United States or Bahrain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"A fine time for sport, Dickey; don't you think there would be more room in the broad street than on this crowded lawn, where you lose your ball so often in the shrubbery?" "This place will do, on a pinch," bawled Dickey "though it might be better. If it warn't for that plagued house, we couldn't ask for a better ball-ground."
As it was, I was made to go through that one trick of the wise monkeys of Japan until I was heartily disgusted with it, or with anything else, in fact, that suggested the land of the Mikado. Stuart was in a hurry to show me off to the other fellows, so he caught me up under his arm, and started off to the ball-ground, where most of them were to be found.
I never heard of a good fielder in base-ball missing a fly because a dog barked, or a horse neighed, on the outside of the ball-ground. If I kept a high school, I would call together the school once a month, to train all hands in the habits requisite for listeners in public assemblies.
"Rather late for grass-seed," he had remonstrated, but the inexorable Miss Moore had replied, "Better late than never." Four or five of the boys, who had used the church common as a ball-ground, were enlisted-a capital stroke of policy that.
Like the English officials of India, the Americans in high places here were noticeable for their youth, and, at least here on the ball-ground, for their democracy, known to all by their boyhood nicknames, yet held almost in reverence by the Mexican youths that filled in the less important positions.
With swelling bosom and eyes stinging with restrained tears she leaned her face against a cool pillar and watched the swallows circle mistily about the red tiling. People, coming from the ball-ground, passed her, unnoticed in the shadow. A man's voice, ringing with merriment, cried: "Poor old Captain! I never saw him have such a chap.
Pausing and striking his boot-heel into the soft earth, he said with much less show of emotion than is exhibited by the average school boy in laying out a ball-ground: "We will build a hotel here; over there a bank. The main street will run toward the railroad. The Basin Central from Barba will come in from the southeast."
Now, so thickly was it built with neat white houses, that only with strenuous clairvoyance could famous old localities be identified: the ball-ground; the marshy stretch that made skating in winter, or, in spring, a fascinating place to catch cold by wading; the grassy common where "shinny" was played by day and "Yellow Horn" by night; the enchanted spot where the circus built airy castles of canvas, and where, on the day after, one might plant one's feet squarely in the magic ring, on the veritable spot, perchance, where the clown had superhumanly ridden the difficult trick-mule after local volunteers had failed so entertainingly.
But as life opens out, other standards are set up, and a new principle of selection takes its place. When the world is seen to be more than a ball-ground, when it is recognized to be a stage oh which men play many parts, a new sort of intimacy is demanded, and it does not follow that it will be with the same persons. Such loss as this is the condition which accompanies the gain of growth.
It was sometimes termed the palaestra, though this name was afterwards restricted to the training-school of the athletes proper, who made gymnastics the business of their lives. It was also styled the sphaeristerium, or ball-ground, to which the nearest approach in modern times is the tennis-court.
Word Of The Day