What is "hobby-horse"

Usage examples of "hobby-horse".

The native, first placing a calabash beneath the nose, as it were, of his curious-looking log-steed, for the purpose of receiving the grated fragments as they fall, mounts astride of it as if it were a hobby-horse, and twirling the inside of his hemispheres of cocoanut around the sharp teeth of the mother-of-pearl shell, the pure white meat falls in snowy showers into the receptacle provided.

The Hobby-Horse, who was behind the dolmen, gave a shrill squeak and went off.

I do remember her big hobby-horse was constructing 3-D seismological models, you know, for trying to project what would happen along this faultline if that crustal plate moved in such-and-such a direction.

Old Tabaret took his place at the table, and helped himself to soup, but mounting his hobby-horse again, he forgot to eat, and remained, his spoon in the air, as though suddenly struck by an idea.

She found that, after the Guiser had acted out his mock decapitation, the Sons danced again and the Betty and Hobby-Horse improvised.

This was his hobby-horse, and he was always quoting it, making the passage square with his momentary feelings.

Soon he is allowing her to prepare salads, and confiding minor Arcana of French Haute Cuisine, its historical beginnings among the arts of the Poisoner, its need to be carried on in an Attitude of unwavering Contempt for any who would actually chew, swallow, and attempt to digest it, and come back for more, the first Thousand Pot-lid settings, from Le Gastreau's fam'd article in the Encyclopédie, the Pot-Lid being indeed a particular Hobby-Horse of Armand's, upon its proper Arrangement often hanging the difference between success and failure.

Some of the boys pranced about on richly caparisoned hobby-horses brandishing long javelins with gay streamers of bright ribands attached to them.

At last, however, after a prolonged combat, during which several of the hobby-horses were gored through and through, and their riders dismounted, the young Count of Tierra-Nueva brought the bull to his knees, and having obtained permission from the Infanta to give the coup de grace, he plunged his wooden sword into the neck of the animal with such violence that the head came right off and disclosed the laughing face of little Monsieur de Lorraine, the son of the French Ambassador at Madrid.

There is also the Spelling School, a very spacious building: the School of Looking glasses: the School of Swearing: the School of Critics: the School of Salivation: the School of Hobby-horses: the School of Poetry: the School of Tops [2]: the School of Spleen: the School of Gaming: with many others too tedious to recount.

Nannies monitored overdressed children freed from the Palace Nursery, frolicking with their wooden hobby-horses, their whipping-tops, their pet dwarf-horses the size of small dogs.