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More "Plaything" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking like a silken finger, is woven about a leaf of sassafras. Even the long stem of the leaf is silk-girdled, and a strong band is looped about the twig to which the leaf is attached. Here, when all the leaves fall, he hangs, the plaything of every breeze, attracting the attention of all the hungry birds. But little does Prometheus care. Sparrows may hover about him and peck in vain; chickadees may clutch the dangling finger and pound with all their tiny might. Prometheus is "bound," indeed, and merely swings ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... busied only with her young lover and her innocent dreams of the future, troubled herself but little concerning what was taking place around her, and did not perceive that others were ready to make her young heart the plaything of ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... wound him. She would win that gentle deference and attention for her own. In her jealous, spoiled, little heart she hated the little brother for lying there in his arms so, interrupting their evening just when she had him where she had wanted him. Whether she wanted him for more than a plaything she did not know, but her plaything he should be as long as she desired him—and more also ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... mean little spite, you've taken over control of the biggest responsibility, for any one with any decent sense of responsibility, that a man could take on his shoulders. And what will you make of it? A toy! A rich kid's plaything." ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... which remains nevertheless only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclinations we have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... war and the chase, which has won so many battles and conquered so many kingdoms, has since the introduction of gunpowder been too readily allowed to sink into a plaything for boys. They retain something of a passion for it. Many can remember when they were wont to select the choicest splits of heart-hickory from the wood-pile, lay them aside to season, and then shape them, or have them shaped by stronger and defter hands, into the four-foot ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... lie down as if life were useless, and wait until something or somebody came along to amuse him. His greatest delight was in fishing things out of a pan of water, and he would wash every pebble or plaything that he owned and carefully lay it out to dry. One day he pounced upon a rooster who insulted him by drinking from his water vessel, and plucked a long feather from his tail so quickly that we could hardly realise what had taken place. He then had great fun in attempting to stick ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... probably seen one whom some low vice has corrupted, one who is the aversion of man and woman, make of himself a plaything for a rollicking crowd of children, enter into their sports in a spirit that made his countenance glow with a delight, as though only goodness had ever been ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... not worth anything more, for it is anything but tragic—yet it might become so, if on account of my sins I were to punish myself by marrying Mr. M. I should be of no worth to him, excepting as housekeeper and plaything, and this would not succeed in the long run; for the rest he does not love me, cannot love me seriously, and would certainly easily ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Then, pausing, he picked up the bag which had been so exhilarating a plaything for him this past few minutes and which he had ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. Brewster's bete noir and plaything, tyrant and slave—the furnace. "She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: "Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn mower, would shake a doleful ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... with her. Besides the rags on her back there was only one thing she could call her own, a tiny soapstone image of the goddess Kwan-yin, which she had found one day while walking in the sand. This was the only treasure and plaything of her childhood, and if she had not watched carefully, her mother would have taken even this away from her. Oh, how she had nursed this idol, and how closely she had listened to the stories an old priest had told about ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... shoes in the earlier contortionist manner. By degrees, first one stout husband and then another, men took to the bottle; the curse of effeminacy was lifted; the habit grew on men of all sizes. It was not a perfect method,—it blacked too many other things besides shoes, and provided an undesirable plaything for baby,—but it was a step forward. There was a refinement, a je ne sais quoi, an 'easier way,' about this sponge in a bottle; and, perhaps more than all, a delusive promise that the stuff would dry shiny without friction, which appealed ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... and a letter found in a book. But was not that sufficient to affirm that I had not been the plaything of ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... of every page with notes. "Why don't you read novels, as other people do?" he was asked. "Because life is more novel than any fiction, for fiction is but an attempt to paint life," he answered. No printed matter of any kind, much less a book, ever could be a plaything to Isaac Hecker. He often made more of the sentences on a scrap of newspaper, and studied them far harder, than the writer of them himself had done. A man whose play and work are in such problems as, how God is known, how the Trinity subsists, what ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... eyes that sting with tears in the creeping grey of dawn, do some remnants of affection yet remain mine, and is her memorial kiss warm upon my cold picture? has she tears for bedfellows, and does she clasp to her bosom and kiss a deluding dream of me? or has she some other new love, a new plaything? Never, O lamp, look thou on that, but be guardian of her whom I gave ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... the strong lines of the face. A high type, in spite of his career, his face was a good deal more suggestive of passion than of sensuality. He was tall, slight, and sinewy, and carried himself with the indolent hauteur of a man of many grandfathers. And indeed, unless, perhaps, that this plaything, the world, was too small, he had little to complain of. Although a younger son, he had a large fortune in his own right, left him by an adoring grandmother who had died shortly before he had come of age, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with; and havin' nobody to control her, she got to be the worst young one, I reckon, in the State o' Kentucky. I used to feel right sorry for her little brothers. They couldn't keep a top or a ball or marble or any plaything to save their lives. Annie would cry for 'em jest for pure meanness, and whatever it was that Annie cried for they had to give it up or git a whippin'. She'd break up their rabbit-traps and their bird-cages and the little wheelbarrers and ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... him something more than a plaything—a wonder. It caused his fancy to soar, and little Ben was always happy when his fancy ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... unjust to others or untrue to my own sense of right. Mr. Leavenworth, if you were an older man, I should not dare to say this to you; but I have brothers of my own, and, remembering how many unkind things they do for want of thought, I venture to remind you that a woman's heart is a perilous plaything, and too tender to be used for a selfish purpose or an hour's pleasure. I know this kind of amusement is not considered wrong; but it is wrong, and I cannot shut my eyes to the fact, or sit silent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... but was powerless to help. The schooner was but the plaything of the waves, while to launch a boat—ah, how the storm-fiends would have laughed at the attempt! So leaving the hapless sailor to his fate, we drove on through a blinding wall of rain into the dark night, waiting for the end. ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... before he could be tried. Lount, another of the leaders, had succeeded in reaching Long Point, Lake Erie. With a fellow patriot, a French voyageur, and a boy, he started to cross Lake Erie in an open boat. It was wintry, stormy weather. For two days and two nights the boat tossed, a plaything of the waves, the drenching spray freezing as it fell, till the craft was almost ice-logged. For food they had brought only a small piece of meat, and this had frozen so hard that their numbed hands could not break ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... careering indignant of restraint between long walls of beetling rock. Here when the sun had gone down we would embark with a crew of lithe brown men in a boat hewn from a single tree, seamless and stoutly fashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterous waters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of mighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in the hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... almost done, the nurse came in with a child of a year old in her arms, who immediately spied me, and began a squall that you might have heard from London Bridge to Chelsea, after the usual oratory of infants, to get me for a plaything. The mother, out of pure indulgence, took me up, and put me toward the child, who presently seized me by the middle, and got my head into his mouth, where I roared so loud that the urchin was frighted, and let me drop, and I should ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... said his mother, when the plaything came back ready to be taken out of the store. The mother had taken it from the clerk, and now she handed ...
— The Story of Calico Clown • Laura Lee Hope
... is the only human reality—Everything that is, is past There are many grand and strong things which you do not feel They are the coffin saying: 'I am the cradle' To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form Trying to make Therese admire what she did not know Unfortunate creature who is the plaything of life What will be the use of having tormented ourselves in this world Women do not always confess it, but it is always their fault You must take me with ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... of mind, long separation from home and kindred, could make him complain. He thought all would come out right at last, such faith had he in the goodness of Providence. The sport of adverse circumstances; the plaything of the miserable slaves, which were persistently sent him from Zanzibar, baffled and worried, even almost to the grave; yet he would not desert the charge imposed upon him. To the stern dictates of duty ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... under the earth belongs to me, to say nothing of the copper and iron, and of the coal mines, which supply me with abundance of fuel. Do you see this splendid crown upon my head? You may have it for a plaything. Oh, we shall be very good friends, and you will find me more agreeable than you expect, when once we get out of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... thought a pretty plaything like this could have told us what we so much wanted to know—namely, what the sun and the stars are made of? It seems too marvellous to be true, yet true it is that for ages and ages light has been carrying its silent messages to our eyes, and ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers. He had been rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough. There was no denying that his plaything had not openly flinched. Plainly he was not good at flinching. Anstruthers wondered how far a man might ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... other factors, including the possibility of international repercussions, the Commission to Combat Dangerous Vegetation decided on one of the least awesome bombs in the catalogue. Just a little bomb—hardly more than a toy, a plaything, the very smallest practicable—ought to allay all fears and set everyone's mind at rest. If it were effective, a bigger one could be employed, or numbers ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... or something equally offensive and objectionable. She waited till her sister was safely out of the way, then she stole from her cover, grabbed the helmet, and returned to the shelter of the pew. It made quite an interesting and fascinating plaything in her estimation. She amused herself with it for a long time, until she heard Winona's voice proclaiming that if they didn't trot home quickly they'd be late for dinner, whereupon she popped it under the seat, and joined the others. Winona, of course, ought to have replaced it ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... of claws, and of the power to use them, an accomplishment of which she was somewhat proud. One evening she crossed over between daylight and dark, and entered the room where Veronica was, with her favorite plaything in her hand, moving it back and forth as she sat in the window in the waning light. She could read very nicely now for two years had passed since she had lost her own mother, and had become Gertrude's child. ...
— Veronica And Other Friends - Two Stories For Children • Johanna (Heusser) Spyri
... I love them," answered Setchem; "but your brother Horns is the younger, and you the elder, to whom the inheritance belongs. Your little niece is a delightful plaything, but in your son I should see at once the future stay of our race, the future head of the family; brought up to my mind and your father's; for all is sacred to me that my dead husband wished. He rejoiced in your early betrothal to Nefert, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... centre of an admiring party, who were equally diverted by his consequential airs and by his accounts of his sports among the Moors. Happy fellow, he could adapt himself to any society, and was ready to be the pet and plaything of the ship's company, believing himself, when he thought of anything beyond the present, to be full on the ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pistol" she could have hurled from her, too. Against this physical bigness, against this insolent bravado and this swift sureness of eye and muscle, she knew the small weapon to be a ridiculous and utterly insufficient plaything. ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... sat Miss Day with her pupils, six in number. She was giving a lesson to Enna, the youngest, the spoiled darling of the family, the pet and plaything of both father and mother. It was always a trying task to both teacher and scholar, for Enna was very wilful, and her teacher's patience ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... taste for mischief, and could be as active in it as so many boys. When a child on Maui, Laka was so loved by his father that he would travel many miles to buy a toy for him, and hearing of a strange new plaything in Hawaii, the father sailed to that island to get it. He never returned, for the natives killed him and hid his skeleton in a cave. When Laka had come to man's estate he began preparations for a voyage to that island, that he might either find his father or ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... her: it was his words as he cast her off and left her. She sat up on the bed, clenching her small hands. How dared he? How dared he? She could not ignore those words and she would let him know that he had been her plaything all ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... to the discouragement and dread of failure with which love begins in earnest, were the last expiring effort of diplomatic reasoning. Thenceforward he knew no afterthoughts, he was the plaything of his love, and lost himself in the nothings of that strange inexplicable happiness which is full fed by a chance word, by silence, or a vague hope. He tried to love Platonically, came daily to breathe the air that she breathed, became almost a part of her house, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... for its exercise, something of a game, something for children and childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old man;—and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be necessary once more for "the old man"—always childish ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the world's first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Eclipse dashed out from his hiding, and rushed at the golden ball and seized it in his jaws. When Inzana saw the Eclipse bearing her plaything away she cried aloud to the thunder, who burst from Pegana and fell howling upon the throat of the Eclipse, who dropped the golden ball and let it fall towards earth. But the black mountains disguised themselves with snow, and as the golden ball fell down towards ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... consist of pigs, carabao, or horses made by sticking bamboo legs into a sweet potato or mango. A more elaborate plaything is an imitation snake made of short bamboo strips fastened together with cords at top, center, and bottom. When this is held near the middle by the thumb and forefinger, it winds and curls about as ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... caused by a mighty and uncomprehended energy, something that achieves results ascribable neither to explosions nor heat, some eternal, inner source.... Radium, if you choose, only he didn't call it that. Radium itself, as known to our modern scientists, he regarded as the harmless plaything of people with time hanging heavy on their hands. He wasn't after force in pin-point quantities: he wanted bulk results. Yet I believe that, after all, what he sought was a sort of higher power of radium. The phenomena were related. And he had some of that concentrated essence of ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that he had reason to be thankful that he had allowed mother and me to remain on board. The 'Victorious' became one of the best disciplined and happiest ships in the service, all because she had a real live plaything on board. She fought several bloody actions. During one of them, when we were tackling a French eighty-gun ship, I got away from mother, who was with the other women in the cockpit attending to the wounded, and slipped up on deck, where before long I found father. 'Here I am,' I said, 'come ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... large sum with him to give to his son, but the soldier gave a shrug of indifference as though he had offered him a plaything. He had never been so rich as at this moment; he had a lot of money in Paris and he didn't know what to do with it—he ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... captive and a culprit, thus converting my own house into a prison, my would-be murderess and former plaything, was intolerably painful. To leave her at large was to incur danger such as I had no right to bring on others. To dismiss her was less perilous than the one course, less painful than the other, but combined ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... reason why you asked me to come here? I am afraid that I will not be an abundant source of distraction. My disposition is not very gay, and I am too proud, too honest, and—too costly to become a plaything. Permit ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... time observed that my watch was a marvelous piece of mechanism beyond their most delicate accomplishments, and they announced the fact to their other companion who again looked at me in breathless surprise. "Where did you get this Fot-sil?" (or plaything), he queried ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... courageous and high-spirited creature, yet it guards man; fish is most pleasant to the taste, the pig the fattest of all animals, yet both are food and delicacies for man. What is huger or more formidable in appearance than the elephant? Yet it is man's plaything, and a spectacle at public shows, and learns to dance and kneel. And all these things are not idly introduced, but to the end that they may teach us to what heights reason raises man, and what things it sets him above, and how it makes him master ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... was Isabella, which they shortened into Bell, and that the name of the deceased non-commissioned officer was Tott. Being the kind of neat little woman it was natural to make a toy of—I never saw a woman so like a toy in my life—she had got the plaything name of Belltott. In short, she had no other name on the island. Even Mr. Commissioner Pordage (and he was a grave one!) formally addressed her as Mrs. Belltott, but, I shall come to Mr. Commissioner ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... the party was extremely hilarious. Its members had ransacked the toy-shops of the fair, and every man was carrying some plaything and making the most of it, and extolling its greater virtues than the playthings of his fellows. Taranne carried a pea-shooter, and peppered his companion's legs persistently, grinning with delight if any of his victims showed irritation. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... grown up together like brother and sister. The priest had taught them their letters out of the selfsame book, and together they had learned their hymns and their verses. Together they had watched Basil at his forge and with wondering eyes had seen him handle the hoof of a horse as easily as a plaything, taking it into his lap and nailing on the shoe. Together they had ridden on sledges in winter and hunted birds' nests in summer, seeking eagerly that marvellous stone which the swallow is said to bring from the shore ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... "What has Marian got to do with it? Marian never cared that about me." He makes an expressive movement with his fingers—a little snap. "I know now that Marian only played with me. I amused her. I was the plaything ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... daughter, was about six years old. At this age, the habits that constitute character are not formed, and it is, therefore, absurd to speak of the character of a child six years old. Favoretta had been, from her birth, the plaything of her mother and of her mother's waiting-maid. She was always produced, when Mrs. Harcourt had company, to be admired and caressed by the fashionable circle; her ringlets and her lively nonsense were the never-failing means of attracting ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a little plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... no longer any claim to purity; her self-respect is lost; she sinks lower and lower; society shuns her, and she is to-day a brothel inmate, the toy and plaything ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... which he endeavoured to lift, was a mere plaything in the hands of the burly Englishman. It was a big grating above an open sewer, and heavy enough to try the strength even of Stuart, yet it yielded to the first tug he gave, and ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... then an infant, and Madame Bauche had accepted the charge without much thought, perhaps, as to what might be the child's ultimate destiny. But since then she had thoroughly done the duty of a mother by the little girl, who had become the pet of the whole establishment, the favourite plaything of Adolphe Bauche, and at last ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... ball with a hole in it was his favorite plaything, and he would take it in his mouth and rush around the house like a child, squeezing it to make it whistle. When he got a new ball, he would hide his old one away until the new one was the worse worn of the two, and then he would bring out the old one again. If Dinnie gave him ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... a bommereng, is made of wood, and is much like the blade of a scimitar. I believe it has been introduced into England as a plaything for children." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... sudden changes may have been long at work within us, but the changes themselves are instantaneous, and apparently without sufficient cause. It was so with Flemming; and from that hour forth he resolved, that he would no longer veer with every shifting wind of circumstance; no longer be a child's plaything in the hands of Fate, which we ourselves do make or mar. He resolved henceforward not to lean on others; but to walk self-confident and self-possessed; no longer to waste his years in vain regrets, nor wait the fulfilment of boundless hopes and indiscreet ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... wild Best befit a thoughtless child, A solid wall, an earthen floor, Prison lights, a padlock'd door, Where's no plaything which he may Turn to harm by random play, For in such sport too oft is found A penny-toy will cost a pound. Be wise and merry;—play, but think; For danger ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... the strain should find a flaw, Should a bolt or rivet draw, Then — God help them! for the vessel were a plaything in the tide! With a face of honest cheer, Quoth an English engineer, 'I will answer for the engines that were built ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... touch, the beetling crag, which took omnipotence a thousand years to rear, crumbles into dust, the mere plaything of the idle wind; it lays its hand upon the populous city with its teeming, restless multitude. And yesterday, where stood the glittering spire, the shining tower, the frowning battlement, today the cold gray ocean rolls in ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... thinking of those days of her mother when she was the pet and plaything of the guests, incited to say clever and pert things, which then were passed round and embellished till she neither knew ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of those little creatures born to be the plaything of Fate. When she was seventeen she married Jack Spaulding—he was part genius, but more fool. He was caught by the girl's spirituality and brightness and he couldn't any more comprehend her than a raw-boned Indian could understand a ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... think you are per-rfect, so lovely in the char-racter, and so clever, and so beautiful, my dear white r-rose. It means, besides those things, that you have saved me from the sin of letting my poor powers grow weaker; that you have changed me from a plaything of chance into a man of will and action. I am bor-rn again, my heart's joy, into a world of force and possibility, and you are the queen of ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... Emmeline was not overburdened with domestic work. She soon found it fortunate that her child, a girl of two years old, needed no great share of her attention; for Miss Derrick, though at first she affected an extravagant interest in the baby, very soon had enough of that plaything, and showed a decided preference for Emmeline's society out of sight and hearing of nursery affairs. On the afternoon of the second day they went together to call upon Mrs. Fentiman, who lived at a distance ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... so!" she said; "you make an idol of your foolish plaything, but other people take it only for ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... I'll keep my love-tale secret while I can * But, an desire prevail, its needs must show: Night brought me nightly vision, bright as dawn; * While nights of my desire lack morning-glow. I mourn for them[FN61] while they heart-freest sleep * And winds of love on me their plaything blow: Free I bestow my tears, my wealth, my heart * My wit, my sprite: most gain who most bestow! The worst of woes and banes is enmity * Beautiful maidens deal us to our woe. Favour they say's forbidden to the fair * And shedding lovers' blood their laws allow; That naught ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... twelve to-night they will rouse up, and their eyes will be keen, and their minds acute, and their arms strong, and their foot fleet to fly or pursue. Many of them have been brought up to the work. They were born in a thief's garret. Their childish plaything was a burglar's dark lantern. As long ago as they can remember, they saw, toward morning, the mother binding up the father's head, wounded by a watchman's billet. They began by picking boys' pockets, and now they can dig an underground ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... wild when he first understood it; but the sorrows of four years old are very transient, and before a week was over, little Eric felt almost reconciled to his position, and had become the universal pet and plaything of every one on board, from Captain Broadland down to the cabin boy, with whom he very soon struck up an acquaintance. Yet twice a day at least, he would shed a tear, as he lisped his little prayer, kneeling at Mrs. Munro's knee, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the spark, proud of his acquisition, came to me, that he had been peeping about in the cabin whilst his mother was packing the chests, and seeing a small brass knob in the wainscot, took it for a plaything, and pulling to get it out, opened a little door of a cupboard, where he had found some very pretty toys that he positively claimed for himself, among which were a small plain gold ring, and a very fine one set with diamonds, which ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... forgotten him as already to plunge headlong into the childish amusements of her own ignorant and degraded people. What more, indeed, he asked himself savagely,—what more could be expected of the base-born child of the plaything of a gentleman's idle hour, who to this ignoble origin added the blood of a servile race? And he, George Tryon, had honored her with his love; he had very nearly linked his fate and joined his blood ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized. An illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful Diane. At last she had met that superior man whom all women desire and seek, if only to make a plaything of him,—that power which they consent to obey, if only for the pleasure of subduing it; at last she had found the grandeurs of the intellect united with the simplicity of a heart all new to love; and she saw, with untold happiness, that these merits were contained in a form that pleased her. ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... view of the change. He acknowledged his Empress in his former plaything, subsided from a sort of stepfather into a courtier, and so rose to honour and wealth, while V. is satisfied to remain an ex-professor ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... these men learned the horrible lesson of the pleasures of pain. On pretence of punishing, the devils wreaked upon their victims the most outrageous whims. Truly an immoral and most shameful idea was this, of a sham justice that befriended the worse side, deepening its wickedness by the present of a plaything, and corrupting the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... streets of New Amstel, with copper buckles in his shoes and his hair tied in an eel-skin queue. The schout, his uncle, who was sheriff and chief of police in one, marched him up to the jail and presented him with a beautiful plaything—a handle of wood with nine leather whip-lashes upon the end of it. "Your duties will be light," said the schout. "Every man you flog will give your mother a fee. Come here with me ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... an old lime-tree in the forest was a well, and when the day was warm the King's child went out into the forest and sat down by the side of the cool fountain, and when she was dull she took a golden ball and threw it up high and caught it, and this ball was her favorite plaything. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... leaves astray Upon the warm wind of an autumn day, When the Indian summer rules the air. Others, having found, Lying idly on the sun-hot ground, Shuttlecocks and battledores, Play with the buoyant feathers and stare Dazzled at the plaything as it soars, Vague against the shining sky, Where light yet throbs and confuses the eye, Then see it again, white and clear, As slowly, poisedly it falls by The dark green foliage and floats near. But Celia, apart, is pensive and must sigh, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... fine customers and them loosening up with the drink. And the ould grannies would have courtesied to me and hate in their hearts. But now a leaf on the wind am I, a broken twig on the stream. And the black men of Ulster have me for a plaything, the men that have a hatred for me and my kind, so that it's a knife they'd put in you, or poison ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... not a square inch about him that had anything to do with modern English life. His visage, which was of the colour of light porphyry, had little of its original surface left; it was a face which had been the plaything of strange fires or pestilences, that had moulded to whatever shape they chose his originally supple skin, and left it pitted, puckered, and seamed like a dried water-course. But though dire catastrophes or the treacherous airs of remote climates had done their worst ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... fighting man, with bombs and tricks and frantic words, instead of convincing him by her wisdom and attainments, by her demonstrations of knowledge of life and its duties and responsibilities, that she has grown at last indeed fitted to be treated as an equal and a comrade, not as a plaything ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... tombs had to be visited, but did not appeal to all tastes. The Bazaars did. So did the Zoo, more fascinating than any other zoo, because each animal has its trick, or pet, or plaything. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... not need it. Eh, I cannot speak well! It is bad to be dumb. But—I would have told you! You did not treat me properly—indeed, why have you so enticed a man? Am I a plaything ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... asked, had come that plaything of the tempest? From what part of the world did it rise? It surely could not have started during the storm. But the storm had raged five days already, and the first symptoms were manifested on the 18th. It cannot be doubted that the balloon came from a great distance, for it could ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... two logs roughly together, so they could not stick down into the water and then mounted their sea horses again and rode away. They were delighted to find that now the logs behaved much better, and they grew so bold that they ventured out into deeper water. They had made a wonderful plaything. ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a sword; for I was a brave soldier in the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... to pieces in mines, who are torn by shot and shell, who have carried the flag of England into every land, who have made her name famous through the nations, who are the nation's pride in her hour of peril and her plaything-in her hour of prosperity—these are the rank and file. We are a curious nation; until lately we bought our rank, as we buy our mutton, in a market; and we found officers and gentlemen where other nations ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... just the slightest shade of satire. But its bitterness passed away the moment Sybilla jumped up and came to sit down on the hearth at his feet, in an attitude of comical attention. Thereupon he patted her on the head, gently and smilingly, for he was a fond husband still, and she was such a sweet plaything for ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Quick with the blessings of beauty, And health and verdurous pleasure, Filling with yellow sheaves And plenty the bosom of Ceres; Calling forth flowers from the slumbering earth, Like thoughts from the dream of a poet, Till the island throughout is a garden, The child and the plaything of summer. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... happen over there in two weeks? And I bound here, hard and fast, hand and foot! By what?—by the plaything code of a plaything honour! Now, if he were any other man under the canopy, I would not stay! The question is, is it imaginable that all this was of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... an old story enough. A villain had betrayed this mitherless lassie; used her as a plaything for months, and then, when the inevitable happened, deserted her, leaving her to face a stern father and a world that was not likely to be tender to her. The day she came to me her father had turned her oot—to think o' treatin' one's ain flesh and ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... southernmost, situated between the lighthouse and the town, has five guns. The second, which is somewhat larger, called el Castillo de San Antonio, is in the southern inlet of the bay. Though the most strongly fortified of the three, it is in reality a mere plaything. In the northern part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... and his kind, she had to meet him with all that was catlike and subtle and devilish at the command of a woman. She had to win him, foil him, kill him—or go to her death. She was no girl to be dragged into the mountain fastness by a desperado and made a plaything. Her horror and terror had worked its way deep into the depths of her and uncovered powers never suspected, never before required in her scheme of life. She had no longer any fear. She matched herself against this man. She anticipated him. And she felt like a woman who had ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... that my watch was a marvelous piece of mechanism beyond their most delicate accomplishments, and they announced the fact to their other companion who again looked at me in breathless surprise. "Where did you get this Fot-sil?" (or plaything), he ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... perhaps, as to what might be the child's ultimate destiny. But since then she had thoroughly done the duty of a mother by the little girl, who had become the pet of the whole establishment, the favourite plaything of Adolphe Bauche, and at last of course his ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... method, he said, had succeeded in the physical sciences, because there we could apply experiment. But experiment is impossible in the science of mind; and therefore philosophy will never be anything but a plaything or a useful variety of gymnastic. Stewart replied at some length in his Essays,[168] fully accepting the general conception, but arguing that the experimental method was applicable to the science of mind. Jeffrey observes that it was now admitted that the 'profoundest reasonings' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... thou knowest, Harry, is the sport, the mere plaything, of gratitude and pity. Kindness will melt my firmest resolutions in a moment. Entreaty will lead me to the world's end. Gentle accents, mournful looks, in my brother, was a claim altogether irresistible. The mildness, the condescension which ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... that too often is like the parasite whose sustaining life comes from the greater life on which it feeds. In the eyes of such a critic the author of an indifferent essay upon Poe has more distinguished himself than if he had written a better than indifferent short story. Fiction, he feels, is the plaything of the populace. The novel is "among the lower productions of our literature." It is plebeian, it is successful, it is multitudinous; the Greeks in their best period did not practise it (but here ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... fool, I suppose," Stillman smiled at Claire, "bringing the car out on a night like this. But the truth is Edington promised to catch this boat and I wanted him to try out the new plaything. I might have known he wouldn't make it. We're running over for dinner with ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... to carry a hard fist, my man, to back up that costume aboard the Namur," he said coldly. "Those black devils are apt to mistake you for a plaything." ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... "A mere plaything! A bouquet that will fade shortly and be flung aside. The thing happens to suit my fancy, ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... is so fleeting and so subject to the dictates of fashion as opera. It has always been the plaything of fashion, and suffers ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... Paris. I must have lost my head during the last few days! I must be the plaything of my enervated imagination, unless I am really a somnambulist, or that I have been brought under the power of one of those influences which have been proved to exist, but which have hitherto been inexplicable, which are called suggestions. In any case, my mental ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Poynsett was wheeled into her own room some compensation befell Eleonora, for she met Julius in the hall, and he offered to drive her to the gates of Sirenwood in what he called 'our new plaything, the pony carriage,' on his way ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... young and handsome, and he had one other great charm, he was her first lover. Every one else called Mademoiselle von Sehwerin a child, and jested with little Louise. The princess royal had begged her from her mother, as a sort, of plaything with which to amuse her lonely hours, and the title "maid of honor" was only a jest, which served merely to secure the entrance of the young lady to her ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... became more than serious. "A daughter of ours has demanded for a plaything a caged bird. Psychologically it is an important occasion. Now or never must she learn to look upon a caged bird with horror. What I am thinking of is the psychological effect upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... To say that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... creature in his bearing toward Doctor Frank, who could not (indeed he had no wish to do so) resist the influence of his cordial treatment. After dinner, they sat together in the library. They chatted of the old, old times when Frank was in college, and Hiram, a little bit of a fellow, was his pet and plaything during the vacations. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... was out of her head. To-morrow she would be returning to the regular job. She would have a page from the Arabian Nights to look upon in the days to come. She understood, though it twisted her heart dreadfully: she was in the eyes of this man a plaything, a pretty woman he had met in passing. If she had saved his life he had in turn saved hers; they were quits. She did not blame him for his point of view. He had come from the top of the world, where ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... honor on the left hand; keeping to the left in passing on the street, with many others, so numerous as to suggest that the same law that placed their feet opposite to ours must have turned their heads the other way. To the Chinese the "south-pointing needle" continued to be a mere plaything to be seen every day in the sedan chair of a mandarin, or in wheeled vehicles. If employed on the water, it was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... was given to him with a generosity that was only equal to the lovable nature that compelled and commanded it. His career is one record of unrivalled precocity. As a child he had been his father's friend rather than his father's plaything; as a {143} lad he was his father's travelling companion, and learned from that father the pleasant art of sowing wild oats not with the hand but with the whole sack. He returned to England a proficient gambler, a finished rake, the dear friend of famous men, the darling ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a beloved being, but love itself—the satisfaction of an irresistible desire, the paradise of bliss which merely loving has become for him. What love means he hardly knows. He only knows that he must love. And women love him—half as a plaything to be trifled with, half as a young god to be wounded by. This rising of the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy, is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall we describe their potency? Who shall ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to the pen and brought something back. She held it up and said shyly, "This is Daddy's hat. It used to be the kittens' bed. Now it is their plaything." ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams
... ground, know it, and work it; and another to have the mine still but regard the story as a fable, throw the aureal hints that find their way to the surface as playthings to the woman who herself is but a plaything in the owner's eyes, and mock her when she takes them for precious. In a word, every man in love shows better than he is, though, thank God, not better than he ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... nothing else and met a rapid side glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers. He had been rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough. There was no denying that his plaything had not openly flinched. Plainly he was not good at flinching. Anstruthers wondered how far a man might ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... him, as also to Arago, an hypothesis, which he had had no need of up to now. He had no business with the origin of the world, whether Moses or Darwin was right. Darwinism, which seemed so important to his fellows, was only the same kind of plaything of the mind as the creation in six days. The question how the world had originated did not interest him, just because the question how it would be best to live in this world was ever before him. He never thought about future life, always bearing in the depth of his soul the firm and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... turned to an article on America, in the periodical in question, and read from it several disparaging expressions concerning Mr. Howel's native country, one of which was, "The American's first plaything is the ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... may not happen over there in two weeks? And I bound here, hard and fast, hand and foot! By what?—by the plaything code of a plaything honour! Now, if he were any other man under the canopy, I would not stay! The question is, is it imaginable that all this was of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... my uncle in a quick businesslike way; "once more, you must remember that a gun is not a plaything, and though you are a boy in years you must begin to acquire the serious ways of a man. To handle a gun properly is an art, perfection in which means safety to yourself and friends, durability to the gun, and death quick and painless for the object at which you fire. ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... tender minds should distinguish beyond facts; they covet this or that play-thing, and the parent, or governor, takes advantage of its desires, and annexes to the indulgence such or such a task or duty, as a condition; and shews himself pleased with its compliance with it: so the child wins its plaything, and receives the commendation so necessary to lead on young minds to laudable pursuits. But shall it not be suffered to enjoy the innocent reward of its compliance, unless it can give satisfaction, that its greatest delight is not in having the thing ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... swineherds beheld the sword in Sir Tristram's hands, they said, "That is no fit plaything for a madman to have," and they would have taken it from him, but Sir Tristram would not permit them, for he would not give them the sword, and no one dared to try to take it ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... uniform, and the centre of an admiring party, who were equally diverted by his consequential airs and by his accounts of his sports among the Moors. Happy fellow, he could adapt himself to any society, and was ready to be the pet and plaything of the ship's company, believing himself, when he thought of anything beyond the present, to be full on the road ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the black rocks. For a few minutes she continued beating on them, rocking to and fro in the wildest agitation; then a huge surge, which appeared to have been for some time collecting its strength, struck her on the side, and rolled her over, as if she had been merely a child's plaything, towards the shore, to all appearance overwhelmed, so as never to rise again. The wild breakers dashed triumphantly over her, but she was not conquered, though it seemed a wonder that wood and iron should hold together under the tremendous ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... never been a desire within her that had not been gratified or that had grown delicious and intense through being thwarted; she had never suffered, never hoped, never feared. The world was there as a plaything; she had seen masks but never faces, she had never looked into a human heart or witnessed human ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... He feasted upon it to satiety as he did with everything else; never having learned not to cloy his appetite by over-feeding. So we saw little of Brandon while the king's fever lasted, and Mary said she wished she had remained silent about the cards. You see, she could enjoy this new plaything as well as her brother; but the king, of course, must be satisfied first. They both had enough eventually; Henry in one way, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... together, so they could not stick down into the water and then mounted their sea horses again and rode away. They were delighted to find that now the logs behaved much better, and they grew so bold that they ventured out into deeper water. They had made a wonderful plaything. ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... that the accounts he had received of Gordon's last attempt to recoup his fortunes were in no way exaggerated. Cortez, long the plaything of the railroad-builders, had been ripe for his touch: it rose in its wounded civic pride and greeted his appeal with frantic delight. It was quite true that the school-children had taken stock in the enterprise: their parents turned their own pockets ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... principles—told him of this impossibility, and his heart cried out. The grim remorselessness of that business had no pity for hearts. There was June, the atom with flaming hair, who had climbed all over him, twined and twisted herself about him—about his heart that was made to be the plaything and beloved resort of tiny, helpless things. With characteristic insight he saw he must part with one or with the other; no half-measures could serve in such a situation. In that lay its tragedy. And the tiny, helpless thing prevailed. He would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... take too long," replied Dorothy's plaything. "But they are all in a book. And Dorothy's brother Dick has a White Rocking Horse, and his adventures are in a ...
— The Story of a Stuffed Elephant • Laura Lee Hope
... who runs quickly from one thing to another like any other mischievous child, getting into first one thing, and then some other, which must be coaxed away from her by management. I usually do this by giving her some new plaything, if I can possibly find any article she has never yet had. A box of needles, buttons and thread she likes best of anything I have yet found, and a grand reckoning day will come before long when Alma finds the little Eskimo has been ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... is. He never talks back, and I am awful sometimes, and once I spit at him, and struck him; but I was so sorry and cried all night, and offered to give him my best doll 'cause it was the plaything I loved most, and I went without my piece of pie so he could have two pieces if he wanted,' Jerry said, her voice trembling as she made this confession, which gave Arthur a better insight into her real character ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... why you asked me to come here? I am afraid that I will not be an abundant source of distraction. My disposition is not very gay, and I am too proud, too honest, and—too costly to become a plaything. Permit me to ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... time when to have Carter Brooks sit beside me, as now, and treat me as fully out in Society, would have thriled me to the core. But that day had gone. I realized that he was not only to old, but to flirtatous. He was one who would not look on a woman's Love as precious, but as a plaything. ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... short, hard laugh that ended in a sneer. Well, he had been a fool—that's all. He had served her purpose, had been the poor dupe upon whom she had practised her wiles, a plaything, to be lightly tossed aside for a new toy. Some day, too late perhaps, she would see her mistake, and then she would suffer, even as he was suffering now—but, no, to suffer one must first love, and woman had not the capacity to love. "To hell with them!" he ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... "Keep that plaything where it is. I have here at my side the sword I wore on the Sillon. Your weapon might shrink ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... parents early, and his brothers and sisters had died in infancy, with the exception of the youngest, Matthew, or Mat, as he was generally called. There was so much difference between their ages that Mat was quite a plaything and pet to his elder brother. From all accounts, he was a bright, engaging little fellow, and developed ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... fairies had a taste for mischief, and could be as active in it as so many boys. When a child on Maui, Laka was so loved by his father that he would travel many miles to buy a toy for him, and hearing of a strange new plaything in Hawaii, the father sailed to that island to get it. He never returned, for the natives killed him and hid his skeleton in a cave. When Laka had come to man's estate he began preparations for a voyage ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... addition, of course, to money; but though he has looked for little else, some other things do frequently force themselves on his attention soon after the knot is tied; and as Caroline Waddington will appear in these pages as wife as well as maid, as a man's companion as well as his plaything, it may be well to say now something as to ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... house where we were living; that she had intercepted my letter, telling Mona of my accident, and made the poor child believe that I had deserted her, and that I had not really married her, but simply brought her abroad with me to be the plaything of my season of travel, after which I was pledged to marry her, Margaret Barton. She repeated this cunning tale to the landlord, and then, when he drove my darling forth into the street, she hired the butler to follow her, and thus give her departure the appearance ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... had reached its climax here,—that we might break our necks, if we liked,—she preferred not to run the risk. Resolved to satisfy our suspicions, we pressed the point, and, after many inquiries and waiting a considerable time upon the motions of the child and her new plaything, we got the brief and somewhat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... clad dolls were the toys she favored most—the black-and-red top, the handsome soldier in the scarlet coat, the jointed snake beside its pipe-like box, and the somersault man, poised heels over head. Beyond these, ranged in a buff row, were the six small ducks acquired at Easter. She gave each plaything a keen glance. They reminded her vividly of the long busy night ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... "For one of so few years you seem to have seen a lot, Lantee—and apparently remembered most of it. But I would agree that you are right about this little plaything; it carries a danger with it, being far less innocent than it looks." He tore off one of the fluttering scraps of rag which now made up his sleeve. "If you'll just remove your foot, we'll put it out of business ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest "spirit"—a little instrument and plaything of thy ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... be fought, 80,000 lives were to be sacrificed, during twenty years of turbulence; and in the blood-drenched interim various monarchs are to make a plaything of the thirty-nine disunited ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... developed intellect, it is true—but the process had refined away the rugged qualities of animal strength which, without a deeper hold on Truth and the way to demonstrate it than Jose possessed, must leave him the plaything of Fate. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... elongated cocoon, looking like a silken finger, is woven about a leaf of sassafras. Even the long stem of the leaf is silk-girdled, and a strong band is looped about the twig to which the leaf is attached. Here, when all the leaves fall, he hangs, the plaything of every breeze, attracting the attention of all the hungry birds. But little does Prometheus care. Sparrows may hover about him and peck in vain; chickadees may clutch the dangling finger and pound with all their tiny might. Prometheus is "bound," indeed, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... desire for the possession of any new and strange object; in a child, therefore, to whom a snake is merely an unusual and fascinating object, there is aroused only curiosity and the desire for the possession of a new plaything. ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... She has her club and her friends, as do the gentlemen of her acquaintance, but her children are not neglected from the fact that she sometimes thinks of other things. She is a helpmeet to her husband, and not a plaything, or a slave. If duty calls her to the kitchen, she goes cheerfully, and, moreover, the cook will not dread to see her coming; or if that important person be absent, the table will be supplied with just as good bread, and just as delicate pastry, as if the lady of the house did not understand ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... and bows, Ambition has likewise its plaything; A coronet beams on his brows; And what is ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... in the habit of indulging him, he began to cry for the sun as a plaything. He kept this up until the father went to the bag and took out the sun and let him have it for a while, being careful to see that it went back into the bag when anyone was coming, or when the boy was ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... woods, and the peace and seclusion reigning there is in marked contrast to the bleak wastes above. When I climbed the steep road on that autumn afternoon, and, passing the zone of tall, withered bracken, reached the open moorland, I seemed to have come out merely to be the plaything of the elements; for the south-westerly gale, when it chose to do so, blew so fiercely that it was difficult to make any progress at all. Overhead was a dark roof composed of heavy masses of cloud, forming long parallel lines of gray right to the horizon. On each ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... tendernesses and all cajoleries possible to the tongue of woman. Yet the irritation of action narrowed Laura more than it did Vittoria; fevered her and distracted her sympathies. Being herself a plaything at the time, she could easily play a part for others. Vittoria had not grown, probably never would grow, to be so plastic off the stage. She was stringing her hand to strike a blow as men strike, and women when they do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... shining breadth of the ocean had shrunk to the roundness of a tiny pond. And the Pomerania? He leaned over, shaken with questions. There, beside the bank, was a little plank of wood, a child's plaything, roughly fashioned shipshape: two chips for funnels; red and yellow frosted leaves for flags; a withered dogwood blossom for propeller. He leaned closer, with whirling mind. In the clear cool surface of the ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the ocean. Few things give more vivid impressions of helplessness than boats thus tossed by the waters when not in their raging humours; for one is apt to expect better treatment than thus to be made the plaything of the element. All, however, who have ever floated on even the most quiet ocean, must have experienced more or less of this helpless dependence, the stoutest boat, impelled by the lustiest crews, appearing half the time like a feather floating in ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... know how I love them," answered Setchem; "but your brother Horns is the younger, and you the elder, to whom the inheritance belongs. Your little niece is a delightful plaything, but in your son I should see at once the future stay of our race, the future head of the family; brought up to my mind and your father's; for all is sacred to me that my dead husband wished. He rejoiced in your early betrothal to Nefert, and hoped that a son ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... platform, overlooking the gardens of the club at Bhutpur. And you have never crept out of it again—won't do so as long as body and mind hang together, or after. It has been a song of degrees.—For years you were to me a delicious plaything; but a plaything with a mysterious soul, after which I felt, every now and again, in worship and awe. The plaything stage came to an end when I was here with you before we went to Paris, four years ago. For I found then, beyond all question of doubt, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... his round face in full bloom. Then what a merry time had they! To look at them, frolicking in the wintry garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for Violet and Peony; and that they themselves had been created, as the snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white mantle which ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... in common with the positive Reason of the rationalists, which takes the world to be directed by mechanical and immutable laws. It is supreme Reason, obeying moral laws too sublimated for our powers of appreciation. How could it be otherwise? Are we not the continual plaything of our senses, which are incapable of grasping absolute truths, and deceive us even ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... thoughts and motives they remain mean and low. He considered similar fashions of speech to be even more intolerable than the words of vain persons who are the sport of their hearers, and whose empty boasting makes them to be like balloons, the plaything of everybody. A mocking laugh is sufficient to let all the wind which puffs them out escape. Words of humility coming merely from the lips, and not from the heart, lead surely to vanity, though by what seems the wrong road. Those who utter them are like people who take their salary gladly enough, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... he is free in act; Naught is he but the powerless worthless plaything Of the blind force that in his will itself Works out for him ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... he's got a weapon like that," he would say with a swaggering air. "I don't care a fig now for the gendarmes. A friend and I went to try it last Sunday on the plain of Saint Denis. Of course, you know, a man doesn't tell everyone that he's got a plaything of that sort. But, ah! my dears, we fired at a tree, and hit it every time. Ah, you'll see, you'll see. You'll hear of Anatole one of these ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... do much good with this plaything,' said Fion; 'it would break at first blow if I were to strike at ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... box, drawer up-stairs,—I fell to playing with the handkerchief as if it were a ball, casting it into the air and catching it—as it fell. The game was stopped by another hand than mine-a hand emerging from a paletot-sleeve and stretched over my shoulder; it caught the extemporised plaything and bore it away with ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... generations, the proclivity is generally strongly marked, and in very early childhood made manifest. Thus, in the third or fourth generation, where all have been blacksmiths, the child will be born with the muscles of the right arm more developed than those of the left, and the first plaything he demands is a hammer. So, where a family have been traders, will the offspring naturally discover an aptness for bargaining and commerce. This is illustrated in the instincts of the Jews, a people of extraordinary brain and wonderful tenacity of purpose. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Woman, but a firm belief in the equality of the sexes. She was his eldest child, and came to him at an age when he needed a companion. From the time she could speak and go alone, he addressed her not as a plaything, but as a living mind. Among the few verses he ever wrote was a copy addressed to this child, when the first locks were cut from her head; and the reverence expressed on this occasion for that cherished head, he never belied. It was to him the temple of immortal ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... head, and said no more. For a moment they halted, where the path broadened on a market-place, part shade, part luminous with golden dust. A squad of lank boys, kicking miraculously with flat upturned soles, kept a wicker ball shining in the air, as true and lively as a plaything on a fountain-jet. Beyond, their tiny juniors, girls and boys knee-high, and fat tumbling babies in rainbow finery, all hand-locked and singing, turned their circle inside out and back again, in the dizzy graces of the "Water Wheel." Other boys, and girls still ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... the day before. There was little danger of his running away now, for the dreaded Cousin Eleanor was quite forgotten and he was certain that the time would not pass slowly since he had acquired this splendid new plaything. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... and pretty, and enriched with monuments) I was provoked to find a little mural cabinet, with his figure three feet high kneeling. Instead of a stern bust (and his head would furnish a nobler than Bernini's Brutus) one is peevish to see a plaything that might have been bought at Chenevix's. There is a tender inscription to the second Lord Strafford's wife, written by himself; but his genius was fitter to coo over his wife's memory than to sacrifice ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... and do not cry," replied the Frog; "I can give thee good assistance. But what wilt thou give me if I succeed in fetching thy plaything up again?" ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... the Christian doctrine of the Second Advent. Many of them have received the polish of literature. The stories of Olger and Arthur, for example, have descended to us as romances written by cultivated men. Don Sebastian was the plaything of a political party, if not the symbol of religious heresy, for nearly two centuries. In all these stories we encounter the belief that the god or hero is in heaven, or in some remote land. Such a belief ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... and again the boy and girl were interested temporarily. But, at last, even this variation of amusement with the new toy became monotonous, and Bark ceased strumming and began a series of boyish experiments with his plaything. He put one end of the stick against the string and pushed it back until the other end would press against the inside of the twig, and the result would be a taut, new figure in wood and string which would keep its form even when laid upon the ground. Bark ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... which his sight could not penetrate; behind him there was only darkness. He seemed to be standing in the midst of a great barren waste, with just a little toy river and forest at his feet—a child's plaything, set down in a ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... massiveness in Madame Hanska which was absent in her rivals. She was characterised by an egoism and self-assertiveness unknown to the "dilecta"; while, on the other hand, her principles were too strong to allow her to use a man as her plaything, as Madame de Castries had no scruple in doing. Side by side with her tendency to mysticism, she possessed much practical ability, a capacity for taking the initiative in the affairs of life, as well as considerable literary and critical power. Balzac ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... pleases your Majesty, I am glad that it is in my power to afford you any amusement; but I am not a plaything for these gentlemen, and I must beg them to dismiss any ideas of that kind from their minds at once,' and with that he turned upon the one who had laughed the loudest and proudly challenged him to a single combat. This Prince, who was called Fadasse, accepted the challenge ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... "A foolish thing, this big canoe! A most foolish thing! The plaything of the wind! Wheresoever the wind goes, it goes too. No man who journeys therein may name the landing beach, for always he goes with the wind, and the wind goes everywhere, ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... virtue and he has never been trained to look beneath that mask; as happened to Richard Feveril,[D] sin may spring upon him unaware. Some one else, all his life, has labeled things for him; he is not in the habit of judging for himself. He is blind, deaf, and helpless—a plaything of circumstances. It is a chance whether he falls into sin ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... with any other divisor, the reduction is too great, and must be followed by multiplication. Think of calling a half five-tenths, a quarter twenty-five-hundredths, an eighth one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousandths! Arithmetic is seldom used as a plaything. It generally comes into use when the mind is too much occupied for sporting. Consequently, the smallest divisor that will serve the purpose is always preferred. A calculation is an appendage to a mercantile transaction, not a part of the transaction itself; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... a disappointment to the children each year at play upon so many beaches—even if they are but dimly aware of their lack—to find their annual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing, indeed, to them, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once a year, but not annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons, not waxing and waning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons whereof no one knows which is the highest ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... Europe's plaything, a witty Frenchman had once called him; but those about him found it hard work often to make him dance to their piping. Perhaps no one understood him better, or had greater influence with him, than the man who now walked a pace or two behind ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove. Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C. Brewster's bete noir and plaything, tyrant and slave—the furnace. "She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: "Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... horrible nature. In a declamatory tone, Tracassier reminded his fellow-citizens, that in the ancient Grecian times of virtuous republicanism (times of which France ought to show herself emulous), an Athenian child was condemned to death for having made a plaything of a fragment of the gilding that had fallen from a public statue. The orator, for the reward of his eloquence, obtained an order to seize every thing in Mad. de Fleury's school-house, and to throw the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... mistake. Do you think you would be just as good a child, if your parents always humored you, and gave you every plaything you asked for? Are you quite sure that you would now mind your father and mother as well, if you had always been allowed to have ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... Advance in repeating syllables. Child is vexed when he can not repeat a word. One new word, heiss (hot) (123). The s is distinct; th (Eng.) appears; w; smacking in sixty-fifth week; tongue the favorite plaything (124). Understands words "moon," "clock," "eye," "nose," "cough," "blow," "kick," "light"; affirmative nod at "ja" in sixty-fourth week; negative shaking at "no"; holding out hand at words "Give the hand" or "hand"; more time required when child is ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... boat in order to do something to help mother," added Dory. "I didn't give forty-two dollars for it for a plaything." ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... be paid in royalties out of accrued net profits, the rights to a published work would be acquired. Its name, say, was A Commonplace Person, which promptly would be changed in executive conclave to The Cataract of Destiny, or perhaps Fate's Plaything, or in any event some good catchy title which would look well in electrics ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... child, by Nature's kindly law, Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw: Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite: Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage, And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age: 280 Pleased with this bauble still, as that before; Till, tired, he sleeps, and life's ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... mechanically took the flower-chains from her hands, and not thinking what I was about, gathered them up into a ball. Suddenly she saw what I had done, and instead of scolding me for spoiling her pretty chains, which I richly deserved, was delighted to find I had twisted them into a new plaything. She ran off with the ball, tossing it about till, excited with her own joy, she got to the brow of the hill, and I began ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of our recollection was a large, sleek, black and white animal, the pet and plaything of our very early childhood. Tom, as we called him, seemed much attached to us all, but when we moved from the house of his kittendom and attempted to keep him with us, we found that we had reckoned without our host; all our efforts were ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... could not answer. How could he stand up and preach the lessons of his Master, being there, as he was, on the devil's business? He was a true believer, otherwise this would have been nothing to him. He had audacity for most things, but he had not audacity to make a plaything of the Lord's word. All this the signora understood, and felt much interest as she saw her cockchafer whirl ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... pen in hand, a half-written screed on a rude table improvised by placing a board across the tub; and again the picture, more eloquent, more explanatory of character and of epoch than any written page of history, was a convincing argument that painting was not a plaything. ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... hoped to prevail by gentle methods. He "invited them to dinner"; "had them often at dinner for a year or more:" but could make no progress in that way. "Who is this we have got for a Governor?" said the noble lords privately to each other: "A Nuremberger Tand" (Nuremberg plaything—wooden image, such as they make at Nuremberg), said they, grinning, in a thick-skinned way: "If it rained Burggraves all the year round, none of them would come to luck in this country;" and continued their feuds, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... heart was filled with love which must spend itself upon something. I offered this love, filial and respectful, to Monsieur le Marquis. Madame, the bottle was more responsive to this outburst of generous youth than Monsieur le Marquis, to whom I was a living plaything, a clay which he molded as a pastime—too readily, alas! And now, behold! he speaks of respect. It would be droll if it were not sad. True, he gave me gold; but he also taught me how to use this devil-key ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... fiends in human shape," said the old man, flourishing his sword with a skill and strength that showed he was no stranger to its use, and that there was danger in him. "Come on, ye shall find that a good blade in an old man's hands is no plaything!" ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... had that old-fashioned distrust of the independent, self-reliant woman, he must needs go to the opposite extreme, and let himself be drawn to one capable of little else in the world but ornamentation. Doris, she knew, was fitted only to be a rich man's plaything. Dudley, she felt instinctively, would start off by expecting of her things she had never had to give, and in his dismay and disappointment might wreck both ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... live, I will have him so handsomely dressed, so well combed out, that he shall always remember me as long as he lives; to imagine that I'm to be a laughing-stock and a plaything for him! So may the Gods bless me! he would not have dared to do to a widow-woman the things which he has done to me.[97] (They go into their ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... chirped the bird. "Oh, what a mistake I have made! Why, you are only a toy lamb, aren't you?" he asked the plaything. ...
— The Story of a Bold Tin Soldier • Laura Lee Hope
... so huge a ship! The old stereotyped "toy" describes her; for toy she was, the sheerest splinter of a plaything in the grip of the elements. And yet, despite this overwhelming sensation of microscopic helplessness, I was aware of a sense of surety. There was the Samurai. Informed with his will and wisdom, the Elsinore was no cat's-paw. Everything was ordered, controlled. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... half-drowned state. Donald had mistaken it for a kitten of some new brand, and it was not until some weeks later, when it sprang upon his little girl and buried his claws in her neck, that he realised what sort of plaything—the puma is the lion of the Rocky Mountains—he had introduced into his family. So Donald's wife was suspicious of pets, and when she saw the monkey she was sure it was another lion, and would not allow it to enter the door. But Gum had other ways of entering houses ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... mean. I have disputed with Augustine and Jerome, with Gregory and him of the Golden Mouth, St. Chrysostom. And they comprehended me still less. Miserable men walk groping in the dark, and Error lifts over their head her monstrous canopy. Simple and sage alike are the plaything of eternal falsehood." ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... a fire chief, son, and a good one. That was a great game. But the game is over now, and you're not a fire chief any more. You're Tony Robeson, and the little hook-and-ladder cart is your plaything. Father wants you to bring it here and put it in its place in the house. It looks a little bit like rain, and the cart mustn't be left ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... A plaything in the hand of Fate, she thought at first, when looking from her balcony she saw the Golden City, with its extensive suburbs stretched out at her feet, and heard the distant, never-ceasing roar of the innumerable mine-batteries of the Rand. But the resistless hand ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... to pick it up, who was to set it down, who was to remain beside it, who was to sleep with it—there was no contingency omitted, all was gone into with the thoroughness of a drill-sergeant on the one hand and a child with a new plaything on the other. ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of art!" repeated he, and the words hissed in his mouth somewhat. "Art is something splendid, but the pity is that it is turned into a plaything ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Leavenworth, if you were an older man, I should not dare to say this to you; but I have brothers of my own, and, remembering how many unkind things they do for want of thought, I venture to remind you that a woman's heart is a perilous plaything, and too tender to be used for a selfish purpose or an hour's pleasure. I know this kind of amusement is not considered wrong; but it is wrong, and I cannot shut my eyes to the fact, or sit silent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... entering once while she was pretending to make porridge in it, held up her hands in horror-struck amazement; but the king would not allow her to interfere, for the king was now Barbara's playmate, and his crown their plaything. ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... of weakness. A sign he neither liked nor respected. The truth was Dug McFarlane had been hit in a direction of which his subordinate had no understanding. That herd of Aberdeen-Angus cattle had been his plaything. His hobby. He had been devoted to it in a way that would have been absurd to any one but a cattleman. Hank decided this unaccustomed weakness must ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... sentimentalism of regret; and a little wistfully withal, because he was at home in life, taking a genuine pleasure in its feelings and its possessions; in the dignity of his reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his satisfaction with the ship—the plaything of his lonely leisure. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... soon you shall make her worse than I have dreamt of being. Her purity shall be dishonoured, her love betrayed, her life reduced to such chaos that she shall cease to believe even in her God, and in return for these things I will give her—you. Your new plaything shall pass through my mill, George Caresfoot, before ever she comes to yours; and on her I will repay with interest all that I have suffered at your hands;" and, exhausted with the fierceness of her own invective ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... a charming pretty little bell! Well, in all my life, I never beheld anything more beautiful. Hark ye, my son, will you sell me that bell? What may be the price of it? I have a little grandson at home, and such a nice plaything as it ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... progenitors, and makes merry over a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife has become a plaything. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... that sting with tears in the creeping grey of dawn, do some remnants of affection yet remain mine, and is her memorial kiss warm upon my cold picture? has she tears for bedfellows, and does she clasp to her bosom and kiss a deluding dream of me? or has she some other new love, a new plaything? Never, O lamp, look thou on that, but be guardian of her whom I gave ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... what I have got in my pocket;" and then they all crowded round him, and I used to creep towards him, and think, May be it is my book that my uncle has got in his pocket. But, no; nothing ever came out for me. Yet the first sight of a plaything, even if it is not one's own, is always a cheerful thing, and a new toy would put them in a good humour for a while, and they would say, "Here, Emily, look what I have got. You may take it in your own hand and look at it." But the pleasure of examining it, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... fund of ingenuity and invention; but, like most geniuses, received more blame than praise. When quite small he constructed a sort of gun made of wood, which would discharge a small ball of paper, pebble, &c. This became a very popular plaything in the nursery, and for once the inventor received due praise, on account of its keeping the children so quiet. But one day Fred undertook to teach the year old baby the art of shooting with it; and with a small corn for a bullet, he placed the toy in the child's hands, ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... at Rome to represent in the imperial palace the family which only ironically can be considered as the most fortunate in Rome. Of three generations, upon whom fate seemed to have showered all the gifts of life, there remained at his side only Claudius, the clownish old man, the plaything of slaves and freedmen, whom no one molested because all could make game of him. A madman and an imbecile,—or at least one who was reputed such by everybody,—this was all that remained of the family of Augustus seventy years after ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... toy, Archibald," said his mother, when the plaything came back ready to be taken out of the store. The mother had taken it from the clerk, and now she handed it ...
— The Story of Calico Clown • Laura Lee Hope
... present, until at last the hidalgo began to express gratitude to them for their gratitude to him. Then came a rolling fire of thanks to St. Sebastian; from the superior, for sending a future saint; from the nuns, for sending such a love of a plaything; and, finally, from papa, for sending such substantial board and well-bolted lodgings, 'from which,' said the malicious old fellow, 'my pussy will never find her way out to a thorny and dangerous world.' Won't she? I suspect, son of somebody, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... you may as well have these, too," adding five more to the ten, all he possessed. They were not the paltry marble of to-day, plaything of infants, but the majestic "rinker," black with white spots, the king of marbles in an era when whole populations practised the game. Edwin looked at them half regretfully as they lay in the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... to be the Ulysses-like plaything of adverse gods at the War Office; an indefatigably prolific wife; a succession of weak and ailing children; misfortune in the seasons of journeying; misfortune in the moods of the weather by sea and land—under all this combination of hostile chances and conditions was the struggle to be carried ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
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