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More "Hobby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... true,' said Ollyett. 'Besides, it is my hobby, I always wanted to be an architect. I'll attend to it myself. It's too serious for The Bun and miles too ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... propulsion. I presume the writer meant on propelling rocket planes. I have experimented on rocket ships for the past three years and can give some data on these as to the construction of models (for when I say ships I really mean model airplanes). I have had this as my hobby for the past four and a half years, and can give extensive information on model building. I specialize in models powered by power other than rubber; and I took second place at the Atlantic City Tournament held in October by the National Play-ground Association, in the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... between the Governments those serving terms of imprisonment for offences committed before the 4th of August, 1917, were released, a great number of the gaol-birds being sent to Stroehen. Residing in prison was a captain who made a hobby of being court-martialled. Under this new ruling he was taken out of cells for a few days, only to be put back to await trial for the trumped-up charge of having poison tablets on his person when recaptured after his last escape. I believe the only tablets he carried were either ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... eager interest, because there was a fatuous grin on the face of every one of them, officers and all. The colonel of the Rifle Brigade said to me afterwards that he trusted the staff did not mean to make a hobby of these knock-about-turns on parade, because if they did it would undermine the discipline ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... intellectual satisfactions out of the work of his profession," answered Armstrong. "Besides, as to that, there's time enough. Fifteen years of solid work will enable one to put by a fair competence, if he lives carefully and has no one but himself to support; and then he will be free to take up a hobby. Oh, I shall cultivate a hobby or two after awhile. It keeps the mind healthy to have some interest of the kind outside of one's business. I may take to book-collecting or numismatics or raising orchids. Perhaps I may ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... outdone by the others, covered her fourth share of the wall with "heroes". Whenever she saw that some member of His Majesty's forces had been awarded the V.C., she would cut out his portrait and add it to her gallery of honour. She wrote to her mother and her sister Nora to help her in this hobby, with the consequence that every letter which arrived for her contained enclosures. Her room-mates were on the whole good-natured, and in return for some contributions she had given to their collections ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... world. He just kept them here in case they might be useful, I expect. When you and I go from London to the country we carry our clothes about with us. Mark never did. In his flat in London he had everything all over again which he has here. It was a hobby with him, collecting clothes. If he'd had half a dozen houses, they would all have been full of a complete ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... at once by his manner that something unusual was in agitation; all their fears about the unsettled state of his mind were roused with tenfold force: they hung about him entreating him not to expose himself to the night air, but all in vain. When Wolfert was once mounted on his hobby, it was no easy matter to get him out of the saddle. It was a clear starlight night, when he issued out of the portal of the Webber palace. He wore a large napped hat tied under the chin with a handkerchief ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... passed. I resigned my situation, however, to make way for some one poorer than myself. At the end of a month I was sick and tired of life; and, to replace the affections that had been denied me, I resolved to give myself a passion, a hobby, a mania. I became a collector of books. You think, sir, perhaps that to take an interest in books a man must have ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... "I take you to witness my vow. If I receive another place, I give a hobby-horse to little Capet. You grant ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... the exaggerated estimate of my ability with which he prefaced it, was, if you will believe me, Watson, the very first thing which ever made me feel that a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby. At the moment, however, I was too much concerned at the sudden illness of my host ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... first very few, so few that they tell us hardly anything. We know when and where Washington was born; and how, when he was little more than three years old,[1] he was taken from Bridges Creek to the banks of the Rappahannock. There he was placed under the charge of one Hobby, the sexton of the parish, to learn his alphabet and his pothooks; and when that worthy man's store of learning was exhausted he was sent back to Bridges Creek, soon after his father's death, to live with ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... kings and statesmen, notably Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead of powerful country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor hobereaux, little hobby-hawks among the gentry, who considered it degradation to help in governing the parish, as their forefathers had governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last farthing out of their tenants, that they might spend it in town during the winter. No wonder that with ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... Lionel Fysshe-Jhonson, who married Miss Buckley on the strength of her celebrity. This young man in less than two years went to his reward; and his widow, after a seemly interval, reinforced her financial position by accepting the hand and heart of old Mr. Tidy, an aitchless property-owner, whose hobby was to collect his own rents. Bottoming on gold this time, she buried the old man within eighteen months, and paid probate duty on 25,000. After three years of something like life, she accepted the addresses of the Hon. Henry Beaudesart, a social refugee from ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... smelted iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek language, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he used the language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried this ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... their father and fellow-labourer's hand, and were not loth to go to rest. Their mother was their attendant. The ruffle had departed from her face. It was as pleasant as before. She was but half a dissenter. So Thompson thought when he called her back again, and bade his "old 'ooman give her hobby one of her good old-fashioned busses, and think no more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... which fall from them, as to increase its value in the course of some years eight or tenfold. The Duke was buried in a coffin made of larch-wood! This sounds as if the merits of the larch-tree had been indeed a hobby with him, but when one comes to enumerate them one does not wonder that a man should feel his life very usefully devoted to establishing so valuable a tree in his native country, and that the pains and pride it brought him should have awakened ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... She knew that argument or persuasion was lost on her sister once she was started on her hobby-horse, ill-temper. She could only hope that she would forget about it by degrees. And after a while it almost seemed so. They went down to the shore, where it was so bright and pleasant that it did not seem possible for the crossest person in the world to resist the soft yet ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... But it is a good thing for an old man to have a hobby, a very perplexing hobby. Modern science makes so many strides every year, every day, that it is practically impossible for an amateur to keep apace." He preceded them to a spacious shed in the rear of the house. It was carefully and immaculately ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... hobby. He and a few others are trying to keep the art of using slings alive," Scotty ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... six: (1) At the at-home aforesaid. (2) At Macmurdo's house in Fitzroy Street in the days of the Century Guild and its paper 'The Hobby Horse.' (3) At a meeting somewhere in Westminster at which I delivered an address on Socialism, and at which Oscar turned up and spoke. Robert Ross surprised me greatly by telling me, long after Oscar's death, that it was this address of mine ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the trout like precious jewels. John and James Ellison, Farmer Ellison's sons, and Benjamin, their cousin, fished the pool once in a great while—and got soundly trounced if caught. It was Farmer Ellison's hobby, this pool and its fish. He gloated over them like a miser. He watched them leap, and counted them when they did, ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... Countries, with the few millions vegetating upon them, into the bargain. Having thus disposed of his fellow-mortals much to his own satisfaction, he went into a convent, reserving for himself a small income, twelve men, and a pony. Whether he afterwards repented his hobby, or mounted his pony is not recorded; but this is certain— that in two ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... to Lord Constantine. Anne moved about like herself in a dream. She was heavenly, and Arthur enjoyed it, offering incense to His Lordship, and provoking him into very English utterances. The young man's fault was that he rode his hobby too hard. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... glad you've come, Bobichel," exclaimed Fanfaro. "We have some fine detective work to do here, and that was always your hobby." ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... "It's his greatest hobby. In his taste for salt water he at least resembles his ancestors. The Gurneys were all ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... lighted up a shelf upon which stood some curious glass jars with perforated stoppers. "I see you have a fine collection of live tarantulas and scorpions. I remember now I have often seen you groping among the aloes. Curious hobby!" ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... he left Smithers he buttonholed another acquaintance, a young man who thought he knew Wall Street, and therefore had a hobby—manipulation. No one could induce him to buy stocks by telling him how well the companies were doing, how bright the prospects, etc. That was bait for "suckers," not for clever young stock operators. But any one, even a stranger, who said that "they"—the perennially mysterious ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... "Oh, my dear boy," she said, "life's too short for all that stuff, and there's no hobby so painful as cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. And, after all, what's the matter with Easthampton people? I'd go to a chauffeurs' ball if the band was the right thing. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... collection of the most curious, he was called Uccello (bird). He was one of the first painters who cultivated perspective. Before his time buildings had not a true point of perspective, and figures appeared sometimes as if falling or slipping off the canvass. He made this branch so much his hobby, that he neglected other essential parts of the art. To improve himself he studied geometry with Giovanni Manetti, a celebrated mathematician. He acquired great distinction in his time and some of his works still remain in the churches and convents of Florence. In the church of S. Maria ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... dunno what to do with it. If Carter ever comes back he might not like my getting rid of it. I was thinking mebbe I'd put it in the hobby show at the county fair next week, though. Ya notice how that funny-looking cube inside there gets bigger every time you look at it? There ... it just doubled its size again, see? People at the fair oughtta get a big kick outta that. No telling how big it'll ...
— Vanishing Point • C.C. Beck
... antiquary and collector, born in London; passed through Edinburgh University to the Scotch bar, and was chief authority on genealogical cases; his hobby was the collection of literary rarities, and he published editions of ancient literary remains; he died at ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... report, afforded hopes of convalescence. A kind of terror came over him that his plans might fail, because he felt almost certain that if Alice and his brother both recovered, Mr. Lindsay might, or rather would, mount his old hobby, and insist on having them married, in the teeth of all opposition on the part of either himself or his mother. This was a gloomy prospect for him, and one which he could not contemplate without falling back upon ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... condition for nearly two years, on account of the building of the Morgan memorial, but has now been planted again. One May-day we had an old English festival around a Maypole on the green, with Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, the hobby- horse, the dragon and all the rest, including Jack in the Green and an elephant. This was such a success that we were asked to repeat it across the river on the East Hartford Library green, where it was highly complimented on account of being so full ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... most venerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations, including transparent file sharing between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work was shifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see {high moby}). The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden is maintaining one 'live' ITS site ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... following document. It is one of many such; for he was a curious and industrious collector of old local traditions—a commodity in which the quarter where he resided mightily abounded. The collection and arrangement of such legends was, as long as I can remember him, his hobby; but I had never learned that his love of the marvellous and whimsical had carried him so far as to prompt him to commit the results of his inquiries to writing, until, in the character of residuary legatee, his will put me in possession of all his manuscript papers. To such as may ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... processes were all serious, and whose hobby was method, Mr. Galbraith had established a custom of giving himself a quiet half-hour of inviolable seclusion in which to read and consider his mail. During this sacred interval the stenographer, standing ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... masons, carpenters, smiths, and such like, requisite for such an action; also mineral men and refiners. Beside, for solace of our people and allurement of the savages, we were provided of musique in good variety; not omitting the least toys, as morris-dancers, hobby-horses, and May-like conceits, to delight the savage people, whom we intended to win by all fair means possible." An armament complete enough, even to that tenderness towards the Indians, which is so striking a feature of the Elizabethan ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... educators often called this power of conscious relationship, "persistency"; have you not seen people whom the world called "hobby riders" or "freaks"? These people are only perverted in the expression of conscious relationship; they hold their relationship to one thing to the exclusion of every other thing ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... country. See how well one is cared for, how civil everybody is, how honest, how manly,' began Livy, as she mounted her hobby, and prepared for a canter over the prejudices of her friend; for Amanda detested England because she knew nothing ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... thought that, at last, he had reached the milk in the cocoanut. Captain Dan, with his love for home and his hatred of lodges and societies, had refused to be interested in his wife's pet hobby, and felt himself neglected and forsaken. He had brooded upon it, and this outburst and the letter he had ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Jail was then called, and in several churches. Some of them were soon afterwards sent on board a prison ship, which was probably the Whitby. "A number of the officers were sent to our place of confinement; Colonel Rawlings, Colonel Hobby, Major (Otho) Williams, etc. Rawlings and Williams were wounded, others were also wounded, among them Lieutenant Hanson (a young Gent'n from Va.) who was Shot through ye Shoulder with a Musq't Ball of which wound he Died ye end ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... hope you won't do it again," said my friend fervently. "It's not a thing to make a hobby of. And don't you come near this infernal river any more until ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... Jerkin, The Falcon and Tassel-gentle, The Laner and Laneret, The Bockerel and Bockeret, The Saker and Sacaret, The Merlin and Jack Merlin, The Hobby and Jack: There is the Stelletto of Spain, The Blood-red Rook from Turkey, The Waskite from Virginia: And there is of short-winged Hawks, The Eagle and Iron The Goshawk and Tarcel, The Sparhawk and Musket, The ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction. Each person with a hobby found it turning into an institution. Rosamund's songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of opera; Michael's jests and paragraphs into a magazine. His pipe and her mandoline seemed between them to make a ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... Brother Gift or the Naughty Girl Reformed. The Sister Gift, or the Naughty Boy Reformed. Hobby Horse or Christian Companion. Robin Good-Fellow, A Fairy Tale. Puzzling Cap, A Collection of Riddles. The Cries of London as exhibited in the Streets. Royal Guide or Early Introduction to Reading English. Mr Winloves Collection of Stories. " " Moral Lectures. History ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... Dick, "this is interesting. I'm not an architect, but construction's my business, as well as my hobby." ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... Excellent hobby. However—I took a snap-shot of this man to show to somebody who might know him better than I did. This is the photograph. Drunk as a lord, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... times of peace, and posing that day as an American,—one of those men who look as if they would bleed water if you pricked them with a bayonet,—needed no second warning. Running the German gauntlet was not precisely his hobby. Down went the emergency brake and the car jolted ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... here busily disturbing the soil that had been allowed to remain unmoved for ages. The overleaning rock, which is separated from my temporary home only by a few yards, probably afforded shelter to generations of those degraded human beings from whom the anthropologist who puts no bridle on his hobby-horse is pleased to claim descent. Near the base is one of those symmetrically scooped-out hollows which are such a striking peculiarity of the formation here, and which suggest to the irreverent that a cheese-taster of prehistoric dimensions must have ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... succession of delicate touches rather than by description. He seems to enter into an individual, and make him betray his peculiarities by significant actions and phrases. Thus Mr. Shandy exposes at once the nature of his mind and the vigor of his "hobby-horse," when he exclaims to his brother Toby: "What is the character of a ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... benefactor is dressed in top-boots, riding breeches of honourable antiquity, a black coat green with age and a "Cup Final" cap. At the same time (this too on The Times' authority) there is an oddly and obsolescently attired lady going about who also makes London hospitals her hobby. She begins by asking the secretary if she may take off her boots, and, receiving permission, takes them off, places her feet on an adjacent chair and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... disdain to make the most in their power by watching the motions of his hobby, and if this was not a sufficient prize to furnish much cause for exultation, it was at least one that it would have been unwise ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... like children that esteem every trifle, and prefer a fairing before their fathers! What difference is between us and them but that we are dearer fools, coxcombs at a higher rate? They are pleased with cockleshells, whistles, hobby-horses, and such like; we with statues, marble pillars, pictures, gilded roofs, where underneath is lath and lime, perhaps loam. Yet we take pleasure in the lie, and are glad we can cozen ourselves. Nor is it only in our walls and ceilings, but all that we call happiness ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... all had gone smooth with Sir Gregory; there was no one to interfere with his hobby, or run counter to his opinion. Alaric was all that was conciliatory and amiable in a colleague. He was not submissive and cringing; and had he been so, Sir Gregory, to do him justice, would have been disgusted; but ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... them many votes. The peasants generally are so prosperous that some, for instance, whom I know of near Kragujevac, men occupied in growing cereals, find that the fowls which they keep rather as a hobby do not have to lay them golden eggs in order to pay all the taxes. In that region it is usual nowadays for peasants not to count their bank-notes, but to weigh them; recently a man disposed of certain fields for his own weight ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... false positions; and now he discovered, somewhat to his chagrin, that the lovely little shrine of St. Spitz, whose stained windows glowed like rubies in its cloister of dark trees, was rather a fashionable hobby among the wealthy landowners of Dalmatian Hills. It had been closed all summer, and they had missed it. The Bishop, in his airy and indefinite way, had not made it quite plain that Gissing was only a lay reader; and in spite of his embarrassed ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated, well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father had perished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn't at all impossible. Rich people—I mean the rich who ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... CRI DE COEUR of mine, I thought at first there would be a fight, and I remembered with regret that the President in early life had had a hobby of killing lions. But really I began to think that I had been mistaken, and that it was not the President after all. There was a confounding sincerity in the anger with which he declared that he was Farmer Bowles, and everybody knowed it. I appeased him eventually ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... layman will never take an author quite seriously. He regards authorship, not as a profession, but as something between au inspiration and a hobby. In as far as it is an inspiration, it is a gift from Heaven, and ought, therefore, to be shared with the rest of the world; in as far as it is a hobby, it is something which should be done not too expertly, but in a casual, amateur, haphazard fashion. For this reason a layman will never hesitate ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... devotional," answered this excellent man. "I have taken considerable pains to see to it. As your mother and I have often agreed, there is no such safeguard for a young girl as a hobby or mania ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... the breast of the heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment. There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half-a-dozen of modern English Bacchanalians! Now I am on my hobby-horse, I cannot help inserting two other old ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... other hand, through hours of active effort emotion finds an outlet and our natures are restored to peace. Introspection is to many people an actual luxury, but like other luxuries it enervates. Reveling in their own emotions is a favorite hobby with quite a lot of people, but for all that it is a very bad one. There really should be no time for it. Our emotions are all needed as driving forces for the times of action. In particular the cultivation of a sense of beauty in art is one of the normal outlets for emotion, ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... use for hydroplanes, he had told Dave. His hobby was air machines. However, because his favorite pupil was going to run the machine, he allowed Dave to explain about the hydroplane, and was ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... the Land Law Act of 1881, is fatal to purchase. (3) The bonus of L12,000,000—on the application of which all parties agreed in 1903—was diverted from the unanimous policy of that year and brought in aid of Mr. Dillon's hobby, which all parties then rejected. Mr. Dillon is at liberty to rejoice over the ruin of one landlord more than over the salvation of 99,000 tenants. The laws of lunacy do not, and ought not to, touch him. But there is no reason why taxpayers should ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... the letter through twice before its meaning dawned on him. Miss Aleyn, an elderly and very eccentric maiden lady, was their near neighbour, and a friend of his mother's. Her hobby was curio-collecting, and she lived in perpetual dread of having her treasures stolen. In fact, judging by the energy and ingenuity she displayed in hunting for them, one might well imagine the old lady was desirous of making a collection of burglars, although so far ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the principles I have already laid down, I shall not thwart him; on the contrary, I shall approve of his plan, share his hobby, and work with him, not for his pleasure but my own; at least, so he thinks; I shall be his under-gardener, and dig the ground for him till his arms are strong enough to do it; he will take possession of it by planting a bean, and this is surely a more sacred possession, and one more worthy of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... deceitful and beauty is vain,'" she quoted in undertone; "oh, Nelly, take your share of the unco guid and the riders of hobby horses, and be thankful ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... "If you were not a stranger, you would know that saving cutlers' lives is my hobby, and one in which I am steadily resisted and defeated, especially by the cutlers themselves: why, I look upon you as a most considerate and obliging young man for indulging me in this way. If you had been a Hillsborough hand, you would insist upon a brain-fever, and a trip to the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... modernism. If he were to shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one intelligent human being. There is no space to tell casually of his various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse enthusiast, etcetera. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... know,' said Lady Petherwin, taking up another sheet of paper. 'I have a dim notion that the son, who had been brought up to no profession, became a teacher of music in some country town—music having always been his hobby. But the facts are not very distinct in my memory.' And she dipped her pen for ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... nothing of the sort. It is a hobby of mine never to waste gas or electricity, and I remember distinctly stopping to put out the light after I had picked ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... still perhaps it was only my fancy. Mitchell has such very high spirits, you see, and is determined to make everything go. He won't have conventional parties, and insists on plenty of verve; so, of course, one's forced to have it.' He sighed. 'They haven't any children, and they make a kind of hobby of entertaining ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... school there is no record or tradition other than that gathered by Parson Weems. He says: "The first place of education to which George was ever sent was a little old field school kept by one of his father's tenants, named Hobby, an honest, poor old man, who acted in the double capacity of sexton and schoolmaster. Of his skill as a gravedigger tradition is silent; but for a teacher of youth his qualifications were certainly of the humbler sort, making what is generally called an A, B, C ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... It wears out after two or three months, but what's the difference? I make 'em as a hobby—turn out two ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... gentleman died shortly after the publication of his work, and now that he is dead and gone, it cannot do much harm to his memory to say that his time might have been much better employed in weightier labours. He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his own way; and though it did now and then kick up the dust a little in the eyes of his neighbours, and grieve the spirit of some friends, for whom he felt the truest deference and affection; yet his errors and follies are remembered "more in sorrow than in anger," and it ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... she cried. "You'll think me unfeeling, but—but—" Then she became matronly. "Oh, but your son wants employment. Has he no particular hobby? Why, I myself have worries, but I can generally forget them at the piano; and collecting stamps did no end of good for my brother. Perhaps Italy bores him; you ought to try the Alps or ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... yes, yes, to all that he suggested, and he began to lay the trail—the trail to lead to his enemy. It was his hobby, this vengeance. He was like a big, cruel boy. It was he, himself, Juan Menendez, who broke into Cray's Folly. It was he who nailed the bat wing to the door. It was he who bought two rifles of a kind of which so ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... kinds of fanaticism, apt to be satirical, even in his sermons, on the right of private judgment to interpret texts as it pleased in ignorance of Hebrew and Greek. He was respected and feared more than any other man in the parish. He had a great library, and had taken up archaeology as a hobby. He knew the history of every church in the county, and more about the Langborough records than was known by the town clerk. He was chairman of a Board of Governors charged with the administration of wealthy trust for alms and schools. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... is my hobby," observes Mr. Yeats, who aspires to be the Einstein of song. When only twelve disciples are able to understand ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... objection to advertising signs was only a rich man's aristocratic hobby, and that it could not be indulged in a democratic community of honest people. His own firm, he said, bought thousands of bushels of oats from the farmers and converted them into the celebrated Eagle-Eye Breakfast Food, three packages for a quarter. They sold this breakfast food ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... true pioneer, or, rather, the king of pioneers, to whom Guff gave place without a murmur, for Reuben was a modest man; and the moment he heard that one of the gentlemen of the Canadian fur-trading company had taken up his favourite hobby, and meant to work out the problem, he resolved, as he said, "to play second fiddle," all the more that the man who thus unwittingly supplanted him was a mountaineer of ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... compunction, "you'll think me an awful bore, Jerrolds, but I've been more or less practising on you, haven't I? But you'll remember, perhaps, this used to be a sort of hobby of mine, and I work it into shape nowadays for a young men's club ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket? Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses;—their running horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... or touching; and—most important— himself passionately addicted to literature. You cannot like Lamb without liking literature in general. And you cannot read Lamb without learning about literature in general; for books were his hobby, and he was a critic of the first rank. His letters are full of literariness. You will naturally read his letters; you should not only be infinitely diverted by them (there are no better epistles), but you should receive from them ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... sire; (female) mare, dam; (young) colt, foal, filly; (small) pony, tit, mustang; steed, charger, nag, gelding, cockhorse, cob, pad, padnag, roadster, punch, broncho, warragal, sumpter, centaur, hackney, jade, mestino, pintado, roan, bat horse, Bucephalus, Pegasus, Dobbin, Bayard, hobby-horse. Associated words: equine, equestrian, equestrianism, equestrienne, equerry, fractious, hostler, groom, hostlery, postilion, coachman, jockey, hippocampus, hippogriffe, manege, chack, hippology, hippophile, hippotomy, tandem, equitation, farriery, equitant, paddock, hippiatrics, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... at this stage of their history that the Spencers grew proud, making a hobby of their family tree and even possibly breathing a sigh over ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... marrying Lucy with any degree of comfort, and meanwhile she would be exposed to the persecutions of the Professor. Perhaps persecutions is too harsh a word, as Braddock was kind enough to the girl. Nevertheless, he was pertinacious in gaining his aims where his pet hobby was concerned, and undoubtedly, could he see any chance of obtaining the money from Random by selling his step-daughter, he would do so. Assuredly it was dishonorable to act in this way, but the Professor was a scientific Jesuit, and deemed that the end justified the ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... about the educated classes? It has long since been the boast and hobby of advanced theology that it, and it alone, will satisfy the religious longings of the educated man who has broken with the traditional dogma and doctrines of orthodox Christianity. But what are the actual facts in the case? It is a fact that there are a considerable number among the ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... dismay, he turned and fixed his eyes on a Japanese jar standing on a begarlanded console table of the time of Louis Quinze; then, recollecting that he must conciliate Mme. de Bargeton's husband, he tried to find out if the good gentleman had a hobby of any sort in which ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... fallen at his hands; but they were many. He was a man of courage undoubtedly. But it was upon his minute acquaintance with the etiquette of the duello, and the nicety of his sense of honor, that he most especially prided himself. These things were a hobby which he rode to the death. To Ritzner, ever upon the lookout for the grotesque, his peculiarities had for a long time past afforded food for mystification. Of this, however, I was not aware; although, in the present instance, I saw clearly that something of a whimsical nature was upon the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... President of Hygeia and the Foreign Secretary of Tritonia as the minimum of hostilities; a wicked newspaper lord, who pulls strings in both countries, and a faithful butler to the Royal Family, who becomes assistant state nursemaid and cleans silver as a hobby. Though I quite agree with Miss EVELYN SHARP and the Ethurians that it is love that makes the world go round, I am not so sure that either hers or theirs is the best way of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... compassion for that poor devil of a Risler, and for Sidonie herself, for that matter, who seemed to him, in theatrical parlance, "a beautiful culprit," he could not help viewing the affair from a purely scenic standpoint, and finally cried out, carried away by his hobby: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... distribution and hybridism, and the possibility of natural hybrids explaining the apparent connecting links between species. No doubt, too, he felt some gratification in learning from his friend Mr. (now Sir W.) Thiselton Dyer, that the results he had already obtained in pursuing this hobby had ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... sacbut, rebec, and tambourine. Then followed the Queen of the May, walking by herself,—a rustic beauty, hight Gillian Greenford,—fancifully and prettily arrayed for the occasion, and attended, at a little distance, by Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, the Hobby-horse, and a band of morrice-dancers. Then came the crowd, pellmell, laughing, shouting, and huzzaing,—most of the young men and women bearing green branches of birch and ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... Electricity was Jim's chief hobby, but anything of a mechanical nature appealed to him. While a gasoline car uses electricity only to explode its fuel, Jim was nevertheless deeply interested, particularly as he had never been able to look into the construction of an auto as thoroughly as he ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... exhausted, the Tudor Sovereigns, or perhaps their favourites, took themselves to exacting gifts and grants from the Bishops, and thus Poynet who was intended in the stead of Gardiner gave Merdon to Edward VI, who presented it to Sir Philip Hobby. It was recovered by Bishop Gardiner, but granted back again by Queen Elizabeth. Sir Philip is believed to have first built a mansion at Hursley, and his nephew sold the place to Sir Thomas Clarke, who was apparently a hard lord of the manor. His tenants still had to labour at his crops ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a little. My great hobby, Mr Guest. But I will not go. We should do more harm than good by stopping him, so I'll go to the church ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... get half a chance," observed Will, whose mind usually ran in the one channel, which of course covered his hobby, "I mean to snap off a picture of him. I've got a lot of freaks in my collection, but nary ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... engaged. He and his charming fiancee plan to run out of excuses during the early Fall of 1994, but this date may be changed at any time by mutual agreement, or the end of the world. He has given up an interest in river pollution in favor of a new hobby, grading type-cleaner. Garrett, who spends an hour each day expanding his repertoire, now claims the ability to distinguish year and vineyard for ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... presumably placed upon him by his Maker. But the pipe, being now master of the position, gently seduced my mind to a wider consideration, merely using the swagman as a convenient spring-board for its flight into regions of the Larger Morality. This is its hobby—caught, probably, from some society of German Illuminati, where it became a kind of storage-battery, or accumulator, of such truths as ministers of the Gospel ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... hadn't they given up every free hour for two years to working like Trojans? though, for that matter, who ever heard of any work the Trojans ever did that amounted to anything—except the spending of ten years in getting themselves badly defeated by a big wooden hobby-horse? ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... a hobby, I suppose," Saton continued. "Mine has always been the study of the least understood of the sciences—I mean occultism. I, too, was prejudiced at first. I saw wonderful things in India, and my British instincts rose up like a wall. I did not believe. I refused to believe my eyes. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... it. The wise thought it very foolish, but the many thought it very funny, and the idle amused themselves by chalking it upon walls, or scribbling it upon monuments. But "all that's bright must fade," even in slang. The people grew tired of their hobby, and "There he goes with his eye out!" was heard no ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... directed envelope and stamps for the purpose. The paper must be ruined by so discourteous an editor, indeed she had not been nearly so much interested as usual by the last few numbers. If only she could get her paper back, she should try the "Englishwoman's Hobby-horse," or some other paper of more progress than that "Traveller." "Is it not very hard to feel one's self shut out from the main stream of the work of the world when one's heart ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... smartest man in our class. Took scholarship prizes as carelessly as a policeman takes peanuts from a Dago stand. Since then he's gone up so fast that every time I see him I insult him by congratulating him on getting the place he's just been promoted from. But what was Rearick's hobby at Siwash? Stealing hatpins. He had four hundred hatpins when he graduated, and he never could see anything wrong in it. Guess he's got them yet. Perkins is in Congress already. He out-debated the whole Northwest ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... riot of wealth would no doubt impress the impecunious Charles. In September he landed in Spain, so destitute that he was glad to accept the offer of a hobby from the English ambassador.[242] At the first meeting of his Cortes, they demanded that he should marry at once, and not wait for Francis's daughter; the bride his subjects desired was the daughter of the King of Portugal.[243] They were no more willing to part ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... haste, now that his secret was out, he was for dropping everything else and rushing headlong into his hobby. Cicely counselled patience. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... pale, enthusiastic young man of the name of Simms; and he held forth to us at great length about his latest hobby. ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... ingenious Lowe a-thinking, and in order to satisfy it he evolved the idea of having rabbits let adrift, but, as usual, another of his little comforting considerations is abortive, and the plan has a tragic finish. Shooting is off. The Emperor's hobby has changed to gardening. The rabbits become an easy prey to the swarms of rats that prowl about Longwood, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... time with the cousins of whom Mrs. Ashe had spoken to Dr. Carr; and as it happened Katy sat next to a quaint elderly American, who had lived for twenty years in London and knew it much better than most Londoners do. This gentleman, Mr. Allen Beach, had a hobby for antiquities, old books especially, and passed half his time at the British Museum, and the other half in sales rooms and the old shops in ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... cannot afford to go too fast with this hobby of yours. Get the buildings up as soon as you can; carry out all the material plans just as you have designed, but we've got to get our feet on good firm ground before we tackle the human problems. You know I am against ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... conceal his opinion. He argued that it would not 'go' with the Chippendale furniture, and Vera said that all beautiful things 'went' together, and Cheswardine admitted that they did, rather dryly. You see, they took the matter seriously because the house was their hobby; they were always changing its interior, which was more than they could have done for a child, even if they had had one; and Cheswardine's finer and soberer taste was always fighting against Vera's predilection for the novel and the bizarre. Apart from clothes, Vera had not much more ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... gate, came huddling out like a flock of sheep that might get together afterward or might not. I did not shine as a shepherd. As a type Eighteen fitted nowhere. I did not find out if he had a nationality, family, creed, grievance, hobby, soul, preference, home, or vote. He only came always to my table and, as long as his leisure would permit, let words flutter from him like swallows leaving ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... course he is. Jack and I have been thinking along the same groove for two or three years about this equipment. It's our hobby, and it may really be ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... selective drafts and other forms of compulsory service, not alone in this country, but throughout the nations of the world and back to the beginning of recorded history. He had become as familiar with all phases of it as though it had been a personal hobby ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his hobby. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... deposed by the regency of Edward VI. on 14th February 1550, John Poynet, a considerable scholar, but a man of disgraceful life, obtained the appointment to the see, by alienating various estates to the Seymour family, and Merdon was resumed by the Crown. It was then granted to Sir Philip Hobby who had been one of King Henry's privy councillors, and had been sent on an embassy to Portugal, attended by ten gentlemen of his own retinue, wearing velvet ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... that's a particular hobby of the dear old body's; two or three times in a season she goes around to all the stores, and buys up the most of their stock; they save the best of them for her, and always know what she's after the moment she shows her pleasant face. She gives them away, ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... are limited to one hobby, and who pursue one line of study for years regardless of other interests, Professor Carnes took little notice of anything outside of his especial work. If Mary had been a new kind of bug he would have studied her with profound interest, spending days in ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... a favourite pursuit is undoubtedly calculated to bias the judgment; but, however liable may be the obscure votary of science to override his hobby, Francis Bacon, Lord High Chancellor of England, in ascribing to scientific discoverers a higher merit than to legislators, emperors, or patriots, cannot be open to the charge of egoistic partiality. What, then, says this illustrious witness?—"The introduction of noble inventions seems to hold ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... look at it ez one uv the crosses that human critters has to bear without complainin' through this vale uv tears. The only thing that bothered him wuz the fear that mebbe he wouldn't live to see the last volyume,—to tell the truth, this kind uv got to be his hobby, and I've heern him talk 'bout it many a time settin' round the stove at the tarvern 'nd squirtin' tobacco juice at the sawdust box. His wife, Hattie, passed away with the yaller janders the winter W come, and all that seemed to reconcile ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... was out a-hunting, and by chance I came to a place I'd never been in before. It was in a wood, and there was an old chalk-pit there, and out of the chalk-pit there came a queer kind of a sort of a humming, humming noise. So I got off my hobby to see what made it, and went quite quiet to the edge of the pit and looked down. And what do you think I saw? The funniest, queerest, smallest, little, black Thing you ever set eyes upon. And it had a little spinning-wheel ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... and look at them; but you must think better of what you say concerning my uncle, for I happen to know—which you ought likewise by this time—how seriously the old man would feel any rejection on your part of the good he fancies he is doing you. I tell you, Henry, it is completely his hobby, and let him have earned his money with ten times the danger he has, he could not spend it with anything like the satisfaction that he does, unless he were allowed to dispose of it ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... "Bayfield," in some old deeds and documents written "Bagvil" or "Baggevil," was neither more nor less than a corruption of Bacchi Villa. Axcester and its neighbourhood are rich in Roman remains—the town stands, indeed, on the old Fosse Way—and, tempted by early success, Narcissus rode his hobby further and further afield. Now, at the age of forty-two, he could claim to be an authority on the Roman occupation of Britain, and especially on the conquests of Vespasian. The circle of—the Westcotes' acquaintance gathered in the fine hall of Bayfield—or, ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... makes these books a sort of hobby-horse, and perhaps indulges his vanity in them to excess. They are ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret of power or pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used the current language of his day, I mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally comprehensible,—that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours is evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... him,—the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered Nature. Well, this fierce masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless. It was old Knowles's vital air. He wondered if the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom. They craved leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their possible divinity. It was a desperate remedy, this sense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story—for story it is getting to be after all—my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon was accessible and pacific only upon points which happened to chime in with the caprioles of the hobby he was riding. For the rest, he laughed with his arms and legs, and his politics were stubborn and easily understood. He thought, with Horsley, that "the people have nothing to do with the laws but to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... his managerial duties without an office staff, wrote all his own letters, and not only wrote them but first carefully drafted them out in a hand minute almost as Jonathan Swift's. A strenuous worker, Mr. Johnstone, like most men who have no hobby, did not long survive his retirement from ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... departure of the cuckoo and swallow and summer birds of passage for warmer regions, once so interesting to me, now scarcely caused me to turn my face to the south; and I continued in this cold and dreary climate for three years. During this period I seldom or never mounted my hobby-horse; indeed, it may be said, with the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... wasn't his fault. The girth went with the crown. All the Koppabottemburgs were enormous. Besides, it went very well with his subjects. Looking upon him, they felt they were getting their money's worth. A man of simple tastes, his favourite hobby was fowls. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... from the world, and meddling little in its concerns, yet I think it almost a religious duty to salute at times my old friends, were it only to say and to know that 'all's well.' Our hobby has been politics; but all here is so quiet, and with you so desperate, that little matter is furnished us for active attention. With you too, it has long been forbidden ground, and therefore imprudent for a foreign friend to tread, in writing to you. But although our speculations ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... movements of the Church, the continuance of the war, the fear the rest of the Tilchester Yeomanry will volunteer; and now and then the hostess warms up, if there is a question of a subscription, to her own pet hobby. Their houses are for the most part tasteless, too; they seem to live in a respectable borne world of daily duties and sleep. Of the three really big houses within driving distance, one is shut up, one is inhabited for a month or ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... certain disadvantage in judging a sixth-century mosaic compared with a person of equal sensibility who knows and cares nothing about Romans and Byzantines, so long as I recognise that art criticism and archaeology are two different things, I hope I may be allowed to dabble unrebuked in my favourite hobby: ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... bewildering one; the idea of putting the babies away alone in their own room fitted up for the purpose, and feeding them with milk until they are old enough to bear strong meat, has been something of a hobby with me. I like it theoretically, but I confess to you that I have never been able to enjoy its practical ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... securely together, as though he feared they might escape; a device all his own of great wooden wedges raising the lower end of the mattress so that his feet were on a level with his pillowed head; the chest of little drawers which his daughters called "father's hobby," nailed high on the wall and filled with all sorts of odds and ends, the detritus and possible repair-material of years of housekeeping—all this Sissy took in with the unseeing eyes one has for ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... only Fayoum dust or mud. Our desert creature, however, does not spurn them. On the contrary, though he pretends not to notice camels, cows, or buffaloes, he whinnies and prances with delight when he meets anything of his own shape, and assumes hobby-horse attitudes, much to the alarm of Cleopatra and Miss Hassett-Bean. Also, just to remind everybody that sand is his element, he shies at water, and almost swoons at sight of the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... yacht, but bearing the English Jack, in August 1671 sails into the midst of the Dutch fleet, singles out the Admiral, shooting twice as they call it, sharp upon him. Which must sure have appeared as ridiculous and unnatural as for a lark to dare the hobby." The Dutch admiral asking "Why," was told "because he and his whole fleet had failed to strike sail to his small craft." The Dutch commander then "civilly excused it as a matter of the first instance, and in which he could have no instruction, therefore proper to be referred ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... regard for such games as Hunt-the-Slipper and Blind-Man's Buff. But I have now reached a time of life, when, to have my eyes blindfolded and to have a powerful boy of ten hit me in the back with a hobby-horse and ask me to guess who hit me, provokes me to a fit of retaliation which could only culminate in reckless criminality. Nor can I cover my shoulders with a drawing-room rug and crawl round on my hands and ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... existence he had never before suspected. He went through the anguishing transformation of the actor who becomes a theatrical manager, of the author who branches out into publishing, of the engineer with a hobby for odd inventions who becomes the proprietor of a factory. His romantic love for the sea and its adventures was now overshadowed by the price and consumption of coal, by the maddening competition that lowered freight ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... their case, to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon, therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type of the sort of talk that ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... I inquired into what they were doing, and found there was in that Quarter the great Magazine of Rebus's. These were several Things of the most different Natures tied up in Bundles, and thrown upon one another in heaps like Faggots. You might behold an Anchor, a Night-rail, and a Hobby-horse bound up together. One of the Workmen seeing me very much surprized, told me, there was an infinite deal of Wit in several of those Bundles, and that he would explain them to me if I pleased; I thanked ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... with those flints of his, that weigh me down at this moment. This stone-collecting, par exemple! I wonder what induced me to take up such a hobby. The German Professor, as usual. Ah, Mr. Koken, Mr. Koken—those light words of yours have borne a heavy fruit. I possess four hundred implements now, and they will double the weight of my luggage and ruin my starched shirts, especially ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... seeing us work in the fields, and when the fit seized her she would come along and help. In order to encourage us in this work, Her Majesty would give a small present to the one who showed the best results so we naturally did our best in order to please her, as much as for the reward. Another hobby of Her Majesty's was the rearing of chickens, and a certain number of birds were allotted to each of the Court ladies. We were supposed to look after these ourselves and the eggs had to be taken to Her Majesty every morning. I could not ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... much to tell Jim, who had been skating. The quarrelling parrots, the beautiful house, the queer little guinea-pigs, and the splendid hobby-horse that they didn't seem to care a bit about. "And Lu is a good deal like Dele, only not so nice or so funny, and her hair is awful black. She ran down-stairs with me in her arms and I was 'most frightened to death. I don't believe I would want to be her little sister. And ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... should be brought out quickly, and no happening of long duration should be recounted. A guest in telling any experience can break his own narration up into conversation by drawing into his talk, or recital, others who are interested in his hobby or in his experience. Responses to toasts at banquets may be somewhat longer than the individual speeches of a single person in general table-talk; but any dinner-speaker knows that even his response runs the risk of being spoiled if extended ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... twins and Alan have the other corner with their doll's house, a tail-less hobby horse, known both as the "palfrey" and the "charger," and blocks and toys without number. We've a piano in the schoolroom for practising, and in the middle of the floor is a large table, round which we sit in and out of school hours. ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... live to be very old. I have barely two or three marriages in a year, and as many burials, so that, you see, one must fill up one's time somehow to escape the sin of idleness. Every man must have a hobby. Mine is ornithology; and yours, Monsieur ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... "Quite a hobby of mine in my younger days," Sir Henry admitted. "One or two of them are very good, I believe. Are you staying in these parts ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pleasant exchange of diplomatic courtesies, but in secret he was sounding Napoleon's possible attitude in the oncoming Prussian war, against Austria. The Emperor was completely tricked. Bismarck talked frankly of the necessity of "reform" in the German Confederation, and Napoleon, whose hobby was that peoples speaking the same language should be under one rule, fell in quite naturally with the plan to "reform" Prussia. The Emperor thought that Bismarck had in mind only certain constitutional changes ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... of fruit growing in America it was the amateur planting of varieties that laid the foundations for the present industry. If shade trees are to be planted let them be nut trees. Plant nut trees as a hobby but do not go into nut culture on a large scale for profit unless you can ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... never takes his eyes from his tablets; he's smart too, and has the right kind of stuff in him, even if he is crazy about birds. I've had to kill three of his linnets already. I told him that a weasel had gotten them, but he's found another hobby, now he paints all the time. He's left the marks of his heels on his Greek already, and is doing pretty well with his Latin, although his master's too easy with him; won't make him stick to one thing. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... let the cat out of the bag prematurely," he said with a smile. "I hadn't intended to spring it until it was a polished work of engineering art. It's been more of a hobby than anything ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Carpentering was Cross's great hobby, and his collection of tools was an exceptionally good one, both as regards quantity and quality. Every one, however, denied having touched the things mentioned. A general search was made; but the missing articles could not be found, and at length ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... doddering old idiot! If you didn't want your little pet hurt, you'd best have kept him home. I understand he's your special hobby." ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... "-ist-" denotes one who occupies himself with or devotes himself to any special thing, as a business or a hobby, as "jugxi", to judge, "jugxisto", a judge; "servi", to serve, "servisto", a servant; "kuraci", to treat (as a doctor), "kuracisto", a doctor; "lavi", to wash, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... behind the Kazan Cathedral. I did not know very much about him except that he was a very wealthy merchant, who had made his money by selling cheap sweets to the peasant. He lived, I knew, an immoral and self-indulgent life, and his hobby was the quite indiscriminate collection of modern Russian paintings, his walls being plastered with innumerable works by Benois, Somoff, Dobeijinsky, Yakofflyeff, and Lanceray. He had also two Serovs, a fine Vrubel, and several Ryepins. He had ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... free hour for two years to working like Trojans? though, for that matter, who ever heard of any work the Trojans ever did that amounted to anything—except the spending of ten years in getting themselves badly defeated by a big wooden hobby-horse? ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... Maggie, you're talking straight and I'll talk straight and all. When I'm set I'm set. You're coming here. I didn't want you when that doctor said it, but, by gum, I want you now. It's been my daughters' hobby crossing me. Now you'll come and ...
— Hobson's Choice • Harold Brighouse
... my sons: aspiring pride is a vapor that ascendeth high, but soon turneth to smoke; they which stare at the stars stumble upon stones, and such as gaze at the sun (unless they be eagle-eyed) fall blind. Soar not with the hobby,[1] lest you fall with the lark, nor attempt not with Phaeton, lest you drown with Icarus. Fortune, when she wills you to fly, tempers your plumes with wax; and therefore either sit still and make no wing, or else beware the sun, and hold Daedalus' ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... furnished as the houses were, with images of the beloved, and the veriest trifles which the deceased had loved. One wonders, as the tomb of a child is opened on the road out of Tanagra, near Athens, and the toys and hobby-horse and little shoes are found therein, if, after all, that father and mother were not wiser than we who, like Constance, "stuff out his vacant garments with his form." Is there not something quite unenlightened in the persistence with which ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... myself as to that. But I have the money and if I chose to spend it on this fad (as one of my friends called it) I don't see why I shouldn't do it. Since your grandmother died I have not felt the same interest in Aldercliffe that I used to. When she was alive that was my hobby. I shall simply be putting out the money in a different direction, that is all. Perhaps it will be a ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... been wise in the purport of his wanderings through the streets of the city,—gaining new experience with every hour, and studying the needs and complaints of his people for himself;—but if we should be told of a modern monarch doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... those flints of his, that weigh me down at this moment. This stone-collecting, par exemple! I wonder what induced me to take up such a hobby. The German Professor, as usual. Ah, Mr. Koken, Mr. Koken—those light words of yours have borne a heavy fruit. I possess four hundred implements now, and they will double the weight of my luggage and ruin my starched shirts, especially those formidable "praechellean" skull-cleavers. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... fear nothing; no further accident could happen, he said; then, sticking the torn out stump between his legs like a hobby-horse and pressing it against the rock with one hand, he himself turned his back to the mountain-side and suddenly, stretching his legs wide apart, let himself glide ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... invited him to lunch with him at his club. "I'd about as soon think of sitting down with one of my grooms as breaking bread with one of that lot; and I shall never get it out of my head that you're a gentleman going in for this sort of thing as a hobby—never b'Gad! if I live to ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... be interested to hear about my latest hobby, the study of singing with the aid of records." Then he plunged at once into the most absorbingly interesting account of his ideas and achievements in this line I ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... "His hobby is the game birds of Virginia. He has a whole room of them. I offered him a good price, but I suppose he'd ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... crazy, but there's none of you too sane; It's just a little matter of degree. My hobby is to hunt out gold; it's fortressed in my brain; It's life and love and wife and home to me. And I'll strike it, yes, I'll strike it; I've a hunch I cannot fail; I've a vision, I've a prompting, I've a call; I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail, To the last, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... made a second report, but it was not until 1871 that action on the subject was secured.[44] George W. Curtis says that at first he "pressed it upon an utterly listless Congress, and his proposition was regarded as the harmless hobby of an amiable man, from which a little knowledge of practical politics would soon dismount him."[45] Most members of Congress thought the reform a mere vagary, and that it was brought forward at a most inopportune time.[46] Mr. Jenckes was the pioneer of the reform, according to Curtis, who says ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... observers," and realised fabulous prices. In a long range of booths, devoted to the products of manufacturing industry, some of the costliest productions of the looms of Europe were exhibited for sale. There were peep-shows, and swings, and merry-go-rounds, and hobby-horses, and, with so many inducements offered, it will not be supposed that ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... times have to fill the role both of "kotoba" and chorus, modulating the voice according to the theme. Symposia is not an unbefitting term. Meetings are held for public competition in gidayu recitation; but in the privacy of one's circle and hobby the banquet is an important feature—at least to the guests. In his history of "Japanese Literature" (Dai Nihon Bungaku Shi, pp. 591-596) Suzuki Cho[u]ko[u] gives a long extract from the play, as sample of Tsuruya's powers as a dramatist. Adopted ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... What's his hobby: butterflies, stones, stamps, or coins?—No, girl; I don't mean that. I'm a little heavy to-night. Do you recollect the night you donned a suit of mine, bundled your hair under a felt hat, and visited the studios? ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... been in parliament, and wanted too again; but the men mistrusted him as Thompson, M.P., though they swore by him as old Baldy Thompson the squatter. His hobby was politics, and his politics were badly boxed. When he wasn't cursing the banks and government he cursed the country. He cursed the Labour leaders at intervals, and seemed to think that he could run the unions better than they could. Also, he ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... has his hobby-liking, mine is for a real farm-lane fenced by old chestnut-rails gray-green with dabs of moss and lichen, copious weeds and briers growing in spots athwart the heaps of stray-pick' d stones at the fence bases—irregular paths worn between, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... man—would have laid down his life to save her a pain in her toe, but he had not a notion of the stuff she was made of. His hobby was the study of the runic crosses with which the Isle of Man abounds, and when she helped him with his rubbings and his casts he was as merry as an old sand-boy. Though they occupied the same house, and her bedroom that faced the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Mrs: Holt. "Oh, dear, I might have known it. You must understand, Honora, that every member of the Holt family has a hobby. Joshua's is Jerseys." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... my special hobby. The differences are obvious. The supra-orbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve, ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... on military principles, it was not peculiarly the school of the soldier. The principal believed in discipline; this was his hobby; and he believed that he could best secure system and order by adopting military routine. His success justified his theory. He had more ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... the toughest customer of his career. Undismayed by his reverses, the Master adapted the style of his fighting to his physical disabilities and resumed his career of victory—defeating Norton (the black), Hobby Wilson, and Levi Cohen, the latter a heavy-weight. Conceding two stone, he fought a draw with the famous Billy McQuire, and afterwards, for a purse of fifty pounds, he defeated Sam Hare at the Pelican Club, London. In 1891 a decision ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... useless pieces of abstruse knowledge. Living too exclusively in a circle where he is idolised both for his genius and the excellence of his disposition, he has acquired strong prejudices, though all of an upright and honourable cast. He rides his High Church hobby too hard, and it will not do to run a tilt upon it against all the world. Gifford used to crop his articles considerably, and they bear mark of it, being sometimes decousues. Southey said that Gifford cut out his middle joints. When John comes to use the carving-knife I fear ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... are being grown by Mr. Bungart, such as filberts, Chinese chestnuts, and Crath Persian walnuts. In a summary of his report he said, "In viewing the growing of nut trees, I am convinced that it is a wonderful hobby, and that the contributions of various individuals and groups will eventually establish nut growing in the northern ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... his surprise, the Fairy turned crimson with rage. It was a hobby of hers to be like nobody, because she was a fairy and able to change her appearance, from one moment to the next, as she pleased. That evening, she happened to be ugly and old and hump-backed; she had lost one of her eyes; and ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... in him yet of the cave bear—he dug graves on the smallest provocations, in which he never buried anything. He was not a "clever" dog; and guiltless of all tricks. Nor was he ever "shown." We did not even dream of subjecting him to this indignity. Was our dog a clown, a hobby, a fad, a fashion, a feather in our caps that we should subject him to periodic pennings in stuffy halls, that we should harry his faithful soul with such tomfoolery? He never even heard us talk about his lineage, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... suspected of covering his sturdy legs in anything but the finest cloth. But if you will glance at your copy of Who's Who, and turn up the "M's", you will find in the space allotted to the Earl the words "Hobby—Gardening". To which, in a burst of modest pride, his lordship has added "Awarded first prize for Hybrid Teas, Temple Flower Show, 1911". The words tell their ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... as possible. Many statesmen have been infected by this Dreadnaught fever. Their policy seems to be based on the idea that the safety of a nation depends on the number of its battleships. Even peaceful and moderate men are carried away by this hobby, and support it. It is forgotten that great changes have taken place during the last twenty or thirty years; that a nation can now be attacked by means quite beyond the reach of Dreadnaughts. The enormous sums spent on these frightful monsters, if applied to more worthy objects, would have a greater ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... crank and as a joke, but none of them, try as they would, could get to know him or win his confidence. They used to wonder what Fletcher did with his spare time, what were his pursuits, what were his hobbies, if he had any. They suspected that Fletcher had some hobby of an engrossing kind, since in everyday life he conveyed the impression of a man who is walking in his sleep, who acts mechanically and automatically. Somewhere else, they thought, in some other circumstances, he must surely wake up and take ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... the physician quitted the "Boundary," the old squaw bestowed upon him, through the interpreter, certain secret magic formulae for working enchantments on his city patients, and thereby effecting rapid cures and filling his coffers. Knowing of Bayne's hobby for linguistics, the oculist jocularly turned these archaic curios over to him. In that connection Bayne recounted that after the child had departed with his mother from the mountains, he himself being detained by final arrangements with the authorities, his interest in researches ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... your hobby, Lucy," cried he, "and speak to me like a woman and like my niece. If this is your objection, overcome it ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... marriage anything but the means of transmitting property to another self, had long sworn to marry Veronique to some rich bourgeois,—so long, in fact, that the idea had assumed in his brain the characteristics of a hobby. His neighbor, the hat-maker, who possessed about two thousand francs a year, had already asked, on behalf of his son, to whom he proposed to give up his hat-making establishment, the hand of a girl so well known ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... humour; he had been taking an old Cremona violin to pieces, and had discovered that the sound-post was fixed half a line more obliquely than usual—an important discovery! one of incalculable advantage in the practical work of making violins! I succeeded in setting him off at full speed on his hobby of the true art of violin-playing. Mention of the way in which the old masters picked up their dexterity in execution from really great singers (which was what Krespel happened just then to be expatiating upon), naturally paved the way for the remark that now the practice ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... or essence of the nobler impulses of the race: he is a spirit, a person, a friend, a great brother, a captain, a king: he "is love and goodness" (p 80); and without him the Service of Man is "no better than a hobby, a sentimentality or a ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... When I quit the university on the other side it was because I had built myself up a big dream. I crossed to the United States with my imagination full of the things I hoped to do. It was the chance I looked for. And I found it in Hellbeam, and the Persian Oils it was his hobby to manipulate. I jumped in and grabbed it with both hands. And, as you say, I beat him at his own game. But that was only part of my dream. The next part you also know, though you choose to think it was only as a refuge from Hellbeam that I came ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... unceasing hobby to the old man. The secondhand dealers never made any objection to his reading books upon the shelves. His purchases were perhaps two books a week, at ten or even five cents each. Now and again he would find one of his own "Irving's ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... back to his desk. The small figure in the doorway stood still a moment, then the footsteps were heard retreating. Five minutes later, Anthony, looking out, saw Tony careering about the garden on a hobby-horse. ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... matter, I say to myself, as long as one doesn't FEEL a fool? You will come and play at the vicarage, I hope. Indeed, I want you to go and come just as you like. We are relations, you know, in a sort of way—at least connections. I don't know if you go in for genealogy—it's rather a hobby of mine; it fills up little bits of time, you know. I could reel you off quite a list of names, but Mrs. Graves doesn't care for ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... wonder; for it had always been a hobby of mine that a certain amount of the married leaven was necessary in every society to give it tone and stamina. Though the French principle of excluding young ladies from all social intercourse, and giving the patent of society to Madame, may be productive of more harm than good, the converse ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... within wheels, you cannot match Fortune. After all, she has made trochilics her hobby through all the ages. Look at her handiwork here. Jill knows Jack for a flunkey and seeks to dissemble her knowledge, for fear of bruising his heart. As for Jack, when Jill stumbles upon his secret, he curses his luck: ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... young Rex Cunningham (Mr. MARTIN LEWIS), a morbid egoist, who nourishes a hopeless passion for her (and others), being well aware of the paramount claims of Robert. She contrives to let him know that she is free, and the youth, whose pet hobby is hopeless passion, at once sheers off in alarm. Caroline is learning—is beginning to understand the dark philosophy of Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM. In despair she again turns to Robert. They become engaged and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... and the lower animals, down to the number of their ribs, seemed no proper topic for light talk at an evening party. It made Aunt Euphemia gasp. Anatomy was Lou's hobby. She was an excellent and practical taxidermist, thanks to her father. And she had learned to name the bones of the human frame along ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... my (puff) dear, the (wheeze) sticks will prove very (wheeze) hereafter,' replied Jogglebury, bridling up at the imputation on his hobby. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... be founded on the life of Saint George, but no one could say with truth that it was very much like the legend. First came a herald tooting on a cow-horn, to proclaim the entrance of the champion, who was Clement the carpenter mounted on a hobby-horse and armed with wooden sword and painted buckler. There was much giggling and whispering among the maids, directed at the demure black-eyed Madelon, of the still- room. This may have been a reason why Saint George stumbled so desperately ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... calculation which enabled me to decipher the manuscript furnished me also with the key, but the whim took me to tell her that a spirit had revealed it to me. This foolish tale completed my mastery over this truly learned and sensible woman on everything but her hobby. This false confidence gave me an immense ascendancy over Madame d'Urfe, and I often abused my power over her. Now that I am no longer the victim of those illusions which pursued me throughout my life, I blush at the remembrance of my conduct, and the penance ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the week's repose came Shaykh Jami, the Berteri, equipped as a traveller with sword, praying-skin, and water-bottle. This bustling little divine, whose hobby it was to make every man's business his own, was accompanied by his brother, in nowise so prayerful a person, and by four burly, black-looking Widads, of whose birth, learning, piety, and virtues he spoke in terms eloquent. I gave them a supper of rice, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... I dunno what to do with it. If Carter ever comes back he might not like my getting rid of it. I was thinking mebbe I'd put it in the hobby show at the county fair next week, though. Ya notice how that funny-looking cube inside there gets bigger every time you look at it? There ... it just doubled its size again, see? People at the fair oughtta get a big kick outta that. No telling how big it'll get ...
— Vanishing Point • C.C. Beck
... had been dropped by an aeroplane into an unknown land, and when the steamer sailed again before midnight, it was all as though it had never been. The orchids on that dinner-table were very remarkable, for orchid-growing was the Administrator's hobby. He grafted his orchids on to orange trees, and so obtained enormous growths. We measured some of the flower-sprays, the biggest being nine feet long. As they were brown and yellow Oncidiums, they were more ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... or informed. The more serious questions of life are barred in society; people wish to be amused, not instructed. An inveterate talker, especially one of a didactic turn, is a bore. So is the man who puts a hobby through its paces. Avoid exaggerations in conversation, also extravagances, such as "beastly this" or "awfully that," also avoid over emphasis. Don't ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... fat Belgian chauffeur, violinist in times of peace, and posing that day as an American,—one of those men who look as if they would bleed water if you pricked them with a bayonet,—needed no second warning. Running the German gauntlet was not precisely his hobby. Down went the emergency brake and the car jolted to ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... organism keyed up to a high pitch. These centres become fatigued easily and ought to be rested occasionally. Therefore, the student should relax at intervals, and engage in something remote from study. To forget books for an entire week-end is often wisdom; to have a hobby or an avocation is also wise. A student must not forget that he is something more than an intellectual being. He is a physical organism and a social being, and the well-rounded life demands that all phases receive expression. We grant that it is wrong ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... the "new tongue" of Truth, having its best interpretation in the power of Christianity to heal. My system of Mind-healing swerves not from the highest ethics and from the spiritual goal. To climb up by some other way than Truth is to fall. Error has no hobby, however boldly ridden or brilliantly caparisoned, that can leap into the ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... interest will be grounded in the end. The child must find as he advances towards maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by temporizing with it. The young are apt to be most sincere at an age when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If authority supplement rather than ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... love—a strong, active love. We were young, human things, of soft features gradually becoming firmer as of shallow characters gradually deepening. And he longed to be in it all—at work in the deepening. We were his hobby. I have met many such lovers of youth. Indeed, I think this is a ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... VI. on 14th February 1550, John Poynet, a considerable scholar, but a man of disgraceful life, obtained the appointment to the see, by alienating various estates to the Seymour family, and Merdon was resumed by the Crown. It was then granted to Sir Philip Hobby who had been one of King Henry's privy councillors, and had been sent on an embassy to Portugal, attended by ten gentlemen of his own retinue, wearing velvet coats with chains ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... English ranter. This was pretty cold work for his auditors, however warming to himself; and I am inclined to think that these native teachers, having acquired facility of speaking and an endless supply of religious platitudes to talk about, ride their hobby rather hard, without much consideration for their flock. The Missionaries, however, have much to be proud of in this country. They have assisted the Government in changing a savage into a civilized community in a wonderfully short ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the tumbler, if he can't fasten on plate, or cloth, or silks, to lay hold of brown paper, Bartholomew babies, lute-strings, or hob-nails. It hath been verily reported," says Decker, "that one gentleman of great hopes took up L100 in hobby-horses, and sold them for L30; and L16 in joints of mutton and quarters of lamb, ready roasted, and sold them for three pounds." Such commodities were called purse-nets.—The tumbler, on his second hunt, trots up and down again; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and children and were furnished with all manner of novel appliances for their amusement, including beautiful little carriages drawn by four goats with girls or boys driving, boats sailing in the air, seemingly propelled by oars, and hobby horses flying round on whirligigs with boys vainly trying to catch each other. No people have ever taken the trouble to invent so many amusements for children as have the French. The people enjoyed being always in the open air, night and day. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... in his beloved Roman Camp; and this diversion enabled me to escape from Marius—I fear with a somewhat unseemly precipitation—by pressing him for information in regard to the matter which the children had in hand. As to openly checking the Vidame, when once he fairly is astride of his hobby, the case is hopeless. To cast a doubt upon even the least of his declarations touching the doings of the Roman General is the signal for a blaze of arguments down all his battle front; and I really do not like even to speculate upon what might happen were I to meet one of his major propositions ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Sam a little vaguely. The resemblance had not struck him. It seemed a silly hobby, and rough ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... feeding their friends with nothing of their own, but what they have twice or thrice cooked, they should not wantonly give out, how soon they had drest it; nor how many coaches came to carry away the broken meat, besides hobby-horses and foot-cloth nags. ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered Nature. Well, this fierce masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless. It was old Knowles's vital air. He wondered if the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom. They craved leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their possible divinity. It was a desperate remedy, this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... denunciation, and denunciation to open hostilities. The matter in dispute was debated for two generations, when the necessary degree of madness having been excited, the leaders of the party, who by this time had worked themselves through their hobby, into the general control of the monikin affairs, called a meeting of all their partisans and passed certain resolutions, which will never be blotted from the monikin memory, so fatal were their consequences, so ruinous for a time their effects! They were conceived ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... just talks in a rambling way about a girl who, he declares, should have a fortune that his uncle has hidden away. He has really never been entirely off, but one of the kind who rides a hobby, you know," said the man. ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... human nature, and usually a correct observer. I am sorry to say that the tendency of the new generation is to be diplomats of a lower type, quick and smart, but not always sound. At present, like any crude or partially developed people, politics is their hobby. ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... flock thither, for in those days communities were the fashion and transcendentalism raged wildly. Some came to look on and laugh, some to be supported in poetic idleness, a few to believe sincerely and work heartily. Each member was allowed to mount his favorite hobby, and ride it to his heart's content. Very queer were some of the riders, and very rampant some ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... outfit of old became his relaxation, his sport, and, as he aged, his hobby. It was said that he had exalted prospecting to the dignity of an art, and no longer hunted gold as a pot-hunter. He was even reputed to have valuable deposits "covered," and certain it is that ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... said Hobler, confidentially, to our dearly beloved Alderman, "How could you have passed such a ridiculous sentence upon Jones, as to direct his hair to be cut off?" "All right, my dear Hobby," replied the sapient justice; "the fellow was found fighting in the streets, and I wanted to hinder him, at least for some time, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... interested with me. Mr. Langley is kind, but he is so wrapped up in his own work that I see very little of him. I took the place because I thought it would give me a good deal of spare time that I might use in furthering some experiments of my own. Electricity is my hobby, and I have one or two ideas that I am foolish enough to hope may be worth developing. I have had time enough, goodness knows, but it's a lonesome sort of life. If it had not been for the captains—and you—I think I should have given ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... seemed by comparison more or less of a piece, though the first officer ignored the purser quite markedly. Captain Day, I discovered, had some taste in letters, and as that also had been my consolation in my exile in Wapping, I think we drew nearer on a common hobby. I visited my patient about nine o'clock, and found her sleeping. As she lay asleep, I was again haunted by the likeness to some one I had seen before; but I was unable to trace it to its source nor did I trouble ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... little pamphlet about the town, and studied a map. Bancroft Road was out toward the northern suburbs. A little talk with the bookseller brought me the information that Mr. Kent was one of his best customers, a pleasant and simple-minded gentleman of sixty whose only hobby was the history of the region. He had written a book called "Memorials of Old Staffordshire," but unfortunately I couldn't get a copy. The bookseller said it ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... princes were attended by their warriors, some of whose helmets and arms were magnificent, with banners and feather standards, and coats of arms, or their equivalents, borne aloft by heralds; ladies also appeared, one a prima-donna, other actresses rode hobby-horses, only the head of the woman and hobby-horse being visible in the clouds of silk and gold. Jesters jested; and tumblers, in blue, loose tunics and wide scarlet trousers, shot across the stage when there was any ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... and such like, requisite to such an action: also Minerall men and Refiners. Besides, for solace of our people, and allurement of the Sauages, we were prouided of Musike in good variety: not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horsse, and Maylike conceits to delight the Sauage people, whom we intended to winne by all faire meanes possible. And to that end we were indifferently furnished of all petty haberdasherie wares to barter ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... sense of ennui which comes of the intuition that nothing in the least interesting is to be looked for, but only a series of wearisome utterances of the kind which are apt to fall from the lips of a man whose hobby has once been touched upon. For every man HAS his hobby. One man's may be sporting dogs; another man's may be that of believing himself to be a lover of music, and able to sound the art to its inmost depths; another's may be that of posing as ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... At last we got to calling him "Old Compound Fracture," for he would say, when we were starting for a fight likely to be serious, "Boys, don't mind those slightly wounded fellows—let the Frenchmen pick them up: just bring me along the compound fractures." These latter were his hobby. He fairly doted on a man whom ordinary surgeons would have given up in despair; and I believe he was the happiest man in Paris when the first patient who had his leg shattered in a half dozen places began hobbling about the camp on crutches. The soldiers got to hear of him at last. More than one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... the sick by music was long considered as mere incantation, but there is a suspicion now that it was actual science. Once there was a man who rode a hobby all his life; and long after he was dead, folks discovered it was a real live horse and had carried ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... the objection to advertising signs was only a rich man's aristocratic hobby, and that it could not be indulged in a democratic community of honest people. His own firm, he said, bought thousands of bushels of oats from the farmers and converted them into the celebrated Eagle-Eye Breakfast Food, three packages for ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... remarkable for a very singular sport on New Year's Day and Twelfth Day, called the Hobby Horse Dance: a person rode upon the image of a horse, with a bow and arrow in his hands, with which he made a snapping noise, keeping time with the music, whilst six others danced the hay and other country dances, with as many rein-deer's heads on their shoulders. To this hobby-horse belonged ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... chuckled. Chow's hobby of concocting weird dishes was a standing joke at Enterprises, and already had led to such dubious triumphs as armadillo stew ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... Laura and her warm friend, Belle Endicott, who was still at Star Ranch, as Mr. Endicott's place was called. It may be said in passing that Mr. Endicott was a rich railroad president, and the ranch, while it paid well, was merely a hobby with him, and he and his family resided upon it only when it suited their ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... McArthur, riding his hobby enthusiastically, quite forgot the character of his listeners, and laid his theories regarding the interchange of mammalian life between America and Asia during the early Pleistocene period, before Meeteetse Ed, Old Man Rulison, Tubbs, ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... meeting with the resistance of the Ferriers and other huge rocks, whirls, and turns, and foams in all directions, so that a frail craft like a canoe would be a death-trap to anyone foolhardy enough to venture out in it. That being the case, I could only follow my canoeing hobby when the sea was calm, but even then did not venture far ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... first teacher was a poor sexton, whose name was Mr. Hobby. There is a story that he had been too poor to pay his passage from England, and that he had, therefore, been sold to Mr. Washington as a slave for a short time; but how true this ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... to be personal, but is this Hague Conference merely your hobby, or are you standing in ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... thinker, or thought he was—which seems to involve original thinking anyway. His hair was thinning rapidly at the top, as if his brain was struggling to get as near as possible to the realities of things. He prided himself on having no fads. Few men are without some foible or hobby; Crowl felt almost lonely at times in his superiority. He was a Vegetarian, a Secularist, a Blue Ribbonite, a Republican, and an Anti-tobacconist. Meat was a fad. Drink was a fad. Religion was a fad. Monarchy ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Mr. Folliot. He was a big, half-asleep sort of man, who had few words and could talk about little else than his hobby. But he was a passionate lover of flowers and plants, and had a positive genius for rose-culture, and was at all times highly delighted to take flower-lovers round his garden. She turned at once and walked in, and Folliot led her ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... years afterwards, in cutting a terrace, all this earth was thrown up, and now the bank is one mass of broom. I see we were in some degree talking to cross-purposes; when I said I did [not] much believe in hybridising to any extent, I did not mean at all to exclude crossing. It has long been a hobby of mine to see in how many flowers such crossing is probable; it was, I believe, Knight's view, originally, that every plant must be occasionally crossed. (19/3. See an article on "The Knight-Darwin law" by Francis Darwin in "Nature," ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... shall keep in touch with the crew by wireless, and advise you of their progress from time to time. Alma is a sort of a hobby with me; I wouldn't ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... his hobby he was an intelligent talker, and told me much that was interesting about Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and the Spanish Main. He had several books on the subject which I greedily devoured. The expedition of Piedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... was a fact. He was an investigator of mysteries, making it his hobby just as other men take to collecting curios or pictures. About his personal appearance there was nothing very remarkable. When pre-occupied he had an abrupt, rather brusque manner, but at all other times he was a very easy-going man of the world, possessor of an ample income left ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... think the fact you mention towards the close of the essay—that the Indian vegetation, in contradistinction to the Malayan vegetation, is found in low and level parts of the Malay Islands, GREATLY lessens the difficulty which at first (page 1) seemed so great. There is nothing like one's own hobby-horse. I suspect it is the same case as of glacial migration, and of naturalised production—of production of greater area conquering those of lesser; of course the Indian forms would have a greater difficulty in seizing on the cool parts of Australia. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... evidently unaware of the author's name, since the words which accompany the title, from the English, are nowhere elucidated, and no hint of authorship, or popularity in England, or possible far-reaching appeal in Germany is traceable. The idea of the hobby-horse is new to the reviewer and his explanation of it implies that he presumed Sterne's use of the term would be equally novel to the readers of the periodical. His compliment to the translation indicates further ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Puff's tragedy— Mrs. Dang. Lord, Mr. Dangle, why will you plague me about such nonsense?—Now the plays are begun I shall have no peace.— Isn't it sufficient to make yourself ridiculous by your passion for the theatre, without continually teasing me to join you? Why can't you ride your hobby-horse without desiring to place me on a pillion behind you, Mr. Dangle? Dang. Nay, my dear, I was only going to read— Mrs. Dang. No, no; you will never read anything that's worth listening to. You hate to hear about your ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... a great fracas at Kensington: one of the Mesdames(718) pulled the chair from under Countess Deloraine(719) at cards, who, being provoked that her monarch was diverted with her disgrace, with the malice of a hobby-horse, gave him just such another fall. But alas! the Monarch, like Louis XIV. is mortal in the part that touched the ground, and was so hurt and so angry, that the countess is disgraced, and her German rival (720) remains in the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... women and children, hobby-horses and canary birds back to their homes in Johannesburg. Betty has returned, accompanied by Mr. Seymour Port, from Pretoria. She gives a very spirited account of her visit. Through Mr. Sauer, one of the advocates retained by the Reformers, a visiting permit ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... facade caught me quite by my weak point. There is a central doorway, and one into each aisle, and round the archways into these lateral doors are sculptured angels playing upon musical instruments. As I have told the reader, ancient forms of musical instruments are my hobby, or rather one of my hobbies. I at once pulled out my sketch-book and drew them; there are angels with fiddles, angels with viols—no, not hurdy-gurdys!—but twanged with the fingers, angels with pipes and horns, one with a harp, two with portable organs of ten pipes ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... tenderness, and its boundless love for all humankind. The play, "Geography and Love," which came between the two just described, is an amusing piece, in the vein of light and graceful comedy, which satirizes the man with a hobby, showing how he unconsciously comes to neglect his wife and family through absorption in his work. The author was, in a way, taking genial aim at himself in this piece, a fact which his son Bjorn, who played the principal part, did not hesitate to emphasize. "Paul ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... answered with what he took for a spiritual response, when it was merely a brain-echo. Looking down into the pond of her being, whose surface was, not yet ruffled by any bubbling of springs from below, he saw the reflection of himself and was satisfied. An able man on his hobby looks a centaur of wisdom and folly; but if he be at all a wise man, the beast will one day or other show him the jade's favour of unseating him. Meantime Augustus Greatorex was fooled, not by poor ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... ordinary, plodding animals whose hoofs know only Fayoum dust or mud. Our desert creature, however, does not spurn them. On the contrary, though he pretends not to notice camels, cows, or buffaloes, he whinnies and prances with delight when he meets anything of his own shape, and assumes hobby-horse attitudes, much to the alarm of Cleopatra and Miss Hassett-Bean. Also, just to remind everybody that sand is his element, he shies at water, and almost swoons at sight of the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... owner of several gold and silver mines, the young deadshot had an income that was more than sufficient to permit him to pursue his favorite hobby, which was riding about through the wildest parts of the states and ...
— Young Wild West at "Forbidden Pass" - and, How Arietta Paid the Toll • An Old Scout
... any the wiser, and all we'll have to do will be to put a little note in." All the time he was fixing the camera on the tripod, focussing the lens on a tree by the path. (It was amazing how quickly Bones mastered the technique of any new hobby he took up.) ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... taught them better! They seem to imagine that they should continually be improving themselves, in either body or mind. If they take up a sport, it is because the sport may improve their health. And if the hobby is intellectual it must needs be employed to improve their brain. The fact is that their conception of self-improvement is too narrow. In their restricted sense of the phrase, they possibly don't need improving; they possibly ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... which gave him a sickly feeling in the pit of the stomach. It was the apprehension of a prisoner awaiting a verdict; the nauseating sensation of one who sees death facing him, with the chances a thousand to one against him. A half-plaited rawhide rope was lying in his lap; the hobby of making these his sister had persuaded him to turn to profitable account. He was expert in their manufacture, and found a ready market for his wares on ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... HOBBY-HORSE, imitation horse of some light material, fastened round the waist of the morrice-dancer, who imitated the movements of ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... to see E. H——, having previously appointed a meeting for the purpose of inquiring about our name. He is an old bachelor, and truly forlorn. The pride of ancestry seems to be his great hobby. He had a good many papers in his desk at the Custom-House, which he produced and dissertated upon, and afterwards went with me to his sister's, and showed me an old book, with a record of the children of the first emigrant, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... for want of service," grumbled Williams, following out his own pet hobby. "Nothing in the world to do for our fellows here. Sport? Why, Captain Orme, we couldn't show you a horse race where I'd advise you to bet a dollar. The fishing doesn't carry, and the shooting is pretty much gone, even if ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... address. This unknown benefactor is dressed in top-boots, riding breeches of honourable antiquity, a black coat green with age and a "Cup Final" cap. At the same time (this too on The Times' authority) there is an oddly and obsolescently attired lady going about who also makes London hospitals her hobby. She begins by asking the secretary if she may take off her boots, and, receiving permission, takes them off, places her feet on an adjacent chair and hands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
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