51�Թ�

“It was still not uncommon for pregnant women to prepare themselves for death to the extent of drawing up conduct letters for children, yet unborn or still in leading strings,” Vickery says.

Several Gypsy men were on horseback, riding ahead of or behind their wagons or leading strings of mules and horses.

Carnesford, now a good-sized village, had once been a tiny hamlet, an appanage of Carne's Hold, but it had long since grown out of leading strings, and though it still regarded The Carnes with something of its old feudal feeling, it now furnished no suit or service unless paid for so doing.

He never would, if he could, render any service to liberty; he cannot understand the elements and first principles of popular freedom; to him the people is always, as a child, to be kept in leading strings and guided, and, if at all boisterous or naughty, smartly birched and put in a dark corner.

It was a revelation of an unpleasant kind to find himself in leading strings; the state of dependence of which the abb� hinted long ago, to be ordered like a lacquey, to be threatened and browbeaten in the presence of others--he, Marquis de Gange, above all, under the eyes of the affinity, and to be powerless to return blow for blow.