"Playground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the man whose sphere of life is large, whose spirit is capable of reacting to the orient and the occident, to height and depth, and whose mind flashes across the space from the dawn to the sunset, and from nadir to zenith. Space is his playground, and his companions are the stars. Such a man feels and knows more life in an hour than his antithesis could feel and know in a century. To his spirit there are no metes and bounds; it has freedom and strength ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... much of a figure at the village school—though he did his best, and was fairly successful—but in the playground he reigned supreme. At football, cricket, gymnastics, and, ultimately, at swimming, no one could come near him. This was partly owing to his great physical strength, for, as time passed by he shot upwards ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... its surroundings, or of a kind which could have no other than a mechanical interest in its execution. The abrupt contrasts, the variety and mystery, characteristic of Gothic architecture, had been a direct and irresistible invitation to the carver, and the freest playground for his fancy. The formality of the classical design, on the other hand, necessarily confined such carving as it permitted to particular lines and spaces, following a recognized rule; and except in the case of bas-relief ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... centre, stood in a great open caldron upon a tripod over a wood-fire. At night the lurid flames and the grouped figures, illuminated by the glare, were picturesque; but in the daytime the charm of these gatherings was chiefly conversational. Then the children made the square their playground, or were driven into it because it was the safest place for them, and every Sunday afternoon the young men of Roc-Amadour met there to play ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... shrieked and struggled in an anguish which was only mitigated by Stephen's reassurances, caresses, even scoldings. The other youths, relieved from the apprehension of death, agreed to regard their detention as a holiday, and not being squeamish, turned the yard into a playground, and there they certainly made uproar, and played pranks, enough to justify the preference of the captain for full grown criminals. But Stephen could not join them, for Jasper would not spare him for ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... life, while other boys of my age were going through the joyous experience of school, and chose my companions from the dusty shelves of some three or four gigantic book-cases, instead of from the class and the playground. Not that I regret it. I believe, on the contrary, that a boy may have worse companions than books and busts, employments less healthy than the study of anatomy, and amusements more pernicious than Shakespeare and Horace. Thank Heaven! I escaped all such; and ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... of training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and other such professionals, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... same expression to old Sabre as we used to use at school. I said, 'Good lord, man, fancy sticking up for a chap like that!' And old Sabre—by Jove, I tell you there we all were in a flash back in the playground at old Wickamote's, down in that corner by the workshop, all kids again and old Puzzlehead flicking his hand out of his pocket—remember how he used to?—like that—and saying, 'You sickening fool, I'm not sticking up for him, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... city was cramped or crowded for room, the place where they now alighted was planned on an unusually large scale. Immense buildings stood upon a large tract of land, planted with trees, grass, and flowers. Here were breathing room and playground. A number of streams of clear water flowed through the grounds, and small ponds were alive with fish and swimming birds. Fountains played, and statues of marble ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... We entered the playground enclosure, and walked by the schoolroom window to get round to the door, which was situated at the back of the building. I stopped for a moment at the window and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... agreed Vava, not seeing very well how she was to get out of it, but wondering what Stella would say to her choice of a friend. As they entered the playground she saw Rosie Brown the centre of a little group of girls, who looked up as she came in, and then looked away again, without nodding ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... He was in the playground, round by the school house, just where the babies' end of the school room joined the cloak room, and school was over for the day. Having a piece of chalk in one hand, and nothing particular to do, he occupied a few minutes by writing upon the weather boards of the cloak-room—"J. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... and the six-story model tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus, the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact, tired old rows of ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... her the strange shell she inhabited suggested more of the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed herself ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... new works on Gun Hill. A Creusot 94-pounder has opened from there, shelling in rapid succession Sir George White's headquarters camp, the Royal Artillery, and the Imperial Light Horse, who have their parade and playground pitted by marks of this fire. People say that "Long Tom" has been shifted from Pepworth's to the new position, but the shells, with their driving-bands grooved deep and sharp, tell another story. It is a new gun, or little used, and probably fresh from ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... began to run again, and in a little while she was standing opposite the square brick house which she knew to be Mr. Bardsley's. There was not a sign of a boy on the steps, nor was there any sound of voices from the playground; evidently Cecil and his companions were already at study. She stood there, panting and weary, not very well knowing what to ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... the kindly custom of allowing the children of Amsterdam the run of the Bourse as a playground for a week every year is some compensation for the suppression of the Kermis, but another story makes the sanction a perpetual reward for an heroic deed against the Spaniards performed by ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... the first time the candidates had been taken upon the regular diamond of Grant Field. Ken had peeped in there once to be impressed by the beautiful level playground, and especially the magnificent turreted grand-stand and the great sweeping stretches of bleachers. Then they had been empty; now, with four thousand noisy students and thousands of other spectators besides, ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... usually called the twin maples. These two very old trees grew side by side, their great trunks not more than four feet apart and their branches so intermingled that they were practically one tree in two parts. The delightful shade of this double tree afforded a favorite playground for the children, and they had missed it during the past week when they were forbidden to go ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... as the money paid with such difficulty to the doctor and the druggist. The man who in his emotional gratitude almost kneels before his political friend who gets his boy out of jail, might be made to see the kindness and good sense of the city authorities who provided the boy with a playground and reading room, where he might spend his hours of idleness and restlessness, and through which his temptations to petty crime might be averted. A man who is grateful to the alderman who sees that his gambling and racing are not interfered with, might learn to ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... admiral at the least, as it would have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great man, which is the main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we will tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by necessity or fear ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... working out for themselves such paths as surrounding circumstances will allow them to find. But Madelon's childhood had known neither nursery nor sheltered home-garden. Her earliest experiences had been amidst the larger ventures of life, the deeper interests that gather round advancing years; her playground had been the salons of the gayest watering-places in Europe, her playthings the roulette-board and the little gold and silver pieces that had passed so freely backwards and forwards on the long green tables where desperate stakes were ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... the Ghetto school, within which free services were going on even in the playground, poor Russians and Poles, fanatically observant, fore-gathering with lax fishmongers and welshers; and without which hulking young men hovered uneasily, feeling too out of tune with religion to go in, too conscious of the terrors of the day to stay ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the week after Commencement. The corridors, class-rooms, and study hall of Saint Andrew's stretched in dim, silent vistas; over the tennis court and the playground there brooded a dead calm; the field, scene of so many strenuous struggles, lay bare and still in the summer sunlight; the quadrangle, that so lately had rung to parting cheer and "yell," might have been a cloister for midnight ghosts to walk. ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... the health of its young people. Exercise is one of the most important means of preserving health, and most of the large cities nowadays are working hard to see that no child shall be out of reach of a good park, a good swimming pool and a good playground. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... little world this is, Phil," he added, smiling in a curious way. "What a wonderfully, wonderfully little world it is! It's only a playground, after all, and the funny part of it is that it is not even large enough to play a game of hide-and-seek in, successfully. I've proved that ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... present at one or two fights before, at the school I used to attend at Westham, where the boys used to settle their differences generally at the bottom of the playground under a little clump of shady trees that were grouped there, which shut off the view of the house and the headmaster's eye; but never previously had the surroundings of any similar pugilistic encounter seemed ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... great veil. As a boy he had divined something of these values of sound and name, but with the years this knowledge had come to seem fantastic and unreal. It now returned upon him with the force of a terrific certainty. That immense old inner playground of his youth, without boundaries or horizon, rolled up before his mental vision, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... express my sincere appreciation of the contribution to the book from Mr. Cabot, who, descendent of the ancient explorers, is peculiarly well fitted to speak of Labrador. The great peninsula has been, as he terms it, his "playground," and by canoe in summer or on snowshoes in winter he has travelled thousands of miles in the interior, thus placing himself in closest ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... It was afternoon; the boys were playing at different games in the green playground, and he was waiting for his turn at rounders. At this moment Barker lounged up, and calmly snatching off Eric's cap, shied it over Dr. Rowlands' garden wall. "There, go ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... decreasing. After thirteen, no school, no books, no reading or writing, nothing to keep up the old knowledge, no kind of conversation that stimulates; no examples of perseverance; in a great many cases no church, chapel, or Sunday-school; the street for playground, exercise, observation, and talk; what kind of young men and maidens are we to expect that these boys and girls will become? If this were the exact, plain, and naked truth we were in a parlous state indeed. Fortunately, however, there arc in every parish ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... was easy; hours at the Rialto were short and the pay was high. Inasmuch as the place was a playground where cares were forgotten, there was a wholly artificial atmosphere of gaiety and improvidence about it. When patrons won at the gambling-games, they promptly squandered their winnings at the bar and in the theater; when they lost, they cheerfully ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... their prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... while snow is on the ground it will be interesting to the children to experiment out of doors in making glaciers. If there are no hills present the children can readily make small hills on their playground and the falling and partial melting of the ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... ravine which separated Storm hill from the property that had formerly belonged to Jacques Benoix, a roofless, tumbledown stone cabin which had been from childhood Jacqueline's own particular playground, as sacred to her as the eyrie to her mother. She called it, grandiloquently, the Ruin. The place had a sinister reputation, and was sedulously avoided by both negroes and whites of the neighborhood; which suited Jacqueline's purposes excellently. All dreamers feel ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Irreverent, Resourceful, prolific, steady-advancing George M. Nothing in life Better becomes him Than his earliest choice Of Jerry and Helen For father and mother; Bred in the wings and the dressing room, The theatre alley his playground, Hotels his home and his schoolhouse, Blessed with a wonderful sister, And in love with a violin. From baby days used to the footlights, With infrequent teachers of book lore In the cities of lengthy engagements Showing him pages ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... in prominent places, but for the most part in undesirable corners that the park gardener is willing to relinquish for the good of the cause. In Riverside Park the plat is adjacent to the summer playground, and the second year that I had the garden, at the end of June when school closed, a few of the children volunteered to attend to it ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... its treasures. But the memory of its cool, flowery glades, its sunny uplands, its wealth of berries or wild grapes or hazel-nuts as the season of each came round, always beckoned the children on holidays. The Gordon boys had long used it as a playground. Here they could indulge in games of wild Indians and pirates, setting fire to the brush-wood, cutting down trees, and engaging in such other escapades as were not sufficiently genteel to be carried on under their ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... four children, two boys besides John, and a little girl, and they determined to give their children a good education. They would have liked to send their boys to Harrow, but finding that would cost too much they sent them to a smaller school at Enfield. It was a good school, with a large playground, and John seems to have had a happy time there. He was a little chap for his years, but a manly little fellow, broad shouldered and strong. He was full of spirits and fond of fun, and in spite of his passionate temper, every one liked him. He was not particularly ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... as if devils had used it for a playground; the trees were mere blackened stumps; the fields on each side stretched burnt and bare. And then came the climax: something passed us,—high above our heads, I fancy, though its frightful winds seemed brushing us,—a ghost of the night, an aerial ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... rest or sun yourself on the stone table of a tomb overgrown on its sides with moss, the two-century-old inscription well-nigh obliterated, in the little grass-grown, flowery churchyard which serves as village green and playground in that small centre of life, where the living and the dead exist in a neighbourly way together. For it is not here as in towns, where the dead are away and out of mind and the past cut off. And if after basking too long ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... though a social institution, is not gregarious; it gives him only a limited contact, and as soon as he is able and self-reliant he seeks out a little herd, and on the streets, in the schoolroom and playground, he really becomes ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... earnest did they become in considering their possible great exploits that Ab demanded of Oak that he go with him to his home. This was a serious matter. It was a no slight thing for a boy of that day, allowed a playground within certain limits adjacent to his cave home, to venture far away; but this in Oak's life was a great occasion. It was the first time he had ever met and talked with a boy of his age, and he became suddenly reckless, assenting promptly to Ab's proposal. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... fighter; strong because he was coarsely fed and hard worked about the house, and a good fighter because Tom furnished him plenty of practice—on white boys whom he hated and was afraid of. Chambers was his constant bodyguard, to and from school; he was present on the playground at recess to protect his charge. He fought himself into such a formidable reputation, by and by, that Tom could have changed clothes with him, and "ridden in peace," like Sir ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Otters and their guests rested for a while, and then Father Otter urged the children to come out and play with him and with Mother Otter. Much surprised, the Three Bears followed the Otters to their playground. And the next Father Bear and Mother Bear knew, Little Bear was sliding down the Otters' toboggan slide and shouting with glee. All the Otters went down that slide, one behind the other, and landed splashety-splash! in the ...
— Little Bear at Work and at Play • Frances Margaret Fox
... playing at rounders in an angle of the court, and I was supposed to be watching them. In reality I was more interested in a group of tall girls who were patrolling up and down under the shade of the trees at the head of their playground—where no boy but I dare enter, and even I only officially. For in kindly Scots fashion, the Eden Valley Academy was not only open to all comers of both sexes and ages, but was set in the midst of a wood of tall pines, in which we seniors were permitted to walk ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... of the things the six little Bunkers said and shouted as they were on the boat going to Nantasket Beach. The day was a fine, sunny one, and they had started early in the morning to have as long a time as possible at the playground, for that is ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope
... of life, which included seven years of uncongenial tasks, and three of writing, and three of wandering in search of health,—that sums up the story of Keats. He was born in London; he was the son of a hostler; his home was over the stable; his playground was the dirty street. The family prospered, moved to a better locality, and the children were sent to a good school. Then the parents died, and at fifteen Keats was bound out to a surgeon and apothecary. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... care-worn. But behind the care-worn face there were kind and tender feelings, especially for the young. Little children would show their trust in him by clasping him about his knees or by nestling in his arms. While he was in Savannah, large groups of children made a playground of the general's headquarters and private room, the doors of which were never ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... can be brought into their true fold of rest while these are scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. And do not think your daughters can be trained to the truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made at once for their school-room and their playground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the rocks of your native land—waters which a Pagan would have worshiped in their purity, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... nature. For all its broad verandas and glaring terraces, its long ranges of windows and glittering crest of cupola and tower, it gradually succumbed to the more potent influences around it, and became their sport and playground. The mountain breezes from the distant summit swept down upon its flimsy structure, shook the great glass windows as with a strong hand, and sent the balm of bay and spruce through every chink and cranny. In the great hall and corridors the carpets billowed with the intruding ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... in his friend's room, was sent for. He was introduced into the conclave assembled in the playground of the younger pupils. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... time ago, but Kullrich was still not happy. When they all walked in the playground during the interval, eating their bread and butter, he stood at some distance and did not eat. Was it really so ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... her deep-sea fishing she would go straight to their playground and call as a sheep calls for a lamb, and wait until she heard Kotick bleat. Then she would take the straightest of straight lines in his direction, striking out with her fore flippers and knocking the youngsters head over heels right and left. There were always a few hundred ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... happy voices from the village playground stealing, With the cadence of their laughter, come floating through the air; And the face of Nature smiling, every thought of care beguiling, Soothes my restless soul to musing in the ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... Bob replied, quickly, "Navajo Peak could be seen on a clear morning, and perhaps that's the one; but Frank, just think, it's about a hundred and twenty miles off. Whew! they do things on a big scale around here; don't they? I'd call it the playground ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... fine building of brick and stone, standing in the center of a beautiful parade ground of nearly ten acres. In front of the parade ground was the wagon road, and beyond was a gentle slope leading down to the lake. To the left of the building was a playground hedged in by cedars, at one comer of which stood a two-story frame building used as a gymnasium. To the right was a woods, while in the rear were a storehouse, a stable, and several other outbuildings, backed up by some farm lands, cultivated for the sole benefit of the institution, ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... On the playground, under the bluest of blue skies, with a fresh, clover-perfumed breeze fanning their dripping brows, the boys of Willard's School were playing the third and deciding game of baseball with the nine of Durham Academy. ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... relieved the anguish that burdened them! and, without a word, went down the stairs, meeting at the landing-place Colonel Poyntz and the old man whose pain my prescription had cured. The old man was whistling a merry tune, perhaps first learned on the playground. He broke from it to thank, almost to embrace me, as I slid by him. I seized his jocund blessing as a good omen, and carried it with me as I passed into the broad sunlight. Solitary—solitary! Should ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it; in his handsome, regular features; in his short, smooth, yellow hair; and in his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a special sort of training was confessed. 'Oxford was your playground, I think, my young friend,' said ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... virginal as a bride on her wedding-day. I walked along the wide pleasant streets with a curious pain. The years that lay between me and the last day I had paced these broad walks under the pale greenery of the elms seemed legendary and dreamlike. There was the schoolhouse on the hill, and the well-worn playground about it. Beyond lay the woods, half colored now with clear pellucid green, gleams of silver and shades of scarlet here and there. My mind reverted with clearness to the little nooks and dingles of the hills and meadows thereabouts: I remembered a woodland spring boiling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... idea of the best in books is the recreation they can so well bring; if we go to books as to a playground to forget our cares and to blow off the cobwebs of business, let us make sure that we find what we seek. It is there, sure enough. The playgrounds of literature are indeed wide, and alive with bracing excitement, nor is there any limit to the variety of the games. But ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... cry alone, and her steps turned instinctively to the well-known refuge of "the barn," an old out-building which the children had turned into a playground of their own; it was otherwise disused, excepting that now and then some trusses of hay or straw were put there, and it was a most splendid place ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... firs. We sniffed the perfume joyously and reminded each other—Jack and I—that Maine is America's Scotland: like Scotland for beauty of lake and forest and mountain; like Scotland, too, "hard for the poor, and a playground ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so you called it just now—of the 'person' who had wakened ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... a house of sand we reared, The walls with shells adorning, While boats our happy playground neared, And breakers gave us warning That though we neither paused nor feared, All would be gone ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and picture to yourself the throng of gay ladies in paniered skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in sea-green inexpressibles, who walked among its groves and fountains two hundred years ago. The palace of the Kings has become the playground of ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... not yet nine o'clock, but, fearful of losing a minute of her precious seaside vacation, Marjorie Dean had come down to her favorite playground for her usual early ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... is an even more attractive playground for children in Nordland than here in the south of Norway. At low-tide there is a much longer ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... a perfunctory dinner in the dining-room, Mrs. Gorman and Dan wrangled in the kitchen, but Molly sat in the playground of the school, with Tim O'Neill, the culprit, facing her, and a circle of grinning ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... the water and watch the clouds chasing each other over the deep blue vault of the sky. The cry of the Night Owl came dreamily from the woods; a prowling Puma roared hungrily to his mate, but the pond of the Musk Rats was a happy playground, and they ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... more didactic. The usher evidently liked to be asked; he was extremely helpful to me, and thanks to him chiefly I made very rapid progress at Doncaster. Unfortunately an occasional injustice made it difficult to be so grateful to him as we ought to have been. Here is an example. One evening in the playground he told me to get on the back of another boy, and then thrashed me with a switch from an apple-tree. I begged to be told for what fault this punishment was inflicted, and the only answer he condescended to give me was that a master owed ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... admit her, he thrust her through, following her fat figure for a second with one anxious eye and breathing audibly in his excitement. The next instant the cheerful clatter of his hob-nailed boots echoed down the hall, followed by a whoop of relief as he emerged upon the playground. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... coast down a hill covered with trees? The children to be pitied, the children whose minds become infected with unwholesome curiosity are those who lack cheerful recreation, religious teaching, and the fine corrective of work. A playground or a swimming pool will do more to keep them mentally and morally sound than ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... hands trained to anything useful, their miserable subsistence a thing to be fought and scrambled for, their homes reeking dens under the law of lease-holding which has produced outcast London and horrible Glasgow, their right to a playground and amusement curtailed to the running gutter, and their great "object-lesson" in life the drunken parents who end so often in the prison, the hospital, and the workhouse. We need not be astonished if these not only are not Christians, but have never understood ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... all the boys ran out of the academy upon the playground, idle George would come moping along. Instead of studying diligently while in school, he was indolent and half asleep. When the proper time for play came, he had no relish for it. I recollect very well, that, when "tossing up" for a game ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Nan's mother came over, the melancholy look on her face somewhat lifted. She brought with her the deed of the land adjoining the cottage and sloping down to the sea. This land she at once undertook to have equipped for a playground with swings, tennis courts, a ball ground and all the things ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... have their place in the playground. There may be thoughtfulness for one who is weaker than the rest, or who is a newcomer, or who, for any reason, is neglected by others. There is an opportunity to stand up for those who are ill-used. There is a generous sympathy for ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... being then little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort of goatlike joyous madness. For how often in those days I used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... her. So unpleasant was talk or sight of woodmen (Thither-folk, as she called them, in contradiction to the Hither people about us here), that the girl was clearly relieved when we were free of the town and out into the open playground of the people. The whole place down there was a gay, shifting crowd. The booths of yesterday, the arcades, the archways, were still standing, and during the night unknown hands had redecked them with flowers, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... been swung wide, with its mockery of open and honest sunlight, and yet his feet were to remain fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to hate. He must still stay an unwilling prisoner in this garden of studied indolence, this playground of invalids and gamblers; he must still dawdle idly about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing a crowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-fed and poorly housed about this opulent showplace of the world that set its appeasing theatricalities ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... length, and upstairs was a vast room, with bare joists above, in which, by virtue of the deed of gift, any Christian sect was free to worship if temporarily deprived of a home. Here the great Whitefield preached, and here generations of boys were taught. Behind the western playground was the graveyard of Christ Church. He was thought a brave lad who, after school at dusk in winter, dared to climb over and search around the tombs of the silent dead for a lost ball ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... the trustees didn't. I joined the boys at their games, hoping my example would have an influence on their conduct on the playground as well as in the schoolroom. We got up a rattling good cricket club. You may not remember that I stood rather better in cricket at the academy than I did in mathematics or grammar. By handicapping me with several poor ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... as an old white-haired lady entered and was placed at the left of the mayor. She it was who had given them their college, their library, their playground. For years and years she had been living away from the town, but still she loved them all and gave of her wealth to make them happy. Her friends were many ...
— Fireside Stories for Girls in Their Teens • Margaret White Eggleston
... blooming with everything that is good and pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and noble, yet comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching it, for very envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in the playground, may watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a particularly fine apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and corn and all the fruits of the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for good-humour, and it's as if one can't say more for her than that, thanks to her putting forward for you ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... door on a still, yellow evening, when the winds were purring in the spruces around the playground, and the shadows were long and lazy by the edge of the woods. She dropped the key into her pocket with a sigh of satisfaction. The school year was ended, she had been reengaged for the next, with many expressions of satisfaction. . . . only Mr. Harmon ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into a violent passion with little Oliver when he went to return his lottery ticket. He abused and ridiculed Howard for his interference, and succeeded so well in raising a popular cry, that the moment Howard appeared on the playground, a general hiss, succeeded by a deep groan, was heard.—Howard recollected the oracle's answer to Cicero, and was not dismayed by the voice of the multitude. Holloway threw down half-a-guinea, to pay Oliver, and muttered to himself, "I'll make you ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... my features presented—a very playground for my varying emotions—was somewhat startling to a maid so new at love. For, glancing with veiled eyes at me, presently her own ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... for some hours every day in the back garden—the house forming one end of this oblong inclosure, the stable and coach-house the other, and two parallel walls of considerable height the sides. Here, as it afforded a perfectly safe playground, they were frequently left quite to themselves; and in talking over their days' adventures, as children will, they happened to mention a woman, or rather the woman, for they had long grown familiar with her appearance, whom ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... every half-hour. The hours of attendance are from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M.; but a rest of half an hour is allowed in the midst of that period. We happened to be there when the said half-hour arrived. All the Abbotts, the pupils, and ourselves went out to the playground, which was furnished with seats, and swings, and skipping-ropes, and swinging-boats, and all sorts of machines for exercise and amusement. In these gymnastic performances the Abbotts themselves joined the pupils, with a beautiful combination of freedom ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... around that article of furniture, on his way from the clothes-rack, which was his tent when he camped out on rainy days, to the sink, which was his oasis in the desert of the basement floor. This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that kitchen-table centre many of the happiest of his early reminiscences. Ann Hughes, the cook, was very good to The Boy. She told him stories, and taught him riddles, all about a certain "Miss ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... must not only diminish the tension and lessen the concentration of attention; one must go further and seek other objects of interest and other kinds of activity; and these objects and activities must be sought and pursued freely, joyfully, and in forgetfulness of self. The old delight of the playground must be called back by the man, and must be at the command of the man. The boy's play, in a real sense, creates the man; the man's play re-creates him by re-vitalising him, refreshing him and restoring to him that delight in activity for ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... enthusiasm, John opened the doors of the refectory. The long, oaken tables, the great fireplace, and the stained glass seemed to delight him, and he alluded to the art classes of monastic life. The class-rooms were peeped into, the playground was viewed through the lattice windows, and they went to John's room, up a ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... of it, Will. Do you think I could? It isn't exactly on the subject. I understood him I was to speak of the tenement in relation to the Playground." ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... their respective—and respectable—congregations; there was a wooden Town Hall, painted grey; a wooden Post Office, painted brown; a red college, where boys in white disported upon a green field; a fawn-coloured school, with a playground full of pinafored little girls; and a Red Tape Office—designed in true Elizabethan style, with cupolas, vanes, fantastic chimney-tops, embayed windows, wondrous parapets—built entirely of wood and painted the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... a playground for the children, that bit of common by their garden-palings! and the pond, and the blue hills over the furzes. I hope those people will not be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pupils of the one school in the little town of Orland, on a certain day in December some years ago, he was at a decided loss to understand what caused such an excitement among them before they had walked the short length of the playground. The deacon had a very large bump of inquisitiveness on his bald head, which, perhaps, accounted for his great desire to know why nearly all the boys and girls had stopped beside the tiny brook that scolded and fretted all the long summer days away, but which was now closely encased in ice, and ...
— A District Messenger Boy and a Necktie Party • James Otis
... names, or the nicknames liberally bestowed upon them by their mates, indiscriminately, and showed no resentment whatever when he heard himself alluded to as Jo, or Hamlet, or the Beetle, his most frequent appellations in the playground. He kept a black bottle in his desk, at the neck of which he habitually refreshed himself before the whole school; and he addressed the children with an elaborate and caustic levity in a thin shaky voice ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... dependent, the neglected, the foreign born, the wage-earner, the poverty-stricken, boys of very wealthy parents, overambitious boys who have overambitious parents, and street boys who are either loafers or engaged in street trades, or are compelled to use the street as a playground. ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... and we had been summoned in from the playground, when Mr. Sharp entered and said, "David Copperfield is ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... American poet has more truthfully and beautifully interpreted the inspired teachings of nature, whispered through the solemn tree-tops or caroled by the happy birds. The open fields surrounding Elmwood and the farms for miles around were his familiar playground, and furnished daily adventures for his curious and eager mind. The mere delight of this experience with nature, he says, "made my childhood the richest part of my life. It seems to me as if I had never seen nature again since ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... minds of Alice and her rescuer. There was, first, a period of utter blank when Coquenil, overcome by the violence of his struggle and the agony of his burns, fell unconscious near the unconscious girl. How long they lay thus in the dark playground of the fairies, so near the raging fire, yet safe from it, was never known exactly; nor how long they wandered afterwards through a strange subterranean region of passages and cross passages, that widened and narrowed, that ascended and descended, ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... deaf in Death's strong spell. Now, while the seasons in their order roll, And sun and rain pour down from God's great dome, And deathless stars shine nightly overhead, Near other children, with her little doll, She waits the wizard that will never come To wake the sleep-struck playground of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... which we had imported a good number, besides those that were descended from the dogs we brought with us—made his way into one of the principal streets of the town. This street led to a little grove which was a favourite playground for children, especially in the evening, and which was full of children when the savage brute suddenly appeared among them. The children were in charge of several women-teachers, who, as well as the children, lost their heads at sight of the monster, which was snorting and puffing like a steam-engine. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... remarkable man in his special line, was born in New York, in 1837, and, at the time this is written, is still living. He was born and grew to boyhood in the shadow of the numerous shipyards then in active operation along the East River. The yards were his playground. At thirteen years of age, he ran away and went to see as cook on a fishing sloop. He admits that he could not then "cook a pot of water without burning it," but claims that he could catch cod-fish where no one else could find them. From fisherman, sailing-master ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... began on that long yellow strand; I did not need to turn my head to see it, for I knew that trees intervened and I knew the twisting path through the wood. That yellow strand speckled with tufts of rushes was my first playground. But when my brother proposed that we should walk there, I found some excuse; why go? The reality would destroy the dream. What reality could equal my memory of the firs where the rabbits burrowed, of the drain where we fished for minnows, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... at one of these schools, daily strengthening its habits of cleanliness and order, learning the rudiments of useful knowledge, receiving the principles of religion and morality, and gaining confirmed health and physical energy by the exercise and drill of the school playground. No children are left idle in the streets of the towns; no children are allowed to grovel in the gutters; no children are allowed to make their appearance at the schools dirty, or in ragged clothes; ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... would have depended on the humour of his fellows, and boys are not always docile subjects even of rulers of their own election. This, however, is a minor consideration, since the Boy-Bishop, when we first make his acquaintance, has already emerged from the obscurity of school and playground, and made good his claim to the homage of superiors in age and station. Hence the term "Boy-Bishop" appears to define more accurately than its Latin analogue the rank and ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... temptation to look within, and toward the old school-house. A massive new one was half built, of gray stone, to the left, but the old one, with its shingles on the outside that had once caused her such wonder, still lay warm in the sun, but closed and deserted. There was the playground where she had been caught in "Ring around the Rosy," and Hale and that girl teacher had heard her confession. She flushed again when she thought of that day, but the flush was now for another reason. Over the roof ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... half-section, an acre of land marked off by a wire fence where the two trails crossed, the two long trails that melted away in the interminable distance. It seemed a lonely little house of scholarship, with its playground worn so bare that even two months of idleness had given scant harborage for the seeds that wind and bird must have brought there. But as I stared at it it seemed to take on a dignity all its own, the dignity of a fixed and far-off ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... laboring life, City and country, women's, men's and children's, Their wants provided for, hued in the sun and tinged for once with joy, Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-room, Labor and toll, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college, The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught, The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father'd and mother'd, The hungry fed, the houseless housed; (The intentions perfect and divine, The ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... many kinds of outside influence, and you know enough of young men, madam, to realize that there is no influence which appeals to them so strongly as that which is outside, what I must call, constituted authority. The Bishop, in short, if I judge him with accuracy, thinks that Oxford is the finest playground for the East-end of London which can be imagined by the wit of man. On this point I disagree with him entirely, not from any dislike to the people of the East-end, but from a profound conviction that young men in Oxford, if they are to do their ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... playground, as a field of action, came, in the children's opinion, the "secret spot." There was a velvety stretch of ground in the Sawyer pasture which was full of fascinating hollows and hillocks, as well as verdant levels, on which to build houses. A group of trees concealed it somewhat ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... with it. The conditions which have chiefly fostered it are the immigration of people who are accustomed to community life, the increase in factory life and the increased number of people of wealth who seek the advantages which the city gives them. The city has always been the favored playground for the social game. The unhealthy conditions of city life are due to the crowding, the more uncertain means of livelihood, the greater influence of vice and alcoholism. Prostitution and the sexual diseases are almost the prerogatives ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... N. arena, field, platform; scene of action, theater; walk, course; hustings; stare, boards &c. (playhouse) 599; amphitheater; Coliseum, Colosseum; Flavian amphitheater, hippodrome, circus, race course, corso[Sp], turf, cockpit, bear garden, playground, gymnasium, palestra, ring, lists; tiltyard[obs3], tilting ground; Campus Martins, Champ de Allars[obs3]; campus [U.S.]. boxing ring, canvas. theater of war, seat of war; battle-field, battle-ground; field of battle, field of slaughter; Aceldama[obs3], camp; the enemy's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... world, on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a view of God which represented Him as outside the universe than with one which insists upon His indwelling in creation. If the earth was the scene and playground of undivine agencies which work their will while the Divine control is withdrawn, then many things became comparatively easy of comprehension; indeed, there was a certain ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... wonderful colors, as if such a day must be ended with a grand ceremony, and the sun go down through banners and gay parades of all the forces of the sky. Nan had watched such sunsets from her favorite playground at the farm, and somehow the memory of those days touched her heart more tenderly than they had ever done before, and she wished for a moment that she could get away from the noisy little flock who were busy getting the supper ready, though they said eagerly ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... in great amusement. "Think of the hens, and cats, and dogs, and rabbits, and, above all, the boys that I have. What sort of a garden would there be, and do you think it would be fair to take their playground from them?" ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... always accompanied us when we walked, invariably presided in the schoolroom, and very generally her eager figure and pleasant, bright eyes were to be discovered in some corner of the playground, where, from a semi-retirement, seated in her fauteuil with book or needlework in hand, she exercised a quiet but effectual surveillance over ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... purity until this greatest danger of the democratic spirit of society is completely overcome and repressed by an honest respect for the expert and a willing subordination of judgment to his better knowledge. Another condition which makes our country a favourite playground for fantastic vagaries is the strong emphasis on the material sides of life, on business and business success. The result is a kind of contrast effect. As the surface of such a rushing business life lacks everything which would satisfy the deeper longings of the soul, the effort ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... engaged lecturers on chemistry, engineering, and natural history; as arithmetic and the elements of physical science were enforced with zeal and care; as all sorts of gymnastics were intermingled with the sports of the playground,—so the youthful idea, if it did not go farther, spread its shots in a wider direction, and a boy could not stay there five years without learning something: which is more than can be said of all schools! He learned at least to use his eyes and his ears and his limbs; order, cleanliness, exercise, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... everything they prayed for, discover, as a peculiar gift of Providence, some fault in the actions or opinions of a neighbour, and run it down, crying and shouting after it, with more alacrity and more clamour than boys would a leveret or a squirrel in the playground. Are our years and our intellects, and the word of God itself, given us for this, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... He thought that, like Moran, he was henceforth to be a sailor of the sea, a rover, and he saw the rest of his existence passed with her, aboard their faithful little schooner. They would have the whole round world as their playground; they held the earth and the great seas in fief; there was no one to let or to hinder. They two belonged to each other. Once outside the Heads again, and they swept the land of cities and of little things behind them, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... than mere mechanical motion is comprehended under the idea of healthful exercise—that, indeed, being most healthful which makes us forget all ulterior ends in the mere enjoyment of it. What, for example, could be substituted for the action of the playground, where the boy plays for the mere love of playing, and without reference to physiological laws; while kindly Nature accomplishes her ends unconsciously, and makes his very indifference beneficial to him. You may have more systematic motions, you may devise means for the more perfect ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... arrived at the house, all in tears and dismay, brought home from the College Bourdaloue by a worthy father in the interest of the poor little fellows themselves, who had received a temporary leave of absence in order to spare them from hearing in the parlour or the playground any unkind story or painful allusion. Thereupon the Nabob flew into a terrible passion, which caused him to destroy a service of porcelain, and it appears that, had it not been for M. de Gery, he would have rushed off at ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her father and demanded that he go build her a ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... spoke she drew Phyllis towards a corner of the playground, where a large, rather ferocious-looking hedgehog was ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Abbey precincts, a hundred yards from the great gate, and separated from it by the Rome land, which may possibly have served the boys as a playground, stood the Grammar School. Whether it offered a different training from that which was usually supplied to the scholars who were under training in the cloister, it is difficult to say. Within the ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... would unquestionably receive adequate support in the press and at public meetings. And none but they can do anything worth doing. And among the rank and file of Radicals the plain common-sense men should make themselves heard. Foreign policy debates in the House are usually the playground of cranks of all varieties, and the plain common-sense man seems to shrink from being vocal in such company. It is a pity. The plain common-sense man should believe in himself a little more. The result would perhaps ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... idiocy. In the Playground of Europe, Leslie Stephen told us that a man who preserves a stolid indifference in face of mountain beauty must be of the "essentially pachydermatous order." He commented at length on the peculiar temperament of those who have expressed dislike of his perfect playground—Chateaubriand, Johnson, Addison, Bishop Berkeley. Bishop Berkeley, who crossed Mont Cenis on New Year's Day 1714, complained that he was "put out of humour by the most horrible precipices." There is huge comfort to be drawn from Stephen's pages descriptive ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... did not answer. The horses were standing close together, heads drooping lazily. Warm breezes came fitfully from the winds' playground below. The handkerchief at the girl's neck fluttered, and a strand of her hair danced and glistened in the sunshine. The graceful lines of her figure were brought out by her riding-suit. Lowell put his palm over the gloved hand on her saddle pommel. Even so ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... the state, or any of the boy's lawful educators? In all the Prussian schools amusements are as much a part of the regular school system as grammar or geography. The teacher is with the boys on the playground, and plays as heartily as any of them. The boy has his physical wants anticipated. He is not left to fight his way, blindly stumbling against society, but goes forward in a safe path, which his elders and betters have marked ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Victoria Square dwelling of Liverpool. Here, on the former site of miserable tenement houses, sheltering more than a thousand people, stands to-day a palatial structure built around a hollow square, the major part of which is utilized as a large shrub-encircled playground for the children. The halls and stairways of the building are broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements perfect. The apartments are divided into one, two, and three rooms each. No room is smaller than 13 x 8 feet 6 inches; most of them are 12 x 13 feet 4 inches. All ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... little boy who had brought down the storm upon him. At which the latter replied haughtily, "My father's a gentleman, and keeps his carriage;" and Mr. William Dobbin retreated to a remote out-house in the playground, where he passed a half-holiday in the ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... than I felt would be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill in a few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed and turned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared. The pond was at first strictly forbidden as a playground, but afterwards I made concessions, and now they are allowed to go to a deserted little burying-ground on the west side of it when the wind is in the west; and there at least they can hear the frogs, and sometimes, if they are patient, catch ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... explaining and strengthening, that faith of which all the stories treat. It is not to be wondered at, that persons who do not seek faith in the stories of the Bible, look for the region of allegorical shades as a pleasant playground ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... to shore. This passenger was Mr. Farrington, one of the engineers. He wished to encourage his men by a good example, for over that terrible gulf it would soon be necessary for many of them to go. His seat was a small piece of board such as we use for a swing in a playground, and it was attached to the wire by four short ropes. The perilous journey took more than twenty minutes, and the people below watched almost breathlessly as the slender thread swayed up and down with the weight of the traveller. To their ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... we are taught in our natural philosophy the use of the lever; every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy. The lessons the scholars learn from one another in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... of the western part of the Mare Serenitatis, where one seems to see the play of the watery currents heaping the ocean sands in waving lines, making shallows, bars, and deeps for the mariner to avoid or seek, and affording a playground for the creatures of the main. What geologist would not wish to try his hammer on those rocks with their stony pages of fossilized history? There is in us an instinct which forbids us to think that there was never any life there. If we could visit the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... given her every chance to become acquainted not only with the school, but with the social life at Eton. But her interest in the gay world, as there represented, was lukewarm. Its shallowness provoked her. She, looking upon life as real and earnest, and not as a mere playground, could not sympathize with women who gave themselves up to dress, nor with men who expended their energies in efforts to raise a laugh. Wit of rather an affected kind was the fashion of the day. At its best it was odious, but when manufactured by the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... adapt his method to it. One child is timid and embarrassed; another may think his mental powers are under suspicion and so react with sullen obstinacy; a third may be in an angry mood as a result of a recent playground quarrel. Situations like these are, of course, exceptional, but in any case it is necessary to create in the child a certain mood, or indefinable attitude of mind, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... friends took their way through the Via Flaminia, almost along the line of the modern Corso, already bordered with handsome villas, turning presently to the left, into the Field-of-Mars, still the playground of Rome. But the vast public edifices were grown to be almost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented now only by occasional open spaces of verdure and wild-flowers. In one of these a crowd was standing, to watch a party of athletes stripped for exercise. Marius had been surprised ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... now fast gathering darkness through a part of the village where the houses were rather spread out. And suddenly, just opposite the now closed, silent schoolhouse and its big playground, Timmy stopped and pointed up to his right. "There's our Shrine," he exclaimed. "If you'll give me the box of matches, I'll strike some while you ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... like men; there are some that have no luck. A genuinely unfortunate tree was the poor sycamore which grew in the playground of an institution for boys on the Rue de la Grande-Chaumiere, directed by ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... she went on, "if you want to see people busy, come down to our camp, some sundown. There ain't that many mosquitoes in all Ioway, and they call this place a national playground. It ain't no such place. And yet, when I go to the post office, store, or the superintendent's office, or the head clerk's house, or the curio store to get some mosquito dope to rub on myself, they ain't got no mosquito dope; but for four dollars you ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough
... expressing their sympathy, had been dismissed by the porter, and bedizened girls had joined the youths. There was no lack of jests and laughter, and when some pretty young mother or female slave passed by leading children, with whom the garden was a favourite playground, many a merry ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the Kembles' Weybridge holidays. This is to be seen in the Eastlands' cottage garden, and is a semi-circular heap of earth or sand planted with trees and shrubs. Once, when it was much larger and higher, it was "the Mound," and was the favourite playground of the Kemble girls and boys. It grew out of a huge heap of sand which the landlord refused to move, and which Mrs. Kemble therefore planted and cut into shape with a walk round the top. Naturally enough, tradition has grown up round this heap of sand. Fanny Kemble was a famous actress, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... will tell you another of Uncle John's pranks at school. There was a large tree in the playground, the upper branches of which spread out very near to the windows of the bedroom I have been describing. One evening Uncle John got hold of a large hand-bell which was used for ringing the boys up in the morning; and climbing up the tree, he fastened it by a piece of string to a branch near the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... across the meadow to the country road, and down it past the schoolhouse standing on its own small rise of ground with the door still wide open, and its shadow, cast by the rays of the now setting sun stretched long across the playground. The young man passed it, paused, turned back, and entered. There at her desk Betty still slept, and as he stepped softly forward and looked down on her she stirred slightly and drew a long ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... sleep, and the other sixteen were given to study. Whether eating, walking, working in the garden or chopping wood, I was boring into the questions of the recitation room. I would occasionally take a little turn with the boys on the playground at noon, but not often. I was fond of it, but felt that I could not spare the time. This was a sad mistake, confirmed by a life of broken-down health. But, like many others, it was not discovered till the mischief was done. A determined effort to crowd four years' work into two, ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... Cliff Street, a point of rock projects beyond the rough side. By a rude sort of stone steps beside this point we could clamber down many feet to the bush-grown ledge below. This point had been a meeting-place and playground for Marjie and myself all those years. We named it "Rockport" after the old Massachusetts town. Marjie could hear my call from the bushes and come up to the half-way place between our two homes. The stratum of rock below this point was full of cunning little ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... and to make the entire works a credit to the municipality from an artistic standpoint. When treated on broad lines, such areas become public parks, and afford open breathing places for the residents, and, if near centers of population, may well be equipped with playground facilities for the children. When thus developed they should have care, that the planting and equipment should not deteriorate and the last state become ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... a mile across the mud, and is furnished with an elaborate pavilion. Sea-bathing of a sort is occasionally obtainable, and some good public baths supply what in this respect is lacking. A strip of sand at the foot of the esplanade furnishes the children with a somewhat restricted playground. The shops are good, the accommodation plentiful, and in amusements the town can almost vie with Blackpool and Brighton. There are two public parks—Grove Park in the centre of the town, and Clarence Park (more spacious and pleasing) near the Sanatorium. In a mushroom-town like ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... screwed out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences, select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun got ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... sought at Marchmont for a little one to love and cheer him. He had taken the twin-like brothers, Freddy and Tommy, whose sweet little faces bore some resemblance to his own. We found the children at school, looking hearty and happy in the playground as we passed the schoolhouse. Mr. V—- was from home, but his mother, a pious woman, received us most kindly, and spoke affectionately of the children. She took us to see her lovely flowerbeds of annuals, all laid out with taste in front of the wooden house, and tended ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... adversity makes one. As I came in sight of the school-house where I had so often been flogged in the cause of wisdom, you would hardly have recognized the truant boy who but a few years since had eloped so heedlessly from its walls. I leaned over the paling of the playground, and watched the scholars at their games, and looked to see if there might not be some urchin among them, like I was once, full of gay dreams about life and the world. The play-ground seemed smaller than when I used to sport about it. The house and park, too, of the neighboring squire, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... many of the duties both of the barn and the house. Here the cows are milked, the horses groomed, the sheep sheared, and the poultry fed. Here, too, is the children's playground, safe from the dangers of the street, and within hearing of the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... with cushions, awnings, and fluttering pennons. Everyone rowed, and the girls as well as the youths had their races, and developed their muscles in the most scientific manner. The large, level meadow near the old willow was now the college playground, and here baseball battles raged with fury, varied by football, leaping, and kindred sports fitted to split the fingers, break the ribs, and strain the backs of the too ambitious participants. The gentler pastimes ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... way by the east end of the cathedral, where in mediaeval times was an open waste, the Motte aux Papelards, the playground of the cathedral servants, the graceful outlines of the apse and the bold sweep of the flying buttresses ever varying in beauty as we pace around. The south portal (ill seen through the iron railings) called of ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... a white mass whiter than the whitest clouds, swimming aerially in mid-heaven. Lieutenant Baker was the first to catch a glimpse of the vision for which every western traveller now watches, the famous peak seen by land or sea for hundreds of miles, the playground of the jagged green lightnings on the hot summer nights; and the peak was ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... of any one. If he were rudely treated, he was neither humiliated nor sullen; he simply withdrew and held himself aloof, with a sort of regretful look, as it were biding his time. This was just how he behaved with me. About two months passed. One bright summer day I happened to go out of the playground after a noisy game of leap-frog, and walking into the garden I saw Pasinkov sitting on a bench under a high lilac-bush. He was reading. I glanced at the cover of the book as I passed, and read Schiller's Werke on the back. ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... passed a primary school playground. The girls had just finished and the boys were beginning Swedish drill. Everyone engaged in the drill, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the touch of which they crept away to nestle in each other's love. Because his presence brooded indoors they had never felt happy of the house. Because he seldom set foot in the garden they had made the garden their playground, their real nursery; the garden, and on wet days the barn, the hay-lofts, the apple-lofts, any Alsatia beyond the rules, where they could run free and lift their voices. He had never been unkind, but merely neglectful, unsmiling, coldly deterrent, unapproachable. They ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a mile to the schoolhouse, which I was lucky to find at all. I could not see it twenty feet away; but I was almost upset by a snow fort which the children had built, and taking this as the sure sign of a playground, I guessed my way the fifty or sixty feet that more by luck than judgment brought me to the back end of the house, instead of the front. I made my way around on the windward side of the building, hoping that the jingle of the bells might be heard as ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... worry you with much sight-seeing and tourists and lessons of history, but I want you to glance at this setting of the life picture of poor Marie Antoinette, because it is full of sentiment and it will make you appreciate more the hameau and her playground afterwards. Something tells me you would rather see these things than all the fine pictures and salons of the ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... sports of the playground, scrupulously applied, would have clarified the ethical atmosphere of this little family. But there was ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... coloured sands,—sweetmeat-sellers moulding animals and monsters out of sugar-paste,—conjurors and tumblers exhibiting their skill.... Later, when the child becomes strong enough to run about, the temple gardens and groves serve for a playground. School-life does not separate the Ujiko from the Ujigami (unless the family should permanently leave the district); the visits to the temple are still continued as a duty. Grown-up and married, the Ujiko regularly visits the guardian-god, accompanied by wife or ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn |
