Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




More "Cackle" Quotes from Famous Books



... by conventions; they cannot even express admiration in fitting language; they may giggle or cackle so that every ripple of laughter and every turn of a phrase sounds nauseously insincere. Marion Dearsley durst not talk frankly with this fine fellow, but she ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... in the mind to suffer" was not a point by which he, "more an antique Roman than a Dane," was at all troubled. Never had he given ear to that cackle which is called Public Opinion. The judgment of his peers—this, he had often told himself, was the sole arbitrage he could submit to; but then, who was to be on the bench? Peerless, he was irresponsible—the captain of his soul, the despot of his future. No injunction but from himself ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... to this mental question a peal of elfish laughter greeted his ear,—a mirthless, falsetto cackle, like that of a parrot, and half hidden behind one of the great marble lions in the shade of the loggia he discerned a grotesque little creature, with the figure of a child and a woman's face, old in its expression ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... Rome, a detachment in single file scaled the hill on which the capitol stood, so silently that the foremost man reached the summit without being challenged; but while striding over the rampart, some sacred geese were disturbed, and by their cackle aroused the guard. Marcus Manlius rushed to the wall, and hustled the Gaul ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... up, and was trying to decide whether some green sprouts were chickweed or the dilatory balsams when a sudden uproar in the next garden made her stop to listen, while Miss Henny said in a tone of great satisfaction, as the cackle ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... was once observed to attach itself in the strongest and most affectionate manner to the house dog, but never offered to go into the kennel except in rainy weather. Whenever the dog barked, the goose would cackle, and run at the person she supposed the dog barked at, and try to bite him by the heels. She would sometimes try to feed with the dog, but this the dog, who treated his faithful companion with indifference, ...
— Anecdotes of Animals • Unknown

... ask her whose ring she was wearing this week; but although both had noticed the new ornament instantly, wild horses could not have drawn the question from them; her desire to be asked was too obvious. With her gay plumage, her "nods and becks and wreathed smiles," and her cheerful cackle, Huldah closely resembled the parrot in ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the circumambient ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... Milking the Cows, Carrying in Wood, Cooking for the Hands, and other Delsarte such as the Respected Farmer usually Frames Up for his Wife, she was as thin as a Rail and humped over in the Shoulders. She was Thirty, and looked Sixty. Her Complexion was like Parchment and her Voice had been worn to a Cackle. She was losing her Teeth, too, but Henry could not afford to pay Dentist Bills because he needed all his Money to buy more Poland Chinas and build other Cribs. If she wanted a Summer Kitchen or a new Wringer or a Sewing Machine, or Anything ...
— More Fables • George Ade

... finished that idiotic cackle, perhaps you will explain how a monkey comes to be acquainted with the ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... Cloelia for their guide. High on a rock heroic Manlius stood, To guard the temple, and the temple's god. Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatch'd with straw, now roof'd with gold. The silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and, by her cackle, sav'd the state. She told the Gauls' approach; th' approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend, and seize the walls. The gold dissembled well their yellow hair, And golden chains on their white necks they wear. Gold are their vests; long Alpine ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... were great tales going the world over about her lace making and her getting famous and proud through the length of the land and I mind well the cackle of a laugh she gave. 'The loveliest lace, is it? Now, isn't that the great wonder surely? The wizenedy, wrinkled old hag with the God-help-you face makes the loveliest lace—' Then she stopped short off and clapped a claw over her mouth and the scar on her pockmarked ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... for to-day our chance and hope were lost. Then the darkness grew deeper, and a star shone through my casement, and feet went up and down upon the stairs, but no man came near me. Below there was some faint cackle of mirth and laughter, and at ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... The cackle of a hen when she lays an egg, says a scientist, is akin to laughter. And with some of the eggs we have met we can easily guess what the hen was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various

... having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; the cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... be so, and if so, Stumps, I shall continue to cackle a little longer on deck while they are ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne

... The inherent insincerity, more or less, of all literary work is a fact of which he had not thought. I am speaking of the mere 'author,' the writer-tradesman, the amateur's superstition; not of men of genius, who, despite cackle, cannot disappoint. If they seem to do so, it must be that we have not come close enough to know them. But the man of genius is rarer, perhaps, in the ranks of authorship than anywhere: you are far more likely to find him on ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... took Nicky White I dare say I was the only party in Little Silver that didn't raise an upstore and cackle about it, because to the common mind it was a proper shock, while to me, in my far-seeing way, I knew that, just because it was the last thing on earth you might have thought Jenny would do, it might be looked for ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts

... in her garden picking flowers for the table. Indoors was a delightful flurry of preparation: from the kitchen came a clatter of pans, and a variety of appetizing odors; above the cackle of Lisa and Gertrudis rang the merry laugh of Juanita as she waited on the busy cooks; while Miguel could be seen haunting the region ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs

... Carnehan, with a dry cackle, nursing his feet which were wrapped in rags. “True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads—me and Dravot —poor Dan—oh, poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not though I begged ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling

... existence, and his consequent horror of ennuyering his world—in short, to perceive the joke of life is rarely given to our people, whilst it forms the mainspring of the Parisian's savoir plaire. The finesse of the Frenchman, acquired in long loafing and clever cafe cackle—the glib go and easy assurance of the petit creve, combined with the chic of great habit—the brilliant blague of the ateliers—the aptitude of their argot—the fling of the Figaro, and the knack of short paragraphs, which allows him to print ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... an operation would sometimes laugh uproariously or cackle fiendishly. Or they would break into torrents of filthy language. One man yelled in a crazy voice that England was the most glorious country on earth and that he had done his best to be a good soldier. Then he was seized by a fit of violent ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... even the ambitious among them set out with the deliberate purpose of becoming the beggars of men's votes; of winning an office the chief worth of which, in their eyes, lies in its emoluments?—when even the glorious and far-sounding voice of fame for them means only the gabble and cackle ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... Governor was one of those men that takes a bit of trouble and considers over a thing before he says yes or no. When he says a thing he sticks to it. When he goes forward a step he puts his foot down, and all the blowing, and cackle, and yelping in the world ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... Only think, and you'll find on reflection You're bargaining, ma'am, for the Voice of Affection; For the language of Wisdom, and Virtue, and Truth, And the sweet little innocent prattle of Youth: Not to mention the striking of clocks - Cackle of hens—crowing of cocks - Lowing of cow, and bull, and ox - Bleating of pretty pastoral flocks - Murmur of waterfall over the rocks - Every sound that Echo mocks - Vocals, fiddles, and musical-box - And zounds! to call such a concert dear! But I mustn't 'swear with my horn in your ear.' Why, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... them patiently till the cackle of shrill voices had exhausted itself, and the six women stood on the sunny mud floor of the hut eyeing each other with venomous glances; for though they were good neighbors at all times, each, in this matter, was hungry for the advantages ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... grip of iron, scrubbed her face with his handkerchief, dabbed it thickly with powder from a small silver box, threw back her head and went up two stairs at a time. On the second floor there was a cackle of laughter, but doors were shut. On the third all was quiet. But on the fourth the tall, thin, Raphael-headed man was drunk again, arguing thickly in the usual cloud of smoke, which drifted sullenly into the passage ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... won't trust anybody but you to tie the knot for me!" That, of course, was what Ascham would think he was wanted for. Granice, at the idea, broke into an audible laugh—a queer stage-laugh, like the cackle of a baffled villain in a melodrama. The absurdity, the unnaturalness of the sound abashed him, and he compressed his lips angrily. Would he take to ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... January we heard a faint cackle outside, and, opening the kitchen door, found our poor widow in a sorry plight. One foot was frozen, her feathers were all rough and dirty, her wings drooping, her bright comb changed to a dull red. How she escaped from the hen-house, ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... time Sitting-Bull made his appearance. He said, just as though I could hear him at this moment: "A bird, when it is on its nest, spreads its wings to cover the nest and eggs and protect them. It cannot use its wings for defense, but it can cackle and try to drive away the enemy. We are here to protect our wives and children, and we must not let the soldiers get them." He was on a buckskin horse, and he rode from one end of the line to the other, calling out: "Make a brave fight!" We were all hidden ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... grunted John Flint, and scowled. "Huh! If it wasn't for Madame and a few more like her, I'd say women and hens are the two plum-foolest things God has found time to make yet. If you don't believe it, watch them stand around and cackle over the first big dunghill rooster that walks on his wings before them! There are times when I could wring their necks. Dern a fool, anyhow!" He wriggled in ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... a barn roof, nor the blue sky above him, but a neat white ceiling, where several flies buzzed sociably together, while from without came, not the tramping of horses, the twitter of swallows, or the chirp of early birds, but the comfortable cackle of hens and the sound of two little voices chanting ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... an' see the parade! Willow Lane's gettin' awful high-toned!" There was a loud cackle of laughter and Madame's shoulders shook with suppressed merriment. "That's Gladys Hurd," she said, shaking her head. "Poor Gladys, I'm afraid she's not a very good girl. She's not got a very ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith

... you may count on me. If that antidote turns up, I shall not fail to cackle over it in your columns. By the by, are you going to review the poison? Excuse so many mixed metaphors," she added, with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Faugh, he don't know no more why he's a Republican than a yeller dog'd know! I went around to-night, when he was out, thought mebbe I could fix it up with the others. No, sir! Couldn't git nothing out of 'em except some more parrot-cackle: 'Vote same Petro. All a good Republican!' It's ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... broad canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details of a modern bedroom: a brief brightness, night and the odor of carrion, a crucified lion, a dying woman, the jeering of ribald mercenaries, the cackle of M. Homais. It is all one. If Flaubert deserved prosecution, it was not for making vice attractive, but for expressing with invasive energy that personal and desperately pessimistic conception of life by which he ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... New England hearts in December. The short, dark days seemed shorter and darker than usual that year, but one morning the sky had a look of Indian summer, the wind was in the south, and the cocks and hens of the Packer farm came boldly out into the sunshine, to crow and cackle before the barn. It was Friday morning, and the next day was the ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett

... a old hen called out of her spear, and unhenly, because she would fly out at a hawk, and cackle loud, and cluck, and try to lead her chickens off into safety. And while the rooster is a steppin' high, and struttin' round, and lookin' surprised and injured, it is the old hen that saves the chickens, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... a drink at Pfahlert's Hotel, where a counter lunch—as good as many dinners you get for a shilling—was included with a sixpenny drink. "Get a quiet corner," said Mitchell, "I like to bear myself cackle." So we took our beer out in the fernery and got a cool place at a little table in a quiet ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson

... surprise," she said, with an apologetic cackle, "it ain't to be suppose as miraculs can be performed with regard to cookin', the fire havin' gone out, not bein' kept alight on account of the 'eat of the day, which was that 'ot as never was, tho', to be sure, bein' a child ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... Ho, Phaedrias! shall we stop their cackle? Suppose one of us were to break a stick ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... personality—that hen: you couldn't keep her down; she never went in when it rained, and she could cackle louder than any hen on the ground; and above all, she took things as they came. I always admired her. I liked the way she died, too. Of course I let her live as long as she could—she wouldn't have been any good to eat, anyway, for she was all brains, and I never could bear to make soup out of ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... Alexandre, sur les Tribulations d'un Israelite Strasbourgeois Pendant la Terreur," p. 37. Order issued by General Dieche to Coppin, in command of the "Seminaire" prison. "Strive with the utmost zeal to suppress the cackle of aristocrats." Such is the sum of the instructions to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... really over, over at last, and still a little bewildered, she turned. The butler and the maid were leaving the room, which they must have entered when the ceremony first over-whelmed her. From the hall a slight cackle floated back. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... of the great routes for the migration of birds. Yesterday and several times to-day I saw flocks of geese flying over our heads and steering south, likely on their way to the Nile and great African lakes. During last night they kept up a constant cackle as ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson

... gander (male goose); gosling (young goose); graylag, ganza (wild goose); goslet; pl. geese; Anseres, Anseriformes. Associated Words: anserene, anserous, gosherd, yang, honk, gaggle, cackle. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... stalwart old peasants Were chuckling together; They'd two hundred roubles In notes, the old rascals! 260 Safe hidden away In the end of their coat-tails. They both had been yelling, ''We're beggars! We're beggars!'' So carried them home. ''Well, well, you may cackle!'' I thought to myself, ''But the next time, be certain, You won't laugh at me!'' The others were also 270 Ashamed of their weakness, And so by the ikons We swore all together That next time we rather Would die of the beating Than feebly give way. It seems the ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov

... amazement. Is such coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really the mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is Titian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as the noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity, after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the knuckles and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... impetus from the rulers, because their whole life—not merely their official life—was lived in this land; and it is the wholeness of life from which originates Art. But our English teachers are birds of passage; they cackle to us, but do not sing,—their true heart is not in ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... from an attack of the enemy. The night was dark and stormy, and the trained eyesight and keen hearing of the Roman outposts failed to reveal the approach of the enemy. But, the keen sense of the geese felt the presence of strange men, and they started to cackle loudly, aroused the guard, and Rome was saved. Skeptical persons have sought to explain this historical case by the theory that the geese heard the approaching enemy. But this explanation will not serve, for the Roman soldiers were marching ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... "For the wide world old Miriam grieves, and at home without bread her children she leaves." He's sorry for the girl, but not sorry for his own son! Sling her round your neck and carry her about with you! That's enough of such empty cackle! ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy

... say, a cackle of laughter issued from his mouth, while his glazed eyes stared idiotically. "He shall tell us about it. Waiter, a ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... inconceivable that, with this magnificent work en evidence, the critics of that age should have been contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that "as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit," and to cackle the foot-rule criticisms of the Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance of composition. But so it was. Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1814, was it thoroughly understood how excellent and individual both as a designer and a colourist was this native ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... many tall sinners down upon their knees, there lived near this place a meagre miserly fellow of the name of Tom Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on she hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the new-laid egg. Her husband was continually prying about to detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in a forlorn-looking house, that stood alone ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... sit here and cackle like Asian birds, Commodus renames Rome the City of Commodus and still ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... "Guess we can't do no better," he said doubtfully. "I mean," he added in answer to the shout of laughter from the team—"Aw, shut up, can that cackle. We know the Master hates football an' this is goin' to be a real fightin' game. He'll get all knocked about an' I don't want that. You know he'll be ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... into the par. Eight men made its retinue, and two of the eight were armed with rusty sabres—sure signs that they followed a person of distinction, for the common folk do not bear arms. An increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and jests, and what to a European would have been bad language, came from behind the curtains. Here was evidently a woman ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... Little Stevie cuss! Better get in on it. Some fight! Tennelly sent 'Whisk' for a whole basket of superannuated cackle-berries"—he motioned back to a freshman bearing a basket of ancient eggs—"we're going to blindfold Steve and put oysters down his back, and then finish up with the fire-hose. Oh, the seven plagues of Egypt aren't in it with what we're going to do; and when we get done if ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... enough, he pecks at you with his great beak. When he is in a good temper he will say, "Poor, poor!" He will sit upon the ivy all the morning and talk to himself, and he will call the gardener, and he will cough and sneeze, and crow and cackle, in a very funny manner. If Jacko sees sparrows picking up a few crumbs, he will rush up, sweeping his great wings along the ground, and take their meal for himself. If he sees poor Pussy picking a bone, he takes great delight in creeping down from his ivy, helping himself down with beak ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous

... midnight, as I lay in my little cabin, by a heavy blow struck at the sides of the canoe close to my head, which was succeeded by the sound of a weighty body plunging into the water. I got up; but all was again quiet, except the cackle of fowls in our hen-coop, which hung over the side of the vessel about three feet from the cabin door. I could find no explanation of the circumstance, and, my men being all ashore, I turned in again and slept until morning. I then found my poultry loose about the canoe, and a large ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... in a dry, mirthless cackle of laughter, and slapped his knees, much as if he had heard ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... a dry cackle, nursing his feet, which were wrapped in rags. "True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads—me and Dravot—poor Dan—oh, poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not though I ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the wild hillside, the keen pure air, the steady setters, the flap and cackle of the rising grouse, the ringing shot that laid him low, born in the purple, and fated there to die. Nor, when corn-fields were cleared, and partridges, almost as swift as bullets and as numerous as locusts, were driven to and fro across the open, was his aim to be foiled ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... words which convey thought?' Ay, if words never needed enswathe aught But ignorance, impudence, envy And malice—what word-swathe would then vie With yours for a clearness crystalline? But had you to put in one small line Some thought big and bouncing—as noddle Of goose, born to cackle and waddle And bite at man's heel as goose-wont is, Never felt plague its puny os frontis— You'd know, as you hissed, spat and sputtered, Clear 'quack-quack' ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... extraordinary and humiliating position for him. He had never been known to carry anything, not even himself if he could help it, since the day his mother died and ceased to force him to carry in wood and water for her at the end of a hickory switch. He glanced uneasily round with a slight cackle of dismay as he arrived in the unaccustomed plush surroundings and tried to find some place to dump his load. But the well-groomed Herbert strode down the long aisle unnoticing and took possession of the section he had secured as if he owned ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill

... said, "It is surely a waterfowl, a duck, or it may be a goose; if we took it to the water it would swim and gabble." But another said, "It has no webs to its feet; it is a barn-door fowl; should you let it loose it will scratch and cackle with the others on the dung-heap." But a third speculated, "Look now at its curved beak; no doubt it is a parrot, and can crack nuts!" But a fourth said, "No, but look at its wings; perhaps it is a bird of great flight." But several cried, "Nonsense! No one has ever seen it fly! Why should ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... a beastly way that I wouldn't put up with it,' said the other. 'He may be "the cock of the walk," but he need not think we are all going to cackle to him like a set of hens. I mean to take that fellow out of Coventry after this. Come on, let us both walk home with him a bit, and see how the cock likes that. There's Howard ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie

... his short, cracked cackle. "Jest old-fashioned house-work, dish-washing and such. 'Help' can't be had in Millings, and Girlie and Babe kick like steers when Momma leads 'em to the dish-pan. Not that you'd have to do it all, you know, just lend a hand to Momma. Maybe ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt

... became frenzy; his love of gold turned to horror; his reason fled; and he dashed himself wildly against the prison which he had reared, until he fell, bleeding and broken. And as he fell, he heard the shrill cackle of demons that danced their hellish steps on the top of the wall. Then the Furies flew ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... it on was upon him, and gosh! they don't mind silences in this man's island, do they? he commented desperately to himself, thinking how different it was from America. Why, there they acted as if silence was an egg that had just been laid, and everyone had to cackle at once to cover it up. But here the talk constantly fell to the ground, and nobody but himself seemed concerned to pick it up. His attempt to praise Chev had not been successful, and he could understand their not wanting to hear about flying ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... devil's cackle that passed with him for a laugh, and stepping close to my side, spoke ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... scowl near Gibraltar, or of Santa Cruz, Tenerife. The men are comparatively noiseless; a bawling voice startles you like a pistol-shot. I rarely heard a crying child or a scolding woman offering 'eau benite a la Xantippe;' even the cocks and hens tied to old shoes cackle with reserve. The climate tames everything from Dom to donkey. Except in January and February it is still, intensely still—the very leaves seem to hang motionless. This softness shows itself especially in the language, which ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... an uncontrollable cackle which issued from the mouth of Mr. Arp. The Colonel turned upon him with a frown, inquiring the cause ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... breezy; geese cackle over its grass, and you may see more than one cricket match being played on holiday afternoons. Once, in 1877, eleven Mitchells played eleven Heaths on the common; the Heaths were all of the same family, but the Mitchells, though ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... heard the cackle of laughter. Guns cracked. Still the doomed man pushed forward. He went down, struck in the body, but dragged himself to ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... Lake Huron still to the Indian. Also there is all the refinement of civilized life in the woods under a sylvan garb. The wildest scenes have an air of domesticity and homeliness even to the citizen, and when the flicker's cackle is heard in the clearing, he is reminded that civilization has wrought but little change there. Science is welcome to the deepest recesses of the forest, for there too nature obeys the same old civil laws. The little red bug ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... have a kind of dry ring to them, the flies are sticky, and the hens cackle. I meant to go fishing, but I couldn't find any worms. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... what he means by always saying he'll have revenge before spring. It makes me creep to hear him cackle and gloat. I think ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... kind to them as he would be to an ailing dog at home. If the sentimentalist's womenfolk go with him, the tour is made still more pleasing. The ladies shudder with terror as they trail their dainty skirts up noisome stairs; but their genteel cackle never ceases. "And you earn six shillings per week? How very surprising! And the landlord takes four shillings for your one room? How very mean! And you have—let me see—four from six leaves two—yes—you ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... a rush—the pewter dinner service, and spotless parlour, smelling of lavender and soap, the cackle of hens and lowing of cows. Eleanor pushes aside the dish of bananas, "Let us go out in the moonlight," she says. "It is lovely in the garden, and you can smoke. Let me light your cigar?" striking a match on the sole of her velvet slipper, ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham

... you preferably pass your days— But brawl no moment longer than it pays. By shouting when no more you can incite The dogs to put the timid sheep to flight To load, for you, the brambles with their fleece, You cackle concord to congenial geese, Put pinches of goodwill upon their tails And pluck them with a touch ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it. He had such a comfortable thing of it! But he went too far. In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of Elmira. To say that this is appalling ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... to get an egg," Aggie replied, with gentle obstinacy. "I am starving, Tish, and I am certain I heard a hen cackle. Probably one of ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the cackle," he said impatiently. "Tell me what you want me to do, and make it plain, very plain, for I can tell you there's a good deal about all this I don't understand, and I'm not inclined to trust you far. For one thing, what are you after yourself? Where do you come in? What are ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon

... and he rubbed his hands, and brightened his eyes savagely. 'That's the way. Opportunity for gossip! Thing's well done—down it goes: you know that. You can't have a word over it—eh? Thing's done fit to toss on a dungheap, aha! Then there's a cackle! My belief is, you do it on purpose. Can't be such rank idiots. You do it on purpose. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... wrong yet," he seemed to be saying to himself. "As soon as she's made a bit of money, she wants everybody to have it. It's the hen and the egg all over again—they've simply got to cackle." ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston

... the depths of starry space; one of those black abysms that are the despair of astronomer and telescope. Ahem!" Pobloff looked so conscious as he wiped his perspiring mop of a forehead that the tenor trombone coughed in his instrument. The strange cackle caused the composer to start: "How's that, what's that?" The man apologized. "Yes, yes, of course you didn't do it on purpose. But how did you do it? Try it again." The trombone blatted and the orchestra roared with laughter. "Gentlemen, gentlemen, this will never do. I needed just ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... inappropriate. Even actors are apt to underrate the importance of the speeches they are called upon to deliver, laying the greater stress upon the "business" they propose to originate, or the scenic effects that are to be introduced into the play. They sometimes describe the words of their parts as "cackle." But perhaps this term also may be accepted as applying, fitly enough, to much of the dialogue of ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... with the most discordant din it had ever been my fortune to hear. A mingling of honk and cackle, it manifested not excitement so much as curiosity. I walked among the boobies, and they never moved except to pick at me with long, sharp bills. Many were sitting on nests, and all around in the sand were nests with eggs, and little boobies just hatched, ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... chloride of sodium. Every man who knows as much about political economy as a terrapin does of the Talmud is well aware that a rise in the price of one commodity simultaneous with the decline in price of another commodity has nothing whatever to do with the currency question. Those who cackle about a rise in wheat synchronously with the fall of silver make a very indecent exposure of their own ignorance. If I had a ten-year old boy who was such a hopeless idiot I'd drown him as not worth honest grub, then seek a surgeon and make sure that I'd never ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... a sudden loud cackle of laughter. "Why! the feller tole me 'at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when it come t' history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... were not common. The seasons were always late in this place—it was high above the sea—and redpoles often used to nest not far off late in the summer; siskins did the same once or twice, and greenfinches, till the beginning of August, used to cackle endlessly ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge

... real state of the case would never have been known at all in the regiment but for Captain Dobbin's indiscretion. The Captain was eating his breakfast one day in the mess-room, while Cackle, the assistant-surgeon, and the two above-named worthies were speculating upon Osborne's intrigue—Stubble holding out that the lady was a Duchess about Queen Charlotte's court, and Cackle vowing she was an opera-singer of the worst reputation. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... out in the country a short distance, out on the Bloomfield pike. She found he was from Bloomfield and trilled away in a high, shrill cackle that she loved every stick and stone in that adorable country. And when she found that he was the nephew of Mrs. Mosby, or, rather, Loraine Fawcette, that was, her ecstasy knew ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... with a laugh. To threaten a king was so funny that he could not refrain from a hoarse cackle. But Sarah had become suddenly silent. She was looking not at him, but behind him. Pharaoh turned, but observed nothing. He could not see what Sarah saw—a figure, a spirit, clutching ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... with a cackle of humorous enjoyment. "He has his spells of bein' decent, and he's pootty smart, too. But when the other spell ketches him it's like as if the devil got a-hold of him, as I said in the first place. I lost my wife here two-three years along back, and that little girl you see him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... has been thy Fortune, such thy Doom. Swift the Ghouls gathered at the Poet's Tomb, With Dust of Notes to clog each lordly Line, Warburton, Warton, Croker, Bowles, combine! Collecting Cackle, Johnson condescends To INTERVIEW the Drudges of your Friends. Thus though your Courthope holds your merits high, And still proclaims your Poems POETRY, Biographers, un-Boswell-like, have sneered, And Dunces edit him ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... present to the envious world the proud spectacle of an Englishman honoured by the great French nation. I will narrate the matter as briefly as is consistent with my respect for accuracy, and with my contempt for the tapioca-brained nincompoops who snarl, and chatter, and cackle at me in the organ of Mr. J. Last Friday I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various

... shrikish notes; then instantly shook his wings with an extraordinary flapping noise, and followed that with several highly curious and startling cries, the concluding one of which sometimes suggested the cackle of a robin. All this he repeated again and again with the utmost fervor. He could not have been more enthusiastic if he had been making the sweetest music in the world. And I confess that I thought he had reason to be proud of his work. The introduction of ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey

... possession too of a very handsome person; the only thing his father has ever given him. His grandfather, Lord Granville, has always told him to choose a gentlewoman, and please himself; yet I should think the ladies Townshend and Cooper would cackle a little. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... of the office vanished from Ann Eliza's sight, and the cackle of the innumerable clocks came to her like the yell of waves in a storm. She tried to speak but could not; tried to get to her feet, ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to travel south with me when I ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... of a row Americans make," he said even before they were out of hearing of the voices. "It will be a positive rest to be in a country where the women do not cackle ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Hen! Layer and sitter Of really first-rate quality. Though rival fowls are enviously bitter, That doth not bate her jollity. Her duties CAQUET BONBEC'S game to tackle, Without much cackle. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various

... sentiments as a violent partisan would not dare to utter except in the unguarded heat of familiar discourse, or the half-humorous ferocity of intoxication. Have done, he said, addressing the Dissenters, with this cackle about Peace and Union, and the Christian duties of moderation, which you raise now that you find "your day is over, your power gone, and the throne of this nation possessed by a Royal, English, true, and ever—constant member of and friend to the Church ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... dangerous, excites his unbounded mirth and ridicule, and he snickers and chatters, hardly able to contain himself; now darting up the trunk of a tree and squealing in derision, then hopping into position on a limb and dancing to the music of his own cackle, and ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... drug all thought; and by Travel I mean Nature, and books, and art, and music, since these are, after all, but dream-voyages in other men's minds—they alone are for me the panacea of pain. Not the cackle of the human tongue—that for ever leaves me cold; not the sympathy which talks and reproves, or turns on the tap of help and courage by the usual trite source—that never helps me to forget. But Work, and Travel, and (for me) Loneliness—these are the three things by which I flee from haunting terrors ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... know it was hens! Never cackle about contrivances. Things mustn't be contrived; they must happen. Woman and her accidents,—mine are ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, "There—there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves me—she loves me!" He then permitted her to slip down from his knee and withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk which our entrance had interrupted. It was chiefly about ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... stone wall the men under Quinnox stood their ground; a solid, defiant line that fired with telling accuracy into the struggling horde. On the walls two Gatling guns began to cackle their laugh of death. And still the mercenaries poured through the gap, forming in haphazard lines under the direction of the ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... a moment of silence; then a cackle of words from several of them together. The Greek's hands on his shoulders tightened. He heard the man's purring voice ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... toward the desolate old soul. But ever and anon, sometimes in the midst of his most earnest talk, this ancient person's intellect would wander vaguely, losing its hold of the matter in hand and groping for it amid misty shadows. Then would he cackle forth a feeble laugh and express a doubt whether his wits—for by that phrase it pleased our ancient friend to signify his mental powers—were not getting a little the worse ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... sound of a hammer on a brazen vessel. Nearly as widely distributed are the various species of green barbet (Thereiceryx), whose call is scarcely less exasperating than that of the coppersmith, and may be described as the word kutur shouted many times and usually preceded by a harsh laugh or cackle. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar

... the female cackle at the Club till Honor's name was introduced, and then he could no longer hold his peace. "What about Honor ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... gentlemen, good gentlemen, we crave your kind attention! Here's Summer, at your service (till you bid the lady stop); Good gentlemen, she's songs for you—'tis time to drop dissension; 'Tis time to cut the cackle and to close awhile the shop; For stags shall be in Badenoch, and Kent hath ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various

... at her side, she said, "You know what an evening is like at such times as this. We women will adjourn to the Drawing Room, you men will presently join us, there will be a buzzing of voices, talk—'cackle' one of America's representatives used to term it, and it was a good name, only that the hen has done something to cackle about, she has fulfilled the purpose for which she came into existence, and women—the average Society women, at least—do not. Then there'll be singing, ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from what little humanity I had known until then—I had found that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was driving me to conclude, however, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... who had been drinking steadily ever since leaving the Lazy D, laughed his low, sinister cackle. "Afraid of me, are y'u? Afraid ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine

... form a pleasing contrast, then, to King Stephen, whose riding-breeches, as we know, 'cost him but a crown.' . . . Very well, I will 'cut the cackle and come to the hosses.' And you, Mr. Isidore? Do I read in your eye that you desire a similar literary restraint in your ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... middle class, it is well-nigh past description and past bearing. The dog-collared, tight-coated, horsey youth learns all the cant phrases from cheap sporting prints, and he has an idea that to call a man a "bally bounder" is quite a ducal thing to do. His hideous cackle sounds in railway-carriages, or on breezy piers by the pure sea, or in suburban roads. From the time when he gabbles over his game of Nap in the train until his last villainous howl pollutes the night, he lives, moves, and has his being in slang; ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... be master of a good house and a good estate? But can Gumbo shut the hall-door upon blue devils, or lay them always in a red sea of claret? Does a man sleep the better who has four-and-twenty hours to doze in? Do his intellects brighten after a sermon from the dull old vicar; a ten minutes' cackle and flattery from the village apothecary; or the conversation of Sir John and Sir Thomas with their ladies, who come ten moonlight muddy miles to eat a haunch, and play a rubber? 'Tis all very well to have tradesmen bowing to your carriage-door, room made for you at quarter-sessions, and my lady ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... doth lay, (Spreads the fame of her doing what she may.) About the yard she cackling now doth go, To tell what 'twas she at her nest did do. Just thus it is with some professing men, If they do ought that good is, like our hen They can but cackle on't where e'er they go, What their right hand doth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... to go out and bring it in, by depositing it in the hay-twist box behind the kitchen stove, in the linen-barrel in the entry, or on the canopied bed. Then she found an appreciative friend in the little girl's mother, who, whenever she heard a proud, discordant announcement, half crow, half cackle, blessed the little white hen as she ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates

... lay, frequently they saw the mountain ptarmigan, at this altitude still in its white winter plumage. These birds, when alarmed, would fly but a short way and then poise in the air, uttering a sharp, crowing cackle, soon to alight and stand motionless on the snow. All these scenes of wild nature were noted by the boys, though perhaps not so much as they might have been had they not been upon ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough

... it in something that fashion myself now. However—" Nicholas cleared his throat. "Since my accident on the hunting field I have seen no one. I had no desire to have a lot of gossipping women and old fool men around. I hate their cackle. I left the management of the estate to Standing, my agent. When he left—he got the offer of a post on Lord Sinclair's estate—Spencer Curtis took his place. He had to report to me, and I saw that he ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... you to tell the truth? Shall a man find a pearl in the dirt and not set it over his heart. I have loved you since first I saw your fair face, and now I honour you. Come to me and bless me; and when these fools cackle and gibber, I shall know how to protect ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington

... a cockatoo. A friend brought him from India, and a funny bird he is, but terribly noisy. He soon began to bark like Fid, and to growl like Bronti; to cackle like the hens, and to imitate every loud noise that he heard. We hoped, if he had a good teacher, he would learn to sing, instead of making such a riot, as he whistles uncommonly well after his master. So we went to buy a Canary bird, and you may ...
— Kindness to Animals - Or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked • Charlotte Elizabeth

... wide his book, The goose makes a long, long neck, to look, He opens his mouth, as if to cough, When, snippety-snap! her head flies off. Now, cackle loudly her sisters fond, Who are watching proudly from the pond, While off to the town that lies beyond, The whole of the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... obvious spontaneity and enjoyment. His lips curled up at each end, his eyes rolled back and then fairly danced with mirth, and his cheeks shook. It was contagious. Not only did Master Benjamin laugh, but the others had to laugh, not excluding Master Jonathan, who emitted a dry cackle as became one ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler

... surprisingly in the next few minutes. Bob and Jimmy kept an interested eye on the back seat where Joel Banks patiently shouted dry jokes into the old woman's trumpet to the accompaniment of the latter's amused cackle. ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman

... all events, the young Cabyle seemed to be dusty and warm with walking. He even seemed fatigued, for, when about to pass the group of slaves, he stopped to rest and flung down his load. The shock of the fall must have snapped a number of legs, for a tremendous cackle burst from the bundles ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... functions if I can help it," the lady answered, her gentle rather drawling voice lending a charm to the words quite apart from their meaning. "I cannot stand the kind of conversation to which one is reduced on such occasions—if you can call that conversation which is but the cackle of geese, each repeating the utterances of the other. When the Lord loves a woman, I think He takes her out of society by some means or other, and keeps her out of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... bent brows were frowning at the path at his feet. He tried to laugh—and the sound of the dry cackle had little ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... not feel herself insulted. "These United States," she cried, "they cackle over the word 'freedom' like so many hens that have each of them laid an egg and go strutting and boasting while the housewife empties their nests. The housewife represents the natural course of events, and in this case ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... know," said Mrs. Cyrus, with her light cackle, "your mother was a little romantic when she was young. No doubt she has conquered it by this time. But she tried ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland

... has been made of the bright side of child-life among the lower races. But from even the most primitive of tribes all traces of the golden age of childhood are not absent. Powers, speaking of the Yurok Indians of California, notes "the happy cackle of brown babies tumbling on their heads with the puppies" (519. 51), and of the Wintun, in the wild-clover season, "their little ones frolicked and tumbled on their heads in the soft sunshine, or cropped the clover ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... phenomena do not turn upon their investigators, and that a Research Society of eminent illusions and hallucinations does not pursue Lagune with sceptical! inquiries. Take his house—expose the alleged man of Chelsea! A priori they might argue that a thing so vain, so unmeaning, so strongly beset by cackle, could only be the diseased imagining of some hysterical phantom. Do you believe that such a thing as Lagune exists? I must own to the gravest doubts. But happily his banker is of a more credulous type than I.... Of all that Lagune will tell ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... "Don't cackle till you've laid your aig, Gentle Annie. When you've thrashed and sold your grain and got your money in the bank, then I'll help you. We'll git drunk if I have ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... for your sake. Ay: there seemed some link 'Twixt your dead grannie and you, too strong for me To break; though it's been strained to the snapping-point, Times out of mind, whenever a hoolet's screech Sang through my blood; or poaching foxes barked On a shiny night to the cackle of wild geese, Travelling from sea to sea far overhead: Or whenever, waking in the quiet dark, The ghosts of horses whinneyed in my heart. Ghosts! Nay, I've been the mare between the limmers Who hears the hunters gallop gaily by; Or, rather, the hunter, bogged in a quaking ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

... ye may ask? Let us pretermit the question till another occasion; anyway here's Drimdarroch wi' the lave, at any rate the weight of it in processes, records, caveats, multiple poindings, actions of suspension and declator, interim decrees, fugie warrants, compts, and reckonings—God! I have the cackle of the law in my head like a ballant, and what's the wonder at that ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... ease, without ceasing to indulge in his little laugh, whilst continuing his perambulation about the room. "You may be right. God has given me a face which only arouses comical thoughts in others. I'm a buffoon. But excuse an old man's cackle. You, Rodion Romanovitch, you are in your prime, and, like all young people, you appreciate, above all things, human intelligence. Intellectual smartness and abstract rational deductions entice you. But, to return to the special case we were talking about just now. I must tell ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... in the house to wake up, and at dawn began to cackle vigorously. Germaine hastened to her, bringing a quantity of corn which the hen, doubtless owing to her fast of the ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar

... Lubin sagely. "The old hen feels herself badly off when the egg teaches her to cackle. That's human nature, that is. And then she was riled because she was afraid I shouldn't have time to get the garden-things in order by to-morrow, when it seems there's some sort o' company expected. I told her 'twould ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... if never certainly before—sat down on the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded like the crumpling ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... needs no gayer melodramatic exhibition than the table d'hote of his inn will afford him, in the conversation of the joyous guests. They mimic the voice and manner of the person they describe; they crow, squeal, hiss, cackle, bark, and scream like mad, and, were it only by the physical strength exerted in telling the story, keep the table in unbounded excitement. But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... visited a hot fountain, an hour west of our camp, which has five eyes, temperature 150 deg., slightly saline taste, and steam issues constantly. It is called Kasugwe Colambu. Earthquakes are well known, and to the Manyuema they seem to come from the east to west; pots rattle and fowls cackle on ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... misfortune: let all the world go, and let you and I be one, and live together; and die together; for now I see I could not have lived without you, nor without your love.' And I whispered something on his shoulder—no matter what; what signifies the cackle of a goose? And we mingled our happy tears, and our hearts, and our souls. Ah, Love is a sweet a dreadful passion: what we two have gone through for one another in a few months! He dined with us, and Edward and he sat a long, long time talking; ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... a succession of jerks in a manner that he would have thought to be impossible. That was the last seen of Baxter. There was a correspondence in the papers, but it never led to anything. There were several other similar cases, and then there was the death of Hay Connor. What a cackle there was about an unsolved mystery of the air, and what columns in the halfpenny papers, and yet how little was ever done to get to the bottom of the business! He came down in a tremendous vol-plane from an unknown height. He never got off his machine and died in his pilot's seat. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... tried to do so, but the most he could accomplish was a feeble cackle, which, his companion fancied, betrayed his age as nothing heretofore had done. It was a nervous, irritated laugh, and was matched by the altered voice in which ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... Christmas day in the morning. There is no doubt about it. The shine of the sun, the frost on the trees, the voice of the birds, and the unusual crow, and cackle and clatter and confusion outside the house can leave no doubts upon the subject, to say nothing of the inside of the house. Here it is Christmas day and no mistake. On what other day is the larder so full?—Full is not expressive enough; crammed, rammed, jammed full is more like the actual condition ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... departed quickly to bring in the offender. The courtiers took up the King's cry most readily; and there was a general cackle of "Adair!" "Adair!" "A trial!" "Sire!" ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody will pay for their own telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where the gold ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... "How you do cackle, OLDY!" said her son, who was very proud of her when she kept still. "You can't see anything good in MONTGOMERY, because, after the first seven or eight breakfasts with us, he said he was afraid that so many fishballs ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... "Swear! Well, I should cackle. You ought to have heard him when he come to, and spit out the loose teeth. You see, since Pa quit drinking he is a little nervous, and the doctor said he ought to go out somewhere and get bizness off his mind, and hunt ducks, and row a boat, and get strength, and Pa said shooting ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck

... he said, 'too much cackle. Come and see me in the town. Or, if I miss you there, I may see you on the road, mayn't I? I'm due out your way ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... mind to suffer" was not a point by which he, "more an antique Roman than a Dane," was at all troubled. Never had he given ear to that cackle which is called Public Opinion. The judgment of his peers—this, he had often told himself, was the sole arbitrage he could submit to; but then, who was to be on the bench? Peerless, he was irresponsible—the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... horizon. After careful reconnoitring, requiring a circuit of the clearing, Jack ventured to make directly for the dark outlines of the cabin. War had obviously not visited the place, for as they passed a low outhouse the startled cackle of chickens sounded toothsomely, and Barney ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... The mirthless, bilious cackle of Jankiel interrupted. "I know a thing or two," he exclaimed; "I knew that you, Abraham, would not easily agree to it. I shall manage that without ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko

... was black, and his bare limbs were black with smoke. All the hair was burnt from his head and face. He stood for a moment in the doorway—a sight never to be forgotten—and then fell headlong down the steps, where he lay motionless. Some one in the crowd laughed—a high cackle which was heard above the roar of the fire and the deafening chorus ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... the middle o' the floor half the day for you to break your shins against 'em. Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion to Adam in Paradise—there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief, though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity. But it's an impious, unscriptural opinion to say a woman's a blessing to a man now; you might as well say adders and wasps, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... over clearly that for to-day our chance and hope were lost. Then the darkness grew deeper, and a star shone through my casement, and feet went up and down upon the stairs, but no man came near me. Below there was some faint cackle of mirth and laughter, and ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... smile, not the Spanish scowl near Gibraltar, or of Santa Cruz, Tenerife. The men are comparatively noiseless; a bawling voice startles you like a pistol-shot. I rarely heard a crying child or a scolding woman offering 'eau benite a la Xantippe;' even the cocks and hens tied to old shoes cackle with reserve. The climate tames everything from Dom to donkey. Except in January and February it is still, intensely still—the very leaves seem to hang motionless. This softness shows itself especially in the language, which ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... Rob. "Then why should not Nurse Rosemary call up a pleasant remembrance? Also it seems to me to be a kind, sweet, womanly voice, which is something to be thankful for nowadays, when so many women talk, fit to scare the crows; cackle, cackle, cackle—like stones rattling in a ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay

... ringing at the door, saw in the limited perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to her. Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant with a military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the janitor's box with bird-cages at the windows. On that side rose, under a green trellis, the mansard of the neighboring house. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... up and relieved her of any share in it; and Will, seeing that she was suffering, told some funny stories which made the old people cackle in ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... the loud scraping of shovels, and the merry cackle of the old negro, happy because others toiled in the glad morning, while he did not. Cally Heth's white glove rested on Mr. Beirne's polished balustrade, and her piquant ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... and the curs snapped at his heels. In another place a lion was seen half dressed in a fox's hide, while a wolf in a sheep's mask was conversing very amicably with a young lamb. Here again might be seen the geese stretching out their necks from the Roman Capitol in full cackle, while the stout invaders were beheld in the distance, running off as hard as they could. In short, in all these quaint entablatures some pithy sarcasm was symbolically conveyed; only over the mantel piece ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... mound of straw. At this moment she caught sight of us and turned in another direction to throw us off the scent. We persevered in our intention of going into her probable retreat, and were cautiously looking for some sign of life in the haymow, when we heard a soft cackle and a ruffling of plumage. Coming closer to the sound we saw a black hen brooding a nest, her bright bead eyes turning nervously from side to side; and, coaxed out from her protecting wings by youthful curiosity, came four ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... cold day in January we heard a faint cackle outside, and, opening the kitchen door, found our poor widow in a sorry plight. One foot was frozen, her feathers were all rough and dirty, her wings drooping, her bright comb changed to a dull red. How she escaped from the hen-house, surmounted the high fence, and ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... into a high, appreciative cackle. Le ffacase turned the deathray of his left eye on him. "Youre a syncophant, Gootes," he stated flatly, "a miserable groveling lowlivered cringing fawning mealymouthed chickenhearted toadeating arselicking, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... My talent is proportioned to my ambition. The things I like to write are the things I like to read. I prefer the lesser poets to the greater, the cackle of the barnyard fowl to the scream of the eagle. I lack the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... and he gave me a cigar, around which was wrapped the check. He winked. Then he laughed, and I joined him, though my laughter resembled mirth less than it did the cackle of a hen which was disturbed over the ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath

... had laughed broke again into a high cackle. "What we'd oughta do," he chortled, "is send 'em word to hereafter turn in lead ropes with every hoss we take off 'n their hands. And by rights we'd oughta stip-ilate that all hosses must be broke to lead. It ain't right—them a gentlin' down everything that goes to army ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower

... Landed Gentry, premonitorily. The tintinnabulation's enough. Periodical footings of Clashthoughts into Mayfair or the Tyrol, signalled by the slide from its mast of a crested index of Aeolian caprice, blazon of their presence, give the curious a right to spin through the halls and galleries under a cackle of housekeeper guideship—scramble for a chuck of the dainties, dog fashion. There is something to be said for the rope's ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... a cottage that was the same colour as 'the second from the miller's' in some place where I had never been, and of which I had not previously heard? I am ashamed to complain, but there were moments when my juvenile and confidential friend weighed heavy on my hands. His cackle was indeed almost continuous, but it was never unamiable. He showed an amiable curiosity when he was asking questions; an amiable guilelessness when he was conferring information. And both he did largely. I am in a position to write the biographies of Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley's father and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... been made of the bright side of child-life among the lower races. But from even the most primitive of tribes all traces of the golden age of childhood are not absent. Powers, speaking of the Yurok Indians of California, notes "the happy cackle of brown babies tumbling on their heads with the puppies" (519. 51), and of the Wintun, in the wild-clover season, "their little ones frolicked and tumbled on their heads in the soft sunshine, or cropped the clover ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... palace-like retreat. So, soon tiring of this, they fell to talking of other things and forgot the creature; till, suddenly, from within the temple came a crow that beat even Herbert's noisy ones. It was so loud and so sudden, and was so closely followed by a jubilant cackle, that all of them were a trifle startled while Wun Sing threw himself down ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond

... meetings were organised in the evenings, Mr Lathrope developing an almost forgotten talent he possessed, and coming out as a comic singer. He absolutely bewitched even the "Major," with his version of "Buffalo Gals," and the "Cackle, cackle, flap your wings and crow," chorus of the Christy Minstrels, who certainly, in his person, did perform on ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... Cyrus, with her light cackle, "your mother was a little romantic when she was young. No doubt she has conquered it by this time. But she tried ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland

... humiliating position for him. He had never been known to carry anything, not even himself if he could help it, since the day his mother died and ceased to force him to carry in wood and water for her at the end of a hickory switch. He glanced uneasily round with a slight cackle of dismay as he arrived in the unaccustomed plush surroundings and tried to find some place to dump his load. But the well-groomed Herbert strode down the long aisle unnoticing and took possession of the section he had secured as if ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill

... a cackle of surprise and laughter among the steamer's officers, in which Frank and some of the passengers joined; and the saucy little "fishing-boat" came steadily on in the wake of her ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard

... Something like a cackle broke from the hag's throat. "Queen Zelaya will let nothing befall you, little ladies," she declared. "Fear not. Her word is law among the Romany folk, poor as she may be. And now tell me, my little birds,—tell me of your riches, and your great houses, and all the wealth your parents ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson

... personage? Are you aware that the actions you are proposing—which would be disgraceful enough if you were any little obscure bourgeoise—must precipitate a public scandal? Have you reflected that it will all be printed in the newspapers, for men to snigger at in their cafes, for women to cackle over in their boudoirs? Have you reflected that you will make yourself a nine-days' wonder, a subject for tittle-tattle with all the gossip-mongers of Europe? Are you without pride, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... wrens. See! on the top of the wood-shed, how proudly the old rooster struts along the weather-board, enjoying the discomfiture of his wives, who have been trying for this half-hour from the corn-house steps to reach the same desirable elevation. And ever and anon he crows to answer the tumultuous cackle of the plebeian fowl in the barn-yard, with whom he never mingles, save when a hawk threatens them with common danger; and then, forgetting all his aristocracy, he seeks the same sheltering apple-tree or clump of briars in the fence-corner, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... sight around the ranch. Never had it appeared more peaceful and pastoral to Jean. The grazing cattle and horses in the foreground, the haystack half eaten away, the cows in the fenced pasture, the column of blue smoke lazily ascending, the cackle of hens, the solid, well-built cabins—all these seemed to repudiate Jean's haste and his darkness of mind. This place was, his father's farm. There was not a cloud in ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... blind when it comes to pickin' a woman. They jest hitch up with everlastin' misery easy as dew rolling off a cabbage leaf. It's sech a blessed sight to see you, and hear your voice and know you're the woman anybody can see you be. Why I'm so happy when I set here and con-tem'-plate you, I want to cackle like a pullet announcin' her first egg. Ain't this porch the ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter

... Dorothy's parrot. But what did it mean by this unusual freak of familiarity? Paul spoke to the bird, which pleased it; and when he put out his hand to smooth its feathers, the parrot lifted its wings, and with a loud cackle exhibited a note which had been carefully tied beneath one of them. Henley relieved the animal of its burden, and discovered that the note was addressed to himself. When he looked around again, the parrot had flown away. This is what the ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... let me understand that his vision received something of my outline, though he would fix his eyes either to left or right of me, as though he was not able to see if he looked straight; and this and his mournful cackle and his nodding head, bowed form, propped hands, and diminished face made him as distressful and melancholy a picture of Time as ever mortal man viewed. He broke off in his rambling to ask for more brandy, taking it for ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... curled up at each end, his eyes rolled back and then fairly danced with mirth, and his cheeks shook. It was contagious. Not only did Master Benjamin laugh, but the others had to laugh, not excluding Master Jonathan, who emitted a dry cackle as became one ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler

... sounds the barnyard suddenly awakens. I hear my horse whinnying from the barn, the chickens begin to crow and cackle, and such a grunting and squealing as the pigs set up from behind the straw stack, it would do a man's heart ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... had happened, but when I caught sight of Skinny sitting in the water I just roared. Skinny sat there with his head above water making no attempt to move, but when I laughed he looked up indignantly and said, "Blime, mite, you'd cackle if a fellar broke his bleedin' neck," and then while I continued laughing he cursed the Germans with every variety of oath to which he could lay his tongue, vowing what he was going to do to get even, but all the time ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien

... by the driver's encouraging, "Pop-pop! Dih-dih-dih! Ho-ho-ho! children of jungle swine; brothers to buffalo!" addressed to the horses lagging in the climb, fluttered away with his silly little cackle. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... Mudder tell them story we chillun noddin'! Some cackle out and all jump up and go back ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration

... foraging through the pastures to be ready for the first blade of grass that appeared. The April sun flooded the bare landscape with its light and heat. From the farm-yards they passed came the merry cackle of hens. Horses and colts galloped gaily around the corrals, and the yellow meadow larks on the fence-posts rang out their glad challenge. The poplar trees along the road were blushing with the green of spring, and up from the river-flats, gray-purple ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung

... But can Gumbo shut the hall-door upon blue devils, or lay them always in a red sea of claret? Does a man sleep the better who has four-and-twenty hours to doze in? Do his intellects brighten after a sermon from the dull old vicar; a ten minutes' cackle and flattery from the village apothecary; or the conversation of Sir John and Sir Thomas with their ladies, who come ten moonlight muddy miles to eat a haunch, and play a rubber? 'Tis all very well to have tradesmen bowing to your carriage-door, room made for ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; "We're sure the Kaiser loves the ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon

... Juan's head, that not a drop touched him, and yet he had the appearance of having been ducked. At which bit of sleight-of-hand the whole court-yard, young and old, babies, cocks, hens, and turkeys, all set up a shout and a cackle, and dispersed to the four corners of the yard as if scattered by a volley of bird-shot. Hearing the racket, the rest of the maids came running,—Anita and Maria, the twins, women forty years old, born on the place the year after General Moreno brought home his handsome young bride; ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... after they're dead," said Droom with a cackle. He grinned broadly at the sight of the youth's horror-struck face. "Go ahead and smoke, my boy. I'll light my pipe. Make yourself at home. I keep the window closed to keep out the sound of those Wells Street cars. It's good of you to come over here and cheer ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... a curious cackle, and continued: "Ah, those wasps—they have a sting so nasty!" He paused an instant, then he added in a lower voice, and not quite so gaily: "Yon is the way that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... now, if never certainly before—sat down on the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded like the crumpling ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... your pretty wife, Shane?' 'She's in all the wo o' the world, ma'am, dear. And she puts the blame of it on me, though I'm not in the fault this time, any how. The child's taken the small pox, and she depinded on me to tell the doctor to cut it for the cow-pox, and I depinded on Kitty Cackle, the limmer, to tell the doctor's own man, and thought she would not forget it, becase the boy's her bachelor; but out o' sight out o' mind—the never a word she tould him about it, and the babby's got it nataral, and the woman's in heart ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... years, and render the occupant of the office thereafter ineligible for reelection. Seven years is, I am aware, under our political system, an unusual term; and here my ears will, I know, be assailed by the great "mandate" cackle. The count of noses being complete, the mind of the composite Democrat is held to be made up. It only remains to formulate the consequent decree; and, with least possible delay, put it in way of practical enforcement. Again, I, as a publicist, demur. It is the old issue, that ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... they cannot even express admiration in fitting language; they may giggle or cackle so that every ripple of laughter and every turn of a phrase sounds nauseously insincere. Marion Dearsley durst not talk frankly with this fine fellow, but ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... Jake Carson's shrill cackle cut through a low rumble of laughter. "That's passing it to him straight," said the old ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory

... statues that looked at me, but I knew that the living animals inside of them were tickled at my singing, strumming, and pirouetting. Cla-cla was, however, an exception, and encouraged me not infrequently by emitting a sound, half cackle and half screech, by way of laughter; for she had come to her second childhood, or, at all events, had dropped the stolid mask which the young Guayana savage, in imitation of his elders, adjusts to his face at about the age of twelve, to wear it thereafter all his life long, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... Grandy took the egg—while he was greatly enjoying it, suddenly there was a flutter in the corner of the hut. An old hen flew up from behind a box in the corner, lit on the side of the box and began to cackle loudly. The Major turned to Grandy and said, "I-I t-t-told you there was going to be a plenty. I invited you to dinner today because this was the day for the hen to lay." He went over and got the fresh egg from ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame

... agreeable to his ears, Arthur returned no answer than a cackle of great delight. Ralph, throwing himself into a chair, they both sat waiting in profound silence. Ralph was thinking, with a sneer upon his lips, on the altered manner of Bray that day, and how soon their fellowship in a bad design had lowered his pride and established ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... lacquey-smoothed amenities of the new life. He was racked with misery at the bare imagination of the fruitless trouble of palace business exchanged for the fruitful quiet of his cell. He feared that psalms would give way to tussles, holy reading to cackle, inward meditation to ugly shadows, inward purity to outer nothingness. His words to the brethren took a higher and a humbler tone, which surprised them, for even they were used to see bishoprics ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country," - which is the gist of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... out the cackle and talk hoss," was the retort. "I size up men first pop. My bet's down now on your blue eye. Let's get a rig. I don't know a darn thing about this part of the world except the drummers' hotels. But Houten takes a chance on me. And if I'm his blue-eyed ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... gold. Every one was suffering more or less from the lassitude produced by excessive heat; the pitch was bubbling up from the seams of the deck; a strong, hot, burning smell pervaded the vessel; the chickens in the hencoops hung their heads and forgot to cackle; the ducks refused to quack, and sat with their bills open, gasping for breath; the pig lay down, as if about to yield up the ghost; and even Ungka, who generally revelled in a fine hot sun, and selected the warmest place on board, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... coming, heard the growing murmur of many voices, the cackle of occasional laughter, and took especial note of "War Eagle" Ivus Niles, who led the parade. A fuzzy and ancient silk hat topped his head, a rusty frock-coat flapped about his legs, and he tugged along at the end of a cord a dirty ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry rot, and stale incense. As the clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they kept, invited the dewy-feathered ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... introduced, when he claimed the privilege of addressing the house, on the proper ground that he had been "brought up among the pigs, and knew all about them"—so we were brought up among cows and cabbages; and the lowing of cattle, the cackle of hens, and the cooing of pigeons, were sounds native and pleasant to our ears. So "Variation under Domestication" dealt with familiar subjects in a natural way, and gently introduced "Variation ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... by surprise," she said, with an apologetic cackle, "it ain't to be suppose as miraculs can be performed with regard to cookin', the fire havin' gone out, not bein' kept alight on account of the 'eat of the day, which was that 'ot as never was, tho', to be sure, bein' a child in the early ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... Above all, that class of 'Logic-choppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder; who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics' Institute of Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round their Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illuminated Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in full day-light, with rattle and lantern, and insist on guiding you and guarding ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... long course of acquaintanceship with stage heroes has been, so far as we are concerned, to create a yearning for a new kind of stage hero. What we would like for a change would be a man who wouldn't cackle and brag quite so much, but who was capable of taking care of himself for a day ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome

... to the text.) From such critics the poet received such applause as has reached us. We also know that the plays were popular; but the audiences have not rushed to pen and ink to record their satisfaction. With them, as with all audiences, the actors and the SPECTACLE, much more than the "cackle," were the attractions. When Dr. Ingleby says that "the bard of our admiration was unknown to the men of that age," he uses hyperbole, and means, I presume, that he was unknown, as all authors are, to the great majority; and that those who knew him in part made no modern ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... care of this house," came the retort, "an' cooked an' baked, an' washed, an' put up with what I put up, you'd have something to be beat out about. You've got a snap, you have. But just wait." Sarah broke off to cackle gloatingly. "Just wait, that's all, an' you'll be fool enough to get married some day, like me, an' then you'll get yours—an' it'll be brats, an' brats, an' brats, an' no more dancin', an' silk stockin's, an' three pairs of shoes at one time. You've got a cinch-nobody to think of but your own ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... and mayhap afterwards we were all soundly punished for it. But at least it was on the level of their soldiers' wit—though I own, at the most, no great matter to cackle of. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... are apt to underrate the importance of the speeches they are called upon to deliver, laying the greater stress upon the "business" they propose to originate, or the scenic effects that are to be introduced into the play. They sometimes describe the words of their parts as "cackle." But perhaps this term also may be accepted as applying, fitly enough, to much of the dialogue of ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... letters had been merely the cackle of the feminine goose who likes writing to an advertised person, I would have torn them up, but they were sometimes signed by men, and often expressed the opinions ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith

... recapitulation, and was stopping at the end of a sentence to see the impression he was making, that uncouth fellow, Lively, moved by what happy inspiration he did not know, suddenly broke in, apropos of nothing, nodding his head, and speaking in a clear cackle, with, "Pray, sir, what is your opinion of the infallibility of the Pope?" Upon which every one but Jennings did laugh out: but he, au contraire, began to look very black; and no one can tell what would have happened, had he not cast his eyes by accident ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... guy, high, kie, lie, my, nigh, eying, pie, rye, sigh, shy, tie, thigh, thy, vie, we, ye, zebra, seizure. Again: most of them may be repeated in the same word, if not in the same syllable; as in bibber, diddle, fifty, giggle, high-hung, cackle, lily, mimic, ninny, singing, pippin, mirror, hissest, flesh-brush, tittle, thinketh, thither, vivid, witwal, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... "Stop your everlasting cackle!" Christopher had once shouted angrily, forgetting Tucker, and for the space of a few minutes the other had lain silent, choking back the strangling sobs. But presently the shattered nerves revolted against restraint, and Will burst out afresh into wild crying. The yellow cat, grown suddenly ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... And the ship, and all the ocean, Woke up in wild commotion. Then the wind set up a howling, And the poodle dog a yowling, And the cocks began a crowing, And the old cow raised a lowing, As she heard the tempest blowing; And fowls and geese did cackle, And the cordage and the tackle Began to shriek and crackle; And the spray dashed o'er the funnels, And down the deck in runnels; And the rushing water soaks all, From the seamen in the fo'ksal To the stokers whose black ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray

... week; but although both had noticed the new ornament instantly, wild horses could not have drawn the question from them; her desire to be asked was too obvious. With her gay plumage, her "nods and becks and wreathed smiles," and her cheerful cackle, Huldah closely resembled the parrot ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Ghent, and the escapades of Count Baldwin. He had lived much among gentlefolk and kept his ears open.... She felt stronger and cheerfuller than she had been for days. That rat-hunt had warmed her blood. She was a long way from death in spite of the cackle of idiot chirurgeons, and there was much savour still in the world. There was her son, too, the young Philip.... Her eye saw clearer, and she noted the sombre magnificence of the great room, the glory of the brocade, the gleam of silver. Was ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... an unpleasant, sarcastic cackle. Bob turned. Four or five of the punchers, mounted and ready for the day's work, were sitting at ease in their saddles enjoying ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... strumming on their samisens. But there was very little music either in the instrument or in the melody. The sound of the string's twang and the rattle of the bone plectrum drowned the sweetness of the note. The result was a kind of dry clatter or cackle which is ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... come down to you, Silas, I may lay my belt across your shoulders," Aylward answered, amid a general shout of laughter. "But it is time young chickens went to roost when they dare cackle against their elders. It is ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... off to his mowing, and Louise heard the cackle of his machine before she reached the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... crowned its brow, where lay the Monastery of St. Michaelsburg—"The White Cross on the Hill." There within the white walls, where the warm yellow sunlight slept, all was peaceful quietness, broken only now and then by the crowing of the cock or the clamorous cackle of a hen, the lowing of kine or the bleating of goats, a solitary voice in prayer, the faint accord of distant singing, or the resonant toll of the monastery bell from the high-peaked belfry that overlooked the ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... nearly one boy's work, for instance, to take care of the Guinea fowls,—the handsome, mottled hens, that never knew when they were well off, but were always running away and getting lost. If it had not been for their shrill, silly cackle, their hiding-places would never have been found. Master Sunshine pursued them every time they strayed, and brought them home triumphantly. I think he loved his sturdy family of Cochin Chinas best; for the great rooster, with his well-feathered legs and scarlet comb, always seemed ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser

... the hideous, unearthly cry of the laughing-jackass, called often the bushman's clock; the screaming cry of thousands of parrots flying here and there through the forest; there was the cackle of the wattle-bird, the clear notes of the magpie, and the confused chattering of thousands of leather-heads; while many other birds added their notes to the discordant chorus, and speedily banished sleep from ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston

... spat forth the word with a cackle of laughter. "Oh, you cannot fool the Black Woman, Yellow Brian! Listen—Brian your name is, and Yellow Brian your name shall be indeed, since this is your will. Owen Ruadh O'Neill lies at the O'Reilly stead at Lough Oughter, but you shall never ride ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones

... political economy as a terrapin does of the Talmud is well aware that a rise in the price of one commodity simultaneous with the decline in price of another commodity has nothing whatever to do with the currency question. Those who cackle about a rise in wheat synchronously with the fall of silver make a very indecent exposure of their own ignorance. If I had a ten-year old boy who was such a hopeless idiot I'd drown him as not worth honest grub, then seek a surgeon and make sure that I'd never again inflict the world ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... "Oh, cut the cackle," he said impatiently. "Tell me what you want me to do, and make it plain, very plain, for I can tell you there's a good deal about all this I don't understand, and I'm not inclined to trust you far. For one thing, what ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon

... Flanagan stood with his hands alternately kept to his nose, from which he flung away the blood, as it sprung out in a most copious stream. Two-thirds, indeed we might say three-fourths of his party, were convulsed with suppressed laughter, nor could they prevent an occasional cackle from being heard, when forcibly drawing in their breath, in an effort not to offend their leader. The discovery of the mistake was, in itself, extremely ludicrous, but when the home truths uttered by Biddy, and the indescribable bitterness'caused by the disappointment, joined to the home ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... roguish look at their fat old mother, he began to scamper off with her. "Cackle, cackle!" screamed the old hen. "Put the baby down this moment, sir!" And the mother flew at Gip before he had gone ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various

... tedious, but one must not flinch When asked the task to tackle; And he's no Frenchman true who, at a pinch, Cannot both crow and cackle. Ah, Vive, once more, the Gallic Cock—and hen! These Talking-Tours are trying, But 'tis with windy flouts of tongue or pen, We keep the French ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various

... time I heard him laugh, a high, uncertain cackle. The girl said nothing, but she stared at him with level, blazing eyes. Also for the first time I began to take an ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... didn't know what to do. He could not tell the old lady about it; for he could only cackle and crow, and she would not understand that language. So he went about all day looking very sober, and would not chase grasshoppers, play hide-and-seek under the big burdock leaves, or hunt the cricket with his sisters. At sunset ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott

... A cackle of laughter came from Quadratilla's chair back of the group that had gathered around the servant. "How like my Pliny!" she remarked genially. "A dirty little rascal restores my property in the hope of picking up a reward. His heart's desire is doubtless a strip of bacon for his stomach on a holiday. ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... near as I could guess by my watch in Peavine, home comes our laboring man and kicks up Ricks, and calls us to the streak of bright moonlight shining in the cabin door. Then he spreads out five packages of one thousand dollars each on the floor, and begins to cackle over the nest-egg ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry

... affidavits for Easel's arrest, which he stretched out considerably by interpolations drawn from his own imagination, we shall follow Darby to M'Slime's, observing, en passant, that the aforesaid Darby, as he went, might have been perceived to grin and chuckle, and sometimes give a short, low, abrupt cackle, of a nature peculiarly gratifying ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... Louis Quatorze; that the tears of Bayswater can possibly be compared for saltness with the lachrymal fluid distilled from South Audley Street glands; that the laughter of Clapham can be as catching as the cultured cackle of Curzon Street? But we, whose best clothes are exhibited only in parlours, what are we to do? How can we lay bare the souls of Duchesses, explain the heart-throbs of peers of the realm? Some of my friends who, being Conservative, attend Primrose "tourneys" (or is it "Courts of love"? I speak ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome

... they are still there, and the black man lounging by the leaders has hardly shifted one leg; pass by at evening, and they have moved on three hundred yards, and are resting again. In the daytime hens peck and cackle in every street; at nightfall the bordering veldt hums with crickets and bullfrogs. At morn come a flight of locusts—first, yellow-white scouts whirring down every street, then a pelting snowstorm of them high up over ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... of vested pelf, And, rich or poor, a man can't rob himself. It is the poor who suffer from temptation, And drink's detestable adulteration, That crying ill which no one dares to tackle! Whilst Witlers howl, and Water-zealots cackle. The poor are poisoned, not by honest drink, But lethal stuff that might scour out a sink. The Poor Man's Beer, quotha! Who'll keep it pure? Not rich monopolists, nor prigs demure, Those shriek for freedom, these for prohibition, "Vend the drugged stuff sans scrutiny or condition!" Cries Vested ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various

... lurched down to the settlement his voice rose in a high cackle of delirious song. These were the words ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... melodramatic exhibition than the table d'hote of his inn will afford him, in the conversation of the joyous guests. They mimic the voice and manner of the person they describe; they crow, squeal, hiss, cackle, bark, and scream like mad, and, were it only by the physical strength exerted in telling the story, keep the table in unbounded excitement. But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... that she had come was all over the noisy house in a minute, and it had the astonishing effect of producing what might roughly be described as a silence. It stopped the reckless waltzing of the piano in the drawing-room; it stopped the cackle incident to cork-pool in the billiard-room; it even stopped a good deal of the whispering under the Chinese lanterns beneath the stairs and in the alcove at the top of the stairs. What it did not stop was the consumption of mince-pies and claret-cup in the small breakfast-room; ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... of me! Every Tory in the two counties will cackle over the story that a Dutchman, a Whig, was affronted here under the Patroon's very roof, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... of an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the circumambient darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as a deep ditch and as ugly. She ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... me in a fine rage, for not only had I lost my precious arrow, but the quarry also, for off flapped my bird, uttering a hoarse cackle as in derision of my ill aim. On I went, seeking for something should serve us for supper, yet look where I would, saw nothing, no, not so much as parrot or macaw that might stay us for lack of better fare. On I went, and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... indeed, if of the very vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... lips for his little speech of welcome but the first sound died with a cackle in his throat, leaving his mouth agape. He stared at the little creature and beyond her at Cornelius Allendyce, who was superintending the unloading ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott

... the Anakim was cross, and muttered that they had sent him out in the village to sleep among the hens, and there was a cackling and screaming and chopping off of heads all night long. But the breakfast-table assured us that many a cackle must have been the swan-song of death. Halicarnassus wondered if something might not be invented to consume superfluous noise, as great factories consume their own smoke, but the Anakim said there was no call for any new invention in that line so long as Halicarnassus continued in his present ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... and "Forty-niner" tried to do so, but the most he could accomplish was a feeble cackle, which, his companion fancied, betrayed his age as nothing heretofore had done. It was a nervous, irritated laugh, and was matched by the altered voice in which its owner ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... existence of which their vote will have denied; and all these results, the self-stultification of the House, and the damage to the moral reputation of its members, are brought about in order that the Tory geese may cackle, and that men like Jemmy Bradshaw and Sir John Tyrrell may wave their hats and their crutches in triumph.[13] It is curious enough that the Ministers had no notion the Tories really meant to press this matter. John Russell went down (Le Marchant told me so) fully sensible of his own ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... began to disappoint me. Saving my mother—whom I did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from what little humanity I had known until then—I had found that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was driving me to conclude, however, that I had been mistaken, and that ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... I never heard a old hen called out of her spear, and unhenly, because she would fly out at a hawk, and cackle loud, and cluck, and try to lead her chickens off into safety. And while the rooster is a steppin' high, and struttin' round, and lookin' surprised and injured, it is the old hen that saves the chickens, nine ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... regiment of the king. Very well, this is weighty matter, of which the king must be advised! Monsieur's wife becomes expectant of a son and heir. 'Tis meet that Louis the Great should be advised of this! Mother of God! 'Tis a pretty mess enough back there on the St. Lawrence, where not a hen may cackle over its new-laid egg but the king must know it, and where not a family has meat enough for its children to eat nor clothes enough to cover them. My faith, in that poor medley of little lords and lazy vassals, how can you wonder that the best ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... she an egg doth lay, (Spreads the fame of her doing what she may.) About the yard she cackling now doth go, To tell what 'twas she at her nest did do. Just thus it is with some professing men, If they do ought that good is, like our hen They can but cackle on't where e'er they go, What their right hand doth their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... voice—is a target which has been hit hard many times, and very justly. A ladies' luncheon can often be truly and aptly compared to a poultry-yard, the shrill cackle being even more unpleasant than that of a large concourse of hens. If we had once become truly appreciative of the natural mellow tones possible to every woman, these shrill voices would no more be tolerated than a fashionable luncheon would be ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... satirised each others' legs, and one, the Aretino of the time, mocked at king Ptolemy and scourged his failings in verse. The literary quarrels (to which Theocritus seems to allude in Idyl VII, where Lycidas says he 'hates the birds of the Muses that cackle in vain rivalry with Homer') were as stupid as such affairs usually are. The taste for artificial epic was to return; although many people already declared that Homer was the world's poet, and that the world needed no other. This epic reaction brought into ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... the other day. It was a statement wrung from him by a deputation which was inflicting on him the familiar talk about lawyers and the need of "business men" to run our affairs. I suppose there has been no more banal cackle in this war than the cackle about a "business Government" and the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... investigators, and that a Research Society of eminent illusions and hallucinations does not pursue Lagune with sceptical! inquiries. Take his house—expose the alleged man of Chelsea! A priori they might argue that a thing so vain, so unmeaning, so strongly beset by cackle, could only be the diseased imagining of some hysterical phantom. Do you believe that such a thing as Lagune exists? I must own to the gravest doubts. But happily his banker is of a more credulous type than I.... Of all that Lagune will tell ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... varnished over in the fall to keep the water and the frost out. Perhaps the boy has been out digging into the maple-trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is pretty sure to announce the discovery as he comes running into the house in a great state of excitement—as if he had heard a hen cackle in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... went on. "I want to fix you up somewhere where you can have a bit of a home all to yourself. Let's see; Bonneville wouldn't do. There's always a lot of yaps about there that know us, and they would begin to cackle first off. How about San Francisco. We might go up next week and have a look around. I would find rooms you could take somewheres, and we would fix 'em up as lovely ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... It is in the blood of every man of our kin to take to the sea. They are like hen-bred ducklings now, and they do but want a duck to lead them pondwards. Then may hen cackle in ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... and here sat a Duck upon her nest; she had to hatch her ducklings; but she was almost tired out before the little ones came; and then she so seldom had visitors. The other ducks liked better to swim about in the canals than to run up to sit down under a burdock, and cackle with her. ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... vacantly out across the hills and speaking to no human being. His good squaws and even his much cherished children went about the camping-space quietly, not caring to disturb the master. He was tired of the lazy sunshine of home; the small cackle of his women, one to another, annoyed him; he was strong with the gluttony of the kettle which was ever boiling; the longing for fierce action and the blood-thirst had taken possession of him. Many times he reached up with his hand to the crown of his head and patted the skin of the little ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington

... open-mouthed at him for a moment. Then, clapping his hands together, he burst into a high-pitched cackle of laughter. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... think, and you'll find on reflection You're bargaining, ma'am, for the Voice of Affection; For the language of Wisdom, and Virtue, and Truth, And the sweet little innocent prattle of Youth: Not to mention the striking of clocks - Cackle of hens—crowing of cocks - Lowing of cow, and bull, and ox - Bleating of pretty pastoral flocks - Murmur of waterfall over the rocks - Every sound that Echo mocks - Vocals, fiddles, and musical-box - And zounds! to call ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial feminine cackle? ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... that labors for the sparrow-hawk Has little time for idle questioners." Whereat Geraint flash'd into sudden spleen: "A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk! Tits, wrens, and all wing'd nothings peck him dead! Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg The murmur of the world! What is it to me? O wretched set of sparrows, one and all, Who pipe of nothing but of sparrow-hawks! Speak, if ye be not like the rest, hawk-mad, Where can I get me harborage for the night? ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... wide and breezy; geese cackle over its grass, and you may see more than one cricket match being played on holiday afternoons. Once, in 1877, eleven Mitchells played eleven Heaths on the common; the Heaths were all of the same family, but the Mitchells, though related, were not. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... Philemon,—"I'll not balk Thy will with any shackle; Wilt add a burden to thy walk? Then take her without further talk; You're both but fit to cackle!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... is upset and one never knows when the French King and his wickedness may come upon us; what with one thing and another, indeed, a maiden may be pleased to find even a plebeian protector.' Thus she rambled on in her sharp voice, yet there was cause for her anxiety, and truth lay beneath her cackle, but the wisdom of age is ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... told her there were great tales going the world over about her lace making and her getting famous and proud through the length of the land and I mind well the cackle of a laugh she gave. 'The loveliest lace, is it? Now, isn't that the great wonder surely? The wizenedy, wrinkled old hag with the God-help-you face makes the loveliest lace—' Then she stopped short off and clapped a claw ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... was of an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the circumambient darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as a deep ditch and ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... see the parade! Willow Lane's gettin' awful high-toned!" There was a loud cackle of laughter and Madame's shoulders shook with suppressed merriment. "That's Gladys Hurd," she said, shaking her head. "Poor Gladys, I'm afraid she's not a very good girl. She's not got ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith

... country. At all events, the young Cabyle seemed to be dusty and warm with walking. He even seemed fatigued, for, when about to pass the group of slaves, he stopped to rest and flung down his load. The shock of the fall must have snapped a number of legs, for a tremendous cackle burst from the bundles as they ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... at their fat old mother, he began to scamper off with her. "Cackle, cackle!" screamed the old hen. "Put the baby down this moment, sir!" And the mother flew at Gip before he had gone ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various

... King's court, and the new Burgrave of Ghent, and the escapades of Count Baldwin. He had lived much among gentlefolk and kept his ears open.... She felt stronger and cheerfuller than she had been for days. That rat-hunt had warmed her blood. She was a long way from death in spite of the cackle of idiot chirurgeons, and there was much savour still in the world. There was her son, too, the young Philip.... Her eye saw clearer, and she noted the sombre magnificence of the great room, the glory of the ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... with its droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry rot, and stale incense. As the clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... He said, just as though I could hear him at this moment: "A bird, when it is on its nest, spreads its wings to cover the nest and eggs and protect them. It cannot use its wings for defense, but it can cackle and try to drive away the enemy. We are here to protect our wives and children, and we must not let the soldiers get them." He was on a buckskin horse, and he rode from one end of the line to the other, calling out: "Make a brave ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... over it, and soiled by the various tables on which it had lain. The old bachelor thus got through the day until it was time for dinner; over that meal he spent as much time as it was possible to give to it. Flore told him the news of the town, repeating the cackle that was current, which she had carefully picked up. Towards eight o'clock the lights were put out. Going to bed early is a saving of fire and candles very commonly practised in the provinces, which contributes no doubt ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... cattle would low with a foolish cry like a man wouldn't be all there, and come home in the evenings to be milked, satisfied and comfortable as a minister; wee calves shy as babies; donkeys with the cross of Christ on their back; goats would butt you and you not looking; hens a-cackle, and cocks strutting like a militiaman and him back from the camp; quiet horses had the strength of twenty men, and scampering colts had legs on them like withes. Up here was nothing, but you ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... ORPEN, A.R.A., are poor sitters. The impulse to rush out and cackle has probably something to do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various

... to accomplish my purpose in another manner: I trained one of my dogs, as soon as the hen cackled, to run to the nest, and bring me the egg without breaking it. In a few days the dog had learned his lesson; but Kees, as soon as he heard the hen cackle, ran with him to the nest. A contest now took place between them, who should have the egg; often the dog was foiled, although he was the stronger of the two. If he gained the victory, he ran joyfully to me with the egg, and put it ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley

... endeavor to represent the depths of starry space; one of those black abysms that are the despair of astronomer and telescope. Ahem!" Pobloff looked so conscious as he wiped his perspiring mop of a forehead that the tenor trombone coughed in his instrument. The strange cackle caused the composer to start: "How's that, what's that?" The man apologized. "Yes, yes, of course you didn't do it on purpose. But how did you do it? Try it again." The trombone blatted and the orchestra roared with laughter. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... troubled, and didn't know what to do. He could not tell the old lady about it; for he could only cackle and crow, and she would not understand that language. So he went about all day looking very sober, and would not chase grasshoppers, play hide-and-seek under the big burdock leaves, or hunt the cricket with his sisters. At sunset he did not go into the hen-house ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott

... creatures, he was awoke a little after midnight, as he lay in his cabin, by a heavy blow struck at the side of the canoe, close to his head. It was succeeded by the sound of a heavy body plunging into the water. When he got up all was again quiet, except the cackle of fowls in the hen-coop, which hung at the side of the vessel, about three feet from the cabin door. In the morning the poultry were found loose about the canoe, two of the fowls being missing; while there was ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... what would we eat? In this crisis I bethought me of a long-neglected art, and crowed like a cock. The shrill strain hardly reached the ear of the good woman before it was answered by such laughter as none but village lungs could raise. William—an admirable mimic—began to cackle like a hen. In due time we had a broiled fowl, an omelette, and boiled eggs." At another place where they stopped for mid-day luncheon Cooper writes: "We asked for a fruit-tart, and—odors and nosegays!—they gave us one made ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips

... again. Gold and silver money flashed on the crumpled handkerchief, and adding to it the last silver piece he had held in his teeth, the loathsome cripple stirred the heap around and around with one dirty forefinger, his mouth stretched in a cackle of greed. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... been sitting in the chairs from three to eleven generations back! And they were searchers of the Sword like thee, but were duped! In like manner, the hen sitteth in complacency, but she bringeth forth and may cackle; 'tis owing to the aids of Noorna that thou art not one of these sitters, O Master of the Event!' Now, they paced through the hall of dainty provender, and through the hall of the jewel-fountains, coming to the palace steps, where stood Abarak ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... really very comfortable here," said he, after scattering these greetings with a cackle of loud laughter that hardly moved the rubicund muscles of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... lounged about the doorways and kept up a constant cackle of conversation in a mysterious patois which Miss Talbot, though an excellent French scholar, could make nothing of. The presence of these people naturally shielded her from the direct observation of La Belle Chasseuse, but nevertheless threatened ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... of the oven on tiptoe and caught hold of the golden hen, and was off before you could say "Jack Robinson." But this time the hen gave a cackle which woke the ogre, and just as Jack got out of the house he heard him calling: "Wife, wife, what have you done with my ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... us. We also know that the plays were popular; but the audiences have not rushed to pen and ink to record their satisfaction. With them, as with all audiences, the actors and the SPECTACLE, much more than the "cackle," were the attractions. When Dr. Ingleby says that "the bard of our admiration was unknown to the men of that age," he uses hyperbole, and means, I presume, that he was unknown, as all authors are, to the great majority; ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... the end of a sentence to see the impression he was making, that uncouth fellow, Lively, moved by what happy inspiration he did not know, suddenly broke in, apropos of nothing, nodding his head, and speaking in a clear cackle, with, "Pray, sir, what is your opinion of the infallibility of the Pope?" Upon which every one but Jennings did laugh out: but he, au contraire, began to look very black; and no one can tell what would have happened, had he not cast his eyes by accident on his ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... corner. Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to her. Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant with a military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the janitor's box with bird-cages at the windows. On that ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... worldling broke forth an involuntary low laugh, which was a sort of cackle. So this was what ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... and the song of the bobolink, poised on the swaying branch of a tall tree, the happiest bird of Spring; the dozy, drowsy hum of bees; the answering call of lusty young chanticleers, and the satisfied cackle of laying hens and motherly old biddies, surrounded by broods of downy, greedy little newly-hatched chicks. The shrill whistle of a distant locomotive startles one with its clear, resonant intonation, which on a less quiet day would pass unnoticed. Mary, with ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... fourteen, whom her husband had taken to look after his horse and garden, giving him his tuition in Latin and other branches, for his services. Ralph was a great amateur in fowls and eggs. No sooner did a hen cackle, but he resorted to the nest, and, with his lead-pencil, wrote the day of the month upon the egg. The lady rung her table-bell, and called him to her, telling him to bring his egg-basket. He brought in an openwork, red osier basket, with ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams

... to you, Silas, I may lay my belt across your shoulders," Aylward answered, amid a general shout of laughter. "But it is time young chickens went to roost when they dare cackle against their elders. ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... pipe for any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country," - which is the gist of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... is like a novel of Fielding on canvas; and it seems inconceivable that, with this magnificent work en evidence, the critics of that age should have been contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that "as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit," and to cackle the foot-rule criticisms of the Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance of composition. But so it was. Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1814, was it thoroughly ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... The shrill cackle was answered by a slow, unctuous chuckle, as of a fat and wheezy person; then a door was closed, and ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

... the boy has been out digging into the maple-trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is pretty sure to announce the discovery as he comes running into the house in a great state of excitement—as if he had heard a hen cackle in the barn—with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... the only thing his father has ever given him. His grandfather, Lord Granville, has always told him to choose a gentlewoman, and please himself; yet I should think the ladies Townshend and Cooper would cackle a little. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... A slight cackle emanated from the ledger, but immediately died away. A dead silence reigned in the office, broken only by the distant sound of the sea, and by the hard breathing of Alphonso, who ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... heard the hens cackle, and thought we were blest, You flew to the hayloft, and found a full nest, Then caught up the treasure, and smiled as you run, With a hat full of eggs, and a head full ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower

... "Think you I knew not 'twas death to you to tell the truth? Shall a man find a pearl in the dirt and not set it over his heart. I have loved you since first I saw your fair face, and now I honour you. Come to me and bless me; and when these fools cackle and gibber, I shall know ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington

... advising business men how to get out of their difficulties," said Mr. Asquith the other day. It was a statement wrung from him by a deputation which was inflicting on him the familiar talk about lawyers and the need of "business men" to run our affairs. I suppose there has been no more banal cackle in this war than the cackle about a "business Government" and the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... dost thou cackle of here?" cried the innkeeper. "Thou thief! dost thou not see that the blood and the fountain is no other thing but the wine-bags which are ripped open, and the red wine which swims up and ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)

... his great beak. When he is in a good temper he will say, "Poor, poor!" He will sit upon the ivy all the morning and talk to himself, and he will call the gardener, and he will cough and sneeze, and crow and cackle, in a very funny manner. If Jacko sees sparrows picking up a few crumbs, he will rush up, sweeping his great wings along the ground, and take their meal for himself. If he sees poor Pussy picking a bone, he takes great delight ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous

... shook the hen, took it by the tail, and gave it such a drubbing that it was enough to make one weep for pity. When the poor hen escaped from the old woman's hands it fled to the highway. While walking along it found a bead, swallowed it, hurried back home as fast as possible, and began to cackle at the gate. The old woman welcomed it joyfully. The hen ran quickly in at the gate, passed its mistress, and went to its nest—at the end of an hour it jumped off, cackling loudly. The old woman hastened to see what the hen had laid. But when she glanced into the nest what did she perceive? ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various

... his mowing, and Louise heard the cackle of his machine before she reached the camp ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... all the wo o' the world, ma'am, dear. And she puts the blame of it on me, though I'm not in the fault this time, any how. The child's taken the small pox, and she depinded on me to tell the doctor to cut it for the cow-pox, and I depinded on Kitty Cackle, the limmer, to tell the doctor's own man, and thought she would not forget it, becase the boy's her bachelor; but out o' sight out o' mind—the never a word she tould him about it, and the babby's got it nataral, and the woman's in heart trouble, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... intermingled with lakes and ponds of all sizes, which filled the hollows for miles round—temporary sheets of water these, formed by the melting snow, that told of winter now past and gone. Additional animation and life was given to the scene by flocks of water-fowl, whose busy cry and cackle in the water, or whirring motion in the air, gave such an idea of joyousness in the brute creation as could not but strike a chord of sympathy in the heart of a man, and create a feeling of gratitude to the ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... Joe Clausin. "I've got that spot marked with a red cross in my mind, and if this boat ever gets close to it again, you'll hear this chicken cackle right smart. It's been photographed on my brain so that I'll see it lots of times when I wake up in ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren

... representative, I would extend the term to seven years, and render the occupant of the office thereafter ineligible for reelection. Seven years is, I am aware, under our political system, an unusual term; and here my ears will, I know, be assailed by the great "mandate" cackle. The count of noses being complete, the mind of the composite Democrat is held to be made up. It only remains to formulate the consequent decree; and, with least possible delay, put it in way of practical enforcement. Again, I, as a publicist, demur. It is the old issue, ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... fame of her doing what she may.) About the yard she cackling now doth go, To tell what 'twas she at her nest did do. Just thus it is with some professing men, If they do ought that good is, like our hen They can but cackle on't where e'er they go, What their right hand doth their left ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... Monastery of St. Michaelsburg—"The White Cross on the Hill." There within the white walls, where the warm yellow sunlight slept, all was peaceful quietness, broken only now and then by the crowing of the cock or the clamorous cackle of a hen, the lowing of kine or the bleating of goats, a solitary voice in prayer, the faint accord of distant singing, or the resonant toll of the monastery bell from the high-peaked belfry that overlooked the hill and valley ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... following words: buy, die, fie, guy, high, kie, lie, my, nigh, eying, pie, rye, sigh, shy, tie, thigh, thy, vie, we, ye, zebra, seizure. Again: most of them may be repeated in the same word, if not in the same syllable; as in bibber, diddle, fifty, giggle, high-hung, cackle, lily, mimic, ninny, singing, pippin, mirror, hissest, flesh-brush, tittle, thinketh, thither, vivid, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... Gentry, premonitorily. The tintinnabulation's enough. Periodical footings of Clashthoughts into Mayfair or the Tyrol, signalled by the slide from its mast of a crested index of Aeolian caprice, blazon of their presence, give the curious a right to spin through the halls and galleries under a cackle of housekeeper guideship—scramble for a chuck of the dainties, dog fashion. There is something to be said for the rope's ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... it, stared at her, pursed his lips, and then read it again. Suddenly he burst into a cackle of laughter, slapping his ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson

... by the great French nation. I will narrate the matter as briefly as is consistent with my respect for accuracy, and with my contempt for the tapioca-brained nincompoops who snarl, and chatter, and cackle at me in the organ of Mr. J. Last Friday I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various

... giant, eyeing me over slowly, "Cock, be ye a cackler—because if so be you do cackle overly here's we as won't love ye ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... judgment the verdict of the great mass of men is infinitely more trustworthy than that of any small body of men, no matter how cultivated. Of plenty of that narrow judgment of select circles which mistakes the cackle of its little coterie for the voice of the world, Cooper was made the subject, and sometimes the victim, during his lifetime. There were any number of writers, now never heard of, who were going to outlive him, according to literary prophecies ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... talk erbout dewin' somethin'—a passel o' poor ole critters like us!" Her cackle of embittered laughter was interrupted by the low, cultivated voice of the belle ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... disturbed by the driver's encouraging, "Pop-pop! Dih-dih-dih! Ho-ho-ho! children of jungle swine; brothers to buffalo!" addressed to the horses lagging in the climb, fluttered away with his silly little cackle. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... on benignantly, and evidently inclined to put in for a share, but restrained by the memory of past rebuffs—when little Blackie, standing on Tilly's knee, and having eaten a large share of what was going, raised itself to its full height, flapped its wings, and gave utterance to a cackle of triumph! A burst of laughter followed—and Tilly gave a shriek of delighted surprise that at once dissolved the spell, and induced the horrified fowl to seek refuge in ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... boy, we are not they Who only go to damn a play, And cackle in the pit; Like good Sir William Curtis{2} we Can laugh at nous and drollery, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... the orange groves or in gardens, the mocking-bird trills in sweet, liquid notes his wonderful song. He mimics, too, many sounds he hears, and sometimes when caged will whistle tunes or say words. The mocker can crow or cackle like the chickens, or mew like the cat. Then he will whistle clear and loud till dogs or boys answer his call. When they find themselves fooled, it is said, he ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... After a severe cackle on both sides the voices began to calm down like water going off the boil, and presently soft low gutturals passed in pleasant modulation. Then the eldest male savage made a courteous signal to Jacky that he should sit down ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... read two lines, the explanation of the whole horrible thing struck me. I stared dumbly down at the little book and laughed. Laughed harshly, so that the sound of my mad cackle echoed in a thousand ghastly reverberations through the dead corridors of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... survivor lurched down to the settlement his voice rose in a high cackle of delirious song. These were the words ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... his fear became frenzy; his love of gold turned to horror; his reason fled; and he dashed himself wildly against the prison which he had reared, until he fell, bleeding and broken. And as he fell, he heard the shrill cackle of demons that danced their hellish steps on the top of the wall. Then the Furies flew ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... to cackle. "Praise be to Allah you are come! I was persuaded to bring the young ladies here. They would make me do it. Yes, sir. It is not my fault. They pay me. I have to obey. Then we get caught, like we was some rats. No fair to punish ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... and cackle like Asian birds, Commodus renames Rome the City of Commodus and still lives!" ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... listen for the answer to the knock. The birds, too, were silent. The house remained immutably quiet. Charles Turold bent down, and peered through the keyhole, but could see nothing within but darkness. Then, as he looked, a sound reached his ears, a sound like a thin cackle of laughter from the interior of the house. In the gathering gloom within he had a momentary impression of a stealing greyish shape—a shape which vanished from his vision as ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... to proceed if I return not unharmed from York Place? Oh, my lord, though my head is in the wolf's mouth, I was not goose enough to place it there without settling how many carabines should be fired on the wolf, so soon as my dying cackle was heard.—Pshaw, my Lord Duke! you deal with a man of sense and courage, yet you speak to him as a ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... to Hollis—a strange, unnatural, sardonic cackle that, in spite of his self-control, caused his flesh to creep. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer

... it a moment, he concludes it not dangerous, excites his unbounded mirth and ridicule, and he snickers and chatters, hardly able to contain himself; now darting up the trunk of a tree and squealing in derision, then hopping into position on a limb and dancing to the music of his own cackle, and ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... into her shoes— Held me for your sake. Ay: there seemed some link 'Twixt your dead grannie and you, too strong for me To break; though it's been strained to the snapping-point, Times out of mind, whenever a hoolet's screech Sang through my blood; or poaching foxes barked On a shiny night to the cackle of wild geese, Travelling from sea to sea far overhead: Or whenever, waking in the quiet dark, The ghosts of horses whinneyed in my heart. Ghosts! Nay, I've been the mare between the limmers Who hears the hunters ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

... thy Fortune, such thy Doom. Swift the Ghouls gathered at the Poet's Tomb, With Dust of Notes to clog each lordly Line, Warburton, Warton, Croker, Bowles, combine! Collecting Cackle, Johnson condescends To INTERVIEW the Drudges of your Friends. Thus though your Courthope holds your merits high, And still proclaims your Poems POETRY, Biographers, un-Boswell-like, have sneered, And Dunces edit him whom ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... has been living on nothing for at least a week; its voice is various, sometimes not unlike that of a large hawk, at others a cackle, or low chuckle; occasionally it runs forward, erecting its crest, and spreading out its tail like a fan, the tail being depressed. I fancy it roosts in trees not unlike certain pigeons, Haematornis one species come in, this genus I think represents Parus: it has the same fluttering ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... creatures that sit in ten thousand ovens, with their legs tied, their wings twisted, and the gravy a-dripping down their sides and bosoms, like rain from the eaves of a house. Of course, for that day, every barn-yard in New England goes into mourning. The poor hen is afraid to cackle when she lays an egg, for fear of having a gun cracked at her. Even the fat hogs look melancholy in their pens, for a smell of roasting spare-ribs comes over them, and they seem to ruminate mournfully on some means of saving their ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... dark already, and in the nebulous middle-distance a laughing jackass was indulging in his evening peal. Cairns jerked his head in the direction of the unearthly cackle. "Lots of 'em down here in Vic, I believe," said he, and at length turned his attention to the bound man. "You see, I wanted to land him alive and kicking without spilling blood," he continued, opening his knife. "That was why I had to let him tie ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... A loud cackle from Hugh, whose grin had been growing wider and wider, now interrupted the discussion: "Ho, ho, ho! One of you is talking about aunts—your Aunt Maria—and the other is talking about ants—the beasts that go to the sluggard," he exploded. "You are ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton

... blackbird, the rusty grackle, the cowbird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not songsters, even in the latitude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers, unless we credit them with a "split-whistle," as Thoreau does. The two first named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in spring (as at times both our crow and jay have), which is very pleasing, and to which Emerson aptly refers in these lines ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... Church has failed dismally to keep before people the teaching of the Church in regard to Angels and Angelic intervention in the affairs of men. There I am in entire agreement with Mr. Machen. Soldiers tell their stories of angels and a few bishops cackle; but not one of them dares to speak of the fuller belief of the Church in angels and the soul-inspiring mystery of the Communion of Saints, the inter-relationship between those on the earth-plane and those who have passed to the higher life. The hardworking ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... this mental question a peal of elfish laughter greeted his ear,—a mirthless, falsetto cackle, like that of a parrot, and half hidden behind one of the great marble lions in the shade of the loggia he discerned a grotesque little creature, with the figure of a child and a woman's face, old in its expression ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... in January we heard a faint cackle outside, and, opening the kitchen door, found our poor widow in a sorry plight. One foot was frozen, her feathers were all rough and dirty, her wings drooping, her bright comb changed to a dull red. How she escaped from the hen-house, surmounted the high fence, and hobbled or flew ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... made your will, hey?' 'Oh,' I retorted, 'If you've bought the road, or the earth, I'll get off it, of course. I should have said you were the escaped lunatic going along at that pace.' He laughed, a high, reedy cackle that seemed familiar, rose stiffly out of his place and stepped down as though he had cramp. 'Ouch!' he said, bending and straightening to unlimber himself. 'Where are we, hey? Barnet? Taking an evening stroll after the office?' And he took off his goggles and I saw ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... yet unfinished; there are roads for commerce yet to be made; the trade of the African interior yet waits to be admitted into the capacious harbour of Sierra Leone for the enrichment of the fond nursing-mother of races who sits dreamily teaching her children how to cackle instead ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... some labour so absorbing as to drug all thought; and by Travel I mean Nature, and books, and art, and music, since these are, after all, but dream-voyages in other men's minds—they alone are for me the panacea of pain. Not the cackle of the human tongue—that for ever leaves me cold; not the sympathy which talks and reproves, or turns on the tap of help and courage by the usual trite source—that never helps me to forget. But Work, and Travel, and (for me) Loneliness—these are the three things by which ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... hen came off, and flew up on the window-sill. Then she began to cackle very loud. I suppose she meant to say, "Go and ...
— The Nursery, November 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 5 • Various

... he to embark on the sea, she to weep, and as he sought his ship he could hear the magpies cackle: "If the sea is changeable women ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... myself now. However—" Nicholas cleared his throat. "Since my accident on the hunting field I have seen no one. I had no desire to have a lot of gossipping women and old fool men around. I hate their cackle. I left the management of the estate to Standing, my agent. When he left—he got the offer of a post on Lord Sinclair's estate—Spencer Curtis took his place. He had to report to me, and I saw that he kept things ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... disappoint me. Saving my mother—whom I did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from what little humanity I had known until then—I had found that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was driving me to conclude, however, that I had been mistaken, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... talk of each group could be overheard by any one who listened. Altercations went on with clangorous fury. Almost every party was in division. Some enthusiastic individual had made a find, or had seen some one else who had. His cackle reached other groups, and out of the dark hulking figures loomed to listen or to throw in hot missiles of ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... amazed to see the effect of this announcement upon the three students. He had expected the crows and cackles of rather absurd merriment with which unbearded youth often greets, such news. But there was no crow or cackle. One young man blushed scarlet and looked guiltily at the floor. With a great effort he muttered: " Shes too good for him." Another student had turned ghastly pate and was staring. It was Peter Tounley ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... cease to cackle in that silly fashion I would tell you of Andreas van Wyck, the coward—a tale that is ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... beckoned wildly with her parasol to the "girls" who were idly strolling in a distant part of the field, and the archdeacon ran at full speed. The air grew dark with bows, and resonant with the genial laugh of the archdeacon, the cackle of the younger ladies, and the shrill parrot-like voices of the matrons; those smiled who had never smiled before, and on some maiden faces there hovered that look of adoring ecstasy with which the old maidens graced their angels. Then, when all the due rites had been performed, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... if so, Stumps, I shall continue to cackle a little longer on deck while they are ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne

... He broke into a sudden loud cackle of laughter. "Why! the feller tole me 'at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when it come t' history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, with a sandy MUS- tache," ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... A fog was creeping up at the time and in ten minutes it was on us, and under cover of the fog we got a little school—the same school we thought and on the exact spot where the cutter was lying when she ordered us off. Didn't we cackle though when we bailed it in? Oh, no! It was not much of a school—only twenty barrels—but it made us all feel fine. Not alone did we feel that we had got the better of the English cutter, but also that luck was coming ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly

... had been drinking steadily ever since leaving the Lazy D, laughed his low, sinister cackle. "Afraid of me, are y'u? Afraid ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine

... lake walk, and the talk of each group could be overheard by any one who listened. Altercations went on with clangorous fury. Almost every party was in division. Some enthusiastic individual had made a find, or had seen some one else who had. His cackle reached other groups, and out of the dark hulking figures loomed to listen or to throw in hot missiles of profanity. Phrases ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... appearance. He said, just as though I could hear him at this moment: "A bird, when it is on its nest, spreads its wings to cover the nest and eggs and protect them. It cannot use its wings for defense, but it can cackle and try to drive away the enemy. We are here to protect our wives and children, and we must not let the soldiers get them." He was on a buckskin horse, and he rode from one end of the line to the other, calling out: "Make a brave fight!" We were all hidden along ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... was, and for some other people as well, the Governor was one of those men that takes a bit of trouble and considers over a thing before he says yes or no. When he says a thing he sticks to it. When he goes forward a step he puts his foot down, and all the blowing, and cackle, and yelping in the world ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... Ellins happened in for his first private view. Mrs. Robert had towed him down special. He's a reg'lar friend, though, Mr. Robert is. I can't say how much of a struggle he had to keep his face straight, but after the first spasm has worn off he don't show any more signs of wantin' to cackle. And he don't pull ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... with a dry cackle, nursing his feet which were wrapped in rags. “True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads—me and Dravot —poor Dan—oh, poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not though I begged ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling

... rolled his head helplessly from side to side, and the hard cackle of his laughter was very trying to men whose nerves were raw ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... all that is golden by merely writing of such virtues at so much a column. The inherent insincerity, more or less, of all literary work is a fact of which he had not thought. I am speaking of the mere 'author,' the writer-tradesman, the amateur's superstition; not of men of genius, who, despite cackle, cannot disappoint. If they seem to do so, it must be that we have not come close enough to know them. But the man of genius is rarer, perhaps, in the ranks of authorship than anywhere: you are far more likely to find him on the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... said a thing that met his own approval Sol Rollin would cackle most cheerfully and then crack a knuckle by twisting a finger. His laugh was mostly out of register also. It had a sad lack of relevancy. He laughed on principle rather than provocation. Some sort of secret comedy of which the world knew nothing, was passing ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... that class of 'Logic-choppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder; who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics' Institute of Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round their Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illuminated Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in full day-light, with rattle and lantern, and insist on guiding you and guarding you therewith, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... about?" said Stella impatiently. "I never saw such provoking boys. You say such strange things, then cackle over it as though there was a joke in it, which nobody ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor

... forth the word with a cackle of laughter. "Oh, you cannot fool the Black Woman, Yellow Brian! Listen—Brian your name is, and Yellow Brian your name shall be indeed, since this is your will. Owen Ruadh O'Neill lies at the O'Reilly stead at Lough Oughter, but you ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones

... ourselves in the midst of "the rustic cackle of the burg." I am sure the municipal convention was verbally reconstructing the universe; but upon our entrance, the matter was abruptly laid on the table. When we withdrew, the entire convention, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; "We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon

... 'Shut up your infernal cackle! The boys hadn't any notion we was here. They had some lark on. They couldn't have seen us—we're ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... tintinnabulation's enough. Periodical footings of Clashthoughts into Mayfair or the Tyrol, signalled by the slide from its mast of a crested index of Aeolian caprice, blazon of their presence, give the curious a right to spin through the halls and galleries under a cackle of housekeeper guideship—scramble for a chuck of the dainties, dog fashion. There is something to be said for ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... not over-clean water so deftly past Juan's head, that not a drop touched him, and yet he had the appearance of having been ducked. At which bit of sleight-of-hand the whole court-yard, young and old, babies, cocks, hens, and turkeys, all set up a shout and a cackle, and dispersed to the four corners of the yard as if scattered by a volley of bird-shot. Hearing the racket, the rest of the maids came running,—Anita and Maria, the twins, women forty years old, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... sagely. "The old hen feels herself badly off when the egg teaches her to cackle. That's human nature, that is. And then she was riled because she was afraid I shouldn't have time to get the garden-things in order by to-morrow, when it seems there's some sort o' company expected. I told ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... instant an icy blade was driven deep between his shoulders; he felt his blood slowly congeal; heard the senile cackle of the perennial Spaniard; saw the Plaza rise and reel till the zenith crashed into the horizon—and knew ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... landing in numbers below our feet! Slowly some advanced, as if to reconnoitre us, and then others came on, till some hundreds were within thirty yards of us, evidently wondering what strange animals we could be. Then they began to talk to each other in a most strange discordant cackle, their voices growing louder and louder, as if they were disputing on the subject, and could not settle it to their satisfaction. We lay back and watched them, highly diverted. Nearer and nearer they approached, talking away furiously all the time in ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... her in the moonlight, but Kamelillo didn't like her. Veronica didn't like her either, and would stand off and cackle at her pointedly. She seemed to think Liebchen carried on improper and had no refinement. Why, I guess from her point of view sea bathing wasn't becoming, and when Liebchen stood on her head in the water, ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... looked again. Gold and silver money flashed on the crumpled handkerchief, and adding to it the last silver piece he had held in his teeth, the loathsome cripple stirred the heap around and around with one dirty forefinger, his mouth stretched in a cackle of greed. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... eyeing me over slowly, "Cock, be ye a cackler—because if so be you do cackle overly here's we as won't love ye ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... this week; but although both had noticed the new ornament instantly, wild horses could not have drawn the question from them; her desire to be asked was too obvious. With her gay plumage, her "nods and becks and wreathed smiles," and her cheerful cackle, Huldah closely resembled the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; the cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving columns; loving his art—for such it is—for art's sake; getting ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... discussing the raid, finally each of them telling exploits of his favorite heroes of outlawry. I could hear Herman, busy among his pots and pans. Then he mounted the tongue of the mess-wagon and called out, "We haf for breakfast cackle-berries, first vot iss come iss served, und those vot iss sleep late ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... beside the snake. But the latter would pay no attention at first to this new victim, but went on hissing at the buni, who teased and irritated it until at last it actually struck at the wretched bird. The hen made a weak attempt to cackle, then shuddered once or twice and became still. The death was instantaneous. Facts will remain facts, the most exacting critic and disbeliever notwithstanding. This thought gives me courage to write what happened further. Little by little the cobra grew so infuriated that it became evident the jadugar ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... strictly unorthodox you may count on me. If that antidote turns up, I shall not fail to cackle over it in your columns. By the by, are you going to review the poison? Excuse so many mixed metaphors," she added, with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... opened from the other side. For fully a minute after the door had closed, Fitzpatrick continued to lean forward, the snarl on his lips, the evil light in his eyes. Then he fell back heavily, with a harsh, mirthless cackle. ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... "I fired five shots, but I saved one for myself. Ha, ha, ha!" And his mirthless cackle broke ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand

... beautiful article of social upholstery in India. He sits in a large chair in the drawing-room. Heads and bodies sway vertically in passing him. He takes the oldest woman in to dinner; he gratifies her with his drowsy cackle. He says "Yes" and "No" to everyone with drowsy civility; everyone is conciliated. His stars dimly twinkle—twinkle; the host and hostess enjoy their light. After dinner he decants claret into his venerable ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... was in sight around the ranch. Never had it appeared more peaceful and pastoral to Jean. The grazing cattle and horses in the foreground, the haystack half eaten away, the cows in the fenced pasture, the column of blue smoke lazily ascending, the cackle of hens, the solid, well-built cabins—all these seemed to repudiate Jean's haste and his darkness of mind. This place was, his father's farm. There was not a cloud in the ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... a dominant monotone above all the talk and the cackle of laughter; ears were dinned everlastingly by the thunder of the cataract near the village. The Noda waters break their winter fetters first of all at Adonia, where the river leaps from the cliffs into the whirlpool. The roar of the falls is a trumpet call ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... truth? Shall a man find a pearl in the dirt and not set it over his heart. I have loved you since first I saw your fair face, and now I honour you. Come to me and bless me; and when these fools cackle and gibber, I shall know ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington

... began to cackle. "Praise be to Allah you are come! I was persuaded to bring the young ladies here. They would make me do it. Yes, sir. It is not my fault. They pay me. I have to obey. Then we get caught, like we was some rats. No fair to punish me. The ladies all right. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... orange groves or in gardens, the mocking-bird trills in sweet, liquid notes his wonderful song. He mimics, too, many sounds he hears, and sometimes when caged will whistle tunes or say words. The mocker can crow or cackle like the chickens, or mew like the cat. Then he will whistle clear and loud till dogs or boys answer his call. When they find themselves fooled, it is said, he mimics ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... never certainly before—sat down on the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded like the crumpling ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... incredible age. She was senile with age. Her cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the circumambient ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... miller's' in some place where I had never been, and of which I had not previously heard? I am ashamed to complain, but there were moments when my juvenile and confidential friend weighed heavy on my hands. His cackle was indeed almost continuous, but it was never unamiable. He showed an amiable curiosity when he was asking questions; an amiable guilelessness when he was conferring information. And both he did largely. I am in a position to write the biographies of Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley's father and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... fluttering and cackling, so did Mrs. Pryor flutter and cackle, up the street, with Mrs. Weight, still breathless, pounding ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards

... up a howling, And the poodle-dog a yowling, And the cocks began a crowing, And the old cow raised a lowing, As she heard the tempest blowing; And fowls and geese did cackle, And the cordage and the tackle Began to shriek and crackle; And the spray dashed o'er the funnels, And down the deck in runnels; And the rushing water soaks all, From the seamen in the fo'ksal To the stokers, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... quickly with fright and relief the White Linen Nurse burst forth into one maddening cackle of hysterical laughter. "Ha! Ha! Ha!" she giggled. "Hi! Hi! ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... of the greatest of small men. Have you read Emerson or Lowell yet? Here are new men of real thoughtfulness whose minds are upon the truth which does not fade with passing events. These questions about Texas and Oregon, about tariffs, about Whigs and Democrats, what are they but the cackle of the moment? And yet there is something pathetic about Douglas. Why does he not settle to the solid study and experiences of the law? Why this catching at this and the other opportunity? Mr. Williams says that Mr. Douglas has just accepted ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... Poor Man's Beer, Should learn it is a dodge of vested pelf, And, rich or poor, a man can't rob himself. It is the poor who suffer from temptation, And drink's detestable adulteration, That crying ill which no one dares to tackle! Whilst Witlers howl, and Water-zealots cackle. The poor are poisoned, not by honest drink, But lethal stuff that might scour out a sink. The Poor Man's Beer, quotha! Who'll keep it pure? Not rich monopolists, nor prigs demure, Those shriek for freedom, these for prohibition, "Vend the drugged stuff sans scrutiny or condition!" Cries ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various

... out on this gallery in the sky! Looking eastward, a limitless expanse of ocean; gazing westward, the waters of the great sound, the shores of which were low marshes miles away. Below me could be heard the soft cackle of the snow-goose (Anser hyperboreus), which had left its nesting-place on the barren grounds of arctic America, and was now feeding contentedly in its winter home in the shallow salt-ponds; which the gentle shur-r-r- of the waves softly broke ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... shoulders of the watchman. Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental author of Pamela; and all the ladies of his court cackle ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... could ever afterward explain it—there was something about the grim old man which commended him to Ab from the very first. There was an occasional twinkle in the fierce old fellow's eye and sometimes a certain cackle in his clucking talk, which betokened not unkindliness toward a healthy youngster, and the two soon grew together, as often the young and old ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... the person of its representatives, got leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the other three!—which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military apparatus) is at least fifty millions. Now seven hundred pounds is to fifty million pounds, roughly, as seven ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... and hurled any missile that came handy; the storm of books, inkstands, and chunks of coal gloomed the air and beat about the manikin's perch relentlessly, but all to no purpose; the nimble figure dodged every shot; and not only that, but burst into a cackle of sarcastic and triumphant laughter as I sat down exhausted. While I puffed and gasped with fatigue and excitement, my Conscience talked ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... was nearly dark already, and in the nebulous middle-distance a laughing jackass was indulging in his evening peal. Cairns jerked his head in the direction of the unearthly cackle. "Lots of 'em down here in Vic, I believe," said he, and at length turned his attention to the bound man. "You see, I wanted to land him alive and kicking without spilling blood," he continued, opening his knife. "That was why I had to let ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first, but had clearly no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether, and they had passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard her mellow note of laughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside our door, and, opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles of massive frame. We then learned that their purchase was in fulfilment of a vow made long ago, in the lifetime of Mr. Johnson, that if ever she wore glasses, they should be gold- bowed; ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... us; what with one thing and another, indeed, a maiden may be pleased to find even a plebeian protector.' Thus she rambled on in her sharp voice, yet there was cause for her anxiety, and truth lay beneath her cackle, but the wisdom of age is often obscured by ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... you may laugh, but last fall during the campaign he was so excited about something that he couldn't eat, and the night they had the Republican mass-meeting here he roosted on the chandelier in the hall, and every time General Trumps made a good point that chicken would cackle and flap his wings, as much as to say, 'Them's my sentiments!' And on the day of the parade he turned out and followed the last wagon, keeping step with the music and never dropping out of line but once, when he stopped ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... In another place a lion was seen half dressed in a fox's hide, while a wolf in a sheep's mask was conversing very amicably with a young lamb. Here again might be seen the geese stretching out their necks from the Roman Capitol in full cackle, while the stout invaders were beheld in the distance, running off as hard as they could. In short, in all these quaint entablatures some pithy sarcasm was symbolically conveyed; only over the mantel piece was the design ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hold of herself with a grip of iron, scrubbed her face with his handkerchief, dabbed it thickly with powder from a small silver box, threw back her head and went up two stairs at a time. On the second floor there was a cackle of laughter, but doors were shut. On the third all was quiet. But on the fourth the tall, thin, Raphael-headed man was drunk again, arguing thickly in the usual cloud of smoke, which drifted sullenly into the ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... death to each. A female inside-passenger, with an infant in her arms, which she nearly let drop in her energies, was the coryphee of this chorus of tongues, which could be compared to nothing but bees in the act of swarming, or the cackle which the entrance of a fox causes in a hen-roost. We were no longer surprised at hearing the peasants whom we met conversing in a tone which we had mistaken for quarrelling. The French generally, indeed, are fond of noise and action and emphasis about what does not concern ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... to see the effect of this announcement upon the three students. He had expected the crows and cackles of rather absurd merriment with which unbearded youth often greets, such news. But there was no crow or cackle. One young man blushed scarlet and looked guiltily at the floor. With a great effort he muttered: " Shes too good for him." Another student had turned ghastly pate and was staring. It was Peter Tounley who relieved the minister's mind, for upon that young man's face was a broad jack-o-lantern ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... these riotous sounds the barnyard suddenly awakens. I hear my horse whinnying from the barn, the chickens begin to crow and cackle, and such a grunting and squealing as the pigs set up from behind the straw stack, it would do a man's ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... enjoyment. His lips curled up at each end, his eyes rolled back and then fairly danced with mirth, and his cheeks shook. It was contagious. Not only did Master Benjamin laugh, but the others had to laugh, not excluding Master Jonathan, who emitted a dry cackle as became one of his ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler

... was irreverent, and mayhap afterwards we were all soundly punished for it. But at least it was on the level of their soldiers' wit—though I own, at the most, no great matter to cackle of. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody will pay for their own telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, we ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... was the hideous, unearthly cry of the laughing-jackass, called often the bushman's clock; the screaming cry of thousands of parrots flying here and there through the forest; there was the cackle of the wattle-bird, the clear notes of the magpie, and the confused chattering of thousands of leather-heads; while many other birds added their notes to the discordant chorus, and speedily banished sleep from the ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston

... 'Where's your pretty wife, Shane?' 'She's in all the wo o' the world, ma'am, dear. And she puts the blame of it on me, though I'm not in the fault this time, any how. The child's taken the small pox, and she depinded on me to tell the doctor to cut it for the cow-pox, and I depinded on Kitty Cackle, the limmer, to tell the doctor's own man, and thought she would not forget it, becase the boy's her bachelor; but out o' sight out o' mind—the never a word she tould him about it, and the babby's got it nataral, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... unpleasant, sarcastic cackle. Bob turned. Four or five of the punchers, mounted and ready for the day's work, were sitting at ease in ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... in surprise. He continued to keep up the cuckoo sound, trying to laugh, and yet totally unable to accomplish even a cackle, as if some internal force clutched the diaphragm and mocked him, so that his efforts were reduced to a gurgling as in cynanche—like a dog choking with a rope round his craig, the sounds coming jerking out in barks, and dying away again in yelps ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... our approach with the most discordant din it had ever been my fortune to hear. A mingling of honk and cackle, it manifested not excitement so much as curiosity. I walked among the boobies, and they never moved except to pick at me with long, sharp bills. Many were sitting on nests, and all around in the sand were nests with ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... legitimately within the scope of their judgment the verdict of the great mass of men is infinitely more trustworthy than that of any small body of men, no matter how cultivated. Of plenty of that narrow judgment of select circles which mistakes the cackle of its little coterie for the voice of the world, Cooper was made the subject, and sometimes the victim, during his lifetime. There were any number of writers, now never heard of, who were going to outlive him, according to literary ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... of fashion; Sloppy words are never said; Voices once a-throb with passion Shake with merriment instead; Poets qualified to tackle Lyric metres when inspired Stoop to make the ladies cackle— Nothing further ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various

... careful of that dollar and a half. Don't you see?—I was a prisoner sawing my way out with a tiny steel saw. And I sawed out!" His voice rose in a shrill cackle of triumph. "Steward, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... comes back with a rush—the pewter dinner service, and spotless parlour, smelling of lavender and soap, the cackle of hens and lowing of cows. Eleanor pushes aside the dish of bananas, "Let us go out in the moonlight," she says. "It is lovely in the garden, and you can smoke. Let me light your cigar?" striking a match on the sole ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham

... shape fate is, in its discordance and its mockery, more truly terrible and most hideously solemn—it is the little child's laugh at a frisking kitten which brings down the avalanche, and lays waste the mountain side, or it is the cackle of the startled geese that ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... the old custom, to the point of riddles. And good humor sounds in the manly words: "What shall I do? I cannot recant. In our century full of intellect and beauty, which might put Cicero into a corner, I am only an unlearned, limited, poorly educated man! But the goose must needs cackle ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... stunted alder, the white side of a leaping salmon, and the gasp of that noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the wild hillside, the keen pure air, the steady setters, the flap and cackle of the rising grouse, the ringing shot that laid him low, born in the purple, and fated there to die. Nor, when corn-fields were cleared, and partridges, almost as swift as bullets and as numerous as locusts, were driven to and fro across the open, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... fearful gnome, against whose family-visitations one ought to watch and pray. As it was, she came into the house rather like one of those breezy days of spring, which burst all the blossoms, set all the doors and windows open, make the hens cackle and the turtles peep,—filling a solemn Puritan dwelling with as much bustle and chatter as if a box of martins were setting up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... wheat-crop into their own crops, after a ravenous fashion. Having eaten their fill, they re-formed their column of march, with a venerable gander at the head, and trudged silently homeward, cautiously followed by their owner, who noticed, that, on regaining his door-yard, they set up a vociferous cackle, such as he had repeatedly heard from them before at about the same hour. It was a most evident attempt to establish an alibi; it was as much as to say, "If you miss any wheat, we didn't take it; we are honest birds, and stay at home o'nights, Dr. Percival." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... she might be over-taken, and prevented from accomplishing this great feat. At first she could hear the voices in the field beneath her, but as she hastened on all became silent but the stirring of the summer breeze in the tree-tops, and the far-away cackle of an industrious hen. The road, at first very sunny, had now wound itself beside huge crags, which made a welcome shade, and Julie saw with delight a little water-fall come tumbling down a narrow fissure, plunging into a pool below, and crossing the path. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... young Cabyle seemed to be dusty and warm with walking. He even seemed fatigued, for, when about to pass the group of slaves, he stopped to rest and flung down his load. The shock of the fall must have snapped a number of legs, for a tremendous cackle burst from the bundles as ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... of silence; then a cackle of words from several of them together. The Greek's hands on his shoulders tightened. He heard the man's purring ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... hen: you couldn't keep her down; she never went in when it rained, and she could cackle louder than any hen on the ground; and above all, she took things as they came. I always admired her. I liked the way she died, too. Of course I let her live as long as she could—she wouldn't have been any good to eat, anyway, for she was all brains, and I never could bear to make soup out ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung









Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com




Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar