Behind him at a discreet distance came a small boy, also attired inantic fashion, carrying carefully in both hands a huge pie.
As one passed they would cease to pluck the grass and begin to dance slowly, such dainty, antic steps, with their heads held down and their pale eyes looking upwards with a joke in them.
Sometimes the dancers themselves sing, dart terribly threatening looks, stamp their feet upon the ground, and exhibit a thousand antic postures and grimaces.
They stamp and jump, and use the most antic gestures for several hours, till they are heartily weary.
With antic toys so funnily bestuck, Light as the singing bird that wings the air,-- (The door!
Again, in the case of a pair of crested grebes that I watched during two successive springs everything (and there was once something very striking) in the nature of an antic or display was indulged in equally by the male and female.
To me it seems that the so-called bathing of many aquatic birds much more resembles an antic than movements made for a definite purpose--or rather I suspect that the one thing is in process of passing into the other.
I can, I think, see another reason why the bathing of aquatic birds has passed, as I believe it has in several instances, into an antic or something partaking of that character.
Montagu, Town Eclogues: "Where the tall jar erects its stately pride, With antic shapes in China's azure dyed.
He had studied the remotest details of his business; he was sternly professional in the conduct of his life, and, as became an old gaol-bird, there was no antic of the policeman wherewith he was not familiar.
With antic toys so funnily bestuck, Light as the singing bird that wings the air-- (The door!
You felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna.
The antic touch of the baroque is scarcely present in it, for, being newly rebuilt after the fire which destroyed the fourth-century basilica in 1823, its faults are not those of sixteenth-century excess.
How dares the slave come hither, covered with an antic face, to fleer and scorn at our solemnity?
They would not lay So dull an antic on me, and this charge Is meant for Bico, my fat monkey here, Whom they may have for trial.
Thus the devotee is thrown out the whole length of the rope, where, as he swings, he plays a thousand antic tricks; being painted and dressed in a very particular manner, on purpose to make him look more ridiculous.
These antic animals he also instructed to play several fanciful tricks, such as drinking to the company, riding and tumbling upon the horse's back, and going through several regular dances with the dog.
When he is not seen, and while his listeners are looking for the enchanter on the roof of their own houses, he is perhaps playing his antic tricks on the chimney-top of some house at a considerable distance.
South Africa, and their appearance on the parade in an antic dance produced a rush to witness the further representations of the manners and sports of savage life to be seen inside.
His portrait in Tempest's collection represents him in the act of shouldering his leg, an antic which is imitated by a monkey.
Assuming it to have been so, then here is a habit of a sport or antic between three birds at the end of an excited chase of each other.
Once, but only once, I saw one indulging in an antic which was sufficiently striking, but of quite a different character.
In this case, we should have a pure antic or display, the reason of it being unobvious and its origin a puzzle.
I'll say an honest antic rhyme I have: Help me, good sorrow-mates, to give him grave.
Not in the most genial club could we have been more kindly treated than in the dressing room where we found Pat Valdo opening his trunk and getting out the antic costumes he had provided.
He thinks of them, in his antic bachelor years, as merely the wrecking train of the sartorial system, a casual conjunction for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small clothes.
If this be so, then what should they do here, Who in their antic pranks of pride appear?
But what can be the end of those that are proud in the decking of themselves after their antic manner?
He liked to embarrass her gravity with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her endeavors to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident trouble when she could find none.
He pushed on to Providence, stifling these antic misgivings as he might, and without allowing himself time to falter from his intent, he set out to find Mrs. Vervain's house.
Over-confidence and an unusually violent antic of the Elsinore caused the disaster.
The outward effect was a see-saw antic with his imposing eyebrows--a proof to me that his sense of the ridiculous had got the better of his gravity.
The water there, Variously dappled by the wreathed sand That sleeps below in many an antic shape, Like the mild plumage of the pheasant-hen Soothes the beholder's eye.
