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Updated: June 16, 2025
"What are you doing?" "Jus' readin' quietly in my room, mother." "Oh, for heaven's sake don't disturb him, then," said William's sister. "It's those silly books you read, Emma. You're always imagining things. If you'd read the ones I recommend, instead of the foolish ones you will get hold of " William's mother was safely mounted on one of her favourite hobby-horses.
But there has been so much demand for hobby-horses of late that we have ordered some, and if you will wait a few days, citizen " "A few days!" interrupted Simon, angrily. "Not a few hours, not a few minutes will I wait. If you have no hobby-horses, tell me, and I will go elsewhere to make my purchases." He turned to go, but the clerk held him back. "Wait only a minute," he said.
Giants and dwarfs, dragons and griffins, hobby-horses and goblins, Robin Hood and the Grand Turk, bears and boars and fantastic animals that never had a name, boys and girls, men and women, in every imaginable costume and device around and around the hall they went, still ringing out the chorus: "Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix, Under the mistletoe!"
I thought of sticks as hobby-horses, staves of music or rhyme, of breaking a stick over a man's back, and heaven knows how many more phrases of the same sort relating to sticks, staves, and skewers. All my thoughts rein on skewers, sticks of wood, and staves; and as I am, at last, a poet, and I have worked terribly hard to make myself one, I can of course make poetry on anything.
As I entered the dark, gloomy place, my vision encountered innumerable relics of my past life, in the shape of toys, books, papers, skates cart-wheels, pieces of hobby-horses, and remnants of garments made by my mother and worn by me years before. I thought of the days gone by, and the many pleasant hours I had spent at the old farm house.
I walk up to the Barriere de l'Etoile, sufficiently dazed by my flight to have a pleasant doubt of the reality of everything about me; of the lively crowd, the overhanging trees, the performing dogs, the hobby-horses, the beautiful perspectives of shining lamps: the hundred and one enclosures, where the singing is, in gleaming orchestras of azure and gold, and where a star-eyed Houri comes round with a box for voluntary offerings.
They came round each time in the same order the correct one, red braces, blue coat, and the bowlers last. Evidently the foremost one knew he could easily win, and the others had decided that 'it was to be. In the machine-like regularity of their advent, their unaltered positions, and leisured pace, they were like hobby-horses.
Some of the boys pranced about on richly- caparisoned hobby-horses brandishing long javelins with gay streamers of bright ribands attached to them; others went on foot waving their scarlet cloaks before the bull, and vaulting lightly over the barrier when he charged them; and as for the bull himself, he was just like a live bull, though he was only made of wicker- work and stretched hide, and sometimes insisted on running round the arena on his hind legs, which no live bull ever dreams of doing.
There is, first, a large pederastic school, with French and Italian masters; there is also the spelling school, a very spacious building; the school of looking-glasses; the school of swearing; the school of critics; the school of salivation; the school of hobby-horses; the school of poetry; the school of tops; the school of spleen; the school of gaming; with many others too tedious to recount.
I remembered the man who took a white stick in his mouth, by which means he could render himself and the stick invisible; I thought of stick hobby-horses, of 'stock rhymes, of 'breaking the staff' over an offender, and Heaven knows of how many phrases more concerning sticks, stocks, staves, and pegs.
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