Mr Grinder's company, familiarly termed a lot, consisted of a young gentleman and a young lady on
stilts, and Mr Grinder himself, who used his natural legs for pedestrian purposes and carried at his back a drum.
MUST I not wear
stilts, that they may OVERLOOK my long legs--all those enviers and injurers around me?
He asked compassionately if there was anything he could do for me, and, of course, there was something he could do, but were I to propose it I doubted not he would be on his
stilts at once, for already I had reason to know him for a haughty, sensitive dog, who ever became high at the first hint of help.
"Boilers on
stilts, I tell you, striding along like men." Most of them were excited and animated by their strange experience.
Hereupon, the offended fowl stalked away on his long
stilts, and utterly withdrew his notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.
There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic
stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.
It was he who had shot James Maclaren at the plough
stilts, a quarrel never satisfied; yet he walked into the house of his blood enemies as a rider[30] might into a public inn.
The stores and houses was most all old, shackly, dried up frame con- cerns that hadn't ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on
stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was over- flowed.
He stalks serenely along, bringing his cushioned
stilts forward with the long, regular swing of a pendulum, and whatever is in the way must get out of the way peaceably, or be wiped out forcibly by the bulky sacks.
For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on
stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
He had been treated, therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon
stilts. They could not spoil his safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of young nobles.
Tim Linkinwater's sister lamented; the housekeeper condoled; and both kept thrusting their heads out of the second-floor window to see if the boy was 'coming'--which would have been highly satisfactory, and, upon the whole, tantamount to his being come, as the distance to the corner was not quite five yards--when, all of a sudden, and when he was least expected, the messenger, carrying the bandbox with elaborate caution, appeared in an exactly opposite direction, puffing and panting for breath, and flushed with recent exercise; as well he might be; for he had taken the air, in the first instance, behind a hackney coach that went to Camberwell, and had followed two Punches afterwards and had seen the
Stilts home to their own door.