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More "Shuttlecock" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... This nobleman was one of the gentlemen of His Majesty's closet, and one with whom the revered monarch was on terms of considerable intimacy. A close regard had sprung up between them in the old King's time; when His Royal Highness, playing at battledore and shuttlecock with the young lord on the landing-place of the great staircase at Kew, in some moment of irritation the Prince of Wales kicked the young Earl downstairs, who, falling, broke his leg. The Prince's hearty repentance ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... been slightly attempted; but it is not really liked: too many balls are lost and the rules of the game have never yet been thoroughly grasped. A quartette of men will occasionally rig up their net, which they raise to about the height of a foot and a half, and play a species of battledore and shuttlecock over it until the balls disappear; but it is scarcely tennis. As a matter of fact, a Russian generally rushes at the ball and misses it; on the rare occasions when he strikes the object, he does so with so much energy that the ball unless ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of merriment was now to be heard—no battledore and shuttlecock- -no ball, no marbles. Some sat in a corner, whispering their wishes that Archer would unbar the doors, and give up. Others, stretching their arms, and gaping as they sauntered up and down the room, wished for air, or food, or water. Fisher and his nine, who had such firm dependence upon the ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... these examples, the Negro must keep a strong and courageous heart. He cannot improve his condition by any short-cut course or by artificial methods. Above all, he must not be deluded into the temptation of believing that his condition can be permanently improved by a mere battledore and shuttlecock of words or by any process of mere mental gymnastics or oratory alone. What is desired, along with a logical defence of his cause, are deeds, results,—multiplied results,—in the direction of building himself up, so as to leave no doubt in the minds ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... accidents—as on the day when Babiche followed her out on the stage and sat at attention like a trick dog. After that Babiche appeared at all the children's matinees and oh, what a delicious lot of animal and children songs the Poetry Girl discovered! And did you ever see her do "Battledore and Shuttlecock" ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Little Abe tipping about in the wind like a shuttlecock." Out I ran, and getting hold of his ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... proclivities, warmly admires that portion of the English system which Englishmen generally tolerate as a necessary evil, but of which they are by no means proud. Most thinking men in this country resent the idea of Indian interests being made a shuttlecock in the strife of party. Not so Mr. Mallik. He shudders at the idea of Indian affairs being considered exclusively on their own merits. "If it is no party's duty to champion the cause of any part of the Empire, that part must be made ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... quiet mornings were those when that true knight was employed in field sports or yeomanry duties, such as the state of the country called for. When he was at home, all was fun and merriment and noise—walks and rides on fine days, battledore and shuttlecock on wet ones, music, singing, paper games, giggling and making giggle, and sometimes dancing in the hall—Mr. Frank Fordyce joining with all his heart and drollery in many of these, like ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood (March 25, 1437). The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers. The Earl of Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the important post of Commander of Edinburgh Castle; the other by ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... pretty game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making,—providing that the players can be quite sure that there shall be no heart ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... on through the ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages, and the political and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. It has wrought itself into the soul, the only living and immortal thing, and so the proper place for ideas. Its mode of transmission has been by the suffusion of the eye, the cheek, the lip, the manner, not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... majestic character of the palm is given not only by their lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussu and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all species of which have similar fruit, there is a vast difference ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... affect the weal or woe of nations yet to come. Then suddenly clapping his hand to his capacious coat-pocket, dragged out a bit of cork with some hen's feathers, and hurrying to his room, took out his knife, and proceeded to whittle away at a shuttlecock of an original scientific construction, which at some prior time he had promised to send to the young Duchess D'Abrantes that ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... directions had sounded simple, but they proved to be anything but simple to follow. Like a shuttlecock, Jasper was tossed from clerk to clerk, until by the time he reached his destination he ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... accompanying photograph of small furniture specially made for her youthful Majesty, and used exclusively by her. The frames are of the finest over-burnish, the plush upholstery being decorated with the rarest specimens of art needlework. On one of the little tables you will note a battledore and shuttlecock, with another thrown upon the floor, as though the player had been suddenly interrupted in the midst of her play. Very ordinary make and shape are these toys, such as you may see in any middle-class English home, and each of them looking ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... the thing best worth seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing box." Though an exquisite, Mr. Standish is clever, entertaining, and agreeable. One day that he sat beside me at dinner, we had a delightful battledore and shuttlecock conversation from grave to gay as quick as your heart could wish: from L'Almanac des Gourmandes and Le Respectable Porc, to ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the shoulders should be drawn back, and the chest should be enlarged by taking deep inspirations of pure air. The muscles of the chest, and of every part of the body, should be free to move and unconfined by tight clothing. Fencing, shuttlecock, and such other useful sports as combine with them free movements of the upper part of the body, are doubly advantageous, for they not only exercise the muscles of the whole body, but possess the additional advantage ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the one affirming he had compared it with the figure and description of Bewick, to which the other replied that Bewick was next to Nature. Here the old gentleman seized me by the thigh with his very hand-vice of a grasp; and I contrived to keep up the shuttlecock of conversation playfully to his highest satisfaction, though they who praised him so ardently, little imagined whose ears imbibed all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... of this fair court dame, Whose whiteness did the snow's pure whiteness shame, King Louis by odd mischance did knock The shuttlecock, Thrice happy rogue, upon the town of doves, To nestle with the pretty little loves! "Now, sire, pray take it out"—quoth she, With an arch smile,—But what did he? What? what to charming modesty belongs! Obedient to her soft command, He raised it—but not with his ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... it as a kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of keeping it up ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... are any roads, men are taking readily to cycling, albeit, from the flowing nature of their garments they generally use ladies' bicycles. Of these few pastimes archery is considered the most distingue, while boys attain to great skill in playing shuttlecock with their feet, being able to keep up the feathered cork for a dozen or twenty times, and passing it considerable distances from one to another. Judge then of my surprise when, on asking a young Chinaman ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half- hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... games began to bore him. His strong arms no longer wanted to play battledore and shuttlecock, they longed to throw stones. The squabbles over a petty game of croquet, which demanded neither muscle nor brain, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... comfort for her. None knew of her weakness. Her mind had vacillated like a shuttlecock, but no one had seen the vacillation. She was in his hands, and she must simply do as he bade her. Then she went down to Mrs Baggett's room, and told the old lady to go up-stairs at her master's behest. ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... and training kept me far ahead of other girls, and while they were scarcely out of the nursery, and still enjoying battledore and shuttlecock, I was seeking information, either by reading or conversation, concerning my ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... he wur goin' daan th' hill he did mak sum manoevures yo mind, for talk abaat fugal men i' th' army wen thay throw thair guns up into th' air an' catches em agean, thay wur nowt ta Joe, for he span his slay boards up an' daan just like a shuttlecock. But wal this wur goin' on th' storm began to abate, and th' water seemed to get less, but still thay kept at it. Wal at last a chap at thay called Dave Twirler shaated aat at he saw summat, and thay look't way at he pointed, and thare behold it wur won o'th' ribs o'th' railway ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... the window oftener than over a book; he loved to amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... not work all the time. They play many pretty games. Chinese boys, too, have many kinds of games and toys. One game is like battledoor and shuttlecock. They use their feet to strike the shuttlecock. They do this so fast that the shuttlecock hardly ever falls to the ground. The Chinese are fond of flying kites. Even old men fly kites. They fly their kites in the spring-time. Chinese kites are of all sizes and shapes. Some are like ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... regal power; and, tobacco or no tobacco, the line must be drawn there. If the charges against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if not, his term should be extended beyond the original commission. A new commission was given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock experience seems to have quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of quarrels with the Virginia council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in 1642 came Sir William Berkeley. This man, who was born about the beginning of the century, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... significant wreck of a pen stood a little carriage clock in a case, and this suddenly lifted a slender voice and announced five. She turned round on her stool and sat staring at the clock. She smiled with the corners of her mouth down. "Home," she said, "and begin again. It's like battledore and shuttlecock.... ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... an order to see Bruce,[121] and after some shuttlecock sort of work, sending and being sent from office to office and Prefet to Prefet, at length we received our ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... accepted a place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the cheapest ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... think I should have slept through the whole of it if it had not been for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, which he disliked ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... man's brain to play shuttlecock with it in that fashion. While I lay in bed trying to sleep, I thought of the meeting between the duke and the princess at the Postern, and back again flew my mind to the conviction that Yolanda ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... amusement of kite-flying even when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... accompanied with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub, a mere conglomeration of bubbles, as hollow and as unsatisfying. And in lower departments of human life, as far as he knew, he saw evils yet more deplorable. The Church played at shuttlecock with men's credulousness; the law, with their purses; the medical profession, with their lives; the military, with their liberties and hopes. He acknowledged that in all these lines of action there ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... "expediency," satisfy their consciences for voting "no" by saying that the women of their family and acquaintance do not want it. Thus is the most valuable of human rights—the right of individual representation—made the football of Legislatures, the shuttlecock of voters, kicked and tossed like the veriest plaything in utter disregard of the vital fact that it is the one principle above all others on which ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of his position and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him. "He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... waging a desperate and bloody war, the United States was like a shuttlecock, being struck repeatedly by the diplomatic battledores of each nation. Between the British "Orders in Council" and the French "Milan Decree," American commerce was in a fair way of being obliterated. To declare war against both nations, would have been absurd in so ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... a sleeve, as it were, are seldom able to concentrate their attention on the one thought which should apparently swamp all others. They either yield to the strain, and lapse into unconsciousness, or their minds become the arena of minor emotions, wherein trivialities play battledore and shuttlecock with the tremendous issues of the moment. When a more extended knowledge of all that had happened, joined to a nicer adjustment of the time-factor in events, enabled Elsie to realise the extraordinary deliverance from death which she had been vouchsafed that night, she ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... restored. But it lasted barely three years. In B.C. 605 the Egyptians were defeated by Nebuchadrezzar under the walls of Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Asia passed into the possession of the Babylonians. Once more Palestine became a shuttlecock between the kingdoms of the Nile and the Euphrates. Trusting to the support of Egypt, Zedekiah of Judah revolted from his Babylonian master. His policy at first seemed successful. The Babylonian army which was besieging ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... obstinate, scrupulous to a fault; but had not that broad outlook on life which comes of experience, nor the power and resolution to readily take a decision under difficult circumstances, and to abide by it once taken. So it was that reason made a shuttlecock of his present resolve, and half a dozen times he stopped in the road meaning to abandon his purpose, and turn back to Cullerne. Yet half a dozen times he went on, though with slow feet, thinking always, Was he right in what ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... as if you had been playing shuttlecock with it!" exclaimed Mrs. Lorton indignantly. "It is absolutely disrespectful of you, not to say ungrateful. Read it, if you please, and slowly; I could not bear to have my cousin's letter gabbled over. I, at least, know what is due to ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... antiquarian associations, but Bentham made a very fair monk. The place, for which he paid L315 a year, was congenial. He rode his favourite hobby of gardening, and took his regular 'ante-jentacular' and 'post-prandial' walks, and played battledore and shuttlecock in the intervals of codification. He liked it so well that he would have taken it for life, but for the loss of L8000 or L10,000 in a Devonshire marble-quarry.[303] In 1818 he gave it up, and thenceforward rarely quitted Queen's Square ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... crucifix; that all the members were forbidden to have connexion with women, but might give themselves up without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery; that when by any mischance a Templar infringed this order, and a child was born, the whole order met, and tossed it about like a shuttlecock from one to the other until it expired; that they then roasted it by a slow fire, and with the fat which trickled from it anointed the hair and beard of a large image of the devil. It was also said that when ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... and so are you, for the two things go together, and in helping seven lads you are unconsciously doing much to improve one lass," said Dr. Alec, stopping to nod and smile at the bright-faced figure resting on the old bamboo chair, after a lively game of battledore and shuttlecock, in place of a run which ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... Toby was not such an absolute Samson, but that he was much more likely to be hurt himself: and indeed, he had flown out into the road, like a shuttlecock. He had such an opinion of his own strength, however, that he was in real concern for the other party: and ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... to make the turns in safety for all that, nor does he have a chance for a long breath before he shoots at ever increasing speed into the "battledore" where the course turns almost at a right angle and shoots him on into the "shuttlecock" where he must negotiate another right angle. Then he must immediately take "stream corner" and be ready for his plunge into "the straight." From this again he has to take "Bulpett's corner." By this time he may be going seventy ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... remember among them a single dull, pompous, morose, or pedantic person. The parties did not usually exceed six or eight in number, so that there was no necessity for breaking up into groups. The shuttlecock of conversation was lightly bandied to and fro across the round table. Each took his share and none took more. All topics—even the, burning question of "expansion"—were touched upon gaily, humorously, and in ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... bungalow, with broad verandas, stood in a small garden a dozen yards from the lagoon, where the Broom Road narrowed as it left the business portion of Papeete and began its round of the island. There was just room enough on the salt grass for the shuttlecock to fall out of bounds, and for the battledores to swing free of the branches of the trees. The consul, though he wore a monocle, was without the pretense of officialdom except to other officials and, of course, at receptions, dinners, and formal gatherings. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... these past six months had been the fullest of his life. Time had made him his shuttlecock. Fortune had played with him. It had caught him when he was up in the world and flung him to the ground, and after that had seized him afresh, and sent him flying to a higher altitude than he had ever known before. As a fact, three ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... in a dream; and pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... and in all probability will only be the most singular. An obstinate man is sure of doing well; a wavering or a whimsical one (which is the same thing) is as uncertain, even in his elevation, as a shuttlecock. But look to the box at the right: do you see the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she wore it in her childish days. Thus attired, she looked about fourteen years old, and the shy way in which she glanced at the company from under her eyelashes, added to the impression of extreme youth. To carry out the character, she held a battledore and shuttlecock in her hand. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... played ball and bandy with the Susquehannock boys, and taught them jack-stones and how to make a shuttlecock. They put eagle's feathers in his hair, and the old men adopted him into their tribe. On the third day the absent Indians returned with a stork. It was a white stork with a red bill and plenty of stork's neck, but short legs. Nanking doubted ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... story that's in it May be told in a minute; But par parenthese chatting, On this thing and that thing, Keeps the shuttlecock ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... limbs. Presently I felt myself lifted up from the ground. I was now under the portico, and was hurled against the pillar on my right; the rebound again drove me to the post on the opposite side; and after being thus repeatedly tossed and buffeted from right to left like a shuttlecock, I was thrust down, outward, on the ground on my head, with all that bundle of rags, having tumbled head-long the whole range of the four marble steps of entrance. The harm, however, was not so great as the fright; and, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... like a falling shuttlecock, shrieking as she fell; and as she struck the water, the drowned bodies of the men she had sent there came to the surface, and caught her by the feet and hair, and drew her down, making an end of her, as she also had made ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... of the system lies in the stabler policy it will ensure. Our present system results in frequent sharp overturns, according as this party or that may get a temporary majority. But this battledore and shuttlecock of legislation does not represent the far more gradual changes in public opinion. A system whereby the number of representatives of each party is always directly proportioned to the number of votes cast for that party would make it possible to evolve a careful machinery ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... licensed jester whooped betwixt mirth and madness, as he brandished his bauble—the morrice-dancers jangled their bells—the rustics hallooed and whistled-men laughed loud, and maidens giggled shrill; while many a broad jest flew like a shuttlecock from one party, to be caught in the air and returned from the opposite side of the road by another, at ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... heart on his friends making a day of it. Accordingly, he had made elaborate preparations for enjoyment. With that practical sagacity which frequently distinguishes the nautical mind, he had provided bowls and quoits for the men; battledore and shuttlecock for the younger women; football and cricket and hoops, with some incomprehensible Eastern games for the children, and a large field at the side of the cottage afforded room for all without ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... big boys seized hold of a blanket, dragged from one of the beds. "In with Scud; quick! there's no time to lose." East was chucked into the blanket. "Once, twice, thrice, and away!" Up he went like a shuttlecock, but not quite ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... all day, and the children had to content themselves with skating and battledore and shuttlecock in the verandahs. Lord Carrington, Tom, and Mabelle went for a long walk, calling on Cardinal Moran, and paying visits to the picture-gallery, the Anglican cathedral, and other places; and after an early dinner at 6.45 all the party went to the meeting of the Royal Humane ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... play seemed all the rest of their quiet lives. But Miss Dilly was ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith was ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... sight of its true meaning. It denotes the absence of a certain order, but to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... whatever chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as shuttlecock and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the harmless blows which are so valuable a training in ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... lunch-table as favors and bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... it, the more he was satisfied of its feasibility, and he trotted over, the next day, to the Old Duke of Cumberland, to see his friend on the subject. Viney, like most victuallers, was more given to games of skill—billiards, shuttlecock, skittles, dominoes, and so on—than to the rude out-of-door chances of flood and field, and at first he doubted his ability to grapple with the details; but on Mr. Watchorn's assurance that he would keep him straight, he gave Mrs. Viney ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... employment of reading each morning was concluded, we danced, we sung, we played at blind-man's-buff, battledore and shuttlecock, and many other games equally diverting and innocent; and when tired of them, drew our seats round the fire, while each one in turn told some merry story to divert ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... as every poet knows. Pegasus is a racer, not a cart-horse; Euterpe trips it like the hare, while dogged criticism is the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite many of the reviews are, some extolling what others vilify; it just ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining. But in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man looms up on the horizon like ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... like you!" made answer Jack, in a tone of considerable astonishment. "I've got a whole ball of new string, and two battledores and a shuttlecock, and a ball, and a ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... Christ Church meadows far behind, and was beginning to feel slightly exhausted by his unwonted exertions, when he reached that bewildering part of the river termed "the Gut." So confusing were the intestine commotions of this gut, that, after passing a chequered existence as an aquatic shuttlecock, and being assailed with a slang-dictionary-full of opprobrious epithets, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... The Dancing Girl. ("There is another and a worse wicked nobleman" N. B., O. W.) But this is no fault, and, indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find fault with Mr. TREE'S Lord Illingworth. Mrs. TREE as Mrs. Allonby, is a very charming battledore in the game of repartee-shuttlecock, who with eight other principal characters in the piece, has nothing whatever to do with the plot. To the character of Lady Hunstanton, as written in the Mrs. Nickleby vein, and as played by Miss ROSE LECLERCQ, the success ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... Christina could not forego her misguided love of power and her tendency to practical joking, and one day she even made two grave philosophers, who were holding a profound discussion in her presence over some deep philosophic subject, suddenly cease their arguments to play with her at battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... the poor town when it once more welcomed the gray-jackets. From the beginning it had been battle-ground and billet of both armies a dozen times. Tossed from Federal to Confederate possession—a very shuttlecock of war—it had been harassed, robbed and pillaged by the one; drained of the very dregs by free gifts to the other. But the people of Winchester never faltered in their faith; and to-day her noble women go down the roll of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a whole day in different conveyances, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches and a piano in the room. ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin. He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down. But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity. He was knocked about like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay helpless on the deck. And no one interfered. Leach could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very time The old church clock at home would chime. Dear heart, how plain he saw it all! The lich-gate and the crumbling wall, The stream, the pathway to the wood, The bridge where they so oft had stood. Then, in a trice, both church and clock Vanish'd before ... a shuttlecock. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... more vivid. I could see the great wind. The tops of the palms are flying about like Brobdingnagian birds, their long blades darting out like infuriated tongues. I saw the oranges flung about in a great game of battledore and shuttlecock—as if the hurricane remembered to play in its fury! I saw men shrieking at the masts of a ship. Their puny lives! Why are they not glad to die so splendid ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... were to ensue; and after his breakfast stood at a window watching the dripping trees and whistling so softly one could not tell whether 'twere he or the birds chirping without. Cedric and Lady Constance played at battledore and shuttlecock. Mistress Penwick sat apart, busy with thought and needle. His Grace of Ellswold sat up that morning, his wife and physicians by his side, and all were happy with the ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"—we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock." It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cucumber ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... borne by the Medway into the Western Swale,—now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... avay," said Mr. Weller. "Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, when you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant. Come avay, sir. If you want to ease your mind by blowing up somebody come out into the ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... might have said it to a merchant's son. Aunt Pen watched and approved this stratagem, hoped for the best results, and believed the day won when Debby grew pale and silent, and followed with her eyes the young couple who were playing battledoor and shuttlecock with each other's hearts, as if she took some interest in the game. But Aunt Pen clashed her cymbals too soon; for Debby's trouble had a better source than jealousy, and in the silence of the sleepless nights that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ourselves within doors, for there is no stirring abroad, with playing at cards, playing at shuttlecock, playing the fool, making love, and making moral reflexions: upon the whole, the week has ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... to the former favour of the public. If he be daunted by a bad reception on this second occasion, he may again become a stranger to the arena. If, on the contrary, he can keep his ground, and stand the shuttlecock's fate, of being struck up and down, he will probably, at length, hold with some certainty the level in public opinion which he may be found to deserve; and he may perhaps boast of arresting the general attention, in the same manner as the Bachelor Samson Carrasco, of fixing the weathercock La ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... have. And don't try to look like an outraged empress until your stays are covered up. Put on your dress and we'll have a game of battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. It's raining. Then we'll have some music this afternoon. My alto used to go beautifully with your soprano, and I'll get out our duets. I haven't forgotten one of the ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... those in power, for very wrong management in the affair of the mayoralty.(13) He is governed by fools, and has usually much more sense than his advisers, but never proceeds by it. I must know how your health continues after Wexford. Walk and use exercise, sirrahs both; and get somebody to play at shuttlecock with you, Madam Stella, and walk to the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... alternation, reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; bandy, transpose, shuffle, change bands, swap, permute, reciprocate, commute; give and take, return the compliment; play at puss in the corner, play at battledore and shuttlecock; retaliate &c. 718; requite. rearrange, recombine. Adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I do not call a tree generous, that sheds its fruit at every breeze.' Sir John having affected to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs, Dr Johnson said, 'Nay, sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at many of those who have written against me, have smiled to think that they were unintentionally subservient ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... beamed, her eyes danced, and she was all aglow from head to foot. The American Ambassador stood behind her, and, as permitted by his greater age, he tossed back the shuttlecock of her playful talk ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... on the afternoon of the same day, abrogated this decree. Thus, since war was in a measure declared between the Regent's authority and that of the Parliament, the orders emanating from the one were disputed by the other, and vice versa. A nice game of shuttlecock this, which it was scarce likely could ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... going I knew not; of what we were going to do I had no inkling. I only knew we were southbound, and at long last I might fairly consider myself to be the shuttlecock of fortune. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... keen and exciting; a ball was driven backwards and forwards, over hills, dales, hedges, and ditches, through bushes, briars, mires, plashes, and rivers, until at length the wished-for goal was gained. Battledore and shuttlecock were favourite games for the girls, which ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Many of my dreams were, if anything, harder to bear than my delusions of the day, for what little reason I had was absolutely suspended in sleep. Almost every night my brain was at battledore and shuttlecock with weird thoughts. And if not all my dreams were terrifying, this fact seemed to be only because a perverted and perverse Reason, in order that its possessor might not lose the capacity for suffering, knew how to keep Hope alive ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... l'Epee, we used to converse for hours, and then I used to walk back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques. But as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game of battledore and shuttlecock being renewed several times. Social and philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us. This fateful year ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... picked, and put into the bosom of her dress, a little belated monthly rose, warm and pink at the heart, but with blighted outer petals. She found it impossible to pursue any one line of thought to its logical outcome; her mind flew like a shuttlecock between a dozen plans for William King's defeat. "Oh, I must decide on something!" she thought, desperately. But the futile morning passed without decision. After dinner she went resolutely into ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... have done, what any man retaining his common sense would have done the moment he got his hands upon the thing, was to turn off the tap. Then he might have played foot-ball with the man, or battledore and shuttlecock as he pleased; and the twenty or thirty people who had rushed forward to assist would have only applauded. His idea, however, as he explained to us afterwards, was to take away the hose from the man, and, for punishment, turn it upon the fool ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... out for fools to sport with, sir! Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn't the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the path of peace? What matters it though many things that we would fain keep are withdrawn from us, if by the withdrawal we are sent a little further forward on the road that leads to God? As George Herbert says, sorrows and joys are like battledores that drive a shuttlecock, and they may all 'toss us to His breast.' In faith, however infantile it may be, there is an undeveloped capacity, a germ of fitness, for dwelling with God. But that capacity is meant to be increased, and the little children are meant to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... same sort, which were not less popular. Skittles; la Soule or Soulette, which consisted of a large ball of hay covered over with leather, the possession of which was contested for by two opposing sides of players; Football; open Tennis; Shuttlecock, &c. It was Charles V. who first thought of giving a more serious and useful character to the games of the people, and who, in a celebrated edict forbidding games of chance, encouraged the establishment of companies of archers ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... again on the grossness of instincts. Thus do the sentiments which are naturally the strongest lose their point and sharpness; their rich and polished remains are converted into playthings for the drawing room, and, thus cast to and fro by the whitest hands, fall on the floor like a shuttlecock. We must, on this point, listen to the heroes of the epoch; their free and easy tone is inimitable, and it depicts both them and their actions. "I conducted myself," says the Duc de Lauzun, "very prudently, and even deferentially with Mme. de Lauzun; I knew Mme. de Cambis very openly, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... gracefully withdrew with this parting speech, and from that time Rosa occupied the restless position of shuttlecock between these two battledores. Nothing could be done without a smart match being played out. Thus, on the daily-arising question of dinner, Miss Twinkleton would say, the three ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... weeks he had learned to regard her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and pagan philosophy. Then he looked across to the river ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... tutor; but what you mean I can't think, and I do wish you'd speak out plainly and tell me if you are in any trouble about money; because, you know, you need not go spending it on me. I'm quite content to play battledore and shuttlecock in the hall, and I didn't want ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... lion, as out of place here as Kathlyn herself; his tail slashed, there was a long black streak from his mane to his tail where the hair had risen. Kathlyn crouched even lower. The lion trotted round the sarcophagus, sniffing. Presently he lifted his head and roared. The echoes played battledore and shuttlecock with the sound. The lion roared again, this time at the insulting echoes. For a few minutes the noise was deafening. A rumble as of distant thunder, and ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... immediately after we had passed them, we entered an elegant treillage of honeysuckles, roses, and eglantine, which formed the grand entrance to the garden. Here a most animated scene of festivity opened upon us. On one side were rope dancers, people riding at the ring, groups of persons playing at shuttlecock, which seemed to be the favourite, and I may add, the most ridiculous diversion; on the other side, were dancers, tumblers, mountebanks, and parties, all with gay countenances, seated in little bowers enjoying lemonade, and ices. In the centre as we advanced, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... us better at the moment," answered Wilding with a touch of sharpness. He turned to the frowning and perplexed Duke—whose mind was being tossed this way and that, like a shuttlecock upon the battledore of these men's words. "Your Grace," he said, "forgive me that I speak it if hear it you will, or forbid me to say it if your resolve is unalterable in ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... be imagined how sick it makes me for an hour or two, and, which is the misery, all that time one must be using some kind of exercise. Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on't that ever you saw. I make her play at shuttlecock with me, and she is the veriest bungler at it ever you saw. Then am I ready to beat her with the battledore, and grow so peevish as I grow sick, that I'll undertake she wishes there were no steel in England. ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... know what I am talking about. And I tell you that the moment you two got your divorce, you said good-bye to all peace and quiet. Bless you'—Sam's manner became fatherly—'I've seen it a hundred times. Couple get divorced, and, if there's a child, what happens? They start in playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with him. Wife sneaks him from husband. Husband sneaks him back from wife. After a while along comes a gentleman in my line of business, a professional at the game, and he puts one across on both the amateurs. He takes advantage of the confusion, slips in, and ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... majesty, I wish there were no geography and history in the world, and then I should not have to study so cruelly hard, and I could play more. My mother sent me last week a new battledore and shuttlecock, but I can never learn to play with it. I no sooner begin, than Herr Behnisch calls me to study. To-day I was very cunning—oh, I was so sly! I put it in the great-pocket of my tutor's coat, and he brought ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... eighteen years of age. On the whole, the position of the apprentice, whether by land or sea, was highly anomalous and uncertain. Often taken by the gang in the hurry of visiting a ship, or in the scurry of a hot press on shore, he was in effect the shuttlecock of the service, to-day singing merrily at his capstan or bench, to-morrow bewailing his hard fate ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... philosopher should, and does, scorn such an itch of the mind, well knowing that were he foolish enough to let it affect his actions or guide his conduct he would straightway cease to be a philosopher, and become instead a sort of human shuttlecock, for ever tossing here and there, from pillar to post, under the unreasoning blows of that battledore which had been his mind. Nay, rather the strappado for me, at any time, than abandonment to foolishness so ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... earnest until now. He scraped with all his might and main. Poor Twirling-stick Mike groaned, and his unhappy head dropped exhausted upon his breast. Miserable man, his last capers were cut! His dancing was no longer worth mentioning. He went up a little way, like a baby's shuttlecock, and came down again feebly and dull. The ducats poured out. The bags swelled; playing and dancing—dancing, such as it was—went forward, and one terrible hour passed away. At last the wrists of the farmer snapped asunder; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... have plenty of play and fun when they are not in school. In both towns and villages the streets are the playground, and here they play ball, or battledore and shuttlecock, or fly kites. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... insects whose efforts have encrusted the islands of the Pacific with vast rocks and surrounded them with enormous reefs. And I observed that many of these insects, though extremely minute, were very beautiful, coming out of their holes in a circle of fine threads, and having the form of a shuttlecock. Here I saw curious little barnacles opening a hole in their backs and constantly putting out a thin, feathery hand, with which, I doubt not, they dragged their food into their mouths. Here, also, I saw those crabs which have shells only on the front of their bodies, ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... games when Primrose came over, or when Cousin Rotherwood had us down in his study or in the hall; but Fly got tired, and knocked up very soon even then. Miss Elbury wanted us always to play battledore and shuttlecock, or Les Graces, if we couldn't ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to a shrubbery of laurels; while I waited for her I was pacing the broad lawn, of meagre close-cropped grass already faded by the sun, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from the path, another little girl, who was putting on her cloak and covering up her battledore, called out sharply: "Good-bye, Gilberte, I'm going home now; don't forget, we're coming to you ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and a night he was a sort of shuttlecock tossed between these alternating moods, and he was still the same when he paced the quadrangle with bowed head and hands clasped behind him awaiting Samoval at a few minutes before twelve of the following night. The windows ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... drawings which represent a lost painting, there is a noble one of Bishop Fisher, whose execution preceded More's by only a few weeks. A literally venerable head it was (Plate 21), to be the shuttlecock of papal defiance and royal determination not to be defied with impunity. For assuredly if the life of the Bishop of Rochester hung in the balance, as it did, in May, 1535, it was Paul III.'s mad effrontery in ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... pleasingly there and here, broken by white clouds that relieve the eye without obscuring the light. At the farthest end of the lawn from the house were some fine trees, under the shelter of which two girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock, and very well they played too. A little nearer this way, that is where John and the carriage stood, in the direction of the house, was a young child seated on the turf holding a dog, whilst two other children were trying to make it jump to catch a flower, ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... Mops and the boys were eating dates from a bowl and pelting each other with the stones, while a new member of the family, a seemingly sexless being in a blue sash and shoulder knots, called "Baby," galloped up and down the room with a battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... man's heart has been treated as a football. Yes; but many a woman's heart has been treated as a shuttlecock. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... Moss. "Oh, Miss Pritchard, couldn't you go back with me to-night and then all of us talk it over together? I don't believe we'll ever come to any understanding unless you do. My flying back and forth between you like a shuttlecock isn't ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... lessons in writing, and copied, at the king's desire, passages from the works of Montesquieu and others, for the use of the Dauphin. Then Clery took Louis to his aunt's room, where they played at ball, and battledore and shuttlecock, till Louis's supper-time, at eight o'clock. Meanwhile the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, till eight o'clock, when they went to Louis, to sit beside him while he had his supper. Then the king amused the children ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... horse and I had a habit of parting company. On one occasion I found myself suddenly prostrate in the streets of York, much to the delight of the Dissenters. Another time my horse Calamity flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful it was not into a neighbouring planet; but as no harm came of it, I might have persevered perhaps, if, on a certain day, a Quaker tailor from a neighbouring village to which I had said I was going to ride, had not taken it into his head ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... holidays were pleasant things, too. Saturday afternoons were always welcome, and all the weeks through we were planning what we would do when they came. Of course these plans were sometimes upset by a rainy day; but, even then, what with battledore and shuttlecock, painting and spinning tops, we contrived to make out the time ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... learnedly discourse on all manner of sage subjects, but that is discussion, debate, argument, what you will, not conversation. Conversation is light, brilliant, and tossed back and forth from one to another with the grace and ease of the feathered shuttlecock. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... amused ourselves within doors, for there is no stirring abroad, with playing at cards, playing at shuttlecock, playing the fool, making love, and making moral reflexions: upon the whole, the week ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... day, and the children had to content themselves with skating and battledore and shuttlecock in the verandahs. Lord Carrington, Tom, and Mabelle went for a long walk, calling on Cardinal Moran, and paying visits to the picture-gallery, the Anglican cathedral, and other places; and after an early dinner at 6.45 all the party ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jack, this morning, knocked his shuttlecock through his bedroom window. I was going to send for the glazier to mend it; but after you lent that five pounds I was sure we couldn't afford it. Oh, no! the window must go as it is; and pretty weather for a dear child to sleep ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... again in a moment with a badminton racket and a shuttlecock. "On the bulldog—one round rapid fire." He fired and with a loud ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... blue sky looks most pleasingly there and here, broken by white clouds that relieve the eye without obscuring the light. At the farthest end of the lawn from the house were some fine trees, under the shelter of which two girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock, and very well they played too. A little nearer this way, that is where John and the carriage stood, in the direction of the house, was a young child seated on the turf holding a dog, whilst two other children were trying to make it jump ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... clouds; here, if there is dewy or rain-besprinkled pasture, it tells of a luminous silvery colour by reason of the light which the clouds reflect upon it; the bottom edges of the clouds are also light through the reflection upward from the grass, but I do not know which begins this battledore and shuttlecock arrangement. These things are like quarrels between two old and intimate friends; one can never say who begins them. Sometimes on a dull gray day like this, I have seen the shadow parts of clouds take a greenish-ashen-coloured tinge from the ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... she asked, putting her arm affectionately round his neck. "You see I am a girl, and perhaps I may like many things that you will not care about. Let me consider. We can arrange my doll's house, or we can play at paying visits; and I have two battledores and a shuttlecock, which I will teach you how to use; and then you must come out and help me to feed my chickens. I have also a garden of my own, and I am sure granny will let you have a piece of ground near it, or else you shall have part of mine, and you can learn how to keep it neat and pretty. ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston
... sounded simple, but they proved to be anything but simple to follow. Like a shuttlecock, Jasper was tossed from clerk to clerk, until by the time he reached his destination he was confused, ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... and from his tone I gathered that all was not rosy in the life of the infant in this game of battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... character of the palm is given not only by their lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussu and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all species ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... The Shuttlecock's a handsome fowl to see, His feathers grow straight upward like a tree. He cannot crow, but oftentimes his flight Will reach up to a most astounding height. He is a gamecock, and, in fighting trim, There are not many ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... band that stuck up like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any slight movement disturbed it. The King's dandies were dressed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his friends making a day of it. Accordingly, he had made elaborate preparations for enjoyment. With that practical sagacity which frequently distinguishes the nautical mind, he had provided bowls and quoits for the men; battledore and shuttlecock for the younger women; football and cricket and hoops, with some incomprehensible Eastern games for the children, and a large field at the side of the cottage afforded room for all without much chance ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... rubbed the hands of the red-jerseyed one. Bobbie burned the feathers of the shuttlecock one by one under his nose, Phyllis splashed warmish milk on his forehead, and all three kept on saying as fast and as ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... derisively. 'It's blithering irony to talk of us Leura squatters as representing capital. We're all playing a sort of battledore and shuttlecock game—tossed about between drought and plenty—boom and slump. A kick in the beam and one end is up and the other end down. There's Windeatt, who will be ruined if his wool-shed is destroyed and his shearing spoiled. No rain, and the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... be very unlike his great father, and showed himself a miserable puny creature. There was no harm in him—he had a great aversion to shedding blood: which was something—but, he was a weak, silly, helpless young man, and a mere shuttlecock to the great lordly ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... seems to have been made a regular shuttlecock of by the contending armies. Stonewall Jackson rescued it once, and last Sunday week his successor, General Ewell, drove out Milroy. The name of Milroy is always associated with that of Butler, and his rule in Winchester seems to have been somewhat similar to that of his illustrious ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... martyrdom which he tells so well and tells so often. Lucifer himself could not be more arrogant or more audacious than this bewitching boy-lover of mine, who writes verses in English or Latin as easy as I can toss a shuttlecock. I doubt the greater number of his verses are scarce proper reading for you or me, Angela; for I see the men gather round him in corners as he murmurs his latest madrigal to a chosen half-dozen or so; and I guess by their subdued tittering that the lines are not over modest; ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... again passionately. 'Am I poisoning even the memory of our past for you?' he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was not ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... indifference to ambition. The watchwords of party appeared to him ridiculous; and politics in general—what a great moralist termed one question in particular—a shuttlecock kept up by the contention of noisy children. His mind thus rested as to all public matters in a state of quietude, and covered over with the mantle of a most false, a most perilous philosophy. His appetites to ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... manoevures yo mind, for talk abaat fugal men i' th' army wen thay throw thair guns up into th' air an' catches em agean, thay wur nowt ta Joe, for he span his slay boards up an' daan just like a shuttlecock. But wal this wur goin' on th' storm began to abate, and th' water seemed to get less, but still thay kept at it. Wal at last a chap at thay called Dave Twirler shaated aat at he saw summat, and thay look't way at he pointed, ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... suddenly lifted a slender voice and announced five. She turned round on her stool and sat staring at the clock. She smiled with the corners of her mouth down. "Home," she said, "and begin again. It's like battledore and shuttlecock.... ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... you?" The question was asked of Mr. Beckett, and thrown lightly as a shuttlecock over the old man's head to us in the next room. It was asked in English, with a curiously winning accent, neither Italian nor Irish, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Western Swale,—now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... the conversation—the shuttlecock of wrath being briskly battled from one sister ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... daughter and his sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a whole day in different conveyances, the last of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... last six weeks he had learned to regard her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and pagan philosophy. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... feel, of course," admitted Mrs. Moss. "Oh, Miss Pritchard, couldn't you go back with me to-night and then all of us talk it over together? I don't believe we'll ever come to any understanding unless you do. My flying back and forth between you like a shuttlecock isn't going to ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... hands, which trembled a little, to the interior of the mummy, whence they drew out a basket, labelled (wonderful to relate) 'Val,' and containing—oh! such treasures, a blue egg full of needlework implements, a new book, an Indian ivory case, a skipping-rope, a shuttlecock, and other delights past description. The exhibition of them was only beginning when the Professor called for Primrose, who was too much frightened to come alone, and therefore was permitted to be brought by Mrs. Halfpenny. The Sphynx was particularly amiable on this occasion, and only asked ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they have in delitiis, as many of our ladies and gentlewomen use monkeys and little dogs. The ordinary recreations which we have in winter, and in most solitary times busy our minds with, are cards, tables and dice, shovelboard, chess-play, the philosopher's game, small trunks, shuttlecock, billiards, music, masks, singing, dancing, Yule-games, frolics, jests, riddles, catches, purposes, questions and commands, [3283]merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, cheaters, witches, fairies, goblins, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... they have plenty of play and fun when they are not in school. In both towns and villages the streets are the playground, and here they play ball, or battledore and shuttlecock, or ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... had put his criticism of our time and civilization in an argument or essay, the world would have received it very differently. As an intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with it and tossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it when we tired of it, as we do other criticism. But he gave it to us as a man, as a personality, and we find it too strong for us. It is easier to deal with a theory than with the concrete reality. ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... seemed all the rest of their quiet lives. But Miss Dilly was ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... chance was lost, with so many others. The war came to an end and a few weeks afterwards the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had so long played shuttlecock with the national destinies of Ireland, went to crashing doom and disaster at the polls. The country had found them out for what they were, and it cast them into that outer darkness from which, for ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... lighthouse, running their boat into the sea in the lee of the rocks, and pulling strongly for the wreck. Father and daughter both labored at the oars, unable to speak on account of the roar of the sea and wind, and blinded by the spray that whirled over them. Their boat was tossed like a shuttlecock in the great waves, and they knew that unless the shipwrecked persons could aid them it would be impossible to return to the lighthouse. They must succeed or die, and their chance ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... decks that rang above the roaring wind. Two days later we fought a large caravel. With a fortunate shot she brought down our foremast, and sailed away from us with small damage of her own. All that day and night the wind blew, driving us out of our course, and by dawn we were as a shuttlecock between it and the sea. We weathered the gale, but when the wind sank there fell on board that black ship ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... of sleep itself. Though I slept fairly well most of the time, mine was seldom a dreamless sleep. Many of my dreams were, if anything, harder to bear than my delusions of the day, for what little reason I had was absolutely suspended in sleep. Almost every night my brain was at battledore and shuttlecock with weird thoughts. And if not all my dreams were terrifying, this fact seemed to be only because a perverted and perverse Reason, in order that its possessor might not lose the capacity for suffering, knew how to keep Hope alive with visions which supplied the contrast ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... tumbled after him, and I followed too, as quickly as I could get along and the motion of the ship would allow me, being buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between the bulwarks and deck-house in my progress onwards, as well as drenched by the spray, which came hurtling inboards over the main-chains from windward as it was borne along by the breeze, wetting everything amidships and soaking ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Squire Western could have cared less for antiquarian associations, but Bentham made a very fair monk. The place, for which he paid L315 a year, was congenial. He rode his favourite hobby of gardening, and took his regular 'ante-jentacular' and 'post-prandial' walks, and played battledore and shuttlecock in the intervals of codification. He liked it so well that he would have taken it for life, but for the loss of L8000 or L10,000 in a Devonshire marble-quarry.[303] In 1818 he gave it up, and thenceforward rarely quitted Queen's Square Place. His life was varied by few incidents, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... at her right side. A scarlet over-sash kept the large sash-knot in its place. Her hair was gay with knot of scarlet crinkled crepe, lacquered comb, and hairpin of tiny golden battledore. Resting thereon were a shuttlecock of coral, another pin of a tiny red lobster and a green pine sprig made of silk. In her belt was coquettishly stuck the butterfly-broidered case that held her quire of paper pocket-handkerchiefs. The brother's dress was of a simpler ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... had placed Captain Bertram next to herself by the coffee-tray, and had planted Matty at his other side, so that he was in a measure hemmed in, and if he did not talk to Matty had no one to fall back on but herself, who, of course, would quickly, using the metaphor of battledore and shuttlecock, toss him back to her daughter—having arranged all this, what should Bell do but put ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... lies in the stabler policy it will ensure. Our present system results in frequent sharp overturns, according as this party or that may get a temporary majority. But this battledore and shuttlecock of legislation does not represent the far more gradual changes in public opinion. A system whereby the number of representatives of each party is always directly proportioned to the number of votes cast ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... were many strangers with us; and in the afternoon I played at shuttlecock with young cousin Emil, to whom we were so kind, and who deserved our kindness so well. How it happened I cannot tell, but before long Ernst took his place, and was my partner in the game. He looked unusually animated, and I felt myself more at ease with him than common. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... of the gentlemen of His Majesty's closet, and one with whom the revered monarch was on terms of considerable intimacy. A close regard had sprung up between them in the old King's time; when His Royal Highness, playing at battledore and shuttlecock with the young lord on the landing-place of the great staircase at Kew, in some moment of irritation the Prince of Wales kicked the young Earl downstairs, who, falling, broke his leg. The Prince's hearty repentance ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sick it makes me for an hour or two, and, which is the misery, all that time one must be using some kind of exercise. Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on't that ever you saw. I make her play at shuttlecock with me, and she is the veriest bungler at it ever you saw. Then am I ready to beat her with the battledore, and grow so peevish as I grow sick, that I'll undertake she wishes there were no steel in England. But then to recompense the morning, I am in good humour all the day after for joy that I ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of governments; no hint of "the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all the time. They play many pretty games. Chinese boys, too, have many kinds of games and toys. One game is like battledoor and shuttlecock. They use their feet to strike the shuttlecock. They do this so fast that the shuttlecock hardly ever falls to the ground. The Chinese are fond of flying kites. Even old men fly kites. They fly their kites in the spring-time. Chinese kites are ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... wish there were no geography and history in the world, and then I should not have to study so cruelly hard, and I could play more. My mother sent me last week a new battledore and shuttlecock, but I can never learn to play with it. I no sooner begin, than Herr Behnisch calls me to study. To-day I was very cunning—oh, I was so sly! I put it in the great-pocket of my tutor's coat, and he brought it here without ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking with the heel. His vocal music to our ears ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... again, and let the[1] sound From one pole to another pole rebound; The earth and sky each be a battledore, And keep the sound, that shuttlecock, up an hour: To Doctors' Commons for a licence I Swift as an arrow ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... of the empty, echoing courtyard, Nana, Pauline and other big girls engaged in games of battledore and shuttlecock. They had grown up together and were now becoming queens of their building. Whenever a man crossed the court, flutelike laugher would arise, and then starched skirts would rustle like the passing of a ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Because, if you knew anything at all about love, you couldn't pay with it as you do. Even the love you've no use for is the biggest thing the poor devil who loves you has to offer you; you've no right to play battledore and shuttlecock with it." ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... would not have accepted a place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the cheapest ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the adjunct of every country house—a large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches and a piano in the room. At one end was a slightly-raised ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... based upon reason than is a bilious headache. The philosopher should, and does, scorn such an itch of the mind, well knowing that were he foolish enough to let it affect his actions or guide his conduct he would straightway cease to be a philosopher, and become instead a sort of human shuttlecock, for ever tossing here and there, from pillar to post, under the unreasoning blows of that battledore which had been his mind. Nay, rather the strappado for me, at any time, than abandonment to foolishness so crass ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... again by scores. Now let us see how good a shot you are. Two cocks on the topmost branch of that old maple, full forty yards to the trunk. No, no! don't get any nearer, for they see you. Well done! Hear him thump on the leaves; and here comes the other, fluttering round and round like a shuttlecock. Ten to one that you shot him through the head. There! I told you so! His wings are not hurt, but a shot has cut away his bill. Here, Dancer, don't bite him so, but bring him here! Chick, chick, churr! Mister Red-squirrel, we'll 'give you a few,' as Jared used ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... accomplishment. Kite-flying has reached a high level of skill. Clever little "messengers" have been devised, which run up the string, carrying fire-crackers which explode at a great height. There is a game of shuttlecock, without the battledore, for which the feet are used as a substitute; and "diavolo," recently introduced into Europe, is an ancient Chinese pastime. A few Manchus, too, may be seen skating during the long northern winter, but the modern ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... and after him; and he heaved a great many profound sighs, and drank a great many glasses of sack, and came to the sorrowful conclusion that Dame Fortune was a malicious jade, inclined to poke fun at his best affections, and make a shuttlecock of his heart for the rest of his life. He thought, too, of Count L'Estrange; and the longer he thought, the more he became convinced that he knew him well, and had met him often. But where? He racked his brain until, between love, Leoline, and the count, he got that ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... furniture specially made for her youthful Majesty, and used exclusively by her. The frames are of the finest over-burnish, the plush upholstery being decorated with the rarest specimens of art needlework. On one of the little tables you will note a battledore and shuttlecock, with another thrown upon the floor, as though the player had been suddenly interrupted in the midst of her play. Very ordinary make and shape are these toys, such as you may see in any middle-class English home, and each of them looking like favourites—judging from the signs ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... this peculiar education and training kept me far ahead of other girls, and while they were scarcely out of the nursery, and still enjoying battledore and shuttlecock, I was seeking information, either by reading or conversation, concerning my ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... andante contemplatif, which deserves its epithet, but falls after a time into rather uninteresting moods, whence it breaks only at the last period. The opening chorus, "God Is Our Refuge and Strength," seems to me to be built on a rather trite and empty subject, which it plays battledore and shuttlecock with in the brave old pompous and canonic style, which stands for little beyond science and labor. It is only fair to say, however, that A.J. Goodrich, in his "Musical Analysis," praises "the strength and dignity" of this chorus; and gives a minute analysis of the whole work with liberal ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... power; and, tobacco or no tobacco, the line must be drawn there. If the charges against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if not, his term should be extended beyond the original commission. A new commission was given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock experience seems to have quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of quarrels with the Virginia council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in 1642 came Sir William Berkeley. This man, who was born about the beginning of ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... has chosen just now to turn head over heels. In turning, it struck the Halbrane and carried it off just as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and now here we are, stranded at certainly one hundred feet above the level ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... the world, despite its grandeur and its beauty, is a world of folly and contradictions; that whatever exists and is formed, bears within itself the germ of death and corruption; that the Lord of all creation himself is but the shuttlecock of irresistible, absolute force, compelling the unconditional surrender of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... mockery of it rang in his ears: where is the God that this man proclaimed? he saw the newspaper headlines, listened in imagination to cynical comments, beheld his name trailed through the soiled places of the cities, the shuttlecock of men and women. "To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The shuttlecock of conversation was well kept up from all sides of the table, and when Regina's thoughts crept back from their numbing reverie, Mr. Chesley was eloquently describing some of the most picturesque localities ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Madame Riennes to wit—there was something stronger than himself which would make him go. It was the old story over again set out by St. Paul once and for ever, that of the two laws which make a shuttlecock of man so that he must do what he wills not. Having once given way to Madame Riennes, who was to him a kind of sin incarnate, he had become her servant, and if she wished to put him to sleep, or to do anything else with him, well, however much ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... order to see Bruce,[121] and after some shuttlecock sort of work, sending and being sent from office to office and Prefet to Prefet, at length we ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... when she might have said it to a merchant's son. Aunt Pen watched and approved this stratagem, hoped for the best results, and believed the day won when Debby grew pale and silent, and followed with her eyes the young couple who were playing battledoor and shuttlecock with each other's hearts, as if she took some interest in the game. But Aunt Pen clashed her cymbals too soon; for Debby's trouble had a better source than jealousy, and in the silence of the sleepless nights that stole her bloom she was taking counsel of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... was one comfort for her. None knew of her weakness. Her mind had vacillated like a shuttlecock, but no one had seen the vacillation. She was in his hands, and she must simply do as he bade her. Then she went down to Mrs Baggett's room, and told the old lady to go up-stairs at her master's behest. "I'm a-going," said Mrs Baggett. "I'm a-going. I ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... Eighteenth dynasty was thus restored. But it lasted barely three years. In B.C. 605 the Egyptians were defeated by Nebuchadrezzar under the walls of Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Asia passed into the possession of the Babylonians. Once more Palestine became a shuttlecock between the kingdoms of the Nile and the Euphrates. Trusting to the support of Egypt, Zedekiah of Judah revolted from his Babylonian master. His policy at first seemed successful. The Babylonian army which was besieging Jerusalem retired on the approach of Psammetikhos II., ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... and suspense followed, during which Amanda strove manfully; Matilda suffered agonies of hope and fear; and Lavinia remained a passive shuttlecock, waiting to be tossed wherever Fate's battledore ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... ridicule and withering scorn distinctive of true friendship and cordial intimacy. Then is each fully and formally debated, every tussle advancing it a stage, and none finally accepted until all the others have fallen in the battledore-and-shuttlecock process to which they have been subjected. Then, when the subject is settled, comes the consideration of the details—what should the grouping be? what the accessories? how many figures?—(during the hunting season John Leech would decline to introduce more than two, as his week-end ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... shuttlecock, shrieking as she fell; and as she struck the water, the drowned bodies of the men she had sent there came to the surface, and caught her by the feet and hair, and drew her down, making an end of her, as she also had made ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... his sisters' games began to bore him. His strong arms no longer wanted to play battledore and shuttlecock, they longed to throw stones. The squabbles over a petty game of croquet, which demanded neither muscle ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making,—providing that the players can be quite sure that there shall be no heart in the matter. Any touch of ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as shuttlecock and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the harmless blows which are so valuable a training in endurance ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... one stared, with a dignified stride And without a word more, He marched on before, Up a flight of stone steps, and so through the front door, To the banqueting-hall that was on the first floor, While the fiendish assembly were making a rare Little shuttlecock there of the curly-wigged Heir. —I wish, gentle Reader, that you could have seen The pause that ensued when he stepped in between, With his resolute air, and his dignified mien, And said, in a tone most ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... drawn back, and the chest should be enlarged by taking deep inspirations of pure air. The muscles of the chest, and of every part of the body, should be free to move and unconfined by tight clothing. Fencing, shuttlecock, and such other useful sports as combine with them free movements of the upper part of the body, are doubly advantageous, for they not only exercise the muscles of the whole body, but possess the additional advantage of animating the mind and increasing the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... and bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little day ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... said Mr. Weller. "Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, when you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant. Come avay, sir. If you want to ease your mind by blowing up somebody come out into the court ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... of this is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit my household gods, please heaven. I wish the day ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; bandy, transpose, shuffle, change bands, swap, permute, reciprocate, commute; give and take, return the compliment; play at puss in the corner, play at battledore and shuttlecock; retaliate &c. 718; requite. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the English system which Englishmen generally tolerate as a necessary evil, but of which they are by no means proud. Most thinking men in this country resent the idea of Indian interests being made a shuttlecock in the strife of party. Not so Mr. Mallik. He shudders at the idea of Indian affairs being considered exclusively on their own merits. "If it is no party's duty to champion the cause of any part of the Empire, that part must be made over to Satan, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... over a book; he loved to amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on some smiling ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now—I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... she dreamed. It seemed to her that the count and Sir Norman were before her, in her chamber in the old house on London Bridge, tossing her heart between them like a sort of shuttlecock. By-and-by, with two things like two drumsticks, they began hammering away at the poor, little, fluttering heart, as if it were an anvil and they were a pair of blacksmiths, while the loud knocks upon it resounded through the room. For ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... age. On the whole, the position of the apprentice, whether by land or sea, was highly anomalous and uncertain. Often taken by the gang in the hurry of visiting a ship, or in the scurry of a hot press on shore, he was in effect the shuttlecock of the service, to-day singing merrily at his capstan or bench, to-morrow bewailing his hard ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... had lain down again, and a sleepy snort, very like a snore, revealed that, if he was not already asleep, he was past understanding a word that Ruby was saying. When young Diamond found this, he thought he might venture to take up the dropt shuttlecock of the conversation. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... sprang forward at once, although the doomed voyager was manifestly beyond the reach of help. But even as they did so, the crisis came. With one leap the boat was in the midst of the rapids, banged to and fro like a shuttlecock by the white leaping waves, amid which it appeared and vanished by turns, till a final plunge sent it right toward ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... motionless, looking ahead beyond the oasis, beyond the stars, to the moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of the bougainvillaea, until upon the background ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... to answer stupid questions," said the woman. "My sons have plenty of business on hand; they are playing at shuttlecock with the clouds up yonder in the king's hall," ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... order, but to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... its sacred stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood (March 25, 1437). The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers. The Earl of Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the important post of Commander ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... depression varied according to accidental variations in the outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces of his respective charmers. Passing and repassing several times a day from the company of the one to that of the other, he was like a shuttlecock between two battledores, changing its direction as rapidly as the oscillations of a pendulum, receiving many a hard knock on the cork of a sensitive heart, and flying from point to point on the feathers of a super-sublimated head. This was an awful state of things. He had now as much mystery ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... never played in right earnest until now. He scraped with all his might and main. Poor Twirling-stick Mike groaned, and his unhappy head dropped exhausted upon his breast. Miserable man, his last capers were cut! His dancing was no longer worth mentioning. He went up a little way, like a baby's shuttlecock, and came down again feebly and dull. The ducats poured out. The bags swelled; playing and dancing—dancing, such as it was—went forward, and one terrible hour passed away. At last the wrists of the farmer snapped asunder; his hands and the bags of gold fell to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... past; he loved this bright young creature with the whole force of his rugged nature, and began dimly to comprehend that she cared no more for him or his sufferings than if his heart had been a football or shuttlecock. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... hour while the king enjoyed a nap. As soon as he awoke, Clery, who had been with the Dauphin for several years, would give him writing and arithmetic lessons, and then he would play ball or battledore-and-shuttlecock for awhile, and then there would be reading aloud until it was time for the Dauphin's supper, after which the king would amuse his children with all sorts of riddles and puzzles and games, and then the ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and courageous heart. He cannot improve his condition by any short-cut course or by artificial methods. Above all, he must not be deluded into believing that his condition can be permanently bettered by a mere battledoor [sic] and shuttlecock of words, or by any process of mere mental gymnastics or oratory. What is desired along with a logical defense of his cause are deeds, results,—continued results, in the direction of building himself up, so as to leave no doubt ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... changed, it is quite on the cards that I shall be able to find language explicit enough to express the desire. My whole desire is to avoid complication of addresses. It is quite fatal. If two P. R.'s have contradictory orders they will continue to play battledoor and shuttlecock with an unhappy epistle, which will never get farther afield ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down but ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... window oftener than over a book; he loved to amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... who, with exceptional abilities and exceptional opportunity for exercising those abilities, could contentedly fill his empty days with the manufacture of blacking, or pass an entire night, as Gronow relates him to have done, playing battledore and shuttlecock for a wager with Ball Hughes, was, in much, a typical product of his generation. His mannerisms were accepted by his contemporaries with a forbearance which bordered on admiration, and, however childish ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... the blue sky looks most pleasingly there and here, broken by white clouds that relieve the eye without obscuring the light. At the farthest end of the lawn from the house were some fine trees, under the shelter of which two girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock, and very well they played too. A little nearer this way, that is where John and the carriage stood, in the direction of the house, was a young child seated on the turf holding a dog, whilst two other children were trying to make it jump ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... women, but might give themselves up without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery; that when by any mischance a Templar infringed this order, and a child was born, the whole order met, and tossed it about like a shuttlecock from one to the other until it expired; that they then roasted it by a slow fire, and with the fat which trickled from it anointed the hair and beard of a large image of the devil. It was also said that when one of the knights ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... had sounded simple, but they proved to be anything but simple to follow. Like a shuttlecock, Jasper was tossed from clerk to clerk, until by the time he reached his destination he was confused, breathless, ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live, is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... her also make sure that her girls have whatever chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as shuttlecock and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the harmless blows which are so valuable a ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... certain order, but to the profit of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the system lies in the stabler policy it will ensure. Our present system results in frequent sharp overturns, according as this party or that may get a temporary majority. But this battledore and shuttlecock of legislation does not represent the far more gradual changes in public opinion. A system whereby the number of representatives of each party is always directly proportioned to the number of votes cast for ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... reciprocation, transposition, rearrangement; shuffling; alternation, reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; bandy, transpose, shuffle, change bands, swap, permute, reciprocate, commute; give and take, return the compliment; play at puss in the corner, play at battledore and shuttlecock; retaliate &c. 718; requite. rearrange, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Nanking played ball and bandy with the Susquehannock boys, and taught them jack-stones and how to make a shuttlecock. They put eagle's feathers in his hair, and the old men adopted him into their tribe. On the third day the absent Indians returned with a stork. It was a white stork with a red bill and plenty of stork's neck, but short legs. Nanking doubted if it could stand ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... he whispered to his daughter and his sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith was ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... forego her misguided love of power and her tendency to practical joking, and one day she even made two grave philosophers, who were holding a profound discussion in her presence over some deep philosophic subject, suddenly cease their arguments to play with her at battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... to ensue; and after his breakfast stood at a window watching the dripping trees and whistling so softly one could not tell whether 'twere he or the birds chirping without. Cedric and Lady Constance played at battledore and shuttlecock. Mistress Penwick sat apart, busy with thought and needle. His Grace of Ellswold sat up that morning, his wife and physicians by his side, and all were happy with the ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... masses of men, habituated to obey their leaders, among whom to change their vote is stigmatized as the treason of an Arnold, and between which the popular will is driven helplessly from side to side, like a shuttlecock between two battledores? Politics cleans our streets, regulates our education, and so on; it is not to be wondered at that it intrudes into the military sphere, with confidence all the greater because it is there especially ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... to walk back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques. But as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game of battledore and shuttlecock being renewed several times. Social and philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us. This fateful year was not more successful than we ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... from a bowl and pelting each other with the stones, while a new member of the family, a seemingly sexless being in a blue sash and shoulder knots, called "Baby," galloped up and down the room with a battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... elegant treillage of honeysuckles, roses, and eglantine, which formed the grand entrance to the garden. Here a most animated scene of festivity opened upon us. On one side were rope dancers, people riding at the ring, groups of persons playing at shuttlecock, which seemed to be the favourite, and I may add, the most ridiculous diversion; on the other side, were dancers, tumblers, mountebanks, and parties, all with gay countenances, seated in little bowers enjoying lemonade, and ices. In the centre as we advanced, were about three ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... He put forth his arm and found that it was so—there was no chair there and no figure seated in the chair. It was a trick of the light and an effect of imagination, an imagination that was hounded, day by day, from depth to pinnacle, from pinnacle to depth, back and forth like a shuttlecock in giant hands. No chair was there and no seated figure. He sank back on the settle and found that he ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... twentieth century author, notwithstanding its apparent caprice, has always been governed by immutable laws. But these laws were not recognised in the benighted epoch in which we happen to live at present. On the contrary, Fashion is thought a whim, a sort of shuttlecock for the weak-minded of both sexes to make rise and fall, bound and rebound with the battledore called—social influence. But it will interest a great many people to learn that Fashion assumed the dignity of a science in 1940. Ten years later it was taken up by the University of Dublin. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... afterwards, the Dauphin again had a play hour while the king enjoyed a nap. As soon as he awoke, Clery, who had been with the Dauphin for several years, would give him writing and arithmetic lessons, and then he would play ball or battledore-and-shuttlecock for awhile, and then there would be reading aloud until it was time for the Dauphin's supper, after which the king would amuse his children with all sorts of riddles and puzzles and games, and then the Dauphin ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the while, as he talked and jested and argued and laughed and drank, his brain was playing with the question of right and wrong as a child with a shuttlecock. Without a hearty conviction of the absolute justice of the principle for which he contended, it is doubtful if Fenton could have acted the lie of assumed innocence. He had entangled the question of his guilt with that of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... many things to let him flaunt abroad the old beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short. "Know him?" he queried curtly, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty of mud. It was soon ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... choky little gurgle in her throat Aunt Jane fell limply against me. It was too much. All day long she had been tossed back and forth like a shuttlecock by the battledore of emotion. She had borne the shock of Mr. Tubbs's sordid greed for gold, his disloyalty to the expedition, his coldness to herself; she had been shaken by the tender stress of the reconciliation, had been captured by pirates, and now suffered the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... childish days. Thus attired, she looked about fourteen years old, and the shy way in which she glanced at the company from under her eyelashes, added to the impression of extreme youth. To carry out the character, she held a battledore and shuttlecock in her hand. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now—I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study: conchology, now: it always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... showed her how to play cross-touch, and puss in the corner, and tag. It was funny, she didn't know any games but battledore and shuttlecock and les graces. But she really began to laugh at last and not to look quite so like ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... hour. At six Clery and Louis entered the apartment, and Clery gave the boy lessons in writing, and copied, at the king's desire, passages from the works of Montesquieu and others, for the use of the Dauphin. Then Clery took Louis to his aunt's room, where they played at ball, and battledore and shuttlecock, till Louis's supper-time, at eight o'clock. Meanwhile the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, till eight o'clock, when they went to Louis, to sit beside him while he had his supper. Then the king amused the ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... the Natives"; but General Botha, the Minister of Native Affairs, "Father of the Natives" and supreme head of the Civil Service, seemed (or pretended) to know absolutely nothing of the manner in which his official underlings play battledore and shuttlecock with the interests of the Native population. To mention but one instance: at one stage of the interview we attempted to enlist his sympathy on behalf of the "Free" State Natives in particular, who, in spite of prohibitive laws in the Boer statute books, had not to our knowledge been debarred ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... a protective iron-work covering, thus allowing the children to come out of their nursery on the third floor freely to enjoy the air and watch the passers-by. In the sketch Maclise has characteristically put in a shuttlecock just over the wall, as though the little ones were playing in the garden. Forster calls it "a handsome house with a garden of considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a brick wall, facing the York Gate into Regent's Park;" and Dickens himself admitted it to be ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... thus restored. But it lasted barely three years. In B.C. 605 the Egyptians were defeated by Nebuchadrezzar under the walls of Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Asia passed into the possession of the Babylonians. Once more Palestine became a shuttlecock between the kingdoms of the Nile and the Euphrates. Trusting to the support of Egypt, Zedekiah of Judah revolted from his Babylonian master. His policy at first seemed successful. The Babylonian army which was besieging Jerusalem retired on the approach of ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... little, to the interior of the mummy, whence they drew out a basket, labelled (wonderful to relate) 'Val,' and containing—oh! such treasures, a blue egg full of needlework implements, a new book, an Indian ivory case, a skipping-rope, a shuttlecock, and other delights past description. The exhibition of them was only beginning when the Professor called for Primrose, who was too much frightened to come alone, and therefore was permitted to be brought by Mrs. Halfpenny. The Sphynx was particularly amiable on this occasion, and only asked 'When ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a section where they had never been before, and were playing battledore and shuttlecock with a warlike tribe of whom they knew nothing. It was impossible, therefore, for them to understand the meaning of the signal, for whose response they ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... six months had been the fullest of his life. Time had made him his shuttlecock. Fortune had played with him. It had caught him when he was up in the world and flung him to the ground, and after that had seized him afresh, and sent him flying to a higher altitude than he had ever known before. As a fact, three months had ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... that stuck up like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any slight movement disturbed it. The King's dandies were ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... excusable, but will not diminish the public contempt; on the other, we have the ill-assorted fragments of a worn-out minority; Mr. Windham with his coat twice turned, and my Lord Grenville who perhaps has more sense than he can make good use of; between the two and the shuttlecock of both, a Sidmouth, and the general football Sir F. Burdett, kicked at by all, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... draw up their histories as it were in parallel columns, and you shall see the likeness clearly; you shall see also, presently, how prettily time and the laws that govern human incarnation played battledore and shuttlecock with the two: what a game of see-saw went on ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs[1106], Dr. Johnson said, 'Nay, Sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends[1107].' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at many of those who have written against me, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the name ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... taking one side and Mr. Pedagog the other. But whatever decision may ultimately be reached, of one thing Mrs. Pedagog must be assured. I on principle side against Mr. Pedagog, and if it be the wish of my good landlady that I shall refrain from playing intellectual battledore and shuttlecock with her husband, whom we all revere, I certainly shall refrain. Hereafter if I indulge in anything that in any sense resembles repartee with our landlord, I wish it distinctly understood that ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... like this demitoilet or dinner jacket, as there is a certain informality about all athletic sports. The same may be said of badminton, another favorite Lenten game, played somewhat after the manner of tennis. The difference is that instead of racquet and ball, battledore and shuttlecock ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... emerge again in a moment with a badminton racket and a shuttlecock. "On the bulldog—one round rapid fire." He fired and with a loud snort the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... difficult to answer stupid questions," said the woman. "My sons have plenty of business on hand; they are playing at shuttlecock with the clouds up yonder in the king's hall," and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... proportioned to the former favour of the public. If he be daunted by a bad reception on this second occasion, he may again become a stranger to the arena. If, on the contrary, he can keep his ground, and stand the shuttlecock's fate, of being struck up and down, he will probably, at length, hold with some certainty the level in public opinion which he may be found to deserve; and he may perhaps boast of arresting the general attention, in the same manner as the Bachelor Samson Carrasco, of fixing ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... you, my lady, is the thing best worth seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing box." Though an exquisite, Mr. Standish is clever, entertaining, and agreeable. One day that he sat beside me at dinner, we had a delightful battledore and shuttlecock conversation from grave to gay as quick as your heart could wish: from L'Almanac des Gourmandes and Le Respectable Porc, to Dorriforth ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... and bewilderment which had been in his mind for weeks past; he loved this bright young creature with the whole force of his rugged nature, and began dimly to comprehend that she cared no more for him or his sufferings than if his heart had been a football or shuttlecock. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... once tumbled after him, and I followed too, as quickly as I could get along and the motion of the ship would allow me, being buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between the bulwarks and deck-house in my progress onwards, as well as drenched by the spray, which came hurtling inboards over the main-chains from windward as it was borne along by the breeze, wetting ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... ship contributed to this. I think I must have fainted, for I cannot recollect what happened. I had no strength to hold on or to grasp the stick, and might have been thrown helplessly about like a shuttlecock till life ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... bilious headache. The philosopher should, and does, scorn such an itch of the mind, well knowing that were he foolish enough to let it affect his actions or guide his conduct he would straightway cease to be a philosopher, and become instead a sort of human shuttlecock, for ever tossing here and there, from pillar to post, under the unreasoning blows of that battledore which had been his mind. Nay, rather the strappado for me, at any time, than abandonment to foolishness so crass as this ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... to a merchant's clerk, when she might have said it to a merchant's son. Aunt Pen watched and approved this stratagem, hoped for the best results, and believed the day won when Debby grew pale and silent, and followed with her eyes the young couple who were playing battledoor and shuttlecock with each other's hearts, as if she took some interest in the game. But Aunt Pen clashed her cymbals too soon; for Debby's trouble had a better source than jealousy, and in the silence of the sleepless nights that stole her bloom she was taking counsel of her own full ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... by his sisters' games began to bore him. His strong arms no longer wanted to play battledore and shuttlecock, they longed to throw stones. The squabbles over a petty game of croquet, which demanded neither muscle nor ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... questioned if we were authorized in accounting them as being equally from Heaven. But such distinctions are fatal to peace. Our souls were kept in constant perturbation, as we accounted ourselves the shuttlecock of rival powers, now God's, now man's. And we ended in ruling God out of more than half our life, and regarding ourselves as the hapless prey of strong and malicious forces to which we were sold, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... do not work all the time. They play many pretty games. Chinese boys, too, have many kinds of games and toys. One game is like battledoor and shuttlecock. They use their feet to strike the shuttlecock. They do this so fast that the shuttlecock hardly ever falls to the ground. The Chinese are fond of flying kites. Even old men fly kites. They fly their kites in the spring-time. Chinese kites are of all sizes and shapes. Some are like birds. ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... of plans, vicissitudes, and suspense followed, during which Amanda strove manfully; Matilda suffered agonies of hope and fear; and Lavinia remained a passive shuttlecock, waiting to be tossed wherever Fate's battledore chose to ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... gambling fury lasted, money was plenty, everybody felt rich and Holland was in a whiz of windy delight. After about three years of fool's paradise, people began to reflect that the shuttlecock could not be knocked about in the air forever, and that when it came down somebody would be hurt. So first one and then another began quietly to sell out and quit the game, without buying in again. This cautious infection quickly spread like a pestilence, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... the topmost branch of that old maple, full forty yards to the trunk. No, no! don't get any nearer, for they see you. Well done! Hear him thump on the leaves; and here comes the other, fluttering round and round like a shuttlecock. Ten to one that you shot him through the head. There! I told you so! His wings are not hurt, but a shot has cut away his bill. Here, Dancer, don't bite him so, but bring him here! Chick, chick, churr! Mister Red-squirrel, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... for her. None knew of her weakness. Her mind had vacillated like a shuttlecock, but no one had seen the vacillation. She was in his hands, and she must simply do as he bade her. Then she went down to Mrs Baggett's room, and told the old lady to go up-stairs at her master's behest. "I'm a-going," said Mrs Baggett. "I'm a-going. I hope he'll find every one else as good ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... first, as it was with great difficulty that he kept his body from playing battledore and shuttlecock. The greater the speed of the huge mass, however, the less inclination there was to bounce about, and he soon found himself literally glued, as it were, ...
— The Magic Soap Bubble • David Cory
... nothing but whip syllabub, a mere conglomeration of bubbles, as hollow and as unsatisfying. And in lower departments of human life, as far as he knew, he saw evils yet more deplorable. The Church played at shuttlecock with men's credulousness; the law, with their purses; the medical profession, with their lives; the military, with their liberties and hopes. He acknowledged that in all these lines of action there was much talent, much good intention, much admirable diligence ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... there for three days, to rest and work. The moral of all this is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit, and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledoor and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac; and I feel Topping's merits more acutely than I have ever done in my life. On Sunday evening, the 17th of July, I shall revisit my household gods, please Heaven. I wish the day were here. For God's sake be in waiting. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... how sick it makes me for an hour or two, and, which is the misery, all that time one must be using some kind of exercise. Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on't that ever you saw. I make her play at shuttlecock with me, and she is the veriest bungler at it ever you saw. Then am I ready to beat her with the battledore, and grow so peevish as I grow sick, that I'll undertake she wishes there were no steel in England. But then to recompense the morning, I am in good ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... the skirt, or tail, was puffily tucked into the waist-band of the said breeches; no coat; a red shoulder-belt; and a demi-semi-military scarlet hat, with a feathered ornament in front, which, to the uninstructed human vision, had the appearance of a moulting shuttlecock. I laid down the newspaper with which I had been occupied, and surveyed the fellow-man in question with astonishment. Whether he had been sitting to any painter as a frontispiece for a new edition of 'Sartor Resartus;' whether 'the husk or shell of him,' ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... mine was seldom a dreamless sleep. Many of my dreams were, if anything, harder to bear than my delusions of the day, for what little reason I had was absolutely suspended in sleep. Almost every night my brain was at battledore and shuttlecock with weird thoughts. And if not all my dreams were terrifying, this fact seemed to be only because a perverted and perverse Reason, in order that its possessor might not lose the capacity for suffering, knew how to keep ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... citizens, how long can the foundations of ours remain secure if we continue to enfranchise ignorance and vice and disfranchise intelligence and virtue?" The action of Legislatures in past years was depicted as "playing shuttlecock and battledore with the amendment, passing it in one House to defeat it in another, in a hypocritical desire to appear favorable and inspire us with hope in order to retain the small amount of influence they think we possess, and yet compelling us ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... was not such an absolute Samson, but that he was much more likely to be hurt himself: and indeed, he had flown out into the road, like a shuttlecock. He had such an opinion of his own strength, however, that he was in real concern for the ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... changing. The essence of the jest consists in some catchword suggested by a political event, an incident in the police courts, a street song, or a bit of burlesque at some theatre, and forgotten in a month. Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battledore and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a recent invention, which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama. The Maison Vauquer had caught the infection ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... belief that all short of these are but an unsatisfactory part of a great and glorious experiment. Now, the rabid Tory prefers an open foe to a false friend; but your go-between, your midway sneak, your shuttlecock, your perjured miser who will swear to any thing for an extra per centage—all these are his detestation: and although he will readily acknowledge some good and some wise in the adversary's ranks, still he recognises that tri-coloured banner as the one under ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... upon the shelf; I am a shuttlecock, myself The world knocks to and fro;— My archery is all unlearn'd, And grief against myself has turn'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... constantly require excitement. They are not often careful in the selection of these emotions, provided there are violent shocks, revulsions of feeling, terror, hope, surprise. Such are the fruits of criminal trials. The head of the prisoner becomes a shuttlecock between the advocate and magistrate. The varied chances of such a scene offer great and real interest, effacing all the fictions of tragedy. There, far more than on the stage, women take delight in the dark dramas, and are the first to resent the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the joy of the poor town when it once more welcomed the gray-jackets. From the beginning it had been battle-ground and billet of both armies a dozen times. Tossed from Federal to Confederate possession—a very shuttlecock of war—it had been harassed, robbed and pillaged by the one; drained of the very dregs by free gifts to the other. But the people of Winchester never faltered in their faith; and to-day her noble women go down the roll of heroism and steadfast ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Majesty's closet, and one with whom the revered monarch was on terms of considerable intimacy. A close regard had sprung up between them in the old King's time; when His Royal Highness, playing at battledore and shuttlecock with the young lord on the landing-place of the great staircase at Kew, in some moment of irritation the Prince of Wales kicked the young Earl downstairs, who, falling, broke his leg. The Prince's hearty repentance for his violence caused him to ally himself ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... been a shuttlecock betwixt two big battledores — New York and Florida. I scarcely dare to recall how many times I have been to and fro these two States in the last six weeks. It has been just move on, all the time: car dust, cinders, the fumes of hot axle grease, these have been ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... and main. Poor Twirling-stick Mike groaned, and his unhappy head dropped exhausted upon his breast. Miserable man, his last capers were cut! His dancing was no longer worth mentioning. He went up a little way, like a baby's shuttlecock, and came down again feebly and dull. The ducats poured out. The bags swelled; playing and dancing—dancing, such as it was—went forward, and one terrible hour passed away. At last the wrists of the farmer snapped asunder; his hands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... house—a large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... racer, not a cart-horse; Euterpe trips it like the hare, while dogged criticism is the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a shuttlecock of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... sagely and says nothing, one is probably grateful and passes on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining. But in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man looms up on the horizon like a ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... remained of the Invincible Armada was buffeted to and fro by the resistless gale, like a shuttlecock between two invisible players. The monster left its bones on the iron-bound shore of Norway and on the granite cliffs of the Hebrides. Its course could be traced by its wrecks. Day followed day, and still God's ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... it most beneficial, the shoulders should be drawn back, and the chest should be enlarged by taking deep inspirations of pure air. The muscles of the chest, and of every part of the body, should be free to move and unconfined by tight clothing. Fencing, shuttlecock, and such other useful sports as combine with them free movements of the upper part of the body, are doubly advantageous, for they not only exercise the muscles of the whole body, but possess the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... wish an address changed, it is quite on the cards that I shall be able to find language explicit enough to express the desire. My whole desire is to avoid complication of addresses. It is quite fatal. If two P. R.'s have contradictory orders they will continue to play battledoor and shuttlecock with an unhappy epistle, which will never get farther afield ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suddenly a change come over the young bonze. His conscience began to trouble him for breaking his vows. In the terrible conflict between principle and passion, the soul of the priest was tossed to and fro like the feathered seed-ball of a shuttlecock. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... her with almost a holy horror. He could not understand by what miracle of self-neglect he had fallen into so perilous an abyss. He had long known Camilla's temper. But in those days in which he had been beaten like a shuttlecock between the Stanburys and the Frenches, he had lost his head and had done,—he knew not what. "Those whom the God chooses to destroy, he first maddens," said Mr. Gibson to himself of himself, throwing himself back upon early erudition and ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Ages, and the political and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. It has wrought itself into the soul, the only living and immortal thing, and so the proper place for ideas. Its mode of transmission has been by the suffusion of the eye, the cheek, the lip, the manner, not by dead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... divorce, you said good-bye to all peace and quiet. Bless you'—Sam's manner became fatherly—'I've seen it a hundred times. Couple get divorced, and, if there's a child, what happens? They start in playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with him. Wife sneaks him from husband. Husband sneaks him back from wife. After a while along comes a gentleman in my line of business, a professional at the game, and he puts one across on both the amateurs. He takes advantage of the confusion, slips ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... declare, here's Little Abe tipping about in the wind like a shuttlecock." Out I ran, and getting hold of his arm ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... every one stared, with a dignified stride And without a word more, He marched on before, Up a flight of stone steps, and so through the front door, To the banqueting-hall that was on the first floor, While the fiendish assembly were making a rare Little shuttlecock there of the curly-wigged Heir. —I wish, gentle Reader, that you could have seen The pause that ensued when he stepped in between, With his resolute air, and his dignified mien, And said, in a tone most decided though mild, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tete-a-tete. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a Saturday, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... a dependable fellow. He drove the full length of the street twice, passing the Inn of the Stars both times at a lively clip, and might have gone on forever in his shuttlecock enterprise, had not the excited voice of a woman hailed him ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... her eyes danced, and she was all aglow from head to foot. The American Ambassador stood behind her, and, as permitted by his greater age, he tossed back the shuttlecock of her playful ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... studies near Bayonne for five years. So closely did they work, that Jansen is said to have spent days and nights in the same chair, snatching only brief intervals of rest. A game at battledore and shuttlecock occasionally relieved their vigils; but no serious employment divided their attention with the arduous task upon which they had entered, of mastering and digesting the principles of the Augustinian theology. The Bishop of Bayonne offered preferment to D’Hauranne, and there were projects ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... slightly attempted; but it is not really liked: too many balls are lost and the rules of the game have never yet been thoroughly grasped. A quartette of men will occasionally rig up their net, which they raise to about the height of a foot and a half, and play a species of battledore and shuttlecock over it until the balls disappear; but it is scarcely tennis. As a matter of fact, a Russian generally rushes at the ball and misses it; on the rare occasions when he strikes the object, he does so with so much energy that the ball unless stopped by the adversary's eye, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful habiliments ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... seldom able to concentrate their attention on the one thought which should apparently swamp all others. They either yield to the strain, and lapse into unconsciousness, or their minds become the arena of minor emotions, wherein trivialities play battledore and shuttlecock with the tremendous issues of the moment. When a more extended knowledge of all that had happened, joined to a nicer adjustment of the time-factor in events, enabled Elsie to realise the extraordinary deliverance from death ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... not answer your letter which I received at Heaton, because the latter part of my stay there was much engrossed by walking, riding, playing battledore and shuttlecock, singing, and being exceedingly busy all day long about nothing. I have just left it for this place, where we stop to-night on our way to Stafford; Heaton was looking lovely in all the beauty of its autumnal foliage, lighted by bright autumnal ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... despise me, crush my heart, but never Alter my love. Three times didst thou repulse The prince, and thrice he came to thee again, To beg thy love, and force on thee his own. At length chance wrought what Carlos never could. Once we were playing, when thy shuttlecock Glanced off and struck my aunt, Bohemia's queen, Full in the face! She thought 'twas with intent, And all in tears complained unto the king. The palace youth were summoned on the spot, And charged to name the culprit. High in wrath The king vowed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is essential as the background for any appreciation of virtue, even any knowledge of its existence.... So now, on the day of Mary Turner's trial, there was a subtle gaiety of gossipings to and fro through the store. The girl's plight was like a shuttlecock driven hither and yon by the battledores of many tongues. It was the first time in many years that one of the employees had been thus accused of theft. Shoplifters were so common as to be a stale topic. There was ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... of course," admitted Mrs. Moss. "Oh, Miss Pritchard, couldn't you go back with me to-night and then all of us talk it over together? I don't believe we'll ever come to any understanding unless you do. My flying back and forth between you like a shuttlecock isn't going ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... the hands of the red-jerseyed one. Bobbie burned the feathers of the shuttlecock one by one under his nose, Phyllis splashed warmish milk on his forehead, and all three kept on saying as fast and as earnestly ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... Winchester seems to have been made a regular shuttlecock of by the contending armies. Stonewall Jackson rescued it once, and last Sunday week his successor, General Ewell, drove out Milroy. The name of Milroy is always associated with that of Butler, and his rule in Winchester seems to have been somewhat ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... purpose, but keep their heads covered. We shave the face; they shave the head and eyebrows. At dinner we begin the meal with soup and fish; they reverse the order and begin with the dessert. The old men fly kites while the boys look on; shuttlecock is their favorite game; it is played, however, not with the hands, but with the feet. White constitutes the mourning color, and black is the wedding hue. The women perform the men's work, and the men wash the clothing. We pay our physicians for attending us in illness; they ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... on the grass that I might face her. "Listen, madame. It is time you knew the story of Pemaou." And thereupon I recited all that had happened between the Huron and myself from the day when we had played at shuttlecock with spears till the night when he had shadowed us at the Pottawatamie camp,—the night before our wedding. I even told her of the profile in ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... procession go on,' he smilingly replied. 'I have just obtained permission, by special revelation, to proceed with it.' His leisure hours he spent in the writing of edifying novels, the composition of acrostics in Latin Verse, and in playing battledore and shuttlecock with his little nieces. There was, indeed, only one point in which he resembled Bishop Blougram—his love of a good table. Some of Newman's disciples were astonished and grieved to find that he sat down to four courses of fish during ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... I have no plans. I won't say with Romeo that I am fortune's fool—but I am fortune's shuttlecock; and I suppose that ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Majesty, and used exclusively by her. The frames are of the finest over-burnish, the plush upholstery being decorated with the rarest specimens of art needlework. On one of the little tables you will note a battledore and shuttlecock, with another thrown upon the floor, as though the player had been suddenly interrupted in the midst of her play. Very ordinary make and shape are these toys, such as you may see in any middle-class English home, and each of them looking ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... now, my dear creatures," hereupon said Miss O'Donoghue, promptly addressing her nieces. "It is a fine morning, and you will lose your roses if you don't get the air. I don't care if it has begun to rain, miss! Go and have a game of battledore and shuttlecock then. Young people must have exercise. Well, my dear Rupert, well!"—when Molly, with a pettish "battledore and shuttlecock indeed!" had taken her sister by the arm ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussu and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all species of which have similar fruit, there is a vast difference ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... death just come into four millions of livres a year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage, too—more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... length be found to surpass imagination, and to suit and savor all literature. The shuttlecock of religious intolerance will fall to the ground, if there be no battledores to fling it back and forth. It is reason for [20] rejoicing that the vox populi is inclined to grant us peace, together with pardon for the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... midst of the empty, echoing courtyard, Nana, Pauline and other big girls engaged in games of battledore and shuttlecock. They had grown up together and were now becoming queens of their building. Whenever a man crossed the court, flutelike laugher would arise, and then starched skirts would rustle like the passing ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... say against Amalia's suggestion, and they all went out of doors. Marcolina, who led the way, ran across the sunlit greensward to join the children in their game of battledore and shuttlecock. She was hardly taller than the eldest of the three girls; and when her hair came loose in the exercise and floated over her shoulders she too looked like a child. Olivo and the Abbate seated themselves on a stone bench ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... have slept through the whole of it if it had not been for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... Dear heart, how plain he saw it all! The lich-gate and the crumbling wall, The stream, the pathway to the wood, The bridge where they so oft had stood. Then, in a trice, both church and clock Vanish'd before ... a shuttlecock. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... the hideous mockery of it rang in his ears: where is the God that this man proclaimed? he saw the newspaper headlines, listened in imagination to cynical comments, beheld his name trailed through the soiled places of the cities, the shuttlecock of men and women. "To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it." Might he ever win that new name, eat of the hidden manna of a hidden ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... o'er again, and let the[1] sound From one pole to another pole rebound; The earth and sky each be a battledore, And keep the sound, that shuttlecock, up an hour: To Doctors' Commons for a licence I Swift as an arrow from a ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... moment, all his tribulations in life may have been said to have commenced. The nobility laughed at his assumption of hereditary rank, while the middle classes frowned at his pretensions to be superior to them, so that he passed the existence of a shuttlecock, continually suspended in the air, and struck at and dismissed ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... a kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of keeping it up as long as they could. To my mind the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... not much patronised; cards, on the other hand, are very common, the favourite games being those in which almost everything is left to chance. As to open-air amusements, youths of the baser sort indulge in battledore and shuttlecock without the battledore, and every resident in China must have admired the skill with which the foot is used instead, at this foot-shuttlecock game. Twirling heavy bars round the body, and gymnastics generally, are ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... was said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of his position and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him. "He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the King, afraid of being abused in the newspapers, afraid of being thought factious if he went out, afraid of being thought interested if he stayed in, afraid of everything, and afraid of being known to be afraid of anything, was beaten backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between Horace Walpole who wished to make him Prime Minister, and Lord John Cavendish who wished to draw him into opposition. Charles Townshend, a man of splendid eloquence, of lax principles, and of boundless vanity and presumption, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you what I've done to-day—my holiday. In the first place it poured with rain all the morning, so I sent for a pair of battledores and a shuttlecock, and when Charles Mason came to render up last night's account, I made him come into a beautiful large ball-room I had discovered in this house, and took a good breathing; and he, being like Hamlet, "fat and scant ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... several games of the same sort, which were not less popular. Skittles; la Soule or Soulette, which consisted of a large ball of hay covered over with leather, the possession of which was contested for by two opposing sides of players; Football; open Tennis; Shuttlecock, &c. It was Charles V. who first thought of giving a more serious and useful character to the games of the people, and who, in a celebrated edict forbidding games of chance, encouraged the establishment of companies of archers and ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... moder all possible respect, my poor moder could not suffer this attachment. And de consequence was, I did not know what to do between them; when I was civil to one, I was scolded by the other, and was very tired of being shuttlecock between them." ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... satisfy their consciences for voting "no" by saying that the women of their family and acquaintance do not want it. Thus is the most valuable of human rights—the right of individual representation—made the football of Legislatures, the shuttlecock of voters, kicked and tossed like the veriest plaything in utter disregard of the vital fact that it is the one principle above all others on which the Government ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... sort of perfection in everything; and perfection once reached, deterioration usually begins. And when, in bandying the phrases infidel and infidelity—like the feathered missiles in the game of battledore and shuttlecock—they fell upon Chalmers, we think there was a droll felicity in the accident, which constitutes for it an irresistible claim of being the terminal one in the series. The climax reached its point of extremest elevation; for ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Fanny to herself, as she quietly surveyed him looming up through the shade of a pair of magnificent whiskers, and heard him passing the shuttlecock of compliment back and forth with the most assured and practised air in the world,—"to be sure, I was a child in imagining that I should see Cousin George Somers. I'm sure this magnificent young gentleman, full of all utterance and knowledge, is not the cousin ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit my household gods, please heaven. I wish ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... somehow or other, my horse and I had a habit of parting company. On one occasion I found myself suddenly prostrate in the streets of York, much to the delight of the Dissenters. Another time my horse Calamity flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful it was not into a neighbouring planet; but as no harm came of it, I might have persevered perhaps, if, on a certain day, a Quaker tailor from a neighbouring village to which I had said I was going to ride, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... style game was played over a net some 5 feet high, and the service was always from the same end, the players changing courts each game. It was more on the style of the present game of badminton or battledore and shuttlecock. ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... swollen with rage. Anger had set her going, just as a blow from a battledoor sends off a shuttlecock. And, once being started, the poor little shuttlecock ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... which has chosen just now to turn head over heels. In turning, it struck the Halbrane and carried it off just as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and now here we are, stranded at certainly one hundred feet above the level of ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... Lady leads. l. 226. The seeds of many plants of this class are furnished with a plume, by which admirable mechanism they are disseminated by the winds far from their parent stem, and look like a shuttlecock, as they fly. Other seeds are disseminated by animals; of these some attach themselves to their hair or feathers by a gluten, as misleto; others by hooks, as cleavers, burdock, hounds-tongue; and others are swallowed whole for the sake of the fruit, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little day ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... with much taste. They lived magnificently, and at the same time without ceremony. There was "a charming large hall" with an organ and harpsichord, where all the company met when they had a mind to be together, and where "music, dancing, draughts, shuttlecock and prayers took their turn." The house is now in ruins, having been sold to Roger O'Connor, and burnt accidentally afterward. Mrs. Delany speaks of her friend, Richard Colley Wesley, the ancestor of the duke, as having more virtues and fewer faults than any man she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... days and a night he was a sort of shuttlecock tossed between these alternating moods, and he was still the same when he paced the quadrangle with bowed head and hands clasped behind him awaiting Samoval at a few minutes before twelve of the following night. The windows ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... kinds delighted him. Battledore and shuttlecock was played constantly in the garden at Devonshire Terrace, though I do not remember my father ever playing it elsewhere. The American game of bowls pleased him, and rounders found him more than expert. Croquet he disliked, but cricket he enjoyed intensely ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... man. Between no God anywhere and the one God who is everywhere, there is no middle ground. Either we are children, buffeted about by fate and circumstances, with events tossing souls about in an eternal game of battledore and shuttlecock, or else the world is our Father's house, and God standeth within the shadow, keeping watch above His own. For the man who believes in God, who allies himself to nature, who makes the universe his partner, there is no defeat, and no death, and no interruption ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... respect Lord Ronald took after his father. From the start the lad had shown the greatest promise. At Eton he had made a splendid showing at battledore and shuttlecock, and at Cambridge had been first in his class at needlework. Already his name was whispered in connection with the All-England ping-pong championship, a triumph which would undoubtedly carry with it a ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... down again, and a sleepy snort, very like a snore, revealed that, if he was not already asleep, he was past understanding a word that Ruby was saying. When young Diamond found this, he thought he might venture to take up the dropt shuttlecock of ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... to play shuttlecock with it in that fashion. While I lay in bed trying to sleep, I thought of the meeting between the duke and the princess at the Postern, and back again flew my mind to the conviction that Yolanda was not, and could not possibly be, the Princess Mary. For days I had been able to think on ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... whale, but niver a fin could a see. 'Twere no wonder, for she were right below t' boat in which a were; and when she wanted to rise, what does t' great ugly brute do but come wi' her head, as is like cast iron, up bang again t' bottom o' t' boat. I were thrown up in t' air like a shuttlecock, me an' my line an' my harpoon—up we goes, an' many a good piece o' timber wi' us, an' many a good fellow too; but a had t' look after mysel', an a were up high i' t' air, afore I could say Jack Robinson, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Alice only, her father also showed himself near the window, and beckoned him up. The family party seemed now more promising than before, and the fugitive Prince was weary of playing battledore and shuttlecock with his conscience, and much disposed to let matters go ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... cycling, albeit, from the flowing nature of their garments they generally use ladies' bicycles. Of these few pastimes archery is considered the most distingue, while boys attain to great skill in playing shuttlecock with their feet, being able to keep up the feathered cork for a dozen or twenty times, and passing it considerable distances from one to another. Judge then of my surprise when, on asking a young Chinaman at Peking how he had spent his holiday of the previous day, ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... infuriated boy. And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin. He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down. But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity. He was knocked about like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay helpless on the deck. And no one interfered. Leach could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was whimpering and wailing in a puppyish sort of ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... fire, is secure. Poverty cannot pinch, passion swerve, or trial shake it. But the man Lessing, harassed and striving life-long, always poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his own right-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin's ploughshare drive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was hardly kindled, and who, through all, was faithful to himself, to his friend, to his duty, and to his ideal, is something more inspiring for us ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... contemplatif, which deserves its epithet, but falls after a time into rather uninteresting moods, whence it breaks only at the last period. The opening chorus, "God Is Our Refuge and Strength," seems to me to be built on a rather trite and empty subject, which it plays battledore and shuttlecock with in the brave old pompous and canonic style, which stands for little beyond science and labor. It is only fair to say, however, that A.J. Goodrich, in his "Musical Analysis," praises "the strength and dignity" of this chorus; and gives a minute analysis of the whole ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... doubt that holidays were pleasant things, too. Saturday afternoons were always welcome, and all the weeks through we were planning what we would do when they came. Of course these plans were sometimes upset by a rainy day; but, even then, what with battledore and shuttlecock, painting and spinning tops, we contrived to make out the ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... multiplying these examples, the Negro must keep a strong and courageous heart. He cannot improve his condition by any short-cut course or by artificial methods. Above all, he must not be deluded into the temptation of believing that his condition can be permanently improved by a mere battledore and shuttlecock of words or by any process of mere mental gymnastics or oratory alone. What is desired, along with a logical defence of his cause, are deeds, results,—multiplied results,—in the direction of building himself up, so as to leave no ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... a shuttlecock may be toss'd With the hand of fate for a battledore; But it matters much for your sweet soul lost, As much as a million ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on more bitterly ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... up, proved to be very unlike his great father, and showed himself a miserable puny creature. There was no harm in him—he had a great aversion to shedding blood: which was something—but, he was a weak, silly, helpless young man, and a mere shuttlecock to the great ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes: a woman ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to feel slightly exhausted by his unwonted exertions, when he reached that bewildering part of the river termed "the Gut." So confusing were the intestine commotions of this gut, that, after passing a chequered existence as an aquatic shuttlecock, and being assailed with a slang-dictionary-full of opprobrious epithets, Mr. Verdant Green ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... leads. l. 226. The seeds of many plants of this class are furnished with a plume, by which admirable mechanism they are disseminated by the winds far from their parent stem, and look like a shuttlecock, as they fly. Other seeds are disseminated by animals; of these some attach themselves to their hair or feathers by a gluten, as misleto; others by hooks, as cleavers, burdock, hounds-tongue; and others are swallowed whole ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... have news from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... now to be heard—no battledore and shuttlecock- -no ball, no marbles. Some sat in a corner, whispering their wishes that Archer would unbar the doors, and give up. Others, stretching their arms, and gaping as they sauntered up and down the room, wished for air, or food, or water. Fisher and his nine, who ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... simple, but they proved to be anything but simple to follow. Like a shuttlecock, Jasper was tossed from clerk to clerk, until by the time he reached his destination he ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... honeysuckles, roses, and eglantine, which formed the grand entrance to the garden. Here a most animated scene of festivity opened upon us. On one side were rope dancers, people riding at the ring, groups of persons playing at shuttlecock, which seemed to be the favourite, and I may add, the most ridiculous diversion; on the other side, were dancers, tumblers, mountebanks, and parties, all with gay countenances, seated in little bowers enjoying lemonade, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... system lies in the stabler policy it will ensure. Our present system results in frequent sharp overturns, according as this party or that may get a temporary majority. But this battledore and shuttlecock of legislation does not represent the far more gradual changes in public opinion. A system whereby the number of representatives of each party is always directly proportioned to the number of votes cast for that party would make it possible to evolve a careful machinery of government, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... a falling shuttlecock, shrieking as she fell; and as she struck the water, the drowned bodies of the men she had sent there came to the surface, and caught her by the feet and hair, and drew her down, making an end of her, as she also had made ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... movement of the ship contributed to this. I think I must have fainted, for I cannot recollect what happened. I had no strength to hold on or to grasp the stick, and might have been thrown helplessly about like a shuttlecock till life was extinct. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... pastime. Dominoes are known, but not much patronised; cards, on the other hand, are very common, the favourite games being those in which almost everything is left to chance. As to open-air amusements, youths of the baser sort indulge in battledore and shuttlecock without the battledore, and every resident in China must have admired the skill with which the foot is used instead, at this foot-shuttlecock game. Twirling heavy bars round the body, and gymnastics generally, are practised by the coolie and ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the Western Swale,—now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty of mud. It was soon discovered by the retainers, and dragged ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... connexion with women, but might give themselves up without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery; that when by any mischance a Templar infringed this order, and a child was born, the whole order met, and tossed it about like a shuttlecock from one to the other until it expired; that they then roasted it by a slow fire, and with the fat which trickled from it anointed the hair and beard of a large image of the devil. It was also said that when one of the knights died, his body ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing box." Though an exquisite, Mr. Standish is clever, entertaining, and agreeable. One day that he sat beside me at dinner, we had a delightful battledore and shuttlecock conversation from grave to gay as quick as your heart could wish: from L'Almanac des Gourmandes and Le Respectable Porc, to Dorriforth and the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... done, what any man retaining his common sense would have done the moment he got his hands upon the thing, was to turn off the tap. Then he might have played foot-ball with the man, or battledore and shuttlecock as he pleased; and the twenty or thirty people who had rushed forward to assist would have only applauded. His idea, however, as he explained to us afterwards, was to take away the hose from the man, and, for punishment, turn it upon ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... thoughtful than the Barbarians, but they could not save the Empire. The Italians of the Middle Ages were the superiors of the French and Germans in every branch of culture, and yet this did not prevent Italy being made the shuttlecock of northern politicians and free-booters. The French overran Germany in the beginning of the present century, and the Germans have overrun France within the last ten years, not in either case owing to ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... times I've seen, Which, I confess it, raised my spleen; They were contrived by Love to mock The battledoor and shuttlecock. Given, returned,—how strange a play, Where neither loses all the day, And both are, even when night sets in, Again as ready to begin! I am not sure I have not played This very game with some fair maid. Perhaps it was a dream; but this I know was not; I know ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... know what it is to set up for a gentleman on the capital of a beggar. It is to be a shuttlecock between discontent and temptation. I would not have my lost wife's son waste his life as I have done. He would be more spoiled, too, than I have been. The handsomest boy you ever saw-and bold as a lion. Once in that set' (pointing over his shoulder towards some of our sporting ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I wish there were no geography and history in the world, and then I should not have to study so cruelly hard, and I could play more. My mother sent me last week a new battledore and shuttlecock, but I can never learn to play with it. I no sooner begin, than Herr Behnisch calls me to study. To-day I was very cunning—oh, I was so sly! I put it in the great-pocket of my tutor's coat, and he brought ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Jacques Collin in the world of money. However, you know as well as I do all the bankruptcies and tricks for which that man deserves hanging. My fetters will leave a mark on all my actions, however virtuous. To be a shuttlecock between two racquets—one called the hulks, and the other the police—is a life in which success means never-ending toil, and peace ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated boy. And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin. He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down. But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity. He was knocked about like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay helpless on the deck. And no one interfered. Leach could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... important enterprise: one which, perhaps, might in the sequel affect the weal or woe of nations yet to come. Then suddenly clapping his hand to his capacious coat-pocket, dragged out a bit of cork with some hen's feathers, and hurrying to his room, took out his knife, and proceeded to whittle away at a shuttlecock of an original scientific construction, which at some prior time he had promised to send to the young Duchess D'Abrantes that ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Sir John having affected to complain of the attacks made upon his Memoirs, Dr Johnson said, 'Nay, sir, do not complain. It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.' Often have I reflected on this since; and, instead of being angry at many of those who have written against me, have smiled to think that ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... and that they constantly require excitement. They are not often careful in the selection of these emotions, provided there are violent shocks, revulsions of feeling, terror, hope, surprise. Such are the fruits of criminal trials. The head of the prisoner becomes a shuttlecock between the advocate and magistrate. The varied chances of such a scene offer great and real interest, effacing all the fictions of tragedy. There, far more than on the stage, women take delight in ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... treaty-ports, and in those places where there are any roads, men are taking readily to cycling, albeit, from the flowing nature of their garments they generally use ladies' bicycles. Of these few pastimes archery is considered the most distingue, while boys attain to great skill in playing shuttlecock with their feet, being able to keep up the feathered cork for a dozen or twenty times, and passing it considerable distances from one to another. Judge then of my surprise when, on asking a young Chinaman at Peking ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... whence they drew out a basket, labelled (wonderful to relate) 'Val,' and containing—oh! such treasures, a blue egg full of needlework implements, a new book, an Indian ivory case, a skipping-rope, a shuttlecock, and other delights past description. The exhibition of them was only beginning when the Professor called for Primrose, who was too much frightened to come alone, and therefore was permitted to be brought by Mrs. Halfpenny. The Sphynx was particularly amiable ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sea in the lee of the rocks, and pulling strongly for the wreck. Father and daughter both labored at the oars, unable to speak on account of the roar of the sea and wind, and blinded by the spray that whirled over them. Their boat was tossed like a shuttlecock in the great waves, and they knew that unless the shipwrecked persons could aid them it would be impossible to return to the lighthouse. They must succeed or die, and their chance of ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Bandied the weariful shuttlecock of gallantry Determine that the future is in our debt, and draw on it Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them He whipped himself up to one of his oratorical frenzies I was discontented, and could not speak my discontent No Act to compel a man to deny what appears in the papers ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... iceberg, which has chosen just now to turn head over heels. In turning, it struck the Halbrane and carried it off just as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and now here we are, stranded at certainly one hundred feet above the level of the ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... every country house—a large unfurnished room. It had been thrown out expressly as a playroom for the children by Cedric Bloxam's father, and as they grew up proved even more useful. Should the house be full and the weather prove wet, what games of battledore and shuttlecock, "bean-bags," &c., were played in it in the daytime, and what a ball-room it made at night! There was no trouble moving out the furniture or taking up the carpet, there being nothing but a few benches and a piano in the room. At one end was a slightly-raised stage, ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... small furniture specially made for her youthful Majesty, and used exclusively by her. The frames are of the finest over-burnish, the plush upholstery being decorated with the rarest specimens of art needlework. On one of the little tables you will note a battledore and shuttlecock, with another thrown upon the floor, as though the player had been suddenly interrupted in the midst of her play. Very ordinary make and shape are these toys, such as you may see in any middle-class English home, and each of them looking like favourites—judging from the signs of much use ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... amuse himself with the varied spectacle of the street. Sometimes it was the fresh-looking Flemish peasant-girl, driving her donkey through the market-place, sometimes the little girls of the neighborhood, playing at shuttlecock during the fine evenings. Peasant-maid and little child were traced in original lines in the memory of the scholar; he already admired the indolent naivete of the one, the prattling grace of the other. He had his eye also on some smiling female neighbor, such as are to be found every where; but ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... "Alackaday! Shuttlecock and battle-dore. And this at, the end of it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John that looks across the Vale of Manona to ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... at Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of governments; no hint of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the happiest period of my life. With regard to the enjoyment of "games," I never played many as a child, but as a man I have derived the greatest possible pleasure from them. I never learned to skip till I was thirty, and at thirty-five my greatest delight was a game of battledore and shuttlecock. Now that I am turned forty I have given up violent exercise, and taken to playing with boxes of bricks and tin soldiers. I am sure that I am far happier with them, now, than I was as a child. In my old nursery days I always quarrelled with my brothers and sisters about our toys, and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the world as ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... watched and approved this stratagem, hoped for the best results, and believed the day won when Debby grew pale and silent, and followed with her eyes the young couple who were playing battledoor and shuttlecock with each other's hearts, as if she took some interest in the game. But Aunt Pen clashed her cymbals too soon; for Debby's trouble had a better source than jealousy, and in the silence of the sleepless nights that stole her bloom she was taking counsel of her own full heart, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... inside to emerge again in a moment with a badminton racket and a shuttlecock. "On the bulldog—one round rapid fire." He fired and with a loud ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... life like a shuttlecock may be toss'd With the hand of fate for a battledore; But it matters much for your sweet soul lost, As much as ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... dear creatures," hereupon said Miss O'Donoghue, promptly addressing her nieces. "It is a fine morning, and you will lose your roses if you don't get the air. I don't care if it has begun to rain, miss! Go and have a game of battledore and shuttlecock then. Young people must have exercise. Well, my dear Rupert, well!"—when Molly, with a pettish "battledore and shuttlecock indeed!" had taken her sister by the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... lightning combinations of wisdom, skill and strength to make the turns in safety for all that, nor does he have a chance for a long breath before he shoots at ever increasing speed into the "battledore" where the course turns almost at a right angle and shoots him on into the "shuttlecock" where he must negotiate another right angle. Then he must immediately take "stream corner" and be ready for his plunge into "the straight." From this again he has to take "Bulpett's corner." By this time he may be going seventy miles an hour, but ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... this decree. Thus, since war was in a measure declared between the Regent's authority and that of the Parliament, the orders emanating from the one were disputed by the other, and vice versa. A nice game of shuttlecock this, which it was ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the amusement of kite-flying even when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... very wrong management in the affair of the mayoralty.(13) He is governed by fools, and has usually much more sense than his advisers, but never proceeds by it. I must know how your health continues after Wexford. Walk and use exercise, sirrahs both; and get somebody to play at shuttlecock with you, Madam Stella, and walk ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... passing; I notice that. As President, I have to sit at the head of the table, and can't join in any of the fun. They have got a joke among them that I can't make out. The joke flies about, like an invisible shuttlecock, between Cazell, Miss Adelaide, Chilvern, Miss ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... am talking about. And I tell you that the moment you two got your divorce, you said good-bye to all peace and quiet. Bless you'—Sam's manner became fatherly—'I've seen it a hundred times. Couple get divorced, and, if there's a child, what happens? They start in playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with him. Wife sneaks him from husband. Husband sneaks him back from wife. After a while along comes a gentleman in my line of business, a professional at the game, and he puts one across on both the amateurs. He takes advantage of the confusion, slips in, and gets away with the kid. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... of pasteboard, shrimps and crabs, do all coldly furnish forth the lunch-table as favors and bonbonnieres. Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... up, as if you had been playing shuttlecock with it!" exclaimed Mrs. Lorton indignantly. "It is absolutely disrespectful of you, not to say ungrateful. Read it, if you please, and slowly; I could not bear to have my cousin's letter gabbled over. I, at least, know what is due to ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... whose name poor ryots' wives scared refractory brats into trembling obedience. Not far from Delhi was a village school, where were many small boys,—so many Asiatic frogs-in-a-well,—to whom "the news of the day" was full of terrible portent. Once, when they were tired of foot-ball, and the shuttlecock had grown heavy on their hands, the cry was, "What shall we play next?" And one daring little fellow—whose father had been to Delhi with his rent, and had told how the Nawab met his kismut (his fate) so quietly, that the gold-embroidered slippers did not fall ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... the lists, he is sure to be judged with severity proportioned to the former favour of the public. If he be daunted by a bad reception on this second occasion, he may again become a stranger to the arena. If, on the contrary, he can keep his ground, and stand the shuttlecock's fate, of being struck up and down, he will probably, at length, hold with some certainty the level in public opinion which he may be found to deserve; and he may perhaps boast of arresting the general attention, in the same ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Louis entered the apartment, and Clery gave the boy lessons in writing, and copied, at the king's desire, passages from the works of Montesquieu and others, for the use of the Dauphin. Then Clery took Louis to his aunt's room, where they played at ball, and battledore and shuttlecock, till Louis's supper-time, at eight o'clock. Meanwhile the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, till eight o'clock, when they went to Louis, to sit beside him while he had his supper. Then the king amused the children with riddles, ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a shuttlecock of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... could not have made the picture more vivid. I could see the great wind. The tops of the palms are flying about like Brobdingnagian birds, their long blades darting out like infuriated tongues. I saw the oranges flung about in a great game of battledore and shuttlecock—as if the hurricane remembered to play in its fury! I saw men shrieking at the masts of a ship. Their puny lives! Why are they not glad to ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... "we have been stagnant for three days, and I begin to feel flat. Races are tabooed: besides, we cannot always leave mother alone. I propose we go out in the garden and have a game of battledore and shuttlecock;" for this had been a winter pastime ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... tall felt thing like a thimble, with a feather it its jeweled band that stuck up like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any slight movement disturbed it. The King's dandies were dressed in about the same fashion as himself, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... 'It's blithering irony to talk of us Leura squatters as representing capital. We're all playing a sort of battledore and shuttlecock game—tossed about between drought and plenty—boom and slump. A kick in the beam and one end is up and the other end down. There's Windeatt, who will be ruined if his wool-shed is destroyed and his shearing spoiled. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... when suddenly a change come over the young bonze. His conscience began to trouble him for breaking his vows. In the terrible conflict between principle and passion, the soul of the priest was tossed to and fro like the feathered seed-ball of a shuttlecock. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... of my family; for, somehow or other, my horse and I had a habit of parting company. On one occasion I found myself suddenly prostrate in the streets of York, much to the delight of the Dissenters. Another time my horse Calamity flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful it was not into a neighbouring planet; but as no harm came of it, I might have persevered perhaps, if, on a certain day, a Quaker tailor from a neighbouring village to which I had said I was going to ride, had not taken it into ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... uninteresting moods, whence it breaks only at the last period. The opening chorus, "God Is Our Refuge and Strength," seems to me to be built on a rather trite and empty subject, which it plays battledore and shuttlecock with in the brave old pompous and canonic style, which stands for little beyond science and labor. It is only fair to say, however, that A.J. Goodrich, in his "Musical Analysis," praises "the strength and dignity" of this chorus; and gives a minute analysis ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... exceptional abilities and exceptional opportunity for exercising those abilities, could contentedly fill his empty days with the manufacture of blacking, or pass an entire night, as Gronow relates him to have done, playing battledore and shuttlecock for a wager with Ball Hughes, was, in much, a typical product of his generation. His mannerisms were accepted by his contemporaries with a forbearance which bordered on admiration, and, however childish his peculiarities, he remained unalterably popular. Nor were the other members of his ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... heart had swollen with rage. Anger had set her going, just as a blow from a battledoor sends off a shuttlecock. And, once being started, the poor ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... take ices to cool them, and then for fear the cold will heat them, they have to take brandy cock-tail to counteract it. So they keep up a sort of artificial fever and ague all day. The ice gives the one, and brandy the other, like shuttlecock and battledore. If they had walked down as they had ought to have done, in the cool of the morning, they would have ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half- hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... worse than play seemed all the rest of their quiet lives. But Miss Dilly was ill now and unable to do her part; and what was worse, and more, she had lost her wonted cheerful and gay way of looking at things. That the little Frenchwoman never lost; but it takes two to keep up a shuttlecock, and Faith ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... his indifference to ambition. The watchwords of party appeared to him ridiculous; and politics in general—what a great moralist termed one question in particular—a shuttlecock kept up by the contention of noisy children. His mind thus rested as to all public matters in a state of quietude, and covered over with the mantle of a most false, a most perilous philosophy. His appetites to pleasure had grown somewhat dulled ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... after him, and I followed too, as quickly as I could get along and the motion of the ship would allow me, being buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between the bulwarks and deck-house in my progress onwards, as well as drenched by the spray, which came hurtling inboards over the main-chains from windward as it was borne along by the breeze, wetting everything amidships and soaking the ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... one would think were nothing, and yet 'tis not to be imagined how sick it makes me for an hour or two, and, which is the misery, all that time one must be using some kind of exercise. Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on't that ever you saw. I make her play at shuttlecock with me, and she is the veriest bungler at it ever you saw. Then am I ready to beat her with the battledore, and grow so peevish as I grow sick, that I'll undertake she wishes there were no steel in England. But then to recompense the morning, I am in good humour all the day after for ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... he said. "I made a few inquiries, and found it was nothing but a shuttlecock of the departments. I should have had no real power, but unlimited quantities of ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... Stopping my passage with the sight of Visus: But as he makes hither, I'll make hence, There's more ways to the wood than one[190]. What, more devils to affright me? O Diabolo! Gustus comes here to vex me. So that I, poor wretch, am like A shuttlecock betwixt two battledoors. If I run there, Visus beats me to Scylla; If here, then Gustus blows me to Charybdis. Neptune hath sworn my hope shall suffer shipwreck. What shall I say? mine Urinal's too thin To bide the fury ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... serious employment of reading each morning was concluded, we danced, we sung, we played at blind-man's-buff, battledore and shuttlecock, and many other games equally diverting and innocent; and when tired of them, drew our seats round the fire, while each one in turn told some merry story to divert ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... that Jack, this morning, knocked his shuttlecock through his bedroom window. I was going to send for the glazier to mend it; but after you lent that five pounds I was sure we couldn't afford it. Oh, no! the window must go as it is; and pretty weather for a dear child ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... him with disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your cousin, ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... iniquitous, I maintain, that fathers should have these unlimited penal powers, that disgrace should be multiplied, apprehension made perpetual, the law now chastize, now relent, now resume its severity, and justice be the shuttlecock of our fathers' caprices. It is quite proper for the law to humour, encourage, give effect to, one punitive impulse on the part of him who has begotten us; but if, after shooting his bolt, insisting on his right, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suggested by a political event, an incident in the police courts, a street song, or a bit of burlesque at some theatre, and forgotten in a month. Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battledore and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a recent invention, which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama. The Maison ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... similar to lawn tennis but played with shuttlecocks. The net is five feet above the ground. The shuttlecock is a cork in which feathers have been inserted. The shuttlecock is served and returned as in tennis and either two or four may play. A badminton court is 30 feet wide ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... of the 19th Century brought a new experience in the sugar business. That was the production of sugar, in commercial quantities, from beets. From that time until now, the commodity has been a political shuttlecock, the object of government bounties and the subject of taxation. In 1747, Herr Marggraf, of the Academy of Sciences, in Berlin, discovered the existence of crystallizable sugar in the juice of the beet and other roots. ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... and the children had to content themselves with skating and battledore and shuttlecock in the verandahs. Lord Carrington, Tom, and Mabelle went for a long walk, calling on Cardinal Moran, and paying visits to the picture-gallery, the Anglican cathedral, and other places; and after an early dinner at 6.45 all the party ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... admiration was involuntarily sent up by the sea of faces around. In place of the homogenous ball, hundreds of small figures of mandarins and ladies, some seated at tables, some riding on mules, others playing at shuttlecock or flying kites, and all clothed in the most beautiful garments, and around which innumerable squibs were hissing and cracking, revealed themselves to our astonished gaze. Another change! The human element disappears. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... I knew not; of what we were going to do I had no inkling. I only knew we were southbound, and at long last I might fairly consider myself to be the shuttlecock of fortune. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Though I slept fairly well most of the time, mine was seldom a dreamless sleep. Many of my dreams were, if anything, harder to bear than my delusions of the day, for what little reason I had was absolutely suspended in sleep. Almost every night my brain was at battledore and shuttlecock with weird thoughts. And if not all my dreams were terrifying, this fact seemed to be only because a perverted and perverse Reason, in order that its possessor might not lose the capacity for suffering, knew how to keep Hope alive with visions which supplied the ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... his criticism of our time and civilization in an argument or essay, the world would have received it very differently. As an intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with it and tossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it when we tired of it, as we do other criticism. But he gave it to us as a man, as a personality, and we find it too strong for us. It is easier to deal with a theory than with the concrete reality. A man is a summons and a challenge, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... Western could have cared less for antiquarian associations, but Bentham made a very fair monk. The place, for which he paid L315 a year, was congenial. He rode his favourite hobby of gardening, and took his regular 'ante-jentacular' and 'post-prandial' walks, and played battledore and shuttlecock in the intervals of codification. He liked it so well that he would have taken it for life, but for the loss of L8000 or L10,000 in a Devonshire marble-quarry.[303] In 1818 he gave it up, and thenceforward rarely quitted Queen's Square Place. His life was varied by few incidents, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... happened at home. The young King, as he grew up, proved to be very unlike his great father, and showed himself a miserable puny creature. There was no harm in him—he had a great aversion to shedding blood: which was something—but, he was a weak, silly, helpless young man, and a mere shuttlecock to the great lordly ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, the history, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Boiling over with rage and brandishing their fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on more bitterly ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... long summer days in rambling and riding, and in wondrous new games which they played in the hall. The striking feature, however, were the matches at battledore and shuttlecock between Madame Phoebus and Lord St. Aldegonde, in which the skill and energy displayed were supernatural, and led to betting. The evenings were always gay; sometimes they danced; more or less they always had some delicious singing. ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub,—a mere conglomeration of bubbles,—as hollow and as unsatisfying. And in lower departments of human life, as far as he knew, he saw evils yet more deplorable. The Church played at shuttlecock with men's credulousness, the law with their purses, the medical profession with their lives, the military with their liberties and hopes. He acknowledged that in all these lines of action there was much talent, much good intention, much admirable diligence and acuteness brought out—but to ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... which represent a lost painting, there is a noble one of Bishop Fisher, whose execution preceded More's by only a few weeks. A literally venerable head it was (Plate 21), to be the shuttlecock of papal defiance and royal determination not to be defied with impunity. For assuredly if the life of the Bishop of Rochester hung in the balance, as it did, in May, 1535, it was Paul III.'s mad effrontery in making him a Cardinal ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... strangers with us; and in the afternoon I played at shuttlecock with young cousin Emil, to whom we were so kind, and who deserved our kindness so well. How it happened I cannot tell, but before long Ernst took his place, and was my partner in the game. He looked unusually animated, and I felt myself more ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... let me draw up their histories as it were in parallel columns, and you shall see the likeness clearly; you shall see also, presently, how prettily time and the laws that govern human incarnation played battledore and shuttlecock with the two: what a game of see-saw went on ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... forward at once, although the doomed voyager was manifestly beyond the reach of help. But even as they did so, the crisis came. With one leap the boat was in the midst of the rapids, banged to and fro like a shuttlecock by the white leaping waves, amid which it appeared and vanished by turns, till a final plunge sent it right toward the edge of ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... in his mind for weeks past; he loved this bright young creature with the whole force of his rugged nature, and began dimly to comprehend that she cared no more for him or his sufferings than if his heart had been a football or shuttlecock. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... I've done to-day—my holiday. In the first place it poured with rain all the morning, so I sent for a pair of battledores and a shuttlecock, and when Charles Mason came to render up last night's account, I made him come into a beautiful large ball-room I had discovered in this house, and took a good breathing; and he, being like Hamlet, "fat and scant of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... he must fight giants, can figure to himself that a giant must have a body as big as a mill; but from what supposition can a sensible man set off to persuade himself that the half of the moon has gone into a sleeve, and that a Sammonocodom has come down from heaven to play at shuttlecock, cut down a forest, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... every poet knows. Pegasus is a racer, not a cart-horse; Euterpe trips it like the hare, while dogged criticism is the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite many of the reviews are, some extolling what ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and then she was ordered by her mother to abandon that love, and to give her heart to another. That in words she has been obedient, I know well; but what I doubt is this,—that she has in truth been able so to chuck her heart about like a shuttlecock. I can only say that I am not ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... not only by their lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussu and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... with the figure and description of Bewick, to which the other replied that Bewick was next to Nature. Here the old gentleman seized me by the thigh with his very hand-vice of a grasp; and I contrived to keep up the shuttlecock of conversation playfully to his highest satisfaction, though they who praised him so ardently, little imagined whose ears imbibed all their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... don't try to look like an outraged empress until your stays are covered up. Put on your dress and we'll have a game of battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. It's raining. Then we'll have some music this afternoon. My alto used to go beautifully with your soprano, and I'll get out our duets. I haven't forgotten one of the accompaniments—What ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... house, and the ravages they have wrought on it for the last six months, pass belief. I had yesterday a bill of sixty dollars' plumbing to pay for damages of various kinds which had had to be repaired in our very convenient water-works; and the blame of each particular one had been bandied like a shuttlecock among our three household divinities. Biddy privately assured my wife that Kate was in the habit of emptying dust-pans of rubbish into the main drain from the chambers, and washing any little extra bits down through the bowls; and, in fact, when one of the bathing-room bowls had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... Dauphin again had a play hour while the king enjoyed a nap. As soon as he awoke, Clery, who had been with the Dauphin for several years, would give him writing and arithmetic lessons, and then he would play ball or battledore-and-shuttlecock for awhile, and then there would be reading aloud until it was time for the Dauphin's supper, after which the king would amuse his children with all sorts of riddles and puzzles and games, and then the Dauphin went ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... to see Bruce,[121] and after some shuttlecock sort of work, sending and being sent from office to office and Prefet to Prefet, at length we received our order ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... later days it was discovered that even the tartan was an anachronism in such case, and that Macbeth and his associates must be clad in stripes, or plain colours. Even the bonnet with the eagle's feather, which Sir Walter Scott induced Kemble to substitute for his "shuttlecock" headdress of ostrich plumes, was held to be inadmissible: the Macbeth of the antiquaries wore a conical iron helmet, and was otherwise arrayed in barbaric armour. But when Garrick first played Macbeth there were good ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the single from the double-flowered plants, M. Chate tells us is not so difficult as might be supposed. The single stocks, he explains, have deep green leaves (glabrous in certain species), rounded at the top, the heart being in the form of a shuttlecock, and the plant stout and thickset in its general aspect, while the plants yielding double flowers have very long leaves of a light green colour, hairy, and curled at the edges, the heart consisting of whitish leaves, curved so that they enclose it completely. Such is the substance ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... didn't disturb you?" The question was asked of Mr. Beckett, and thrown lightly as a shuttlecock over the old man's head to us in the next room. It was asked in English, with a curiously winning accent, neither Italian nor Irish, but ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the territorial expansion of the provinces under one Dominion, with their political development, which has assumed even national attributes, with the steady growth of an imperial sentiment in the parent state, the old condition of things that too often made the provinces the shuttlecock of skilful American diplomacy has passed away. The statesmen of the Canadian federation are now consulted, and exercise almost as much influence as if they were members of the imperial ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... work all the time. They play many pretty games. Chinese boys, too, have many kinds of games and toys. One game is like battledoor and shuttlecock. They use their feet to strike the shuttlecock. They do this so fast that the shuttlecock hardly ever falls to the ground. The Chinese are fond of flying kites. Even old men fly kites. They fly their kites in the spring-time. Chinese ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... on the island,—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and vulgar Sicilian, evidence enough that it was the meeting ground of the nations of Europe, Asia and North Africa.[872] Polyglot Malta to-day tells the same story of successive conquests, the same shuttlecock history.[873] Almost every language of Europe is spoken here; but the native Maltese speech is a corrupt form of Arabic mixed with modern Italian and ancient Phoenician words.[874] The whole island is ethnographically a border hybrid of Europe and North Africa. The Channel Isles ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... strikes out to the right and to the left, never missing his aim, never miscalculating distances by an inch, till, like an arrow shot by dexterous archer, the little craft reaches the calm. Whilst, indeed, it seems tossed like a shuttlecock on the engulphing waves, it is in reality being most skilfully piloted. The veteran at the stern we could not see, but doubtless his skill was equally remarkable. The two, of course, act in concert, both knowing the river as other ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... fury lasted, money was plenty, everybody felt rich and Holland was in a whiz of windy delight. After about three years of fool's paradise, people began to reflect that the shuttlecock could not be knocked about in the air forever, and that when it came down somebody would be hurt. So first one and then another began quietly to sell out and quit the game, without buying in again. This cautious infection quickly spread like a pestilence, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, which he disliked still more; and was beginning to lose ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... pale flower Whose chill would quench in everlasting peace His soul's unmeasured flame—O paradox! Might he but learn the trick!—to wear her heart One fragile hour of heedless innocence, And then, farewell, and the incessant grave. "O fool! O villain!"—'tis the shuttlecock Wit never leaves at rest. It is his fate To be a needle in a world of hay, Where honour is the flattery of the fool; Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest; Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood For words to fell. Ah! but the ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... of passion, but again on the grossness of instincts. Thus do the sentiments which are naturally the strongest lose their point and sharpness; their rich and polished remains are converted into playthings for the drawing room, and, thus cast to and fro by the whitest hands, fall on the floor like a shuttlecock. We must, on this point, listen to the heroes of the epoch; their free and easy tone is inimitable, and it depicts both them and their actions. "I conducted myself," says the Duc de Lauzun, "very prudently, and even deferentially with Mme. de Lauzun; I knew Mme. de Cambis very ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... popular. Skittles; la Soule or Soulette, which consisted of a large ball of hay covered over with leather, the possession of which was contested for by two opposing sides of players; Football; open Tennis; Shuttlecock, &c. It was Charles V. who first thought of giving a more serious and useful character to the games of the people, and who, in a celebrated edict forbidding games of chance, encouraged the establishment of companies ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... but organized masses of men, habituated to obey their leaders, among whom to change their vote is stigmatized as the treason of an Arnold, and between which the popular will is driven helplessly from side to side, like a shuttlecock between two battledores? Politics cleans our streets, regulates our education, and so on; it is not to be wondered at that it intrudes into the military sphere, with confidence all the greater because it is there especially ignorant. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... (oscillation) 314; caprice &c 608. fickleness, levity, legerete [Fr.]; pliancy &c (softness) 324; weakness; timidity &c 860; cowardice &c 862; half measures. waverer, ass between two bundles of hay; shuttlecock, butterfly; wimp; doughface [U.S.]. V. be irresolute &c adj.; hang in suspense, keep in suspense; leave "ad referendum"; think twice about, pause; dawdle &c (inactivity) 683; remain neuter; dillydally, hesitate, boggle, hover, dacker^, hum and haw, demur, not know one's own ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques. But as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game of battledore and shuttlecock being renewed several times. Social and philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us. This fateful year was not more successful than we had been in ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... has marcher carquills ainsi que des volants. Early commentators have generally stated that volants means here "the beams of a mill," but MM. Moland and E. Despois, the last annotators of Molire, maintain that it stands for "shuttlecock," because the large rolls (canons), tied at the knee and wide at the bottom, bore a great resemblance to shuttlecocks turned upside down. I cannot see how this can suit the words marcher carquills, for the motion of the canons ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... is not really liked: too many balls are lost and the rules of the game have never yet been thoroughly grasped. A quartette of men will occasionally rig up their net, which they raise to about the height of a foot and a half, and play a species of battledore and shuttlecock over it until the balls disappear; but it is scarcely tennis. As a matter of fact, a Russian generally rushes at the ball and misses it; on the rare occasions when he strikes the object, he does so with so much energy that the ball unless stopped by ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... ensue; and after his breakfast stood at a window watching the dripping trees and whistling so softly one could not tell whether 'twere he or the birds chirping without. Cedric and Lady Constance played at battledore and shuttlecock. Mistress Penwick sat apart, busy with thought and needle. His Grace of Ellswold sat up that morning, his wife and physicians by his side, and all were happy ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... of another (with which we are not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together—a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... pouch hanging at her right side. A scarlet over-sash kept the large sash-knot in its place. Her hair was gay with knot of scarlet crinkled crepe, lacquered comb, and hairpin of tiny golden battledore. Resting thereon were a shuttlecock of coral, another pin of a tiny red lobster and a green pine sprig made of silk. In her belt was coquettishly stuck the butterfly-broidered case that held her quire of paper pocket-handkerchiefs. The brother's ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... fashion in which she wore it in her childish days. Thus attired, she looked about fourteen years old, and the shy way in which she glanced at the company from under her eyelashes, added to the impression of extreme youth. To carry out the character, she held a battledore and shuttlecock in ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... or not." How empty a satisfaction is this "purchased at so great an expense as that of conscience, and of a dishonour done to truth!" And the crime is so entirely objectless. A man who tells a lie, properly so called, has some hope of reward by it. But to lie for sport is to play at shuttlecock with your soul, and load your conscience for the mere sake of being a fool. "With what temper should I speak of those people? What words can express the meanness and baseness of the mind that can do this?" In ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... in spite of my pronounce features, and I could still enter into the delights of a good drawn battle of battledore and shuttlecock. Perhaps it was the repressed enthusiasm of my tone, for I really meant what I said; but Flurry's brief coldness vanished, and she caught at ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... were in a section where they had never been before, and were playing battledore and shuttlecock with a warlike tribe of whom they knew nothing. It was impossible, therefore, for them to understand the meaning of the signal, for whose response they ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... from their fetters, an indulgence which was a proof of the lenity of the Government, as the ordinary keepers of the prison would not have dared to have allowed it.[407] After this, Mr. Forster and others amused themselves with the game of shuttlecock, at which, relates the author of the Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate, the "valiant Forster beat every one who engaged him: so that he triumphed with his feathers in the prison, though he could not do it in the field." On the tenth of April that gentleman made ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... and surrounded them with enormous reefs; and I observed that many of these insects, though extremely minute, were very beautiful, coming out of their holes in a circle of fine threads, and having the form of a shuttlecock. Here I saw curious little barnacles opening a hole in their backs and constantly putting out a thin, feathery hand, with which, I doubt not, they dragged their food into their mouths. Here, also, I saw those crabs which have shells ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... there and here, broken by white clouds that relieve the eye without obscuring the light. At the farthest end of the lawn from the house were some fine trees, under the shelter of which two girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock, and very well they played too. A little nearer this way, that is where John and the carriage stood, in the direction of the house, was a young child seated on the turf holding a dog, whilst two other children were ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
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