"Early childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he came—he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery—a charming waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better than anyone else in ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... spontaneous, perhaps put on, but in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... he was perched upon a table, and with large, wide-opened blue eyes was gazing with all the innocence and inquiry of infancy into his father's face, as if he would there read the mystery of life and creation, which the wondering gaze of early childhood seems ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... born in Canaan, N.Y., in 1783. Her father, George Hinsdale, who died in her early childhood, must have been a man of good abilities and religious feeling, being the reputed composer of the psalm-tune, "Hinsdale," ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... my mother was in the physical management of her children. Like many mothers whose bodies and minds are kept at the highest tension, she failed to give vital strength to her children. The most promising of these died in early childhood, "by the will of God," as we say in our blindness. One of them especially, the "little king," as he was called, being a magnificent child, both in mental and moral development. Of those who came to maturity, one died at the age of twenty-seven, one has been an invalid for years, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... rarely, and has smiling hours unthought in the past. And Ruth has proven that the mystery was adequately solved. She married the kind of man so excellent a woman should have, and went through the trying weeks of her motherhood and has cared for her boy through the demanding months of early childhood without a complication. And all this in the face of Aunt ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... I cannot recollect an instance that I was so called when in England, but neither can I recollect when the name was first given me; and if anything is to be founded on these queries and my answers, I desire my early childhood ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... solitude that society forces upon him, because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is essential to the poet. In the Prelude he relates how, from early childhood, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... From early childhood he could never be prevailed on to eat any flesh or fish, but he subsisted on vegetable food and milk; neither could he be persuaded to eat high seasoned food of any kind. When he was a child, his parents used to scold him severely, and threaten to whip him because he refused ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Newman's side. Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity, designate imperfections: therein following De Quincey, who read Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a critic, saw things sometimes. Bonus dormitat Homerus, says Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked." He was the product of a great creative force; which did not however work in a great literary age: and all I am going to say ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... EARLY CHILDHOOD. As at Sparta the infant was examined at birth, but the father, and not a council of citizens, decided whether or not it was to be "exposed" or preserved. Three ceremonies, of ancient tribal origin, marked the recognition and acceptance of the child. The first took place five ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... His early childhood, however, was passed almost wholly at Malaval, a tiny hamlet in the parish of Lavaysse, whose belfry was visible at quite a short distance; but to reach it one had to travel nearly twenty-five rough, mountainous miles, through ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... carefully traced in several words the outline of the letters, until suddenly a few of the characters that he had learned from the school-teacher when, in his early childhood days, he was sent to school as protector of his younger cousins, returned to his mind, and although they had been meaningless then and had been long since forgotten, they corresponded perfectly with those before him. Thus ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... IS NO ONE who stands so near the girl as the mother. From early childhood she occupies the first place in the little one's confidence—she laughs, plays, and corrects, when necessary, the faults of her darling. She should be equally ready to guide in the important laws of life and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... would get overwhelmingly attached to this abode of wrath, but Comrade Adair seems to have done it. He's all for giving Sedleigh a much-needed boost-up. It's not a bad idea in its way. I don't see why one shouldn't humour him. Apparently he's been sweating since early childhood to buck the school up. And as he's leaving at the end of the term, it mightn't be a scaly scheme to give him a bit of a send-off, if possible, by making the cricket season a bit of a banger. As a start, why not drop him a ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... The early childhood of George Borrow was spent in stirring times. Without, there was the menace of Napoleon's invasion; within, every effort was being made to meet and repel it. Dumouriez was preparing his great scheme of defence; Captain Thomas Borrow ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... father's—words which he had spoken, unheeded at the time, or at any rate not understood, now seemed to acquire a new meaning. She had been utterly ignorant of her aunt's existence, or if she had known her in early childhood, she had lost all recollection of her. Her father had ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... In early childhood he was destined to lose the loving father to whom his "shouts of joy" were the sweetest ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... David Scott, as true a man as ever lived among the hills of the Cumberland river. David Scott had one son, William Scott, as noble a lad as ever lived. He was honest, true, and like Estelle, was loved by all. William was just two years older than Estelle, and together they had played from early childhood. During Estelle's sickness no one, unless her parents, seemed more anxious about her than did William Scott. Never a day or night passed but that William Scott called at the Ramon home to inquire about Estelle during ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... sex-instruction should not be concentrated in a short period of youth is that it is impossible to exert the most desirable influence upon health, attitude, and morals except by instruction beginning in early childhood and graded for each period of life up to maturity. Most young people who in early adolescence receive their first lessons from parents and teachers have already had their attitude formed by their playmates. Even their ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... heard from the lips of parent or teacher. Therefore, the literature of the first volume forms a treasure house from which the parent may draw many a good story to tell, and where he may find more that will be excellent for him to read aloud. The taste for the best literature is often formed in early childhood. So no child is too young for Journeys and no child is too old. The real things we read over and over with increasing interest as the years go on. Elsewhere in this volume are directions for story-telling, and many especially good selections are named. What the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... at request of Army Council he undertook unpaid post of Civil Member on Claims Commission in France. Comes back to Treasury Bench as Postmaster-General, in succession to the INFANT SAMUEL, who, in accordance with the tradition of early childhood, has, since first promoted to Ministerial office, been "called" several ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... he calls "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807), Wordsworth sums up his philosophy of childhood; and he may possibly be indebted here to the poet Vaughan, who, more than a century before, had proclaimed in "The Retreat" the same doctrine. This kinship with nature and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... how papa used to put on his fur coat and fire off his gun from the balcony. And don t you remember——?" And so they went on recalling, one after the other, not the bitter memories of old age, but the bright pictures of early childhood, which float and fade on a distant horizon of poetic vagueness, midway between reality and dreams. Sonia remembered being frightened once at the sight of Nicolas in his braided jacket, and her nurse promising her ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... about the house into dangerous and forbidden places, at the risk of life and limb, was our hero's chief delight in early childhood. To fall out of his cradle and crib, to tumble down stairs, and to bruise his little body until it was black and blue, were among his most ordinary experiences. Such mishaps never drew tears, however, from his large blue eyes. After struggling violently ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... children arriving early at positions of eminence in the dramatic art. It is true that there are a few who shine as stars in the theatrical profession, and who entered upon their dramatic career in early childhood; but these are ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... our early childhood the love and care of Tze-hsi, etc., the Great Empress Dowager. Our gratitude is boundless. We have received the command to succeed to the throne and we fully expected that the gentle Empress Dowager would be vigorous and reach a hundred years ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... that and other things, which came back to him uncertainly, like the little incidents of his early childhood, like the first words he could remember hearing and answering, like the sensation of being on his mother's knee and resting his head upon her shoulder, like the smell of the roses and the bitter-orange blossoms in the villa, like the first sensation of being ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... From early childhood I had been subject to a peculiar malady. I say malady for want of a better and truer word, for my condition had never been one of physical or mental suffering. According to my father's opinion, an attack of ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... rude stone, to guide them to the place where their kind neighbors had gently laid them down to rest from the turmoil of life's uneven ways. The summer months were spent among strangers and the scenes of her early childhood, and visiting the burial-place of her parents weekly, to water the moss-rose and the eglantine she had planted on their graves, and scatter the most beautiful flowers that bloomed in that region upon their graves at the hour of falling ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... because she was told that the Quaker lady was Mrs. Opie. My friend was just beginning her life. Mrs. Opie must have been ending hers. It is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so suddenly overpoweringly affected; but Mrs. Opie was no born daughter of the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. I have heard a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily and ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... must learn to fence, and told some story of an ancestor of mine who was the best swordsman in the country, and kept all comers at bay in some old fight long ago. I took the long bit of springy steel, and found it extraordinary comfortable to the hand. Practice with the fiddle-bow since early childhood gave, I may suppose, strength and quickness to the turn of my wrist; however it was, the marquis cried out that I was born for the sword; and in a few minutes again cried to know who had taught me tricks of fence. Honesty knows, I had had ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... should be commenced in early childhood. Parents should not only encourage their children to express themselves freely upon everything that attracts their attention and interests them, but they should also incite their faculties of perception, memory and close observation, by requiring them to recount everything, ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... inseparable playmates from early childhood; and as we lived near a broad, deep inlet, which put in from the Atlantic, they learned to swim at the age of ten, and soon learned to manage a yacht as well as veterans. I was sometimes anxious because of their venturesome disposition, but ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... business call. Mr. Checkynshaw was troubled. Fitz was a thorn in his flesh and a stumbling-block in his path. Doubtless it was very annoying for the father of Marguerite to break up the educational and social relations she had sustained from early childhood. Doubtless it was very wicked of Fitz to put him to all this trouble for nothing. Perhaps it was rash in him to discharge his clerk; but Fitz was so airy and impudent, that a decent self-respect would not permit ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... when the voice of the forest called—when school and city and travel had palled and tortured—Diane had traveled feverishly north with Aunt Agatha, and thence to the Adirondack lodge which had been her hermitage since early childhood and to which, by an earlier compact, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... nursery was moved to Richmond. This was a welcome move to Anne, who had spent her early childhood near enough to be sometimes taken thither, and to know the Park well, so that there was a home feeling in the sight of the outline of the trees and the scenery of the neighbourhood. The Queen intended going to Bath, so that the establishment was only that of the Prince, and the life ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brute creation; and that one of those principles is an innate desire to please and secure the good opinion of the opposite sex, born with every man and woman, or at least developed, more or less strongly, in very early childhood, and that too without any instruction or hint ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... seat so as to shut all this from view. His excitement was intense, extraordinary, and from the deep, hidden recesses of his mind there began to emerge spectres of early childhood, old beliefs, banished superstitions. The coachman proposed another route; he shook his head and said that he would wait. He leaned forward to get a better look at the card-reader's house ... Then he made a gesture ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... health as she sat before her granddaughter's comfortable fire. She spoke quietly, with little excitement, and readily recalled events of her early childhood. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... early childhood the foreskin should be pushed back at least twice a week while the child is in his bath, and the parts thus exposed washed gently with absorbent cotton ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt
... not so harsh and rude as it seemed, and can readily be explained on the theory by which she governed her feelings and actions toward her son. An obscure weakness in the functions of his heart had rendered him subject to fainting turns from early childhood. Physicians had always cautioned against over-exertion and over-excitement of any kind; therefore he had not been sent to school like the other children, or permitted to indulge in the sports natural to his age. Having been constantly cautioned, curbed, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... children, my sister Mary and myself were the only two that survived the perils of infancy and early childhood. I, being the younger by five or six years, was always regarded as THE child, and the pet of the family: father, mother, and sister, all combined to spoil me—not by foolish indulgence, to render me fractious and ungovernable, but by ceaseless kindness, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... but most pleasing recollections of the home of her early childhood, was one of a boy with curly black hair and smiling face, who brought her beautiful flowers, and made for her rabbits out of his handkerchief, and pretty little boats out of nut-shells. She remembered eagerly leaning over ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... excellent quality in any country village. It is not from lack of intelligence or education, for the men you meet in the woods, as outers or sportsmen, are rather over than under the average in these respects. Perhaps it is because it has been dinned into our ears from early childhood, that an appetite, a healthy longing for something good to eat, a tickling of the palate with wholesome, appetizing food, is beneath the attention of an aesthetic, intellectual man. Forgetting that the entire man, mental and physical, depends on proper ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... and who make life rich in resource and interest are comparatively few. America needs poetry more than it needs industrial training; though the two ought never to be separated. The time to awaken the imagination, which is the creative faculty, is early childhood; and the most accessible material for this education is the literature which the race created in its childhood. The creative man, whether in the arts or in practical affairs, in poetry, in engineering or in business, is always ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... pasty-faced, and sickly Louis Willems—who rolled a glass inkstand, solid with dried ink, about the floor, and tottered after it with the portentous gravity of demeanour and absolute absorption by the business in hand that characterize the pursuits of early childhood. Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... now closes. We have followed a devoted servant of Christ from youth to womanhood—from early childhood to an early grave. It is pleasant to contemplate such an example, to shed tears of gratitude over such a tomb. The name we pronounce deserves to be recorded in a more conspicuous place in the book of fame than any name which has gathered gory laurels on the wet field of carnage; she deserves ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... but those thoughts flow slowly into words. He is keenly appreciative of his own limitations and quietly he observes everything around him. From early childhood he had been taught to be swift and keen in observation—the rustling of a leaf might be related to a squirrel's presence, and behind each moving shadow there is ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... From early childhood up to the time of his Illumination Tolstoi indulged in seriousness of thought. Like Mohammed, great and overpowering desire to fathom the mystery of death took possession of him. He was ever haunted by an excessive dread of the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... mouth, and a high, round forehead, far smoother than his age had promised, were distinguishing physical features of him. His wife had been dead eighteen years, and of his two children one only survived. The elder, a boy toddling in early childhood at the water's edge, was unmissed until too late, and found drowned next day after a terrible night of agony for both parents. Indeed, Mrs. Lyddon never recovered from the shock, and Phoebe was but a year old when her mother died. Further, it need only be mentioned that the miller had heard of Will's ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... seemed to touch their hands. At these times nothing was hidden from him; it was necessary only that he should desire fervently to see any particular person or place, and that the intent of the wish should be innocent, and he became straightway clairvoyant. To the blind man, deprived in early childhood of physical sight, this miraculous power was an inestimable consolation, and Christmas Eve became to him a festival of illumination whose annual reminiscences and anticipations brightened the whole round of the year. And when ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... kept by Henry Pickering, a man far above his occupation in manner, education, and culture. He had lived many years in France, where he had married a woman of good station, and where his only child, Bettina, whom we called Betty, was born and lived during her early childhood. Pickering's wife died in France, and his fortunes failed, so he returned to England, bought the Old Swan, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... face; but they were no longer the chilling tears of sorrow I had long been used to shed, they were tears of joy and gladness at being restored to a kind father, to whom I had feared I was lost for ever. When he spoke, I seemed to recollect the tones of his voice; the scenes of my early childhood returned to my memory, and I asked him if he had not been used to call me his Annie and ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... boy alleged not only to be deficient in goodness, but redundant in ill: 'The lad, madam or sir, evinces very corrupt qualities, does he? No end to them.' 'But, have confidence, there will be; for pray, madam, in this lad's early childhood, were not those frail first teeth, then his, followed by his present sound, even, beautiful and permanent set. And the more objectionable those first teeth became, was not that, madam, we respectfully submit, so much the more reason to look for their speedy substitution by the present ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... paying back what—I owe," she murmured, and all the wretched company of her early childhood seemed to hold out imploring hands to her. Her father, her mother, the line of miserable brothers and sisters who ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... error resulting from mere oblivescence and the arbitrary selection of mental images is seen most plainly, perhaps, in our subsequent representation and estimate of whole periods of early life. Our idea of any stage of our past history, as early childhood, or school days, is built up out of a few fragmentary intellectual relics which cannot be certainly known to answer to the most important and predominant experiences of the time. When, for example, we try to decide whether our school days were our happiest days, as is so often alleged, it is ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... right answer for him, the one she had learned by rote in early childhood: "All life moves in cycles. Creation and progress must be preceded by destruction. In ancient times that meant we had to destroy each other; but for the past century our inherent need for negative moments has been ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like the others of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his somewhat startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands to match, his shapeless garments hanging ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... whom one would fain know more, died in the early childhood of his son Thomas. He left a handsome estate of L9,000, and a widow not wholly inconsolable with her third portion and a not unduly deferred second marriage to a titled gentleman, Sir Thomas Button,—a knight so scantily and at the same time so variously ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... much with fear as delight, I caught up the letter, and, rushing with it to my room, locked myself in and tore open the envelope. A single sheet fell out; it was signed with the name I had heard whispered in my ear from early childhood, and always in connection with riches and splendor and pleasures,—it was rapture to dream of. This was an agitation in itself, but the words—the words! I have never told them to mortal being, but I must tell them now; I remember them as I remember the look of my child's face when ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... only a Minnow. The fear of water which had lurked in her ever since the accident in her early childhood had kept her from any attempt to learn to swim. It was only since she had become a Winnebago and had once conquered her fear on that memorable night beside the Devil's Punch Bowl that she began to entertain ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... myself, waking as from a sleep. Sometimes, however, the recollection would be vivid and complete; sometimes I saw the face of my lost father; sometimes I heard his very voice, as I had seen and heard him in my early childhood, when he would let me rest for hours beside him as he mused or studied, happy to be so quietly near him, for I loved him, oh, so dearly! and I remember him so distinctly, though I was only in my sixth year when he died. Much more recently—indeed, within the last few months—the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... immediately confronted with an individual whose countenance wears an expression associated with some reminiscences of your youth, but so dim and undefined is it, that you cannot, for the life of you, give it its appropriate name or place. What is to be done? The recollections of early childhood are expected spontaneously to burst forth from under a heap of later and more vivid associations, and the name, residence, business, and whole history of the unwelcome guest are called upon to suggest ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... only too well aware of the facts which gave the speech its trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert Vallincourt, a cousin—a gay and debonair young rake of much charm of ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... this ballad romantically in writing about his early childhood. He was travelling with his father's regiment from town to town and from school to school, and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... have just sustained. In truth, for a good while past I have expected nothing else: but when the inevitable actually comes, it is always a sad and overwhelming stroke. To think that one who was so dear to us, whom we hung upon with the feelings of early childhood, and also in later years were bound to by respect and love, that such an object is gone from the world, that with all our striving we cannot bring it back,—to think of this is always something frightful. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... gray, and withal he was not satisfied with their outcome. In the midst of the struggle he had weakened in one manly resolve—against his will he married. The lady was a Fusilier, Agricola's sister, a person of rare intelligence and beauty, whom, from early childhood, the secret counsels of his seniors had assigned to him. Despite this, he had said he would never marry; he made, he said, no pretensions to severe conscientiousness, or to being better than others, but—as between his Maker and himself—he had forfeited the right to wed, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... carefully-levelled and much-trodden Queen's path at Buxton, considering that it ascended steeply all the way, and made the solemn, much-enduring Earl pant for breath; but the Queen, her rheumatics for the time entirely in abeyance, bounded on with the mountain step learned in early childhood, and closely followed the brisk Emmott. The last ascent was a steep pull, taking away the disposition to speak, and at its summit Mary stood still holding out one hand, with a finger of the other on her ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wakes are now, it is believed, almost entirely discontinued, and with them have gone the stories. The Negroes are very shy of telling them, and both the clergyman of the Church of England, and the Dissenting Minister set their faces against them, and call them foolishness. The translator, whose early childhood was passed in those islands, remembers to have heard such stories from his nurse, who was an African born; but beyond a stray fragment here and there, the rich store which she possessed has altogether escaped his memory. The following stories have been ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... not adapt himself to the blessings of this education, and the mere threats of the rod-switching deprived the child of his senses and threw him into convulsions. But though the little Napoleon was gloomy, monosyllabic, and quiet, yet was he from early childhood the favorite of all who knew him, and he already wielded over brothers, sisters, and ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... a very different May from the girl who ran about with Rose, and was kept in her proper place by Annie, which revived in Doctor Millar the old regret that Providence had not blessed him with a son. He could not exactly make a son of May, since from her early childhood she was a little sensitive woman all over, but he did what he could. He had her taught Latin, Greek, and mathematics just to afford her the chance of being a scholar. He never told himself, and nobody else did, in the meantime, what she ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... hard apprenticeship in early childhood. Nature directs him to adopt this course of life, and endows him with a bold heart, a cool head, a sinewy frame, and an iron constitution. The incipient poachers soon leave the inhabited districts to live in the forests, with ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... of the Holy One making holy. And yet throughout the book of Genesis the word never occurs again; it is as if God's Holiness is in abeyance; only in Exodus, with the calling of Moses, does it make its appearance again. This is a fact of deep import. Just as a parent or teacher seeks, in early childhood, to impress one lesson at a time, so God deals in the education of the human race. After having in the flood exhibited His righteous judgment against sin, He calls Abraham to be the father of a chosen people. And as the foundation of all His dealings with ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... the first traditions of a tribe, and the people as a whole have just as long a memory as the individual persons, who are wont to retain faithfully to extreme old age the impressions of early childhood. When now we consider that an individual human life may last as long as ninety years, and, furthermore, that the years of a people are as centuries, it is no longer a matter of wonder to us that, in the regions where the events of our story took ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... absolute and most splendid monarchy of Europe, and in the highest rank of her proud and chivalrous nobility. He had been educated at a college of the University of Paris, founded by the royal munificence of Louis XIV., or Cardinal Richelieu. Left an orphan in early childhood, with the inheritance of a princely fortune, he had been married, at sixteen years of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most distinguished family of the kingdom, scarcely deemed in public consideration inferior to that which wore the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... lisped in early childhood; but she had grown out of it. Only on occasions of stress and strain did the tendency re-assert itself. She hadn't lisped for a year; and now at this very moment, when she was so especially desirous of appearing grown up and sophisticated, she must go and lisp like a baby! It was too mortifying; ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... user to find just what he is looking for, and to find it quickly. The Graded Index is intended primarily for the use of the parent. It sorts out and selects the best material for each age. First is given a brief, clear account of the tastes and needs of Infancy, Early Childhood, Middle Childhood, Late Childhood, and Adolescence. Then all the material in The BOOKSHELF is assorted under its score of important subjects, and put in the grade where it belongs. By this plan the child ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... temperament, had especially one well-marked phobia, the fear of falling downstairs. It had never been absent all his life, and he had grown used to making the descent of the stairs clinging firmly to the stair-rail. Family tradition assigned this infirmity to a fall downstairs in early childhood. But all children fall downstairs and are none the worse. The persistence of the fear was due, I make no doubt, to the attitude of the parents or nurse, who made much of the accident, impressed the occasion ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... give him a written promise to comply with his Excellency's orders and went away. This policeman's visit and the unexpected invitation to see the governor had a most depressing effect on me. From my early childhood I have had a dread of gendarmes, police, legal officials, and I was tormented with anxiety as though I had really committed a crime and I could not sleep. Nurse and Prokofyi were also upset and could not sleep. And, to make ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... scene. Still another, from a somewhat later period, relates how the mother was once walking with her children and told them a Bible story so touchingly that they all knelt down and prayed. This is about all that has come down concerning Schiller's early childhood. He may have seen the passion-play at Gmuend, but this is uncertain. In any case it only added one more to the religious impressions that already dominated ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... been so little together that we had in common none of those childish remembrances which serve, more powerfully than all else in later life, to cement and soften affection. In fact, I was the scapegoat of the family. What I must have been in early childhood I cannot tell; but before I was ten years old I was the object of all the despondency and evil forebodings of my relations. My father said I laughed at la gloire et le grand monarque the very first time he attempted to explain to me the value of ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... THERESE. Gold medal at International Art Exhibition, Berlin, 1876; medal at Chicago, 1893; second-class medal at Paris Exhibition, 1900. Born in London. From early childhood this artist was fond of drawing and had the usual drawing-class lessons at school and also drew from the antique in the British Museum. Her serious study, however, began at the age of eighteen, under ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... plays with boys, even her own brothers and cousins, and after she reaches twelve or fourteen years of age she scarcely speaks to them. Modesty is a virtue which is deeply impressed upon her from early childhood, and the bashfully drooping head, the averted look, the voice low and seldom heard, these are graces much ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... are called bagontaos, [156] and girls of marriageable age, dalagas. Both classes are people of little restraint, and from early childhood they have communication with one another, and mingle with facility and little secrecy, and without this being regarded among the natives as a cause for anger. Neither do the parents, brothers, or relatives, show any anger, especially if there is any ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... the station, but was then a field, he modelled the great statue of Liberty that crowns the Capitol in Washington, and Washington's own monument which stands in Richmond, and many of his other works. My own early childhood was spent there, among the old-time gardens, and avenues of lordly cypresses and of bitter orange trees, and the moss-grown fountains, and long walks fragrant with half-wild roses and sweet flowers that no one thinks of planting now. Beyond, a wild waste of field and broken land led up ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... early childhood Emma exhibited a passion for music; at three years of age she discoursed upon the piano-forte in such a manner as to excite the marvel of all auditors. The teacher of the village school at that time was one Eugene F. Baldwin, who, being ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... conversation to swing around so as to be able, even with considerable violence, to make the transition he desired. He first let her lead, and she talked to him about the East and the queer ways of the yellow Mongolians she remembered. These memories of early childhood, in the blessed period when care and responsibility had not yet disturbed the spirit's freedom, brought her a certain relief from gnawing reflections. When she tired it was his turn to lead, and he soon slipped into his old grooves and entertained her with stories of the marvelous prices ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... limited, and it was the custom among the wealthy planters to send their sons to England to complete their education. This was done by Augustine Washington with his eldest son Lawrence, then about fifteen years of age, and whom he no doubt considered the future head of the family. George was yet in early childhood: as his intellect dawned he received the rudiments of education in the best establishment for the purpose that the neighborhood afforded. It was what was called, in popular parlance, an "old field school-house;" ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... about this miniature round table, used sometimes to sit with Pere Jerome two friends to whom he was deeply attached—one, Evariste Varrillat, a playmate from early childhood, now his brother-in-law; the other, Jean Thompson, a companion from youngest manhood, and both, like the little priest himself, the regretful rememberers of a fourth comrade who was a comrade no more. Like Pere Jerome, they had come, through ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... share the flowers; we know the light, the fragrance and the birds we know together.... They tell me—even our mother says it sometimes with a sigh—that you are far away, not understanding that we have but recovered the garden of our early childhood, you permanently, I whenever the thrill opens the happy gates. You are as near to me as that. Our love was forged inside those ivory gates that guard that childhood state, facing four ways, and if I wandered outside a-while, puzzled and lonely, the thrill of beauty has led me ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... smiling eyes and a hand upraised to her disordered hair, to note the new-comer. It was Dormer Colville, who laid aside his waterproof as he came and greeted her as an old friend. He had, indeed, known her since her early childhood, and had always succeeded in keeping pace with her, even in the rapid changes of her last ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... and the poor, frightened soldier-boy, who has perhaps spent the night with a prostitute, now prostrates himself before a holy Woman-being who is lifted high above the shames of the flesh, and who stirs the thrills of awe and affection which his mother brought to him in early childhood. Read over the phrases of this "Litany of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... half-exultant, escaped her. For there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing village began to rise from the dull inland level—hills green on the land side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island—she espied the wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her beads. Where it stood, the road from Commequiers and the road she travelled became one: a short mile thence, after winding among the hillocks, it ran down to the beach and ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... when that tremendous slice in a man's life—forty- five years—was overpast, he sloughed off the old garments of Agnosticism, and came back to the Christian faith professed by him in early childhood so conscientiously—and, indeed, up to the year after ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Beacon-Street door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, —you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!—Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.—As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of those who seem to have been born without much interest in religion or fear of the here-after, and in a way I am like you, but with a difference: I acquiesced in early childhood, and accepted traditional beliefs, and tried to find happiness in the familiar rather than in the unknown. Whether I should have found the familiar enough if I hadn't met you, I shall never know. I've thought a good deal on this subject, and it has come to seem to me that we are too much ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... professional killers, had been professional killers for a thousand years. Success in hand to hand combat with any individual foe was every male Roman's ideal of the crowning glory of human life; the thought of it was in every Roman's mind from early childhood, every act of life was a preparation for it. Their wives and sisters shared their enthusiasm for fighting and their daughters inherited the instinct. Combat on the field of battle was felt as the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... ten, I was at ease over its safety; but if over ten years, I was distressed unless I could hear of some words from the one taken away, that would indicate a preparation for the change of worlds. The vividness of those early childhood impressions are frequent reminders of the importance of giving clear explanations to children, in regard to important religious truths, as their young hearts are much more ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... first glance Mathieu had detected that the child was one of those who are fed on pap, stuffed for economy's sake with bread and water, and fated to all the stomachic complaints of early childhood. And at the sight of the poor little fellow, Rougemont, the frightful slaughter-place, with its daily massacre of the innocents, arose in his memory, such as it had been described to him in years ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that, which he might have been, was compelled into that, which he was to be. From his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him stand up on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practiced so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... however, was entirely devoid of any admixture of sexual feeling. But in the consciousness of the full-grown man, in whom homosexual feeling has later undergone full development, all this becomes distorted. The non-sexual motives are forgotten; he believes that even in early childhood he had homosexual inclinations, and that for this reason it gave him pleasure to ride on his ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left—natural history, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... categorical imperative, was lamenting to me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus: "My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... my early childhood was something like this: It seemed that I was very small and that I lay curled up in a sort of nest of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I was lying on my back. In this position it seemed that I spent many hours, watching the play of sunlight on the foliage and the stirring of the leaves ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... time the Puritan theory of life lay at the bottom of the whole system of popular education in New England. According to that theory, it was absolutely essential that every one should be taught from early childhood how to read and understand the Bible. So much instruction as this was assumed to be a sacred duty which the community owed to every child born within its jurisdiction. In ignorance, the Puritans maintained, lay the principal ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... pauperism which rests upon congenital defects. This is illustrated by the case of the deaf. Deaf-mutes are of two sorts: persons who are born deaf, or the congenital deaf-mutes, and persons who become deaf-mutes through diseases affecting the ear in early childhood. These latter are styled adventitious deaf-mutes. Now when congenital deaf-mutes marry, they show a strong tendency to transmit their defect to offspring, but the children of adventitious deaf-mutes are always normal. Dr. Fay, in his investigations into the marriages of the deaf in the United ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... welfare—esteem for his character; but she calmly yet decidedly rejected his addresses. She was grieved, she said, most deeply grieved that anything in her manner towards him had encouraged his hopes. She had acted but as she felt, looking on the companion of her early childhood, the son of her father's and her own kind friend, as a brother and a friend, in which light she hoped he would ever permit her to regard him. Hope found no resting-place in her letter, but it breathed such true and gentle sympathy ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... men existed before the bodies with which they are connected has been held in all ages and has often found expression in literature. The English poets have not infrequently alluded to it. See Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood, 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting' etc.; also, in Tennyson's Two Voices the ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... faery seas forlorn. From Whitebait to Kipper: The Story of Seven Lives, is the vivid record of a family of herrings, set down (posthumously, it would seem) with refreshing simplicity by Walter Herring, the youngest and perhaps the most brilliant of the family. The story begins with the early childhood of Walter, John, Isabel, Margaret, Rupert, Stephanie and little Foch, the last of whom was so named because he was born on the anniversary of the Armistice. (As a matter of fact they were all born on the same day, but for some reason which is not explained only one of them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... and pure as in her early childhood, a gentle image of renunciation, "all unspotted from the world," whose withering breath he had so ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... to the care of the maid, sat down by the window, took up the paper and began to read again. She had kept the custom of glancing through the art news first of all. This habit had been formed in the days of her early childhood, when she and her brother, who was now an actor, used to go to the top gallery of the Burg-Theater together. Her interest in art naturally grew when she attended the conservatoire of music; in those days she had ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... reached the great hulk of Ultra Vires, manipulated one of the airlocks and entered its dark corridors. There was no light, and a test of the light switch proved that the electrical system was no longer operating. But Dark knew every inch of this place from early childhood. He felt his way through the pitch darkness to ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... OF EARLY CHILDHOOD. Wordsworth's sublime Ode. It was a happy thought which led to the presentation of this favorite masterpiece of England's former Poet Laureate, as it here appears with full-page illustrations, by Hassam, Garrett, Lungren, Miss ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... advantages of a half ignorance. From early childhood we had thought of Arabia as the "burning desert"—flat, of course—and of the Red Sea as bordered by "shifting sands" alone. If we had known the truth—if we had not been half ignorant—we would have missed the profound surprise of discovering ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Winnebago City, Minnesota. Lived in New York City since early childhood. Privately educated. Chief interests: decorative art, gardening, people. First published story: "Burned Hands," Harper's Bazar, Nov., 1918. Lives in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... overlooked as predisposing causes in young Hazlitt's later career; as that he was Irish by blood, intellectual by geniture, born into dissent, and a minority of dissent, taught at home to value the things of the mind, in early childhood a nomad, in later childhood 'privately educated'—a process which (whatever its merits) is apt to develop the freak as against the citizen, the eccentric and lop- sided as against what is proportionate ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... piety, the elder one already being as grave as herself, whilst the younger, albeit very devout, was still fond of play, with an intensity of life within her which found vent in gay peals of sonorous laughter. From their early childhood Pierre and Marie played together, the hedge was ever being crossed, the two families constantly mingled. And on that clear sunshiny morning, when he pictured her parting the leafy branches she was already ten years old. He, who was sixteen, was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... from their places of safe keeping or where they are on exhibition as ornaments, and kissed and fondled as expressions of love for the absent giver. This is interesting as evidence of love-fetichism appearing in early childhood. ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... some deeply marked traits of character in common. The Emperor, as was Bismarck, is Prussian, that is to say mediaeval, to the core, notwithstanding that he had an English mother and lived in early childhood under English influences. He has always exhibited, as Bismarck always did, the genuine qualities of the Prussian—self-confidence, tenacity of purpose, absolute trust in his own ideals and intolerance of those of other ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... early childhood to read "with most believing heart" all the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... servant maids who chiefly controlled my early childhood must have been more ignorant than any member of their class in post-Board School days. Yet it seems beyond question clear to me that such beginnings of a mind as I possessed at the age of ten, such mental ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... ever met little girls except at children's balls, and in my early childhood I did not think further of any of them. But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... set-back in early childhood influence him? I wonder! He had another such set-back when he first went on the stage, and for some six weeks in Dublin was subjected every night to groans, hoots, hisses, and cat-calls from audiences who resented him because he had taken the place of a dismissed ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... make life rich in resource and interest, are comparatively few. America needs poetry more than it needs industrial training, though the two ought never to be separated. The time to awaken the imagination, which is the creative faculty, is early childhood, and the most accessible material for this education is the literature which the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... who is just "nervous." Teachers cannot know whether twitching eyes, emotional storms, constant motion of the fingers or feet are due to chorea, to malnutrition, to eye strain, or to habits acquired in babyhood or early childhood and continued for the advantage that accrues when discipline impends. Many a child treasures as his chief asset in time of trouble the ability to lose his temper, to have a "fit," to exhibit nervousness that frightens parent, teacher, or playmate, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... unprovisioned open boat. The child for whose sake they fled, was the only one rescued from the hands of these enemies, and the tradition of their sufferings had been handed on with the faithfully preserved relic, down to the slender girl, their sole descendant, and who in early childhood had drunk in the tale from the lips of her father. The child of the persecutors and of the persecuted, Genevieve Durant did indeed represent strangely the history of her ancestral country; and as Albinia said to her, surely it ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all the old playgrounds and favorite haunts of her early childhood; all her familiar, her secret places; some of them known to John, some to herself alone. There was the spot where the Indian pipes grew; the particular bit of marshy ground where the fringed gentians used to be largest and bluest; the rock maple ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of early childhood there may be freedom, not only from adult authority, but even from the restrictions of nature or of circumstances since "let's pretend" annihilates time and space and all ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... he concealed from observation the stirring little scenes he thus enacted, a love of realism was increasing within him. Early childhood is not fastidious about the accessories of its drama—a cane is vividly a gun which may instantly, as vividly, become a horse; but at Penrod's time of life the lath sword is no longer satisfactory. Indeed, ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... own way. If in early childhood Paul had been scalded on his shoulder by boiling water, he would have a scar whose appearance would denote ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... all the Jigbees—and they were a prolific race—swore that their distinguished relative was a pattern of artlessness and innocence. That she was remarkable from early childhood for a charming frankness and transparent candor. That when this bright ornament of the Jigbee stock was sought in marriage by the defendant, the whole family, with one mind and voice, opposed the match. They had felt that a being of her exalted intellectual ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... existence in my early childhood, and the manner of its conduct was primitive enough, the barter system still prevailing by force of necessity. Those who brought the huge sticks of oak and pine timber for masts and planks were ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Abraham Lincoln's early childhood we know almost nothing. He lived a solitary life in the woods, returning from his lonesome little games to his cheerless home. He never talked of these days to his most intimate friends. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] Once, when asked what he ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... later character appeared in his early childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.... I became ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... reading and oratory. Care and attention, with diligent practice, will keep young persons from falling into the bad habit of imperfect articulation, for most voices are good until domestic or local habits spoil them. Hence the great importance of careful training in early childhood, for if parents and instructors would direct their attention to this matter a manifest improvement would quickly follow; yet, to acquire a good articulation is not so difficult a task "as to ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... have been more pleased with any weapon, short of a rifle, which he could have found for me, since I have been adept with the rope from early childhood; but I must confess that I was less favorably inclined toward my apparel. In so far as the sensation was concerned, I might as well have been entirely naked, so short and light was the tunic. When I asked Chal-az for the Caspakian name ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... From his early childhood onwards, an army of maladies surrounded him, invested him, cut him off if, in an hour of health, he ventured on any sally; but they never overcame his invincible resolution. He was, as one of his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Above, I heard father pacing up and down his rooms, slowly, almost feebly. Sometimes he would hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon a table which had stood beside the head of his bed so burdened since my early childhood. I had always dreaded his moroseness and instinctively felt the cause of it. I had never really loved him until just the last few days, and now I felt my love rise in a tide that threatened ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... children to public ridicule or contempt, tends either to make them sullen and despondent, or else to arouse their resentment and to make them reckless and desperate. Most persons remember through life, some instances in their early childhood, in which they were disgraced or ridiculed at school; and the permanence of the recollection is a test of the violence of ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... to support himself or his wife and family. In the astral world no support is necessary; food is no longer needed, shelter is not required, since he is entirely unaffected by heat or cold; and each man by the mere exercise of his thought clothes himself as he wishes. For the first time since early childhood the man is entirely free to spend the whole of his time in doing just ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... Arthur! it was not so unjustifiable as it seemed then. I dared not breathe the truth in Isabella's court. I dare not whisper it now save to thee, who would die rather than reveal it. Arthur, dearest Arthur, it was no Christian whom I wedded. We had been betrothed from early childhood, though I knew it not; and when the time came, I could not draw down on me a father's curse, or dash with agony a heart that so cherished, so loved me, by revelation of a truth which could avail me nothing, and would bring him but misery. Ferdinand ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... the crises of his early childhood, and at five years old, though pale and weak of limb and almost careworn in face—for he had really retained the old look—he was a healthy boy, who ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread; and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Amos Huntingdon in his early childhood. But the cloud grew darker over him when he had reached the age of ten. It was then that the news came one morning that Mr Sutterby had died, leaving no will, for indeed he had nothing to bequeath except a few small personal effects, which went to some distant cousin. ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... recedes, and his nether lip curls over redly—though the other traits be handsome, and the figure full of grace and strength controlled—trust that man I never could! Such an one I saw once in my early childhood. My mother pointed him out to me and bade me note ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... dear Sirs, accept my grateful thanks for all your goodness to me, from my early childhood to the day, the unhappy day, of my error! Forgive that error!—And God give us a happy meeting in ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... "In my early childhood I had been spared, by the tenderest of mothers, from many of the ablutions practised by the Hindoos, under the belief that they would be injurious to my constitution, which, though healthy, had never been robust. ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... same business. John, a seven months' child, was born at the Swan and Hoop on 31 October, 1795. Three other children grew up—George, Thomas, and Fanny, John is said to have been violent and ungovernable in early childhood. He was sent to a very well-reputed school, that of the Rev. John Clarke, at Enfield: the son Charles Cowden Clarke, whom I have previously mentioned, was an undermaster, and paid particular attention to Keats. The latter did not show any remarkable ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... because she ought to lose it. If she gains physical strength and loses that effeminate delicacy that provides for nothing and cares for nothing but its own selfish, quiet enjoyment, I shall rejoice with joy unspeakable. My strong hands have tilled the fields; and in my early childhood have harnessed the horse, and brought the wood to the door; have led him to the blacksmith's shop to be shod. These are things I do not often tell in public. I have braved public opinion; I have tilled my ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... themselves disarmed and powerless in important circumstances of life, for having neglected in youth the training of the heart's affections! How many are unequal to the task of discharging a painful duty, because they were wont to seek their pleasure in all they did from early childhood! How many who, spite of the chastisement of adversity and deception incurred by their idolizing preference for their levity and affections, still remain the dupes of their blind attachment even in their old age! Your esteem ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... knelt many a humble, loyal, trustful peasant; there was the widowed Dame Ewins, trying to be comforted, as they told her she ought; there was the lady herself, at once sorrowful and yet earnestly thankful; there was Sylvester Enderby, hearing and following the prayers he had been used to in his early childhood, with a growing feeling that here lay the right and the truth; there was Deborah, weeping, grieving over her own fault, and almost heart-broken at the failure of him on whom she had set her warm affections, yet perhaps in a way made wiser, and taught to trust no longer to a broken ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the most beautiful of all his poems Wordsworth calls by the cumbrous name of Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood. This is his way of saying that when we are small we are nearer the wonder-world than when we grow up, and that when we first open our eyes on this world they have not quite forgotten the wonderful sights they saw in that eternity whence we came, for the soul ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the moonlight. As Loo Loo leaned on the balustrade, the clustering roses hung over her in festoons, and trailed on her white muslin drapery. Alfred was struck, as he had been many times before, with the unconscious grace of her attitude. In imagination, he recalled his first vision of her in early childhood, the singular circumstance that had united their destinies, and the thousand endearing experiences which day by day had strengthened the tie. As these thoughts passed through his mind, he gazed upon her with devouring earnestness. She was too beautiful, there in the moonlight, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... attorney of Stark County, and served one term, being defeated two years later for the same office. Mr. McKinley took an active interest in State politics, and made speeches in many of the campaigns. On January 25, 1871, married Miss Ida Saxton. Two daughters were born to them, both of whom died in early childhood. In 1876 was elected a member of the National House of Representatives, and for fourteen years represented the Congressional district of which his county was a part, except for a portion of his fourth term, when he was unseated late in the first session. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... heaven, shall be the type no less of our physical than our spiritual advancement,—when men and women shall arise, keeping through long and happy lives the simple, unperverted appetites, the joyous freshness of spirit, the keen delight in mere existence, the dreamless sleep and happy waking of early childhood? ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... her hand with an air of the deepest attention, and her whole being was in ecstasy from the scattered breathings she heard. They were the virgins of the "Golden Legend" that her imagination called forth, as in her early childhood, and whose mystic flight came from the old book with its quaint pictures, that was placed on the little table. Agnes was first, clothed with her beautiful hair, having on her finger the ring of betrothal to the Priest Paulin. Then all the others came in turn. Barbara with her tower; Genevieve ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... flowering bushes waving over dusky headlands, for it was dark as they crossed the plain; and they had heard rather than seen the rushing stream, bubbling out of the earth, making music in the still night. He knew the stream from early childhood, but he had never really known it until he stood with Jesus under the stars by the narrow pathway cut in the shoulder of the hill, whither the way leads to Capernaum, for it was there that Jesus took his hands and ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... born in a little town in Languedoc," the doctor resumed. "My father had been settled there for many years, and there my early childhood was spent. When I was eight years old I was sent to the school of the Oratorians at Sorreze, and only left it to finish my studies in Paris. My father had squandered his patrimony in the course of an exceedingly wild and extravagant youth. He had ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac |
