Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 20, 2025
I am quite positive that we could not have repeated in concert the memorable words which open this chapter, but, while the letter of the injunction was absent, the spirit was with us and we carried it out in considerable detail, the Indians joining with us. We shot at a mark, we ran horse-races with the Indians and also foot-races.
There were horse-races held on the moors just above the village, which were periodical sources of drunkenness and profligacy. Scarcely a wedding took place without the rough amusement of foot-races, where the half-naked runners were a scandal to all decent strangers. The old custom of "arvills," or funeral feasts, led to frequent pitched battles between the drunken mourners.
The popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races and boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which young folk sat quaffing wine. The festival appears to have been a sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which fell at Midwinter.
We never took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. That is, Johnny was but I held his hat.
I scrambled some pounds of beads among their people, and got up foot-races for prizes. This was a long blue shirt with red waist-band, a bright tin funnel inverted to form a helmet with a feather in the tube, and a pair of spectacles.
First, there were foot-races, in which Yan won in spite of his wounded arm, the city boy making a good second; then target-shooting and "Deer-hunting," that Yan could not take part in. It was not in the programme, but Raften insisted on seeing Yan measure the height of a knot in a tree without going to it, and grinned with delight when he found it was accurate.
The public who attend rowing-matches, foot-races, and other exhibitions of that sort, see nothing but the successful results of muscular training. Fathers and mothers at home see the failures.
Besides the usual life of a child in the country, running foot-races with my brother Chandler, building brick ovens to bake apples in the side-hill opposite the house, and the steeds of willow sticks cut there, and beyond the unvarying gentleness of my mother and the peremptory decision and playfulness at the same time of my father, his slightest word was enough to hush the wildest tumult among us children, and yet he was usually gay and humorous in his family, besides and beyond this, I remember nothing till the first event in my early childhood, and that was acting in a play.
Off came the shoes and stockings of those boys who had been trammeled by such articles of attire all except Crow Wing. He still wore his moccasins. The foot-races were to come first, and Bolderwood and Lot carefully measured the distance along the bank where the land was almost level, setting stakes at either end of the course.
At Easter the local favourite sport was renewed with zest and eagerness, and almost everywhere foot-races were run, the prize of the conqueror being a tansy-cake. Stoolball and barley-brake were also favourite games in this month, as Poor Robin says in his Almanack for 1677.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking