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More "Shuttlecock" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suggested by a political event, an incident in the police courts, a street song, or a bit of burlesque at some theatre, and forgotten in a month. Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battledore and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a recent invention, which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama. The Maison ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... day, and the children had to content themselves with skating and battledore and shuttlecock in the verandahs. Lord Carrington, Tom, and Mabelle went for a long walk, calling on Cardinal Moran, and paying visits to the picture-gallery, the Anglican cathedral, and other places; and after an early dinner at 6.45 all the party went to the ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... let me draw up their histories as it were in parallel columns, and you shall see the likeness clearly; you shall see also, presently, how prettily time and the laws that govern human incarnation played battledore and shuttlecock with the two: what a game of see-saw went on between the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... are seldom able to concentrate their attention on the one thought which should apparently swamp all others. They either yield to the strain, and lapse into unconsciousness, or their minds become the arena of minor emotions, wherein trivialities play battledore and shuttlecock with the tremendous issues of the moment. When a more extended knowledge of all that had happened, joined to a nicer adjustment of the time-factor in events, enabled Elsie to realise the extraordinary deliverance ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Because, if you knew anything at all about love, you couldn't pay with it as you do. Even the love you've no use for is the biggest thing the poor devil who loves you has to offer you; you've no right to play battledore and shuttlecock with it." ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... top, was tossed backward and forward—as if he had been a shuttlecock between two battledores—and it was just as much as he could do to keep his hold among the branches, much less finish the loading of his fusil, which he had only half accomplished when the rocking began. Had he been alone, his position would have been one of great ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... this man who, with exceptional abilities and exceptional opportunity for exercising those abilities, could contentedly fill his empty days with the manufacture of blacking, or pass an entire night, as Gronow relates him to have done, playing battledore and shuttlecock for a wager with Ball Hughes, was, in much, a typical product of his generation. His mannerisms were accepted by his contemporaries with a forbearance which bordered on admiration, and, however childish his peculiarities, he remained ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... educational trainings, but let her also make sure that her girls have whatever chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as shuttlecock and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the harmless blows which are so valuable a training ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... was not such an absolute Samson, but that he was much more likely to be hurt himself: and indeed, he had flown out into the road, like a shuttlecock. He had such an opinion of his own strength, however, that he was in real concern for the other ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... himself with them. There were several games of the same sort, which were not less popular. Skittles; la Soule or Soulette, which consisted of a large ball of hay covered over with leather, the possession of which was contested for by two opposing sides of players; Football; open Tennis; Shuttlecock, &c. It was Charles V. who first thought of giving a more serious and useful character to the games of the people, and who, in a celebrated edict forbidding games of chance, encouraged the establishment of companies of archers and bowmen. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... explicit enough to express the desire. My whole desire is to avoid complication of addresses. It is quite fatal. If two P. R.'s have contradictory orders they will continue to play battledoor and shuttlecock with an unhappy epistle, which will never get farther ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at once tumbled after him, and I followed too, as quickly as I could get along and the motion of the ship would allow me, being buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between the bulwarks and deck-house in my progress onwards, as well as drenched by the spray, which came hurtling inboards over the main-chains from windward as it was borne along by the breeze, wetting everything amidships ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... forehead in the fashion in which she wore it in her childish days. Thus attired, she looked about fourteen years old, and the shy way in which she glanced at the company from under her eyelashes, added to the impression of extreme youth. To carry out the character, she held a battledore and shuttlecock ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... next day Nanking played ball and bandy with the Susquehannock boys, and taught them jack-stones and how to make a shuttlecock. They put eagle's feathers in his hair, and the old men adopted him into their tribe. On the third day the absent Indians returned with a stork. It was a white stork with a red bill and plenty of stork's neck, but short legs. Nanking doubted if it could stand on one leg ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... used to walk back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques. But as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game of battledore and shuttlecock being renewed several times. Social and philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us. This fateful year was not more successful than we had been in solving the problems which it had ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... meaning. It denotes the absence of a certain order, but to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. So there arises the problem ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... mother to abandon that love, and to give her heart to another. That in words she has been obedient, I know well; but what I doubt is this,—that she has in truth been able so to chuck her heart about like a shuttlecock. I can only say that I am ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... uninteresting moods, whence it breaks only at the last period. The opening chorus, "God Is Our Refuge and Strength," seems to me to be built on a rather trite and empty subject, which it plays battledore and shuttlecock with in the brave old pompous and canonic style, which stands for little beyond science and labor. It is only fair to say, however, that A.J. Goodrich, in his "Musical Analysis," praises "the strength and dignity" of this chorus; and gives a minute analysis ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... believe any one tried; For while every one stared, with a dignified stride And without a word more, He marched on before, Up a flight of stone steps, and so through the front door, To the banqueting-hall that was on the first floor, While the fiendish assembly were making a rare Little shuttlecock there of the curly-wigged Heir. —I wish, gentle Reader, that you could have seen The pause that ensued when he stepped in between, With his resolute air, and his dignified mien, And said, in a tone most decided ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... peculiarly majestic character of the palm is given not only by their lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussu and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all species of which have similar fruit, there is a vast difference ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... not Alice only, her father also showed himself near the window, and beckoned him up. The family party seemed now more promising than before, and the fugitive Prince was weary of playing battledore and shuttlecock with his conscience, and much disposed to let matters go as chance ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... colonists' part of regal power; and, tobacco or no tobacco, the line must be drawn there. If the charges against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if not, his term should be extended beyond the original commission. A new commission was given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock experience seems to have quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of quarrels with the Virginia council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in 1642 came Sir William Berkeley. This man, who was born about the beginning ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... leads. l. 226. The seeds of many plants of this class are furnished with a plume, by which admirable mechanism they are disseminated by the winds far from their parent stem, and look like a shuttlecock, as they fly. Other seeds are disseminated by animals; of these some attach themselves to their hair or feathers by a gluten, as misleto; others by hooks, as cleavers, burdock, hounds-tongue; and others are swallowed whole for the sake of the fruit, and ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... not have accepted a place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... looking ahead beyond the oasis, beyond the stars, to the moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of the bougainvillaea, until upon the background of dull ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... admires that portion of the English system which Englishmen generally tolerate as a necessary evil, but of which they are by no means proud. Most thinking men in this country resent the idea of Indian interests being made a shuttlecock in the strife of party. Not so Mr. Mallik. He shudders at the idea of Indian affairs being considered exclusively on their own merits. "If it is no party's duty to champion the cause of any part of the Empire, that part ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... dozen big boys seized hold of a blanket, dragged from one of the beds. "In with Scud; quick! there's no time to lose." East was chucked into the blanket. "Once, twice, thrice, and away!" Up he went like a shuttlecock, but not quite up ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now—I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... know. I have no plans. I won't say with Romeo that I am fortune's fool—but I am fortune's shuttlecock; and I suppose that means pretty ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the recollections of the morning's work, and after luncheon there was walking in the park, rowing or sailing on the lake, riding or driving in the adjacent country, archery in a spacious field; and in bad weather billiards, reading in the library, music in the drawing-rooms, battledore and shuttlecock in the hall; in short, all the methods of passing time agreeably which are available to good company, when there are ample means and space for their exercise; to say nothing of making love, which Lord Curryfin did with all delicacy and discretion—directly ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... flower Whose chill would quench in everlasting peace His soul's unmeasured flame—O paradox! Might he but learn the trick!—to wear her heart One fragile hour of heedless innocence, And then, farewell, and the incessant grave. "O fool! O villain!"—'tis the shuttlecock Wit never leaves at rest. It is his fate To be a needle in a world of hay, Where honour is the flattery of the fool; Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest; Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood For words to fell. Ah! but the secret lacking, The ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to keep the conversational shuttlecock in the air with no less a person than Horace Greeley. Amid the laughter and comment which followed the narration one mirthful genius who chose for the day to occupy the seat of the scorner, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... poet knows. Pegasus is a racer, not a cart-horse; Euterpe trips it like the hare, while dogged criticism is the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite many of the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... little they have plenty of play and fun when they are not in school. In both towns and villages the streets are the playground, and here they play ball, or battledore and shuttlecock, or fly kites. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... to amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on some smiling female neighbor, such as are to be found every ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... pulling strongly for the wreck. Father and daughter both labored at the oars, unable to speak on account of the roar of the sea and wind, and blinded by the spray that whirled over them. Their boat was tossed like a shuttlecock in the great waves, and they knew that unless the shipwrecked persons could aid them it would be impossible to return to the lighthouse. They must succeed or die, and their chance of success ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... not have made the picture more vivid. I could see the great wind. The tops of the palms are flying about like Brobdingnagian birds, their long blades darting out like infuriated tongues. I saw the oranges flung about in a great game of battledore and shuttlecock—as if the hurricane remembered to play in its fury! I saw men shrieking at the masts of a ship. Their puny lives! Why are they not glad to die ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... treaty-ports, and in those places where there are any roads, men are taking readily to cycling, albeit, from the flowing nature of their garments they generally use ladies' bicycles. Of these few pastimes archery is considered the most distingue, while boys attain to great skill in playing shuttlecock with their feet, being able to keep up the feathered cork for a dozen or twenty times, and passing it considerable distances from one to another. Judge then of my surprise when, on asking a young Chinaman ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... stupid questions," said the woman. "My sons have plenty of business on hand; they are playing at shuttlecock with the clouds up yonder in the king's hall," and she ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... daan th' hill he did mak sum manoevures yo mind, for talk abaat fugal men i' th' army wen thay throw thair guns up into th' air an' catches em agean, thay wur nowt ta Joe, for he span his slay boards up an' daan just like a shuttlecock. But wal this wur goin' on th' storm began to abate, and th' water seemed to get less, but still thay kept at it. Wal at last a chap at thay called Dave Twirler shaated aat at he saw summat, and thay look't way at he pointed, and thare behold ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... fear I cannot," said Rollo sadly. "It is like battledore and shuttlecock, is it not? I think, if you do not mind, I will watch Mr. Bradley and his friend Mr. Robbins play at golf, which is a game I have never witnessed, though I have often seen gentlemen falling over their golf-sticks ...
— Rollo in Society - A Guide for Youth • George S. Chappell
... flowers, and he had set his heart on his friends making a day of it. Accordingly, he had made elaborate preparations for enjoyment. With that practical sagacity which frequently distinguishes the nautical mind, he had provided bowls and quoits for the men; battledore and shuttlecock for the younger women; football and cricket and hoops, with some incomprehensible Eastern games for the children, and a large field at the side of the cottage afforded room for all without much chance ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... later days it was discovered that even the tartan was an anachronism in such case, and that Macbeth and his associates must be clad in stripes, or plain colours. Even the bonnet with the eagle's feather, which Sir Walter Scott induced Kemble to substitute for his "shuttlecock" headdress of ostrich plumes, was held to be inadmissible: the Macbeth of the antiquaries wore a conical iron helmet, and was otherwise arrayed in barbaric armour. But when Garrick first played Macbeth there were good reasons why the reform to be introduced by Macklin at a later date could ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... dreamless sleep. Many of my dreams were, if anything, harder to bear than my delusions of the day, for what little reason I had was absolutely suspended in sleep. Almost every night my brain was at battledore and shuttlecock with weird thoughts. And if not all my dreams were terrifying, this fact seemed to be only because a perverted and perverse Reason, in order that its possessor might not lose the capacity for suffering, knew ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... at every breeze.' Sir John having affected to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs, Dr Johnson said, 'Nay, sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... heart, how plain he saw it all! The lich-gate and the crumbling wall, The stream, the pathway to the wood, The bridge where they so oft had stood. Then, in a trice, both church and clock Vanish'd before ... a shuttlecock. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... fair court dame, Whose whiteness did the snow's pure whiteness shame, King Louis by odd mischance did knock The shuttlecock, Thrice happy rogue, upon the town of doves, To nestle with the pretty little loves! "Now, sire, pray take it out"—quoth she, With an arch smile,—But what did he? What? what to charming modesty belongs! Obedient to her soft command, He raised it—but not with his hand! No, marveling ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... I did, it was sufficient that she had decided. There was no appeal; so, kissing her again, I wished her a good night, quitted her, and retired to my hotel. What a night of tumult did I pass! I was tossed from Emily to Eugenia, like a shuttlecock between two battledores. The latter never looked so lovely; and to the natural loveliness of her person, was added a grace and a polish, which gave a lustre to her charms, which almost served Emily as I had served the footman. I never once closed my eyes during the night—dressed ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... conferences now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tete-a-tete. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... system lies in the stabler policy it will ensure. Our present system results in frequent sharp overturns, according as this party or that may get a temporary majority. But this battledore and shuttlecock of legislation does not represent the far more gradual changes in public opinion. A system whereby the number of representatives of each party is always directly proportioned to the number of votes cast for that party would make it possible to evolve a careful machinery of government, as is not ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... And don't try to look like an outraged empress until your stays are covered up. Put on your dress and we'll have a game of battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. It's raining. Then we'll have some music this afternoon. My alto used to go beautifully with your soprano, and I'll get out our duets. I haven't forgotten one of ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... The shuttlecock of conversation was well kept up from all sides of the table, and when Regina's thoughts crept back from their numbing reverie, Mr. Chesley was eloquently describing some of the most picturesque ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Majesty's closet, and one with whom the revered monarch was on terms of considerable intimacy. A close regard had sprung up between them in the old King's time; when His Royal Highness, playing at battledore and shuttlecock with the young lord on the landing-place of the great staircase at Kew, in some moment of irritation the Prince of Wales kicked the young Earl downstairs, who, falling, broke his leg. The Prince's hearty repentance for his violence caused him to ally himself closely with ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... background for any appreciation of virtue, even any knowledge of its existence.... So now, on the day of Mary Turner's trial, there was a subtle gaiety of gossipings to and fro through the store. The girl's plight was like a shuttlecock driven hither and yon by the battledores of many tongues. It was the first time in many years that one of the employees had been thus accused of theft. Shoplifters were so common as to be a stale topic. There was a refreshing novelty in ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... an idle hour" called The Shuttlecock Papers, Mr. J. Ashby-Sterry thus sympathetically alludes to "Bleak House":—"What a romantic place this is to write in, is it not? What a glorious study to work in! Indeed, both from situation and association, it would be impossible to find a better place for writing, ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... absolute disregard to propriety. I made a point of listening for the accentuation of the 'my dear' which was being interchanged, but the key-note to the harmony existing between husband and wife was neither excessively unctuous, nor shrewd, and the connubial shuttlecock was so well kept up on both sides that I chose to await the issue rather than speculate on the origin of this strange exhibition. I therefore, as I could not be accused of an outrage to modesty, permitted myself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... elbows on the grass that I might face her. "Listen, madame. It is time you knew the story of Pemaou." And thereupon I recited all that had happened between the Huron and myself from the day when we had played at shuttlecock with spears till the night when he had shadowed us at the Pottawatamie camp,—the night before our wedding. I even told her of the profile in ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit my household gods, please heaven. I wish ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... a start of anger: "What! It was with Monsignor Nani that I began, from him that I set out; and I am to go back to him? What game is that? Can I consent to be a shuttlecock sent flying hither and thither by every battledore? People are having a game ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... simple, but they proved to be anything but simple to follow. Like a shuttlecock, Jasper was tossed from clerk to clerk, until by the time he reached his destination he was confused, ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... like you!" made answer Jack, in a tone of considerable astonishment. "I've got a whole ball of new string, and two battledores and a shuttlecock, and a ball, and a bow ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... with the figure and description of Bewick, to which the other replied that Bewick was next to Nature. Here the old gentleman seized me by the thigh with his very hand-vice of a grasp; and I contrived to keep up the shuttlecock of conversation playfully to his highest satisfaction, though they who praised him so ardently, little imagined whose ears imbibed all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... ranks. In the suburbs of Paris, and in the neighbouring villages, where many of the allied troops were quartered, they appeared always on the best terms with the female inhabitants, and were often to be seen assisting them in their work, playing at the battledore and shuttlecock with them in the streets, or strolling in their company along the banks of the Seine, and through the woods of Belleville or St Cloud, evidently to the satisfaction of both parties. Much must be allowed for the national levity of the French; yet it may be doubted, whether the officers ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... in everything; and perfection once reached, deterioration usually begins. And when, in bandying the phrases infidel and infidelity—like the feathered missiles in the game of battledore and shuttlecock—they fell upon Chalmers, we think there was a droll felicity in the accident, which constitutes for it an irresistible claim of being the terminal one in the series. The climax reached its point of extremest elevation; ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was not made to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... iceberg, which has chosen just now to turn head over heels. In turning, it struck the Halbrane and carried it off just as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and now here we are, stranded at certainly one hundred feet above the level of the ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... a sleepy snort, very like a snore, revealed that, if he was not already asleep, he was past understanding a word that Ruby was saying. When young Diamond found this, he thought he might venture to take up the dropt shuttlecock ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of his position and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him. "He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry experience ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the world as to the duty of teaching ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... this peculiar education and training kept me far ahead of other girls, and while they were scarcely out of the nursery, and still enjoying battledore and shuttlecock, I was seeking information, either by reading or conversation, concerning my ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... broidered pouch hanging at her right side. A scarlet over-sash kept the large sash-knot in its place. Her hair was gay with knot of scarlet crinkled crepe, lacquered comb, and hairpin of tiny golden battledore. Resting thereon were a shuttlecock of coral, another pin of a tiny red lobster and a green pine sprig made of silk. In her belt was coquettishly stuck the butterfly-broidered case that held her quire of paper pocket-handkerchiefs. ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... house—a large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches and a piano in the room. At one end was ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... you said good-bye to all peace and quiet. Bless you'—Sam's manner became fatherly—'I've seen it a hundred times. Couple get divorced, and, if there's a child, what happens? They start in playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with him. Wife sneaks him from husband. Husband sneaks him back from wife. After a while along comes a gentleman in my line of business, a professional at the game, and he puts one across on both the amateurs. He takes advantage of the confusion, slips ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... that she knew. She was leaving a wagon and a tent, but it was the only home that she could remember. In a vague and childish way, she felt herself to be the sport of mysterious powers, a little shuttlecock between the battledores of Fortune. Whatever her destiny was to be, there was no use in struggling, and so she sobbed softly and yielded to the inevitable. Her little hands were folded across her heart in an instinctive ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... serious employment of reading each morning was concluded, we danced, we sung, we played at blind-man's-buff, battledore and shuttlecock, and many other games equally diverting and innocent; and when tired of them, drew our seats round the fire, while each one in turn told some merry ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... would have any part, in her future life. He too was dead and passed away, like her father. Lady Mabel's husband, the master of Briarwood in esse, and of Ashbourne in posse, was quite a different being from the rough lad with whom she had played at battledore and shuttlecock, billiards, croquet, and rounders. ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... Egalite had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... there and here, broken by white clouds that relieve the eye without obscuring the light. At the farthest end of the lawn from the house were some fine trees, under the shelter of which two girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock, and very well they played too. A little nearer this way, that is where John and the carriage stood, in the direction of the house, was a young child seated on the turf holding a dog, whilst two other children were trying to make it jump to catch a flower, one held in her hand. There was also ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... with disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... thought that a debating club of 12 members that had given three presidents to the University Unions, had not done badly. The rest was sentimental. Then began a most extraordinary game of battledore and shuttlecock. Vernede proposed the Secretary, Mr. Oldershaw. Mr. Oldershaw, instead of replying properly, proposed Mr. Bentley and the absent members. Waldo responded for these or rather instead of responding proposed Mr. Maurice Solomon. Mr. Maurice Solomon instead of responding ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and suspense followed, during which Amanda strove manfully; Matilda suffered agonies of hope and fear; and Lavinia remained a passive shuttlecock, waiting to be tossed wherever Fate's battledore chose to ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... which had been in his mind for weeks past; he loved this bright young creature with the whole force of his rugged nature, and began dimly to comprehend that she cared no more for him or his sufferings than if his heart had been a football or shuttlecock. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... that's in it May be told in a minute; But par parenthese chatting, On this thing and that thing, Keeps the shuttlecock flying, And attention ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... too many balls are lost and the rules of the game have never yet been thoroughly grasped. A quartette of men will occasionally rig up their net, which they raise to about the height of a foot and a half, and play a species of battledore and shuttlecock over it until the balls disappear; but it is scarcely tennis. As a matter of fact, a Russian generally rushes at the ball and misses it; on the rare occasions when he strikes the object, he does so with so much energy that the ball unless stopped ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... possible respect, my poor moder could not suffer this attachment. And de consequence was, I did not know what to do between them; when I was civil to one, I was scolded by the other, and was very tired of being shuttlecock ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... a falling shuttlecock, shrieking as she fell; and as she struck the water, the drowned bodies of the men she had sent there came to the surface, and caught her by the feet and hair, and drew her down, making an end of her, as she also had ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... order to see Bruce,[121] and after some shuttlecock sort of work, sending and being sent from office to office and Prefet to Prefet, at length we received ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... come avay," said Mr. Weller. "Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, when you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant. Come avay, sir. If you want to ease your mind by blowing up somebody come out into the court and blow up me; ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... with a feather it its jeweled band that stuck up like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any slight movement disturbed it. The King's dandies were dressed in about ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... several months, when suddenly a change come over the young bonze. His conscience began to trouble him for breaking his vows. In the terrible conflict between principle and passion, the soul of the priest was tossed to and fro like the feathered seed-ball of a shuttlecock. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... politics now but organized masses of men, habituated to obey their leaders, among whom to change their vote is stigmatized as the treason of an Arnold, and between which the popular will is driven helplessly from side to side, like a shuttlecock between two battledores? Politics cleans our streets, regulates our education, and so on; it is not to be wondered at that it intrudes into the military sphere, with confidence all the greater because it is there especially ignorant. Let there be no ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... less for antiquarian associations, but Bentham made a very fair monk. The place, for which he paid L315 a year, was congenial. He rode his favourite hobby of gardening, and took his regular 'ante-jentacular' and 'post-prandial' walks, and played battledore and shuttlecock in the intervals of codification. He liked it so well that he would have taken it for life, but for the loss of L8000 or L10,000 in a Devonshire marble-quarry.[303] In 1818 he gave it up, and thenceforward rarely quitted Queen's Square ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... feel, of course," admitted Mrs. Moss. "Oh, Miss Pritchard, couldn't you go back with me to-night and then all of us talk it over together? I don't believe we'll ever come to any understanding unless you do. My flying back and forth between you like a shuttlecock isn't going to ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... majesty, I wish there were no geography and history in the world, and then I should not have to study so cruelly hard, and I could play more. My mother sent me last week a new battledore and shuttlecock, but I can never learn to play with it. I no sooner begin, than Herr Behnisch calls me to study. To-day I was very cunning—oh, I was so sly! I put it in the great-pocket of my tutor's coat, and he brought it here without ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... laid upon the shelf; I am a shuttlecock, myself The world knocks to and fro;— My archery is all unlearn'd, And grief against myself has turn'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... render their failure more excusable, but will not diminish the public contempt; on the other, we have the ill-assorted fragments of a worn-out minority; Mr. Windham with his coat twice turned, and my Lord Grenville who perhaps has more sense than he can make good use of; between the two and the shuttlecock of both, a Sidmouth, and the general football Sir F. Burdett, kicked at by all, and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... this hour. At six Clery and Louis entered the apartment, and Clery gave the boy lessons in writing, and copied, at the king's desire, passages from the works of Montesquieu and others, for the use of the Dauphin. Then Clery took Louis to his aunt's room, where they played at ball, and battledore and shuttlecock, till Louis's supper-time, at eight o'clock. Meanwhile the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, till eight o'clock, when they went to Louis, to sit beside him while he had his supper. Then the king ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... of the Chinese were festival gatherings for purposes of archery, to which succeeded exercises partaking of a military character. Hunting was a favourite amusement. They played games of calculation, chess (or the 'game of war'), shuttlecock with the feet, pitch-pot (throwing arrows from a distance into a narrow-necked jar), and 'horn-goring' (fighting on the shoulders of others with horned masks on their heads). Stilts, football, dice-throwing, boat-racing, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the gentleman winding worsted"—we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock." It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and fretted over her lessons at times. So they showed her to the doctor, who came to see Lady Jane every alternate day; and when he said she wanted more exercise, her morning walk was made an hour longer, and a shuttlecock and battledores were bought, with which it was decreed that Mrs. Lacy should play with her for exactly half an hour every afternoon, or an hour when it was too ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whole, the position of the apprentice, whether by land or sea, was highly anomalous and uncertain. Often taken by the gang in the hurry of visiting a ship, or in the scurry of a hot press on shore, he was in effect the shuttlecock of the service, to-day singing merrily at his capstan or bench, to-morrow bewailing his hard fate on board ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... all the rest of their quiet lives. But Miss Dilly was ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith was ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... brandishing their fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on more ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... this parting speech, and from that time Rosa occupied the restless position of shuttlecock between these two battledores. Nothing could be done without a smart match being played out. Thus, on the daily-arising question of dinner, Miss Twinkleton would say, the three ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... days and a night he was a sort of shuttlecock tossed between these alternating moods, and he was still the same when he paced the quadrangle with bowed head and hands clasped behind him awaiting Samoval at a few minutes before twelve of the following night. The windows that looked down from the four sides of that enclosed garden were all ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making,—providing that the players can be quite sure that ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... last six weeks he had learned to regard her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and pagan philosophy. Then he looked ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... practical joking, and one day she even made two grave philosophers, who were holding a profound discussion in her presence over some deep philosophic subject, suddenly cease their arguments to play with her at battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... from his mane to his tail where the hair had risen. Kathlyn crouched even lower. The lion trotted round the sarcophagus, sniffing. Presently he lifted his head and roared. The echoes played battledore and shuttlecock with the sound. The lion roared again, this time at the insulting echoes. For a few minutes the noise was deafening. A rumble as of distant thunder, and the storm ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... fin could a see. 'Twere no wonder, for she were right below t' boat in which a were; and when she wanted to rise, what does t' great ugly brute do but come wi' her head, as is like cast iron, up bang again t' bottom o' t' boat. I were thrown up in t' air like a shuttlecock, me an' my line an' my harpoon—up we goes, an' many a good piece o' timber wi' us, an' many a good fellow too; but a had t' look after mysel', an a were up high i' t' air, afore I could say Jack Robinson, an' a thowt a were safe for another dive int' saut water; but i'stead ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had put his criticism of our time and civilization in an argument or essay, the world would have received it very differently. As an intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with it and tossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it when we tired of it, as we do other criticism. But he gave it to us as a man, as a personality, and we find it too strong for us. It is easier to deal with a theory than with the concrete reality. A man ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... by the Medway into the Western Swale,—now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... that o'er again, and let the[1] sound From one pole to another pole rebound; The earth and sky each be a battledore, And keep the sound, that shuttlecock, up an hour: To Doctors' Commons for a licence I Swift as an arrow from a ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining. But in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man looms up on the horizon like a ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... flung out for fools to sport with, sir! Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn't the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... chief magistrate of Rome entered the apartment. He was a short, fat, undignified man. Indolence and vacillation were legibly impressed on his appearance and expression. You saw, in a moment, that his mind, like a shuttlecock, might be urged in any direction by the efforts of others, but was utterly incapable of volition by itself. But once in his life had the Prefect Pompeianus been known to arrive unaided at a positive determination, and that was ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Mops and the boys were eating dates from a bowl and pelting each other with the stones, while a new member of the family, a seemingly sexless being in a blue sash and shoulder knots, called "Baby," galloped up and down the room with a battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... man's heart has been treated as a football. Yes; but many a woman's heart has been treated as a shuttlecock. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... and yet 'tis not to be imagined how sick it makes me for an hour or two, and, which is the misery, all that time one must be using some kind of exercise. Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on't that ever you saw. I make her play at shuttlecock with me, and she is the veriest bungler at it ever you saw. Then am I ready to beat her with the battledore, and grow so peevish as I grow sick, that I'll undertake she wishes there were no steel in England. But then to recompense ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... and the chest should be enlarged by taking deep inspirations of pure air. The muscles of the chest, and of every part of the body, should be free to move and unconfined by tight clothing. Fencing, shuttlecock, and such other useful sports as combine with them free movements of the upper part of the body, are doubly advantageous, for they not only exercise the muscles of the whole body, but possess the additional advantage of animating ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... responsibility in the service of the Czar. But everybody knew that Ignatieff was just then out of favor at St. Petersburg, and that his absence from the centres of active statecraft at a time when the peace of Europe fluttered like a shuttlecock in the air, between Salisbury and Shouvaloff, was nothing more or less ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... has marcher carquills ainsi que des volants. Early commentators have generally stated that volants means here "the beams of a mill," but MM. Moland and E. Despois, the last annotators of Molire, maintain that it stands for "shuttlecock," because the large rolls (canons), tied at the knee and wide at the bottom, bore a great resemblance to shuttlecocks turned upside down. I cannot see how this can suit the words marcher carquills, for the motion of the canons of gallants, walking or straddling about, is very unlike ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... like playing shuttlecock and battledore," said Esau grimly. "If they served me so I ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... remember, I remember The years of "Jarndyce" jaw, The lively game of shuttlecock 'Twixt Equity and Law. Tribunals then were "Courts" indeed That are "Divisions" now, And Silken Gowns have feared the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... thing best worth seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing box." Though an exquisite, Mr. Standish is clever, entertaining, and agreeable. One day that he sat beside me at dinner, we had a delightful battledore and shuttlecock conversation from grave to gay as quick as your heart could wish: from L'Almanac des Gourmandes and Le Respectable Porc, to ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... way, beyond doubt, but no worse than millions of young men before and after him; and he heaved a great many profound sighs, and drank a great many glasses of sack, and came to the sorrowful conclusion that Dame Fortune was a malicious jade, inclined to poke fun at his best affections, and make a shuttlecock of his heart for the rest of his life. He thought, too, of Count L'Estrange; and the longer he thought, the more he became convinced that he knew him well, and had met him often. But where? He racked his brain until, between love, Leoline, and the count, he got that delicate organ ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... the Negro must keep a strong and courageous heart. He cannot improve his condition by any short-cut course or by artificial methods. Above all, he must not be deluded into believing that his condition can be permanently bettered by a mere battledoor [sic] and shuttlecock of words, or by any process of mere mental gymnastics or oratory. What is desired along with a logical defense of his cause are deeds, results,—continued results, in the direction of building himself ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... few are, a safe-keeper and conductor of celestial fire, is secure. Poverty cannot pinch, passion swerve, or trial shake it. But the man Lessing, harassed and striving life-long, always poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his own right-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin's ploughshare drive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was hardly kindled, and who, through all, was faithful to himself, to his friend, to his duty, and to his ideal, is something more inspiring ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... indulgence which was a proof of the lenity of the Government, as the ordinary keepers of the prison would not have dared to have allowed it.[407] After this, Mr. Forster and others amused themselves with the game of shuttlecock, at which, relates the author of the Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate, the "valiant Forster beat every one who engaged him: so that he triumphed with his feathers in the prison, though he could not do it in the field." On the tenth of April that gentleman made his escape: ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... stream could be seen to decrease perceptibly in size, from a broad sheet to a wide band, a narrow ribbon, a line, a hair and then disappear altogether. While the distant mountains were still growling, mumbling and playing shuttlecock with the echoes a timid chief hare went hopping across a green half-acre of grass at the damp edge of a melting snow patch in my path. Overhead a golden eagle sailed with a small mammal in its talons; strange reddish-colored bumblebees busied themselves in a bunch of ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... it like the hare, while dogged criticism is the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite many of the reviews are, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... century author, notwithstanding its apparent caprice, has always been governed by immutable laws. But these laws were not recognised in the benighted epoch in which we happen to live at present. On the contrary, Fashion is thought a whim, a sort of shuttlecock for the weak-minded of both sexes to make rise and fall, bound and rebound with the battledore called—social influence. But it will interest a great many people to learn that Fashion assumed the dignity of a science in 1940. Ten years later it was taken up by the University ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... monstrous Dutch gambling fury lasted, money was plenty, everybody felt rich and Holland was in a whiz of windy delight. After about three years of fool's paradise, people began to reflect that the shuttlecock could not be knocked about in the air forever, and that when it came down somebody would be hurt. So first one and then another began quietly to sell out and quit the game, without buying in again. This cautious infection quickly spread like a pestilence, as it always does in such cases, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... nothing, one is probably grateful and passes on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining. But in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man looms up on the horizon like a blanket ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches and a piano in the room. At one end was a slightly-raised stage, and off that was a ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... him," retorted Aunt Temperance. "Hast thou not heard, he hath his duties? To hold skeins of silk whilst my Lady winds them, maybe, and to ride the great horse, and play tennis and shuttlecock with his Lord, and to make up his mind to which of all his Lady's damsels he'll make ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... length be found to surpass imagination, and to suit and savor all literature. The shuttlecock of religious intolerance will fall to the ground, if there be no battledores to fling it back and forth. It is reason for [20] rejoicing that the vox populi is inclined to grant us peace, together with pardon for the preliminary ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... the word "shuttlecocks" three times. I know what was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver her over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was that Edward ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down but ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there was walking in the park, rowing or sailing on the lake, riding or driving in the adjacent country, archery in a spacious field; and in bad weather billiards, reading in the library, music in the drawing-rooms, battledore and shuttlecock in the hall; in short, all the methods of passing time agreeably which are available to good company, when there are ample means and space for their exercise; to say nothing of making love, which Lord Curryfin did ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... nations yet to come. Then suddenly clapping his hand to his capacious coat-pocket, dragged out a bit of cork with some hen's feathers, and hurrying to his room, took out his knife, and proceeded to whittle away at a shuttlecock of an original scientific construction, which at some prior time he had promised to send to the young Duchess ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... with so many others. The war came to an end and a few weeks afterwards the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had so long played shuttlecock with the national destinies of Ireland, went to crashing doom and disaster at the polls. The country had found them out for what they were, and it cast them into that outer darkness from which, for ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Joe Hobb, a handloom weaver, browt his slay boards, and as he wur goin' daan th' hill he did mak sum manoevures yo mind, for talk abaat fugal men i' th' army wen thay throw thair guns up into th' air an' catches em agean, thay wur nowt ta Joe, for he span his slay boards up an' daan just like a shuttlecock. But wal this wur goin' on th' storm began to abate, and th' water seemed to get less, but still thay kept at it. Wal at last a chap at thay called Dave Twirler shaated aat at he saw summat, and thay ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... quiet mornings were those when that true knight was employed in field sports or yeomanry duties, such as the state of the country called for. When he was at home, all was fun and merriment and noise—walks and rides on fine days, battledore and shuttlecock on wet ones, music, singing, paper games, giggling and making giggle, and sometimes dancing in the hall—Mr. Frank Fordyce joining with all his heart and drollery in many of these, like ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. So it is that the shuttlecock of Beauty is ever ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... tobacco, the line must be drawn there. If the charges against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if not, his term should be extended beyond the original commission. A new commission was given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock experience seems to have quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of quarrels with the Virginia council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in 1642 came Sir William Berkeley. This man, who was born about the beginning of the century, was twice governor; his present term, lasting ten ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Dauphin again had a play hour while the king enjoyed a nap. As soon as he awoke, Clery, who had been with the Dauphin for several years, would give him writing and arithmetic lessons, and then he would play ball or battledore-and-shuttlecock for awhile, and then there would be reading aloud until it was time for the Dauphin's supper, after which the king would amuse his children with all sorts of riddles and puzzles and games, and then the Dauphin ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful habiliments of a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... diminish the public contempt; on the other, we have the ill-assorted fragments of a worn-out minority; Mr. Windham with his coat twice turned, and my Lord Grenville who perhaps has more sense than he can make good use of; between the two and the shuttlecock of both, a Sidmouth, and the general football Sir F. Burdett, kicked at by ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Watteau had his nose out of the window oftener than over a book; he loved to amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on some smiling female neighbor, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... what I've done to-day—my holiday. In the first place it poured with rain all the morning, so I sent for a pair of battledores and a shuttlecock, and when Charles Mason came to render up last night's account, I made him come into a beautiful large ball-room I had discovered in this house, and took a good breathing; and he, being like Hamlet, "fat and scant of breath," took ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... they have plenty of play and fun when they are not in school. In both towns and villages the streets are the playground, and here they play ball, or battledore and shuttlecock, or fly kites. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... contractors must needs procure their slaves by arrangement with Dutch and English who delivered them at Curacao and Jamaica. Soon after this contract expired the asiento itself was converted from an item of Spanish internal policy into a shuttlecock of international politics. It became in fact the badge of maritime supremacy, possessed now by the Dutch, now by the French in the greatest years of Louis XIV, and finally by the English as a trophy in ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... "Alackaday! Shuttlecock and battle-dore. And this at, the end of it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Lady leads. l. 226. The seeds of many plants of this class are furnished with a plume, by which admirable mechanism they are disseminated by the winds far from their parent stem, and look like a shuttlecock, as they fly. Other seeds are disseminated by animals; of these some attach themselves to their hair or feathers by a gluten, as misleto; others by hooks, as cleavers, burdock, hounds-tongue; and others are swallowed ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... many balls are lost and the rules of the game have never yet been thoroughly grasped. A quartette of men will occasionally rig up their net, which they raise to about the height of a foot and a half, and play a species of battledore and shuttlecock over it until the balls disappear; but it is scarcely tennis. As a matter of fact, a Russian generally rushes at the ball and misses it; on the rare occasions when he strikes the object, he does so with so much energy that the ball unless stopped by the adversary's ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... specially made for her youthful Majesty, and used exclusively by her. The frames are of the finest over-burnish, the plush upholstery being decorated with the rarest specimens of art needlework. On one of the little tables you will note a battledore and shuttlecock, with another thrown upon the floor, as though the player had been suddenly interrupted in the midst of her play. Very ordinary make and shape are these toys, such as you may see in any middle-class English home, and each of them looking like favourites—judging ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... four young ones kept as much together as we could do in the house and gardens, and played all our dear old games of shuttlecock, and pig go to market, and proverbs, and all that you, my children, call very English sports, because we knew only too well that we should never play at them altogether again. The more I was blamed for being childish, the more I was set upon them, ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such case, and that Macbeth and his associates must be clad in stripes, or plain colours. Even the bonnet with the eagle's feather, which Sir Walter Scott induced Kemble to substitute for his "shuttlecock" headdress of ostrich plumes, was held to be inadmissible: the Macbeth of the antiquaries wore a conical iron helmet, and was otherwise arrayed in barbaric armour. But when Garrick first played Macbeth there were good reasons why the reform to be introduced by Macklin at a later date could ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and sure he strikes out to the right and to the left, never missing his aim, never miscalculating distances by an inch, till, like an arrow shot by dexterous archer, the little craft reaches the calm. Whilst, indeed, it seems tossed like a shuttlecock on the engulphing waves, it is in reality being most skilfully piloted. The veteran at the stern we could not see, but doubtless his skill was equally remarkable. The two, of course, act in concert, both knowing the river as other ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... is quite on the cards that I shall be able to find language explicit enough to express the desire. My whole desire is to avoid complication of addresses. It is quite fatal. If two P. R.'s have contradictory orders they will continue to play battledoor and shuttlecock with an unhappy epistle, which will never get farther ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blithering irony to talk of us Leura squatters as representing capital. We're all playing a sort of battledore and shuttlecock game—tossed about between drought and plenty—boom and slump. A kick in the beam and one end is up and the other end down. There's Windeatt, who will be ruined if his wool-shed is destroyed and his shearing spoiled. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... do, Norman?" she asked, putting her arm affectionately round his neck. "You see I am a girl, and perhaps I may like many things that you will not care about. Let me consider. We can arrange my doll's house, or we can play at paying visits; and I have two battledores and a shuttlecock, which I will teach you how to use; and then you must come out and help me to feed my chickens. I have also a garden of my own, and I am sure granny will let you have a piece of ground near it, or else you shall have part of mine, and you can learn how to keep it neat and pretty. And ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston
... "games," I never played many as a child, but as a man I have derived the greatest possible pleasure from them. I never learned to skip till I was thirty, and at thirty-five my greatest delight was a game of battledore and shuttlecock. Now that I am turned forty I have given up violent exercise, and taken to playing with boxes of bricks and tin soldiers. I am sure that I am far happier with them, now, than I was as a child. In my old nursery ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... affected to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs[1106], Dr. Johnson said, 'Nay, Sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends[1107].' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at many of those who have written against me, have smiled to think ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... only by their lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussu and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all species of which have ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... pasteboard, shrimps and crabs, do all coldly furnish forth the lunch-table as favors and bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... grounds with much taste. They lived magnificently, and at the same time without ceremony. There was "a charming large hall" with an organ and harpsichord, where all the company met when they had a mind to be together, and where "music, dancing, draughts, shuttlecock and prayers took their turn." The house is now in ruins, having been sold to Roger O'Connor, and burnt accidentally afterward. Mrs. Delany speaks of her friend, Richard Colley Wesley, the ancestor of the duke, as having more virtues and fewer faults than any man she knew. She ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... drawings which represent a lost painting, there is a noble one of Bishop Fisher, whose execution preceded More's by only a few weeks. A literally venerable head it was (Plate 21), to be the shuttlecock of papal defiance and royal determination not to be defied with impunity. For assuredly if the life of the Bishop of Rochester hung in the balance, as it did, in May, 1535, it was Paul III.'s mad effrontery in making him a Cardinal while he ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... I've seen, Which, I confess it, raised my spleen; They were contrived by Love to mock The battledoor and shuttlecock. Given, returned,—how strange a play, Where neither loses all the day, And both are, even when night sets in, Again as ready to begin! I am not sure I have not played This very game with some fair maid. Perhaps ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Middletons feel, of course," admitted Mrs. Moss. "Oh, Miss Pritchard, couldn't you go back with me to-night and then all of us talk it over together? I don't believe we'll ever come to any understanding unless you do. My flying back and forth between you like a shuttlecock isn't going to amount ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... has been treated as a football. Yes; but many a woman's heart has been treated as a shuttlecock. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... of Winchester seems to have been made a regular shuttlecock of by the contending armies. Stonewall Jackson rescued it once, and last Sunday week his successor, General Ewell, drove out Milroy. The name of Milroy is always associated with that of Butler, and his ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... running their boat into the sea in the lee of the rocks, and pulling strongly for the wreck. Father and daughter both labored at the oars, unable to speak on account of the roar of the sea and wind, and blinded by the spray that whirled over them. Their boat was tossed like a shuttlecock in the great waves, and they knew that unless the shipwrecked persons could aid them it would be impossible to return to the lighthouse. They must succeed or die, and their chance of ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... obstinate, scrupulous to a fault; but had not that broad outlook on life which comes of experience, nor the power and resolution to readily take a decision under difficult circumstances, and to abide by it once taken. So it was that reason made a shuttlecock of his present resolve, and half a dozen times he stopped in the road meaning to abandon his purpose, and turn back to Cullerne. Yet half a dozen times he went on, though with slow feet, thinking always, Was he right ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... not answer your letter which I received at Heaton, because the latter part of my stay there was much engrossed by walking, riding, playing battledore and shuttlecock, singing, and being exceedingly busy all day long about nothing. I have just left it for this place, where we stop to-night on our way to Stafford; Heaton was looking lovely in all the beauty of its autumnal foliage, lighted by bright autumnal skies, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... his bosom. Within the last six weeks he had learned to regard her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and pagan philosophy. Then he looked across ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... other hand, with the territorial expansion of the provinces under one Dominion, with their political development, which has assumed even national attributes, with the steady growth of an imperial sentiment in the parent state, the old condition of things that too often made the provinces the shuttlecock of skilful American diplomacy has passed away. The statesmen of the Canadian federation are now consulted, and exercise almost as much influence as if they were members of the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... somehow or other, my horse and I had a habit of parting company. On one occasion I found myself suddenly prostrate in the streets of York, much to the delight of the Dissenters. Another time my horse Calamity flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful it was not into a neighbouring planet; but as no harm came of it, I might have persevered perhaps, if, on a certain day, a Quaker tailor from a neighbouring village to which I had said I was going to ride, had not taken it into his head to call, soon after my departure, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... morning at my office, in comes my father, and with him I walked, and leave him at W. Joyce's, and went myself to Mr. Crew's, but came too late to dine, and therefore after a game at shittle-cocks—[The game of battledore and shuttlecock was formerly much played even in tennis courts, and was a very violent game.]—with Mr. Walgrave and Mr. Edward, I returned to my father, and taking him from W. Joyce's, who was not abroad himself, we inquired of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the 19th Century brought a new experience in the sugar business. That was the production of sugar, in commercial quantities, from beets. From that time until now, the commodity has been a political shuttlecock, the object of government bounties and the subject of taxation. In 1747, Herr Marggraf, of the Academy of Sciences, in Berlin, discovered the existence of crystallizable sugar in the juice of the beet and other roots. No practical use ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... who, with exceptional abilities and exceptional opportunity for exercising those abilities, could contentedly fill his empty days with the manufacture of blacking, or pass an entire night, as Gronow relates him to have done, playing battledore and shuttlecock for a wager with Ball Hughes, was, in much, a typical product of his generation. His mannerisms were accepted by his contemporaries with a forbearance which bordered on admiration, and, however childish his peculiarities, he remained unalterably popular. ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... shoulders should be drawn back, and the chest should be enlarged by taking deep inspirations of pure air. The muscles of the chest, and of every part of the body, should be free to move and unconfined by tight clothing. Fencing, shuttlecock, and such other useful sports as combine with them free movements of the upper part of the body, are doubly advantageous, for they not only exercise the muscles of the whole body, but possess the additional advantage of animating the mind and increasing ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tete-a-tete. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a Saturday, the day of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... coffee-tray, and had planted Matty at his other side, so that he was in a measure hemmed in, and if he did not talk to Matty had no one to fall back on but herself, who, of course, would quickly, using the metaphor of battledore and shuttlecock, toss him back to her daughter—having arranged all this, what should Bell do but put ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... than the Barbarians, but they could not save the Empire. The Italians of the Middle Ages were the superiors of the French and Germans in every branch of culture, and yet this did not prevent Italy being made the shuttlecock of northern politicians and free-booters. The French overran Germany in the beginning of the present century, and the Germans have overrun France within the last ten years, not in either case owing to superiority in lifting or boxing, or in literary ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... change come over the young bonze. His conscience began to trouble him for breaking his vows. In the terrible conflict between principle and passion, the soul of the priest was tossed to and fro like the feathered seed-ball of a shuttlecock. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... it, the more he was satisfied of its feasibility, and he trotted over, the next day, to the Old Duke of Cumberland, to see his friend on the subject. Viney, like most victuallers, was more given to games of skill—billiards, shuttlecock, skittles, dominoes, and so on—than to the rude out-of-door chances of flood and field, and at first he doubted his ability to grapple with the details; but on Mr. Watchorn's assurance that he would keep him straight, he gave Mrs. Viney a key, desiring ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... transposition, rearrangement; shuffling; alternation, reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; bandy, transpose, shuffle, change bands, swap, permute, reciprocate, commute; give and take, return the compliment; play at puss in the corner, play at battledore ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... good for one player or for two. The only game to be played is to see how long the shuttlecock can be kept in the air. If you are alone the best way is to set yourself a number, say a hundred, and persevere until you reach it. This can be varied by striving to reach, say, thirty, by first hitting the ball each time as hard as possible, ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... as background for our joys—just as sin is essential as the background for any appreciation of virtue, even any knowledge of its existence.... So now, on the day of Mary Turner's trial, there was a subtle gaiety of gossipings to and fro through the store. The girl's plight was like a shuttlecock driven hither and yon by the battledores of many tongues. It was the first time in many years that one of the employees had been thus accused of theft. Shoplifters were so common as to be a stale topic. There was a refreshing novelty in this ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... proclivities, warmly admires that portion of the English system which Englishmen generally tolerate as a necessary evil, but of which they are by no means proud. Most thinking men in this country resent the idea of Indian interests being made a shuttlecock in the strife of party. Not so Mr. Mallik. He shudders at the idea of Indian affairs being considered exclusively on their own merits. "If it is no party's duty to champion the cause of any part of the Empire, that part must be made ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... "who, at the age of fifteen, has in him the power to be the greatest man of his day, and in all probability will only be the most singular. An obstinate man is sure of doing well; a wavering or a whimsical one (which is the same thing) is as uncertain, even in his elevation, as a shuttlecock. But look to the box at the right: do you ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pelting each other with the stones, while a new member of the family, a seemingly sexless being in a blue sash and shoulder knots, called "Baby," galloped up and down the room with a battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... more serious employment of reading each morning was concluded, we danced, we sung, we played at blind-man's-buff, battledore and shuttlecock, and many other games equally diverting and innocent; and when tired of them, drew our seats round the fire, while each one in turn told some merry story to divert ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... said Mr. Weller. "Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, when you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant. Come avay, sir. If you want to ease your mind by blowing up somebody come out into the court and blow ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... consulate. The old wooden bungalow, with broad verandas, stood in a small garden a dozen yards from the lagoon, where the Broom Road narrowed as it left the business portion of Papeete and began its round of the island. There was just room enough on the salt grass for the shuttlecock to fall out of bounds, and for the battledores to swing free of the branches of the trees. The consul, though he wore a monocle, was without the pretense of officialdom except to other officials and, of course, at receptions, dinners, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... at Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of governments; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... played ball and bandy with the Susquehannock boys, and taught them jack-stones and how to make a shuttlecock. They put eagle's feathers in his hair, and the old men adopted him into their tribe. On the third day the absent Indians returned with a stork. It was a white stork with a red bill and plenty of stork's neck, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... waging a desperate and bloody war, the United States was like a shuttlecock, being struck repeatedly by the diplomatic battledores of each nation. Between the British "Orders in Council" and the French "Milan Decree," American commerce was in a fair way of being obliterated. To declare war against both nations, would have been absurd in so young ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... were many strangers with us; and in the afternoon I played at shuttlecock with young cousin Emil, to whom we were so kind, and who deserved our kindness so well. How it happened I cannot tell, but before long Ernst took his place, and was my partner in the game. He looked unusually animated, and I felt myself more ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... as it was with great difficulty that he kept his body from playing battledore and shuttlecock. The greater the speed of the huge mass, however, the less inclination there was to bounce about, and he soon found himself literally glued, as it ...
— The Magic Soap Bubble • David Cory
... when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking with the heel. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the cheapest ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... yellowing pods among the frosted flowers; and once she picked, and put into the bosom of her dress, a little belated monthly rose, warm and pink at the heart, but with blighted outer petals. She found it impossible to pursue any one line of thought to its logical outcome; her mind flew like a shuttlecock between a dozen plans for William King's defeat. "Oh, I must decide on something!" she thought, desperately. But the futile morning passed without decision. After dinner she went resolutely into the parlor, and sitting down on her little ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... future occasion, explain it. It was one afternoon, when he chanced to meet me and Adele in the grounds: and while she played with Pilot and her shuttlecock, he asked me to walk up and down a long beech ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... his tribulations in life may have been said to have commenced. The nobility laughed at his assumption of hereditary rank, while the middle classes frowned at his pretensions to be superior to them, so that he passed the existence of a shuttlecock, continually suspended in the air, and struck at and dismissed ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name —could not find anybody who seemed to know its name—but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, and ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing box." Though an exquisite, Mr. Standish is clever, entertaining, and agreeable. One day that he sat beside me at dinner, we had a delightful battledore and shuttlecock conversation from grave to gay as quick as your heart could wish: from L'Almanac des Gourmandes and Le Respectable Porc, to Dorriforth ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... at the best; what's more, he has learned too many things to let him flaunt abroad the old beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short. "Know him?" he queried curtly, as he lit ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... satisfy their consciences for voting "no" by saying that the women of their family and acquaintance do not want it. Thus is the most valuable of human rights—the right of individual representation—made the football of Legislatures, the shuttlecock of voters, kicked and tossed like the veriest plaything in utter disregard of the vital fact that it is the one principle above all others on which ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... standing by with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... tubs, in which were orange and lemon trees, and in the centre of the grass-plot stood a tub yet huger, holding an enormous aloe, The hall itself, to my fancy then lofty and wide as a cathedral would seem now, was a famous place for battledore and shuttlecock; and behind was a garden, equal to that of old Alcinous himself. My favourite walk was one of turf by a long straight pond, bordered with lime-trees. But the whole demesne was the fairy ground of my childhood; and its presiding genius was ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... sacred stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood (March 25, 1437). The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers. The Earl of Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the important post of Commander of Edinburgh ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... were playing at shuttlecock with my soul. Underneath my misery there flickered a thought which, wild as it was, I dared not dismiss—the thought that, after all, it might not be Winifred who had died in that den. Possible it was—however improbable—that ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... him with an affectionate intimacy which may be paralleled in the religion of Krishna but hardly in Christianity.[537] Thus several hymns have reference to a game, such as tossing about a ball (hymn vii), battledore and shuttlecock (xiv) or some form of wrestling in which the opponents place their hands on each other's shoulders (xv). The worshipper can even scold the deity. "If thou forsake me, I will make people smile at thee. I shall abuse thee sore: madman clad in elephant skin: madman that ate the poison: madman, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of keeping it up as long as they ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... mane to his tail where the hair had risen. Kathlyn crouched even lower. The lion trotted round the sarcophagus, sniffing. Presently he lifted his head and roared. The echoes played battledore and shuttlecock with the sound. The lion roared again, this time at the insulting echoes. For a few minutes the noise was deafening. A rumble as of distant thunder, ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... chosen just now to turn head over heels. In turning, it struck the Halbrane and carried it off just as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and now here we are, stranded at certainly one hundred feet above the level of the ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... had sounded simple, but they proved to be anything but simple to follow. Like a shuttlecock, Jasper was tossed from clerk to clerk, until by the time he reached his destination he was ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... to answer stupid questions," said the woman. "My sons have plenty of business on hand; they are playing at shuttlecock with the clouds up yonder in the king's ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... humbles itself and becomes silly. I have seen chaos, I now see a mess. Students deliberating on the National Guard,—such a thing could not be seen among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches! Savages who go naked, with their noddles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less of brutes than those bachelors of arts! The four-penny monkeys! And they set up for judges! Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate! The end of the world is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable terraqueous globe! ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. So there arises the problem how order is imposed on disorder, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... call her Catherine. Thou regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! How thou didst make me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had been raining, thou didst float bits of straw on the gutters, and watch them pass away. One day I gave thee a willow battledore and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and green feathers. Thou hast forgotten it. Thou wert roguish so young! Thou didst play. Thou didst put cherries in thy ears. Those are things of the past. The forests through which one has passed with one's child, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... stage and sat at attention like a trick dog. After that Babiche appeared at all the children's matinees and oh, what a delicious lot of animal and children songs the Poetry Girl discovered! And did you ever see her do "Battledore and Shuttlecock" to minuet time? ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Eighteenth dynasty was thus restored. But it lasted barely three years. In B.C. 605 the Egyptians were defeated by Nebuchadrezzar under the walls of Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Asia passed into the possession of the Babylonians. Once more Palestine became a shuttlecock between the kingdoms of the Nile and the Euphrates. Trusting to the support of Egypt, Zedekiah of Judah revolted from his Babylonian master. His policy at first seemed successful. The Babylonian army ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... If an Indian chief was killed by a buffalo, what should you do among them? Why they would toss you over their heads like a shuttlecock. ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of the bougainvillaea, ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... disturb you?" The question was asked of Mr. Beckett, and thrown lightly as a shuttlecock over the old man's head to us in the next room. It was asked in English, with a curiously winning accent, neither Italian nor Irish, but ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"—we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock." It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day from the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... games began to bore him. His strong arms no longer wanted to play battledore and shuttlecock, they longed to throw stones. The squabbles over a petty game of croquet, which demanded neither muscle nor brain, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... know what I am talking about. And I tell you that the moment you two got your divorce, you said good-bye to all peace and quiet. Bless you'—Sam's manner became fatherly—'I've seen it a hundred times. Couple get divorced, and, if there's a child, what happens? They start in playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with him. Wife sneaks him from husband. Husband sneaks him back from wife. After a while along comes a gentleman in my line of business, a professional at the game, and he puts one across on both the amateurs. He takes advantage of the confusion, slips in, and gets away with ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... feelings in the morning, tired limbs, and a weary listless air, and fretted over her lessons at times. So they showed her to the doctor, who came to see Lady Jane every alternate day; and when he said she wanted more exercise, her morning walk was made an hour longer, and a shuttlecock and battledores were bought, with which it was decreed that Mrs. Lacy should play with her for exactly half an hour every afternoon, or an hour when it was too ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... impressionable, and that they constantly require excitement. They are not often careful in the selection of these emotions, provided there are violent shocks, revulsions of feeling, terror, hope, surprise. Such are the fruits of criminal trials. The head of the prisoner becomes a shuttlecock between the advocate and magistrate. The varied chances of such a scene offer great and real interest, effacing all the fictions of tragedy. There, far more than on the stage, women take delight in the dark dramas, and are the first to resent the terrible ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... What a shuttlecock of a fellow would the greatest philosopher that ever existed be whisk'd into at once, did he read such books, and observe such facts, and think such thoughts, as would eternally be making ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... enterprise: one which, perhaps, might in the sequel affect the weal or woe of nations yet to come. Then suddenly clapping his hand to his capacious coat-pocket, dragged out a bit of cork with some hen's feathers, and hurrying to his room, took out his knife, and proceeded to whittle away at a shuttlecock of an original scientific construction, which at some prior time he had promised to send to the young ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... to himself that a giant must have a body as big as a mill; but from what supposition can a sensible man set off to persuade himself that the half of the moon has gone into a sleeve, and that a Sammonocodom has come down from heaven to play at shuttlecock, cut down a forest, and ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... hour. At six Clery and Louis entered the apartment, and Clery gave the boy lessons in writing, and copied, at the king's desire, passages from the works of Montesquieu and others, for the use of the Dauphin. Then Clery took Louis to his aunt's room, where they played at ball, and battledore and shuttlecock, till Louis's supper-time, at eight o'clock. Meanwhile the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, till eight o'clock, when they went to Louis, to sit beside him while he had his supper. Then the king amused the children with riddles, which he had found in a ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... Abe tipping about in the wind like a shuttlecock." Out I ran, and getting hold of his arm towed ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little more of this erotic battledore-and-shuttlecock would send them both out of their minds. It was a mistake to write, when both needed a holiday. He telephoned to his agent and walked to Covent Garden for a consultation ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... were making things lively in their own way. Mops and the boys were eating dates from a bowl and pelting each other with the stones, while a new member of the family, a seemingly sexless being in a blue sash and shoulder knots, called "Baby," galloped up and down the room with a battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... just come avay," said Mr. Weller. "Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, when you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant. Come avay, sir. If you want to ease your mind by blowing up somebody come out into the court and blow up me; but it's ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... were, are seldom able to concentrate their attention on the one thought which should apparently swamp all others. They either yield to the strain, and lapse into unconsciousness, or their minds become the arena of minor emotions, wherein trivialities play battledore and shuttlecock with the tremendous issues of the moment. When a more extended knowledge of all that had happened, joined to a nicer adjustment of the time-factor in events, enabled Elsie to realise the extraordinary deliverance from ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... seldom a dreamless sleep. Many of my dreams were, if anything, harder to bear than my delusions of the day, for what little reason I had was absolutely suspended in sleep. Almost every night my brain was at battledore and shuttlecock with weird thoughts. And if not all my dreams were terrifying, this fact seemed to be only because a perverted and perverse Reason, in order that its possessor might not lose the capacity for suffering, knew how to keep Hope alive with visions ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... street. Watteau had his nose out of the window oftener than over a book; he loved to amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on some smiling female neighbor, such as are to be found ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... found myself suddenly prostrate in the streets of York, much to the delight of the Dissenters. Another time my horse Calamity flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful it was not into a neighbouring planet; but as no harm came of it, I might have persevered perhaps, if, on a certain day, a Quaker tailor from a neighbouring village to which I had ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... better at the moment," answered Wilding with a touch of sharpness. He turned to the frowning and perplexed Duke—whose mind was being tossed this way and that, like a shuttlecock upon the battledore of these men's words. "Your Grace," he said, "forgive me that I speak it if hear it you will, or forbid me to say it if your resolve ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... regard her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and pagan philosophy. Then he looked ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... not call a tree generous, that sheds its fruit at every breeze.' Sir John having affected to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs, Dr Johnson said, 'Nay, sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at many of those who have written against me, have smiled to think that they were unintentionally ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... of the poor town when it once more welcomed the gray-jackets. From the beginning it had been battle-ground and billet of both armies a dozen times. Tossed from Federal to Confederate possession—a very shuttlecock of war—it had been harassed, robbed and pillaged by the one; drained of the very dregs by free gifts to the other. But the people of Winchester never faltered in their faith; and to-day her noble women go down the roll of heroism and steadfast truth, hand in hand ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... dreams of girlhood and the natural hopes of women, when I was too young to give consent?" These and other unanswerable questions continually drifted through Susanna's mind, disturbing its balance and leaving her like a shuttlecock bandied to and ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... been for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, which he disliked ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... The Shuttlecock's a handsome fowl to see, His feathers grow straight upward like a tree. He cannot crow, but oftentimes his flight Will reach up to a most astounding height. He is a gamecock, and, in fighting trim, There are not many birds ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... Majesty, and used exclusively by her. The frames are of the finest over-burnish, the plush upholstery being decorated with the rarest specimens of art needlework. On one of the little tables you will note a battledore and shuttlecock, with another thrown upon the floor, as though the player had been suddenly interrupted in the midst of her play. Very ordinary make and shape are these toys, such as you may see in any middle-class English home, and each ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... my elbows on the grass that I might face her. "Listen, madame. It is time you knew the story of Pemaou." And thereupon I recited all that had happened between the Huron and myself from the day when we had played at shuttlecock with spears till the night when he had shadowed us at the Pottawatamie camp,—the night before our wedding. I even told her of the profile ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... withdrew with this parting speech, and from that time Rosa occupied the restless position of shuttlecock between these two battledores. Nothing could be done without a smart match being played out. Thus, on the daily-arising question of dinner, Miss Twinkleton would say, the three being ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... many-flowered brocade, with scarlet broidered pouch hanging at her right side. A scarlet over-sash kept the large sash-knot in its place. Her hair was gay with knot of scarlet crinkled crepe, lacquered comb, and hairpin of tiny golden battledore. Resting thereon were a shuttlecock of coral, another pin of a tiny red lobster and a green pine sprig made of silk. In her belt was coquettishly stuck the butterfly-broidered case that held her quire of paper pocket-handkerchiefs. The brother's dress was ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... that stuck up like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any slight movement disturbed ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... truth; he understood the confusion and bewilderment which had been in his mind for weeks past; he loved this bright young creature with the whole force of his rugged nature, and began dimly to comprehend that she cared no more for him or his sufferings than if his heart had been a football or shuttlecock. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... must talk about it and explain it; I could never bring it out just as we went along. It would have been a curious reason in connection with anybody, but doubly so as explaining the behaviour of Miss Anderson, whose profile gave you the impression that she was anything but the shuttlecock of her emotions. Shortly, her reason was a convict, Number 1596, who, up to February in that year, had been working, or rather waiting, out his sentence in the State penitentiary. So long as he worked or waited, Madeline remained in New York, ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now—I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... delights to play with me, Stopping my passage with the sight of Visus: But as he makes hither, I'll make hence, There's more ways to the wood than one[190]. What, more devils to affright me? O Diabolo! Gustus comes here to vex me. So that I, poor wretch, am like A shuttlecock betwixt two battledoors. If I run there, Visus beats me to Scylla; If here, then Gustus blows me to Charybdis. Neptune hath sworn my hope shall suffer shipwreck. What shall I say? mine Urinal's too thin To bide the fury ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... he nods his head sagely and says nothing, one is probably grateful and passes on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining. But in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man looms up on the horizon ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... motionless, looking ahead beyond the oasis, beyond the stars, to the moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of the ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... many strangers with us; and in the afternoon I played at shuttlecock with young cousin Emil, to whom we were so kind, and who deserved our kindness so well. How it happened I cannot tell, but before long Ernst took his place, and was my partner in the game. He looked unusually animated, and I felt myself ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... according to the twentieth century author, notwithstanding its apparent caprice, has always been governed by immutable laws. But these laws were not recognised in the benighted epoch in which we happen to live at present. On the contrary, Fashion is thought a whim, a sort of shuttlecock for the weak-minded of both sexes to make rise and fall, bound and rebound with the battledore called—social influence. But it will interest a great many people to learn that Fashion assumed the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the Medway into the Western Swale,—now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... seems to have been made a regular shuttlecock of by the contending armies. Stonewall Jackson rescued it once, and last Sunday week his successor, General Ewell, drove out Milroy. The name of Milroy is always associated with that of Butler, and his ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... shuttlecock, but there was none to admire her dexterity; besides, she was not allowed to strike it across the room, as that would have been an invasion on one of her sister's territories. She could not expect that either of them would quit ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... education and training kept me far ahead of other girls, and while they were scarcely out of the nursery, and still enjoying battledore and shuttlecock, I was seeking information, either by reading or conversation, concerning my forefathers, position, duties, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... down the canyon road, Darrell, with Trix, bringing up the rear, feeling himself a sort of shuttlecock tossed to and fro by antagonistic forces in whose conflicts he personally had no part and no interest. However, he wasted no moments in useless regrets, but rode along in deep thought, planning for the uninterrupted pursuit of his studies amid ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the world ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... herself by the coffee-tray, and had planted Matty at his other side, so that he was in a measure hemmed in, and if he did not talk to Matty had no one to fall back on but herself, who, of course, would quickly, using the metaphor of battledore and shuttlecock, toss him back to her daughter—having arranged all this, what should Bell do but put ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... tumbled after him, and I followed too, as quickly as I could get along and the motion of the ship would allow me, being buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between the bulwarks and deck-house in my progress onwards, as well as drenched by the spray, which came hurtling inboards over the main-chains from windward as it was borne along by the breeze, wetting everything amidships and soaking the main-sail as if buckets of water were ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... judgment about the latter, and questioned if we were authorized in accounting them as being equally from Heaven. But such distinctions are fatal to peace. Our souls were kept in constant perturbation, as we accounted ourselves the shuttlecock of rival powers, now God's, now man's. And we ended in ruling God out of more than half our life, and regarding ourselves as the hapless prey of strong and malicious forces to which we were sold, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... but not much patronised; cards, on the other hand, are very common, the favourite games being those in which almost everything is left to chance. As to open-air amusements, youths of the baser sort indulge in battledore and shuttlecock without the battledore, and every resident in China must have admired the skill with which the foot is used instead, at this foot-shuttlecock game. Twirling heavy bars round the body, and gymnastics generally, are practised ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... it possible that this should be otherwise: love is a passion, wayward and impetuous in its very nature—agitating and disquieting in its effects, rendering its votary the slave of circumstances—a mere shuttlecock alternating between the extremes of hope and fear, joy and sorrow, confidence and mistrust—a thing which a smile can exalt to the highest pinnacle of delight, or a frown strike down to the depths of despair. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... up in the top, was tossed backward and forward—as if he had been a shuttlecock between two battledores—and it was just as much as he could do to keep his hold among the branches, much less finish the loading of his fusil, which he had only half accomplished when the rocking began. Had he been alone, his position would have been one of great danger: for no ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... of the English system which Englishmen generally tolerate as a necessary evil, but of which they are by no means proud. Most thinking men in this country resent the idea of Indian interests being made a shuttlecock in the strife of party. Not so Mr. Mallik. He shudders at the idea of Indian affairs being considered exclusively on their own merits. "If it is no party's duty to champion the cause of any part of the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... an expense as that of conscience, and of a dishonour done to truth!" And the crime is so entirely objectless. A man who tells a lie, properly so called, has some hope of reward by it. But to lie for sport is to play at shuttlecock with your soul, and load your conscience for the mere sake of being a fool. "With what temper should I speak of those people? What words can express the meanness and baseness of the mind that can do this?" In making this protest against frivolous story-telling, the humour of ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... Whose chill would quench in everlasting peace His soul's unmeasured flame—O paradox! Might he but learn the trick!—to wear her heart One fragile hour of heedless innocence, And then, farewell, and the incessant grave. "O fool! O villain!"—'tis the shuttlecock Wit never leaves at rest. It is his fate To be a needle in a world of hay, Where honour is the flattery of the fool; Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest; Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood For words to fell. Ah! but the secret lacking, The secret of the child, the bird, the ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... but to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. So there arises the problem how order ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... emerge again in a moment with a badminton racket and a shuttlecock. "On the bulldog—one round rapid fire." He fired and with a loud snort ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... kinds delighted him. Battledore and shuttlecock was played constantly in the garden at Devonshire Terrace, though I do not remember my father ever playing it elsewhere. The American game of bowls pleased him, and rounders found him more than expert. Croquet he disliked, but cricket he enjoyed intensely as ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... in The Dancing Girl. ("There is another and a worse wicked nobleman" N. B., O. W.) But this is no fault, and, indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find fault with Mr. TREE'S Lord Illingworth. Mrs. TREE as Mrs. Allonby, is a very charming battledore in the game of repartee-shuttlecock, who with eight other principal characters in the piece, has nothing whatever to do with the plot. To the character of Lady Hunstanton, as written in the Mrs. Nickleby vein, and as played by Miss ROSE LECLERCQ, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... side and Mr. Pedagog the other. But whatever decision may ultimately be reached, of one thing Mrs. Pedagog must be assured. I on principle side against Mr. Pedagog, and if it be the wish of my good landlady that I shall refrain from playing intellectual battledore and shuttlecock with her husband, whom we all revere, I certainly shall refrain. Hereafter if I indulge in anything that in any sense resembles repartee with our landlord, I wish it distinctly understood that an ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... taking readily to cycling, albeit, from the flowing nature of their garments they generally use ladies' bicycles. Of these few pastimes archery is considered the most distingue, while boys attain to great skill in playing shuttlecock with their feet, being able to keep up the feathered cork for a dozen or twenty times, and passing it considerable distances from one to another. Judge then of my surprise when, on asking a young Chinaman at Peking how he had spent ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... plainly had begun with a gusto. It stirred one's blood. It called—it summoned with such a promise of variety, of adventure, of flotsam and jetsam and shuttlecock of chances, that I, a youth with twenty-one dollars and a half at disposal, all his clothes on his back, a man's weapon at his belt, and an appointment with a lady as his future, forgetful of past and courageous in present, strode confidently, even recklessly ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... it for the last six months, pass belief. I had yesterday a bill of sixty dollars' plumbing to pay for damages of various kinds which had had to be repaired in our very convenient water-works; and the blame of each particular one had been bandied like a shuttlecock among our three household divinities. Biddy privately assured my wife that Kate was in the habit of emptying dust-pans of rubbish into the main drain from the chambers, and washing any little extra bits down through the bowls; and, in fact, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... comfort for her. None knew of her weakness. Her mind had vacillated like a shuttlecock, but no one had seen the vacillation. She was in his hands, and she must simply do as he bade her. Then she went down to Mrs Baggett's room, and told the old lady to go up-stairs at her master's behest. "I'm a-going," ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... slay boards, and as he wur goin' daan th' hill he did mak sum manoevures yo mind, for talk abaat fugal men i' th' army wen thay throw thair guns up into th' air an' catches em agean, thay wur nowt ta Joe, for he span his slay boards up an' daan just like a shuttlecock. But wal this wur goin' on th' storm began to abate, and th' water seemed to get less, but still thay kept at it. Wal at last a chap at thay called Dave Twirler shaated aat at he saw summat, and thay look't way at he pointed, and thare behold it wur ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... are principally of domestic scenes, child-life, and other genre subjects. "Battledore and Shuttlecock" is an interior, with a graceful girl playing the game, to the amusement of a young child sitting on a nurse's lap. The room is attractive, the accessories well painted, and a second girl just coming through the door and turning her eyes up to the shuttlecock ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... cabin. The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated boy. And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin. He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down. But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity. He was knocked about like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay helpless on the deck. And no one interfered. Leach could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... roasted alive, and have to take ices to cool them, and then for fear the cold will heat them, they have to take brandy cock-tail to counteract it. So they keep up a sort of artificial fever and ague all day. The ice gives the one, and brandy the other, like shuttlecock and battledore. If they had walked down as they had ought to have done, in the cool of the morning, they would ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... dangerous attempt to scale it. But not Alice only, her father also showed himself near the window, and beckoned him up. The family party seemed now more promising than before, and the fugitive Prince was weary of playing battledore and shuttlecock with his conscience, and much disposed to let matters go as ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... carquills ainsi que des volants. Early commentators have generally stated that volants means here "the beams of a mill," but MM. Moland and E. Despois, the last annotators of Molire, maintain that it stands for "shuttlecock," because the large rolls (canons), tied at the knee and wide at the bottom, bore a great resemblance to shuttlecocks turned upside down. I cannot see how this can suit the words marcher carquills, for the motion of the canons of gallants, ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... Dilly was ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith was welcome ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... it proved a sad failure. While soaring in the air—all his four feet raised high off the ground—the huge horns of his adversary were impelled with fearful force against his ribs, the stroke tossing him like a shuttlecock clear over the ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... process at law if they were over eighteen years of age. On the whole, the position of the apprentice, whether by land or sea, was highly anomalous and uncertain. Often taken by the gang in the hurry of visiting a ship, or in the scurry of a hot press on shore, he was in effect the shuttlecock of the service, to-day singing merrily at his capstan or bench, to-morrow bewailing his hard fate on board ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tete-a-tete. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square offices with him, a stack of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... because my brother has it—private tuition from his tutor; but what you mean I can't think, and I do wish you'd speak out plainly and tell me if you are in any trouble about money; because, you know, you need not go spending it on me. I'm quite content to play battledore and shuttlecock in the hall, and I didn't ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... of it, the more he was satisfied of its feasibility, and he trotted over, the next day, to the Old Duke of Cumberland, to see his friend on the subject. Viney, like most victuallers, was more given to games of skill—billiards, shuttlecock, skittles, dominoes, and so on—than to the rude out-of-door chances of flood and field, and at first he doubted his ability to grapple with the details; but on Mr. Watchorn's assurance that he would keep him straight, he gave Mrs. Viney a key, desiring her to ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... empire of the Eighteenth dynasty was thus restored. But it lasted barely three years. In B.C. 605 the Egyptians were defeated by Nebuchadrezzar under the walls of Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Asia passed into the possession of the Babylonians. Once more Palestine became a shuttlecock between the kingdoms of the Nile and the Euphrates. Trusting to the support of Egypt, Zedekiah of Judah revolted from his Babylonian master. His policy at first seemed successful. The Babylonian army which was besieging Jerusalem retired ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... like the children's game of shuttlecock. So long as the flying shuttle keeps moving in its restless course to and fro, life is. A single stop is death. The very same blow which, rightly placed, sends it like an arrow to the safe centre of the opposing racket, if it fall obliquely, or even with too great or too little force, drives ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... under the portico, and was hurled against the pillar on my right; the rebound again drove me to the post on the opposite side; and after being thus repeatedly tossed and buffeted from right to left like a shuttlecock, I was thrust down, outward, on the ground on my head, with all that bundle of rags, having tumbled head-long the whole range of the four marble steps of entrance. The harm, however, was not so great as the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... and he heaved a great many profound sighs, and drank a great many glasses of sack, and came to the sorrowful conclusion that Dame Fortune was a malicious jade, inclined to poke fun at his best affections, and make a shuttlecock of his heart for the rest of his life. He thought, too, of Count L'Estrange; and the longer he thought, the more he became convinced that he knew him well, and had met him often. But where? He racked his brain until, between love, Leoline, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... difficult to answer stupid questions," said the woman. "My sons have plenty of business on hand; they are playing at shuttlecock with the clouds up yonder in the king's ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... not work all the time. They play many pretty games. Chinese boys, too, have many kinds of games and toys. One game is like battledoor and shuttlecock. They use their feet to strike the shuttlecock. They do this so fast that the shuttlecock hardly ever falls to the ground. The Chinese are fond of flying kites. Even old men fly kites. They fly their kites in the spring-time. Chinese kites are of all sizes and shapes. Some are like birds. ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... a night he was a sort of shuttlecock tossed between these alternating moods, and he was still the same when he paced the quadrangle with bowed head and hands clasped behind him awaiting Samoval at a few minutes before twelve of the following night. The windows that looked down from the four sides of that enclosed ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... kiddie," said he, and from his tone I gathered that all was not rosy in the life of the infant in this game of battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... be the adjunct of every country house—a large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches and a piano in the room. At one ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... gurgle in her throat Aunt Jane fell limply against me. It was too much. All day long she had been tossed back and forth like a shuttlecock by the battledore of emotion. She had borne the shock of Mr. Tubbs's sordid greed for gold, his disloyalty to the expedition, his coldness to herself; she had been shaken by the tender stress of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... one day she even made two grave philosophers, who were holding a profound discussion in her presence over some deep philosophic subject, suddenly cease their arguments to play with her at battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... merchant's son. Aunt Pen watched and approved this stratagem, hoped for the best results, and believed the day won when Debby grew pale and silent, and followed with her eyes the young couple who were playing battledoor and shuttlecock with each other's hearts, as if she took some interest in the game. But Aunt Pen clashed her cymbals too soon; for Debby's trouble had a better source than jealousy, and in the silence of the sleepless nights that stole her bloom she was taking counsel of her own full heart, and resolving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... game was played over a net some 5 feet high, and the service was always from the same end, the players changing courts each game. It was more on the style of the present game of badminton or battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... When I wish an address changed, it is quite on the cards that I shall be able to find language explicit enough to express the desire. My whole desire is to avoid complication of addresses. It is quite fatal. If two P. R.'s have contradictory orders they will continue to play battledoor and shuttlecock with an unhappy epistle, which will never get farther afield ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her heart had swollen with rage. Anger had set her going, just as a blow from a battledoor sends off a shuttlecock. And, once being started, the poor ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... while the king enjoyed a nap. As soon as he awoke, Clery, who had been with the Dauphin for several years, would give him writing and arithmetic lessons, and then he would play ball or battledore-and-shuttlecock for awhile, and then there would be reading aloud until it was time for the Dauphin's supper, after which the king would amuse his children with all sorts of riddles and puzzles and games, and then the ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... all his might and main. Poor Twirling-stick Mike groaned, and his unhappy head dropped exhausted upon his breast. Miserable man, his last capers were cut! His dancing was no longer worth mentioning. He went up a little way, like a baby's shuttlecock, and came down again feebly and dull. The ducats poured out. The bags swelled; playing and dancing—dancing, such as it was—went forward, and one terrible hour passed away. At last the wrists of the farmer ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... with severity proportioned to the former favour of the public. If he be daunted by a bad reception on this second occasion, he may again become a stranger to the arena. If, on the contrary, he can keep his ground, and stand the shuttlecock's fate, of being struck up and down, he will probably, at length, hold with some certainty the level in public opinion which he may be found to deserve; and he may perhaps boast of arresting the general attention, in the same manner as the Bachelor Samson Carrasco, of fixing the weathercock ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... feel slightly exhausted by his unwonted exertions, when he reached that bewildering part of the river termed "the Gut." So confusing were the intestine commotions of this gut, that, after passing a chequered existence as an aquatic shuttlecock, and being assailed with a slang-dictionary-full of opprobrious epithets, Mr. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... one of those anecdotes of his Scottish martyrdom which he tells so well and tells so often. Lucifer himself could not be more arrogant or more audacious than this bewitching boy-lover of mine, who writes verses in English or Latin as easy as I can toss a shuttlecock. I doubt the greater number of his verses are scarce proper reading for you or me, Angela; for I see the men gather round him in corners as he murmurs his latest madrigal to a chosen half-dozen or so; and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... foggy all day, and the children had to content themselves with skating and battledore and shuttlecock in the verandahs. Lord Carrington, Tom, and Mabelle went for a long walk, calling on Cardinal Moran, and paying visits to the picture-gallery, the Anglican cathedral, and other places; and after an early dinner at 6.45 all the party went to the meeting ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... resembled, with a meerschaum in her scarlet lips and a world of wrath in her bright black eyes, dashed past him into the darkness within, and before the dealer knew or dreamed of her, tossed up the old man's little shriveled frame like a shuttlecock, shook him till he shook like custards, flung him upward and caught him as if he were the hoop in a game of La Grace, and set him down bruised, breathless, and terrified out ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... our past for you?' he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was not made ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... alternation, reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; bandy, transpose, shuffle, change bands, swap, permute, reciprocate, commute; give and take, return the compliment; play at puss in the corner, play at battledore and shuttlecock; retaliate &c. 718; requite. rearrange, recombine. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that were to ensue; and after his breakfast stood at a window watching the dripping trees and whistling so softly one could not tell whether 'twere he or the birds chirping without. Cedric and Lady Constance played at battledore and shuttlecock. Mistress Penwick sat apart, busy with thought and needle. His Grace of Ellswold sat up that morning, his wife and physicians by his side, and all were happy ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... myself in the most charming manner and with the greatest expression. Now and then, I raise my head (I am sitting on the hardest of wet seats, in the most uncomfortable of wet attitudes, but I don't mind it,) and notice that I am a whirling shuttlecock between a fiery battledore of a lighthouse on the French coast and a fiery battledore of a lighthouse on the English coast; but I don't notice it particularly, except to feel envenomed in my hatred of Calais. Then I go on again, 'Rich and rare were ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... eglantine, which formed the grand entrance to the garden. Here a most animated scene of festivity opened upon us. On one side were rope dancers, people riding at the ring, groups of persons playing at shuttlecock, which seemed to be the favourite, and I may add, the most ridiculous diversion; on the other side, were dancers, tumblers, mountebanks, and parties, all with gay countenances, seated in little bowers ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... was one of the gentlemen of His Majesty's closet, and one with whom the revered monarch was on terms of considerable intimacy. A close regard had sprung up between them in the old King's time; when His Royal Highness, playing at battledore and shuttlecock with the young lord on the landing-place of the great staircase at Kew, in some moment of irritation the Prince of Wales kicked the young Earl downstairs, who, falling, broke his leg. The Prince's hearty repentance for his ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... King, afraid of being abused in the newspapers, afraid of being thought factious if he went out, afraid of being thought interested if he stayed in, afraid of everything, and afraid of being known to be afraid of anything, was beaten backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between Horace Walpole, who wished to make him prime minister, and Lord John Cavendish, who wished to draw him into opposition. Charles Townshend, a man of splendid eloquence, of lax principles, and of boundless vanity and presumption, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dates from a bowl and pelting each other with the stones, while a new member of the family, a seemingly sexless being in a blue sash and shoulder knots, called "Baby," galloped up and down the room with a battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... to have done, what any man retaining his common sense would have done the moment he got his hands upon the thing, was to turn off the tap. Then he might have played foot-ball with the man, or battledore and shuttlecock as he pleased; and the twenty or thirty people who had rushed forward to assist would have only applauded. His idea, however, as he explained to us afterwards, was to take away the hose from the man, and, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... in spite of my pronounce features, and I could still enter into the delights of a good drawn battle of battledore and shuttlecock. Perhaps it was the repressed enthusiasm of my tone, for I really meant what I said; but Flurry's brief coldness vanished, and she caught at ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... himself that a giant must have a body as big as a mill; but from what supposition can a sensible man set off to persuade himself that the half of the moon has gone into a sleeve, and that a Sammonocodom has come down from heaven to play at shuttlecock, cut down a forest, and perform ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... it had not been for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, which he disliked still more; and was beginning to ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... times I've seen, Which, I confess it, raised my spleen; They were contrived by Love to mock The battledoor and shuttlecock. Given, returned,—how strange a play, Where neither loses all the day, And both are, even when night sets in, Again as ready to begin! I am not sure I have not played This very game with some fair maid. Perhaps it was a dream; but this I know was not; I know a kiss Was given me in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and eglantine, which formed the grand entrance to the garden. Here a most animated scene of festivity opened upon us. On one side were rope dancers, people riding at the ring, groups of persons playing at shuttlecock, which seemed to be the favourite, and I may add, the most ridiculous diversion; on the other side, were dancers, tumblers, mountebanks, and parties, all with gay countenances, seated in little bowers enjoying lemonade, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... once tumbled after him, and I followed too, as quickly as I could get along and the motion of the ship would allow me, being buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between the bulwarks and deck-house in my progress onwards, as well as drenched by the spray, which came hurtling inboards over the main-chains from windward as it was borne along by the breeze, wetting everything amidships and soaking the main-sail as if buckets of ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... up and enlarges by closing the shops, keeping in their sheds the heavy drays and trucks, leaving the space free for wandering bands of children washed and in their Sunday clothes, and for games of battledore and shuttlecock played amid the great circlings of the swallows beneath some porch of old Paris. It must be seen in the densely populated, feverishly toiling suburbs, where, as soon as morning is come, you may feel it hovering, resposeful and sweet, in the silence of the factories, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... weeks he had learned to regard her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and pagan philosophy. Then he looked ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... were going I knew not; of what we were going to do I had no inkling. I only knew we were southbound, and at long last I might fairly consider myself to be the shuttlecock of fortune. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... meanwhile, Mr. Mallik, with true Eastern proclivities, warmly admires that portion of the English system which Englishmen generally tolerate as a necessary evil, but of which they are by no means proud. Most thinking men in this country resent the idea of Indian interests being made a shuttlecock in the strife of party. Not so Mr. Mallik. He shudders at the idea of Indian affairs being considered exclusively on their own merits. "If it is no party's duty to champion the cause of any part of the Empire, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... town of Winchester seems to have been made a regular shuttlecock of by the contending armies. Stonewall Jackson rescued it once, and last Sunday week his successor, General Ewell, drove out Milroy. The name of Milroy is always associated with that of Butler, and his rule in Winchester ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... his criticism of our time and civilization in an argument or essay, the world would have received it very differently. As an intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with it and tossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it when we tired of it, as we do other criticism. But he gave it to us as a man, as a personality, and we find it too strong for us. It is easier to deal with a theory than with the concrete reality. A man is a summons and a ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the doctor, and for a few moments more we bandied quick questions and replies like children playing at battledore and shuttlecock. Then he said: ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making,—providing ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... have some lingering doubts as to the "expediency," satisfy their consciences for voting "no" by saying that the women of their family and acquaintance do not want it. Thus is the most valuable of human rights—the right of individual representation—made the football of Legislatures, the shuttlecock of voters, kicked and tossed like the veriest plaything in utter disregard of the vital fact that it is the one principle above all others on which the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub,—a mere conglomeration of bubbles,—as hollow and as unsatisfying. And in lower departments of human life, as far as he knew, he saw evils yet more deplorable. The Church played at shuttlecock with men's credulousness, the law with their purses, the medical profession with their lives, the military with their liberties and hopes. He acknowledged that in all these lines of action there was much talent, much good intention, much admirable diligence and acuteness brought out—but to ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... white clouds that relieve the eye without obscuring the light. At the farthest end of the lawn from the house were some fine trees, under the shelter of which two girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock, and very well they played too. A little nearer this way, that is where John and the carriage stood, in the direction of the house, was a young child seated on the turf holding a dog, whilst two other children were trying to make ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... to the moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of the bougainvillaea, until upon the background ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... verandas, stood in a small garden a dozen yards from the lagoon, where the Broom Road narrowed as it left the business portion of Papeete and began its round of the island. There was just room enough on the salt grass for the shuttlecock to fall out of bounds, and for the battledores to swing free of the branches of the trees. The consul, though he wore a monocle, was without the pretense of officialdom except to other officials and, of course, at receptions, dinners, and formal gatherings. After the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Benton plainly had begun with a gusto. It stirred one's blood. It called—it summoned with such a promise of variety, of adventure, of flotsam and jetsam and shuttlecock of chances, that I, a youth with twenty-one dollars and a half at disposal, all his clothes on his back, a man's weapon at his belt, and an appointment with a lady as his future, forgetful of past and courageous in present, strode confidently, even recklessly down, as eager as one to the manners ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... or a whirlpool," she said, rather sententiously: "we have been stagnant for three days, and I begin to feel flat. Races are tabooed: besides, we cannot always leave mother alone. I propose we go out in the garden and have a game of battledore and shuttlecock;" for this had been a winter pastime with them ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... excusable, but will not diminish the public contempt; on the other, we have the ill-assorted fragments of a worn-out minority; Mr. Windham with his coat twice turned, and my Lord Grenville who perhaps has more sense than he can make good use of; between the two and the shuttlecock of both, a Sidmouth, and the general football Sir F. Burdett, kicked at by all, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... fellow. He drove the full length of the street twice, passing the Inn of the Stars both times at a lively clip, and might have gone on forever in his shuttlecock enterprise, had not the excited voice of a woman hailed him from ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... L300 this morning at my office, in comes my father, and with him I walked, and leave him at W. Joyce's, and went myself to Mr. Crew's, but came too late to dine, and therefore after a game at shittle-cocks—[The game of battledore and shuttlecock was formerly much played even in tennis courts, and was a very violent game.]—with Mr. Walgrave and Mr. Edward, I returned to my father, and taking him from W. Joyce's, who was not abroad himself, we inquired of a porter, and by his direction went to an alehouse, where after a ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... peace His soul's unmeasured flame—O paradox! Might he but learn the trick!—to wear her heart One fragile hour of heedless innocence, And then, farewell, and the incessant grave. "O fool! O villain!"—'tis the shuttlecock Wit never leaves at rest. It is his fate To be a needle in a world of hay, Where honour is the flattery of the fool; Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest; Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood For words to fell. Ah! but the ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... showed her how to play cross-touch, and puss in the corner, and tag. It was funny, she didn't know any games but battledore and shuttlecock and les graces. But she really began to laugh at last and not to look quite so ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... infusion next morning, which one would think were nothing, and yet 'tis not to be imagined how sick it makes me for an hour or two, and, which is the misery, all that time one must be using some kind of exercise. Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on't that ever you saw. I make her play at shuttlecock with me, and she is the veriest bungler at it ever you saw. Then am I ready to beat her with the battledore, and grow so peevish as I grow sick, that I'll undertake she wishes there were no steel in England. But ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... the simpler kinds delighted him. Battledore and shuttlecock was played constantly in the garden at Devonshire Terrace, though I do not remember my father ever playing it elsewhere. The American game of bowls pleased him, and rounders found him more than expert. Croquet he disliked, but cricket he enjoyed intensely ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... attempted; but it is not really liked: too many balls are lost and the rules of the game have never yet been thoroughly grasped. A quartette of men will occasionally rig up their net, which they raise to about the height of a foot and a half, and play a species of battledore and shuttlecock over it until the balls disappear; but it is scarcely tennis. As a matter of fact, a Russian generally rushes at the ball and misses it; on the rare occasions when he strikes the object, he does so with so much energy that the ball unless stopped by the adversary's eye, or his ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... I've done to-day—my holiday. In the first place it poured with rain all the morning, so I sent for a pair of battledores and a shuttlecock, and when Charles Mason came to render up last night's account, I made him come into a beautiful large ball-room I had discovered in this house, and took a good breathing; and he, being like Hamlet, "fat and scant of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... lady, is the thing best worth seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing box." Though an exquisite, Mr. Standish is clever, entertaining, and agreeable. One day that he sat beside me at dinner, we had a delightful battledore and shuttlecock conversation from grave to gay as quick as your heart could wish: from L'Almanac des Gourmandes and Le Respectable Porc, to Dorriforth ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... were waging a desperate and bloody war, the United States was like a shuttlecock, being struck repeatedly by the diplomatic battledores of each nation. Between the British "Orders in Council" and the French "Milan Decree," American commerce was in a fair way of being obliterated. To declare war against both nations, would have been absurd in so young a people; and for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... wicked nobleman" N. B., O. W.) But this is no fault, and, indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find fault with Mr. TREE'S Lord Illingworth. Mrs. TREE as Mrs. Allonby, is a very charming battledore in the game of repartee-shuttlecock, who with eight other principal characters in the piece, has nothing whatever to do with the plot. To the character of Lady Hunstanton, as written in the Mrs. Nickleby vein, and as played by Miss ROSE LECLERCQ, the success is mainly due; and "for this relief much ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... howl, but the rock walls seemed to catch it as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and send it bounding back to me. I knew then that a cry from those depths would not carry far; and the fear at my heart gave ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... bonze. His conscience began to trouble him for breaking his vows. In the terrible conflict between principle and passion, the soul of the priest was tossed to and fro like the feathered seed-ball of a shuttlecock. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... heart has been treated as a football. Yes; but many a woman's heart has been treated as a shuttlecock. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... and a night he was a sort of shuttlecock tossed between these alternating moods, and he was still the same when he paced the quadrangle with bowed head and hands clasped behind him awaiting Samoval at a few minutes before twelve of the following ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Austin! If an Indian chief was killed by a buffalo, what should you do among them? Why they would toss you over their heads like a shuttlecock. ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... sight of its true meaning. It denotes the absence of a certain order, but to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... lodgers in this house that the doorpost seemed to be as full of bell-handles as a cathedral organ is of stops. Doubtful which might be the clarionet-stop, he was considering the point, when a shuttlecock flew out of the parlour window, and alighted on his hat. He then observed that in the parlour window was a blind with the inscription, MR CRIPPLES's ACADEMY; also in another line, EVENING TUITION; and behind the blind was a little ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... have plenty of play and fun when they are not in school. In both towns and villages the streets are the playground, and here they play ball, or battledore and shuttlecock, or fly kites. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... and the children had to content themselves with skating and battledore and shuttlecock in the verandahs. Lord Carrington, Tom, and Mabelle went for a long walk, calling on Cardinal Moran, and paying visits to the picture-gallery, the Anglican cathedral, and other places; and after an early dinner at 6.45 all the party went to the meeting ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... passionately. 'Am I poisoning even the memory of our past for you?' he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was not made to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... strongly for the wreck. Father and daughter both labored at the oars, unable to speak on account of the roar of the sea and wind, and blinded by the spray that whirled over them. Their boat was tossed like a shuttlecock in the great waves, and they knew that unless the shipwrecked persons could aid them it would be impossible to return to the lighthouse. They must succeed or die, and their chance of success ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of governments; no hint of "the speedy nuptials of the daughter ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... interview he whispered to his daughter and his sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a whole ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his indifference to ambition. The watchwords of party appeared to him ridiculous; and politics in general—what a great moralist termed one question in particular—a shuttlecock kept up by the contention of noisy children. His mind thus rested as to all public matters in a state of quietude, and covered over with the mantle of a most false, a most perilous philosophy. His appetites to pleasure had grown somewhat dulled by experience, but he was as yet neither ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... healthy spot, that it be well-drained, that there be a large play-ground attached to it, that the young people are allowed plenty of exercise in the open air—indeed, that at least one-third of the day is spent there in croquet, skipping, archery, battle-dore and shuttlecock, gardening, walking, running, &c. ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit my household gods, please heaven. I ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... forth the lunch-table as favors and bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... snuff-shop; but in later days it was discovered that even the tartan was an anachronism in such case, and that Macbeth and his associates must be clad in stripes, or plain colours. Even the bonnet with the eagle's feather, which Sir Walter Scott induced Kemble to substitute for his "shuttlecock" headdress of ostrich plumes, was held to be inadmissible: the Macbeth of the antiquaries wore a conical iron helmet, and was otherwise arrayed in barbaric armour. But when Garrick first played Macbeth there were good reasons why the reform to be introduced by Macklin at a later date could not ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... generous, that sheds its fruit at every breeze.' Sir John having affected to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs, Dr Johnson said, 'Nay, sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at many of those who have written against me, have smiled to think that they ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... the joy of the poor town when it once more welcomed the gray-jackets. From the beginning it had been battle-ground and billet of both armies a dozen times. Tossed from Federal to Confederate possession—a very shuttlecock of war—it had been harassed, robbed and pillaged by the one; drained of the very dregs by free gifts to the other. But the people of Winchester never faltered in their faith; and to-day her noble women go down the roll of heroism and steadfast truth, hand in hand ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... equally good for one player or for two. The only game to be played is to see how long the shuttlecock can be kept in the air. If you are alone the best way is to set yourself a number, say a hundred, and persevere until you reach it. This can be varied by striving to reach, say, thirty, by first hitting the ball each time ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the children's game of shuttlecock. So long as the flying shuttle keeps moving in its restless course to and fro, life is. A single stop is death. The very same blow which, rightly placed, sends it like an arrow to the safe centre of the ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... period of my life. With regard to the enjoyment of "games," I never played many as a child, but as a man I have derived the greatest possible pleasure from them. I never learned to skip till I was thirty, and at thirty-five my greatest delight was a game of battledore and shuttlecock. Now that I am turned forty I have given up violent exercise, and taken to playing with boxes of bricks and tin soldiers. I am sure that I am far happier with them, now, than I was as a child. In ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... shoulders; some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name —could not find anybody who seemed to know its name—but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... which renders serious thought unnecessary, and silence impossible. If he has been unfortunate, he recounts his distresses, and in doing so, forgets them. His mind never reposes for a moment upon itself; his secret is to keep it in perpetual motion, and, like a shuttlecock, to whip it back and forward with such rapidity, that although its feathers may have been ruffled, and its gilding effaced by many hard blows, yet neither you nor he have ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... that true knight was employed in field sports or yeomanry duties, such as the state of the country called for. When he was at home, all was fun and merriment and noise—walks and rides on fine days, battledore and shuttlecock on wet ones, music, singing, paper games, giggling and making giggle, and sometimes dancing in the hall—Mr. Frank Fordyce joining with all his heart and drollery in many of these, like ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... connexion with women, but might give themselves up without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery; that when by any mischance a Templar infringed this order, and a child was born, the whole order met, and tossed it about like a shuttlecock from one to the other until it expired; that they then roasted it by a slow fire, and with the fat which trickled from it anointed the hair and beard of a large image of the devil. It was also said that when one of the knights died, his body was burnt into a powder, and then mixed ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... browt his slay boards, and as he wur goin' daan th' hill he did mak sum manoevures yo mind, for talk abaat fugal men i' th' army wen thay throw thair guns up into th' air an' catches em agean, thay wur nowt ta Joe, for he span his slay boards up an' daan just like a shuttlecock. But wal this wur goin' on th' storm began to abate, and th' water seemed to get less, but still thay kept at it. Wal at last a chap at thay called Dave Twirler shaated aat at he saw summat, and thay look't way at he pointed, and thare behold it wur won o'th' ribs o'th' railway stickin' ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... But it lasted barely three years. In B.C. 605 the Egyptians were defeated by Nebuchadrezzar under the walls of Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Asia passed into the possession of the Babylonians. Once more Palestine became a shuttlecock between the kingdoms of the Nile and the Euphrates. Trusting to the support of Egypt, Zedekiah of Judah revolted from his Babylonian master. His policy at first seemed successful. The Babylonian army which was besieging Jerusalem retired ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... difference between the real and the ideal, of the perception that the world, despite its grandeur and its beauty, is a world of folly and contradictions; that whatever exists and is formed, bears within itself the germ of death and corruption; that the Lord of all creation himself is but the shuttlecock of irresistible, absolute force, compelling the unconditional surrender of subject ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... falling shuttlecock, shrieking as she fell; and as she struck the water, the drowned bodies of the men she had sent there came to the surface, and caught her by the feet and hair, and drew her down, making an end of her, as she ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... am talking about. And I tell you that the moment you two got your divorce, you said good-bye to all peace and quiet. Bless you'—Sam's manner became fatherly—'I've seen it a hundred times. Couple get divorced, and, if there's a child, what happens? They start in playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with him. Wife sneaks him from husband. Husband sneaks him back from wife. After a while along comes a gentleman in my line of business, a professional at the game, and he puts one across on both the amateurs. He takes advantage of the confusion, slips in, and gets away ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... games of the same sort, which were not less popular. Skittles; la Soule or Soulette, which consisted of a large ball of hay covered over with leather, the possession of which was contested for by two opposing sides of players; Football; open Tennis; Shuttlecock, &c. It was Charles V. who first thought of giving a more serious and useful character to the games of the people, and who, in a celebrated edict forbidding games of chance, encouraged the establishment of companies of archers and bowmen. These companies, to which was ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... her cream, the freshness of her eggs, the ruddiness and flavor of her strawberries, as so many proofs of her skill in managing her establishment; and would not fear to shock her aunts by tempting one of her sisters-in-law to a game at ball, or battledoor and shuttlecock. But she probably enjoyed still more the power of gratifying the inhabitants of Versailles and the neighborhood. The moment that her improvements were completed, she opened the gardens to the public to walk in, and gave ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... found to surpass imagination, and to suit and savor all literature. The shuttlecock of religious intolerance will fall to the ground, if there be no battledores to fling it back and forth. It is reason for [20] rejoicing that the vox populi is inclined to grant us peace, together with pardon for the preliminary battles that ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... archery, in which the Tartars have always excelled, was regarded almost as a semi-divine accomplishment. Kite-flying has reached a high level of skill. Clever little "messengers" have been devised, which run up the string, carrying fire-crackers which explode at a great height. There is a game of shuttlecock, without the battledore, for which the feet are used as a substitute; and "diavolo," recently introduced into Europe, is an ancient Chinese pastime. A few Manchus, too, may be seen skating during the long northern winter, but the modern inhabitant of the Flowery Land, be he Manchu ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... bewilderment which had been in his mind for weeks past; he loved this bright young creature with the whole force of his rugged nature, and began dimly to comprehend that she cared no more for him or his sufferings than if his heart had been a football or shuttlecock. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... branch of that old maple, full forty yards to the trunk. No, no! don't get any nearer, for they see you. Well done! Hear him thump on the leaves; and here comes the other, fluttering round and round like a shuttlecock. Ten to one that you shot him through the head. There! I told you so! His wings are not hurt, but a shot has cut away his bill. Here, Dancer, don't bite him so, but bring him here! Chick, chick, churr! Mister Red-squirrel, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... life like a shuttlecock may be toss'd With the hand of fate for a battledore; But it matters much for your sweet soul lost, As much as a million ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... lessons in writing, and copied, at the king's desire, passages from the works of Montesquieu and others, for the use of the Dauphin. Then Clery took Louis to his aunt's room, where they played at ball, and battledore and shuttlecock, till Louis's supper-time, at eight o'clock. Meanwhile the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, till eight o'clock, when they went to Louis, to sit beside him while he had his supper. Then the king amused the children with riddles, which he had found in a collection of old newspapers. ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... play; and no worse than play seemed all the rest of their quiet lives. But Miss Dilly was ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith was ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now—I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study: conchology, now: it always think that must be a light study. Or ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... girl's sash was of many-flowered brocade, with scarlet broidered pouch hanging at her right side. A scarlet over-sash kept the large sash-knot in its place. Her hair was gay with knot of scarlet crinkled crepe, lacquered comb, and hairpin of tiny golden battledore. Resting thereon were a shuttlecock of coral, another pin of a tiny red lobster and a green pine sprig made of silk. In her belt was coquettishly stuck the butterfly-broidered case that held her quire of paper pocket-handkerchiefs. The brother's dress was of a simpler style and soberer coloring. His pouch ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... sprang forward at once, although the doomed voyager was manifestly beyond the reach of help. But even as they did so, the crisis came. With one leap the boat was in the midst of the rapids, banged to and fro like a shuttlecock by the white leaping waves, amid which it appeared and vanished by turns, till a final plunge sent it right toward the ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... beneficial, the shoulders should be drawn back, and the chest should be enlarged by taking deep inspirations of pure air. The muscles of the chest, and of every part of the body, should be free to move and unconfined by tight clothing. Fencing, shuttlecock, and such other useful sports as combine with them free movements of the upper part of the body, are doubly advantageous, for they not only exercise the muscles of the whole body, but possess the additional ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... wish there were no geography and history in the world, and then I should not have to study so cruelly hard, and I could play more. My mother sent me last week a new battledore and shuttlecock, but I can never learn to play with it. I no sooner begin, than Herr Behnisch calls me to study. To-day I was very cunning—oh, I was so sly! I put it in the great-pocket of my tutor's coat, and he brought ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... is made up of opposites, light and shade, hard and soft, hot and cold, sweet and sour, for the purpose, no doubt, of placing man between two moral battledores so as to drive the weak and erring shuttlecock of his will right and left, and thus keep it in the middle course of rectitude. No sooner had our adventurers sunk to the profoundest depths of gloom, than the battledore of brighter influences began to ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... have whatever chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as shuttlecock and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the harmless blows which are so valuable a training in endurance ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... now, my dear creatures," hereupon said Miss O'Donoghue, promptly addressing her nieces. "It is a fine morning, and you will lose your roses if you don't get the air. I don't care if it has begun to rain, miss! Go and have a game of battledore and shuttlecock then. Young people must have exercise. Well, my dear Rupert, well!"—when Molly, with a pettish "battledore and shuttlecock indeed!" had taken her sister by the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... interest the party," said the professor. "Claude Martine was a Breton soldier who went with his regiment to Pondicherry, the principal French settlement in India, which has been tossed back and forth between the English, Dutch, and French like a shuttlecock, but has been in possession of my country since 1816. He attained the grade of corporal; but this elevated rank did not satisfy him, and he ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... Poor Twirling-stick Mike groaned, and his unhappy head dropped exhausted upon his breast. Miserable man, his last capers were cut! His dancing was no longer worth mentioning. He went up a little way, like a baby's shuttlecock, and came down again feebly and dull. The ducats poured out. The bags swelled; playing and dancing—dancing, such as it was—went forward, and one terrible hour passed away. At last the wrists of the farmer snapped asunder; his hands and the bags of gold ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Euterpe trips it like the hare, while dogged criticism is the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite many of the reviews are, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... uproarious. Boiling over with rage and brandishing their fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... shuffling; alternation, reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; bandy, transpose, shuffle, change bands, swap, permute, reciprocate, commute; give and take, return the compliment; play at puss in the corner, play at battledore ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... islands of the Pacific with vast rocks and surrounded them with enormous reefs. And I observed that many of these insects, though extremely minute, were very beautiful, coming out of their holes in a circle of fine threads, and having the form of a shuttlecock. Here I saw curious little barnacles opening a hole in their backs and constantly putting out a thin, feathery hand, with which, I doubt not, they dragged their food into their mouths. Here, also, I saw those crabs which have shells only on the front of their ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... just come into four millions of livres a year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his life"? That was a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Conversation, like a shuttlecock, should not be suffered to remain with one person, but ought to pass in turn to all. But as few people think for themselves, so few people talk for themselves, and a colloquial monopoly is as common and as disagreeable as any other. Yet when we observe how much these rattles ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... thousand years or so, it is still a very ancient pastime. Dominoes are known, but not much patronised; cards, on the other hand, are very common, the favourite games being those in which almost everything is left to chance. As to open-air amusements, youths of the baser sort indulge in battledore and shuttlecock without the battledore, and every resident in China must have admired the skill with which the foot is used instead, at this foot-shuttlecock game. Twirling heavy bars round the body, and gymnastics generally, are practised by the coolie and horse-boy classes; but the disciple of Confucius, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... of reading each morning was concluded, we danced, we sung, we played at blind-man's-buff, battledore and shuttlecock, and many other games equally diverting and innocent; and when tired of them, drew our seats round the fire, while each one in turn told some merry story ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... written about them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down but ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... argot is always changing. The essence of the jest consists in some catchword suggested by a political event, an incident in the police courts, a street song, or a bit of burlesque at some theatre, and forgotten in a month. Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battledore and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a recent invention, which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama. ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... it. A fearful faintness was coming over me. Perhaps the movement of the ship contributed to this. I think I must have fainted, for I cannot recollect what happened. I had no strength to hold on or to grasp the stick, and might have been thrown helplessly about like a shuttlecock till ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... on the grass that I might face her. "Listen, madame. It is time you knew the story of Pemaou." And thereupon I recited all that had happened between the Huron and myself from the day when we had played at shuttlecock with spears till the night when he had shadowed us at the Pottawatamie camp,—the night before our wedding. I even told her of the profile ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of keeping it up as long as they could. To my mind the old ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... strangers should feel thoroughly welcome and at home, she joined them as soon as possible after their return from the sheepfold, and exerted herself to keep the shuttlecock of conversation in constant motion; but her brother's watchful eyes discerned the perturbed feeling she sought to hide; and, when she insisted, for the first time in two years, upon taking her seat and presiding at the tea-table, he busied himself in arranging ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Hercules! Fortune, the queen, delights to play with me, Stopping my passage with the sight of Visus: But as he makes hither, I'll make hence, There's more ways to the wood than one[190]. What, more devils to affright me? O Diabolo! Gustus comes here to vex me. So that I, poor wretch, am like A shuttlecock betwixt two battledoors. If I run there, Visus beats me to Scylla; If here, then Gustus blows me to Charybdis. Neptune hath sworn my hope shall suffer shipwreck. What shall I say? mine Urinal's too thin To bide the fury of such ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... it was so—there was no chair there and no figure seated in the chair. It was a trick of the light and an effect of imagination, an imagination that was hounded, day by day, from depth to pinnacle, from pinnacle to depth, back and forth like a shuttlecock in giant hands. No chair was there and no seated figure. He sank back on the settle and found that ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... family; for, somehow or other, my horse and I had a habit of parting company. On one occasion I found myself suddenly prostrate in the streets of York, much to the delight of the Dissenters. Another time my horse Calamity flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful it was not into a neighbouring planet; but as no harm came of it, I might have persevered perhaps, if, on a certain day, a Quaker tailor from a neighbouring village to which I had said I was ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... tied the body to the horse, and the man rode away with it. We travelled on without speakin' for a long time, and then I heard him say absently: 'I am sick of that. When once you have played shuttlecock with human life, you have to play it to the end—that is the penalty. But a woman is a woman, and she must be protected.' Then afterward he turned and asked me if I had friends in Pipi Valley; and because ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... propriety. I made a point of listening for the accentuation of the 'my dear' which was being interchanged, but the key-note to the harmony existing between husband and wife was neither excessively unctuous, nor shrewd, and the connubial shuttlecock was so well kept up on both sides that I chose to await the issue rather than speculate on the origin of this strange exhibition. I therefore, as I could not be accused of an outrage to modesty, permitted myself to maintain what might be invidiously ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... restored me to my position as his son. Now it is iniquitous, I maintain, that fathers should have these unlimited penal powers, that disgrace should be multiplied, apprehension made perpetual, the law now chastize, now relent, now resume its severity, and justice be the shuttlecock of our fathers' caprices. It is quite proper for the law to humour, encourage, give effect to, one punitive impulse on the part of him who has begotten us; but if, after shooting his bolt, insisting on his right, indulging ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... ourselves within doors, for there is no stirring abroad, with playing at cards, playing at shuttlecock, playing the fool, making love, and making moral reflexions: upon the whole, the week ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... the ravages they have wrought on it for the last six months, pass belief. I had yesterday a bill of sixty dollars' plumbing to pay for damages of various kinds which had had to be repaired in our very convenient water-works; and the blame of each particular one had been bandied like a shuttlecock among our three household divinities. Biddy privately assured my wife that Kate was in the habit of emptying dustpans of rubbish into the main drain from the chambers, and washing any little extra bits down through the bowls; and, in fact, when one of the bathing-room ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... treat him with an affectionate intimacy which may be paralleled in the religion of Krishna but hardly in Christianity.[537] Thus several hymns have reference to a game, such as tossing about a ball (hymn vii), battledore and shuttlecock (xiv) or some form of wrestling in which the opponents place their hands on each other's shoulders (xv). The worshipper can even scold the deity. "If thou forsake me, I will make people smile at thee. I shall abuse thee sore: madman clad in elephant skin: madman ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... how plain he saw it all! The lich-gate and the crumbling wall, The stream, the pathway to the wood, The bridge where they so oft had stood. Then, in a trice, both church and clock Vanish'd before ... a shuttlecock. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... stood a little carriage clock in a case, and this suddenly lifted a slender voice and announced five. She turned round on her stool and sat staring at the clock. She smiled with the corners of her mouth down. "Home," she said, "and begin again. It's like battledore and shuttlecock.... ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on some smiling female neighbor, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... thimble, with a feather it its jeweled band that stuck up like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any slight movement disturbed it. The King's dandies were dressed in about the same fashion as ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... dinner was served, and afterwards, the Dauphin again had a play hour while the king enjoyed a nap. As soon as he awoke, Clery, who had been with the Dauphin for several years, would give him writing and arithmetic lessons, and then he would play ball or battledore-and-shuttlecock for awhile, and then there would be reading aloud until it was time for the Dauphin's supper, after which the king would amuse his children with all sorts of riddles and puzzles and games, and then the Dauphin ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... was lost, with so many others. The war came to an end and a few weeks afterwards the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had so long played shuttlecock with the national destinies of Ireland, went to crashing doom and disaster at the polls. The country had found them out for what they were, and it cast them into that outer darkness from which, for them, there is ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... find language explicit enough to express the desire. My whole desire is to avoid complication of addresses. It is quite fatal. If two P. R.'s have contradictory orders they will continue to play battledoor and shuttlecock with an unhappy epistle, which will never get farther afield but perish ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of kite-flying even when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking with the heel. His vocal music to our ears seems ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... hand.{4} There is a sort of perfection in everything; and perfection once reached, deterioration usually begins. And when, in bandying the phrases infidel and infidelity—like the feathered missiles in the game of battledore and shuttlecock—they fell upon Chalmers, we think there was a droll felicity in the accident, which constitutes for it an irresistible claim of being the terminal one in the series. The climax reached its point of extremest elevation; for even should our infidel-dubbers do their best or worst now, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... be, there is no doubt that holidays were pleasant things, too. Saturday afternoons were always welcome, and all the weeks through we were planning what we would do when they came. Of course these plans were sometimes upset by a rainy day; but, even then, what with battledore and shuttlecock, painting and spinning tops, we contrived to make out the time ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... us better at the moment," answered Wilding with a touch of sharpness. He turned to the frowning and perplexed Duke—whose mind was being tossed this way and that, like a shuttlecock upon the battledore of these men's words. "Your Grace," he said, "forgive me that I speak it if hear it you will, or forbid me to say it if your resolve is unalterable in ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... don't try to look like an outraged empress until your stays are covered up. Put on your dress and we'll have a game of battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. It's raining. Then we'll have some music this afternoon. My alto used to go beautifully with your soprano, and I'll get out our duets. I haven't forgotten one of the accompaniments—What ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... marcher carquills ainsi que des volants. Early commentators have generally stated that volants means here "the beams of a mill," but MM. Moland and E. Despois, the last annotators of Molire, maintain that it stands for "shuttlecock," because the large rolls (canons), tied at the knee and wide at the bottom, bore a great resemblance to shuttlecocks turned upside down. I cannot see how this can suit the words marcher carquills, for the motion of the canons of gallants, walking or straddling ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... for her. None knew of her weakness. Her mind had vacillated like a shuttlecock, but no one had seen the vacillation. She was in his hands, and she must simply do as he bade her. Then she went down to Mrs Baggett's room, and told the old lady to go up-stairs at her master's behest. "I'm a-going," said Mrs Baggett. "I'm a-going. I hope he'll ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... ensue; and after his breakfast stood at a window watching the dripping trees and whistling so softly one could not tell whether 'twere he or the birds chirping without. Cedric and Lady Constance played at battledore and shuttlecock. Mistress Penwick sat apart, busy with thought and needle. His Grace of Ellswold sat up that morning, his wife and physicians by his side, and all were happy ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... happens," said Phyllis, in a tone of exasperated triumph, "I've got a shuttlecock in my pocket. ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... the bosom of her dress, a little belated monthly rose, warm and pink at the heart, but with blighted outer petals. She found it impossible to pursue any one line of thought to its logical outcome; her mind flew like a shuttlecock between a dozen plans for William King's defeat. "Oh, I must decide on something!" she thought, desperately. But the futile morning passed without decision. After dinner she went resolutely into the parlor, and sitting down on her little low chair, pressed her fingers over her eyes to ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... learnedly discourse on all manner of sage subjects, but that is discussion, debate, argument, what you will, not conversation. Conversation is light, brilliant, and tossed back and forth from one to another with the grace and ease of the feathered shuttlecock. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... compared it with the figure and description of Bewick, to which the other replied that Bewick was next to Nature. Here the old gentleman seized me by the thigh with his very hand-vice of a grasp; and I contrived to keep up the shuttlecock of conversation playfully to his highest satisfaction, though they who praised him so ardently, little imagined whose ears imbibed all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... loss. 'You may let the procession go on,' he smilingly replied. 'I have just obtained permission, by special revelation, to proceed with it.' His leisure hours he spent in the writing of edifying novels, the composition of acrostics in Latin Verse, and in playing battledore and shuttlecock with his little nieces. There was, indeed, only one point in which he resembled Bishop Blougram—his love of a good table. Some of Newman's disciples were astonished and grieved to find that he sat down to four courses ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Ronald took after his father. From the start the lad had shown the greatest promise. At Eton he had made a splendid showing at battledore and shuttlecock, and at Cambridge had been first in his class at needlework. Already his name was whispered in connection with the All-England ping-pong championship, a triumph which would undoubtedly carry with it a ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... her Catherine. Thou regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! How thou didst make me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had been raining, thou didst float bits of straw on the gutters, and watch them pass away. One day I gave thee a willow battledore and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and green feathers. Thou hast forgotten it. Thou wert roguish so young! Thou didst play. Thou didst put cherries in thy ears. Those are things of the past. The forests through which one has passed with one's child, the trees under which ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
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