company with that pastime. I had forgot to tell you that they have none but vocal Musick here, by what I could learn, except only a row of a kind of Bells without Clappers, 16 in number, and their weight increasing gradually from about three ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... awakening in an unwatched moment, liberated his tender hands from the swaddling band, swept away by his left arm the primitive forest planted by the Lord at creation's dawn, and raised by his right hand this mighty metropolis. Why, if that be your childhood's pastime, I am awed by the presentiment of your manhood's task; for it is written, that it is forbidden to men to approach too near to omnipotence. And that people here which created this rich city, and changed the native woods of the red man into a flourishing seat of Christian civilization ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... But since man proposes and God disposes, the posts were either careless, or God ordained it thus; for suddenly the enemy rushed upon our men, who could not unite, as they were by that time scattered through the forest. The enemy, having caught them off their guard, made a pastime of it, killing twenty-six men, and carrying off arms, powder, balls, and fuses. I regard that event as the greatest of all our losses. Among those of our men killed there by the enemy was Captain Lopez Suarez, a fine soldier. Our men were not disheartened by these reverses, except such and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... pastime of our boys, was that of imitating the noise of every bird and beast in the woods. This faculty was not merely a pastime, but a very necessary part of education, on account of its utility in certain circumstances. The imitations of the gobbling, and other sounds of wild turkeys, often ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... it some way. In pleasant weather, getting acquainted with nature, in field and garden and by the seashore, was my favorite pastime." ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... hand they strove and wrestled Stoutly for that pearl of pride, Where mid flame and woe it nestled Down with danger at its side. Yet like boys released from class time, Though the blast destroying blew, There they played and found a pastime While the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... whelp. He was idly beating the branches as he lounged along: or he stooped viciously to rip the moss from the trees with his stick. He was startled when they came upon him while he was engaged in this latter pastime, and ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... of future mischief. This is not the principle of Richard's cruelty, which displays the wanton malice of a fiend as much as the frailty of human passion. Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and retaliation by necessity; to Richard, blood is a pastime.—There are other decisive differences inherent in the two characters. Richard may be regarded as a man of the world, a plotting, hardened knave, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, and the means to secure them.—Not so Macbeth. The superstitions ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of Lady Jane Grey. "In our forefathers' time, when Papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... define humor in terms of what it is not. We can draw lines around it and distinguish it from its next of kin, wit. This indeed has been a favorite pastime with the jugglers of words in all ages. And many have been the attempts to define humor, to define wit, to describe and differentiate them, to build high ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... began to tell each other fearful stories of Surajah Dowlah and his career. It was said that when he was a child his favourite pastime had been the torturing of birds and animals, from which, while still in his boyhood, he had passed to mutilating slaves; that not only had he given himself from his earliest years to every species of oriental lust—some too vile ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... the mountaines, and appoynted for euery Gentleman and Captaine that would ride, a horse ready sadled, and then singled out three of the best of them to bee hunted by horsemen after their maner, so that the pastime grewe very pleasant for the space of three houres, wherein all three of the beasts were killed, whereof one tooke the Sea, and there was slaine with a musket. After this sport many rare presents and gifts were giuen and bestowed on both parts, and the next day wee played the Merchants ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... been seriously ill for some weeks and totally incapable of duty. The first mate died on the voyage, and the second was not equal to the difficulties of navigation. The captain was accompanied by his daughter, who had been several years at sea and learned the mysteries of Bowditch more as a pastime than for anything else. In the dilemma she assumed control of the ship, making the daily observation and employing the mate as executive officer. When they reached Hong Kong the captain was just ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... began a little to decrease; for, though a boy has no objection to see his neighbour laughed at, he does not like quite so well to be laughed at himself, and there are very few who can bear it with good humour. And now Joachim had given such way to the pastime, that he was always hunting up absurdities in his friends and neighbours, and no ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... literary work, until the sound of a conch summoned the family to a lunch, or second breakfast, about eleven o'clock. After this there was rest and music till four, and then outdoor work or play, lawn-tennis being a very favourite pastime, and in the evening they had more music, and a game at cards. It was a simple, natural life, and one that made far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors, too, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... mouth, must die of hunger and cease from gazing altogether, or be fed by his friends. The instruments of achievement may be adorned, and made delightful in the using, but they must not {197} on that account be mistaken for the achievement; leisure may be made a worthy pastime through the cultivation of the sensibilities, but it must not be substituted for vocation, or allowed to infect a serious purpose ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... mill-hand is that she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time stretch toward it. They have no time to think, even if they knew how. All that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find under their hand. We have never realized, they have never known, that their great need—given the work that is wrung from them and the degradation in which they are forced to live—is a craving for amusement ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... all by itself. It was the deck on which one could occasionally see the patients playing an odd game with long sticks and bits of wood—not shuffleboard but something even lower in the mental scale. This morning, however, the devotees of this pastime were apparently under proper restraint, ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... committed an act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime. Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his choice of recreations, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the accepted leader and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove Hugo to writing his Hernani, and Gautier to wearing his red waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of shocking the bourgeois. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them so and to explain why; and we made our protest against ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... with feverish anticipation for the time when he should win a vast fortune to lay by for the child, his pet and darling, to keep her from want if death should take him away. But of this little Nell knew nothing, or she would have implored him to give up the wicked and dangerous pastime. ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... a rattling pace. It is to be feared that his perception of the difference between good architecture and bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have been seen gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. Ugly churches were a part of his pastime in Europe, as well as beautiful ones, and his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided stroll in ...
— The American • Henry James
... aloud, Chieftains world-famed! I hear the ancient blood That leaps against your hearts! What? Warriors ye! Danger your birthright, and your pastime death! Behold your foes! They stand before you plain: Ill passions, base ambitions, falsehood, hate: Wage war on these! A King is in your host! His hands no roses plucked but on the Cross: He came not hand of man in woman's tasks To mesh. In ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... legions already drawn from their numbers, disciplined, and accustomed to our modes of warfare? Truly, this war with Rome seems to be approached much as if it were but some passing show of arms, some holiday pastime. But the gods grant that none of my ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... became his muster-field. Here Lewis Willis, John Fitzhugh, William Bustle, Langhorn Dade, and other companions, marched and counter-marched, under the generalship of their young commander, George. Soldiering became the popular pastime of the region, in which the boys played the part of the Englishmen and Spaniards better than boys can ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... passion for great societies, balls, masquerades, and all kinds of public and private amusements, as well as her subsequent attachment to the Duchesse de Polignac, who so much encouraged them for the pastime of her friend and sovereign. Though naturally averse to everything requiring study or application, Marie Antoinette was very assiduous in preparing herself for the parts she performed in the various comedies, farces, and cantatas given ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... hunting. He had first been led to the country by that spirit of the hunter, which in him amounted almost to a passion. This propensity may be said to be natural to man. Even in cities and populous places we find men so fond of this pastime that they ransack the cultivated fields and enclosures of the farmer, for the purpose of killing the little birds and squirrels, which, from their insignificance, have ventured to take up their abode with civilized ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... homesteads closely resembling those of the Gauls are met with at every turn, and cattle are very numerous. Gold coins are in use, or iron bars of fixed weight. Hares, fowls, and geese they think it wrong to taste; but they keep them for pastime or amusement. The climate is more equable than in Gaul, the cold being less severe. The island is triangular in shape, one side being opposite Gaul. One corner of this side, by Kent—the landing-place ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... sinned against the law, instead of rending his garments, he would do all the law commanded to obtain forgiveness. Was there, he asked, anything in the law against cock-fighting? or in the traditions? It was a pastime of the heathen: he knew that, and had hoped a day of fasting might be suggested to him, but if this offence was more serious than he had supposed he besought his father to say so. Tell me, Father, have I ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... obliged the husbandmen to take precautions for the safety of their flocks. They constructed provisional enclosures into which the animals were driven every evening, when the pastures were too far off to allow of the flocks being brought back to the sheepfold. The chase was a favourite pastime among them, and few days passed without the hunter's bringing back with him a young gazelle caught in a trap, or a hare killed by an arrow. These formed substantial additions to the larder, for the Chaldaeans do not seem to have kept ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... upon biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime; but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity of ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and present companion, who kept a hawk, and vainly endeavoured to teach the bird to know him and perch on his wrist. But Perry was fond of hawks, and much regretted that the days were gone by when hawking was a favourite pastime. ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... decidedly of this opinion herself, albeit she would not have dared to say as much. She liked soft raiment, bright colours, dainty ways, and pretty speeches. Looking down from her window upon the passers by, it was her favourite pastime to fancy herself one of the hooped and powdered and gorgeously-apparelled ladies, with their monstrous farthingales, their stiff petticoats, their fans, their patches, and their saucy, coquettish ways to the gentlemen in their train. All this bedizenment, which ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... gospel of work to its fullest extent. He did not, indeed, disdain pleasure; no one enjoyed physical exercise, or a good play, or a pleasant dinner, more than he; he drank in deep draughts of the highest and the best that life had to offer; but even in pastime he was never idle. He did not know what it was to saunter, he debited himself with every minute of his time; he combined with the highest intellectual powers the faculty of utilizing them to the fullest extent ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... and emeralds, on the tops of the cattail rushes. Very lazily and without the slightest reluctance, Uncle Andy ruled in his line, secured his cast, and leaned his rod securely in a forked branch to await more favorable conditions for his pet pastime. For the present it seemed to him that nothing could be more delightful and more appropriate to the hour than to lie under the thick-leaved maple at the top of the bank, and smoke and gaze out in lotus-eating ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in the shelter of the camp cottage going through this pastime, a voice from near at hand resounded through the woods, and made their blood stop to circulate for an instant on ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... by loud voices and laughter reminded him he had promised, at that hour, and in that sequestered place, to decide a bet respecting pistol-shooting, to which the titular Lord Etherington, Jekyl, and Captain MacTurk, to whom such a pastime was peculiarly congenial, were parties as well as himself. The prospect this recollection afforded him, of vengeance on the man whom he regarded as the author of his sister's wrongs, was, in the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... desert me without relief." "By Allah," replied she, "they will not profit thee with aught of aid." Said he, "I will rise at once and go to them and knock at their doors; it may be I shall get from them somewhat wherewith I may trade and leave pastime and pleasuring." So he rose without stay or delay, and repaired to a street wherein all his ten friends lived. He went up to the nearest door and knocked; whereupon a handmaid came out and asked him, "Who art thou?"; and he answered, "Tell thy ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... from lovers and to reply to them. The natural consequence of this was the custom, which so largely prevailed, of young men, absolutely unknown to the parents, establishing correspondence or meetings with the objects of their adoration by means of a complacent doncella with an open palm, or the pastime known as pelando el pavo (literally, "plucking the turkey"), which consisted of serenades of love songs, amorous dialogues, or the passage of notes through the reja—the iron gratings which protect the lower windows of Spanish houses from the prowling ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... fair lady; yet he complained of the interval being tedious, as indeed most young men are impatient when they are waiting for the accomplishment of any event they have set their hearts upon. The prince, therefore, to make the time seem short to him, proposed as a kind of merry pastime that they should invent some artful scheme to make Benedick and Beatrice fall in love with each other. Claudio entered with great satisfaction into this whim of the prince, and Leonato promised them his assistance, and even Hero said ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash. His alter ego "walked"—that was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself did—Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... the exile sleeps, And well his tongue the solemn secret keeps Of the great peace he found afar, until, Death's writ of extradition to fulfill, They brought him, helpless, from that friendly zone To be a show and pastime in his own— A final opportunity to those Who fling with equal aim the stone and rose; That at the living till his soul is freed, This at the body to conceal ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... trifling circumstance of a mislaid sermon-book to take the vicar and Robin into the church at an unaccustomed time, without which sermon-book they would never have met Priscilla in the churchyard and driven her out of it. Thus are all our doings ruled by Chance; and it is a pleasant pastime for an idle hour to trace back big events to their original and sometimes absurd beginnings. For myself I know that the larger lines of my life were laid down once for all by—but what has this to do with Priscilla? Thus, I say, are all our doings ruled by Chance, who loves to use ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... presence in the house he would not have got into this habit of going there. As far as ever from harbouring any serious thoughts concerning Rhoda, he felt himself impelled along the way which he had jokingly indicated in talk with Micklethwaite; he was tempted to make love to her as an interesting pastime, to observe how so strong-minded a woman would conduct herself under such circumstances. Had she or not a vein of sentiment in her character? Was it impossible to move her as other women are moved? Meditating thus, he looked up and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... about angling is that it is just the pastime for an idle man. "The lazy young vagabond cares for nothing but fishing!" exclaims the despairing mother to her sympathetic neighbour of the next cottage listening to the family troubles. Even those who ought to know better ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... bad habit," said my lord, lighting another seagar: "a disgusting and filthy practice, which you, my dear child, will do well to avoid. It is at best, dear Algernon, but a nasty, idle pastime, unfitting a man as well for mental exertion as for respectable society; sacrificing, at once, the vigor of the intellect and the graces of the person. By-the-by, what infernal bad tobacco they have, too, in this hotel. Could not you send ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... will," and Freedom, on the other, "You shall not." So the war-cloud, "the size of a man's hand" only at first, appeared upon the dim horizon of the future. Wisdom sought to devise plans for averting war, but Folly shook her locks tauntingly, and said mockingly, "Ha! ha! War is pleasant pastime." So the culmination was reached, and a misguided people, clamorous for war, sounded the tocsin that caused rivers of blood to flow from brothers' hearts, and enshrouded a grand and happy people ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... ball to their end of the parish at New Court." Many severe kicks were given, and the whole thing was taken so keenly "that a Bro or a Blaenau would as soon lose a cow from his cowhouse as the football from his portion of the parish." There is plainly more than a mere pastime here; the thing appears to have been originally a struggle between ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... mansion boldly enough, and it was only when the Princess had invited me to dance, and I, for some reason or another (though I had driven there with no other thought in my head than to dance well), had replied that I never indulged in that pastime, that I began to blush, and, left solitary among a crowd of strangers, became plunged in my usual insuperable and ever-growing shyness. In fact, I remained silent on that spot almost ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... chase each other through the water, and flap their wings and dive about, in evident enjoyment of their pastime, it is a sign that rain ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... with a handle of walrus-tooth; in his left hand he bore two spears tipped with glittering bronze. Fergus and Concobar watched him as he strode over the grass; Concobar noted his beauty and grace, but Fergus noted his great strength. Soon the boys, being divided into two equal bands, began their pastime and contended, eagerly urging the ball to and fro. The noise of the stricken ball and the clash of the hurles shod with bronze, the cries of the captains, and the shouting of the ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... reader—old writers always called you gentle—something very much more than a novel to amuse an idle hour. To read it will be enjoyable pastime, no doubt; but the brilliant romance of the brilliant author calls upon you for some exercise of the finest sympathy and intelligence; sympathy for a glorious nation which, with only one exception, has suffered beyond all other nations; ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... guard him. In a few minutes, with this one exception, they were all asleep. It seemed to George that these men could sleep at all hours of the day or night; in fact, as far as he could see, it was their one pastime. Work and watchfulness, except when compulsory, seemed to be quite out ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... the lorde Generall gaue sharpe commandement by his letters, forbidding al men aboorde the ships to vse any play, with tables, cards, or dice, either for money, or for pastime, or vpon credit. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Reading being the one pastime which could be practiced without making a noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by stealth, everything that fell ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the improved method of fire fighting in Southern cities—before the steam engine, the hook and ladder and water tower companies supplanted the old hand pump and bucket companies, the Negro was the chief fire fighter, and there was nothing that tended more to make fire fighting a pleasant pastime than those old volunteer organizations. For many years after the war Wilmington was supplied with water for the putting out of fires by means of cisterns which were built in the centre of streets. When the old bell in the market house tower sounded the alarm of fire, ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... let the people make all the laws they liked; it did not matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians. Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more. Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... the firm was always in a hurry; never seemed to have a minute to spare; the "racing rush" took hold of him. Duncan Fraser smiled grimly as he thought how Alan careered about the country in pursuit of his favorite pastime. ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... went on Mistress Margaret, in her singularly sweet old voice; "and you know it, my nephew. It is very well as a pastime, but some folks make it their business; and that is nothing less than fooling with the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Pullen, having amassed sufficient of this world's goods, lived in peaceful seclusion, far removed from the worldly strife he wished to avoid. With his two sons, he tilled a few acres of land. He fished a little as a pastime, and visited the mainland but seldom. He was a blunt-spoken, but warm-hearted man, with shaggy white beard and hair, and a voice and handshake as hearty as ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... exhausted) had not the means of allaying—while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings; the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return toward nightfall to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the hours of uneasy ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Spermaceti whale; for like you mortals, the whale is at times a sort of hypochondriac and dyspeptic. You must know, subjects, that in antediluvian times, the Spermaceti whale was much hunted by sportsmen, that being accounted better pastime, than pursuing the Behemoths on shore. Besides, it was a lucrative diversion. Now, sometimes upon striking the monster, it would start off in a dastardly fright, leaving certain fragments in its wake. These fragments the hunters picked up, giving over the chase for a while. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... arranged for a bull-fight—a form of recreation that, as I was informed, is much dans les habitudes Nmoises and very common throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nmes it has a characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make a circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves. I was surprised ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... with both its own, under which the flying damsel who has to be caught and kissed bobs in and out, doubling like a hare, till she is out of breath, and is overtaken at last, and led bashfully into the centre of the group, to suffer the awful penalty of the law. While this popular pastime is prolonged to the last moment, the van is getting ready to return; the old folks assist in stowing away the empty baskets and vessels; and an hour or so before sun-down, or it may be half an hour after, the whole party are remounted, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... declined, in his fine bold hand, to countenance in person an act of folly he disapproved. Christopher put his letter away with a momentary sigh, and would not show it Rosa. All other letters they read together, charming pastime of that happy period. Presents poured in. Silver teapots, coffeepots, sugar-basins, cream-jugs, fruit-dishes, silver-gilt inkstands, albums, photograph-books, little candlesticks, choice little services of china, shell salt-cellars in a case lined with maroon velvet; a Bible, superb ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... accustomed way: school in the morning, with recess; school in the afternoon, followed by play, games of all sorts, and many another delightful pastime. Betty went for a walk with her two sisters; and presently, almost before they knew, they found themselves surveying their three little plots of ground in the gardens, which they had hitherto neglected. While they were so employed, Mrs. Haddo ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... destinies of writers and their works. Fortune awaits the aspiring scribe with many wiles, and oft treats him sorely. If she enrich any, it is but to make them subject of her sport. If she raise others, it is but to pleasure herself with their ruins. What she adorned but yesterday is to-day her pastime, and if we now permit her to adorn and crown us, we must to-morrow suffer her to crush and tear us to pieces. To-day her sovereign power is limited: she can but let loose a host of angry critics upon us; she can but scoff at us, take away our literary reputation, and turn ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... shown, and some more noble heart broke through Its bloody bond, and saved perhaps some pretty Child, or an aged, helpless man or two— What 's this in one annihilated city, Where thousand loves, and ties, and duties grew? Cockneys of London! Muscadins of Paris! Just ponder what a pious pastime war is. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... forget whose daughter that girl is; I will be a mother to her. And for yourself, give me the right to feel for you again as I once did, and I may find a way to raise you yet,—higher than you can raise yourself. I have some wit, Jasper, as you know. At the worst you shall have the pastime, I the toil. In your illness I will nurse you: in your joys I will intrude no share. Whom else can you marry? to whom else could you confide? who ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sinecure. Bricks without straw were a child's pastime to the cures aunt Polly and the Springs effected without a pretense to the comforts of life in health, to say nothing of sickness. Modern conveniences are costly, and how are you to get the facilities for "pay patients" when you have no patients that pay! Prosperity ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... President. But business-like to the last and after, he went off to the moment, just before the Grand Prix, choosing a week entirely blank, when, as there was no crime, or duel, or interesting lawsuit, or political event, the sensational obsequies of the Permanent Secretary would be the only pastime of the town. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... gloated over the little white pots, and was never tired of counting them. They looked so like New England, he declared, that he felt as if he must get a girl at once, and go and walk in the graveyard,—a pastime which he remembered as universal in his native town. Various cakes and puddings appeared to attest the industry of the housekeepers; and on the only wet evening, when a wild thunder-gust was sweeping down the valley, they had a wonderful candy-pull, and made enough ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... much the same, I think, with all amusements. How many men go to balls, to races, to the theatre, how many women to concerts and races, simply because it is the thing to do? They have perhaps, a vague idea that they may ultimately find some joy in the pastime; but, though they do the thing constantly, they never like it. Of all such men, the hunting men are perhaps ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... one shall tell me that it is to undervalue the Muses to make use of them only for sport and to pass away the time, I shall tell him, that he does not know so well as I the value of the sport, the pleasure, and the pastime; I can hardly forbear to add that all other end is ridiculous. I live from day to day, and, with reverence be it spoken, I only live for myself; there all my designs terminate. I studied, when young, for ostentation; since, to make myself ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... were simply swept out of existence, and the defenders irretrievably buried in the debris. One of the attacking divisions was Irish, who as a pleasing change from road-making in that malarial hole, Salonica, gave of their best with the bayonet, in which bright pastime they were capably aided and abetted by the 60th Division. It is the fashion to speak of successful military operations as being carried out "like clockwork." If extreme dash and gallantry in the face of every obstacle that brain of man ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... never carried out. Treasure Island was finished; the greater part of the Silverado Squatters written; so were the essays Talk and Talkers, A Gossip on Romance, and several other of his best papers for magazines. By way of whim and pastime he occupied himself, to his own and his stepson's delight, with a little set of woodcuts and verses printed by the latter at his toy press—"The Davos Press," as they called it—as well as with mimic campaigns carried on between ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acquaintance. He was the best posted man in military tactics I ever met, and was thoroughly familiar with all its branches from the school of the soldier to the grand tactics of a division. It was very profitable pastime for me to go over the tactics under his instruction, he illustrating each battalion movement by the use of matches on the coverlets of our cots. In that way I learned the various tactical movements as I had never been able to do before, and it was of immense value to me, having now ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... pill-box cap, he started forth, carrying himself as though exceeding proud to be what he was, and wondering whether a swim in the sea, which should end somewhere between Shorncliffe and Dieppe (and end his troubles too), would not be a better pastime. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... which the soldiers were exposed after the reduction of their number led to various scuffles; but their discipline prevented them from effectually retaliating on their persecutors, and baiting the soldiers became a popular pastime. On the evening of the 5th Captain Preston of the 29th regiment and about a dozen soldiers went to the rescue of a sentinel who was being ill-treated by the mob. After some provocation his men fired without orders, three of the mob were killed on the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... the forenoon was far advanced before we reached the field and began bean-planting. Quite enough of it remained, however, to render me certain that farm work, in summer, is far from being a pastime. We planted the beans among the corn which had been planted two weeks previously and was now a finger's length above the ground. The corn hills were three feet and a half apart, and between the hills of every row we now inserted ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... and undisciplined: they had never fought together. With Surcouf it was far different. His sailors were veterans—they had boarded many a merchantman and privateer before—and, they were well used to this gallant pastime. Besides, each had a boarding-axe, a cutlass,—pistol and a dagger—to say nothing of a blunderbuss loaded with six bullets, pikes fifteen feet long, and enormous clubs—all of this with "drinks all round" and the promise of pillage. No ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... fair sailor. I can handle a small yacht better than most men of my age. My experience is confined to a lake, but it is complete in that small way. And I taught myself the rudiments of navigation as a pastime." ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... complained of the taxing labor of all-day marching up and down streets and stairs and Zone hills beneath it; but to me, fresh from tramping over the mountains of Central America with twenty pounds on my shoulders, this was mere pastime. Heat had no terrors for the enumerated, however. Often in the hottest hour of the day I came upon negroes sleeping in tightly closed rooms, the sweat running off them in streams, yet apparently vastly enjoying ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... slouched upon a rock, glanced up at them dully. He had a long stick, with which he was apathetically turning over the smaller stones within his reach, and as apathetically killing the black bugs that scuttled out from the moist earth beneath. He desisted from this unexciting pastime as they drew near, and eyed them with the sullenness that comes of long isolation when the person's nature forbids that other extreme of babbling garrulity, for no man can live long months alone and remain perfectly normal. Nature, that stern mistress, ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... them would Kick In for any Pastime more worldly than a 10-cent M. P. Show depicting a large number of ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... of the plains. They joined a party of Mandans and soon were free to follow with them the exciting chase of the buffalo. A hunting-party was organized and a leader was chosen with due ceremony according to tribal rites. Those engaging in this dangerous pastime were mounted. They spread out so as to form a circle round the dense herd of buffaloes. By this means an equal chance was ensured to each hunter. Turn what way they would, the confused and struggling animals were confronted by hunters with gun and bow. When the sport was at its height misfortune ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... and manoeuvring of airships is not a pastime within the reach of a private purse. The British Government had taken advantage of the enterprise and rivalry of private makers of aeroplanes, whom it wisely permitted to run the risks and show the way. No such policy was possible in the manufacture of airships, which is essentially ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... with sighs Ulysses gave reply: "Ah why the ill-suiting pastime must I try? To gloomy care my thoughts alone are free; Ill the gay sorts with troubled hearts agree; Sad from my natal hour my days have ran, A much-afflicted, much-enduring man! Who, suppliant to ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... strongly attached to field sports, and as the "brawn of the tusked swine" was the first Christmas dish, it was provided by the pleasant preliminary pastime of hunting the wild boar; and the incidents of the chase afforded interesting table talk when the boar's head was brought in ceremoniously ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... among it, the champion fishers of the world, who spent their spare time in drifting past the English boats and hurling salty wit—at which pastime they often came off ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... forefinger extended with a threatening waggle was sufficient to rob her of every vestige of self-control, while the play of her brother's fingers over her ribs reduced her instantly to grovelling submission. To do Graham justice, he was quite unable to appreciate the fact that this pastime cost Ruth real suffering. He would have put his hand into the fire before he would have struck his sister, yet he frequently subjected her to misery compared to which a blow would ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... is intended to pass. His lordship is fond of amusing himself there in hunting down little animals called hares, and sometimes treats himself to a stag hunt. Not the slightest interference is contemplated with his lordship's pastime, or rather pursuit, for such it is, occupying nearly his whole time, and exercising all the ability of which he is possessed; but still he objects to the intrusion. The bridge that is to be constructed by the Company to give access to the wood, or ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... flame which arises from the fires kindled by the kind spirits of the north, to thaw the frozen mist which impedes their light footsteps across the face of the heavens. And the laugh is the laugh of eager joy, which those spirits utter when, indulging in their loved pastime, they remember the occurrence which led to their glorious destiny, and made the bright and starry north their place of residence ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... tell what the situation is here. But, in spite of the censor, I am going to tell what the situation is. It is involved. That is not because no one will explain it. In Greece at present, explaining the situation is the national pastime. Since arriving yesterday I have had the situation explained to me by members of the Cabinet, guides to the Acropolis, generals in the army, Teofani, the cigarette king, three ministers plenipotentiary, the man from St. Louis who is ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... one blows out a candle. There are many quite natural things in this world which we are strong enough to bear but for our nerves. I am struck by a truth not recognized by me formerly, not recognized generally,—that love for another man's wife, if only a pastime is the greatest vileness, and if real, the greatest misfortune that can happen to any man; the more worthy the woman the greater the misfortune. I have a burning curiosity within me, very bitter at ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of our existence is imaginary; and wise-acres may scoff as much as they please at what they term 'castle-building,' I believe all mankind indulge in it more or less; and it is an innocent, harmless pastime, which injures no one. I consider it the 'unwritten poetry,' the romance of life, which all feel; but many, like the dumb, strive in vain to give ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... by the strains in which they have joined. Song holds a large place in German life, and an essentially good one. As a means of strengthening popular patriotism no one has ever denied its efficacy, and as a mere pastime it is probably the most pacific and harmless that could be named. It may even be believed that the capacity and willingness among young men to amuse themselves with chorus singing indicates to some extent a national love of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... so far as to wear a tiny bit of ribbon by way of asserting allegiance to this or that crew, which sported the same color in cap, uniform, or flag. This, strange to say, did not act in the least as "a damper" on the pastime; even the fact that girls became popular as coxswains did not take the life out of it; all of which, as Dorry said, served to show the great hardihood ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... emerged from my hiding place, when the old villain scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she was trespassing, and she had learned that there were usually some swift penalties attached to this pastime. ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... mind-companions either of her own age or of any other. She was one of those unfortunate persons whose education and instincts' unfit them for their position. The diversions of youth had been denied her, the pleasures of dress or company had never been within her reach. For pastime she was turned back continually to her own thoughts, and an active imagination and much desultory reading had educated her in a school of romance, which found no counterpart in the life of Cullerne. She was proud at heart (and it is curious that those are often ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... pins as mere pastime. His countenance expressed his perfect incredulity. Napoleon, perceiving this, addressed to him some of his usual apostrophes, in which he was accustomed playfully to indulge in moments of relaxation, ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... threatening Arthur or myself, it was rapture to be restored to right thinking as regards this captivating and youthful spirit, who had suffered and must suffer always—and all through me, who thought it a pleasant pastime to play with hearts, and awoke to find I was playing with souls, and those of the two noblest ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... alive to the probabilities, nevertheless was disposed to regard them as 'fun and pastime.' He had had many a frolic with his baby-sisters, and this would be only a prolonged one; besides, it was 'Berry's' one hope, and to rescue any creature from a convent was a good work, in his Protestant eyes, which had not become a whit less prejudiced at Paris. So he was quite prepared to take ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shores and plains, and to retire to the most isolated and rugged parts of the islands, where they now are. They are still so brutal and so averse to civilization that they scarcely deserve more than the name of men; for they often cut off the heads of their own fathers and brothers as a pastime, for no other reason than their natural cruelty and brutality. Very few of them have fixed settlements, nor do they plant crops; but they live upon camotes (a kind of potato), other herbs and roots, and the game which they hunt. They hardly ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... walking pastime for two is for one to drive the other. Hoops are a great help (see p. 169) and so are dolls' perambulators. But on many walks nothing of this kind is allowed, and one has to fall back on conversation. Telling stories in turns, or making up stories about passers-by, is useful, but it is not every ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... called golf, and is the favourite pastime of my loyal Scottish subjects," said Prince Charles. "For that reason, that I may be able to share the amusements of my people, whom I soon hope to lead to a glorious victory, followed by a peaceful and prosperous reign, I am acquiring a difficult art. I'm practising walking ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... their kinsmen on the Continent also we learn from Caesar's account of the Germans (and Celts?) who, he says, practised warfare not only for a means of subsistence but also for exercising their warriors. How long-lived the custom has been amongst the Gaelic Celts, as an occupation or as a pastime, is evident not only from the plundering incursions or "creaghs"[3] as they are called in the Highlands and described by Scott in Waverley and The Fair Maid of Perth, but also from the "cattle-drives" which have been resorted to in our own day ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... were brought in, places were changed, and the stretcher bearers became the wounded and vice versa. We got rather tired of this pastime about 12.30 but there was still another wounded to be brought in. She had chosen the bottom of a heathery slope and took some finding. It was the C.O. She feigned delirium and threw her arms about in a wild manner. ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... had read of in poetry. But Mr Fisker liked to have his amusement as well as did the others, and went up resolutely into the cardroom. Here they were joined by Lord Grasslough, and were very quickly at work, having chosen loo as their game. Mr Fisker made an allusion to poker as a desirable pastime, but Lord Nidderdale, remembering his poetry, shook his head. 'Oh! bother,' he said, 'let's have some game that Christians play.' Mr Fisker declared himself ready for any game,—irrespective ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... walk the plank! The super won't forgive a single man who is caught at the royal pastime of hazing! I'm going to write, now, for the money to get home with. You know, in the last two affairs, the hazers have been dismissed ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... vp in their heauenly bodyes. And they perceiuing the same did smile at my bashful behauiour, making great sport at me: And thereat I was glad, and contented that I might any way occasion their pastime. But I was greatly ashamed, in that I was an vnfit companion for such a company, but that they intreated mee to enter in with them where I stood like a Crowe among white Doues, which made me partly ashamed to behould, and ouerlooke such ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... but war is not a pastime nor a very humane occupation. The result was, that robbery disappeared, and it is better for all that enlisted men should be soldiers rather than thieves. To secure the ends which alone can justify war—and if the Netherlanders engaged in defending national ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of young men having been making merry with their sweethearts, were at their coming home to come over a heath. Robin Good-fellow, knowing of it, met them, and to make some pastime, he led them up and down the heath a whole night, so that they could not get out of it; for he went before them in the shape of a walking fire, which they all saw and followed till the day did appear: then Robin left them, and at his departure spake ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... notebooks, 'unknown.' I will not try to tell you about all the good results of our Audubon Class that I have noticed. The most important thing I think is that a few more children have a keen interest and a true love for their little brothers of the air. Last year a favourite pastime of a neighbour was shooting birds for his cat, and I think he was no more particular than his cat as to the kind of birds he destroyed. His little daughter was a member of the Audubon Class and this spring I notice our {250} neighbour's cat has ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio settlement seem only a boy's pastime, to be put away with other childish things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand dunes—everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... this,' said Mrs Maurice, 'is the result of what, under other circumstances, would be a mere innocent gratification, a pleasant pastime, and a useful exercise.' ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... It is a fine pastime to step out from the surge of Life for a minute and let it ebb and flow around one in the lobby of the St. Francis. Such a pageant of individual stories. An exquisitely dressed young girl meets another there, ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... excellent progress and do much to keep up the reading habit. Fourth—The "Oh, just-anything-good-you-know" reader. Her name is legion. She never knows what she has read. Yet the social student who failed to take into account the desultory, pastime reader, would miss a great factor in the spread of ideas. Fifth—The person who does not read. He is commoner than most suppose. He is often young, more often boy than girl, oftener young man than young woman. He commits ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... their "Wardour Street" Old French are not usually the best qualified to do so; and it is not to be forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of Rabelais and a legitimate inheritor of Gauloiserie. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this way, except now and then as a mere pastime. And it is fair to recollect that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a year or two, did not waste much more time on these things, and that the intended ten dizains never, as a matter ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... powder pouches of the roughest and rudest make slung across the shoulders by a piece of thin cord? And such shot! irregular pellets of raw iron and lead, of which all I can say is that dying by such help would be far from an aesthetic operation. And yet these same soldiers, as a mere pastime, are employed in a service which requires no mean bravery. When not fighting the two-legged enemies of their country, they are engaged waging war against the four-legged ones, their land being infested with tigers ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... a hasty gesture, which she did not see, and then, ashamed at his feeling of impatience, went and sat beside her, and arranged the silks in her basket. Engaged in this light pastime, he did not hear a low rap at ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... look upon art as a pastime, literature as an occupation useless at best, while he willingly relegated love to the performance of a function, and suspected the motives of the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... for what might come next. The Princess, if she was in any way discomposed, did not show it. She sat erect in her chair, her head slightly thrown back, her eyebrows a little contracted. It was as though she were asking who had dared to break in so rudely upon her pastime. Jeanne had sunk back into the window, and was sitting ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been affianced oftener than any woman in Bursley. Her employers were so accustomed to an interesting announcement that for years they had taken to saying naught in reply but 'Really, Maggie!' Engagements and tragic partings were Maggie's pastime. Fixed otherwise, she might ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... boy, but I have seen him, nevertheless, and I shall be much surprised if you do not see and hear more of him than you desire before many days are out. That villain does not sail the seas for pastime, you may ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... slaves, to whom he gave out their daily portions of broth and meat; but from the first he had not shown any recognition of Attalus, and had signed to him that they must be strangers to one another. A whole year had passed away in this manner, when one day Leo wandered, as if for pastime, into the plain where Attalus was watching the horses, and sitting down on the ground at some paces off, and with his back towards his young master, so that they might not be seen together, he said, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unfortunate Bibbs afforded every one such exquisite enjoyment that an effort was made to prolong the pastime by forcible attempts to fasten the placard on to other members of the company, and a general melee, would have followed if the attention of the combatants had not been attracted in another direction. Ronleigh having won the toss and elected to go ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... their faces often with its paws, but the face of Puglioni Sin had kissed all over the mouth and chin. Their food was robbery and their pastime murder. All of them had incurred the sorrow of God and the enmity of man. They sat at a table with a pack of cards before them, all greasy with the marks of cheating thumbs. And they whispered to one another over their gin, but ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... the strictness of Batavian etiquette is likely to be modified by the introduction of a pastime so essentially English as lawn-tennis. The courts of the Bataviasche Lawn-tennis Club are in the Zoological Gardens, south of the King's Plain. The club holds numerous tournaments in the course of the year, and competitions are established for both a ladies' and ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... scanty years are told, It seems like pastime to grow old; And as Youth counts the shining links That Time around him binds so fast, Pleased with the task, he little thinks How hard that chain will press at last. Vain was the man, and false as ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... seventy shillings was put down without a murmur. How much farther the bidding would have gone will never be known, for a vicious little bird must needs tell the Colonel all about it. That gentleman happened to be engaged in his favourite (proclaiming) pastime; he sat ruminating on the high price of coal, and evolving schemes to bring wood back to its proper level. The latter article was what the poorer classes used as fuel. The Colonel had no scruples about dotting ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... book that you have genius, and that I am a failure. It is well that something brought it home to me before I wasted any more time." I meant to speak bravely, but I knew more than this. I knew that, with all my air-castles shattered, with the knowledge that to him literature was a pastime, while to me it meant livelihood, I gloried more in his success than I should in my own, that I was glad that he, and not I, was to have fame; and in the tumult of new emotions against which I struggled, my lip quivered, I turned aside my head, and felt, but ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... had undertaken to subdue this wilderness, to plant here the civil, religious and educational institutions of Connecticut, and to prepare this beautiful heritage for their children and children's children, was no holiday pastime, no gainful speculation, no romantic adventure. It was grim, persistent, weary toil and danger, continued through many years, with the wolf at the door and the savage in ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... Probably no publication extent will furnish a more complete and exhaustive exhibit of the progress of science and the arts in this country for the past twenty-two years than a complete file of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. It is a curious and interesting pastime to compare the condition of the mechanic arts as presented in some of our first volumes with that shown in our more recent ones. During all this time, nearly a quarter of a century, our journal ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... of such a possession? I fear no such idea crossed his mind. He caught her up, and there followed some minutes of very rough play, during which it is difficult to say whether the father or the daughter laughed and shouted the loudest. At length, however, the boisterous pastime terminated, suddenly, as might be expected: the little one was hurt, and began to cry; and the ungentle play-fellow tossed it into its mother's lap, bidding her 'make all straight.' As happy to return to that gentle comforter ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... young ladies, internes of the Convent, when granted permission to go out into the city, was a favorite pastime, truly a labor of love, of the young gallants of that day,—an occupation, if very idle, at least very agreeable to those participating in these stolen promenades, and which have not, perhaps, been altogether discontinued in Quebec even ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... very much better than that of Perry, his friend and present companion, who kept a hawk, and vainly endeavoured to teach the bird to know him and perch on his wrist. But Perry was fond of hawks, and much regretted that the days were gone by when hawking was a favourite pastime. ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... serious work, than pacing from house to house in the early afternoon, delivering a pack of visiting-cards, varied by a perfunctory conversation, seated at the edge of an easy-chair, on subjects of inconceivable triviality. Of course there are men so constituted that they find this pastime a relief and a pleasure; but their felicity of temperament ought not to be made into a rule for serious-minded men. The only social institution which might really prove beneficial in a University is an informal evening salon. If people might drop in uninvited, in evening dress or not, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... good thing we don't go in for that sort of thing extensively in Canada," put in Horrocks, as the representative of the law. "The peaceful pastime of the police would soon be taken from them. Why, the handling of ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... wished, my dear sister, to speak to you as a brother. Whatever may be the force of a custom preserved during nineteen years, I shall know how, in sharing the fatigues of my troops, to deprive myself of what is a pastime to them. Other occupations will but too easily absorb me entirely. Cease to see by any other vision than your own. Trust to the evidence of your own senses, and no other. I have learned, through a long series ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... window, looking out with that well-bred interest in details of sport and pastime which was part of his creed. He braved it out even before the woman who had been a better friend to him than his dead wife. Not even to her would he confess that any event of existence could reach him through the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... grew correspondingly, for now they could converse and aided by the mental powers of their human heritage they amplified the restricted vocabulary of the apes until talking was transformed from a task into an enjoyable pastime. When Korak hunted, Meriem usually accompanied him, for she had learned the fine art of silence, when silence was desirable. She could pass through the branches of the great trees now with all the agility and stealth of The Killer ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... an end to the moment of strained silence which succeeded. He laid hold of two of Smiles' fingers and began to pull at her, while saying insistently, "Come down to the beach with me, Aunty Smiles, and hear the waves ro-er." This was a favorite pastime with him. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... a very hopeful frame of mind. Though he was not very tired or very sleepy, yet for the want of something better to do, he felt compelled to go to sleep, hoping, as on the previous day, to dispose of the weary hours in this agreeable manner. His pastime, however, was soon interrupted by loud shouts and the tramp of men, not far from the spot where he lay. A hurried examination of the surroundings assured him that he had chosen a resting place near one of the fords of the river, ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... his godly simplicity. Parson Manners held rule over an obscure and quiet village in the wilds of Vermont, where hard-handed farmers wrestled with rocks and forests for their daily bread, and looked forward to heaven as a land of green pastures and still waters, where agriculture should be a pastime, and winter impossible. Heavy freshets from the mountains that swelled their rushing brooks into annual torrents, and snow-drifts that covered five-rail fences a foot above the posts and blocked up the turnpike-road ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... horrid species of sport or pastime, this amphibious business of his, catching wild birds and dragging them about as though he ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... before. They appointed as high-priest one Phanias, a coarse and clownish rustic, utterly ignorant of the sacerdotal duties, who when decked in the robes of office caused great derision. This sport and pastime for the Zealots caused the more religious people to shed tears of grief and shame; and the citizens, unable to endure such insolence, rose in great numbers to avenge the outrage on the sacred rites. Thus a fierce civil war broke out in which very ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... checked by the whirlwind of "Fairs." The Woman's Central, issued a Circular urging its Auxiliaries to continue their regular contributions, and to make their working for Fairs a pastime only. In no other way could it meet the increased demands upon its resources, for the sphere of the Sanitary Commission's usefulness had now extended to remotest States, and its vast machinery for distribution had become more ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... things which Mayster More wrote in his youth for his pastime' prefixed to his Workes, 1557, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... which she had felt so excited, and certainly none—which was another special point—that so brought with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime, in her view, precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... air in a cozy, snow-mantled nook is so genial and comforting that one wonders that the buds do not start. To go to the southward of a clump of dense evergreens is as good as a trip to Bermuda. On such a day the noon fire is a pastime rather than a necessity, though the making of a luxurious lunch may require heat. To tramp a spot on the snow with the snowshoes and then start a fire on it is to demonstrate the non-conductivity of this ermine mantle of the woods. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... letters from home, and in the joyous meetings with old friends. All admired the fine climate, and, as that part of South America is the greatest country in the world for horses, the young sailing-master rejoiced in the opportunity offered to indulge in his favorite pastime of riding. He also showed his prowess as a devotee of the chase in the fine sport afforded on the pampas that enabled him to run down and shoot a South ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... husband and the maid had both turned upon you and beaten you soundly. There should not be so much ado for a kiss; and 'twould have been better if his wife had said nothing about it, and had suffered him to take his pastime, which might perchance have ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... retained the sunshine of his boyish days, being as merry-hearted, and full of jokes, and as open as a child. One winter day an old friend found him and his wife dancing madly about the room; knowing Mozart's fondness for this pastime—his favourite of all forms of amusement—the friend expressed his pleasure at finding them so light-hearted, when Mozart, pointing to the empty stove, explained that they were dancing in order to keep themselves ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... King Francis, "Distance all value enhances. When a man's busy, why, leisure Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: Faith, and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy. Here we've got peace; and aghast I'm Caught thinking war the true pastime. Is there a reason in metre? Give us your speech, master Peter!" 10 I who, if mortal dare say so, Ne'er am at loss with my Naso "Sire," I replied, "joys prove cloudlets: "Men are the merest Ixions"— Here the King whistled aloud, "Let's —Heigho—go ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... in me that, coming round a corner of rock from which one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you know), and finding round this corner a peasant sitting at his ease, I was ashamed. For I did not like to be overheard singing fantastic songs. But he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, and we walked along together, pointing out to each other the glories of the world before us and exulting in the morning. It was his business to show me things and their names: the great Mountain of the Pilgrimage to the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of Charles was ill fitted to remedy those defects in the constitution. He acted in the administration of public affairs, as if government were a pastime, rather than a serious occupation; and, by the uncertainty of his conduct he lost that authority which could alone bestow constancy on the fluctuating resolutions of the parliament. His expenses, too, which sometimes, perhaps, exceeded the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... yiss! A bressbounder, eh!" Then he gave a half-laugh, and muttered the old formula about "the man who would go to sea for pleasure, going to hell for a pastime!" ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... some valley by the River Saint Lawrence, where the Red Man at present reigns in indolence. He who can sit on a knoll for an hour and let old Mother Earth spin her tune to the fathering sun, is ever a friend of mine. But the Red Man carries the pastime beyond me, unless when he is on the warpath, and then he is a devil. It would give me no compunction to reign with a hundred or more Fraser Highlanders, in a strath from which the Red Man has to be persuaded away, or driven by force. Perhaps I could even hold ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... and billiards," but football was too rough a game for his Majesty, and "meeter for laming than making able." Stubbs also speaks of it as a "bloody and murthering practice, rather than a fellowly sport or pastime." From the descriptions of the old games, it seems to have been very painful work for the shins, and there were no rules to prevent hacking ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... understand the profound badness of her character. She exercised a certain fascination over him, as a man grows fond of some beautiful, wicked beast he has half-tamed, though it turn and show its teeth at him sometimes, and be altogether more of a care than a pastime. She was so fair and evil that he could not hurt her; it would have seemed a crime to destroy anything so wondrously made. Moreover, she could amuse him and make many an hour pass pleasantly when she was ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... appeared when his sons, who did not wish to live by painting any longer, devoted themselves entirely to commerce, opening an establishment at Venice in conjunction with their father, who after a certain time abandoned painting altogether, only to take it up as an amusement and pastime. By dint of trading and practising his art, Agnolo had amassed considerable wealth when he came to die in the sixty-third year of his life, succumbing to a malignant fever which carried him off in a few days. His pupils were Maestro Antonio da Ferrara, who did many fine works in Urbino and at Citta ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... making a frame for the rich and restful picture of the Big House and its lands. Now and again overhead there swung slowly an occasional great black bird, its shadow not yet falling straight on the sunlit ground, as it would at midday, when the puppies of the pack would begin their daily pastime of ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... far up on the parade above them. 'Twas dinner-time, and the skaters were compelled to give up their pastime. Armitage set his teeth at the entirely too devotional attitude of the artilleryman as he slowly and lingeringly removed her skates, and turned away in that utterly helpless frame of mind which will overtake the strongest men on similar ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... all to the good that there should be fewer professional artists, since some of the finest work has been done by men and groups of men to whom artistic expression was only a pastime. They were not hampered by the solemnity and reverence for art which too often destroy the spontaneity of the professional. Indeed a revival of this attitude to art is one of the good results which may be hoped for from a Communist revolution in a more advanced industrial ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... "Why urge thy chase so far astray? And why so late returned? And why"— The rest was in her speaking eye. "My child, the chase I follow far, 'Tis mimicry of noble war; 570 And with that gallant pastime reft Were all of Douglas I have left. I met young Malcolm as I strayed Far eastward, in Glenfinlas' shade, Nor strayed I safe; for all around, 575 Hunters and horsemen scoured the ground. This youth, though still a royal ward, Risked life and land to be my guard, And through ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... retorted Beasley, with a grin. "The feller that robs me'll need to chew razors fer a pastime. If it comes to that you're yearnin' fer glory at the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Kennington Common; even in 1845 the solid road which circles the ground was no more than a ditch and a quickset hedge. But a hundred years before 1845! Cricket, even then, was a game in Surrey. Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, and father of George III, was introducing his favourite pastime to the nobles and the gentlemen. In 1737 Kent played Surrey and London on Kennington Common, and round the pavilion set up for the Prince of Wales there was so great a crush of spectators that a poor woman fell and had her leg broken. The Prince gave her ten guineas. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... nights, Mind, by way of pastime, used, out of dried, wild chestnuts, to carve little cats, bears, and other beasts, and this with so much art that these little dainty toys were shortly in no less request than his drawings. It is a pity that insects, such as frequently ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... out, and one of the players called loudly on Goodell to take his place. Goodell lighted another cigarette and nonchalantly seated himself in the vacant chair. Then I observed for the first time that the game was for blood rather than pastime, for Goodell paid for his little pile of white beans in good, gold coin of the realm. Next to playing a little "draw" myself, I like to watch the game, and so I moved over where I could see the bets made and the hands exhibited. And there I stuck ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... countess. Stools covered with velvet, and some cushions disposed in the Moorish fashion, and ornamented with Arabesque needle-work, supplied the place of chairs in this apartment, which contained musical instruments, embroidery frames, and other articles for ladies' pastime. Besides lesser lights, the withdrawing-room was illuminated by four tall torches of virgin wax, each of which was placed in the grasp of a statue, representing an armed Moor, who held in his left arm a round buckler of silver, highly polished, interposed ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... by so many interwoven links of rhyme, ending in long Alexandrines, the long cantos, the lingering sweetness long drawn out through so many unended books, begun to weary her at last? Had even a quarrel with a fisher lad been a little pastime to her? and did she now wish she had detained him a little longer? Could she take any interest in him beyond such as she took in Demon, her father's dog, or ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... that he was in a new world, which soothed and appealed to his clouded nature as did the birds and the flowers. That impulse, which he could neither express nor understand, which sent him so constantly into the woods and solitudes, was gratified now. This was as delightful as his favorite pastime of lying upon the grass and gazing upward ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... strained eastward, because that that farthest shore was the end of the world that belongs to man the dweller, the beginning of the other and veiled world that is held by the strange race, whose life (like the pastime of Satan) is a “going to and fro upon the face of the earth.” From those grey hills right away to the gates of Bagdad stretched forth the mysterious “desert”—not a pale, void, sandy tract, but a land abounding in rich pastures, a land ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... the worthy citizen, "we have had our permitted hour of honest and hospitable pastime, and now I would fain delay you for another and graver purpose, as it is our custom, when we have the benefit of good Mr. Windsor's company, that he reads the prayers of the church for the evening before we separate. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... and if the excellent Captain had never uttered another word, he might have passed for a profound philosopher. It is a rule which should shine in gilt letters on the gingerbread of youth, and the spectacle-case of age. Every man who reads with any view beyond mere pastime, knows the value of it. Every one, more or less, acts upon it. Every one regrets and suffers who neglects it. There is some trouble in it, to be sure; but in what good thing is there not? and what trouble does it save! Nay, what mischief! Half the lies that are ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... starving of the rebellion. They calculate upon the comparative poverty of the rebels, repeating the fallacious adage, that money is the sinews of war. Money is so, but only in a limited degree, and more limited than is generally supposed; more limited even now when war is a very expensive pastime. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... barley-fields; market-girls in red cloaks and damsels of high degree; curly shepherd-boys and long-haired pages in gay livery; an abbot on an ambling pad and knights in armor and nodding plumes; and her constant pastime was to weave these sights into the magic web on which she wrought. I undertake, in a modest way, to follow her example, and weave a series of pictures from the sights that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... General's Women, who with a great deal of Respect conducted them into the House. Captain Swan, and we that were with him followed after. It was not long before the General caused his dancing Women to enter the Room, and divert the Company with that pastime. I had forgot to tell you that they have none but vocal Musick here, by what I could learn, except only a row of a kind of Bells without Clappers, 16 in number, and their weight increasing gradually from about three to ten pound weight. These were set in a row on a Table in the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... there you would find some genius playing dreamy, monotonous Spanish airs on the guitar, in the midst of a merry group of dancing and singing young Mexicans, many of whom were not older than I. Card-playing seemed, however, to be their favorite pastime; all Mexicans are inveterate gamesters, who look upon the profession of gambling as an honorable ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... Viola to turn and transfix the offender with a stare so haughty that he abruptly diverted his attention to the upper north-east corner of the court-house, where, fortunately for him, a pair of pigeons had just alighted and were engaged in the interesting pastime of ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... bombshells fell upon the defenseless houses of citizens. The attacks of Pougatcheff made very little excitement. I was dying of ennui. I had promised Accoulina that I would correspond with her, but communication was cut off, and I could not send or receive a letter from Belogorsk. My only pastime consisted in military sorties. Thanks to Pougatcheff I had an excellent horse, and I shared my meager pittance with it. I went out every day beyond the ramparts to skirmish with Pougatcheff's advance guards. The rebels ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... the wild boar, my Lord?" lightly answered the other. "How mighty it is! How savage! What tusks! You know the pastime? A quick step, a sure arm, an eye like lightning—presto! your boar lies on his back, with his feet in the air! You, my Lord, are the boar; big, clumsy, brutal! Shall we begin the sport? I promise to prick you with ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... pet pastime of the boys of Dawson's Landing was to steal apples, peaches, and melons from the farmer's fruit wagons—mainly on account of the risk they ran of getting their heads laid open with the butt of the farmer's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "But this is merely pastime," he said, touching the paper, yet leaving it undisturbed beneath the fair weight that was pressing it down. "My work is finished: you must have met Henry ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... the legible addendum of "Oh, ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness!"—the forgotten first line of a popular song, which no scratching would erase—seemed too like an ironical postscript to be thought of for a moment. He threw aside his pen and cast the discordant record of past foolish pastime into the dead ashes of ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... my dear Frank?" said the dowager Lady Aveleyn, one day, when a thick fog debarred her son of his usual pastime. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient's complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative's map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... source of danger. The drama and the essay appear so full of difficulties that the student regards their study seriously, as a task, and finds it necessary to apply himself vigorously in order to master them. On the other hand, the novel is so delightful, so easy, that he looks upon it as a pastime. A superficial reading often gives him knowledge of many of the main facts, and a mistaken idea that he knows the story. It is the task of the teacher to get him to read with careful attention and with imagination ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... which are found in the comedies of our time, and which are their meat rather than the spice, are the reasons why he who says 'Comedy' seems to speak of a buffoon's pastime. They wrong themselves who give to such gracious poesy a sense so unworthy. True comedy, properly regarded, has for its object the representation in divers personages of almost all the actions of familiar life. To hold the mirror up to human life it bestows attention no less upon ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... By moonshine do the greensour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime Is to ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Sir, long ago," answered the damsel; "though that they lived here once is true enough. There's Bonza's Chair, you must have passed before the fog came on, and could not but have noticed; and the hurling-stones he used to throw for pastime with his brother, they are to be seen still; but all that about his having such long arms that he could snatch the sailors from the decks of ships as they went by, is, in my judgment, but an old wife's tale, and I don't credit it. There, see, Sir; the fog is thinning; that is ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... safeguard to her, jumped at the invitation, and expressed her gratification and thanks for so kind a consideration on my aunt's part. I have not alluded to Harry all this time, but of course, whenever his mother and I were occupied in amorous alliance, he was equally engaged in the same delicious pastime with Ellen. And, I may add, that once or twice I had seized a favourable opportunity of gratifying the little lecherous creature with what she called a feast of my noble prick. She, of course, was delighted at my aunt's proposition as she at once foresaw how she would have me all to herself for ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... dynamite, slaughter of fingerlings, and unholy baits devastate the fish, so that 'Free Fishing' spells no fishing at all. This presses most hardly on the artisan who fishes fair, a member of a large class with whose pastime only a churl would wish to interfere. We are now compelled, if we would catch fish, to seek Tarpon in Florida, Mahseer in India: it does not suffice to 'stretch ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... are not attracted by pebbly streams? Wading in the water and skating flat stones on its surface was a joyous pastime for them. The banks of the river were strewn with stones of various colors and sizes such as would naturally attract ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... treaty with many of the tribes, held at Deerfield in 1735, the St. Francis Indians were represented, and agreed to the arrangement for perpetual peace; but a few years elapsed before they were again engaged in their bloody pastime. War was declared against France in 1744, and the Abenakis were soon hovering on the frontiers. In 1746, Keene and Concord, in New Hampshire, felt their power, and many captives were carried to Canada. In 1752 Capt. Phineas Stevens proceeded to Canada, as a delegate from the governor of ...
— The Abenaki Indians - Their Treaties of 1713 & 1717, and a Vocabulary • Frederic Kidder
... which the reader is already acquainted with, and of which a few words will suffice to remind him. The Puritans who founded the American republics were not only enemies to amusements, but they professed an especial abhorrence for the stage. They considered it as an abominable pastime; and as long as their principles prevailed with undivided sway, scenic performances were wholly unknown amongst them. These opinions of the first fathers of the colony have left very deep marks on the minds of their descendants. The extreme regularity ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... tenants of the flood, With grace of motion that might scarcely seem Inferior to angelical, prolong Their curious pastime! shaping in mid air (And sometimes with ambitious wing that soars High as the level of the mountain tops,) A circuit ampler than the lake beneath, Their own domain;—-but ever, while intent On tracing and retracing that large round, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... their watery way, And, 'O my sire!' did Ellen say, 'Why urge thy chase so far astray? And why so late returned? And why '— The rest was in her speaking eye. 'My child, the chase I follow far, 'Tis mimicry of noble war; And with that gallant pastime reft Were all of Douglas I have left. I met young Malcolm as I strayed Far eastward, in Glenfinlas' shade Nor strayed I safe, for all around Hunters and horsemen scoured the ground. This youth, though ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... read Matthew Hale and became a master in thought. Benjamin Franklin would sit up all night at his books. Thomas Jefferson read fifteen hour a day. Patrick Henry read for employment, and kept store for pastime. Daniel Webster was a devouring reader, and retained all that he read. At the age of fourteen he could repeat from memory all of Watt's Hymns and Pope's "Essay on Man." When but a youth, Henry Clay read books of history and science and practiced giving their contents ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... walking carefully with his toes turned in, breaking off twigs to mark a place, guessing at the time by the sun, and grunting "Ugh" or "Wagh" when anything surprised him. Disparaging remarks about White-men, delivered in supposed Indian dialect, were an important part of his pastime. "Ugh, White-men heap no good" and "Wagh, paleface—pale fool in woods," ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.... I am convinced both by faith and experience that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime." This book has, directly or indirectly, caused more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... sat on the seashore, repeating to myself the lines of Mr. Watson's poem, and breathing the fresh air, which an official of the bath-house told me was made in Germany (meaning thereby that the wind was blowing from the east), the thought struck me that it would be a pardonable pastime to employ the spare time I had before the boat started for Lerwick, in writing a Sonnet to Mr. William Watson. In such exercitations it is necessary to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... side of nature, I was soon promoted to the post of night nurse, with every facility for indulging in my favorite pastime of "owling." My colleague, a black-eyed widow, relieved me at dawn, we two taking care of the ward between us, like regular nurses, turn and turn about. I usually found my boys in the jolliest state of mind their condition allowed; for it was a known fact that Nurse Periwinkle ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... they are come of age and fit to do for themselves; so that they may not be under the power or jurisdiction of any other woman. Neglect not to give them education suitable to their birth, and let them be trained up to every exercise and pastime requisite for king's sons to learn. This is all I have ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... mouth would grow neither larger nor smaller for it." But I stood still and wept, and looked on the ground. "Why should I weep?" she asked. Her cousin Clas had a bride of his own already, and only took a little pastime with her, and so she must cure me now with another ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... appearance to his mode of life. Consequently one observes that they have altogether withdrawn, in public at any rate, from every sort of pleasures. One sees no longer Cardinals in masquerade or on horseback, nor driving with women about Rome for pastime, as the custom was of late; but the utmost they do is to go alone in close coaches. Banquets, diversions, hunting parties, splendid liveries and all the other signs of outward luxury have been abolished; ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... frolics he of course well knew, Rare pastime for the ragamuffin crew! Who welcome with the crowing of a cock, This hero ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... fiendish mischief. When by this means the belief in a league between witch and demon had become firmly established, witchcraft grew into a well-defined crime, hateful enough in itself to furnish pastime for the torturer and food for the fagot. In the fifteenth century, witches were burned by thousands, and it may well be doubted if all paganism together was ever guilty of so many human sacrifices in the same space of time. In the sixteenth, these holocausts were appealed to as conclusive ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... all last year's single-trigger double-barrel hammer-less ejectors are as flintlocks! "Murderous weapon, and bloodthirsty shooter"—some old-fashioned gunners of to-day will say, just as our grandfathers spoke when breechloaders came in, and that delightful pastime with ramrod and wads, powder flask and shot belt went out. So it ever has been! Since the day some horrid fellow used a bronze sword instead of a stone on a stick, and since Richard of the Lion Heart took to that "infernal instrument," the cross bow, because of its ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... sufferers being ourselves, and the 8th and 52nd Regiments. To cheer the soldiers, the bands played in camp of an evening, while some officers and men engaged in sport of various kinds; but the angel of Death was hovering over my poor regiment, and few of us had the heart to join in pastime while our comrades lay stricken and ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere—somehow; where we cannot tell; how we cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... reply. Was not what Woodell was saying but the truth? Did he really care for Jenny or she for him? What had it been but pastime? He could give her up. It would be a little hard, of course. It is always so when a man has to surrender those close relations with a woman which are so fascinating, and which come only when there has been established that sympathy between them which, if not love, is involuntarily considered by each ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... bonne, who had taken care of my mother in her infancy and had never left her, now took charge of me. She watched over me faithfully and filled up my childhood with affectionate attention and innocent pastime. My uncle, the Count, who had never been married, loved, petted, and indulged me in every wish. When I grew old enough, he secured a governess well qualified to teach and discipline me. Under her care, with the aid of masters ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... important part of the study, the one which becomes increasingly interesting as readers grow older and the stories they study become more and more complex and difficult. The study of the characters of Shakespeare's heroes and heroines is more than interesting pastime for men and women—it ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... For it was this experience which threw him back on his own peculiar talents for a livelihood, and drove him into the police force. Had he been able to enter any other profession, his genius might have been stunted to a mere pastime, instead of being, as now, utilised for the ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... suspicious oysters, and dog's meat. Beneath its stalls at night, many a 'lodger' often slumbered; and every Sunday morning it was the theatre of a lively and amusing scene, wherein was performed the renowned pastime of 'niggers dancing for eels.' All the unsavory fish that had been accumulated during the week, was thus disposed of, being given to such darkies as won the most applause in the science of the 'heel and toe.' The sport used to attract hundreds of spectators, and the rum ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... observed. These same flowers also varied much in the number of the petals, and occasionally in the number of the stamens and pistils; so that they were semi-monstrous in structure, yet they produced plenty of fruit. Mr. Thompson remarks that in the Pastime gooseberry "extra bracts are often attached to the sides of the fruit." (10/124. 'Catalogue of Fruits of Hort. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... who formed the nucleus of the philosophical salons was airing its theories and enjoying its increasing vogue, there was another circle which played with the new ideas more or less as a sort of intellectual pastime, but was aristocratic au fond, and carefully preserved all the traditions of the old noblesse. One met here the philosophers and men of letters, but they did not dominate; they simply flavored these coteries of rank and fashion. In this age of esprit no salon was complete without its sprinkling ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... May-green hedges. As there was not room for three abreast, the colonel made up the rear-guard, and was consoled by having Miss Middleton's figure to contemplate; but the readiness of her joining in Crossjay's pastime of the nest-hunt was not so pleasing to a man that she had wound to a pitch of excitement. Her scornful accent on "Marriage" rang through him. Apparently she was beginning to do with him just as she liked, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... greater part of two years. He found it, he says, "a barbarous country, where chemical spirits were so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable, that it was hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it;" and he had betaken himself to "anatomical dissections" as the only kind of scientific pastime that Irish conditions favoured. On returning to England, in 1654, he had settled in Oxford, to be in the society of Wilkins, Wallis, Goddard, Ward, Petty, Bathurst, Willis, and other kindred scientific spirits, most of them recently ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... conclusion was an orthodox belief of celestial mechanics until 1853, when Professor Adams of Neptunian fame, with whom complex analyses were a pastime, reviewed Laplace's calculation, and discovered an error which, when corrected, left about half the moon's acceleration unaccounted for. This was a momentous discrepancy, which at first no one could explain. But presently Professor Helmholtz, the great German physicist, suggested that a key might ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... her shoulder, with the little frown of displeasure that always greeted such ignorance on Norma's part, had but one reply: "Tante," she would declare, and continue her measured walk about the floor. So, for pastime, Norma began teaching her the figures of a dance then on the boards at the Opera House, to which her little ladyship lent herself with readiness. The motions, sometimes approaching the grotesque in the lean and elderly chorus-lady as she bobbed about the ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... in the morning, his delight and pleasure of an afternoon was to come and sit with the sick man's company in the sunny autumn evenings; and he had the honour more than once of giving Miss Bell his arm for a walk in the Temple Gardens; to take which pastime, when the frank Laura asked of Helen permission, the Major eagerly said, "Yes, yes, begad—of course you go out with him—it's like the country, you know; everybody goes out with everybody in the Gardens, and there are beadles, you know, and that sort of thing—everybody walks ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... roaming about our lovely lochs—Highland or Lowland—and have the excitement of landing fish, coupled with our enjoyment of fresh air and grand scenery. For this reason, if for no other, cultivate as often as you can, without entrenching on the nobler pastime of fly-fishing, the art of trolling—for we must confess that there is an art in this as in everything else; and should my reader be sceptical on the point, he has only to try conclusions, when he gets the chance, with some old troller, and he will ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as an elegant pastime. They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money. They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough exposition of their profound penetralia. It may be, too, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... he was privately relishing life with enviable gusto. In those days he could and did: being alive was the most satisfying pastime he could imagine, or cared to, who was a thundering success in his own conceit and in fact as well; since all the world for whose regard he cared a twopenny-bit admired, respected, and esteemed him in his public status, and admired, respected, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... to write anything for publication. At the age of nearly sixty-two I received an injury from a fall, which confined me closely to the house while it did not apparently affect my general health. This made study a pleasant pastime. Shortly after, the rascality of a business partner developed itself by the announcement of a failure. This was followed soon after by universal depression of all securities, which seemed to threaten the extinction of a good part ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... nuisance; while, if he succeeded, they would gain an immense advantage over their enemies. Such, at least, is the comment of the historian; but he makes no remark on the incredible levity of the Athenians, to whom the gravest interests of state were matter for mirth and pastime; and he has not a word of censure for Nicias and his "sober-minded" partisans, who, in their eagerness to ruin a political opponent, showed a criminal disregard for the ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... refuse to cultivate Chrisoganus and the Arts, preferring a life of dalliance and pleasure, and to patronise plays and players instead. Other characters are introduced representing the Law, the Army, and Merchandise, who also neglect the Arts and live for pastime ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... tormentors. A massacre at the Bicetre, in which six thousand had perished, had warned these unhappy people that neither the prison wall, nor night, was to be security against the rage of the bloodhounds with whom murder seemed to have grown into a pastime; and after having seen several of their number shot down within their dungeon, they determined to attack them, and, if they must die, at least die in manly defence. Their rush was perfectly successful; it had the effect of a complete surprise; and though their only weapons were fragments of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... honour of knighthood, as did General Carlton for similar success in Canada—the one becoming Sir William Howe, and the other Sir Guy Carlton; but neither did much afterwards to merit the honour. The English officers seemed to have anticipated a pastime in America instead of hard fighting and severe service, and the German mercenaries anticipated rich ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... probably few Presidents have kept since then. He strove to care for his health by daily exercise. In the morning he swam in the Potomac, often for a long (p. 207) time; and more than once he encountered no small risk in this pastime. During the latter part of his Presidential term he tried riding on horseback. At times when the weather compelled him to walk, and business was pressing, he used to get his daily modicum of fresh air before the sun was up. A life of this kind ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... not the Head. What I refer to is the pursuit and collection of decapitated human heads, belonging generally to personal enemies of the collector; it is a sport common in Borneo, and among other interesting, if primitive, nationalities. This pastime is, I understand, a favourite one with some students of the college. It is practised, I need hardly say, under the very strictest supervision; there must be a certificate signed by the British Resident, and a special written recommendation from the Director of ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... with them. Back in the seventies, in the time of the trail herds, Dodge was a howling cow-town. There was a period of its existence when the punchers used to indulge in the pastime of shooting up the place; but there were a great many of these frolicsome riders, and too much wanton revolver shooting is sure to breed trouble if it is combined with hard liquor, gambling, and a tough floating population. The prominent business men of Dodge watched the hectic ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... although she is like me." Then the matter dropped, and she slopped her cunt clean. I used to like a woman whom I knew not to wash it, when I was going to fuck her again, Camille had humored me in this, and as my lust came on for my second poke, used to bring my amatory pastime by looking at the cunt with my pleasure signs on it. So Camille washing astonished me. "I am going to be married, and ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together, braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand apart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and season. Our pent-up energies required a vent, and we rushed round like caged animals suddenly loosened. "Gently," cried our good-natured custodian; but we paid little heed to his admonition; our blood was up, and we raced each other until we were wearied of the pastime. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... were piled up, a hideous mound, in the corners of the court. The priests, without delay, met with the same fate. A moment sufficed for trial, and verdict, and execution. Night came. Brandy and excitement had roused the demon in the human heart. Life was a plaything, murder a pastime. Torches were lighted, refreshments introduced, songs of mirth and joviality rose upon the night air, and still the horrid carnage continued unabated. Now and then, from caprice, one was liberated; but the innocent and ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Almost as soon as Uncle Moses could have done so he had landed his first catch and left it floundering on the bank. Katharine had never thought about the cruel side of angling. It was left for this forlorn creature to teach her that of this pretty pastime there is something else than lounging beside charming waterways and beneath green boughs. Angleworms might not suffer much, might even get used to being tortured, as Montgomery averred; but how about that beautiful shining thing done to slow death on the sward beside her? A new pity ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... experience, even if the history of the world had not furnished many examples to prove it, that prophecy is risky. It is a fascinating pastime inasmuch as it affords the imaginative faculties full scope, but at the same time it is a mistake to let the imagination run riot. I have no intention, in considering the future of Japan, of depicting an Arcadia or a Utopia ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... empty houses, and through empty hearts. I know Francesca will be proud of you. Women admire you heroes. Rusty sages, Pale poets, and scarred warriors, have been Their idols ever; while we fair plump fools Are elbowed to the wall, or only used For vacant pastime. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... time, when leaves grow green, And blossoms bedeck the tree, King Edward would a hunting ride, Some pastime for to see. ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... attic I clambered one day, When the roof was resounding with rain. And there, among relics long hidden away, I rummaged with heart-ache and pain. A hope long surrendered and covered with dust, A pastime, out-grown, and forgot, And a fragment of love, all corroded with rust, Were lying ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Hollister at the house of his friend Pinney, whose wife was her sister. She had soft gray eyes, a pretty color in her cheeks, rosy lips, and a charming figure. In the course of the evening somebody suggested mind-reading as a pastime, and Lansing, who had some powers, or supposed powers, in that direction, although he laughed at them himself, experimented in turn with the ladies. He failed with nearly every subject until it came Mary Hollister's turn. As ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there was the sort he liked, and that was something. He came to a region of comparative quiet; he left behind him a region peopled with furies, madmen, devils, where slaughter was a daily pastime and no man's life safe for a moment. In Paris, mobs roared through the streets nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted. The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings, and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the streets, just as they ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 'it is the first time that I have seen the pastime, and I would fain practise it ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... leisurely ascended—imaginary papers were glanced at, imaginary scandal was discussed with elderly shakings of the head, and—regrettable to say—imaginary glasses were lifted lipwards. Heaven only knows how the germ of this dreary pastime first found way into his small-boyish being. It was his own invention, and he was proportionately proud of it. Meanwhile, Charlotte and I, crouched in the window-seat, watched, spell-stricken, the whirl and eddy and drive of the innumerable snow-flakes, wrapping our cheery little world in an uncanny ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... strip of dark blue firmament visible above the admirably proportioned cornice he caught sight of two planets flaming high in the west, and in close juxtaposition. Necessity had made him somewhat of an astronomer, and he had studied Chinese astrology as a pastime. He recognized these lamps of the empyrean as Mars and Venus, and, up-to-date American though he was, drew comfort from that favoring augury. Then, in stepping from the roadway to the sidewalk, he stumbled over a heavy curb, and laughed at the reminder ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... geological features was called: Bowers had a scheme for returning from the Pole by the Plateau instead of the Barrier: Oates might be heard saying that he thought he could do with another chupattie. A favourite pastime was the making of knots. Could you make a ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... young men having been making merry with their sweethearts, were at their coming home to come over a heath. Robin Good-fellow, knowing of it, met them, and to make some pastime, he led them up and down the heath a whole night, so that they could not get out of it; for he went before them in the shape of a walking fire, which they all saw and followed till the day did appear: then Robin left them, and at his ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... wondering whether she would recognize his back. He hoped that it was not because of her mishap that she was not in a habit. He could hardly be expected to divine the true reason. This was, shortly, that the lady, who had expected to see him, could not enjoy a pastime from participation in which footmen are for a variety of reasons so rigorously debarred. Incidentally, she had seen Anthony before he had seen her, and the smile with which he had credited her companion's ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... been a study and a pastime. Every cleric is familiar with the prose translations which aided his boyhood's labours in rendering the poetry of Horace and Euripides into modern speech. But prose efforts are one thing, and poetical efforts are another, and just as many have laboured to present Virgil and Homer in modern ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... permitted to carry arms, but compelled by law to practice from childhood the use of the bow, and accustomed to consider sword-play and quarter-staff as a necessary part and parcel of education, and the pastime of every leisure hour. The "fiercest nation upon earth," as they were then called, and the freest also, each man of them fought for himself with the self-help and self-respect of a Yankee ranger, and once bidden to do his work, was trusted to carry it out by his own wit as best he could. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... suffering because therapeutics will have overtaken every disease that the flesh is heir to, or better still, that some new discovery will have made it possible to heal all sicknesses without the tedious work of surgeons and nurses. Healing will become a pastime like table-turning. Neither will there be any criminals because the whole social state will be so happy, contented, and knit together that inducement to crime will cease. Others will treat the ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... that is, Or how could I have written this? And, should it ever cross your mind That, now and then, you were unkind. You never, never, were at all! Remember that! It's natural For one like Mr. Vaughan to come, From a morning's useful pastime, home, And greet, with such a courteous zest His handsome wife, still newly dress'd, As if the Bird of Paradise Should daily change her plumage thrice. He's always well, she's always gay. Of course! But he who toils all day, And comes home hungry, tired, or cold, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... my fun!' said Esther hastily, and gave him the ring back, but his cordiality was gone. He felt no inclination to renew the idle-word pastime, said it was time to go, and, swinging his cane vexedly, struck off the heads of the flowers and the weeds as he went. Esther walked by his side in complete silence, a phenomenon of which he presently became conscious. He felt rather ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... mentioned before, the strictness of Batavian etiquette is likely to be modified by the introduction of a pastime so essentially English as lawn-tennis. The courts of the Bataviasche Lawn-tennis Club are in the Zoological Gardens, south of the King's Plain. The club holds numerous tournaments in the course of the year, and competitions are established for both a ladies' and gentlemen's ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... inhabited this bothy, and the rain had driven them all indoors. In better weather they spend the leisure of the evening at the game of quoits, which is the standard pastime among Scottish ploughmen. They fish the neighboring streams, too, and have burn-trout for supper several times a week. When I entered, two of them were sitting by the fire playing draughts, or, as they called it, "the dam-brod." The dam-brod is the Scottish laborer's billiards; and he ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... and his somewhat self-conscious and pedantic manner did not encourage effusion.[192] Like certain other poets he affected the tone of a man of the world and deliberately avoided topics relative to his own art. The two themes on which he expanded were riding and skating—of which latter pastime he had indeed made himself the laureate. Goethe himself was passionately fond of both exercises, but from "the patriarch of German poetry" he might have expected discourse on higher themes. Apparently, however, their relations remained sufficiently ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... thee, Prince Leviathan; and I promise thee that thou shalt long continue with me among the sweet vapours of this place, and scourge the shades of the great princes of the earth for thy pastime. Hem! a fine fellow, and seems to have had quite enough of men and things. Despair, audacity, hate, rancour, agony, and pride, have torn deep furrows in his soul. He looks even at us and hell without trembling. Faustus, art thou become ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... dear sister, to speak to you as a brother. Whatever may be the force of a custom preserved during nineteen years, I shall know how, in sharing the fatigues of my troops, to deprive myself of what is a pastime to them. Other occupations will but too easily absorb me entirely. Cease to see by any other vision than your own. Trust to the evidence of your own senses, and no other. I have learned, through a long series of misfortunes, how to be a man, and to be upon my guard against ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... performing duties for which they were scarcely better paid than the commonest soldier—these were the men whom our city fathers were so blandly and pleasantly removing from their field of duty. Was it wonderful, then, that the whole affair seemed quite like pastime to those engaged in it; or that they made themselves jocosely eloquent upon the subject, whenever one of the grave minority ventured to lift his voice against ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... This amiable pastime of throwing stones at each other was just then interrupted by the entrance of Maggie for an appointed sitting, before going to her business of carrying a tray of cigarettes about the Ritzmore. She gave Hunt a pleasant "good-morning," the pleasantness purposely stressed in order ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... rely on yourself for that. You must say, 'I will not,' and it will be very easy. Besides," she added, with another laugh, in which there was a rather nervous ring,—"besides, you know all this is only a comedy, or a pastime. You are ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... sex played its part. Bold advances of the man, with internal fear to offend, mock retreats of the girl, with internal throbs of complacency, and life invested with a new and growing charm to both. Leaving this pretty little pastime to glide along the flowery path that beautifies young lives to its inevitable climax, we go to a matter more prosaic, yet one that proved a source of strange ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... favorite pastime, and many a time the prairie rang with the yelping of the twenty or twenty-five dogs which he kept under the care of a special negro servant at the fort. His deadly aim was known to all. An army officer who insulted him was severely wounded in a duel; he often ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... one pastime which could be practiced without making a noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by stealth, everything that ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... popular pastime among the machine men of Zor was the exploration of the Universe. This afforded them a never ending source of interest in the discovery of the variegated inhabitants and conditions of the various planets on which they came to rest. Hundreds of space ships were sent out in all ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, and made merry over a virtuoso's whim. Somebody else—Mr. Slater, I think it was—thought fit to put in a defence, and thereupon a dispute arose as to why men bought first editions dear when they could buy last editions cheap. Brutal, domineering fellows bellowed their complete indifference ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... protect ours. The main lines were, generally, in easy cannon range, in most places within musket range, and the pickets of the two armies were, for the most part, in speaking distance, and the men often indulged in talking, for pastime. Except in rare instances the sentinels did not fire on each other by day, but sometimes at night firing was kept up by the Confederates at intervals to prevent desertion. During the last months of ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Then the old man struck back. The pain in the colonel's arm was excruciating. His saber rattled to the stone flooring. Before he could recover the weapon the victor had put his foot upon it. He was still smiling, as if the whole affair was a bit of pastime. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... and certain fact is that Bannockburn was fought on a point of chivalry, on a rule in a game. England must "touch bar," relieve Stirling, as in some child's pastime. To the securing of the castle, the central gate of Scotland, north and south, England put forth her full strength. Bruce had no choice but to concentrate all the power of a now, at last, united realm, and stand just where he did stand. His ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... not often, in these days, when the pastime of bibliography is reduced to a science, that one is rewarded, as one so often was a quarter of a century ago, by picking up an unregarded treasure on the bookstalls. But the other day I really had a pleasant little "find," and ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... shrieking of the western wood-pewees—a vocal performance that they, in their innocence, seriously mistake for melody—and continued until night had again settled on the vale. In this place I spent three or four days, giving myself up to my favorite study and pastime, and a list of all the birds that I saw in the neighborhood would surprise the reader. However, a mere catalogue would be of slight interest, I apprehend, and therefore mention will be made only of those species which I had not seen elsewhere, passing by such familiar feathered folk ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... hasty gesture, which she did not see, and then, ashamed at his feeling of impatience, went and sat beside her, and arranged the silks in her basket. Engaged in this light pastime, he did not hear a low rap ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... related the story as told by a cavalry lieutenant, who with a party reconnoitered a distance from camp. The thick growth of grass and vines made ambuscading a favorite pastime with the Spaniards. With smokeless powder they lay concealed in the grass. As the party rode along the sharp eye of a colored cavalryman noticed the movement of grass ahead. Leaning over his horse with sword in hand he plucked up an enemy whose gun was levelled at ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... Of me you shall not win renown; You thought to break a country heart For pastime, ere you went to town. At me you smiled, but unbeguiled I saw the snare, and I retired: The daughter of a hundred Earls, You are not one ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... making the tour of his town according to his laudable official habit, Beauvisage from the top of the bridge chanced to catch sight of the fair Parisian who with outstretched arms and gracefully bent body was pursuing her favorite pastime. A slight movement, the charming impatience with which the pretty fisher twitched her line from the water when the fish had not bitten, was perhaps the electric shock which struck upon the heart of the magistrate, hitherto irreproachable. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... upon the lifeless body of the otter and cried out, "This creature which you mistook for an otter, and which you have robbed and killed, is my son, Oddar, who for mere pastime had taken the form of the furry beast. You are ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... perhaps even serenade. This looks as if they were furiously in love, and has therefore been included among the rules of the game. Youth must keep up the poetic tradition of "fiery." Besides, it is an inexpensive pastime—the cinematograph costs forty centimes—and you really cannot sit in ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief, too vain, to hurt any one but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked as those who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... cruel, and untamable, digs its food out of graves," cachinnating the while like a thousand or fifteen hundred of brick. There are other ravenous beasts in the world; but this one is peculiar in that he laughs over his work, which is also his pastime. Now, if you wish to hear a Boy laugh—a horse-laugh, a giant-laugh—just put some other animal, human or otherwise, through a course of torture. Twist a pig's tail until it comes out; or, if you don't like the occupation, ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... to discuss details. About the middle of October he had two interviews with the Earl of Clare, Lord Chancellor of Ireland. These important conferences took place at Holwood, where he was then occupied in marking out a new road; for his pastime every autumn was to indulge his favourite pursuit of planting trees and otherwise improving his grounds. The two ablest men in the sister kingdoms must have regarded one another with interest. They were not unlike in figure except that Clare was short. His frame was as slight as Pitt's; ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the art and in any width or form, and it may be produced in many textures, although really intended for heavy effects. The making of such lace possesses a great charm for womankind in general, and will undoubtedly retain favor as long as needlecraft remains a pastime and employment with ...
— The Art of Modern Lace Making • The Butterick Publishing Co.
... really was a very dangerous pastime, for although sometimes the drift tunnel led us to a sunlit opening on the hillside, more often we reached a blind end and were forced to return to the main shaft and to "shin" up the rope, with from ten to ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... character deficient neither in courage nor backbone, were united to much good nature. Believing at last that I had sent for him in a fit of the vapours, he devoted himself to amusing me and abusing Bruhl—a very favourite pastime with him. And in this way he made out a call of ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... talked not of that. It was for France. So he went, not to return. Ah, yes! At Ypres, after only three months in the trenches. Then I say to the little mother, 'Courage! I, Leon Battou, am still a painter. The art which has been as a pastime shall be made to yield us bread. You shall see.' ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... eyes feasted on the scarlet hue of German blood, his ears were ravished with the sounds of German groans and sighs; and oftentimes, when the poor hunted fugitives were flying from his presence, he made a pastime of their misery for himself, by aiming at them with his own musket, to see how many he could bring down before they passed out ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... systematically, to write "finis" for Dickebusch. The church had already been pretty well shot up, as well as the surrounding graveyard where many of the tombs and monuments were smashed and the dead thrown from their graves. This blowing up of the dead seems to be a favorite pastime with the gentle Hun. They, the Germans, were now engaged in the demolition of the buildings along the principal streets and were doing it in a very thorough manner. We had here many demonstrations of a matter about which I have ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... dear sir. I did but own to Mrs. Braefield that I had paid a visit to Oxford in order to confer with a learned man on a question that puzzled me, and as abstract as that feminine pastime, theology, is now-a-days. I cannot convince Mrs. Braefield that Oxford admits other puzzles in life than those which amuse the ladies." Here Kenelm dropped into a chair ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... attached, still he prefers war; when he may live at home at ease, he insists on toil, if only it may end in fighting; when it is given to him to keep his riches without risk, he would rather lessen his fortune by the pastime of battle. To put it briefly, war was his mistress; just as another man will spend his fortune on a favourite, or to gratify some pleasure, so he chose to ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... come with me, thou wight yeman, And Robin thou soone shalt see; But first let us some pastime ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even these will appreciate the remark of a diplomatist of a certain weak country in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... not know where it was all leading to, or what it was leading up to as a final denouement, but he was inured to the taking of desperate chances. Peril was a pastime to him. He was ever watchful and ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... "and go take thy pastime in yonder forest, there wilt thou see the good flowers and grass, and hear the sweet birds sing. Perchance thou shalt hear some word, whereby ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... admitted, that Joachim's popularity began a little to decrease; for, though a boy has no objection to see his neighbour laughed at, he does not like quite so well to be laughed at himself, and there are very few who can bear it with good humour. And now Joachim had given such way to the pastime, that he was always hunting up absurdities in his friends and neighbours, and no one ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... prohibited by law the sportsmen of the period turned their attention to dog-fighting, and for this pastime the Bulldogs were specially trained. The chief centres in London where these exhibitions took place were the Westminster Pit, the Bear Garden at Bankside, and the Old Conduit Fields in Bayswater. In order to obtain greater quickness of movement many of ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... only by about two weeks when he joined me—to appreciate what I endeavored to instil into him, that while winning a boat-race was all very well, to take part in a victorious fight, in a real battle, was a good deal better. Sport is a fine thing as a pastime, and indeed it is more than a mere pastime; but it is a very poor business if it is permitted to become the one serious occupation ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... years ago I passed the winter in the wilderness of northern Maine. I was passionately fond of skating, and the numerous lakes and rivers, frozen by the intense cold, offered an ample field to the lover of this pastime. ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
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