"Battledore" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... later she stood opposite the count in the great library, swinging the battledore with grace. There was much soft laughter and gay repartee; and Adrian followed the movements of Katherine's lithe form, clad in the soft, clinging grey of the convent. She became remiss; for Adrian's glances were confusing, and intentional laches ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... what they called the "Academy Band," and grand music it made, with a hat-box for a drum, cricket-bat for violoncello, and paper flute and trumpets. You would not recognize Uncle John, whom you know only as a man six feet high, in that little lad on the left side of the picture with a battledore for a fiddle. They had a great deal of what he called excellent fun, though I am afraid it sometimes bordered upon mischief or naughtiness. I used to consider that he and his schoolfellows were regular heroes ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... on the side of his bed and tried to think things out, but he felt as if he didn't know b from a battledore, so he decided to think no more, and after saying his prayers he lay down and went to sleep. And he did sleep! When he woke it was close on eight o'clock, and he had only time to fly to the window and look out, when the great clock on the tower began to whirr before it struck the hour. And there ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... hours were the average of his every toilet, and other hours were spent in council with the cutter of his coats or with the custodian of his wardrobe. A single, devoted life! To Whites, to routs, to races, he went, it is true, not reluctantly. He was known to have played battledore and shuttlecock in a moonlit garden with Mr. Previte and some other gentlemen. His elopement with a young Countess from a ball at Lady Jersey's was quite notorious. It was even whispered that he once, in the company of some friends, made as though he would ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... had a hard life. His father met with reverses in business, and as Carl had not many warm friends, and, above all, was not sustained by noble principles, he has been tossed about by fortune's battledore until his gayest feathers are nearly all knocked off. He is a bookkeeper in the thriving Amsterdam house of Boekman and Schimmelpenninck. Voostenwalbert, the junior partner, treats him kindly; and he, in turn, is very respectful to the "monkey ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... conclusion but so essentially feminine that I forgave her at once. And, when she came to me, and put her arms around my neck and urged me to go with her to a tennis match—a foolish game where grown-up people knock little balls over a net with a battledore—I pointed out to her that such spectacles, while eminently proper for young folk, argued a failing mind in those of maturer years. With a ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... Can't you see that is a dram? Animal food twice a day. No wine but a little claret and water; no pastry, no sweets, and play battledore with ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... play beyond this point, for it dwindles off into sentimental mystification which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under fifty, or appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives opportunity merely for settings and some rare moments of costuming, the lady with the battledore reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and, of course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess of Towers in the first act—all these touches furnish more than a satisfying background for the very shy and ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... lemon trees, and in the centre of the grass-plot stood a tub yet huger, holding an enormous aloe, The hall itself, to my fancy then lofty and wide as a cathedral would seem now, was a famous place for battledore and shuttlecock; and behind was a garden, equal to that of old Alcinous himself. My favourite walk was one of turf by a long straight pond, bordered with lime-trees. But the whole demesne was the fairy ground of my childhood; and its presiding genius was ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... indefinitely, to all neglect of emptiness of meaning and triteness. Thus the words "Pars mea, Rex meus" are repeated by the alto exactly thirteen times! which, any one will admit, is an unlucky number, especially since the other voices keep tossing the same unlucky words in a musical battledore. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... 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 ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... of the cloister. When I made up my mind to carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of fourteen playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny, her winsome ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not yet over; it was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before their doors as if it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I watched the charming expression ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... them the benefit of a fresh dressing of manure. Maud, however, without a hat of any sort, her long, luxuriant, silken, golden tresses covering her shoulders, and occasionally veiling her warm, rich cheek, was exercising with a battledore, keeping Little Smash, now increased in size to quite fourteen stone, rather actively employed as an assistant, whenever the exuberance of her own spirits caused her to throw the plaything beyond her reach. In one of the orchards, near ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... sexual character seems to me the plumules or battledore scales on the wings of certain families and genera of butterflies, almost invariably changing in form with the species and genera in proportion to other changes, and always constant in each species yet confined to the males, and so small ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... a weak monarch, I beg leave to differ in opinion, since he has the boldness to prolong his childhood and be happy, in spite of years and conviction. Give him a boar to stab, and a pigeon to shoot at, a battledore or an angling rod, and he is better contented than Solomon in all his glory, and will never discover, like that sapient sovereign, that all is vanity and vexation ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... 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 ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... work, and after luncheon there was walking in the park, rowing or sailing on the lake, riding or driving in the adjacent country, archery in a spacious field; and in bad weather billiards, reading in the library, music in the drawing-rooms, battledore and shuttlecock in the hall; in short, all the methods of passing time agreeably which are available to good company, when there are ample means and space for their exercise; to say nothing of making love, which Lord Curryfin did with all delicacy and discretion—directly to Miss Gryll, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... rather sententiously: "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 with them at ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... 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 ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... easily accessible by daylight, although at night he had found it a dangerous attempt to scale it. But not 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 ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen |
