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Updated: May 3, 2025
"Ay, ay! you shall be an officer in time, my hearty," answered the Coxswain "Lord High Admiral, for a certainty; but you must creep through the hawse-holes first. There's nothing like half-a-dozen cruises before the mast for taking the conceit out of a maple-faced hobbledehoy."
Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous hobbledehoy.
How fearfully this cursed heat, these cursed moonlight nights, must have unstrung me! This Venice would certainly kill me in the long-run! Why, the sight of this idiotic engraving, the mere name of that coxcomb of a singer, have made my heart beat and my limbs turn to water like a love-sick hobbledehoy.
It is slowly evolving itself out of a chaos of doubt and disbelief. Before the growing insight and experience the diffidence recedes. A man rarely carries his shyness past the hobbledehoy period. Even if his own inward strength does not throw it off, the rubbings of the world generally smooth it down.
My bedroom work at brass casting, my foundry work at the making of steam-engines, and my studies at the University classes, were perhaps too much for a lad of my age, just when I was in the hobbledehoy state between a boy and a man. Whether his apprehensions were warranted or not, it did so happen that I was attacked with typhus fever in 1828, a disease that was then prevalent in Edinburgh.
Eighteen years had passed since we parted. Already her hair had lost the brightness of its youth, and she seemed to me smaller and more fragile; and the face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy, and loved when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always shall love till I die, was soft and worn. Margaret was an old woman, and she was only forty-three: and I am the man who made her old.
I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered eyelids. . .
She asked the hobbledehoy, who took her ticket, where Mrs Devitt lived, at which the youth looked at her in a manner that evidently questioned her sanity at being ignorant of such an important person's whereabouts. Mavis repeated her question more sharply than before. The ticket-collector looked at her open mouthed, glanced up the road and then again to Mavis, before saying: "Here her be."
A soldier, a noble, of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me to the consciousness of duty. When I saw how it was I did not lose time in indecision. The old classical conflict of love and honour being once fairly before me, it did not cost me a thought.
He was to be a man immediately; not for him that absurdly dilatory condition of pimples and hobbledehoy boots that mark a transition period. Dawson's had been the most insignificant sojourn in the tent of the enemy, and the world, it was implied, had lamented his enforced absence.
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