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Babyhood   /bˈeɪbihˌʊd/   Listen
Babyhood

noun
1.
The early stage of growth or development.  Synonyms: early childhood, infancy.
2.
The earliest state of immaturity.  Synonym: infancy.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Babyhood" Quotes from Famous Books



... in order that they may supply vigor to the whole frame. All enlightened parents are acquainted with these laws of nature, and generally act on them; but when, owing to judicious management, their children emerge from babyhood in full enjoyment of all the animal organs, and with muscles and sinews growing firmer every day in consequence of the exercise which their little owners delight in giving them, is the same judicious ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... essence of modern science into his poetical constitution, so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters, the products of the wild babyhood of the Universe, were as the daisies and the nightingales were to Keats; he absolutely realised the great literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job: "He saw Behemoth, and he played with him as ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... their father's absence, and whose curious looks she was aware of upon her averted face, her down-dropped eyelids. She felt alone indeed, with her uncle gone, and the boys who had been as brothers to her almost since babyhood suddenly become strangers, their interests and hers ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... and made plans. My little boys died in babyhood. I imagine their father and I would have mortgaged the farm, and I would have taken in washing, and he would have gone back to his trade to send those boys through college. But the girls don't need a college education. The boys might have been ministers—one ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... long bands of needlework, my aunt's masterpieces, which hung in wide folds over the doors! With what admiration I regarded the faded carpet, with its impossible flowers, which I had so often tried to gather in my babyhood! This was one of the legends of my earliest years, one of those anecdotes which are told of a beloved son, and which make him feel that the smallest details of his existence have been observed, understood, and loved. In later days I have been frozen by the ice of indifference. And my aunt, she whose ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... individual I met—but now as I walked up the hill from the depot I was an entire stranger—Twenty years makes a great change, Many were my meditations as I walked over the little marsh where I had so often passed when a mere child. I entered the old store, the one in which I spent my babyhood—where Father ran store before he bought the farm An old lady stooped, and seamed came in to ascertain that which I wanted, had I have been any other place I could not have gussed who she was, I told her I wanted a quarters worth ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis

... link in his chain. He cannot. If he made up his mind to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link—a thought bound to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain by the first act of his babyhood." ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... craved affection. From babyhood until the time of her death, when the poisoned arrow of Kulonga had pierced her savage heart, Kala had represented to the English boy the sole object of love which ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... under him; Major Karri Davis, of the Imperial Light Horse; Colonel Frank Rhodes, Lord Ava, and a few others got together the materials for a great Christmas tree, to which all the little ones between babyhood and their teens were invited. The Light Horse Major's long imprisonment with his brother officer Sampson in Pretoria, far from embittering him against humanity in general, has only made him more sympathetic with the trials and sufferings of others; just as heavy fines and a death sentence ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... her niece, Genevieve Stebbins, and reared her from babyhood to a splendid womanhood. She contributed freely to entertainments for charity, by her Shakespearean readings and other recitations, and happily prepared whole parties for private theatricals. With such mental strain, she kept herself fit by Saturday outings, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... voice, told him the story of his babyhood: how he had been abandoned at the forest's edge and left a prey to wild beasts, and how the loving nymph Necile had rescued him and brought him to manhood under the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum

... His native home is in Africa, and his human associates, if they are human, have been the Hottentots, the Namaquois or the Amazoulons—the most impossible and hideous people on the earth. Since his babyhood days he has seen nothing but cannibalism and carnage among the savages; and since his transportation to Europe by a strange occurrence of horrible circumstances, he has been the subject for all kinds of barbarous punishments which ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... Anna had left babyhood far behind her and was now a girl of fifteen. Her mother at this period, decided that it was time to call in the aid of masters to assist in her daughter's education. Accordingly, such were summoned from a distant town. There was ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul

... it came from no personal mark or peculiarity or as the result of any particular incident of his babyhood. It was merely a convenient adaptation by his parents of a childish expression of his own, a labial attempt to say something. His mother had mimicked his babyish prattlings, the father had laughed over the mimicry, and, almost unconsciously, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... they matured young? There, all about them, from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple. Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through finger-tips, all through those early years when eyes and finger-tips are ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... the shaft of sunlight and the woman at the writing table turned. On the threshold stood Kenneth Thornton and by the hand he held a savage-visaged child clad in breech clout and moccasins, but otherwise naked. Its eyes held the beady sharpness of the Indian, and though hardly past babyhood, it stood haughtily ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... her soul and show her the way. Anita appeared to be about seventeen years old; but her mother with whom a few hours later I had an interview, and a most distressing one, I assure you, told me that the girl was but fourteen, that she had been so petted and spoilt from her babyhood up (parents and others, please take note of this) as to be absolutely unmanageable, that she was out at all hours of the night, in all sorts of places, with all sorts ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts

... right side, when a child has been restless or crying, and especially if it has been lying on its back, will at once relieve it and allow it to go to sleep again. It is the knowledge of these little things that count in babyhood. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... in this early story, and imagination also, altho not so abundant. But as the author brooded over the incidents of Mowgli's babyhood there in the thick of the forest, in the midst of the beasts, whose blood-brother he became, suddenly his imagination revealed to him that the jungle and all its inhabitants must be governed by law, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... his very babyhood the child delights in colour, and at a very early age he learns to love and understand pictures. Then comes the desire to make these for himself. Give him pencil and paper, give him chalk, charcoal, a paint-box, and other suitable materials, and he will set to work ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... we painfully may earn rectitude and a proper balance in the conduct of our short affairs I must believe that you will practise; and I must believe, as I look here into your face, seeing your confident advance (as though you were flying out from your babyhood into young life without any fear), that the virtues which now surround you in a crowd and make a sort of court for you and are your angels every way, will go along with you and will stand by you to the end. Even so, and the more so, you will find (if you read this some years ...
— On Something • H. Belloc

... you!" said Cecelia Anne who had never quite outgrown her babyhood's lisp, "and can I have the saddle lowered so's I ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... for Pym to return, and then, taking Ixza with her, had gone forth; but where the old nurse resided, only Lilama and Ixza knew. The maid knew only that Lilama had left the cellar with the intention of assisting, in some manner, the nurse of her babyhood. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... exhibiting much interest. Ann had been the deus ex machina of the house since Christa's babyhood. It never occurred to her that any power needed to interfere on behalf ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall

... From his babyhood, almost, the love of art was innate in the boy; and when he was only seven years old, he began to draw upon a slate a scene that particularly pleased him—a line of geese sailing upon the smooth glassy surface of a neighbouring ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen

... gaze The dusk of Autumn days Is blent with April haze, As when of old began The bursting of the bud Of rosy babyhood— When all the ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley

... years correspond by analogy in a planet. In man the sixtieth part is a very venerable age. But as to a planet, as to our little earth, instead of arguing dotage, six thousand years may have scarcely carried her beyond babyhood. Some people think she is cutting her first teeth; some think her in her teens. But, seriously, it is a very interesting problem. Do the sixty centuries of our earth imply youth, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... first, in Newland Archer's boyhood, as a brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten, of whom people said that she "ought to be painted." Her parents had been continental wanderers, and after a roaming babyhood she had lost them both, and been taken in charge by her aunt, Medora Manson, also a wanderer, who was herself returning to New ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... Opinion were not over for the day, for turning again at last into the home Square, tired out by her three hours' ramble, she met an old lady whom she and Gratian had known from babyhood—a handsome dame, the widow of an official, who spent her days, which showed no symptom of declining, in admirable works. Her daughter, the widow of an officer killed at the Marne, was with her, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... craving for something he could not define, but which always merged itself into his great grievance. He lived alone. At his work—which he obtained readily, for he was strong and efficient, and gave double value for his wages—he had no mates. Girls he had seen grow up from babyhood developed into beautiful creatures, with miraculous eyes, round limbs, and cheeks so red, so tender, that their soft ripeness haunted his dreams. Under cover and in secret he would watch them pass or at play with a throbbing heart and a passionate hunger for companionship, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... to suckle her babe. He ought to be accustomed to take the bosom while she is lying down; if this habit is not at first instituted, it will be difficult to adopt it afterwards. Good habits may be taught a child from earliest babyhood. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... with a pink ball of a face set in white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the Northwest grow from babyhood. He had passed his seventieth year, but Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation. There was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... admiration. Then the baby, who never before had seen the purple and fine linen of majesty or the sparkling jewels of wealth, knowing this was the opportunity of his life put up his hands in welcome and said in the universal language of babyhood, "Ah, goo! ah, goo!" He was a worthy child of a great mother, and the minute he was left to himself he came before the footlights and with one word captivated his audience, and a storm of kisses fell upon his ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley

... experiment I wanted. I did not value Bettine so much; she had not pride enough for me; only now when I am sure of myself, would I pour out my soul at the feet of another. In the assured soul it is kingly prodigality; in one which cannot forbear, it is mere babyhood. I love abandon only when natures are capable of the extreme reverse. I knew Bettine would end in nothing, when I read her book. I knew she could not ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... be somewhat difficult to apply this sweeping generalisation. We wonder, for instance, how this theory could be made to cover the large category of infantile ailments. How, we are {133} entitled to ask, would Christian Science deal with the teething-troubles which attend babyhood? Is it seriously suggested that a feverish, wailing child is merely the victim of an hallucination—and how would the Christian Scientist undertake to convince him of his illusion? On the face of it, such an enterprise ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... little charge with the nurse, and trying to cheer up a solemn-looking boy of three, who evidently considered his deposition from babyhood as a great injury, she tripped lightly down again, to take part in the Saturday's ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... infant voice; Young innocence is full of charms: There's not a pleasure half so choice, As tossing up a child in arms. Babyhood is a blessed state, Felicity expressly made for; But still, on earth it is our fate, That even "Children ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... few weeks during the year. No snow! no ice! Can you imagine such a condition? And up there it is almost the Eskimo's only commodity. He eats it, drinks it, lives in it, sleeps on it, and his castle is built of it. And he endures it year after year, from his babyhood to his gray days, and there appears no hope for him. Bare ground is a curiosity to the Eskimo; and there are no spring freshets. Their bridges across their streams are formed of ice; the very salt sea is covered with it; and they venture out on those great ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... beak opens it shows a large throat of deepest carmine, so that it possesses the beauty of colour from its earliest days, and when full grown and in fine plumage it is one of the handsomest of our birds. In its babyhood my jay was much like other young things of his kind, always clamouring for food, and seeming to care for little else, but as he grew up he attached himself to me with a wonderful strength of affection ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen

... face,—beautiful too, though with none of the regal beauty crowned by my mother's massive hair, and pencilled brows. It was a timid, girlish face, with reverent eyes, and ripe, tremulous lips,—weak lips, as I remember them. From babyhood, I felt a want in the face. I had, of course, no capacity to define it; it was represented to me only by the fact that ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... his door, and he called "Come in." From her babyhood Lily had had her own peculiar method of signaling that she stood without, a delicate rapid tattoo of finger nails on the panel. He watched ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... creature (the cockatoo, not the cousin, who was plain), and John Broom's admiration of him was boundless. He gazed at the sulphur-colored crest, the pure white wings with their deeper-tinted lining, and even the beak and the fierce round eyes, as he had gazed at the broom bush in his babyhood, with insatiable delight. ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... Slim," as he took pains to inform the object of his caress. He further announced to all present, men and mules, that he had been brought up with mules from babyhood and knew mules from the tips of their long ears to the ends of their ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons

... Lizzie sitting grandly, with a feast of literature, and not a drop of gravy. Mother was in the corner also, with her cheery-coloured ribbons glistening very nice by candle-light, looking at Annie now and then, with memories of her babyhood; and then at her having a baby: yet half afraid of praising her much, for fear of that young Lizzie. But Lizzie showed no jealousy: she truly loved our Annie (now that she was gone from us), and she wanted to know all sorts of things, and she adored the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... the beauty of the Christ Child, The gentleness, the grace, The smiling, loving tenderness, The infantile embrace! All babyhood he holdeth, All motherhood enfoldeth— Yet who ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various

... possibilities to become like the enviable, wonderful Virginia Lee. But she breathed to none her ambitions and hopes except at night as she knelt by her high old-fashioned bed and bent her head to say the prayer Aunt Maria had taught her in babyhood. Then to the prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep," she added an original petition, "And please let me get like my ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... endeavored to view this room with Kara's eyes. Kara loved it and the old Gray House that had sheltered her since babyhood, her refuge when apparently deserted by the parents she had ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook

... to you and suffering humanity to acknowledge the benefit that I have received from your treatments. From babyhood till I was twenty years old I was continually bothered with a weakness of the muscles of the bladder, that gave me much trouble, both by night as well as day. I doctored with several physicians and tried all patent medicines, but could not get ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... forced them to love and depend upon themselves in a world where brothers and sisters as habitually teased and annoyed each other, would have struck them as fantastic. Perhaps Kate herself hardly knew the power of her own will upon them. Her commands in their babyhood had not been couched in the language of modern child-analysts, nor had she given, or been able to give, any particular reason for her law. But the instinct by which she drew Wolf's attention to his sister's goodness, or noted Wolf's cleverness for Rose's benefit, was better ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... wicked at the early age of one, And then reforms—and dies at thirty-six a spotless son, Is never, never saddled with his babyhood's defect, But earns from ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... hand in recognition, as if he had been a young officer. Most boys might have looked awkward or theatrical in making the gesture, but he made it with naturalness and ease, because he had been familiar with the form since his babyhood. He had seen officers returning the salutes of their men when they encountered each other by chance in the streets, he had seen princes passing sentries on their way to their carriages, more august personages raising the quiet, recognizing hand to their helmets as they rode ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... "is this child going to live over again those dreadful days of her babyhood? The Lord give me wisdom to know what ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May

... I christened that boy Christopher Mark Antony Burton, fourth," announced he, as if every whit of responsibility for the boy's good judgment were traceable to his name. "He has the stuff in him—has had since babyhood." ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... fail to be remarkable in some way. It is not from such sources that the mediocrities are recruited. But the child was utterly unlike her parents, and never showed much likeness to either in after life. Her genius was unquestioned even from her precocious babyhood, and she was the wonder and admiration of all the brilliant circle of her father's friends. Her temperament was most vehement and impulsive, and her vivacity a wonder even to the Parisians. She seemed to know everything by intuition, and made light of the hardest tasks ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... was not, however, any greater, if as great, as my right to inclusion in the collection of Scottish Poets. If I "lisped in numbers," it was not in Yorkshire, for Yorkshire I left for ever before even the first babblings of babyhood began. However, "kissing goes by favour," and I was happy in the favour ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... she must be subject to her father, in middle age to her husband, and in old age to her son. The revolutionary power of Christianity has established a new order, and in the Christian community we see her welcomed in babyhood, cared for in childhood, and receiving the honour due to her womanhood when she becomes a bride. I have been amazed at the sacrifices I have seen made by parents for their daughters. I have known a father, too ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... was going to fight for her. To make the world a safe place for girls such as she! All the terrible stories of Belgium flashed across her mind, and she was lifted on a great wave of gratitude to this boy friend of her babyhood for ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill

... sometimes laughingly declared that Alex's most intimate friends were Miss Virginia Wilbur and Miss Sarah Leigh, and it was true she often sought their society. Miss Wilbur had made pets of the Russell children from their babyhood, and they were both fond of her. There were times when Alex found her placid absorption in everyday matters rather soothing, at others Miss Sarah ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... During babyhood the children stay with their mothers; but from the age of four on the boys spend most of their time in the gamal, while the girls remain under their mother's care. Clothes are not worn by the boys till they have joined the Suque, which, in some ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... her jealousy of all other pupils, interests and saddens me. Her devotion to you is of that morbid type, so unwholesome and so dangerous to her peace, and the peace of all her associates. It is a misfortune that mothers do not take such traits in early babyhood, and eradicate them by patient, practical methods. Instead, this mother, like many others, seems to think her little girl should be favoured and flattered because of her ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... when they ought to be at play. An article on "Nerves and Over-Pressure" in the "Dublin Review" conveys the impression that little boys and girls are dangerously absorbed in their lessons, and draws a fearful picture of these poor innocents literally "grinding from babyhood." It is over-study (an evil from which our remote ancestors were wholly and happily exempt) which lays, so we are told, the foundation of all our nervous disorders. It is this wasting ambition which exhausts the spring of childhood and the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... American girl from her babyhood upwards. The first is the baby, plump, bright-eyed, and with more expression than the average English child; a little older, see her still plump, short-legged, made to look stout by the double covering of the leg bulging over the boots; ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... seemingly, The open book upon thy knee, And through the quiet woodlands hear Sounds full of mystery to ear Of grosser mould—the myriad cries That from the teeming world arise; Which we, self-confidently wise, Pass by unheeding. Thou didst yearn From thy weak babyhood to learn Arcana of creation; turn Thy eyes on things intangible To mortals; when the earth was still. Hear dreamy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... entered the Hall of Fine Arts and looked upon that impressive picture entitled, "Breaking Home Ties." The lad is about to go out from the roof that has sheltered him from babyhood, to be his own guide in the big wide world. His mother holds his hand as she looks love into his eyes, and gives him her warnings and blessing; the father, with his boy's valise in his hand, has turned away with a lump in his throat, while even the dog seems ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... to a man who had paddled two days in a hot sticky fog, as, clad in white, she sat still and placid on her airy perch. Her hair, of the very light fleecy gold seldom seen after babyhood, hung over her shoulders unconfined by comb or ribbon, felling around her like a veil and glittering in the horizontal sunbeams; her face, throat and hands were white as the petals of a white camellia, her features infantile, her cast-down eyes invisible under the full-orbed lids. Waring ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... there were any of his own kind in the neighborhood. As a matter of fact, he had never thought about himself at all, but, having all he wanted in the shape of food and sport, had made himself quite content and even happy. As he grew from babyhood he got more mischievious still, and gave no end of trouble by eating and destroying nearly all the grapes on the vines, and fruit on the trees ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin

... the city than to the little house at Auteuil, where he spent twenty summers. So he knew his Paris very intimately, and was limited too by knowing only her life and thought. To his repressed youth, guarded by a strict father and a cross servant,—for his mother died in his babyhood,—is sometimes attributed his lack of emotional quality. But his was not an intense nature, and probably no training could have made the didactic poet lyric or passionate. Sincerity and common-sense were his predominating qualities, and he had the rare faculty of obedience ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him. She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought his mind ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... now down-town New York, between the Rialto and its more conventional prototype, Society,—that is, she lived east of Broadway on a cross-street in the forties. The maid who took care of her had been in her aunt's employ for years, and had seen Nancy grow from her rather spoiled babyhood to a hoydenish childhood, and so on to soft-eyed, vibrant maturity. She was the only person who tyrannized over Nancy. She brought her a cup of steaming hot water with a pinch of ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... said, but we cannot vouch for the fact—that Cauchon, in order to acquire the scent, swiftness and sagacity of the cariboo, has lived on cariboo milk, with an infusion of moss and bark, ever since his babyhood, but that this very winter (1865) he killed, with slugs, four cariboo at one shot, we can ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... the tracks that Bob's progress had left behind. The imprint of a rabbit's foot would not have escaped notice from such eyes as those of the half-breed, who had been trained in all forest lore from his babyhood. Hence it was mere child's play for him to pick up the track of top-boots, as well as the traces that had been made by the ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby

... the poor child found indescribably agitating and even horrible—their silence was broken by a question. For they asked what she, Damaris, meant to say, meant to do, when he—her father, the all-powerful Commissioner Sahib of her babyhood's faith and devotion—came home ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... of catechising the boys according to their ages and acquirements, with questions, exciting their attention to subjects of the gravest importance. Compare this with the custom of asking a child its name, and requiring it to narrate circumstances which took place in the time of unconscious babyhood; instead of impressing upon it the existence of God and the solemn realities of eternity. The Assembly's, Dr. Watts', and especially Bunyan's catechisms, are admirably adapted to assist a parent in these important ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... to get the ten best boxers of the regiment to jointly engage in a ten-round contest with him, one round each. He would frequently finish fresher than the tenth man. Coming of notedly powerful stock on both sides, and having been physically educated from babyhood, Dam, with clean living and constant training, was a very uncommon specimen. There may have been one or two other men in the regiment as well developed, or nearly so; but when poise, rapidity, and skill were taken into account there was no one near him. Captain Chevalier said he ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... horrors, to bloodshed, and the shudder of grisly phantoms there was, perhaps, something of the man of peace. It is only the unwarlike citizen who could delight in imagining a brigand nurtured from babyhood on human blood. He was, indeed, writing in the very period which the historian fixed upon as the happiest and most prosperous that the human race has ever enjoyed—those two or three benign generations when, under the Antonines, provincials combined ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... and married men, in a manner which did extraordinary credit to her years: and let not the reader fancy such pastimes unnatural at her early age. The ladies—Heaven bless them!—are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards. Little SHE'S of three years old play little airs and graces upon small heroes of five; simpering misses of nine make attacks upon young gentlemen of twelve; and at sixteen, a well-grown girl, under encouraging ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of introspective accounts of the babyhood, childhood, adolescence and inevitably gloomy maturity of countless men and women, it is refreshing to turn to "Bricklaying in Modern Practice," by Stewart Scrimshaw. "Heigh-ho!" one says. ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... separate the crag from the opposite mainland were running high and boisterous, but Cleer had a sure foot, and could leap, light as a gazelle, from rock to rock. Not for nothing was she Michael Trevennack's daughter, well trained from her babyhood to high and airy climbs. She chose an easy spot where it was possible to spring across by a series of boulders, arranged accidentally like stepping-stones; and in a minute she was standing on the main crag itself, a huge beetling mass of detached ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen

... Since babyhood she had listened with awe to tales of him; and the red-letter days of her childhood's calendar were the days upon which her father would take her down to the docks, past great windowless warehouses of concrete and sheet-iron, where big glossy horses stood harnessed to high-piled trucks—past great ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... in 1800. His father was a tireless and devoted member of the group of London anti-slavery workers (Claphamites), and was Secretary of the company which conducted Sierra Leone (the African state for enfranchised negroes); he had also made a private fortune in African trade. From his very babyhood the son displayed almost incredible intellectual precocity and power of memory. His voracious reading began at the age of three, when he 'for the most part lay on the rug before the fire, with his book on the floor, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... were fairly off, and out of sight of waving hands and the two strong, kind faces that had been his ideals from his babyhood, even Eustace began to cheer up considerably. He had been very much like a bear with a sore head, rather to his mother's and Miss Chase's astonishment; for Eustace could generally be counted on as sensible and fairly serene in temper. ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield

... listened, thought how fit and delightful an incident it would be, if fairies, or still better, if angel-children were to come from paradise, and play invisibly with her own darlings, and help them to make their snow-image, giving it the features of celestial babyhood! Violet and Peony would not be aware of their immortal playmates,—only they would see that the image grew very beautiful while they worked at it, and would think that they ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... wise counsel of his elders? It is one of the most familiar of facts that man alone among animals, exhibits a capacity for progress. That man is widely different from other animals in the length of his adolescence and the utter helplessness of his babyhood, is an equally familiar fact. Now between these two commonplace facts is there any connection? Is it a mere accident that the creature which is distinguished as progressive should also be distinguished ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske

... trouble about them, but they amused him, and he found pleasure in watching their unsophisticated ways. His good-natured, smiling face appealed to a certain part of Daisy Home, not a very high part certainly, but with the charming frankness of babyhood, the part appealed to ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade

... Allyn's cheek. It was much the caress she would have bestowed upon Melchisedek, if she had chanced to step on his paw; but she never forgot the look of disgusted scorn with which Allyn had marched out of the room. Accustomed from her babyhood to petting her father and being petted by him, the girl was at first at a loss to interpret the situation. When the truth dawned upon her that Allyn was really in earnest, she refused to be suppressed, and persecuted the boy ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... sound heart a—I use the word in its olden sense—lover. With his equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton and a Swedish woman, Thora Halversen, who had been Edith Throckmartin's nurse from babyhood, they had set forth for the Nan-Matal, that extraordinary group of island ruins clustered along the eastern shore of Ponape ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... a ready welcome. Bless her sweet face! There she sits, at the moment that I am writing this to you, with her willow arms twined around the exquisite form of her little lily-bud boy, and bending low her graceful form over him, hushing to sleep the very bravest, noblest, merriest little specimen of babyhood—the exact image ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... they had really a great deal too much leisure. They could not be forever playing at hide-and-seek among the flower-shrubs, or at blind-man's-buff with garlands over their eyes, or at whatever other games had been found out while Mother Earth was in her babyhood. When life is all sport, toil is the real play. There was absolutely nothing to do. A little sweeping and dusting about the cottage, I suppose, and the gathering of fresh flowers (which were only too abundant everywhere), and arranging them in vases,—and poor ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... boys in a farming community, brought up on the farm, naturally become farmers, yet in the interim, between babyhood and farmer life, they go to school. How absurdly easy the task of the school—to determine that they shall be intelligent, progressive, enthusiastic, up-to-date farmers. The girls, too, marry farmers, keep farmers' homes and raise farmers' sons. How simple ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... English, and who might be able to learn something of her antecedents. And Frank had answered that he would do so, knowing the while that nothing could tempt him to bring her and his brother together until all the recollections of her babyhood, if she had any, were obliterated, and she had in ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... built upon a little rise in the bottom land, down to the water's edge. Often when she was a child, and I a man well toward middle life, did I play with the enchanting little elf upon the blue-grass lawn, and drink the waters of perennial youth at the fountain of her sweet babyhood. Vividly I remember the white-skinned sycamores, the gracefully drooping elms, and the sweet-scented honey-locust that grew about the cabin and embowered it in leafy glory. Even at this long distance of time, when June ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... for whom the doings of the wild Everards did not provide food for discussion. For Nan undoubtedly was an Everard still, her grand wedding notwithstanding. No one ever dreamed of applying any other title to her than the familiar "Miss Nan" that she had borne from her babyhood. There was, in fact, a general feeling that the unknown husband of Miss Nan was scarcely worthy of the high honour that had been bestowed upon him. His desertion of her on the very day succeeding the wedding had been freely criticised, and in many quarters condemned out of hand. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall. Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing up, pushed her gently into the ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... hazardous to guess the three figures in the domestic symphony. Now in jolly Scherzo (munter) begin the tricks and sport of babyhood. There is of course but one theme, with ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... Babyhood has no monopoly on the tantrum. The characters of King Lear and Ivan the Terrible have much in common. One might almost believe that the writer of Ivan had felt the incompleteness of Lear, and had seen the absurdity of making a melodramatic bid for sympathy in behalf of this old ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... all the disposable property he held, and deemed it but a small price for such a son. The Duchess thought of her feeble boy-babies who had been whooping-coughed or scarlet-fevered out of the world, and sighed, and loved her nephew better than ever his mother had loved him since his babyhood. When the Dovedales were at their place in the Forest, Roderick almost lived with them; or, at any rate, divided his time between Ashbourne Park and the Abbey House, and spent as little of his life at home as he could. He patronised Lady, Mabel, who was his junior by ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon

... lips to speak. The little remark of her sister-in-law, apparently so harmless and sensible, was in fact a poisoned arrow. For Mildred was twenty-three, had been "out" five years, and was not even in the way to become engaged. She and everyone had assumed from her lovely babyhood that she would marry splendidly, would marry wealth and social position. How could it be otherwise? Had she not beauty? Had she not family and position? Had she not style and cleverness? Yet—five years out and not a "serious" proposal. An impudent poor fellow with ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... journeyed from the far-off Lands Of Babyhood—where baby-lilies blew Their trumpets in mine ears, and filled my hands With treasures of perfume and honey-dew, And where the orchard shadows ever drew Their cool arms round me when my cheeks were fired With too much joy, and lulled mine eyelids to, And only let the starshine trickle ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley

... particular instance I was the exception to the rule, that hair generally gives a boy no great trouble from the time he merges out of babyhood until he puts on long pants and begins to discern something strangely and subtly attractive about the sex described by Mr. Kipling as being the more deadly of the species. During this interim it is a matter of no moment to a boy whether he ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb

... In babyhood Tom cuffed and banged and scratched Chambers unrebuked, and Chambers early learned that between meekly bearing it and resenting it, the advantage all lay with the former policy. The few times that his persecutions had moved him beyond control and made him fight back had cost him very ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... about a month old they begin to feel that life has its realities, and that they must do something towards the end for which they were made. The thought is faint at first, but by degrees grows weightier, till at last they can stand it no longer, and, making a great effort to throw off the incubus of babyhood that weighs so heavily upon them, they burst open the back door of their shell and slowly creep out backwards. It takes about five minutes for them to get entirely out, head, legs and all, and then for a moment or two they gaze in stupefaction at their old shell, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various

... a boy; he was deaf and dumb, and as uncanny a child as his father was a man. He was a beautiful boy to look at, with soft fair skin and golden hair, but he had his father's cruel eyes, and his father's cruel nature. From his babyhood his mischievousness and wickedness knew no bounds; any bird, or animal, or even child that came within his reach he would torment almost to death, and the more his victim writhed and screamed, the greater ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... been favoured, among a series of pictures, with the following of George the Fourth, exhibited in his babyhood. We are told that "all persons of fashion were admitted to see the Prince, under the following restrictions, viz.—that in passing through the apartment they stepped with the greatest caution, and did not offer to touch his Royal Highness. For the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... sent forth to play with his comrades with his hair done up in curls by a fond mama, would encounter the jeers of the whole neighborhood. From babyhood, the ribbons, curls, frills and silks are for the girls, who are thereby rendered deeply conscious of their appearance and taught above all things to keep themselves clean and ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias

... Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home—and by "home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother at home completely—and by "home" I now mean the town ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... at the saddle, Roy pranking thither and yonder, rich just in the joy of being alive. Shashai had never quite overcome his jealousy of his young half-brother, and now laid back his ears in reproof of his unseemly gambols; Shashai's own babyhood was not far enough in the background ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... if Carrie should get miffed and begin to divulge. Once we had a telephone girl who did this. She was a pert young thing who had come to town with her family a short time before. It was a mistake to hire her—telephone girls should be watched and tested for discretion from babyhood up—but our directors did it, and because she showed a passion for literature and gum and very little for work, they fired her in three months. She left with reluctance, but she talked with enthusiasm; and Homeburg was an armed ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... it is easy for most of us to make a fair beginning at almost anything. In the rough and tumble of babyhood and youth we all accumulate experiences which are raw material for any and every occupation. So when one of them kindles in you a light blaze of curiosity, you have only to pull yourself together, you ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... almost entire charge of her little god-daughter; and, as "Nina" grew out of her babyhood, Sarah continued to exercise such general supervision over her that the child learned to look up to her as to a mother, and frequently when together, and in her correspondence for many years, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. For sixty years, the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... in the shroud did lurk A curious frame of Nature's work; A flow'ret crushed in the bud, A nameless piece of Babyhood Was in her cradle-coffin lying; Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying: So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb For darker closets of the tomb! She did but ope an eye, and put A clear beam forth, then straight up shut For the long dark: ne'er more to see Through glasses ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... two "men" his hands encountered the knobs on their heads—the tiny metal balls protruding from the top of the skull at the point where, in babies, the head remains soft during babyhood. He could have broken connection with Barter for these two by jerking the controls free. And then what? He would never get through to Barter and would release in Bronx Park two men whose strange type of madness, when they were discovered, ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks

... as you used to in the days of your babyhood," he said, kissing her, as they rose to return to Guy's room, "you never even then, would call Mrs. Cameron or myself anything but 'mamma' and 'papa,' and now you shall ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... away from boys twice and four times from girls. A boy cannot get married until the cochiste is taken away. A girl at the age of puberty is pledged to a year of chastity, and the same ceremony is performed on her as in babyhood, to be repeated in the following year. Should she transgress during that time the belief is that she or her parents or her lover will die. The principle of monogamy is strictly enforced, and if a woman deviates from it she has to be cured by the shaman, or an accident will befall her—a jaguar or ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... his babyhood, Ivan had lived in the extreme eastern end of the house—as far as possible from his father's rooms. In this putting of him away even from her own proximity, Sophia had shown the self-sacrifice of devotion. During many a night had the unhappy woman lain thinking of her child, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... life was his little daughter, Aglaia. That was a brave name, truly, for a flaxen-haired toddler; but the mountaineers love sonorous and stately names. The mother had encountered it somewhere in a book, and the deed was done. In her babyhood Aglaia herself repudiated the name, as far as common use went, and persisted in calling herself "Dums." The miller and his wife often tried to coax from Aglaia the source of this mysterious name, but without results. At last they arrived ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry



Words linked to "Babyhood" :   immatureness, infancy, oral stage, time of life, oral phase, immaturity, early childhood, baby



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