"Boyhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his life, while the wood crumbled to ashes and the moon came up over the hills. A misguided, misspent boyhood; too much money; too little common sense; then the fling in the open with every emotion and desire uncurbed. Well, he had to learn his lesson and God knew he had; but why, in the working of things, shouldn't one be given a chance to prove the well-learned ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... possible that while I have been suffering so much, in striving with my sense of what is due to you, and must be rendered to you, I have made you suffer what your words disclose to me? Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... have written enough to him to fill a dozen books. We are going back to the city now. In his last letter Ernest says he has been home, and that his mother is delighted to hear of his engagement. He says, too, that he went to see an old lady, one of the friends of. his boyhood, to ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... its yellow light poured into the room, casting dim shadows over the white walls, and bringing up before me row on row of spectre desks. The chair I sat in, the table on which I leaned were real enough. They were part of my to-day, but that dim-lighted room was the school-house of my boyhood. The fourth of those spectre desks measuring back from the stove, was where Tim and I sat day after day together, with heads bowed over open books and eyes aslant. That was not the same Tim who had passed me a while before, swaggering ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... From earliest boyhood when I read the works of Henry M. Stanley and books about Cecil Rhodes, Africa has called to me. It was not until I met General Smuts during the Great War, however, that I had a definite ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... Limping from mission to mission, with a lame foot that must never be cured, fasting much and passing sleepless nights, depriving himself of comfortable clothing and nutritious food, he felt that he was imitating the saints and martyrs who were the ideals of his sickly boyhood, and in recompense of abstinence he was happy. He was kind-hearted and charitable to all, but most strict in his enforcement of religious duties. It never occurred to him to doubt his absolute right to flog his neophytes for any slight negligence in matters of the faith. His holy desires trembled ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... boys took quite a liking to him. He conversed fluently upon subjects pertaining to America, where he said he had visited more than once, and also spoke familiarly of that spot on the African coast where Jack had made his boyhood home. ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... of Sir William Dobbin, a London tradesman. Uncouth, awkward, and tall, with huge feet; but faithful and loving, with a large heart and most delicate appreciation. He is a prince of a fellow, is proud and fond of Captain George Osborne from boyhood to death, and adores Amelia, George's wife. When she has been a widow for some ten years, he marries her.—Thackeray, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... her; she smiled reassuringly. Then he forgot all about the steps and counting time. He felt as he had that morning on shipboard when the America passed the Great Britain. All the joy of boyhood resurged through his veins, and he danced in a wild abandonment of bliss; for the band was playing "Home, Sweet Home," and to Sandy it meant that, come what might, within her shining eyes his gipsy soul had found its ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... never had taste or judgment. If Norman were not a lusus naturae," said Dr. May, hesitating for a word, "his head would have been turned long ago. And he wants companions too—he has been forced out of boyhood too soon, poor fellow—and Harry gone too. He does not get anything like real relaxation, and he will be better among youths than boys. Stoneborough will never be what it was in my time!" added the doctor mournfully. "I never thought to see the poor old place come to this; but there—when ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and being a middy of some two years' standing on board the Sea Rover, and full of fun and "larkishness," to coin a term, assumed a slightly protective air towards Johnny Liston, the son of one of the cabin passengers, between whom and himself one of those stanch friendships common to boyhood had sprung up during the voyage to Australia. "A whale, your grandmother, Jonathan!" repeated Davy Armstrong in a bantering tone, with all—as his companion thought he could detect—the conscious superiority of a sucking ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... put a polish on his apparel, with an energetic humility that looked like unconquerable patience; as though he had said: "While life is left in me, I will be seen for what I am." We will vary it—"For what I think myself." In reality, he fought no battle. He had been dead-beaten from his boyhood. Like the old Spanish Governor, the walls of whose fortress had been thrown down by an earthquake, and who painted streets to deceive the enemy, he was rendered safe enough by his astuteness, except against a traitor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... simple home in the country, and in obtaining it they were indulging a sentiment of returning to the primitive life of their father, who had come to the city from a hill farm, and had been too busy all his life to recur to the tastes of his boyhood. At least that was the theory of his daughters; but the old gentleman had a horror of his early life, and could scarcely be dragged away from the city even in the summer. He would no doubt have been astonished at the lofty and substantial ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Battleby Tring had laboured from boyhood to eld On the Lines of the East and the West, and eke of the North and South; Many Lines had he built and surveyed—important the posts which he held; And the Lords of the Iron Horse were dumb when he ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... blame. When he was out of his Consulship, seeing that among past Consuls there was no one on a par with him, and thinking but little of those who were below consular rank, he became idle in his work to which from boyhood he had devoted himself, and chose to live in the midst of his wealth, as he thought a happier life—certainly an easier one. The first two or three years took off something from him. As the gradual decay ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... in passing from one air current to another. It was a unique one, for I was still a little incredulous. I had not entirely lost my old boyhood belief that the wind went all ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... He had been brought up in a town, founded in the wilderness, at a distance of less than one hundred and fifty miles (p. 104) from the commercial capital of the republic. He lived long enough to see the frontiers of civilization pushed one thousand miles west of the line it had held in his boyhood's home. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... had been going on within him between the world and the other world, the world had been getting the mastery. The attractions of a martial life had shone more brightly than the light which had flamed about him in his boyhood. Then Loe spoke, and thenceforth there was no more perplexity. Penn's ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... derive from a theme as simple and as strong as that of a classic symphony—from those words with which it opens: "'T isn't life that matters! 'T is the courage you bring to it." From that moment on, the novel follows the struggle of Peter Westcott, in boyhood and young manhood, with antagonists, inner and outer. At the end we have him partly defeated, wholly triumphant, still fighting, still ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... late eighteenth century federal architecture in Alexandria is the residence at 607 Oronoco Street,[Owners: Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Goodale.] commonly spoken of as the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee. This house abounds with memories of Alexandria. Her history, romance, and past are interwoven here in a perfect pattern. Washington, perhaps, frequented this house more than any other save Dr. ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... and his Indian dancers gave an unusually fine exhibition of their tribal dances for the visitors. The General expressed his appreciation quite warmly to Joe after the dance ended, and asked Joe to pose with him for a picture. He was recalling other boyhood reading he had done, and his interest in the Indians was quite naive. Joe took him into the Hopi House and they spent an hour or so going over the ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... the bright and cheerful looks of his comely sister. Our portraits of the Misses Stisted are also from paintings by Jacquand. Burton's habit of concealing his ailments which we noticed as a feature of his boyhood was as conspicuous in later life. "On one occasion," says Miss Stisted, "when seized with inflammation of the bladder, a fact he tried to keep to himself, he continued to joke and laugh as much as usual, and went on with his reading and writing as if little were the matter. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... endurance would be evident. It would breed people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This is ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... The skiff landed, and we saw its passengers step ashore. They came along the levee's crown towards us, "by two, by two." Bonaventure was mated with a young Methodist preacher, who had been my playmate in boyhood, and who lived here in Carrollton. Behind him came St. Pierre and Sidonie. Then followed Claude and Marguerite; and, behind ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... some advantage in this elaborate method of dissecting out every distinct fibre and ramification of an argument. But, on the whole, one is apt to remember that life is limited, and that there are some things in this world which must be taken for granted. If a man's boyhood fill two volumes, and if one of these (though under unfavourable circumstances) took six months to revise, it seems probable that in later years he would have taken longer to record events than to live them. No autobiography ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the country with his father in boyhood, was taken by Wouter van Twiller into the service of the Company as an assistant, and afterwards became a tobacco planter. The Company has aided him with necessaries as it is to be seen by the books, but they have been ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... protection of the chief magistrate, and ascertain the intentions of the French. Young Stanhope was invested with the command of this little force; and perhaps there was no man in the colony, who would have conducted the enterprize with more boldness and address. He had entered the English navy in boyhood; and, after many years of faithful service, was rapidly acquiring rank and distinction, when the unhappy dissensions of the times threw their blighting influence on his prospects, and disappointed ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... My boyhood days were happy ones. I attended a subscription school several miles from home, riding back and forth on a pony. The studies were elementary, and though I never distinguished myself in my classes, I was always ready to race my pony, and never refused to play truant when the swimming ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... countryside came off my pen—sketches of odd events and characters there in Faraway. These were read to the assembled household. Elizabeth Brower would sit looking gravely down at me, as I stood by her knees reading, in those days of my early boyhood. Uncle Eb listened with his head turned curiously, as if his ear were cocked for coons. Sometimes he and David Brower would slap their knees and laugh heartily, whereat my foster mother would give them a quick glance and shake her head. For she ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... had two sons, George and Robert, the elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how, after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat, George ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... ten nurses, and after being weaned ate as much as five men! Such being the case, he was able, by the time he was eight years of age, to slay a mad white elephant with a single stroke of his fist. Many similar feats were performed during the boyhood of this Persian Hercules, who longed to fight when the realm was finally invaded by the Tartar chief Afrasiab and war ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... made any explanations in her memoirs, the editor has thought fit to suppress them. She mentions only, that in consequence of some ominous circumstances relating to the title of Valois, which was the proper second title of the Orleans family, her son, the Regent, had assumed in his boyhood that of Duc de Chartres. His elder brother was dead, so that the superior title was open to him; but, in consequence of those mysterious omens, whatever they might be, which occasioned much whispering at the time, the great title of Valois was laid aside for ever as of bad augury; nor ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... had one object before me from my boyhood, and since you told me that I was to be your husband, that object has grown from a vague intention to a fixed purpose. Alice, I want to buy back the acres of my forefathers; I wish, I intend, that another Buckley shall be the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... of Colonel William F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill," as told by his sister and Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in Iowa and his first encounter with an Indian. We see "Bill" as a pony express rider, then near Fort Sumter as Chief of the Scouts, and later engaged in the most dangerous Indian campaigns. There is also a very interesting account of the travels of "The Wild West" Show. No character ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... creditably united. [Footnote: The following sensible remarks upon the first interruption of the political connection between the Heir Apparent and the Opposition, are from an unfinished Life of Mr. Sheridan now in my possession—written by one whose boyhood was passed in the society of the great men whom he undertook to commemorate, and whose station and talents would have given to such a work an authenticity and value, that would have rendered the humble memorial, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey, there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp, unerring skill, with which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the head of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single stroke of the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middle age sanctifies all that ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... But yo are not Esther, are you?" He looked again into her face, and seeing that indeed it was his boyhood's friend, he took her hand, and shook it with a cordiality that forgot ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to-morrow." The word mister sounded sharply, yet not unpleasingly, to my ear: it was the first time I had been so designated or so dignified. Here was another evidence that I had, or ought to, cast from me the slough of boyhood, and enact, boldly, the man. I therefore summoned up courage to say that I did not perfectly understand the purport of the captain's order, and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... When I fully awoke, we were being driven through the streets of a large city—Savannah. I sat up and blinked at the bright lights. At Savannah we boarded a steamer which finally landed us in New York. From New York we went to a town in Connecticut, which became the home of my boyhood. ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... were in Paris I was very pleasantly surprised to receive the following invitation from the citizens of West Virginia and of the city near which I had spent my boyhood days:— ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... which be had portrayed the sufferings of Bet Bennam and Mary Bacon. Who shall say what other scenes, sad or mirthful, presented themselves among his "thick-coming fancies"? Possibly he recalled the high hopes of his boyhood, when he thirsted to better the condition of the poor, and was almost persuaded that he had been sent into the world expressly to guard their interests against the exactions of grasping landlords. Visions, too, may have arisen before him of his beautiful Wiltshire farm, where the modest daisies peeped ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... phases of belief and unbelief —those wild enthusiasms, to be rejected later in life—which generally fall to the lot of young men of talent. Perhaps his reasoning and reflective powers were developed unusually early, so that he sowed his mental wild oats in his boyhood. At any rate, in his garret in 1819 he was the same Balzac that we know in later life. Large-minded and far-seeing—except about his business concerns—he was from his youth a voyant, who discerned with extraordinary acuteness ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... an account—mostly from his own Souvenirs—of the early life and boyhood of Jasmin. The eighteenth century, old, decrepit, and vicious, was about to come to an end, when in the corner of a little room haunted by rats, a child, the subject of this story, was born. It was on the morning of Shrove Tuesday, the 6th of March, 1798,—just as the ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... my boyhood. I had always a strange passion for highwaymen, and have listened by the hour to their exploits, as narrated by my father, and especially to those of "Dauntless Dick," that "chief minion of the moon." One of Turpin's adventures in particular, the ride to Hough Green, which took ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... from French Broad (Springs) where they summered it. They brought a great deal of this cloth they call blue drilling to make a suit for every boy big enough to wear a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes for every one. I thought that the happiest 'set up' I had in boyhood. Blue drilling pants and coat and shoe. And Sund'y come we have to go to the Big House for Marse Josh to see how the clothes fit. And him and Miss Bess make us run races to see who run the fastest. That the happiest time I members when I ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... fault is largely yours and Matilda's. Matilda says your parents died when you were all young; and he admitted that he does not even remember them. And he also admitted, when I pressed him, that you and Matilda had not given him very much attention during his boyhood. You and Matilda are older; you should have brought him up more carefully; you are both seriously to blame for what he is. So I hope," she concluded, "that both of you will ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... speeches in the Reichstag was devoted to attacking the Polish sympathies of the Catholic party in Prussia. He was never tired of laughing at the characteristic German romanticism which was so enthusiastic for the welfare of other nations. He recalled the memories of his boyhood when, after the rebellion of 1831, Polish refugees were received in every German town with honours and enthusiasm greater than those paid to the men who had fought for Germany, when German children would sing Polish national airs as though ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... her in kind, but self-justification passed his power. He couldn't say, "Because this evening you made me lose faith in everything, and I thought to forget you by going to the devil the quickest way I knew—this way!"—though that was true. He couldn't say: "Because, a thief from boyhood, habit proved too strong for me, and I couldn't withstand temptation!"—for that was untrue. He could only hang his head and mumble the wretched confession: "I ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... vital, staggered the returned native. In his boyhood that posthumously libelled sovereign lady, Anne, had terribly prevailed among the dwellings on this highway; now, however, there was little left of the jig-saw's hare-brained ministrations; but the growing pains of the adolescent city had wrought ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... playing "I-spy" through Kenilworth Castle with Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Mary Ann Evans and a youth I used to know in boyhood by the name of Bill Hursey. We chased each other across the drawbridge, through the portcullis, down the slippery stones into the donjon-keep, around the moat, and up the stone steps to the topmost turret ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... well acquainted with the place from boyhood though since the squire's marriage he had ceased to enter it unannounced. Before his appointment to the village school, he had acted for a time as the squire's secretary; but it had never been more than a temporary arrangement and it had come to a speedy end when Mrs. Fielding became mistress ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... family ever since I was a kid, and from boyhood up this old boy had put the fear of death into me. Time, the great healer, could never remove from my memory the occasion when he found me—then a stripling of fifteen—smoking one of his special cigars in the stables. He got after me with a hunting-crop just at ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... half-decked; but Neb's vigorous arms made her move through the water with some rapidity, and, to own the truth, the lad sprang to his work like a true runaway negro. I was a skilful oarsman myself, having received many lessons from my father in early boyhood, and being in almost daily practice for seven mouths in the year. The excitement of the adventure, its romance, or what for a short time seemed to me to be romance, and the secret apprehension of being detected, which I believe accompanies every clandestine undertaking, soon set me in ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... was dearer that night than the best of their boyhood, One hope more radiant than any their hearts could prize. The touch of your hand, The light of your ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... an unseen chicadee, or, from the intense blue overhead, the abrupt, thin whistle of a soaring fish-hawk. To Barnes it all seemed such a safe, friendly world, his well-understood intimate since small boyhood. Yet here it was, apparently, turned smooth traitor at last, and about to destroy him as pitilessly as might the most scorching desert or blizzard-scourged ice-field. A silent rage burned suddenly through all his veins—which was well, since ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more and more deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him with questions touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin, concerning his ways of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when he came to the crown of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de Souza told her served but to engrave more deeply upon her virgin mind the adorable image of the knightly king. Ever present in the daily thoughts of this ardent girl, his empanoplied figure haunted ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... had made such strenuous objections as to quite enrage my father. I was an only child, and (as often happens in such cases) my father never could be brought to realise that I had many years since attained my majority. It had been his wish, ever since my boyhood, that I should marry your mother, and he made use, when I was nearly forty, of the selfsame insistent and coercive methods with which he had sought to subdue my will when I was but twenty, and at last he attained his end. I had learned from friends in Bombay that not only had Rama Ragobah recovered ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the familiar inn that the gay image of the Madonna and Cluld, and the little lamp above, were no longer there. The pictures of the saints had been removed from the public rooms, and even the painting which had been impressed upon his memory from boyhood—like a sign of the house—had vanished. A large red cock, crowing with wide-open beak at the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from the notes of the songsters of the grove, the swelling strains of the English skylark and thrush, with the more gentle warbling of the finch and linnet. It was indeed a brilliant morning, teeming with life and beauty, and recalled to my memory a thousand affecting associations of sanguine boyhood, when I was thoughtless and happy. The barbarians around me were all cheerful and full of joy. I have heard that like sorrow, joy is contagious, and I believe that it is, for it inspired me with ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the air was thick with doom. Then he gave his benediction to the old knight and turned away weeping, and since that hour none talk of wizardry but all of judgment. Men in Dunwich who have quarrelled from boyhood, forgive each other and sing psalms instead of swearing oaths, and I have been paid debts that have been owing to me for years, all because of ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... one, however, uttered a word of reproach, and we all did our utmost to console him. Arthur tried to speak cheerfully: Tim attempted to sing one of the melodies of his native land, which he had learned in his boyhood; but his voice broke down, and he was well-nigh ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... goods and other baggage to the cart. When I did so the old gentleman and several others began to laugh, and said they guessed I'd have to hire a teamster, as I would find considerable difference between horses and oxen. I told them of my early boyhood experience in breaking steers, and to prove the truth of my assertion, took up the ox-whip and "gee-d" them around on the streets several times ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... March 1784. He was educated at the grammar school of Tiverton, and at Winchester, and in 1801 was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, becoming B.A. in 1804. In 1809 he was elected a fellow of his college, and was admitted into holy orders. From early boyhood he had exhibited a strong taste for natural science, which was subsequently stimulated by the lectures of Dr John Kidd on mineralogy and chemistry; and his attention was especially drawn to the then infant ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through his great constitutional decisions, but also that ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... cutting the walnut-saplings for my bow, or the straight pine for my arrow, or carving my mimic ship, did I muse upon these words of my father,—so deeply are the kind expressions of a judicious parent engraven on the heart and memory of boyhood. ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... boyhood!—the old days recalling, When wood grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! When wild, ugly faces we carved in the skin, Glaring out through the ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... in 1795, and settled among the people who had known him from boyhood. His success was immediate, and yet Dr. Samuel Brown, who knew him in Virginia, and was his classmate in Scotland, had said, when asked of him: "Pish! he left home a gosling and came back a goose." In a little while he commanded all the surgical operations of importance for hundreds of miles ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell
... warranted it he became a priest; and in the course of time, a canon of the cathedral of—. What had been the joys of his boyhood, became, afterwards, the safe-guards of his manhood, and finally the support and comfort of his declining years. The business of his life was prayer, and the exercise of the most unwearied and ardent charity. Its ruling principle, love to God, and to man. In the few hours of ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... searching days. Growing up happily under the care of the simple monks of Beaulieu he had never looked beyond their somewhat mechanical routine, accepted everything implicitly, and gone on acquiring knowledge with the receptive spirit but dormant thought of studious boyhood as yet unawakened, thinking that the studious clerical life to which every one destined him would only be a continuation of the same, as indeed it had been to his master, Father Simon. Not that Ambrose expressed this, beyond saying, "They are good and holy men, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself with difficulty through the very small window of the dungeon. It was unbarred, because, opening out on the face of an almost sheer precipice, it was thought that nothing without wings could escape from it. Black, however, had been accustomed to precipices from boyhood. He had observed a narrow ledge just under the window, and hoped that it might lead to something. Just below it he could see another and narrower ledge. What was beyond that he knew not—and ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... she had not looked its way. The picture had caught the quiet passion and intensity of Godfrey Langrishe's gaze, as though he looked on deeds of glory and fought his way towards them. The face was less stern than she remembered it; it had yet some of the bloom and bonniness of his boyhood; renunciation had not written its deeper meaning in lines ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... considered, as entering too early into the history of his mind in boyhood: to this I reply, that the entire man so to speak, is to be seen even in the cradle of the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... the great territorial families of Norman immigration, who brought their place-names with them. Manning Brown was so termed from his complexion; his elder son, not being specially remarkable, was known merely as Romund Fitz-Manning; but the younger, in his boyhood of a somewhat impetuous temper, had conferred on him the epithet of Haimet Escorceueille, or Burntown. The elder brother of Manning was dubbed Gilbert Cuntrevent, or Against-the-Wind; and his two sons, of whom one was the head porter, and another ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... so very long since he had cherished a few holy beliefs. The good intentions of his boyhood were not quite obliterated from his ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... eastern potentates went to war, for the conqueror to sell the subjects of the vanquished enemy as slaves; and many of these, bought by merchants, were carried to Egypt, and sold to the sultan, who had them trained from boyhood to serve him as soldiers. Carefully were these young captives reared; and, when their beards began to grow, they were taught to draw the bow and wield the sword. After becoming expert in military exercises, ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... Patches heard him finding his bed, long after the other members of the outfit were sound asleep. And the following day, through the trying work of loading the cattle, the young foreman was so little like himself that, had it not been that his men were nearly all old-time, boyhood friends who had known him all his life, there would ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... Whose fields first fed my childish fantasy, Whose mountains were my boyhood's wild delight, Whose rocks, and woods, and torrents were to me The food of my soul's youthful appetite; Were music to my ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... were occupied with Mr. Eustace, Mr. Sidney just packs his portmanteau and out he goes by the back door. When we missed him we sent for Dr. Baker, but by the time he came it was too late to get here. Dr. Baker said at once he'd revert to his boyhood's home. And the doctor has ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... celebration was to outdo itself. Because of the centennial feature, no less a person than the President of the United States, who had spent a year of his boyhood at a local school, was pledged to attend. In itself this meant a record crowd. Crops had been good locally and the toil-worn agriculturist had surplus money wherewith to purchase phonographs, gold teeth, crayon enlargements of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his day. The Chevalier de Simiane was famous alike for his drinking powers and his gift of graceful verse; De Fargy was a polished wit, and the handsomest man in France, with an unrivalled reputation for gallantry; the Comte de Noce was the Regent's most intimate friend from boyhood—brother-in-law he called him, since they had not only tastes but even mistresses in common. Then there were the Marquis de la Fare, Captain of Guards and bon enfant; the Marquis de Broglio, the biggest debauchee ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... a good story current of Lord Stowell in Newcastle, that, when advanced in age and rank, he visited the school of his boyhood. An old woman, whose business was to clean out and keep the key of the school-room, conducted him. She knew the name and station of the personage whom she accompanied. She naturally expected some recompense—half-a-crown perhaps—perhaps, since ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Thyland is dead, and his widow is to have the rich inheritance. But how comes it that one relation is always harder towards another than even strangers would be? The widow's husband had possessed all Thyland, with the exception of the church property. Her son was not at home. In his boyhood he had already started on a journey, for his desire was to see foreign lands and strange people. For years there had been no news of him. Perhaps he had been long laid in the grave, and would never come back to his home, to rule ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... in boyhood again with this stifling and leaden atmosphere of authority and disapproval to breathe. He knew that Francis in his place would have done somehow differently; he could almost hear Aunt Barbara laughing at the pomposity ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... in San Francisco in 1876. At fifteen I was a man among men, and if I had a spare nickel I spent it on beer instead of candy, because I thought it was more manly to buy beer. Now, when my years are nearly doubled, I am out on a hunt for the boyhood which I never had, and I am less serious than at any other time of my life. Guess I'll find that boyhood! Almost the first things I realized were responsibilities. I have no recollection of being taught to read or write—I could do both at the age of five—but I know that my ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... is—almost as pretty as Roselands," said her father. "Travilla and I have known each other from boyhood, and I spent many a happy day at Ion, and we had many a boyish frolic together, before I ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... account of how a certain rising politician confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of boyhood. It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters. I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose: all this generalisation leads up to only one fact—the fact that I once met ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... to be assumed for all instinctively nomadic Englishmen, it would make family trees as farcical in general as they often are now. At any rate, Burton early showed a love for travel which circumstances strengthened. Although born in Hertfordshire, England, he spent much of his boyhood on the Continent, where he was educated under tutors. He returned for a course at Oxford, after which, at twenty-one, he entered the Indian service. For nineteen years he was in the Bombay army corps, the first ten in active service, principally in the Sindh Survey, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the wonders and relics he had seen in his journeyings in the East; but especially did the girl love to hear him tell of the boy king of the Franks, Hlodo-wig, or Clovis, who lived in the priest's own boyhood home of Tournay, in far-off Belgium, and who, though so brave and daring, was still a pagan, when all the world was fast becoming Christian. And as Clotilda listened, she wished that she could turn this brave young chief away ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... sale, he built a hunting lodge, called Gunsborough House. This was Herbert Horatio Kitchener's birthplace. Whether the name of the house had anything to do with his warlike career, history does not state. But certain it is, that he was a born soldier—a man of iron almost from his boyhood. ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... there was next to none among the professed teachers of science and religion. If the statements of the celebrated scholar and printer, Robert Etienne, or Stephens, seem almost incredible, they nevertheless come from a witness of unimpeachable veracity. Referring to the period of his boyhood or early youth—he was born in 1503—Etienne sketched the biblical attainments of the doctors of the Sorbonne after this fashion: "In those times, as I can affirm with truth, when I asked them in ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Quintus is his fellow soldier Aulus. They had spent their boyhood together among the scenes of Rome; now they are companions still, on this last Roman expedition to the district of Judaea. While the common soldiery are throwing their dice in the camp thoroughfare, these are speaking of more serious things. The picture on ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... dawn with its sweet call. And another had answered from the depth of the wood, and then another, while the little canoe had slipped noiselessly past into strange lands,—a country altogether new and mysterious.... To-night that old boyhood thrill came over him, as when kneeling in the canoe with suspended paddle, in the half light of dawn, he had heard the thrushes calling from the woods. Then it had seemed that life was like this adventurous journey through the gray meadows, past the silent woods, on into ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... strong, broad-shouldered, and active; the slightly vacant look in his face that had come from his boyhood incapacity had changed to a frank stare that demanded consideration and respect. He seldom asked a question twice now—once was usually enough. He had a fist that could smash the panels of a door, a voice that he could not modulate to conversational tones—so used ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... to business direction, into special study for the engineering trades, for the profession of soldiering, [Footnote: I may perhaps explain that my conception of military organization is a universal service of citizens —non-professional soldiers—who will be trained—possibly in boyhood and youth, to shoot very well indeed, to ride either horses or bicycles, and to take up positions and move quickly and easily in organized bodies, and, in addition, a special graduated profession of soldiers who will be in their various ranks engineers, gunners, special-force men of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... such a tiny little frogling could make such a loud, shrill, and ear-piercing sound? Who would think that a million of such puny things, could make the air of a summer evening so full of the music of their songs? I remember how, in my boyhood, I listened to their voices, which came up loudest, shrillest, merriest, when twilight was spreading its grey mantle over the earth; while the song of the birds was hushing into silence, and the coming darkness was lulling ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... they should? What if your boy or mine Should cross o'er the threshold which marks out the line 'Twixt virtue and vice, 'twixt pureness and sin, And leave all his innocent boyhood within? Oh, what if they should, because you and I While the days and the months and the years hurry by, Are too busy with cares and with life's fleeting joys To make round our hearthstone a place for the boys? There's a place for the boys. They'll find it somewhere; And if our own homes are ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... youthfulness of aspect far beyond the period of life usual with other peoples. This mixed expression charmed the eye of Isaac van Ostade, who had painted his portrait from a sketch taken at one of those skating parties, with his plume of squirrel's tail and fur muff, in all the modest pleasantness of boyhood. When he returned home lately from his studies at a place far inland, at the proposal of his tutor, to recover, as the tutor suggested, a certain loss of robustness, something more than that cheerful indifference of early youth had passed away. The learned man, who held, as was alleged, the ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... event He's peevish of a morning. He seems old; He's not the proper stomach or the sleep— And they're two sovran agents to conserve him Against the fiery art that has no mercy But what's in that prodigious grand new House. I gather something happening in his boyhood Fulfilled him with a boy's determination To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well, I hope at last he'll have his joy of it, And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves, And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover, Be less than hell to his attendant ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... loving remembrance of my boyhood, made happy by your care, and in firm reliance upon your friendship, your troublesome John ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... art. And something more. It was also a passion. A good swordsman can be made; a superior swordsman may be born; the real masters are both born and made. It was so with Cleggett. His interest in fencing had been keen from his early boyhood. In his teens he had acquired unusual practical skill without great theoretical knowledge. Then he had recognized the art for what it is, the most beautiful game on earth, and had made a profound and thorough study of it; ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... entirely absorbed by the reading of these tomes, he might have become a mere dreamy bookworm, his intellect saturated with the sentimental and romantic mysticism permeating Germany even unto this day, and, as he cared nothing for the sports of boyhood, body might ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... In his case, that spirit of innovation which had shown itself timidly in the case of Hob by the admission of new manures, and which had run to waste with Gilbert in subversive politics and heretical religions, bore useful fruit in many ingenious mechanical improvements. In boyhood, from his addiction to strange devices of sticks and string, he had been counted the most eccentric of the family. But that was all by now; and he was a partner of his firm, and looked to die a bailie. He too had married, and was rearing a plentiful family ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wilfred's altar. Thou hast, I hope, received safely the letters I sent from Joppa last autumn, and knowest whom I am bringing home with me. How wonderful it all is, and with what strange feelings the exile must approach the home of his boyhood! But he is very composed and quiet in his manner, and we grow in mutual esteem daily. He declares that he will accept no part of his ancient inheritance, but that he finds his highest joy in thinking that, in his sister's children, the descendants of the ancient line yet possess ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... generous emotions of the morning of life have died out. That man may become hardhearted, skeptical and sensual, a hater of his kind, a hater of all that is holy and good, he must divest himself entirely of the fresh and ingenuous feeling of early boyhood, and receive in its place that malign and soured feeling which is the growth, and sign, of a selfish and disingenuous life. It is related of Voltaire,—a man in whom evil dwelt in its purest and most defecated essence,—that he had no sympathy with ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... something about "liquidation," and closing up an account which required his presence, and in the middle of it all there were certain expressions which seemed to have stumbled accidentally into the commercial style. For instance, in one place there was "brother of my boyhood;" and further on, "with sincere wishes for brotherly companionship;" and finally, he read, in the middle of a long involved sentence, "Dear Richard, don't lose heart." This stirred Richard Garman into action: he made an effort, and set off home. When ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... "Of my boyhood, dearest. Yonder is the first city I ever beheld. Shall I tell you of it—and of that shy country lad who came hither to learn something of deportment, so that he might venture to enter an assembly and forget his hands ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... paroxysm. These were like the three warnings of death in the old parable. You would probably survive the first and might never have another; but if you had your second, it was considered equivalent to a notice to quit the country promptly and without counting the cost. In my boyhood days in the Middle West, I can recall hearing old pioneers tell of little groups of one or more families moving out on to some particularly rich and virgin bottom-land and losing two or three or more members out of each family by congestive ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... had been spent in the stirring excitement and perpetual watchfulness of adventures in the wilderness, the change was far from promising an increase of that contentment and inward satisfaction most conducive to happiness. He who, like myself, has roved almost from boyhood among the children of the forest, and over the unfurrowed plains and rugged heights of the western wastes, will not be startled to learn, that notwithstanding all the fascinations of the world on this civilized side of the mountains, I would fain ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... those among whom he lived. Timid, susceptible, lost in reverie, fond of solitude, or seeking no better company than a book, the years had stolen on, till he had arrived at that mournful period of boyhood when eccentricities excite attention and command no sympathy. In the chapter on Predisposition, in the most delightful of his works,[1] my father has drawn from his own, though his unacknowledged feelings, immortal truths. Then commenced the age of domestic criticism. His mother, not incapable ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a really striking and beautiful picture in his incongruous habiliment. His strong and thoughtful face, over which yet clustered the curly hair of boyhood, just touched with gray, lit up by his earnest, sad eyes, seemed—how distinctly I recall it—almost ideally lovely that morning, and I compared him in my thoughts with the father of Romola, only as wearing a more youthful expression. He was ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Whether he write at all, and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,—perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... had worked with Terra since boyhood, had finally come to a point of decision and gone his own way. And it ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... of Phei, Yung, and Wei; of the Royal Domain; of Kang; of Kh; of Pin; of Khin; of Wei; of Thang; of Khan; of Kwei; and of Zho. They sang to, him also the odes of the Minor Y and the Greater Y; and they sang finally the pieces of the Sung. We have thus, existing in the boyhood of Confucius, what we may call the present Book of Poetry, with its Fang, its Y, and its Sung. The only difference discernible is slight,-in the order in which the Books of ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... me, O thou who wast my boyhood's guide, I bend my exile-weary feet to thee, Teach me the indivisible to divide, Show me how three are one and One is three! How Christ to save all men was crucified, Yet I and mine are damned eternally. Instruct me, Sage, why Virtue starves alone, While falsehood step ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... his recent loss the captain could not help a grim smile stealing over his face at the boy's readiness for adventure, no matter where it might lead. But he had been a rover in his boyhood himself, and so he said ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... flowers and gazed with interest at the catkins of the hazel, have now become places covered with ironworks, where steam hammers make their perpetual thuds, and through which railway-sidings everywhere ramify. Quiet lanes in which, during early boyhood, I went with a companion trying to catch minnows with a hand-net in a clear little stream running by the hedge, have been transformed into straight roads between land-allotments, with scattered houses built by artizans. And where I picked ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Comfort, a seventh Truth, an eighth Kindness, a tenth Gratitude, an eleventh Cheerfulness, a twelfth Exercise, a thirteenth Sobriety, etc. They are elected to duties of that kind, each one to that duty for excellence in which he is known from boyhood to be most suitable. Wherefore among them neither robbery nor clever murders, nor lewdness, incest, adultery, or other crimes of which we accuse one another, can be found. They accuse themselves ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... peas stood the old clergyman who had said the last solemn words over Jessica's mother years before, and who had come from another city, many miles distant, to marry Jessica and Reddy. Here it was that the bridegroom, accompanied by his best man, Tom Gray, awaited his one-time playmate, his boyhood friend, his first and only sweetheart, who had now come in all the bravery of her wedding finery to place her hands, trustingly, confidently in his for the journey over the untrodden trail they ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... verbs, discuss the effect of the Fall of Rome on Western Civilization, and probably compute the orbit of an artificial satellite. But can James Holden fly a kite or shoot a marble? Has he ever had the fun of sliding into third base, or whittling on a peg, or any of the other enjoyable trivia of boyhood? Has he—" ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Scenes of his boyhood, the panorama of his young manhood, pictures of his battle for success against overwhelming forces in the great city. These pictures returned again and again, vivid in their relief. He saw again the death of his wife and the spirit of darkness that had then come to walk beside him, ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... week—sometimes two or three in the week. Ned never began a fight, and, indeed, did not like fighting. But some big boys will domineer over little ones, and Ned would not be domineered over; consequently he had to be thrashed. He was possessed, even in boyhood, of an amount of physical courage that would have sufficed for any two ordinary men. He did not boast. He did not quarrel. He never struck the first blow, but, if twenty boys had attacked him, he would have tried to fight them all. He never tyrannised over small boys. It was not his ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... his hand more than once a year, as is shown by the very slender quantity of his remains. For you see here, sir, green wood and dry, without any sort of selection, all that has come into my possession; insomuch that there are among the rest efforts even of his boyhood. In point of fact, he seems to have written them merely to show that he was capable of dealing with all subjects: for otherwise, thousands of times, in the course of ordinary conversation, I have heard things drop from him infinitely more worthy of being admired, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... is written primarily for men: and there are therefore other aspects of the life of sex upon which it is necessary to touch, though they are difficult matters to handle. It is well known that large numbers of men in boyhood, either through untutored ignorance of the physiology of their own bodies, or as a result of the corrupt example and teaching of others, become addicted to habits of solitary vice, in which the seed of life within ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora's death. He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilisation, at Nature's altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such life-long ministration, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... An affection that had its inception in his boyhood days shone in his eyes. The hand in which the Lowestoft had shaken rested now heavily on an old man's bent shoulder—a shoulder that straightened itself in unconscious loyalty under ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... belonged to my boyhood, and has grown up with me, and will never leave me, once belonged then, more or less, to the whole of the English people. Except with those who, like me, have been fed with the poetry and the literature of America, this romance is impossible. I ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... surely as the child passes on from childhood, with its follies, its quarrels, and its accidents, to mature, self-respecting manhood, just so surely will the human race go through its babyhood, through its boyhood, and on into years of wisdom, justice, ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... one. I do not think, though I am not quite certain, that when I first read it myself I was exactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and simple (that is to say, under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-boyhood (that is to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I own that at that time, whatever my exact age was, I found it so uninteresting that I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the last respect, have I improved with it—for it would be presumptuous to say, "has it ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... devote themselves, and with each year new demands will spring up, which will create new industries to supply them. I was born in the midst of a splendid farming country. The business of nine tenths of the people of my native county was farming. My intelligent boyhood was spent there from 1850 to 1860, when there was no tariff for protection. There were thriving towns for the general trading. There were woollen mills and operatives. There were flouring mills and millers. There were iron founders and their employes. There were artisans of every ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... few years before Bill was born, but it held good in some cases, he was sure, in his early boyhood. There were then some cotton mills in Keighley district, and the young were allowed to submit to toil which was far too exhausting to allow of nature battling for the support of the human frame. Hence, Bill's own description ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... Hampden's regiment, madam, and went all through the war. When the King came back I had friends who stood by me, and bought me this boat. I was used to handle an oar in my boyhood, when I lived on a little bit of a farm that belonged to my father, between Reading and Henley. I was oftener on the water than on the land in those days. There are some who have treated me roughly because I fought against the late King; but folks are beginning to find out that the Brewer's ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... failure, and, moreover, knowing his father's sternness, he knew that he would be severely punished. Unfortunately for Ben, his father had a stern, unforgiving disposition, that never made allowances for the impulses of boyhood. He had never condescended to study his own son, and the method of training he had adopted with him was in some respects very pernicious. His system hardened, instead of softening, and prejudiced Ben against ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... physician had mistaken him for a member of the brotherhood of Israel that he had ventured upon his now transparent jests. "Good God!" thought Da Costa, sickening as he remembered the auto-da-fe he had seen at Lisbon in his boyhood, when De la Asuncao, the Franciscan Jew monk, clothed in the Sanbenito, was solemnly burnt in the presence of the king, the queen, the court, and the mob. "What if 'twas my tale to Frei Jose that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... abominable hollow ogre's eye of the pistol-muzzle. We exchanged passes, the prince chiefly attacking. Of all the things to strike my thoughts, can you credit me that the vividest was the picture of the old woman Temple and I had seen in our boyhood on the night of the fire dropping askew, like forks of brown flame, from the burning house in London city; I must have smiled. The prince cried out in French: 'Laugh, sir; you shall have it!' He had nothing but his impetuosity for an assurance of his promise, and was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... school was much more keen on drawing and painting than they had ever been in the days of the skilled teachers. The conclusion I came to was that my bad drawing encouraged the children. I remembered the beautiful copy-book headlines of my boyhood, and I recalled the hopelessness of ever reaching the standard set by the lithographers. No child should have perfection put before him. The teacher should never try to teach; he should work alongside the children; he should be a ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... was majestic; he strode when he walked, and his physical strength and courage were heroic. His mode of speaking was 'very impressive,' his utterance 'deliberate and strong.' His conversation was compared to 'an antique statue, where every vein and muscle is distinct and bold.' From boyhood throughout his life his companions naturally deferred to him, and he dominated them without effort. But what overcame the harshness of this autocracy, and made it reasonable, was the largeness of a nature that loved men and was ever hungry for knowledge of them. 'Sir,' said he, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... dolls and cooking, this is because his mother and others have told him, perhaps with mockery, that such amusements are unsuited to a boy; whilst in a similar way the girl is dissuaded from the rough sports of boyhood. Such an assumption is the expression of that general psychological and educational tendency, which ascribes to the activity of the will an overwhelmingly powerful influence upon the development of the organs subserving the intellect, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... of cause and country and king and kinsman, the two boyhood comrades could not be induced to oppose each other further. Happily for all concerned, the trouble between Charlemagne and Guerin was settled in a few ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... enormous hoard at that time; for they were worth I couldn't now tell you how many hundred thousand francs in assignats. Mongenod and I had studied at the same collage,—that of Grassins,—and we had met again in the same law-office,—that of Bordin,—a truly honest man. When you have spent your boyhood and played your youthful pranks with the same comrade, the sympathy between you and him has something sacred about it; his voice, his glance, stir certain chords in your heart which only vibrate under the memories that he brings back. Even if you have had cause of complaint against such ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... winter descent; how he had risked his life (in the exuberance of youthful daring) to ascertain the truth; how, trusting to his knowledge of Carisbrooke, wherein he had spent many pleasant days in his boyhood, he had ventured amongst the Danes as a gleeman, in imitation of Alfred of old; how there he had assisted, unsuspected, at a meeting of the council in the great hall, and heard it decided to invade England, and finally how he had escaped. ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... agree with his account of himself in boyhood,—'It pleased God to put it into my parent's heart to put me to school, to learn both to read and write; though, to my shame I confess, I did soon lose that I learnt, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... left her, a little chagrined at her apparent slowness in appreciating his noble condescension. In his boyhood he had entertained a passion for his cousin, Anne Chute; but after the long separation of school and college, he had imagined that his early love was completely forgotten. The feeling with which he regarded her now was rather of resentment than indifference, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... are chiefly significant for us in that they show that he in whom his disciples came to recognize a divine nature began his earthly life in the utter helplessness and dependence of infancy, and grew through boyhood and youth to manhood with such naturalness that his neighbors, dull concerning the things of the spirit, could not credit his exalted claims. He is shown as one in all points like unto his brethren (Heb. ii. 17). Two statements in Luke (ii. 40, ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up, and gave me good day. I told him that a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley—Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time resident of Angel's Camp. I added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sighed twice, and looking tenderly into Lady Alicia's blue eyes, began in a gentle, reminiscent voice, "My boyhood was troubled and unhappy: no kind words, no caresses. I was beaten by a cruel stepfather, ignored and insulted for my physical deformities by a ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... is represented as saying that in his boyhood when sitting under a tree he once fell into a state of contemplation which he calls the first Jhana. It is akin to a sensation which comes to Europeans most frequently in childhood, but sometimes persists in mature life, when the mind, usually under the influence of pleasant summer scenery, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... for battle, burning for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives and revolvers, and for every form and expression of physical force;—he might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a bold, daring military man, but his whole boyhood is full of rebukes and disciplines for sins which are only the blind effort of the creature to express a nature which his parent does not and cannot understand. So again, the son that was to have upheld the old, proud merchant's ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... bear me on to one I've loved From Boyhood's thoughtlessness to Manhood's thought, In all the changes of our lives, unmoved— That young affection no regret has brought: Beloved one! when I seem Fortune's slave, Reckless and wrecked upon the wayward wave, Bright Hope, the Halcyon, rises o'er the sea, Calming the troubled wave—bearing ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... boy! He had never had any boyhood, any childhood—he had been a state personage ever since he had known that he was anything. I found myself thinking suddenly of the thin-lipped old family lawyer, who had had much to do with shaping his character, and whom Sylvia described to me, sitting at her dinner-table and bewailing the folly ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... was suddenly left me. Then for the first time I understood why I had during my boyhood been so periodically sent to see a cross old brother of my mother's, who lived near Cold Spring on the Hudson, and whom we called Uncle Snaggletooth when no one could hear us. Uncle Godfrey (for I have called him by his right name ever since) died and left me what in those old days six years ...
— Mother • Owen Wister
... boyhood into ways of vice and crime sees this hope and this hope only to make a strike. He has no strong convictions and no well-settled habits to hold him back. The fear of the law only means greater caution, and after all he has nothing to lose. In his world arrest and conviction do not mean ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... vain I look For haunts in which my boyhood trifled; The level lawn, the trickling brook, The trees I climbed, the beds I rifled: The church is larger than before: You reach it by a carriage entry: It holds three hundred people more: And pews are ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... very often at the Rectory, and sometimes at other houses where we visited. He was much liked by the Thornleigh people, who had, most of them, known him in his boyhood; and it was considered by his old friends, that, whatever his career abroad might have been, he had begun, and was steadily pursuing, a reformed course of life. His means did not enable him to do much, but he was doing a little ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... great a distance, as well as the impossibility of putting in depositions in a criminal case, without the District Attorney's consent, which he would not give, he went on to call the attention of the jury to the details he meant to prove. He intended to show Crandall's whole course of life, from his boyhood up; that he was regularly educated as a surgeon and physician, and settled in Peekskill; and that no man ever obtained a higher character for probity and skill; that he never was a member of an abolition society, and there was none in the place where he ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... theme" is constantly deserted, and matters are introduced that have no connection with the hero further than his being present at them, or their occurring to his acquaintance. In fact, from the time that David Copperfield emerges from boyhood, the interest in his adventures ceases, beyond that sort of feeling which many readers entertain of wishing to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Mose says that slaves like his father who worked in the mansion, were given much better clothing. His father received of "The Colonel" and his grown sons many discarded clothes. One of the greatest thrills of Mose's boyhood was receiving first pair of "ausenberg" pants. As his mother had already taught him to knit (by using four needles at one time) all that he had to do was to go to his hiding place and get the socks that he ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... and shambled out of the cave. Long afterwards I heard that he shot it through the dining-room window on a dart of hazelwood while my aunt and Mrs Cottier were at lunch. That was the last letter I wrote for many a long day. That was my farewell to boyhood, that letter. ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... a good son: but he never loved his mother so tenderly as he did this night. His heart yearned over this poor panting soul, so stately in form, yet so weak, so womanly, and lovable; his playmate in childhood; his sweet preceptor in boyhood; the best friend and most unselfish lover he had, or could ever hope to have, on earth; dear to him by her long life of loving sacrifice, and sacred by that their great calamity, which had fallen so much heavier on ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... birth a Southerner and a native of Kentucky, a fact which he never forgot and of which he was exceedingly proud. After the wandering boyhood of a pioneer and a period of manual labour as a "rail-splitter" he had settled in Illinois, where he had picked up his own education and become a successful lawyer. He had sat in the House of Representatives as a Whig from 1846 to 1848, the period of the Mexican War, during which he had ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... other companion than his father, had no sooner seen you than 'twas you alone that he desired, that he demanded, that he sought with ardour? Will they tear, will they lacerate me with their censures, if I, whose body Heaven fashioned all apt for love, whose soul from very boyhood was dedicate to you, am not insensible to the power of the light of your eyes, to the sweetness of your honeyed words, to the flame that is kindled by your gentle sighs, but am fond of you and sedulous to pleasure you; you, again I bid them remember, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Newton, in an address on education at Cambridge, playfully referred to the fact that in his boyhood he did not have to prevaricate to escape punishment, his grandmother being always willing to lie for him. His grandmother was his first teacher and his best friend as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... have some more talk about all this. I don't want to keep your mother waiting, as I promised to talk some more to her this evening. So we'll go upstairs. Some day, perhaps, I'll tell you some of the experiences of my boyhood. I'm glad, by-the-by, to see that you don't ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... literature of his nation had been familiar from his boyhood. Very early in life, and several years before the publication of Maler Mueller's spirited drama, his mind was powerfully impressed by the Faust-fable, and the greater part of the present fragmentary poem was already written ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened affections, as he is when he is writing with ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Admiral Dewey on board the "Olympia," he went ashore at Cavite, his boyhood home, began to organize the Filipinos into a powerful army, captured 1500 Spanish soldiers who were holding out-lying posts, and hemmed in the ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey |
