"Playground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... understand that on a certain day in September, which you mark on the calendar with bright crayon, you and he will go there. Let him see one of the little white beds where he will sleep after you return home, the sunny dining room where he will eat his morning porridge and his Sunday ice cream; the playground full of rollicksome youngsters, with whom he will seesaw and play tag by and by, and the busy schoolroom, where so many delightful and interesting things ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... hardly whispered to one another. And all the children were emaciated and wailed continually for food, sleeping little, playing less, stunted in their growth and threatened with disease; if the war went on another year they would join the little Polish victims on their shadowy playground.... They feared for their daughters at home even as they feared for their young sons in the trenches.... Barring a revolution, the war might last for years ... years.... "Peace Proposals" irritated ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... a favorite with Jack than with the rest of the household. Indeed, he has constituted himself her especial guardian. Rough as he is in the playground, he is always gentle with her. When she was just learning to walk, and in her helplessness needed the constant care of others, he used, from choice, to relieve his mother of much of the task of amusing the child. He had never had a little sister, and the care of a child as ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... happened, old Madame Chantemesse was obliged to get up to put the bed-clothes straight again; and, by way of sending the children to sleep, she would administer a box on the ear to both of them. For a long time their bed was a sort of playground. They carried their toys into it, and munched stolen carrots and turnips as they lay side by side. Every morning their adopted mother was amazed at the strange things she found in the bed—pebbles, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... "This was the playground of the Aesir, where they practiced trials of skill one with another and held tournaments and sham fights. These last were always conducted in the gentlest and most honorable manner; for the strongest law of the Peacestead was that no angry blow ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... without great violence to language, may be called a school of the woods? In the sense in which a playground is a school—a playground without rules or methods or a director—there is a school of the woods. It is an unkept, an unconscious school or gymnasium, and is entirely instinctive. In play the young of all animals, no doubt, get ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... inhabited suggested more of the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical hieroglyphics after her own fashion, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... receive adequate support in the press and at public meetings. And none but they can do anything worth doing. And among the rank and file of Radicals the plain common-sense men should make themselves heard. Foreign policy debates in the House are usually the playground of cranks of all varieties, and the plain common-sense man seems to shrink from being vocal in such company. It is a pity. The plain common-sense man should believe in himself a little more. The result would perhaps startle his modesty. And he should begin instantly on the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... sunbonnet gravely. It seemed a solemn thing to start on such a journey. After leaving the church there was only one more place to bid good-bye, and that was the schoolhouse sitting through its lonely vacation time in a deserted playground, gone to weeds. ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... calfhood. Education of the physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large part of the curriculum at English schools. The playground and the study-room form no unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones. The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... out. "How selfish I have been!" he said; "now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever." He was really very sorry for ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... films of the antelope, Tom and his two companions went farther on. They were fortunate enough to find a place that seemed to be a regular playground of the deer. There was a large herd there, and, getting as near as he dared, Tom focused his camera, and began ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... began the usual slow, nightly invasion and investment of it by nature. For all its broad verandas and glaring terraces, its long ranges of windows and glittering crest of cupola and tower, it gradually succumbed to the more potent influences around it, and became their sport and playground. The mountain breezes from the distant summit swept down upon its flimsy structure, shook the great glass windows as with a strong hand, and sent the balm of bay and spruce through every chink and cranny. In the great hall and corridors ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... he rode down the hog's back trail, of the day coming when all the National Forests would be a great park, the people's playground, yielding bigger annual harvest in ripe lumber than the wheat fields or the corn; yielding income for the State and health for the Nation. Germany did it. Why couldn't America? Why not, indeed; except that ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the noise on the opposite side of the playground was ceasing, and soon, from the corner of his eye, he saw Jones minimus detach himself from the crowd. "Half a mo'," he heard Jones minimus say; "I want to get a knotted handkerchief," and he saw him hurry into the school. As he emerged he flourished the knotted handkerchief, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... home in which our child finds himself, though a social institution, is not gregarious; it gives him only a limited contact, and as soon as he is able and self-reliant he seeks out a little herd, and on the streets, in the schoolroom and playground, he really becomes ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... bedroom was a window overlooking the side playground. From this window Mont decided to reach the ground by ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... of Churchyards (Vol. ii., p. 55.).—A portion of many churchyards is said to have been left unconsecrated, though not to be used as playground for the youth of the parish, but for the burial of excommunicated persons. This was {93} not, however, always on the north side of the church, as is evident from the following extract from the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... "Chevaliers of the Arena." As its name implies, this curious fraternity was composed of the soldiers of the ancient amphitheatre. Like many others of the time it was semi-military, semi-religious, its members bound by many solemn oaths and ceremonies, and thus, by the eccentricity of fate, this old pagan playground became a fortress consecrated to Christian defence, the scene ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... however, ought not to be permanently lodged within doors, and the dog-room is only complete when it has as an annexe a grass plot for playground and free exercise. Next to wholesome and regular food, fresh air and sunshine are the prime necessaries of healthy condition. Weakness and disease come more frequently from injudicious feeding and housing than from any other cause. Among the free and ownerless pariah dogs of the ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... one of the engineers. He wished to encourage his men by a good example, for over that terrible gulf it would soon be necessary for many of them to go. His seat was a small piece of board such as we use for a swing in a playground, and it was attached to the wire by four short ropes. The perilous journey took more than twenty minutes, and the people below watched almost breathlessly as the slender thread swayed up and down with the weight of the traveller. To their eyes it appeared at times as if he was soaring through ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... country, women's, men's and children's, Their wants provided for, hued in the sun and tinged for once with joy, Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-room, Labor and toll, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college, The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught, The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father'd and mother'd, The hungry fed, the houseless housed; (The intentions perfect and divine, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... through in consistent purity until this greatest danger of the democratic spirit of society is completely overcome and repressed by an honest respect for the expert and a willing subordination of judgment to his better knowledge. Another condition which makes our country a favourite playground for fantastic vagaries is the strong emphasis on the material sides of life, on business and business success. The result is a kind of contrast effect. As the surface of such a rushing business life lacks everything which would satisfy the deeper longings of the soul, the effort to create an inner ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the more sightly ones midst lawns and flowers; while others, still more thorough, will be satisfied with nothing short of sweeping away all traces of the graves, and transforming the whole space at one stroke into a public playground. The choice of systems is in some degree a question of environment. Wherever open ground is needed for the health and enjoyment of dwellers in towns, it is now generally conceded that, with certain reservations and under reasonable conditions, disused churchyards—especially ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... go somewhere and cry alone, and her steps turned instinctively to the well-known refuge of "the barn," an old out-building which the children had turned into a playground of their own; it was otherwise disused, excepting that now and then some trusses of hay or straw were put there, and it was a most splendid place to ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... All this bleak stretch of his history he crosses, in a sort of delirium loading the battered old car with company of the make-believe kind whom he has watched the children in the city parks playing with long ago. The ghost of a jack-in-the-box which he had once dragged away from a playground and murdered with a stick in his den appears by night in the terminal building. It smiles forgivingly ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... be a hare because I run so fast. Anybody can be a hound, but there's only two hares, and they all want me. And can I have a jersey? We begin next Saturday. He saw me run. I ran twice round the playground. He said I was splendid! Of course, it's a great honour to be a hare. We start from Hampstead Heath. And may I have a ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... school. When a child who has reigned in undisputed sovereignty at home is thrust among other children at school, one of two things happens: either she is scorned and rebelled against, and her little crown of superiority rolled in the dust of the common playground, or she extends the territories of her empire. Ellen extended hers, though involuntarily, for there was no conscious ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tree trunks—round about for the protection of his sheep and nowt in the event of a foray, and was as pleased with 'the Bower' as Lord William Howard with Naworth. 'Twas a quaint name enough, for 'the Bower' stood on the true march line of the naked Border, and in the very haunt and playground of the winds. Not only was it obnoxious to the winds, but equally exposed to raiding from Scotland, as also to the 'broken men' of 'the Waste,' for it stood erect above the Lewis Burn where it flows forth from Hells-bottom on the edge of Coplestone, where the Liddesdale fells join hands ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... watery playground chattered and flapped their heavy wings. The frogs in their reedy beds croaked and chirruped without ceasing. And who shall say how much they had heard, or had seen, or knew of that compact sealed in Bad ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... been cashiered for gambling or debt and takes a desperate chance out of patriotism and the hope of atonement. Naturally, the easiest route for spies was through Holland and Switzerland which became the gateway of passing spies and the playground of espionage and counterespionage. Gradually the restrictions tightened for all neutral travelers from capital to capital, while none were permitted to go into the zones of the armies, some twenty or thirty miles from ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... good deal of melancholy in the girl's mind at that moment. She was taking leave of the place: had come to say it a farewell. That park had been her playground, her studio, her stage, her world of fancy and romance and poetry since her infancy. She had driven her brother as a horse there, and had played with him at hunting lions. She had studied landscape drawing there from the days when a half staggery ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment, and that Gray Kidds was a harmless patient allowed to join the boys ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... have his horses act; first the part of a school, then of a court room, last a military drill and taking of a fort. They came in one after another, pretending, if that is not too strong a word, that they were on the way to school, and that was the playground; and there they played together, with such soft, graceful action, such caressing ways, and trippings as dainty as in "Pinafore," until at the ringing of a bell they came at once to order from their mixed-up, mazy pastime, and waited the arrival of their teacher, the Professor, who entered with ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... stone building forms the principal architectural feature of the square on the west side. It contains the free baths and would be a credit to any part of the city. Most of the remaining space is given over to the children for a playground. There is a semi-enclosed gymnasium for the boys, hand-ball and tether-ball courts, a separate enclosure for the girls and smaller children—in a word, every form of amusement and exercise that is practicable ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... than a mile to the schoolhouse, which I was lucky to find at all. I could not see it twenty feet away; but I was almost upset by a snow fort which the children had built, and taking this as the sure sign of a playground, I guessed my way the fifty or sixty feet that more by luck than judgment brought me to the back end of the house, instead of the front. I made my way around on the windward side of the building, hoping that the jingle ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... be the chaperon but the dictator of this tour," declared Winnie when they alighted at the big playground. "I've never been here before, and I don't want anybody to tell me ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... they have plenty of play and fun when they are not in school. In both towns and villages the streets are the playground, and here they play ball, or battledore and ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... studio, before the others were astir. Work was left behind, for who could work indoors on days like these? There was a holiday feeling in the very air. Songs and laughter and the echo of merry voices were heard on every side, and the city seemed one vast playground, where all the grown-up children as well as the babies were ready ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time. History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people's lives, instead of by a list of dates in a catechism. Geography is illustrated in the garden plot of the school playground. But in responding to the new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them, schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up. The manual training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but nothing more. The most valuable and ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... John opened the doors of the refectory. The long, oaken tables, the great fireplace, and the stained glass seemed to delight him, and he alluded to the art classes of monastic life. The class-rooms were peeped into, the playground was viewed through the lattice windows, and they went to John's room, up a ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... which the young foxes love to meet and play on moonlight nights, much as rabbits do, though in a less harum-scarum way. When well fed, and therefore in no hurry to hunt, the heart of a young fox turns naturally to such a spot, and to fun and capers. The playground may easily be found by following the tracks after the first snowfall. (The knowledge will not profit you probably till next season; but it is worth finding and remembering.) If one goes to the place on some still, bright night in autumn, and hides on the edge of the ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... the beauty spot as a National Park forever. Several men arose to endorse the request, and in March, 1872, Congress passed an act dedicating Yellowstone Park to the public for all time, declaring it to be a grand national playground and a museum of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... and pastoral are these cool resting-places in the heart of the Vosges! Gerardmer and many another as yet unfrequented by the tourist world, and unsophisticated in spite of railways and bathing seasons. The Vosges has long been a favourite playground of our French neighbours, although ignored by the devotees of Cook and Gaze, and within late years, not a rustic spot possessed of a mineral spring but has become metamorphosed into a second Plombieres. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... space looking down upon the town. Here, on a January afternoon in 1783, a score of boys were hard at work building a snow fort. The winter had been very cold and a great fall of snow at the first of the year had covered the playground several feet deep. After each storm the boys in the military school fought battles back and forth over the open ground, and up and down the roads that led to the village; but this battle was ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... away from that little house built at the top of the stairs; and it was his wharf, to which tall-masted ships came with the swift quiet of so many pigeons. But now the roof was for him still another place—besides a health resort: it was his playground for ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the Otters and their guests rested for a while, and then Father Otter urged the children to come out and play with him and with Mother Otter. Much surprised, the Three Bears followed the Otters to their playground. And the next Father Bear and Mother Bear knew, Little Bear was sliding down the Otters' toboggan slide and shouting with glee. All the Otters went down that slide, one behind the other, and landed splashety-splash! in the ...
— Little Bear at Work and at Play • Frances Margaret Fox
... and scramble ensued. Some boys, taking off their coats and tucking up their sleeves as they ran, made headlong for the playground. Some, with books under their arms, scuttled off to their studies. The heroes of the Sixth stalked majestically to their quarters. The day boarders hurried away to catch the train at Maltby. A few slunk sulkily to answer to their names in the detention-room, ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... the sights upon which my eyes rest oftenest and with deepest content is a broad sweep of meadow slowly climbing the western sky until it pauses at the edge of a noble piece of woodland. It is a playground of wind and flowers and waving grasses. There are, indeed, days when it lies cold and sad under inhospitable skies, but for the most part the heavens are in league with cloud and sun to protect its charm against all comers. When the turf is fresh, ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... minutes at the close of every half-hour. The hours of attendance are from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M.; but a rest of half an hour is allowed in the midst of that period. We happened to be there when the said half-hour arrived. All the Abbotts, the pupils, and ourselves went out to the playground, which was furnished with seats, and swings, and skipping-ropes, and swinging-boats, and all sorts of machines for exercise and amusement. In these gymnastic performances the Abbotts themselves joined the pupils, with ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... "I don't think I need the lecture. I admire their tenacity. I admire their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity attitude of acting as if the Great Creator had concocted the whole glorious Universe for their own playground. Yes," said the chief wearily, "singly they aren't bad traits. Boiled down into the self-esteem of a single race, I don't admire them ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith
... waiting in his friend's room, was sent for. He was introduced into the conclave assembled in the playground ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... to the migraines of the woman soul as clothes. Their only rival is travel and there are cases where they know none. Sometimes women remember to pity men, that have no such happy playground. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... pennons. Everyone rowed, and the girls as well as the youths had their races, and developed their muscles in the most scientific manner. The large, level meadow near the old willow was now the college playground, and here baseball battles raged with fury, varied by football, leaping, and kindred sports fitted to split the fingers, break the ribs, and strain the backs of the too ambitious participants. The gentler pastimes of the damsels were at a safe distance from this ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... fragments. Marm Lisa could push the twins up to this vantage-ground, and crawl up after them. Once ensconced, if they had chosen the right time of day, interesting events were sure to be forthcoming. In a large playground within range of vision, there were small children, as many in number as the sands of the seashore. At a given moment, a lovely angel with black hair and a scarlet apron would ring a large bell. Simultaneously, a lovely angel ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was finishing marking the exercises, the master's bell sounded, and the boys were dismissed for a few minutes' run in the playground; but Johnnie was obliged to stay behind to learn to spell correctly the words he had blundered over. Poor Johnnie! It was very hard for him to have to stay there, trying to fix in his mind the fact that "Receive" is spelt with the E before the I, and "Believe" with the I before the ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... has the advantage of offering the wildest alpine sport in combination with a well-appointed hotel as a base of operations. Hence the majority of visitors know only that side. Everybody should know it, too, for there is not a nobler playground anywhere; but should also know that it is by no means ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... many a house of sand we reared, The walls with shells adorning, While boats our happy playground neared, And breakers gave us warning That though we neither paused nor feared, All would be ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... them to claim the entire credit to themselves. Apart from these, at the terminal stations where no barriers exist, are folk who make but little affectation of being passengers, and use the station as a playground, with engine and train ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... able boats, which fought the Atlantic, and the old curraghs were left to blister in the sun far up on the beach. Instructors from the Isle of Man taught new ways of catching mackerel. Green patches between the cottages and the sea, once the playground of pigs and children, or the marine parade of solemn lines of geese, were spread with brown nets. On May mornings, if the take was good, long lines of carts rattled down the road carrying the fish to the railway at Clifden, and the place ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... friends, and had promised to give away, as I now see reason to believe, a handsome covey of partridges potted, and about a hundredweight of guava jelly. It was now that Globson, Bully no more, sought me out in the playground. He was a big fat boy, with a big fat head and a big fat fist, and at the beginning of that Half had raised such a bump on my forehead that I couldn't get my hat of state on, to go to church. He said ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... noisy, distracting place for a time; the playground was the scene of frequent uproars and even fights. They seemed to have no idea of playing together or following a leader or of organizing and keeping ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various
... clouds chasing each other over the deep blue vault of the sky. The cry of the Night Owl came dreamily from the woods; a prowling Puma roared hungrily to his mate, but the pond of the Musk Rats was a happy playground, and ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... question of the drive from the station to the hotel had to be thought out. A trial trip was made in an automobile. If the route followed a car line or passed any spot likely to be noisy, such as a market place or a school playground, or if it led over a roughly paved road on which the car would jolt, another route had to be selected, which, as far as possible, dodged ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... my tramping about the country, I saw you with the other young gentlemen in the playground on ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... by age and infirmities, he assailed with his ridicule, as she daily went out upon her crutch, to draw water from the well near her house, and just within the playground of ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... was more successful in his attempts to interest his friend. In spite of their intimacy at school and on the playground Edgar had up to this time never visited the Stanard home. Rob had enlisted his mother's sympathy in the orphan boy and she had suggested that he should invite Edgar home with him some day. It now occurred to Rob that this would ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... younger fry, they did not content themselves with whispers, but shouted to each other of their new playground beneath our dear ex-warden's well-loved elms, of their future own gardens, of marbles to be procured in the wished-for city, and of the rumour which had reached ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... merely a substitute for the parent, the household of boarders merely a substitute for the family. What is meant by school here, is that which is possessed in common by day school and boarding-school—the schoolroom and the recess playground part. It is something which the savage and the barbarian distinctively do not possess as a phase in their making, and scarcely even its rudimentary suggestion. It is a new element correlated with the establishment of a wider political order and with ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... no fear of the forest till that day when I was lost therein, for the nearer glades round our village had been my playground ever since I could remember, and before I knew that fear therein might be. That was not so long a time, however, save that the years of a child are long years; for at this time, when I first learned the full wildness of the woods of the ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... was easy; hours at the Rialto were short and the pay was high. Inasmuch as the place was a playground where cares were forgotten, there was a wholly artificial atmosphere of gaiety and improvidence about it. When patrons won at the gambling-games, they promptly squandered their winnings at the bar and in the theater; when they lost, they cheerfully ignored their ill- fortune. Even the gamblers ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... element of the Oriental architecture of the Mediterranean, which provided the theme of the Exposition plan. There, however, it is the patio, the place of the siesta, the playground of the children. Here the courts have been made the chief architectural feature of the group. There the courts are private. Here they ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... hump toward the sky in the space of fifteen blocks, and on the top, secure as the howdah of a chieftain, stands the noble portico of the old college. To the westward, as every one knows, lie the river and the more pretentious park; on the east an abrupt descent offers space for a small grassy playground for children, who may be seen, during the sunny hours of the day, romping over ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... like that of the bard can be— The wandering bard, who roams as free As the mountain lark that o'er him sings, And, like that lark, a music brings Within him, where'er he comes or goes,— A fount that for ever flows! The world's to him like some playground, Where fairies dance their moonlight round;— If dimmed the turf where late they trod, The elves but seek some greener sod; So, when less bright his scene of glee, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of folks are these Thomases?" asked Kinch, as he sat beside Charlie in the playground munching the last of the apple-tart; "what kind of folks are they? Tell me that, and I can give you ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... months in visits to the homeland. Some have brown mothers, half-islanders; yet if they learn the tripping tongue of their French progenitor and European manners, they think of France as their ultimate goal, of Paris their playground, and the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... tell papa. I went down with him to the playground this morning, and there they settled it. The Andersons, and Axworthy, and he, are going to hire a gun, and shoot ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... to be allowed to return immediately and have lessons with a private governess; the third day she wanders about, trying to get sympathy from anyone who is weak-minded enough to listen to her, till in desperation somebody drags her into the playground, and makes her have a round at hockey. That cheers her up, and she begins to think life isn't quite such a desert. By the fourth morning she has recovered her spirits, and come to the conclusion that Chessington College is a very decent kind of place; and she begins to be alarmed ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... generous visitor who tipped him, a good action never forgotten; and the garden with its flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the much-prized emerald May-bugs; for the whole garden was liberally thrown open to us beyond the gravelled playground; all being now given over to monks and nuns. Then I recollect how a rarely-dark annular eclipse of the sun convulsed the whole school, bringing smoked glass to a high premium; and there was a notable boy's library of amusing travels and stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the whole wide world outdoors turns into one great playground; and it is largely because we turn out into this playground that we have so much less sickness, and so many fewer cases of the serious diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia, and rheumatism in summer than ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... they wandered as they had done in earlier years by purling streams and mossy banks, under cool shadows of friendly trees. Every old playground and hallowed spot was visited once more, and they lived over ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... was cramped or crowded for room, the place where they now alighted was planned on an unusually large scale. Immense buildings stood upon a large tract of land, planted with trees, grass, and flowers. Here were breathing room and playground. A number of streams of clear water flowed through the grounds, and small ponds were alive with fish and swimming birds. Fountains played, and statues of ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... another school, set apart for the instruction of middle class boys, and in charge of three Xavierian brothers. About 90 boys attend it, and they are well disciplined. At the rear of the school there is a fine playground for the boys—it is about the largest in Preston; and close to it we have the old graveyard of the church, which is in a tolerably fair state of order. Brothers of the Xavierian type have been in ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... those parts of northern Italy and the Austrian Tyrol and Trentino which for generations have been known and admired all over the world for their scenic beauty and natural grandeur. People from many countries of the world have used this ground which now is so bitterly fought over as their playground, and have carried away from it not only improved health, but also the most pleasant of memories. Though much of its beauty undoubtedly will survive the ravages of even this most destructive of wars, a great deal of damage has been inflicted. For in order ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... every chance to become acquainted not only with the school, but with the social life at Eton. But her interest in the gay world, as there represented, was lukewarm. Its shallowness provoked her. She, looking upon life as real and earnest, and not as a mere playground, could not sympathize with women who gave themselves up to dress, nor with men who expended their energies in efforts to raise a laugh. Wit of rather an affected kind was the fashion of the day. At its best it was odious, but ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the bodies have long since gone back to dust, into playgrounds, with walks, and seats, and beds of flowers. Here the children can romp from morning till night, instead of living in the stifled air of the tenement houses. In old St. Pancras churchyard, now used as a playground, she has erected a sundial as a memorial ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... the jockey's silks. There was the babel of excited voices, the shouting as the horses rushed down the picturesque "straight." Then the betting. The lunching. The sun. The blessed sun and gracious woodland slopes shutting in this happy playground of men and women become children again at the touch of pleasure's magic wand. No, for all her anxiety, Nan had no power to withstand the charm and delirium of it all. And, for a while, she flung herself into it with an abandon ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... confidence, and drove up into a hilly country which soon hid the sun. The long shades crept past and behind them. There was a country church, with a graveyard full of white stones nearly smothered in grass and briers. And there was a school-house in an open space, with a playground beaten bare and white in the midst of a yellow mustard jungle. They saw some loiterers creeping home, carrying dinner-pail and basket, and taking a languid last tag of each other. The little girls looked ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... fixed at six years, delicate children should be kept out of school until they are seven or eight years old, provided they have good homes. In addition to the excitation incident to studying and reciting lessons, conditions frequently arise both in the schoolroom and upon the playground that create a feeling of fear or dread in the minds of children. Quarrels and feuds among the children and the bullying of big boys on the playground may work untold harm. All conditions tending to develop fear, uneasiness, or undue excitement on ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... wintry afternoon, when the writer stopt in the front of the playground of a suburban school. The ground swarmed with boys full of the Saturday's holiday. The earth seemed roofed with the oldest lead, and the wind came, sharp as Shylock's knife, from the Minories. But those happy boys ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... — N. arena, field, platform; scene of action, theater; walk, course; hustings; stare, boards &c (playhouse) 599; amphitheater; Coliseum, Colosseum; Flavian amphitheater, hippodrome, circus, race course, corso [Sp.], turf, cockpit, bear garden, playground, gymnasium, palestra, ring, lists; tiltyard^, tilting ground; Campus Martins, Champ de Allars^; campus [U.S.]. boxing ring, canvas. theater of war, seat of war; battle-field, battle-ground; field of battle, field of slaughter; Aceldama^, camp; the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... this moment of agony. The whole room looks black before him as some chipper little girl, who knows not the meaning of the word "embarrassment," comes to greet him. He crawls off to the friendly shelter of a group of boys, and sees the "craven of the playground, the dunce of the school," with a wonderful self-possession, lead off in the german with the prettiest girl. As he grows older, and becomes the young man whose duty it is to go to dinners and afternoon parties, this terrible weakness ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... seasons in their order roll, And sun and rain pour down from God's great dome, And deathless stars shine nightly overhead, Near other children, with her little doll, She waits the wizard that will never come To wake the sleep-struck playground of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... which the whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world; but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plain the city moans with a human cry, And the man-gnomes delve and burrow for gold till they drop and die; But here there is naught for conquest and the spoiler stands at bay, For God still keeps one playground where ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation and world must also ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and dismay, brought home from the College Bourdaloue by a worthy father in the interest of the poor little fellows themselves, who had received a temporary leave of absence in order to spare them from hearing in the parlour or the playground any unkind story or painful allusion. Thereupon the Nabob flew into a terrible passion, which caused him to destroy a service of porcelain, and it appears that, had it not been for M. de Gery, he would have rushed off at once to punch ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by surrendering ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... fact that Miss Cardrew should have a letter, nobody but Delia was capable of seeing; but Delia was given to seeing jokes on all occasions, under all circumstances. Go wherever you might, from a prayer-meeting to the playground, you were sure to ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... penetrated her room. She sniffed at it, smiling again. Well, that had been a fascinating interlude! He looked so amazingly happy: his heavy clothes and big buttoned gloves; his beautifully brushed hair... and that smile... "Jolly" was the word—just a well-fed boy with the world for his playground. People like that did one good—one felt "made over" at the sight of them. SANE they were—so sane and solid. You could depend on them never having one mad impulse from the day they were born until the day they died. And Life was in league with them—jumped them on ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... Dick no more: a tall, heavily built blond boy, with a quiet, sweet disposition, that at first offered temptations to the despots of the playground; but a sudden flaring up once or twice of that unexpected spirit which had broken out in his babyhood brought him ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... there was life—life in a thousand varying forms, filling the sea and the air. On calm mornings the swelling waves were splashed by myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. Surrounded by a universe filled with pulsing, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... certainly be in some degree destructive of the general good. That to allow this in certain individuals would be injurious to the great body, but still more so to the individuals themselves; and that what was wrong in the schoolroom or on the playground at eleven in the morning, could not be right in the fields at six in the afternoon. In conclusion he said, 'Whether or not we have the power to fine a person for a breach of our laws when he is ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... schools are of inestimable value, and we quite agree with one who said: "If we can only afford one of the two—the playground or the school—have the playground first and afterward the school." The small parks and playgrounds of the cities are a great ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... birds sing the same sweet stave, Her lights and airs are given, Alike, to playground and the grave,— And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... who says: "Children do not play because they are young; they are young in order that they may play." Play is a normal process of the child's growth through spontaneous activity. Joseph Lee, the president of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, goes so far as to say: "Play is thus the essential part of education. It is nature's prescribed course. School is invaluable in forming the child to meet actual social opportunities and conditions. Without ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... honestly believed that he was changed to his heart's core. He thought that, like Moran, he was henceforth to be a sailor of the sea, a rover, and he saw the rest of his existence passed with her, aboard their faithful little schooner. They would have the whole round world as their playground; they held the earth and the great seas in fief; there was no one to let or to hinder. They two belonged to each other. Once outside the Heads again, and they swept the land of cities and of little things behind them, and they ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... would accommodate many visitors during the night; tables that had been constructed out in the open staggered under the load of provisions the wagons had brought from the nearest town; a platform for dancing later was already the playground of ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... names, or the nicknames liberally bestowed upon them by their mates, indiscriminately, and showed no resentment whatever when he heard himself alluded to as Jo, or Hamlet, or the Beetle, his most frequent appellations in the playground. He kept a black bottle in his desk, at the neck of which he habitually refreshed himself before the whole school; and he addressed the children with an elaborate and caustic levity in a thin shaky voice quite twenty years too old for him. His humour was thrown away upon ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the newcomer, who had just been left by Dr. Rayne in the school playground, where boys of all sorts and sizes, from ten to fourteen, were congregated, newly arrived from home and holidays, and while they waited for the tea-bell, were inspecting the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... playground, wondering, wretched, and yet smitten through with faint delicious thrillings of a new-found happiness such as I had often dreamed of, but had scarcely dared hope ever to realise. I, Janet Hope, going home! It was almost too incredible for belief. I ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... were two Napoleons—the boy Napoleon and the man Napoleon—but both alike; two Howards—the boy Howard and the man Howard—but both alike; two Samsons—the boy Samson and the man Samson—but both alike. This giant was no doubt the hero of the playground, and nothing could stand before his exhibitions of youthful prowess. At eighteen years of age he was betrothed to the daughter of a Philistine. Going down toward Timnath, a lion came out upon him, and, although this young giant was weaponless, he seized the monster by the long mane and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... the schoolhouse door on a still, yellow evening, when the winds were purring in the spruces around the playground, and the shadows were long and lazy by the edge of the woods. She dropped the key into her pocket with a sigh of satisfaction. The school year was ended, she had been reengaged for the next, with many expressions of satisfaction. . . . only ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pledge, a bargain. I remember it all perfectly now. We had been reading some dreadful book and we swore to appear to one another—I mean, whoever died first swore to show himself to the other. And we sealed the compact with each other's blood. I remember it all so well—the hot summer afternoon in the playground, seven years ago—and one of the masters caught us and confiscated the knives—and I have never thought of ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood |
