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Updated: June 27, 2025
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 avidity with which the Americans seize upon a sport and the suddenness with which they drop it, illustrating what I have said about the lack of a national sporting taste, is well shown by the coming of a game called "ping pong," a parlor tennis, with our battledores for rackets.
A great noise of shouting, drumming on battledores, and blowing through discordant horns, let them know, as they came up the lane, that the community was in a state of high activity; and when they reached the garden gate they were just in time to see the whole family vanish round a corner, running at full speed after a donkey on which Johnnie was riding.
What are our 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?
A tender young cork, however, would have had no more chance against a pair of corkscrews, or a tender young tooth against a pair of dentists, or a little shuttlecock against two battledores, than I had against Uriah and Mrs. Heep.
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.
"If I had my football I might kick it about, and have some fun," he thought, "no one has taken the trouble to mend it. I should think Fanny, who is so nimble with her fingers as granny says, might have done so. I must have a game at battledore and shuttlecock, I can play that alone." He went into the drawing-room to get one of the battledores, which were kept in an Indian cabinet.
Pouchskin, far 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.
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