"Hobbletehoy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the honorary steward in hour of duty and glory; see me circulate amid crowd, radiating affability and laughter, liberal with my sweetmeats and cigars. I say unblushing things to hobbledehoy girls, tell shy young persons this is the married people's boat, roguishly ask the abstracted if they are thinking of their sweethearts, offer Paterfamilias a cigar, am struck with the beauty and grow curious about the age of mamma's youngest who (I assure her gaily) will be a man before his ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... some occult reason, had the courage to stare back into his grandmother's eyes, quite as if he were a man, and not a hobbledehoy, expecting to ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by a big, square collar of coarse tatten lace laid out on his shoulders like a barber's towel, and illustrating the great red ears that stood out at right angles above it. But Obed was only a boy. He was not expected to be more than clean and speechless; and, to tell the truth, Eben, being in the hobbledehoy stage of boyhood—gaunt, awkward, and self-sufficient—rather surpassed his small brother in unpleasant aspect and manner. But who would look at the boys when Dolly stood beside them, as she did now, tall and slender, with the free grace of an untrammelled figure, her small head erect, her ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... new symptoms supposed to indicate pulmonary weakness, there was a marked improvement in his aspect since he had visited London. He still had that ultra-youthful figure that partook the traits of the hobbledehoy, arrived at man's stature, but not yet possessing the full manly proportions. His extremities were large, his limbs long, his face small, and his thorax very partially developed, especially in girth. An habitual eagerness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... if he had known how to use them. He was tall and active, light and lithe in gesture, not a clumsy hobbledehoy. He had the face that caught the eye, in Rome a few years later, of Keats' Severn, no mean judge, surely, of faces and poet's faces. He was undeniably clever; he knew all about minerals and mountains; he was quite an artist, and a printed ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... a youth, or a lad, or a young man, or a hobbledehoy, or whatever you like to call him, of eighteen or nineteen, or ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... really, the chief danger to me is that I might unconsciously catch some reflection of Lorraine's charm and become dangerously attractive myself, instead of just an outspoken hobbledehoy no one ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... spring, Fyfe's household transferred itself to the Roaring Lake bungalow again. Stella found the change welcome, for Vancouver wearied her. It was a little too crude, too much as yet in the transitory stage, in that civic hobbledehoy period which overtakes every village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way for them into any circle. Stella had ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... never meant to be bedfellows in the harmonious course of nature. One was the unblushing effrontery of the new brick pairing itself brazenly with the venerable gray stone manor-house on the adjoining knoll—impudence perceivable even to a hobbledehoy fresh from the school desk and the dormitory. Another was the total lack of sympathy between ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... to pass that the next scene of this little history opens, not upon the South African veld, or in a whitewashed house in some half-grown, hobbledehoy colonial town, but in a set of the most comfortable chambers in the Albany, the local and appropriate habitation of the bachelor brother ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... novelist writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee protests that the very faults are symptomatic of excellence. He is like a sensitive mother, unable to deny that her awkward hobbledehoy of a son offends against the proprieties, but tacitly resolved to see proofs of virtues present or to come even in his clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like boasting. 'No author,' he says, 'can conceive of the difficulty of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Venice would certainly kill me in the long-run! Why, the sight of this idiotic engraving, the mere name of that coxcomb of a singer, have made my heart beat and my limbs turn to water like a love-sick hobbledehoy. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... a story dealing, of course, with an abnormal character, in abnormal circumstances. It is a quite original variation on the triangle theme. It has genuine humour, and the conclusion leaves one in a muse. "The Hobbledehoy," translated into French as "Un Adolescent," is, on the whole, Dostoevski's worst novel, which is curious enough, coming at a time when he was doing some of his best work. He wrote this while his mind was busy with a great masterpiece, "The Karamazov Brothers," and in this book we get nothing but ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... it, don't he? It did make him so savage when he heard, and he said he wasn't half such a hobbledehoy as old Reb was, and Dicksee said he'd go ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... walk home, when the younger members of the family walked on ahead, and the two older girls followed sedately in the rear. Bridgie's eyes glowed as she looked after her "children", Pat and Miles, tall and graceful even in this their hobbledehoy stage, Esmeralda queening it in their midst, and Pixie dancing blissfully through every puddle ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... doubtless great; but you have others. Witness your pension expenditures. With us the money drawn from the people is used in such a way as to be of inestimable value to them. We take the young hobbledehoy farm-hand or mechanic, ignorant, mannerless, uncleanly as he may be, and turn him out at the end of three years with his regiment, self-respecting and well-mannered, with habits of cleanliness and obedience, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... big-boned hobbledehoy, in sea boots, pushed the stools up towards the fire, on which a log of wood was blazing cheerily. The two Girdlestones sat warming themselves, while the fisherman and his son surveyed them silently with open eyes and mouth, as though they were a ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... encounter, I went out the back way past more gardens and irregular enclosures, where under widespreading cedar-trees I found a boy at the hobbledehoy age chopping wood in a desultory fashion, as though to get rid of time, rather than to enlarge the stack of short sticks, were the most imperative object. Driving his axe in tight and holding on to it as a sort of balance, he leant back, effected a passage in his nostrils, and after having ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... of the daughters of France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; I had fought and conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons. A soldier, a noble, of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I was not an interesting boy, and had I been imposed upon you in my hobbledehoy period, our present relations might never have existed. I must ask your congratulations also," he continued, turning toward the major and his daughter. "My aunt and I have in a sense adopted each other. I came hither to pay her a formal call, and have made ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... hundred times Chuck was right. Any other girl, and this jest might have passed capitally; but he wanted the respect of this particular woman, and he had carelessly closed the doors to her regard. She might tolerate him, that would be all. She would look upon him as a hobbledehoy. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... was all very well for Phillis to say Dick was Dick, and there was an end of it. After all, he belonged to the phalanx of her enemies, those shadowy invaders of her hearth that threatened her maternal peace. Dick was not a boy any longer; he had outgrown his hobbledehoy ways; the slight sandy moustache that he so proudly caressed was not a greater proof of his manhood than the undefinable change that ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey |
