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Updated: June 16, 2025
'But ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats, water-thieves, and land-thieves I mean pirates; and then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks. To this list the nervous owner of rare books must add fire, that dread enemy of all the arts. It is often difficult to provide stabling for dead men's hobby-horses.
At last, however, after a prolonged combat, during which several of the hobby-horses were gored through and through, and, their riders dismounted, the young Count of Tierra-Nueva brought the bull to his knees, and having obtained permission from the Infanta to give the coup de grace, he plunged his wooden sword into the neck of the animal with such violence that the head came right off, and disclosed the laughing face of little Monsieur de Lorraine, the son of the French Ambassador at Madrid.
There were peep-shows, and swings, and merry-go-rounds, and hobby-horses, and, with so many inducements offered, it will not be supposed that holiday people were wanting.
Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, have they not had their Hobby-Horses; their running horses, their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, their maggots and their butterflies? and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?
They straddled across the benches and barged at each other in single tourneys and jousts, riding their hobby-horses with violent rearings and plungings and bruising one another without grievous hurt and with yells of laughter. Glasses broke, crockery crashed upon the polished boards. One boy danced the Highland fling on the tables, others were waltzing down the corridors.
This announcement was received with cheers, and preparations were instantly made for the mock tourney. A large circle being formed by the yeomen of the guard, with an alley leading to it on either side, the two combatants, mounted on gaudy-caparisoned hobby-horses, rode into the ring.
She was as industrious as an ant, and in the highest degree helpful to those who were deserving of help, but less merciful than Lafontaine's ants were to thoughtless crickets and their fellows. Louise had three hobby-horses, although she never would confess that she had a single one.
The arena was then cleared amidst much applause, and the dead hobby-horses dragged solemnly away by two Moorish pages in yellow and black liveries, and after a short interlude, during which a French posture-master performed upon the tightrope, some Italian puppets appeared in the semi-classical tragedy of Sophonisba on the stage of a small theatre that had been built up for the purpose.
All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the scene was at Athens or London.
After that, the pandemonium left the dining-room, to spread itself over the spacious house from the basement to the great playroom in the attic, where the dolls and blocks and hobby-horses of the parental generation stoically awaited the new.
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