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Playground   Listen
noun
Playground  n.  A piece of ground used for recreation; as, the playground of a school.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Playground" Quotes from Famous Books



... scramble ensued. Some boys, taking off their coats and tucking up their sleeves as they ran, made headlong for the playground. Some, with books under their arms, scuttled off to their studies. The heroes of the Sixth stalked majestically to their quarters. The day boarders hurried away to catch the train at Maltby. A few slunk sulkily to answer to their names in the detention-room, and others, with ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed

... pitied who has not at some time revelled in a packing-box house big enough to get into and furnished by his own efforts. But a "village" of such houses offers a greatly enlarged field of play opportunity and has been the basis of Miss Mary Rankin's experiment on the Teachers College Playground.[B] ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt

... amie, the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side as long as the moonlight lasts, and longer if they list, with never a gendarme to say them nay, or a rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, "allez!" The Bois de Boulogne is literally and absolutely a playground, the playground of the people, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a million of Parisians were ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... sir. About two years ago, I passed again over the same common with my associates. I could not resist the wish to see if you were still in the playground. I did not see you among the rest, and I made bold to inquire of one of the elder boys where you were. He told me the name of the ship, and of your captain. The first thing on coming into the harbour that struck my eye ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... {6} owing to the sudden departure of Thompson, the teacher in charge. A man of much greater ability, Sandy Maclean, took his place the following term. He had read widely, and was almost as fond of poetry as of his glass. His young French pupil, who was picking up English in the playground and in the home as well as in the school, long cherished the memory of the man who first opened to him a vista of the great treasures of ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... Present at a discussion in the playground about the best way of intercourse, which I heard of for the first time. This was followed by enlightenment on the source of children. Concluded it must be very painful to both parties. 'Just the other way,' I was told. But the idea of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... one-story frame building, having the shape of a letter T, was then erected just in the rear of Alabama Hall. It has been used for girls' sleeping-rooms until this year, when it was taken down to make room for a park and playground for young women. There were also successively built for the growing demands of this department, and in the vicinity of the original girls' building, Willow Cottage, Hamilton Cottage, Parker Memorial Home, Huntington Hall, and only this last year Douglass Hall. Huntington Hall ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... and pastoral are these cool resting-places in the heart of the Vosges! Grardmer and many another as yet unfrequented by the tourist world, and unsophisticated in spite of railways and bathing seasons. The Vosges has long been a favourite playground of our French neighbours, although ignored by the devotees of Cook and Gaze, and within late years, not a rustic spot possessed of a mineral spring but has become metamorphosed into a second Plombires. Grardmer—"Sans Grardmer et un peu Nancy, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... laboring life, City and country, women's, men's and children's, Their wants provided for, hued in the sun and tinged for once with joy, Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-room, Labor and toll, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college, The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught, The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father'd and mother'd, The hungry fed, the houseless housed; (The intentions perfect and divine, The workings, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... fry, they did not content themselves with whispers, but shouted to each other of their new playground beneath our dear ex-warden's well-loved elms, of their future own gardens, of marbles to be procured in the wished-for city, and of the rumour which had reached them of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... connected, and even when we were all little boys together we knew that his mother's brother was Lord Holdhurst, the great conservative politician. This gaudy relationship did him little good at school. On the contrary, it seemed rather a piquant thing to us to chevy him about the playground and hit him over the shins with a wicket. But it was another thing when he came out into the world. I heard vaguely that his abilities and the influences which he commanded had won him a good position at the Foreign Office, and then he passed completely out of my ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... Pastoral Bees in "Locusts and Wild Honey:" The communal life of the bees. (d) W.H. Hudson, The Perfume of an Evening Primrose, in "Idle Days in Patagonia:" The association of phenomena of nature with events in one's life. (e) Leslie Stephen, Sunset on Mont Blanc, in "The Playground of Europe:" An analysis of the circumstances which combined to give this sunset its peculiar interest. (f) John Ruskin, descriptions of water, sky, clouds, and foliage in "Modern Painters," Vol. I (look up passages other than those selected for the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... clearly recognize the necessity for more attention to the commercial side of the question if there is to be a lasting future for Carrington," he said. "We are proud of the colony, and we are all sportsmen, I think, but it seems to us that it is not wise to make it a mere playground and keep out all but people of our own station. On the contrary it would be better to welcome any well-educated Englishman and make it easier for him to earn a living here. In fact, we want an open-door policy, and a means of providing ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... platform, extending along one side of the large church, by which it was masked from the view of persons approaching from the direction of Vittoria. A sort of cloister, with stone benches beneath it, ran along the wall of the church, and in front of the platform was a broad greensward, used as a playground by the village children. Whilst the Carlists grouped themselves in the cloisters, talking eagerly together, and waiting the coming of Count Villabuena, their horses and ponies stood saddled and bridled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... added, the first escape from civilised restraint, the first survey of primordial nature as seen in the boundless expanse of the open prairie, the habitat of wild men and wild animals, - exhilarate one with emotions akin to the schoolboy's rapture in the playground, and the thoughtful man's contemplation of the stars. Freedom and change, space and the possibilities of the unknown, these are constant elements of our day- dreams; now and then actual life dangles visions of them before our ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... in it and several smaller children hanging on to her skirt; and she goes down the foul street and on until she comes to a tiny little bit of ground, where there are seats and some bushes and hard paths, and this is a playground. But what do you think it really has been? A graveyard, and there are still graves and big stones, showing that people have been buried there long years ago. But the children who play in it do not mind this at all; they sit on the graves, and think ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... play for some hours every day in the back garden—the house forming one end of this oblong inclosure, the stable and coach-house the other, and two parallel walls of considerable height the sides. Here, as it afforded a perfectly safe playground, they were frequently left quite to themselves; and in talking over their days' adventures, as children will, they happened to mention a woman, or rather the woman, for they had long grown familiar with her appearance, whom they used to see in the garden while they were at play. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... not by such affairs that contests are decided—on the playground or in strategy. Lord Roberts proceeded with his preparations undisturbed by the mosquito buzzings about his ears or on his trail. At last, when ready, a second long leap was made. The British army, leaving Bloemfontein on the 2nd of May, was on the 12th at Kroonstad, ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan

... who had bought me, and hooted at me, "Going, going, gone!" I never whispered in that wretched place that I had been Haroun, or had had a Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my reverses, I should be so worried, that I should have to drown myself in the muddy pond near the playground, which looked like ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens

... tuition of that school was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences, select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells

... inhabited suggested more of the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theatre of her active maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... Sloyd will succeed in the midst of incongruous surroundings. To train the eye to a sense of the beautiful in a dirty schoolhouse is somewhat difficult. The glorious handiwork of God will not be taught in the playground which, with its mudholes, ruts, and filth, more resembles a cattle yard than anything else. A school and its grounds must at least show that the authorities themselves really appreciate the lessons they are endeavouring to have instilled into the minds of their scholars. So, too, ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll

... these two processes in the closest juxtaposition in ordinary life. There is many a house where there is a coffin upstairs and a cradle downstairs. The churchyard is often the children's playground. The web is being run down at the one end and woven at the other. Wherever ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... was eating a perfunctory dinner in the dining-room, Mrs. Gorman and Dan wrangled in the kitchen, but Molly sat in the playground of the school, with Tim O'Neill, the culprit, facing her, and a circle of grinning children's faces ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... tones, tints, and shades of green, running from very light to dark, and make a lot of them varying in height, the trees will look very pretty and they can form a jungle where toy wild animals can live; or a number of the trees might form a playground or a grove where dolls may ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard

... a very large playground; beyond it were fields, orchards and walks of large extent reserved for the use of the two head-masters' families, many of whom were girls. On Saturday half-holidays only, if the fruit was not ripe, we were allowed to range certain fields, and the long bough-covered paths, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... Commencement. The corridors, class-rooms, and study hall of Saint Andrew's stretched in dim, silent vistas; over the tennis court and the playground there brooded a dead calm; the field, scene of so many strenuous struggles, lay bare and still in the summer sunlight; the quadrangle, that so lately had rung to parting cheer and "yell," might have been a cloister ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman

... kind which could have no other than a mechanical interest in its execution. The abrupt contrasts, the variety and mystery, characteristic of Gothic architecture, had been a direct and irresistible invitation to the carver, and the freest playground for his fancy. The formality of the classical design, on the other hand, necessarily confined such carving as it permitted to particular lines and spaces, following a recognized rule; and except in the case of bas-relief figure subjects and detached ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack

... Henry saw Charles Wilbraham go out in company with one of the delegates from Central Africa. No doubt but that the fellow had arranged to be seen lunching with this mainstay of the League. To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder. It was Charles Wilbraham's daily goal: Henry remembered that ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... heard the college bell jangle; she knew that it was nine o'clock, and boys and masters were being ingathered for morning work. The college buildings in their bare enclosure stood on the other side of the road. Winifred would have been too shy to pass the playground while the boys were out, but now that every soul connected with the place would be indoors, she thought she might go round the sides of the Harmon garden and see the red bird much nearer from a place she ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... search of the house and garden. She valued Hero's faithfulness; and not even Ruth herself would have been more pleased than Aunt Deborah to hear his bark, and see him jump forward from his usual playground in the garden. ...
— A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia • Alice Turner Curtis

... and would even brush his clothes did he ever think that necessary, who does not see herself reflected in Leonora; probably every German householder either longs to possess her or believes that he does possess her. Consequently, just as Mozart's "Don Giovanni" became the playground of the Italian prima donna, so has "Fidelio" become the playground of that terrible apparition, the Wifely Woman Artist, the singer with no voice, nor beauty, nor manners, but with a high character for correct morality, and a pressure of sentimentality ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... Congresses with regard to the Anarchists should be enforced. The Anarchists who cynically declare Workers' Congresses "absurd, motiveless, and senseless" must be taught once and for all, that they cannot be allowed to make the Congresses of the Revolutionary Socialists of the whole world a playground for reaction and ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... therefore retired a little way and, moving through the mists, came forward to points whence they could watch the church, well concealed on the wild plain, which here and there gave up a field to man but was mostly the playground of wild creatures whose ways were the bowmen's ways. And here ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany

... this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so you called it just now—of the 'person' who had wakened me: she was utterly ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... was younger than me we were in the same class. Such a bright, clever fellow he was! Always through with his lessons before any of the rest of us, he was, and always at the top of the class. And the stories he could tell, lad! Never did I hear such stories. In the playground before school opened we used to get around him and make him tell stories till ...
— The Marx He Knew • John Spargo

... lives, we must expect our lives to be cut and fitted accordingly. It is an aesthetic as well as a practical law that this should be so. The law of nature where there is room for a man to be a man is not the law of nature where there is not room for him to be a man. If there is no playground for his individual instincts except the street he must give them up. Inasmuch as natural selection in overcrowded conditions means selecting things by taking them away from others, it can be neither beautiful nor useful to ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... city gay with bunting and flags that would accommodate many visitors during the night; tables that had been constructed out in the open staggered under the load of provisions the wagons had brought from the nearest town; a platform for dancing later was already the playground of laughing children and ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... primary school building and he was busy counting windows to find Miss Mason's room. The Oak Hill primary grades occupied an old building on a corner lot, while the grammar and high schools were housed in a handsome modern building a few blocks away, with a playground and even an extra lot for the school gardens. But the primary children really had a better time by themselves, and were certainly spared a great ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley

... it—but he'd lie in wait for stragglers that was left behind by the convoy, and it would be the same old sad story. You can know what it meant when I tell you that the last year Shelley went to school they say he could come onto the playground with his long yellow curls floating in the breeze, and not a word would be heard from the fifty boys that ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... despairing mothers that they hardly whispered to one another. And all the children were emaciated and wailed continually for food, sleeping little, playing less, stunted in their growth and threatened with disease; if the war went on another year they would join the little Polish victims on their shadowy playground.... They feared for their daughters at home even as they feared for their young sons in the trenches.... Barring a revolution, the war might last for years ... years.... "Peace Proposals" irritated what little humor they had left ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton

... Still further on there is another school, set apart for the instruction of middle class boys, and in charge of three Xavierian brothers. About 90 boys attend it, and they are well disciplined. At the rear of the school there is a fine playground for the boys—it is about the largest in Preston; and close to it we have the old graveyard of the church, which is in a tolerably fair state of order. Brothers of the Xavierian type have been in charge of the school for about nine years. The three now at it are mild, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... another reason why the Athenians rejoice in the country. The dusty streets are at best a poor playground for the children, the inner court of the house is only a respectable prison for the wife. In the country the lads can enjoy themselves; the wife and the daughters can roam about freely with delightful absence of convention. There ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... my aunt and Mrs. Levinstein, who was staying with her, on foot, and Dimmock, the veterinary surgeon, and one or two others. My shadow moved a little to the north of them like the shadow of a fish. At Lady Grove the servants were out on the lawn, and the Duffield school playground swarmed with children too indifferent to aeronautics to cease their playing. But in the Crest Hill direction—the place looked extraordinarily squat and ugly from above—there were knots and strings ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... Canyon was only a mood of nature, a bold promise, a beautiful record. He meant that mountains had sifted away in its dust, yet the canyon was young. Man was nothing, so let him be humble. This cataclysm of the earth, this playground of a river was not inscrutable; it was only inevitable—as inevitable as nature herself. Millions of years in the bygone ages it had lain serene under a half moon; it would bask silent under a rayless sun, in the ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey

... she drew Phyllis towards a corner of the playground, where a large, rather ferocious-looking hedgehog was curled up ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... catch the afternoon boat train for Boulogne, and go for a walking tour in Normandy and Brittany. When I was your age and a junior in a bank I had to take my holidays in May; each year I tramped that corner of France. I recommend it as a playground. It will appeal to your literary instincts, and it has the immeasurable advantage just now of being practically as remote from London ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... sands,—sweetmeat-sellers moulding animals and monsters out of sugar-paste,—conjurors and tumblers exhibiting their skill.... Later, when the child becomes strong enough to run about, the temple gardens and groves serve for a playground. School-life does not separate the Ujiko from the Ujigami (unless the family should permanently leave the district); the visits to the temple are still continued as a duty. Grown-up and married, the Ujiko regularly visits the guardian-god, accompanied by wife or husband, and brings ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... know. To begin with, Lancilly itself, the woods, the walled gardens and courts, even the staircases and galleries of the house—all was more familiar to her than to them. She and Angelot had found Lancilly a splendid playground, ever since she was old enough to walk so far; they had spent many happy hours there in digging out rabbits, catching rats, birds-nesting, playing cache-cache, and other charming employments. She enlarged on ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... devices and mad, tomboyish pranks merely reactionary, and the only means they have of finding vent for their naturally high spirits? If so, I devoutly wish they would choose some locality other than my study for their playground. Yet they interest me, and although I quake horribly when they are present, I derive endless amusement at other times, in speculating on their raison d'etre, and curious—perhaps complex—constitutions. I do not believe they have ever inhabited ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... pupils to better efforts and higher ideals.—The recitation is the teacher's mental "point of contact" with his pupils. He meets them socially in a friendly way at intermissions and on the playground. His moral character and personality are a model to the children at all times. But it is chiefly in the recitation that the mental stimulus is given. The teacher who is lifeless and uninspiring in the teaching of the recitation cannot but fail to inspire his school ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts

... enjoyed by him would have depended on the humour of his fellows, and boys are not always docile subjects even of rulers of their own election. This, however, is a minor consideration, since the Boy-Bishop, when we first make his acquaintance, has already emerged from the obscurity of school and playground, and made good his claim to the homage of superiors in age and station. Hence the term "Boy-Bishop" appears to define more accurately than its Latin analogue the rank and ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... what is called the "Ecole Gardienne," or infant school—like the rest kept up entirely at M. Menier's expense—and herein, the grandest gift of organization is seen, perhaps, more strikingly than anywhere. These children, little trotting things from three to five years old, have a large playground, open in summer and covered in winter, and a spacious school-room, in which they receive little lessons in singing, A B C, and so on. Instead of being perched on high benches without backs, and their legs dangling, as is the case in convent schools for the poor, they have delightful ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... liberally bestowed upon them by their mates, indiscriminately, and showed no resentment whatever when he heard himself alluded to as Jo, or Hamlet, or the Beetle, his most frequent appellations in the playground. He kept a black bottle in his desk, at the neck of which he habitually refreshed himself before the whole school; and he addressed the children with an elaborate and caustic levity in a thin shaky voice quite twenty ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... are the immigration of people who are accustomed to community life, the increase in factory life and the increased number of people of wealth who seek the advantages which the city gives them. The city has always been the favored playground for the social game. The unhealthy conditions of city life are due to the crowding, the more uncertain means of livelihood, the greater influence of vice and alcoholism. Prostitution and the sexual diseases are almost ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... said Susan, 'it would be of no use. He was just as bad about a playground for the boys, though it would have prevented ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Close beside this fairy playground great gray rocks rose like sentinels, as if to warn off trespassers. Clinging to their rugged sides were starfish of all sizes and colors, varying from white to red, with all the intervening shades. Sea urchins, those porcupines of the deep, with ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson

... in the city was cramped or crowded for room, the place where they now alighted was planned on an unusually large scale. Immense buildings stood upon a large tract of land, planted with trees, grass, and flowers. Here were breathing room and playground. A number of streams of clear water flowed through the grounds, and small ponds were alive with fish and swimming birds. Fountains played, and statues of ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson

... window of my study I could look into a great garden in which a house was being built; when the carpenters left in the evening they put two blocks at the entrance and put a board on them crosswise. Later there came each evening a gang of youngsters who found in this place a welcome playground. That obstruction which they had to pass gave me an opportunity to notice the expression of their characters. One ran quickly and jumped easily over,—that one will progress easily and quickly in his life. Another approached carefully, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... drinking-places, and if there is no opportunity to go to a brook or river to find out, do not state that the banks are low. The fact presented in that way would be almost devoid of meaning. But let the child model a river valley in the sand box or out on the playground showing steep banks in places and in others banks that slope gently. Then let him think of a herd of cattle feeding on the hillsides. The cattle need water. Suppose that they come up to the steep banks. Can they reach the water? ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

... courage prevented her from utterly breaking down. Sleep had deserted her. By day she rarely ventured out-of-doors. Riding she had given up, and she feared to walk in the garden of the Tuileries, even in the little portion marked off for the dauphin's playground, lest she should expose herself to the coarse insults which, the basest of hirelings were ever on the watch to offer her.[7] She could not even venture to go openly to mass at Easter, but was forced ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... smiling as if for a wager. Came in a gentleman with a deep bass voice consciously indicated in the carriage of his head—the voice garrotting him, as it were, rather high up in the collar. Came in a gentleman with heavy movable eyebrows, which looked too big for the limited playground a very small forehead afforded. Came in a small apoplectic man, bald and clean-shaven, and red and angry in the face, like an ill-conditioned baby. Came in ladies and gentlemen who smirked and slid; ladies and gentlemen who loitered, and were sheepish when by hazard they caught an eye; ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... lessons lately administered to the prowling beasts—the terrible saber-tooth, the giant red bear of the caves, the proud black lion, and the bone-crushing cave hyena—that even the stretch of bumpy plain outside the circle of the fires, to a distance of several hundred paces, was considered a safe playground for the children of the tribe. On the outermost skirts of this playground, to be sure, just where the reedy pools and the dense bamboo thickets began, there was a fire kept burning. But this was more as a reminder than as an actual defense. When a bear ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... will support the same principle. A speech is made to affect a single audience, therefore it must be fitted as closely as possible to that audience in order to be effective. A city official invited to a neighborhood gathering to instruct citizens in the method of securing a children's playground in that district is not only wasting time but insulting the brains and dispositions of his listeners if he drawls off a long introduction showing the value of public playgrounds in a crowded city. His presence before that group of ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... land and seemed to be composed of oozy slime. The growth that covered it was tangled and twisted as if thrown together by a mad burst of storms. Dark, sinister and threatening the interior loomed before them; and without needing to consult their maps they spoke as one: "The Devil's Playground!" ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... develop his powers and those of his children that they may be factors in making of this land, the greatest in goodness in all this world. Don't circumscribe the able, noble souls among the Negroes. Give them the world as a playground for their talents and let Negro men dream of stars as do your men. They need that as much as you do. As for me, I shall leave ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... love and trust you, but not long from those who do not; and if you are not old in sin—Flora and the Baron were infants—you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from those who love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of the playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable

... rough jagged summit. Whatever region it may resemble, and perhaps its nearest analogues are the wilder portions of the Bavarian Alps or the less rugged parts of the Tyrol, it is lovely and romantic, and needs only to be visited by a few Western tourists to become an extension of the playground of Europe; for, in combination with beautiful scenery, there are charming costumes, primitive manners, and some interesting phases of Oriental life. And should his way lead him to Sinaia, the summer ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... Liverpool. Here, on the former site of miserable tenement houses, sheltering more than a thousand people, stands to-day a palatial structure built around a hollow square, the major part of which is utilized as a large shrub-encircled playground for the children. The halls and stairways of the building are broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements perfect. The apartments are divided into one, two, and three rooms each. No room is smaller than 13 x 8 feet 6 inches; most ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... generosity have their place in the playground. There may be thoughtfulness for one who is weaker than the rest, or who is a newcomer, or who, for any reason, is neglected by others. There is an opportunity to stand up for those who are ill-used. There ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... did not answer. The horses were standing close together, heads drooping lazily. Warm breezes came fitfully from the winds' playground below. The handkerchief at the girl's neck fluttered, and a strand of her hair danced and glistened in the sunshine. The graceful lines of her figure were brought out by her riding-suit. Lowell put his palm over the gloved hand on her saddle pommel. Even so ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... like,' agreed Vava, not seeing very well how she was to get out of it, but wondering what Stella would say to her choice of a friend. As they entered the playground she saw Rosie Brown the centre of a little group of girls, who looked up as she came in, and then looked away again, without nodding ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin

... Larry Colby, as major, proved a strict disciplinarian when on parade. In the playground he was as "chummy" as ever, but this was cast aside when he buckled on his ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer

... brought into their true fold of rest while these are scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. And do not think your daughters can be trained to the truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made at once for their school-room and their playground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the rocks of your native land—waters ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... it, being then little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort of goatlike joyous madness. For how often in those days I used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and watch the glad romps of the little lambs ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... head mistress?" she went on thinking. "Oh! my clothes, they are not so pretty as those which the little girls who were in the playground wore." She listened tremblingly for the sounds of approaching footsteps. How she wished that the ordeal of the first interview would be passed. She grew so excited that she would have given anything to be out of that room. Any sudden catastrophe which would have ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel

... our breath, for it seemed like a schoolboy's prank. Well, after the long toil in the fen, we were like boys just freed from school, though our game was the greatest of all—that of war—the game of Hodur's playground, ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... Allycompane. We were introduced instantly: "Lord Claude Lollypop, Mr. and Mrs. Coxe." The little lord wagged his head, my wife bowed very low, and so did Mr. Coddler; who, as he saw my lord making for the playground, begged him to show us the way.—"Come along," says my lord; and as he walked before us, whistling, we had leisure to remark the beautiful holes in his ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... yer lives in is a sink, or somethink wus; With a drunkard for a mother, and some neighbour for a nuss; With the gutter for yer playground, and a 'ome from which yer shrink, Can you wonder that poor Slum-birds is give o'er to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various

... by no means unwholesome fare for growing boys, was not what he had been accustomed to, and feeling far too heavy and unwell after it to venture upon an encounter with the Doctor, he wandered slow and melancholy round the bare gravelled playground during the half-hour after dinner devoted to the inevitable "chevy," until the Doctor appeared at the head ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... marking many that do not smile. You watch them and you see unhappiness, unrest, despair, and resignation. It you become acquainted with the life and gossip of the various colonies, you will not need a Victor Marguerite to reveal to you the inner life of the world's "playground." More frequently than not it is a case of on with the dance. What a price ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... in the school playground, under the shadow of the grand cathedral, Phil was as English as any; being foremost in their rough sports, and ready for any fun ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty

... reluctance from her lips. Mr. Heatherbloom had become all attention. More than that he seemed greatly distressed. A woman actually in need, starving—no use mincing words!—in Central Park, the playground of the most opulent metropolis of the world. It was monstrous; he tendered her his purse, with several weeks' pay in it. Her reply had a spirited ring; he felt abashed and returned the money to his pocket. She sat back with eyes half-closed; he saw ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... fell on the beach, which only a slanting copse of scrub-oak and willow hid from the cottage. Nevertheless, she knew this league-long strip of shining sand much better, it is to be feared, than the scanty flower-garden, arid and stunted by its contiguity. It had been her playground when she first came there, a motherless girl of twelve, and she had helped her father gather its scattered driftwood—as the fortunes of the Millers were not above accepting these occasional offerings of ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... month or two longer, he must have sought release in suicide. I know very well that my own courage would not have borne me to the end of the twelvemonth; humiliation, resentment, loathing, would have goaded me to madness. At school we used to be "drilled" in the playground once a week; I have but to think of it, even after forty years, and there comes back upon me that tremor of passionate misery which, at the time, often made me ill. The senseless routine of mechanic exercise was in itself all but unendurable to me; I hated the standing ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... first at school, and there he had tried to draw the eyes of the maiden upon himself by methods known only to heroes, to savages, and to boys. He had prowled around her in the playground with the wild vigour of a young colt, tossing his head, swinging his arms, screwing his body, kicking up his legs, walking on his hands, lunging out at every lad that was twice as big as himself, and then bringing himself down at length with a whoop and a crash on his hindmost ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... even guess; but I was one of the four, innocent as a babe, but adjudged to have been the guiltiest of the guilty. We each had to write out a sermon, and my sermon was the longest of the four. During the whole of one term-time we were helped last at every meal. We were not allowed to visit the playground till the sermon was finished. Mine was only done a day or two before the holidays. Mrs. Drury, when she saw us, shook her head with pitying horror. There were ever so many other punishments accumulated on our heads. It broke my heart, knowing myself to be innocent, and suffering ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... that there is no influence which appeals to them so strongly as that which is outside, what I must call, constituted authority. The Bishop, in short, if I judge him with accuracy, thinks that Oxford is the finest playground for the East-end of London which can be imagined by the wit of man. On this point I disagree with him entirely, not from any dislike to the people of the East-end, but from a profound conviction that young men in Oxford, if they are to do their work with success, have already more ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... are these Thomases?" asked Kinch, as he sat beside Charlie in the playground munching the last of the apple-tart; "what kind of folks are they? Tell me that, and I can give you ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... characteristic of his friend. What it especially pointed to was Gordon's want of imagination—a deficiency which was a matter of common jocular allusion between the two young men, each of whom kept a collection of acknowledged oddities as a playground for the other's wit. Bernard had often spoken of his comrade's want of imagination as a bottomless pit, into which Gordon was perpetually inviting him to lower himself. "My dear fellow," Bernard said, "you must really excuse ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... well off on their road again, took up our own way to Gad's Hill Place. How comfortable it looked on our return; how beautifully the afternoon gleams of sunshine shone upon the holly-trees by the porch; how we turned away from the door and went into the playground, where we bowled on the green turf, until the tall maid in her spotless cap was seen bringing the five-o'clock tea thitherward; how the dews and the setting sun warned us at last we must prepare for dinner; and how Dickens played longer and harder than any ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... face dulled. "If it had been anybody else! But, mother, I don't think you know that he is the one French boy we disliked. It was he who always shouted 'a bas les Anglais!' in the playground." ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... to love and cheer him. He had taken the twin-like brothers, Freddy and Tommy, whose sweet little faces bore some resemblance to his own. We found the children at school, looking hearty and happy in the playground as we passed the schoolhouse. Mr. V—- was from home, but his mother, a pious woman, received us most kindly, and spoke affectionately of the children. She took us to see her lovely flowerbeds of annuals, all laid ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe

... any teacher using the lesson in literature or history to cultivate the finer emotions? What emotions have you seen appealed to by a lesson in nature study? What emotions have you observed on the playground that needed restraint? Do you think that on the whole the emotional life of the child receives enough consideration in ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... of the biggest chaps rushed into the schoolroom, and seizing each an arm, run me into the playground—bolt up ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray

... clamour for more dinner than I felt would be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill in a few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed and turned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared. The pond was at first strictly forbidden as a playground, but afterwards I made concessions, and now they are allowed to go to a deserted little burying-ground on the west side of it when the wind is in the west; and there at least they can hear the frogs, and sometimes, if they are patient, catch a ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim

... because he was the son of a rich man. Such cases occur sometimes among American schoolboys, but generally they are too democratic and sensible to attach importance to social distinctions in the schoolroom, or in the playground. ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... knowledge. To Spinrobin it was like the lifting of a great veil. As a boy he had divined something of these values of sound and name, but with the years this knowledge had come to seem fantastic and unreal. It now returned upon him with the force of a terrific certainty. That immense old inner playground of his youth, without boundaries or horizon, rolled up before his mental vision, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation and world ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... there, Ernst heard, at the suggestion of the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who was a friend of Dean Colet, and who, some years before, had visited London. Under the figure also were some lines in Latin, written by the same learned person. Behind the school was a playground surrounded by cloisters, where the pupils played ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston

... features of the place and range the more sightly ones midst lawns and flowers; while others, still more thorough, will be satisfied with nothing short of sweeping away all traces of the graves, and transforming the whole space at one stroke into a public playground. The choice of systems is in some degree a question of environment. Wherever open ground is needed for the health and enjoyment of dwellers in towns, it is now generally conceded that, with certain reservations ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... myself, throngs of voices all about me, standing half-unconsciously by a high iron fence in Bermondsey watching that smooth asphalt playground where one sees the very dead (for once) crowded by the living—pushed over to the edges—their gravestones tilted calmly up against the walls. I stand and look through the pickets and watch the children run and shout—the little funny, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... gloom of noble lime-trees o'er shadow'd, Which for many a century past on the spot had been rooted, Stood there a green and spreading grass-plot in front of the village, Cover'd with turf, for the peasants and neighbouring townsmen a playground. Scooped out under the trees, to no great depth, stood a fountain. On descending the steps, some benches of stone might be seen there, Ranged all around the spring, which ceaselessly well'd forth its waters, Cleanly, enclosed by a low wall all round, and convenient to draw ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... fear of the forest till that day when I was lost therein, for the nearer glades round our village had been my playground ever since I could remember, and before I knew that fear therein might be. That was not so long a time, however, save that the years of a child are long years; for at this time, when I first learned the full wildness of the woods of the great Andredsweald ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... by Genest ('English Stage', vol. viii. pp. 432-434). As a comic actress, Mrs. Jordan was unrivalled; her voice was perfect; and her natural gaiety irresistible. Sir Joshua Reynolds preferred her to all other actresses as a being "who ran upon the stage as a playground, and laughed from sincere wildness of delight." In genteel comedy, critics like Genest ('English Stage', vol. viii. p. 431) and Leigh Hunt ('Dramatic Essays', ed. 1894, p. 82) agree that she failed, perhaps, as the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... one inch thick. Several hundred of these are kept neatly piled against the fence, and the children are expected to leave them in good order. This bit of voluntary discipline has its good uses on the playground, and the free building allowed with this larger material gives rise to individual effort, and tests the power of the children in a way which makes the later, more organized work at the tables far more full of meaning."—Kindergarten Magazine, ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... seraphic to my ears,) and who had never vouchsafed to waste a word on such a child as myself. The day was come, however, when all that would be changed. One of these leaders strode up to me in the public playground, and, delivering a blow on my shoulder, which was not intended to hurt me, but as a mere formula of introduction, asked me "what the devil I meant by bolting out of the course, and annoying other people in that manner. Were 'other people' to have no rest for me and my verses, which, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... should be employed for the purpose of inducing and increasing, of explaining and strengthening, that faith of which all the stories treat. It is not to be wondered at, that persons who do not seek faith in the stories of the Bible, look for the region of allegorical shades as a pleasant playground in which to ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... go, and they tarry; But if I now venture a cast, Of a sudden the playground is empty, As my ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... notion of the old Quaker, George Fox, to read his bequest by will of a tract of land near Philadelphia "for a playground for the children of the town to play on and for a garden to plant with physical plants, for lads and lassies to know simples, and learn to make oils ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... press, and the free pulpit. It is impossible to compute the power of this trio. The free schools, open to rich and poor, bind together the people in educational bonds, and in the common memories of the recitation-room and the playground; and how strong they are, you, reader, well know, as some past recollection tugs at your heart-strings. The free press may not always be altogether as dignified or elevated as the more highly cultivated may desire, but it is ever open to complaints of the ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... long-curved ironwork of Pelham Bridge. And the farm, promontoried with its woods and thick cover between these boundaries and more woods to the north, was an overgrown, run-down, desolate, lonely, deserted old place. Had it not been for the old sign that said "Bewarr," it must have been a great playground for children—for their picnics, and their hide-and-seeks, and their games at Indians. But the ferocious animals imagined by the old Revolutionary were as efficacious against trespassers as a cordon of ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party. And this belief, among others, he handed on to me. On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the Tariff. It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats were irrational, inferior, and—with certain exceptions like ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... playground after school, or went to the post-office for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand, it would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone; the frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the lights were shining pale in kitchen ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... large house, which is either plastered stone or adobe, contains the dormitories, visitors' room, and oratory, and three houses at the back, all densely shaded, are used as schoolroom, cook-house, laundry, and refectory. There is a playground under some fine tamarind trees, and an adobe wall encloses, without secluding, the whole. The visitors' room is about twelve feet by eight feet, very bare, with a deal table and three chairs in it, but it ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... factory rules—can be described in figures and actions that appeal to the imagination and impress upon the mind pictures that are repeatedly reawakened by experience and observation on the playground, at home, on the way to school or to work. "Once upon a time—" will always arrest attention more quickly than "The human frame consists—." What others think of me helps me to obey law—statutory, moral, or hygienic—more than what I know ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of America. It was rather a terra incognita, regarded with a sort of reverential ignorance by the average American tourist. By the range of his humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour of his expression he awoke immediate attention. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... brought home from the College Bourdaloue by a worthy father in the interest of the poor little fellows themselves, who had received a temporary leave of absence in order to spare them from hearing in the parlour or the playground any unkind story or painful allusion. Thereupon the Nabob flew into a terrible passion, which caused him to destroy a service of porcelain, and it appears that, had it not been for M. de Gery, he would have rushed off at once to punch ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... playground! there's the lime, Beneath whose shade in summer's prime So wildly I have read!— Who sits there now, and skims the cream Of young Romance, and weaves a dream Of Love ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... It is a study, the most patient, the most profoundly earnest to which these works now invite us. Let those who will, stay in the playground still, and make such sport and pastime of it there, as they may; and let those who feel the need of inductive rules here also,—here on the ground which this pastime covers—let those who perceive that we have as yet, set our feet only on the threshold ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... to be the chaperon but the dictator of this tour," declared Winnie when they alighted at the big playground. "I've never been here before, and I don't want anybody to tell me ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester

... included seven years of uncongenial tasks, and three of writing, and three of wandering in search of health,—that sums up the story of Keats. He was born in London; he was the son of a hostler; his home was over the stable; his playground was the dirty street. The family prospered, moved to a better locality, and the children were sent to a good school. Then the parents died, and at fifteen Keats was bound out to a surgeon and apothecary. For four years he worked as an apprentice, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... surrounding circumstances will allow them to find. But Madelon's childhood had known neither nursery nor sheltered home-garden. Her earliest experiences had been amidst the larger ventures of life, the deeper interests that gather round advancing years; her playground had been the salons of the gayest watering-places in Europe, her playthings the roulette-board and the little gold and silver pieces that had passed so freely backwards and forwards on the long green tables where desperate stakes were ventured, and fortunes ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter



Words linked to "Playground" :   dandle board, yard, borscht belt, spa, playground slide, teeter-totter, curtilage, watering place, vacation spot, slide, teeter, sliding board, Waikiki, resort hotel, borscht circuit



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