"Truant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they say, Rather a bad stick any way, Splintered all over with dodges and tricks, Known as "the worst of the Deacon's six;" I, the truant, saucy and bold, The one black sheep in my father's fold, "Once on a time," as the stories say, Went over the hill on a winter's day— Over the hill ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... shouldn't like to say, I'm sure, I shouldn't like to say Why I hear your voice, so fresh and pure, In the dash of the laughing spray. Nor why the wavelets that all the while, In many a diamond-glittering file, With truant sunbeams play, Should make me remember your rippling smile— I shouldn't ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... and it was very dark, as Audrey and her squire passed along Third Avenue to the front. They did not converse—they were both too shy, too impressed by the peculiarity of the predicament. They simply peered. They peered everywhere for the truant form of Musa balanced on one side by a bag and on the other by a fiddle case. From the trim houses, each without exception new, twinkled discreet lights, with glimpses of surpassingly correct domesticity, and the wind rustled loudly through the foliage of the prim gardens, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... dragged his truant mind from outside subjects and concentrated his attention upon ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... tenants, and worst of all there were the rough, boisterous, over-age, uninterested, incorrigible boys and girls, who flitted from school to home, to street, to jail, and then, gripped by the infirm hand of the law, in the form of a Juvenile Court probation officer, or a truant officer, they came back to school unwillingly enough to begin the ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... most provoking," he interrupted. "I really ought not to stay. But I certainly mean to hear this." He turned irritably to the servant. "Tell the hansom to wait," he commanded, and, with an air of a boy who is playing truant, slipped guiltily ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... where for more than a hundred afternoons and evenings the "Professor," as he was called, showed off his four-footed pupils. One forenoon he set apart for a free entertainment of as many poor children as the house would hold, who went under the charge of the truant officers and ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... shakes off his drowsihed, And 'gins to sprinkle on the earth below Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow; Meantime, by truant love of rambling led, I turn my back on thy detested walls, Proud City! and thy sons, I leave behind, A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind; Brute things, who shut their ears when ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... the housekeeper, "he's playing truant these two days, and I don't like to bother the doctor, and get him into trouble. I hide what I can, in ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... good-bye. Tom felt rather mean, 'like a wriggle-up worm' as he afterwards put it, and he half resolved to give up his plan and go soberly to school, for, to tell the truth, he had already resolved to play truant. Unhappily, as he turned into the lane from the drive gates, a rabbit dashed across the road right in front of him, and frisked into the hedge in a most tantalising manner, as if to show his contempt for stupid human beings who plod along the beaten track. That ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the tumble, which was only a variation of its method of progress, came over on its knees and rose at once to go ahead; but the delay had been sufficient. Steve caught up; and the next instant, the truant, feeling the ground removed from under it, hung helpless across the hand of ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... Leaving the captured horse in charge of Mr. Burges, I followed the rest; caught another after a smart ride of three miles, but it was not till I reached the East Irwin that I could again overtake the rest, when, favoured by the steep bank of the stream, I succeeded in securing our truant steeds. It was now dark, and being unable to manage nine horses by myself, I tethered several of the wildest, and started with two of the best for the encampment ten miles distant, which, owing to the nature of the country, I did not reach till midnight. Mr. Burges had ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... me, Steal my priceless jewels, In fancy's store-house cherished, Your roguish eyes have robbed me, Of all my dreams bereft me, Dreams that are fair, yet fleeting. Fled are my truant fancies, Regrets I do not cherish, For now life's rosy morn is breaking, Now golden love is waking. Now that I've told my story, Pray tell me yours, too; Tell me frankly, who are you? Say, ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dear. I was but jesting. If you have had an agreeable time, you are forgiven for playing truant. Where have ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... reason why you shouldn't." So he put Young Gerard to work, first as sheepboy to his own flock, but later the boy had a flock of his own. There was no love lost between these two, and kicks and curses were the young one's fare; for he was often idle and often a truant, and none was held responsible for him except the old shepherd who was selling him piece-meal, year by year, to their master. Because of what depended on him, Old Gerard was constrained to show him some sort of care when he would liever have wrung his neck. The boy's fits exasperated the man; ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... an approximate ephemeris of probable positions when the planet should emerge from the sun's light. There was an exciting hunt, and on December 31st (the day before its birthday) De Zach captured the truant, ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... not till now, how oft soe'er the task Of truant verse hath lightened graver care, From Muse or Sylvan was he wont to ask, In phrase poetic, inspiration fair; Careless he gave his numbers to the air, They came unsought for, if applauses came: Nor for himself prefers he ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... minutes her head was covered with tiny close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, long, carefully, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... elicited the melancholy fact that the boy had been left behind at Potsdam. The tutor thereupon turned back in one of the carriages, whilst the rest proceeded to the next stopping-place. In the course of an hour he returned with the truant seated by his side, dusty and footsore, but otherwise as fresh as when he had started. He had, it appeared, strayed from the party at Potsdam, and returned to the starting-place in time to see the carriages disappearing in the distance enveloped in a cloud of dust. He began ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... belt of short flowery turf at the base, the Violet, the Gilliflower, and the vermilion spotted Mignonette, on their breast, and the chaplet of wilding shrubs upon their brows, give them a charm in the most common-place observation. With me, truant as I have been to the Classic page, it seemed a natural process of my desultory mind, to revert from a contemplation of such pensive dreamy realities of waking enjoyment as I have described, to visions, startling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... &c 949; barrater^, barrator^; shyster [U.S.]. traitor, betrayer, archtraitor^, conspirator, Judas, Catiline; reptile, serpent, snake in the grass, wolf in sheep's clothing, sneak, Jerry Sneak, squealer [Slang], tell-tale, mischief-maker; trimmer, fence-sitter, renegade &c (tergiversation) 607; truant, recreant; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Cruikshank's illustrations of Punch says he "saw the late Mr. Wyndham, then one of the Secretaries of State, on his way from Downing-street to the House of Commons, on the night of an important debate, pause like a truant boy until the whole performance was concluded, to enjoy a hearty laugh at the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... for the loving thoughts that start Into being are like perfumes from the blossom of the heart; And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine— When my truant fancies wander with that old sweetheart ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... inhabitants of the invisible world there is one class which lives a particularly painful life, sometimes for a great many years, namely, the suicide who tried to play truant from the school of life. Yet it is not an angry God or a malevolent devil who administers punishment, but an immutable law which proportions the sufferings differently to each ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... Westminster. It was not long before he rebelled against the discipline and trammels of school-boy life; and one day he threw down his Euclid and Caesar and vanished as completely as if the earth had swallowed him. Every street, court, and alley was searched in vain for the truant; advertisements and handbills offering a reward for his recovery were equally futile. Not a trace of the runaway ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... they circled the 'drome once, noted the wind socks on the great hangars, and dropped as lightly to the field as two tardy, truant schoolboys seeking to gain entrance without ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... Ned's appeal. I had played truant once before, a long time ago, and the memory of the punishment that I received in the woodshed at home was still strongly impressed on ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... the city, a long, irregular line of laughing, jostling, shouting men, constantly renewed at the rear until the procession covered miles of roadway. They were of all races and all types; individually they were, many of them, like boys playing truant from school, not quite certain of themselves, smiling and yet uneasy, not entirely wicked in intent. But they were shepherded by men with cunning eyes, men who knew well that a mob is greater than the sum of its parts, more wicked than the individuals who compose it, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Late Archdeacon Elwood, A.M. Thomas Moore Robert Burns Byron Goderich Kelvin Niagara Falls Autumn A Sunset Farewell By the Lake The Teacher Grace Darling The Indian Lines on the North-West Rebellion Louis Riel Ye Patriot Sons of Canada A Hero's Decision John and Jane The Truant Boy A Swain to his Sweetheart The Fisherman's Wife The Diamond and the Pebble Temptation Slander Woman Sympathy Love and Wine. How Nature's Beauties Should be Viewed To a Canary The School-Taught Youth ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... "Ah, truant!" cried the fair maiden, as she caressed her little favourite, "how could you wander from me—how could you ever fancy yourself safe apart from Duty? I saw the hawk wheeling in the air, and I trembled for my beautiful pet; but he has found here a refuge and protector. Nelly, I thank you for your ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... learned to have language at command; you never thought, after so many years' schooling of the world, that your pliant tongue would play you truant. Yet now ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... of Gilles de Sille was still swathed in bandages when, with an additional swaddling of disguise across his eyes, he and Laurence, that truant scion of the house of O'Halloran, stole out into the night. A frosty chill had descended with the darkness, and a pale, dank mist from the marshes of the Seine made the pair shiver as arm in arm they ventured ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... persistently into her dreams? Why had the flush risen to her cheeks at the thought? At another time she would have refused to listen to the voice which answered; but now, as the object of her thoughts lay dying on her pillow, her mind would not play truant to her heart. Sometimes the approach of love is so imperceptible that it does not provoke analysis. We wake suddenly to find it in our hearts, so strong and splendid that we submit without question.... All, all her dreams had vanished, the latest and the fairest. Across the azure of her youth had ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... joy!—and was then all deceit? Did he but mock me, when with tears of rapture He bathed my hand; knelt; sighed; as had his voice By pleasure been o'erwhelmed, a while was silent; But soon came words, sweet as those most sweet kisses Which grateful Venus gave the swain whose care Brought back her truant doves!——So sweet, so sweet—— Distrust, herself, must have believed those words. Oh! and was all ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... not require a second intimation as to my duty in the case. Only a moment or two elapsed before I was on the pavement, and making rapid approaches towards my truant boy. ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... shall some day know. What is more, I am satisfied that the larger one has more than an ordinary interest in Stephens. She has twice already saved his life; and I should not be surprised if she were now to lay him once more under the obligation. Ha, truant," he said, turning to one of his staff who had come from a nigh tree-clump, where he had been writing, "you should have been here to see the beautiful Metis maiden. She was in disguise, but her beauty was not less divine than that of your own Iena. Fancy the feelings of Stephens, ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... countenance of the mirza lightens up a little, as though infected by the khan's overflowing merriment and the mudbake's rough handling of the young goat. They know each other thoroughly—as thoroughly as orchard-looting, truant-playing, teacher-deceiving school-boys—these three hopeful aspirants to the favor of Allah; they are an amusing trio, and not a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... bare earth dropped with a startling sound. 85 From that soft couch I rose not, till the sun Had almost touched the horizon; casting then A backward glance upon the curling cloud Of city smoke, by distance ruralised; Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive, 90 But as a Pilgrim resolute, I took, Even with the chance equipment of that hour, The road that pointed toward the chosen Vale. [F] It was a splendid evening, and my soul Once more made trial of her strength, nor lacked 95 AEolian visitations; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... heart, With instant flash, life's inextinguished fires; Plunging along each tense limb poured the blood Hot with its years of sleeping-smothered flame. And in a dream I charged, and in a dream I smote resistless; foemen in my path Fell unregarded, like the wayside flowers Clipped by the truant's staff in daisied lanes. For over me burned lustrous the dear eyes Of my beloved; I strove as at a joust To gain at end the guerdon of her smile. And ever, as in the dense melee I dashed, Her name burst from my lips, as lightning breaks Out of the ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... the wind among heaps of other leaves, where its splendor no more attracted attention. Of the gaiety of autumn, only the red bunches of the sumach were left as a parting present to welcome winter in. The querulous note of the quail had long been heard calling to his truant mate, and reproaching her for wandering from his jealous side; the robins had either sought a milder climate or were collected in the savin-bushes, in whose evergreen branches they found shelter, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... my way home. I found that my family had been somewhat alarmed at my non-appearance. My father, who always took matters coolly, accepted my excuses, but Aunt Deb scolded me roundly for having played truant. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... know whether I will receive you—a truant should be whipped as a punishment—but, mayhap, this will do as well for the nonce,' and the Queen stroked Philip Sidney on both cheeks, saying, 'The gem of my Court, how has it fared ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... companion, who was talking with quickness and vivacity, her fair face radiant with smiles. Lemercier looked at them as they passed by. "Sur mon ame," muttered Frederic to himself, "surely that is la belle Julie; and she has got back her truant poet at last." ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... conscientious, Timothy's mother found it hard not to spoil the youngest in the family. Master Timothy was wilful, and his feet became used to taking their own way before he stepped into the fairy shoes. He played truant from school, and was late for dinner so often that at length his mother decided that something must be done about Timothy. One morning the leather of the fairy shoes was brightly blacked and the copper tips polished, and Timothy wore them for the ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... stations, overrunning the suburbs; drilling—horseback and on foot—through clouds of sand; drilling at skirmish over burnt sedge-grass and stunted and charred pine woods; riding horses into the sea, and plunging in themselves like truant schoolboys. In the bay a fleet of waiting transports, and all over dock, camp, town, and hotel an atmosphere of fierce unrest and of eager longing to fill those wooden hulks, rising and falling with such maddening ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... my mother that her other sons shall comfort her old age, and I was aye a truant bird, that thought his home a cage; For my father was a soldier, and even as a child My heart leaped forth to hear him tell of struggles fierce and wild; And when he died, and left us to divide his scanty hoard, I let them take whate're they would, but kept my father's sword, And ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... you call it, but I'm going round among those fleets with my niece, and I shall start in a week. If I'm satisfied, you shall hear from me." "And I'm going to play truant and go with you, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... it may be surmised, were no other than Miss Hopkins and Miss Rae, whom chance or fate or bungling Eric Madden, who bought the tickets, had seated side by side with the Maddens and Jerrolds. It was bothersome, when Norman and Eric had played truant at any rate, but there was no help for it; so after a little Eric introduced them all round, and the two parties apparently merged into one, or broke up into four, for tete-a-tetes soon began. It was a little hard that three girls ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... The truant quarrier seemed rather inclined to stay where he was and finish the mug of ale, but Pierston quickened him, and he ascended the staircase. As soon as the lower room was empty Pierston leant with his elbows on the table, and covered his ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... through the gaily-crowded streets was sweet to him as a lazy truant ramble in the woods during church-time. Everything that he looked at delighted him—the richness of shop-windows, showing all the expensive useless goods that no sensible person ever wants; the liveries worn by pampered servants standing at carriage wheels; the glossy coats ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... stuck fast in the bare branches of an ancient lilac bush which some worshiper of former time had planted by the church door. Galusha rose and limped over to rescue his truant property. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... after the manner o' my little lady on her most unquiet days, till at last, for the sake o' peace, I did slyly lead him in the direction o' the great nursery. There, catching sight o' a little red petticoat, he enters, where stand my truant elves confessed, Mistress Marian frowning and biting o' her dark hair, but my little lady like to stifle, with both hands over her mouth to hide her smiles, and her blue eyes dancing a very Barley Break o' mirth among the yellow ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... ceased immediately, but at first the man could not locate the truant. Finally he discovered Black Bruin away up in the top of the tree, where he was well screened ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... Sin. If Ursula slapped Theresa across the face, even on a Sunday, that was not Sin, the everlasting. It was misbehaviour. If Billy played truant from Sunday school, he was bad, he was wicked, but he was ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... what next!" demanded the offended and, as she was fain to believe, neglected wife, under the impression that it was her truant husband, making his tardy return to his domestic allegiance, who had thus presumed to disturb her slumbers. "Is it not enough that you have eloped from my bed and board, for a long night, but you must dare to break in on the natural rest ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... escape, was about to obey this order, when the truant, Marmion, came in sight, trotting leisurely up the path, carrying in his mouth the rabbit, which he had succeeded in gnawing out of the log. He stopped short on discovering Pierre, dropped his game, and gathered ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... of the neighbours, the policeman on the beat and the truant officer, they were finally dragged to the halls of learning and delivered into the hands of Miss Bailey, who installed them in widely separated seats and seemed blandly unimpressed by their evident determination to make things unpleasant in Room 18. She met Leah's ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... in which, in that woman-despising country, only boys could hope to excel. One day, when she was about fourteen years old, the Princess Woo was missing from the Nestorian mission-house, by the Yellow River. Her troubled guardian, in much anxiety, set out to find the truant; and, finally, in the course of his search, climbed the high bluff from which he saw the massive walls, the many gateways, the gleaming roofs, and porcelain towers of the Imperial city of Chang-an-the ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... glided by, and another messenger came. The migratory swallow, returned from foreign travel, sought the ancient gable, and rejoicing in safety, commenced building a home. At twilight's hour might she be seen, unscared by the truant's stone, repairing to the placid pool—skimming over its glassy surface, in rapid circle and with humid wing—and returning in triumph, bearing ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... deserve it! I have been nothing but a truant and a vagabond. I have never obeyed anyone and I have always done as I pleased. If I were only like so many others and had studied and worked and stayed with my poor old father, I should not find myself here now, in this field and in the darkness, taking the place of a farmer's watchdog. ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... to that, I can say nothing," said Jenkin, "I have always served duly and truly; I have no heart to play truant, and cheat my master of his time as well ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... East gives warning, 'Tis the wished-for nuptial morning. Sweetest truant from Elysium, Golden morning of the May! All the guests are in their places— Lilies with pale, high-bred faces— Hawthorns in white wedding favours, Scented with celestial savours— Daisies, like sweet country maidens, Wear white scolloped frills to-day; 'Neath her hat of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... said Gunson, as we drew near our resting-place; and I believe now he said it to try and cheer me on. "Perhaps while we have been away the truant ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... these woods are wild and drear; These tangled paths are rough and lone; These dells are full of things of fear, And should be rather shunned than known. Then turn thy truant foot away, And seek afar the cultured glade, Nor dare with reckless step to stray, 'Mid these lone realms of fear and shade! You go not, and you seek to hear, Why one like me should idly roam, 'Mid scenes like these, so dark, so ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... taste to praise Lydgate more than Chaucer, yet we may put this down to his love for his old master, and may rest assured that though the cantankerous Ritson calls the Bury schoolmaster a 'driveling monk,' yet the larking schoolboy who robbed orchards, played truant, and generally raised the devil in his early days (Forewords to Babees Book, p. xliv.), retained in later years many of the qualities that draw to a man the boy's bright heart, the disciple's fond regret. We too will therefore hope that ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... Marguerite was announced, for an open book lay on a table beside her; but it seemed to the visitor that mayhap the young girl's thoughts had played truant from her work, for her pose was listless and apathetic, and there was a look of grave ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... like the preface to Frank: the engineer and the scientific part will tire you—skip and go on to the third volume. Delightful breakfast to-day at Mr. Ricardo's. We have this last week seen all Calcott's principal pictures, and those by Mulready, an Irish artist: one of a messenger playing truant; the enraged mistress, and the faces of the boys he is playing with, and the little child he had the care of asleep, all tell their story well; but none of these come near the exquisite humour and ingenuity of ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... burnished bell Of some strange blossom that long afternoons Of summer coax to open: all the moon's Chaste lustre in it; hues that only dwell With purity.... It takes me, like a spell, Back to a day when, whistling truant tunes, A barefoot boy I waded 'mid the rocks, Searching for shells deep in the creek's slow swirl, Unconscious of the pearls that 'round me lay: While, 'mid wild-roses,—all her tomboy locks Blond-blowing,—stood, unnoticed then, a girl, ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... hope, that any of her lost ones would ever be restored to her, she fell down on the shore in a swoon with the names of her husband and sons upon her lips. None was there to administer cold water or aught else that might recall her truant powers; her animal spirits might even wander whithersoever they would at their sweet will: strength, however, did at last return to her poor exhausted frame, and therewith tears and lamentations, as, plaintively repeating her sons' names, she roamed in quest of them from cavern to ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... path which, in view of his character, seems singularly narrow. In book after book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon parents, teachers, and all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights, plays truant, learns to swear and smoke, with the same devices and consequences; suffers from the same agonies of shyness, the same indifference to the female sex, the same awkward inclination toward particular little girls. For the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... night To scratch and write Upon a three-legged stool; Nor mourn the joys Of truant boys ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... the confines of Little Africa had penetrated the truant officer and the terrible penalty of the compulsory education law. Time and time again had poor Eliza Barnes been brought up on account of the shortcomings of that son of hers. She was a hard-working, honest woman, and day by day bent over ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... window leading into the garden open; but Honor was well round the corner, and running fast towards the cricket field. Vivian was very much disturbed and distressed. She scarcely knew what she ought to do. She ventured a little way into the grounds, but not a trace of any truant was to be seen, so she thought it useless to search far. One of the girls must have gone out; on that point she was ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... anticipate the condition of the Southern States at that period, should no remedy be devised to arrest the progressive miseries attendant on slavery? Will the absent father's heart be at peace, when, amid the hurry of public affairs, his truant thoughts return to the home of his affection, surrounded by doubtful, if not dangerous, subjects to precarious authority? Perhaps when deeply engaged in his legislative duties his heart may quail and his tongue falter with irresistible apprehension for the peace and safety of objects ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... again. That he dared not do; but accident, the lover's friend, performed the work, and did him a good turn beside. The old Frenchman was slowly approaching, when a frolicsome wind whisked off his hat and sent it skimming along the beach. In spite of her late lecture, away went Debby, and caught the truant chapeau just as a wave was hurrying up to claim it. This restored her cheerfulness, and when she returned, she was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... faithful, say. 'Tis all through me that Cino can display The sail of fame on life's unhappy stream." "Thee," quoth I, "root of all my woe I deem, I found what gall beneath thy sweetness lay." Then he: "Ah, traitorous and truant slave! Are these the thanks thou renderest, ingrate, For giving thee a maid without a peer?" "Thy left," cried I, "slew what thy right hand gave." "Not so," said he. The judge, "Your wrath abate. I must have time to ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... and when the truant gull Skims the green level of the lawn, his wing Dispetals roses; here the house is framed Of kneaded brick and the plumed mountain pine, Such clay as artists fashion and such wood As the tree-climbing urchin ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, Frank and Fanny went to school again; but Jack played truant, as he had done in the morning, and went down in the meadows, with the boys, whom he had told Frank he was ...
— Frank and Fanny • Mrs. Clara Moreton
... seemed to be enjoying a quick and merry reaction from the doleful domestic dumps in which the voyage was begun. Old and young behaved this afternoon like a lot of truant boys on a lark. When we came to a pond fenced off from the main channel by a moraine dam, John went ashore to seek a shot at ducks. Creeping up behind the dam, he killed a mallard fifty or sixty feet from the shore and attempted to wave it within ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... attempt to escape?" said that noble, grimly. "I fear that thou art playing the truant—against thine own interests, and must take thee with me whither I am bound, which happeneth ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... a very small school, for many boys were away helping to collect the sheep for the schooner, which was coming in, and some were playing truant. The sheep were carted down to the shore and the men were ready for embarking, when the ship moved out, and so all their labour was again in vain. The sea was "making up," and to-night is stormy. It is rather late in the year for a sailing-ship ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... a yet wider sweep. It goes from the wooing of a nation to the wooing of a race, from Jew distinctively to Roman representatively, from Annas standing in God's flood light rejected to Pilate in nature's lesser light obscured, from God's truant messenger nation to the world's ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his earliest known verses are translations from Bellay, a poet who was charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad school. We must not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the demi-monde will give us all the elements of the French character. It has been both grave and profound; nay, it has ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... was a little mud schoolhouse, and one day E. A. Partridge was asked to go over and teach in it. It was known that back East, besides working on his father's farm, he had taught school for awhile. Learning was a truant for the younger generation on the prairies at that time, there being only a few private schools scattered here and there. Though it was not much of an opportunity for anything but something to do, the offer was accepted, and every morning, ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Sofa, may I never feel: For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink, E'er since a truant boy I passed my bounds To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames. And still remember, nor without regret Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared, How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed, Still hungering penniless and far from home, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... uniform and sedentary life, affected the system of her nerves, and contributed to debilitate her frame. She was prohibited by her physician, not merely from committing her thoughts to paper, but, had it been possible, from thinking at all. No truant, escaped from school, could receive more pleasure in eluding a severe master, than did Mrs. Robinson, when, the vigilance of her physician relaxing, she could once more resume her books ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... finally came to a gateway that he remembered to have seen several times. It was a low, smooth arch, where it always smelled like ashes. Here, as a truant, he had taken that leap! He was with Franz Halleman, who had dared him to cut sacred studies and jump from the top of this arch. Walter did it just because little Franz ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... had but begun; the horse had but warmed to his work; the hunter had but tasted of sweet triumph. Another hopeful of a buffalo mother, negligent in danger, truant from his brothers, stumbled and fell in the enmeshing loop. The hunter's vest, slipped over the calf's neck, served as danger signal to the wolves. Before the lumbering buffalo missed their loss, another ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... by that expression?' 'A painter's eye,' replied Gainsborough, 'is to him what the lawyer's eye is to you.' As a boy at the Grammar School of his native town, it is to be feared he loved to play truant. One day he went out to his usual sketching haunts to enjoy the nature which he loved heartily, previously presenting to his uncle, who was master of the school, the usual slip of paper, 'Give Tom a holiday,' in which his father's handwriting was so exactly imitated that not the slightest ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... full-voice anthem which summer will harmonize. Ah! what shades and sunlight! what coloring! Green in the grass and trees, blue in the violets and sky, gray in the moss, yellow in the jessamines, falling around in a perfect Danaean shower of burnished gold! My truant fancy sees all this—and more! A dear hand that held mine, a "pure hand," a boy's hand, that ere many summers had spread out their gorgeous pageantry had drawn the sword for that dear summer-land of the jessamine and pine—had drawn the sword and dropped it; dropped it from the earnest, ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... seldom that her wishes cross the limits of the domestic circle, which to her is earth itself, and all that it contains which is most desirable. Her husband and children compose her little world, and beyond them and their sympathies, it is rare indeed that her truant affections ever wish to stray. A part of this concentration of the American wife's existence in these domestic interests, is doubtless owing to the simplicity of American life and the absence of temptation. ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... been an Irish politician of considerable ability and some prominence on the East River side of the city. The boy's early education had been picked up in the streets (his father had got the truant officer his position) and it was thorough. Later he had received a more theoretical training in the University of New York, but I think it was his early education which stuck by him longest, and which, in the end, was probably the more useful of the two. Armed ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... discerned it this forenoon soon after the burden of the school day was taken up. A marked disinclination for the prescribed routine of classroom and study hall appears to be one of its most pronounced manifestations. I am strangely distraught; preoccupied with truant and wandering thoughts having no bearing ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... forwarded to Turin, to become inmate of a sort of charity school for the instruction of catechumens. The very day after he started on foot, his father, with a friend of his, reached Annecy on horseback, in pursuit of the truant boy. They might easily have overtaken him, but they let him go his way. Rousseau explains the case on behalf ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... friends, an R.A.M.C. man, who assured him that a serious illness at his father's time of life was not infrequently followed by a marked rejuvenation of the patient; so that he was able to regard with unqualified gratitude the generosity and kindness of the truant Writer to ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood's, whose Friday fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been inflamed and irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper earned by ten hours' work. My back was turned to the door, which I knew must be open, as I felt ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... alone into the gallery, "You little truant!" she cried, "why so long? you said you would soon be with the foremost. I thought you must have escaped me, and have sought you through half the garden, and you are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... I am a truant there, for I do not answer aunt Julia's letters as punctually as I ought to do. I shall be down there for the hunting I suppose next month." Then dinner was announced; and as it was necessary that the Earl should take down Mrs. Bluestone and the Serjeant Lady ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... the old man was angry with them for playing truant. He said, slowly, "N—no. She didn't exactly send us; but I don't think she'll mind our having come if we get back in time for supper. Mamma never forbid ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... to come back," said Huldbrand; and he began to call in the most earnest manner: "Undine! Undine! Pray come back!" The old man shook his head, saying, that all that shouting would help but little, for the knight had no idea how self-willed the little truant was. But still he could not forbear often calling out with him in the dark night: "Undine! Ah! dear Undine, I beg you to come ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... put out, except as a picturesque and imaginative way of rubbing her altruism into its nearest victim. Unless, indeed, it was done in order that the darkened window should seem to announce to the returning truant that she had gone to bed, and to lull his mind to unconsciousness of the ambush that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... one friend always reappears, A good ghost, not to be forsaken; Whereat she laughs and has no fears Of what a ghost may reawaken, But welcomes, while she wears and mends The poor relation's odds and ends, Her truant from a tomb of years— Her power ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... an incorrigible truant, a chip of the old block, as Tona put it, thinking of that loafer who had been responsible for her, and who also sat staring day in day out at the horizon like a good-for-nothing idiot, half awake. If Tona had had to depend on that girl for a living, a fine mess she ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Woodruff and stopped there. Determined still to attend strictly to his own affairs, his thoughts persisted in playing truant and in straying to a subject he much preferred not to think of at all. Why should Al Woodruff be interested in the exact spot where Brit Hunter's daughter had spent the night of the storm? Why should Lone instinctively discount her statement and lie whole-heartedly ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... came; but no Sidney. They had sent to the place whither he had been despatched; he had never arrived there. Mr. Morton grew alarmed; and, when Mr. Spencer came to dinner, his host was gone in search of the truant. He did not return till three. Doomed that day to be belated both at breakfast and dinner, this decided him to part with Sidney whenever he should be found. Mrs. Morton was persuaded that the child only sulked, and would come back fast enough when he was hungry. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Tennysonians still walked past him as primly as a young ladies' school—the Browningites still inked their eyebrows and minds in looking for the lost syntax of Browning; while Browning himself was away looking for God, rather in the spirit of a truant boy from their school looking for birds' nests. The nineteenth-century sceptics did not really shake the respectable world and alter it, as the eighteenth-century sceptics had done; but that was because the eighteenth-century sceptics ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... his, and bade me take them for my hermitage. I had a great making-up to arrange with Nature, and I half wondered how she would receive me after all this long time. But when did that mother ever turn her face from her child, however truant from her care? It had been with a beating heart that I had passed up the hillside on an evening in early June, and approached the hushed green temple, wherein I was to take Summer sanctuary from ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... (ah, joy!) our singer For his truant string Feels with disconcerted finger, 45 What does cricket else but fling Fiery heart forth, sound the note Wanted ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... first the doctor's surgery and consulting-room had had a strange fascination for him, and whenever he was missing, the maid-of-all-work, who rarely showed her face out of the dim kitchen, knew that the boy would not be playing truant from his work or playing with other lads of his age, but would be found reading, dusting, or amusing himself in the surgery, smelling bottles, opening drawers, or standing on a chair, gazing at the ghastly preparations in one or other of ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... on the coach, they journeyed toward town, the man related his history. Born at Padua, the son of a poor barber, and one of fourteen children, Giovanni Battista Belzoni felt from his earliest youth a longing desire to visit foreign lands. This "truant disposition" was fostered, if not caused, by the stories of maritime adventures told him by an old sailor; who was strongly suspected of having, during many years, practiced ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... order to break the quorum and so prevent the call for a State convention to consider the Constitution, the remaining members brought back two of them by force. "When perceiving the other side to have an advantage, they play truant," said Noah Webster, a New England pedagogue, who had gone to Philadelphia at this time to lecture and to sell his new Grammatical Institute. "An officer or a mob hunts the absconding members in all the streets and alleys in town." To be held in their seats and counted ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... changed every other emotion to lively apprehensions for her safety, but he soon saw her run back, and, on observing him coming to meet her, assume an untroubled countenance. "Has this serene night," said she, "made you too a truant with your pillow? I have, of late, been little disposed to sleep, and enjoy a moon-light walk amazingly."—"Do not those dogs annoy you," inquired Sedley, with more of moody displeasure than tenderness; "I should think ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... back the fairy books," she said, "and all those wonderful and never-to-be-forgotten sensations of the truant, doesn't it? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and Mrs. Dolman invited her to their house, where she was found by Mr. Linley, on his arrival in pursuit of her. After a few words of private explanation from Sheridan, which had the effect of reconciling him to his truant daughter, Mr. Linley insisted upon her returning with him immediately to England, in order to fulfil some engagements which he had entered into on her account; and a promise being given that, as soon as these ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... I would not hear your enemy say so, Nor shall you do my ear that violence, To make it truster of your own report Against yourself: I know you are no truant. But what is your affair in Elsinore? We'll teach you to drink deep ere ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... disguise—no one else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, when driven to extremity, grow romantic and extravagant; for the romance of his heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the habitual prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to their affections, and taught by the force of feeling when to forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women were in this respect exquisite logicians; for there is nothing so logical as ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... truant," said Wilfred, self-consciously; his schoolmaster had often proved an alibi against him. "Then Denzil ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... vanished. As soon as the decorous swish of Sunday silks had ceased in the corridor outside, she caught up a book and a cushion, and, creeping down by the side stairs, set gaily out across the sunlit lawn, with the deliciously guilty thrill of a truant little boy who has ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... was known to be a Philadelphian by birth, had returned by the train to London, as the porter had said, and then left the country under an assumed name, to escape that worst kind of widowhood—the misery of being wedded to a fickle, faithless, and truant husband? ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... performances. Girls are sometimes forbidden to sell newspapers or deliver messages for telegraph companies or others. Compulsory education is, of course, universal, and the machinery to bring it about is generally based upon a system of certificates or cards, with truant ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... the lights and shades of spring and summer greenness. Or, as just then, in the gorgeous October coloring of the whole landscape that lies below, across the farm, which stretches on through an intervale of beautiful meadows and pastures to the woods that skirt the valley of the little truant river, ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... O! had my truant, and ungrateful heart Her merit justly priz'd, I might this day, In honour, as in virtue have been happy, Not thus a wretched outcast of the world— I pray return it with a thousand blessings— Heart-rending ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... one think that he is therefore in love with idleness; he turns to something which is more agreeable to his inclination, and doubtless more suited to his nature; but he is not in love with idleness. A boy may play the truant from school because he dislikes books and study; but, depend upon it, he intends doing something the while—to go fishing, or perhaps to take a walk; and who knows but that from such excursions both his mind and body may derive more benefit than from books and school? Many people go to sleep ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... the subject of the American War, without further reference to the truant who stood by them in the covert of the dusk, thrilling with happiness and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foot, and the entire body of truant warriors were brought back without bloodshed. One of them, a young warrior, came to Will's tent to beg for tobacco. The Indian—as all know who have made his acquaintance—has no difficulty in reconciling begging with his native dignity. To work ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... to sing. He had himself a pretty talent for playing on the oaten reed, a little flute of that period. He played on it agreeably, as also on the chiffonie, a sort of beggar's hurdy-gurdy, mentioned in the Chronicle of Bertrand Duguesclin as the "truant instrument," which started the symphony. These instruments attracted the crowd. Ursus would show them the chiffonie, and say, "It is called organistrum ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... five years old when he entered heder, hated to be shut up all day over a printed page that meant nothing to him. He cried and protested, but my father was determined that he should not grow up ignorant, so he used the strap freely to hasten the truant's steps to school. The heder was the only beginning allowable for a boy in Polotzk, and to heder Joseph must go. So the poor boy's life was made a nightmare, and the horror was not lifted until he was ten years old, when he went ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... afterwards, ambling along, Came dainty Zephyrus humming a song, And pausing—the truant—to kiss each flower That blushed in garden, or field, or bower. But no one was left to be merry with him, So he danced with the leaves till the light grew dim, And, as Twilight was going to sleep in the west, He, too, fell asleep on a ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... the true reason down in the record book. And there it will stay always. My nice little boy was a truant-player. And we shall all be so ashamed. What will your father say? And he was so afraid last night ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... Master, he craved pardon for having permitted the rest of his people to go out to see the hunt, observing, that "They wad never think of his lordship coming back till mirk night, and that he dreaded they might play the truant." ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... laugh so that she tumbled into a clover-bed, and lay there a minute to get her breath. Just then, as if the playful wind repented of its frolic, the long veil fastened to the hat caught in a blackberry-vine near by, and held the truant fast till ...
— Marjorie's Three Gifts • Louisa May Alcott
... progress, she declared, had been snatched by the roaring waves and was floating in the trough of the sea, just beyond their reach. None of the number being acquainted with the process of sculling, they considered it imperative to secure the truant tool, unless they wished to perish floating about unseen; and having weighed the expediency of rigging Helen into a jury-mast, they were now using their endeavors to regain the oar,—Mary Purcell whirling them about like a maelstroem with the remaining one, and Mrs. McLean with her ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... with the trap?" said Aveline. "We can't drag it back ourselves. And what about the pony? He's playing truant!" ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... by stream and meadow, They searched 'neath hedge and tree; "Where," said the puzzled children, "Where can the truant be?" ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of talk, friendly and otherwise, we took turns at the searchlight and wrote, each of us, a letter to his sister, I in a sense seeking to guarantee a respectability I do not look or feel since I am a truant myself with an indifferent amount of worldly goods. However, I couldn't help thinking how she'd worry and I ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... illustrated again, as in Essex, the continuity of the superstition in a given locality. The Lancashire witches of 1633 were the direct outcome of the Lancashire witches of 1612. The story is a weird one. An eleven-year-old boy played truant one day to his cattle-herding, and, as he afterwards told the story, went plum-gathering. When he came back he had to find a plausible excuse to present to his parents. Now, the lad had been brought up in the Blackburn forest, close to Pendle Hill; he had overheard ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... a person whose imagination plays no truant pranks like this," replied Mr. Allison. "And this shall be at least one exception ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... his wife soon called his thoughts back to misery. Health had wandered away, and the smiling truant strayed so long, that hope of her return had almost ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... with a glance who rules us as her own, Opening my breast my heart in hand to take, Thus said to me: "Of this no mention make." I saw her then, in alter'd air, alone, So that I recognised her not—O shame Be on my truant mind and faithless sight! And when the truth I told her in sore fright, She soon resumed her old accustom'd frame, While, desperate and half dead, a ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... for the credit or advantage to be gained by it; he makes what is allowed or approved a pretext for doing what would be opposed or condemned; a tricky schoolboy makes a pretense of doing an errand which he does not do, or he makes the actual doing of an errand a pretext for playing truant. A ruse is something (especially something slight or petty) employed to blind or deceive so as to mask an ulterior design, and enable a person to gain some end that he would not be allowed to approach directly. A pretension is a claim that is or may be contested; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... So vice must ever be followed by woe— The W duly succeeds the V, This is the order of A, B, C. Ubi erit victoriae spes, Si offenditur Deus? which says, How, pray ye, shall victory e'er come to pass, If thus you play truant from sermon and mass, And do nothing but lazily loll o'er the glass? The woman, we're told in the Testament, Found the penny in search whereof she went. Saul met with his father's asses again, And Joseph his precious fraternal train, But he, who 'mong soldiers shall hope to see God's fear, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... years old. She was the twin of a child who died early and who never developed normally. Her mother said she seemed smart enough in some ways; she had reached 7th grade before she was 14, but even at that time she was a truant and would run off to moving-picture shows at every opportunity. Her father was a rascal and came of an immoral family. He had a criminal record, and that was another reason why the mother felt this girl was going to the bad. The mother ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Appear'd like two poor harmless women, who Of goblins, but still more of men afraid, Had thought one man might be deterr'd by two, And therefore side by side were gently laid, Until the hours of absence should run through, And truant husband should return, and say, 'My dear, I was ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... and genial was the weather that certain lads, imbued with that spirit of lawlessness and adventure which seems inherent in the nature of the young Briton, had conspired together to defy the authority of their schoolmaster by playing truant from afternoon school and going to bathe in Firestone Bay. And it was while these lads were dressing, after revelling in their stolen enjoyment, that their attention was attracted by the appearance of a tall ship gliding up the Sound before the soft breathing ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... was not to get his holiday so easily. There came a shout from the forest, and a boy on a brown moor pony went racing off after the truant beast, while a lady and a young girl looked on laughing. It was a very pretty chase, but at last Roger came back in triumph and tethered the donkey, repentant and ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... they were now quite close together; both presenting faces of a very heightened colour to the eyes of Mr. Edward Hugh Bloomfield. That gentleman, coming up the river in his boat, had captured the truant canoe, and divining what had happened, had thought to steal a march upon Miss Hazeltine at her sketch. He had unexpectedly brought down two birds with one stone; and as he looked upon the pair of flushed and breathless culprits, the pleasant human instinct of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and activity. The usual occupations of the sons of Japanese peasants, such as grass-cutting and rice-weeding, were not to the taste of young Monkey-pine, as the villagers called him, and he spent his time in the streets, a keen-witted and reckless young truant, who feared and cared for no one, and lived ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... am a Lad of about fourteen. I find a mighty Pleasure in Learning. I have been at the Latin School four Years. I don't know I ever play'd [truant, [1]] or neglected any Task my Master set me in my Life. I think on what I read in School as I go home at noon and night, and so intently, that I have often gone half a mile out of my way, not minding whither I went. Our Maid tells me, she often hears me talk Latin in my sleep. And I dream ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... his sixpence for the hospital-cot collection at the children's service last Sunday. He had only fourpence halfpenny. I remember it all now. Oh, how stupid I've been, to be sure!' It was an intense relief to have chased successfully the truant halfpence. 'Now, Queenie,' went on Theo gleefully, 'in five minutes I shall be ready for you, and we are going to have a good time in the boat. Get ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... farther from literary excellence than the first. I fear this little boy plays truant from school as well as taking apples which do not belong to him. It is high time that he learnt to spell, and also to observe the difference between meum and tuum. From not being well grounded on these two points, many boys have lost ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Gobillot's fresh, chubby face, her figure prim beyond measure in a lilac-and-green plaid gingham dress, and carrying a basket on her arm, a necessary burden to maidens of a certain class who play truant. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... woods witnessed a startling spectacle. Rabbinical students, playing truant, resorted thither to read Mapu's novel in secret. Luxuriously they lived the ancient days over again. The elevated love celebrated in the book touched all hearts, and many an artless romance was ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... triumph came when his wife and Mrs. Look, adventuring to seek their truant husbands, sat for a little while in the tavern kitchen and ate a doughnut, and added their astonished indorsement. In the flush of his masterfulness he would not permit them to lay finger on dish, pot, ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... acquired something, for he retained, to old age, the memory of some of the scenes through which he used to pass on his way to and from this school. For want of the necessary preliminary training, he could do little or nothing with letters: he rather preferred playing truant and roaming the meadows in listless idleness, wherever his fancy led him. This could not last. His father soon set him to work in the foundry; and with this advantage, that the lad stood on better terms with himself than he had been for a considerable period, for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... puzzled at the coldness with which Mr. Webber listened to his explanation of what had taken place. The school principal fell back doggedly upon one fact. It would not have happened if Jeff had not been playing truant. Therefore he was to ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... been full of gruesome things. In "The Innocents Abroad," the author tells how he once spent a night in his father's office and discovered there a murdered man. This was a true incident. The man had been stabbed that afternoon and carried into the house to die. Sam and John Briggs had been playing truant all day and knew nothing of the matter. Sam thought the office safer than his home, where his mother was probably sitting up for him. He climbed in by a window and lay down on the lounge, but did not sleep. Presently he noticed what appeared ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... pity on poor uncle," growled Joseph, who re-entered, "this uncle whom your father drives out of doors in all weathers to look for his daughter's truant lover." ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... a schoolboy, Keith, you would be cleverer at making an excuse for playing truant," she said, laughing. "And I could ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... at this. Abel Cumshaw in the city would be as hard to find as the proverbial needle in a bundle of hay, but in the bush it would be much easier to locate him, Bryce considered. So he drove the car along at a low speed, keeping all the time a watchful eye out for any signs of the truant. As he progressed he was surprised and not a little pleased to find that his New Guinea woodcraft was coming back to him by degrees. The joy of the chase was his, and he experienced again the same keen ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... green and cool and alive with the piping of robins. Over the lake which glimmered faintly through the trees ahead came the whir and hum of a giant bird which skimmed the lake with snowy wing and came to rest like a truant gull. Of the habits of this extraordinary bird Rex, barking, frankly disapproved, but finding his mistress's attention held unduly by a chirping, bright-winged caucus of birds of inferior size and interest, he barked and ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... trust me for a spy? Dear Mullinix, your good advice I beg; you see the case is nice: O! were I equal in renown, Like thee to please this thankless town! Or blest with such engaging parts To win the truant schoolboys' hearts! Thy virtues meet their just reward, Attended by the sable guard. Charm'd by thy voice, the 'prentice drops The snow-ball destined at thy chops; Thy graceful steps, and colonel's air, Allure the cinder-picking ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head. Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way, With blossom'd furze unprofitably gay, There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule, The village master taught his little school. A man severe he was, and stern to view; I knew him well, and every truant knew; Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace The day's disasters in his morning face; Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee At all his jokes, for many a joke had he; Full well the busy whisper circling round Conveyed the dismal tidings ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous |
