semi-sweet

Updated: May 15, 2025

I associate less elegance with the Parade-ground, into which we turned for recreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the parades deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed the switch of office abounded there, for what I best recover in the connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-tree that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up the semi-sweet rankness of the plant was all in the air and small boys pranced about as cavaliers whacking their steeds.

Henry James - A Small Boy and Others