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More "Cuckoo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... became suddenly self-assertive. The rustle of squirrels along the pine-stems, the monotonous music of the cuckoo, varied by a charge of toy pistol-shots when an inexperienced monkey alighted on a dead twig. Brutus, standing squarely between them, eyed each in turn with critical speculation, his ugly head cocked very much to one side. He instinctively mistrusted all wearers of petticoats, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... shells, which we can hardly crack with our teeth, or even with a hammer, will divide of themselves, and make way for the little tender sprout which proceeds from the kernel. There are instances, it is said, such as in the Touch-me-not (impatiens), and the Cuckoo-flower (cardamine), in which the seed-vessels, by an elastic jerk at the moment of their explosion, cast the seeds to a distance. We are all aware, however, that many seeds—those of the most composite flowers, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the eighth chapter of "The Origin of Species" Darwin says ("Origin of Species" (6th edition), page 205.), "I will not attempt any definition of instinct... Every one understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate and to lay her eggs in other birds' nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... chimes which it sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg, and I prefer it to the cuckoo ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... with funny little flowers in it which went out of fashion in America about twenty years ago. There was also a chalet in the garden, where we saw at once that we could buy cuckoo clocks and edelweiss and German lace if we wanted to. There was a big hotel full of people speaking strange languages—by this time we all sympathised with Mr. Mafferton in his resentment of foreigners in Continental hotels; as he said, one expected them to do their travelling in England. There ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that cock of the walk, the ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... and wagons to the top of a barn to shade the wood from the sun's rays; some tumbling cheeses down a hill in the expectation that they would find their way to Nottingham Market, and some were employed in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched upon an old bush. Seeing men engaged in such employments as these the king's servants were convinced that the villagers were all fools, and quite unworthy the king's notice. The villagers, however, seeing that they had outwitted the king, considered themselves ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action. The cuckoo lays its egg in the strange bird's nest, and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest that has ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... A cuckoo sat on a tree and sang, "Summer is coming, coming"; And a bee crept out from the hive and ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... zakukovali, i.e., "They began to cuckoo." The resemblance between the word kukla, a puppet, and the name and cry of the cuckoo (Kukushka) may be merely accidental, but that bird has a marked mythological character. See the account of the rite called "the ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Jim had been elevated to a starry firmament of importance, from wellnigh the lowest position of insignificance in the camp, attained by his general worthlessness and shiftlessness—of mind and demeanor—which qualities had passed into a proverb of the place. Procrastination, like a cuckoo, had made its nest in his pockets, where the hands of Jim would hatch its progeny. Labor and he abhorred each other mightily. He had never been known to strike a lick of work till larder and stomach were both of them empty and credit had taken to the hills. He ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... walls, for in places they had crumbled, and admire the bracken in the hollows and the wind-blown hawthorn-trees growing on the other side of the long, winding drive. He had long wished to walk in the park and now he was there. The hawthorns were in bloom and the cuckoo was calling. The sky was dark overhead, but there was light above the trees, and long herds of cattle wandered and life seemed to Ned extraordinarily lovely and desirable at that moment. "I wonder what her dreams are? ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... fight the most, for they begin almost in the winter if the sun shines warm for an hour, and they keep on all day in the summer, and till it is quite dark and the stars are out, besides getting up before the cuckoo to go on again. Yet they are the sweetest and nicest of all the birds, and the most gentle, and do not mind our coming into their fields. So I am sure, Bevis, that you are wrong, and fighting is not wicked if you love one another. You and Mark are fond ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... debt of the poet to the birds has been dwelt upon in many poems, the best known of which are Shelley's "Skylark" and Wordsworth's "To the Cuckoo." ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... boy's ancestry, somewhere, there must have been a stream of gentle blood. He was a song-bird in a cuckoo's nest. When the military band played, his spirit was so moved that he shed tears. But when his mother died, and her body was placed in a new board coffin made by a neighbor who worked in the shipyard, he admired the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... time the men of Gotham would have kept the Cuckoo so that she might sing all the year, and in the midst of their town they made a hedge round in compass and they got a Cuckoo, and put her into it, and said, "Sing there all through the year, or thou shalt have neither ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... Again I catch the cuckoo's note That faintly murmurs near, The mingled melodies that float To rapture's listening ear. While April like a virgin pale Retreats with modest grace, And blushing through her tearful veil Just shows her ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the second of these two assumptions, viz., that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued. It is without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year, and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct which aims at being complete. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... of looking at the inscriptions on the great cliffs at the River of the Dog—the strange beauty of that name! It was like the place-names of native Ulster—Athbo, the Ford of Cows, Sraidcuacha, the Cuckoo's Lane—one name sounded to the other like tuning-forks. And the sweet strange harmony of it filled his heart, so that he could understand the irresistible charm of Lebanon—the high clear note like a bird's song. Here was the sun and the dreams of mighty things, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... more or less, results of interference and disquietude. And thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding this, observe the anxious doubling of every object by a visible echo or shadow throughout this picture. The grandest feature of it is the steep distant cliff; and therefore the dualism is more marked here than elsewhere; the two promontories or cliffs, and two ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... on golden gales Scents hawthorn blown down happy dales; The phantom cuckoo calls forlorn From limits of the haunted morn;— Sing, elfin heart! thy notes to me Are bells that ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... a jackdaw—he chatters without knowing what he is chattering about, and pays no heed to the root of things, so busy is he with stuffing himself full with the grain. I say this to you with absolute earnestness, for I perceive you to be strange to our ways—a cuckoo that has blundered ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Graham, author of "Carrots" and "Tell me a Story"; published by Macmillan & Co. This volume is well illustrated by Walter Crane. The cuckoo in an old clock makes friends with a lonely little girl, and causes her to have a good time, and to see many wonderful things. One of the prettiest parts of the story is the account of the making of the clock in the German home of the ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... Hindoo type;—that is, she should have the complexion of chocolate and cream; "her face should be as the full moon, her nose smooth as a flute; she should have eyes like unto lotuses, and a neck like a pigeon's; her voice should be soft as the cuckoo's, and her step as the gait of a young elephant of pure blood." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... butterflies danced and fluttered over the flowers, which lifted their heads as though to drink in the rays of the sun. In every tree in the garden a thrush woke up and began to sing; sparrows chirped, jays screamed, blue-tits chattered, and the chiff-chaff uttered his strange note. In the woods a cuckoo called and blackbird fluted to blackbird in the hedge. In the stables the horses awoke and champed at their stalls; the cat jumped down and ran after a mouse which crept out from under the straw. The sentry at the courtyard gate woke up and rubbed his eyes and came smartly to attention, ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... The father and mother slept, but the little son was not asleep. I saw the flowered cotton curtains of the bed move, and the child peep forth. At first I thought he was looking at the great clock, which was gaily painted in red and green. At the top sat a cuckoo, below hung the heavy leaden weights, and the pendulum with the polished disc of metal went to and fro, and said 'tick, tick.' But no, he was not looking at the clock, but at his mother's spinning wheel, that stood just underneath it. That was the boy's ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... Llangynog town at nine Without a darkening frown, And fleeter than the cuckoo's flight ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... these wanderings were brought to a final close; afterwards I often roved in imagination through distant countries famous for natural history, but felt no strong inclination to go thither, as the last adventure had terminated in such unexpected vexation. The departure of the cuckoo and swallow and summer birds of passage for warmer regions, once so interesting to me, now scarcely caused me to turn my face to the south; and I continued in this cold and dreary climate for three years. During this period I seldom or never mounted my hobby-horse; ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Cuckoo sings in April, The Cuckoo sings in May, The Cuckoo sings in June; In July ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... the coming on of night, the air grew cool, and in the mellowing distance smoke was rising gently from the cottage chimneys. There were a thousand pleasant scents diffused around, from young leaves and fresh buds; the cuckoo had been singing all day long, and was but just now hushed; the smell of earth newly-upturned, first breath of hope to the first labourer after his garden withered, was fragrant in the evening breeze. It was a time when most men cherish good resolves, and sorrow for the wasted ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... other beautiful spots of scenery among the upland, considerable portions of which, particularly in long sloping valleys, that faced the morning sun, were covered with hazel and brushwood, where the unceasing and simple notes of the cuckoo were incessantly plied, mingled with the more mellow and varied notes of the thrush and blackbird. Sometimes the bright summer waterfall seemed, in the rays of the sun, like a column of light, and the springs that issued from the sides of the more distant and ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... a woman of large body and small brain. In respect of reasoning power, she was little better than the wooden cuckoo which came out periodically from the interior of the clock that stood over her own fireplace and announced the hours. She entertained settled convictions on a few subjects, in regard to which she resembled a musical box. If you set her ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... slowly, clasping his head in his hands, "you are my daughter's affianced, are you not, and will give her high place and many famous titles, and her son shall be called Clavering, that the old name may not die but be great in England, in France, and in Italy. You must bide to marry her, lest that cuckoo, Hugh de Cressi, that cuckoo with the sharp bill, should creep into my nest. I'll not be worsted by a stripling clad in merchant's cloth who slew my only son. Take not my words ill, noble Noyon, for I am overdone with grief for the past and fear ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... success. The only European who had seen and fired at one agreed with the natives that it is of the size of a pigeon, with a long tail. I believe it is a Podargus or Night Hawk." In a subsequent note he further says—"I have since seen two birds by moonlight, one of the size and shape of a cuckoo, the other a large black bird, which I imagine to be the one ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... a cuckoo, coming to bathe in the stream, called out, 'Why, river! what has happened? You ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last "I see," and popped back, clapping shut ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... of an honest woman,' said the portress, an old acquaintance of mine, 'I believe he swallows it all and is none the fatter for it; he is as thin and dried up as the cuckoo ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... the nest Where, as a lonely guest, First thy young head did rest, Cuckoo, so dear! Strange to the father-bird, Strange to the mother-bird, Sounded the note they heard, Tender and clear. Fleeing thy native bow'rs, Bright with the silv'ry flow'rs, Oft in the summer hours Hither thou fliest; ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... bird "the cuckoo." But only one Indian knew how the cuckoo came to be, and why it is too lazy to ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... thee! Seek for sweet surprise In the young children's eyes. But I have learnt the years, and know the yet Leaf-folded violet. Mine ear, awake to silence, can foretell The cuckoo's fitful bell. I wander in a grey time that encloses June and the wild hedge-roses. A year's procession of the flowers doth pass My feet, along the grass. And all you sweet birds silent yet, I know The notes that stir you so, Your ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... Before them, on one side, the sea lay like a silver mist; on the other the mountains, so ethereal that they looked as though at any moment they might melt away into the blue of the sky. But Mick had no heart for these things. Even when he heard the cuckoo across the fields, for the first time that year, it was with no answering thrill, but only with a dull sense that he had grown too old now to care—seeing Aunt Mary had brought back all the trouble he had tried ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... which he had plenty, this pleasant honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Gonerill herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick; such as comparing the king to the hedge-sparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains: and saying, that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear's daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); and that Lear was no longer Lear, but the shadow ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the winter. I am a vagrant really: or a migrant. I must migrate. Do you think a cuckoo in Africa and a cuckoo in Essex is one AND the same bird? Anyhow, I know I must oscillate between north and south, so oscillate I do. It's just my nature. All people ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... falls destroy my dreams, the nervous shock being sufficient to bridge the thousand centuries in an instant and hurl me wide awake into my little bed, where, perchance, I lie sweating and trembling and hear the cuckoo clock calling the hour in the hall. But this dream of my leaving home I have had many times, and never yet have I been awakened by it. Always do I crash, shrieking, down through the brush and fetch up with a ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... the umbilical region. Her yoni [vulva] resembles the opening lotus bud, and her love-seed is perfumed like the lily that has newly burst. She walks with swanlike [more exactly, flamingolike] gait, and her voice is low and musical as the note of the Kokila bird [the Indian cuckoo]; she delights in white raiment, in fine jewels, and in rich dresses. She eats little, sleeps lightly, and being as respectful and religious as she is clever and courteous, she is ever anxious to worship the gods and to enjoy the conversation of Brahmans. Such, then, is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... moved through thy whiteness, O City, and its dreams lay down to dreams in the freedom of thy fields! Years come and years go, but every year I see city and plain in the happy exaltation of Spring, and departing before the cuckoo, while the blossom is still bright on the bough, it has come to me to think that Paris ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... russet floors, by waters idle, The pine lets fall its cone; The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing In leafy dells alone; And traveler's joy beguiles in autumn Hearts that ...
— Last Poems • A. E. Housman
... are results of interference and disquietude. Thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the note or syllable gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence also the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the voice of a cuckoo." ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... reigns in this wilderness, interrupted only by the thunderings of the avalanche and by the noise which occasions the motion of the glaciers. No bird moves its wings or raises its twittering in this sorrowful region; only the melodious sighs of the cuckoo are borne thither by ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... onward, ever breathes A beauty and a fragrance, which enwreathes Within the being until every thought With a strange mystery of joy is fraught. And where the hazel forms a leafy screen Of verdant matting, the cuckoo, unseen, Chaunts forth her woodnotes through the stilly air, Whose silent motions far the accents bear. And thou hast come, sweet Nightingale! once more O'er our entranced spirits to outpour Thy liquid warblings! 'Mid the flow'rets' scent And summer's gladness rises ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... elves present, to quench his thirst, A pure seed-pearl of infant dew, Brought and besweeten'd in a blue And pregnant violet; which done, His kitling eyes begin to run Quite through the table, where he spies The horns of papery butterflies, Of which he eats; and tastes a little Of that we call the cuckoo's spittle; A little fuz-ball pudding stands By, yet not blessed by his hands, That was too coarse; but then forthwith He ventures boldly on the pith Of sugar'd rush, and eats the sagge And well-bestrutted bees' sweet bag; Gladding his palate ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... fair on April 14—Hefful being Sussex for Heathfield—that, tradition states, the old woman lets the cuckoo out of her basket and starts him on his course through the summer months. A local story tells of a Heathfield man who had a quarrel with his wife and left for Ditchling. After some days he returned, remarking, "I've had enough of furrin ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... nothing to hurt the poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a charge he can't support; she punishes him by taking three years' lease of independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then comes cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can win the shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully the hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a side-head at her, husbanded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... head-waiters receiving a modest grade of the Victorian Order. Later in the day, let the King visit the National Gallery—a hall filled with picture post-cards of the most picturesque spots in Switzerland; and thence let him be conducted to the principal factory of cuckoo-clocks, and, after some of the clocks have been made to strike, be heard remarking to the President, with a hearty laugh, that the sound is like that of the cuckoo. How the second day of the visit would be filled up, I do not know; I leave that to the President's discretion. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the kitchen wall of an old farm-house on a mountain-side in Switzerland there hangs a tiny wooden clock. In the tiny wooden clock there lives a tiny wooden cuckoo, and every hour he hops out of his tiny wooden door, takes a look about to see what is going on in the world, shouts out the time of day, and pops back again into his little dark house, there to wait and tick away the minutes until it ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... 'Penny Magazine,' containing a single short leader on some current topic, without any pretensions to excellence; some driblets of news spread out in large type; half a column of foreign intelligence, with a column of facetious paragraphs under the heading of "The Cuckoo;" while the rest of each number consisted of advertisements. Notwithstanding the comparative innocence of the contents of the early numbers of the paper, certain passages which appeared in it on two occasions subjected the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... to which you don't demean yourself by going!—and obliged to tell and act a string of lies, when lies happen to be just one of the vices you're not inclined to! And then afterward you find yourself let in for living years and years with a bad conscience—hating the cuckoo-child, too, more and more as it grows up. Yes!—I am quite sorry ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... do like a cuckoo," Dan admonished his brother. "Wise you are, father. Big already is your giving ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... but others did, and the years between the licensing act and 1743 find Mrs. Clive in demand as the affected lady of quality, speaker of humorous epilogues, performer in Dublin, and singer of such favorites as "Ellen-a-Roon," "The Cuckoo," and "The Life of a Beau." This period is also marked by Mrs. Clive's first professional venture with David Garrick, in his Lethe, the beginning of a relationship to become one of the most tempestuous and ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... earth when thou didst go, In life's spring-bloom, Down to the appointed house below— The silent tomb. But now the green leaves of the tree, The cuckoo, and "the busy bee," Return, but with them bring ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... there is not one which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief and murderess," as another ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... cinnamon-backed cuckoo must be a graceful minstrel in our green hedges in July, though I am ashamed to admit I never was lucky enough to meet him. The oriole, blue jay, officer-bird, summer red-bird, indigo-bird and golden-winged woodpecker form a group of striking beauty; a most excellent idea, I would say, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... should never go again to the corner where I always found the earliest violets; and then I cried to think that the nightingale would soon be back, and how that very morning, when I opened my window, I had heard the cuckoo, and could tell that he was calling from just about ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the cuckoo," said Mary Acton. "Do you remember the young one we found last spring, sprawling all over the nest, and opening its ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... Chamber of Deputies, which was not to make laws affecting education, religious corporations, the registration of births and marriages; or to confer civil rights on non-catholics, or to touch the privileges and immunities of the clergy, might have suited Cloud-cuckoo-town, but would not suit the solid earth, were facts easy to recognise, but no one had time to pause and consider. It was sufficient to hear Pius proclaim that in the wind which was uprooting oaks and cedars might be clearly distinguished the Voice of the Lord. Such utterances, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... of the bell, the back-gate was usually opened, and the Doctor was wont to come forth as punctually as a cuckoo of a clock at the striking of the hour; but a deviation was observed on this occasion. Formerly, Mrs. Pringle and the rest of the family came first, and a few minutes were allowed to elapse before the Doctor, laden with grace, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... personation; representation &c. 554; semblance; copy &c. 21; assimilation. paraphrase, parody, take-off, lampoon, caricature &c. 21. plagiarism; forgery, counterfeit &c. (falsehood) 544; celluloid. imitator, echo, cuckoo|, parrot, ape, monkey, mocking bird, mime; copyist, copycat; plagiarist, pirate. V. imitate, copy, mirror, reflect, reproduce, repeat; do like, echo, reecho, catch; transcribe; match, parallel. mock, take off, mimic, ape, simulate, impersonate, personate; act ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... me, till the evening. I felt as though I had been let out of prison as I breakfasted joyfully on the verandah, the sun streaming through the creeperless trellis on to the little meal, and the first cuckoo of the year calling to me from the fir wood. Of the dinner and evening before me I would not think; indeed I had a half-formed plan in my head of going to the forest after lunch with the babies, taking wraps and provisions, and getting lost till well on ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... swallows as they twittered past, or stayed on the sharp, high top of the pear tree; to the vehement starlings, whistling and screeching like Mrs. Iden herself, on the chimneys; chaffinches "chink, chink," thrushes, distant blackbirds, who like oaks; "cuckoo, cuckoo," "crake, crake," buzzing and burring of bees, coo of turtle-doves, now and then a neigh, to remind you that there were horses, fulness and richness of musical sound; a world of grass and leaf, humming like a hive ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... the men and the women had been forbidden in the fiercest terms by Monsieur le Directeur: nevertheless conversation spasmodically occurred, thanks to the indulgent nature of the Wooden Hand. The Wooden Hand must have been cuckoo—he looked it. If he wasn't I am totally at a loss ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... the caterpillars in rolling up the leaves is not only to conceal themselves from birds and predatory insects, but also to protect themselves from the cuckoo-flies, which lie in wait in every quarter to deposit their eggs in their bodies, that their progeny may devour them. Their mode of concealment, however, though it appear to be cunningly contrived and skilfully executed, is not always successful, their enemies often discovering their hiding ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... rests on a strong three-sided bone called the sacrum, or sacred-bone, which is wedged in between the hip bones and forms the keystone of the pelvis. Joined to the lower end of the sacrum is the coccyx, or cuckoo-bone, a ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... insolence—because you treat my soldiers like paupers—because you are one of those who do no more to have the right to live than the purple butterfly that flies in the sun, and who oust the people out of their dues as the cuckoo kicks the poor birds that have reared it, out of the nest of down, to which it never has carried a twig or ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Pluck me next an old Cuckoo; Emblem of the happy fates Of easy, kind, cornuted mates. Pluck him well—be sure you do— Who wouldn't be an old Cuckoo, Thus to have his plumage blest, Beaming ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... inert mother, who always regarded this daughter of hers somewhat as a cuckoo in the nest, was in a complaining mood this morning. She sat in her dressing-gown embroidering peonies on a lambrequin and aired her grievances. Kate, writing notes at the old-fashioned black walnut writing desk, looked up at the climaxes of her mother's address, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... his own France, he still reigned over the whole world. Before long he embarked in the same little cockleshell of a boat he had had in Egypt, sailed round the beard of the English, set foot in France, and France acclaimed him. The sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; all France cried out with one voice, 'LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!' In this region, here, the enthusiasm for that wonder of the ages was, I may say, solid. Dauphine behaved well; and I am particularly pleased to know that her ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... Robert of Lincoln William Cullen Bryant The O'Lincon Family Wilson Flagg The Bobolink Thomas Hill My Catbird William Henry Venable The Herald Crane Hamlin Garland The Crow William Canton To the Cuckoo John Logan The Cuckoo Frederick Locker-Lampson To the Cuckoo William Wordsworth The Eagle Alfred Tennyson The Hawkbit Charles G. D. Roberts The Heron Edward Hovell-Thurlow The Jackdaw William Cowper The Green Linnet William Wordsworth To the Man-of-War-Bird Walt ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... lark flies away to the cuckoo," snarled the old man, with flecks of froth gathering at the corners of his mouth; for the sight of this ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... flower by the end of December,—rye was in ear by the middle of March, and vines, in sheltered situations, blossomed about the end of that month,—so that an assured and unchecked spring was established at least four or five weeks earlier than usual;—yet neither the cuckoo nor the swallow arrived a single day before their accustomed periods. They are indeed, beautifully and wisely directed,—"Yea, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle, and the crane, and the swallow, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... arrived, The telltale cuckoo; spring's his confidant, And he lets out her April purposes!) 140 Or—better go at once to modern time, He has—they have—in fact, I understand But can't restate the matter; that's my boast: Others could reason it out to you, and prove Things they ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... feathers." The bird went and alighted on a fountain, which said: "Bird, why are you plucking out your feathers so?" The bird answered as the others had done, and the fountain said: "And I, as fountain, will dry up." A cuckoo went to drink at the fountain, and asked: "Fountain, why have you dried up?" And the fountain told him all that had happened. "And I, as cuckoo, will put my tail in the fire." A monk of St. Nicholas passed by, and said: "Cuckoo, why is your tail in the ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... almost universal character of this law it would be strange if these peculiar forms of dependence did not appear in the avian community. We do find such developments in that department of creation. Across the waters there is one bird that has won an unenviable reputation as a parasite: the European cuckoo relies almost wholly on the efforts of its more thrifty neighbors to hatch and rear its young, and thereby perpetuate the species. Strangely enough, our American cuckoos are not given to such slovenly habits, but build their own nests and faithfully perform the duties ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... just when the dingles of April flowers Shine with the earliest daffodils, When, before sunrise, the cold clear hours Gleam with a promise that noon fulfils,— Deep in the leafage the cuckoo cried, Perch'd on a spray by a rivulet-side, "Swallows, O Swallows, come back again To swoop ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... who has grounnds for his opinin. D'ye think, because Dockers Short, an' Bist, an' Kinyon, an' Cuckoo, an' Jackdaw, an' Starling, an' Co., don't know the dire effecks of calomel an' drastics on the buddy, I don't know't? Her eye, her tongue, her skin, her voice, her elastic walk, all tell me she has not been robbed of her vital resources. 'Why, if she had taken that genteel old thief Short's rimidies ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... (469/1. See "Expression of the Emotions," page 99.) I want to show that this expression is common to all or most of the families of birds. I know of this only in the fowl, swan, tropic-bird, owl, ruff and reeve, and cuckoo. I fancy that I remember having seen nestling birds erect their feathers greatly when looking into nests, as is said to be the case with young cuckoos. I should much like to know whether nestlings do really thus erect their feathers. I am now at ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... should love to stroke you both, but I'm not sure how Joyeuse would take it. So I'll stroke you down verbally instead. I admired your attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of course I don't agree with a word of it. Your description of him building a hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he was isolating it was rather sweet. Seriously though, I regard him as one of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... readily could the practised observer distinguish the skull of the tuneful, melodious canary from that of the chirping, inharmonious sparrow. Nor could he fail to mark the constant difference between the form of the head of a song thrush and that of the jackdaw; or to discern how the cuckoo's head is hollow where the organ of the love of offspring is located, whilst the same part presents a striking protuberance in the partridge. In the dolphin, the porpoise, the seal, and many other animals, the male could there be distinguished from the female by the form of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... crop. If they encounter on their way to the fields any one of the following creatures, they must at once return home, and stay there a day and a night, on pain of illness or early death: certain snakes, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, and birds of two species, JERUIT and BUBUT (a cuckoo). Or again, if the shoulder straps of their large baskets should break on the way, if a stump should fall against them, or the note of the spider-hunter be heard, or if a woman strikes her foot by accident against any object, the party must return ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... she might with her busy needle, the day was drearily long; and few genuine cuckoo-carols have been listened to with such grateful rejoicing as greeted those metallic gutturals that once in every sixty minutes issued from the throat of the gaudy automaton caged in ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... a duet of little cuckoo clocks, both in unison, both in time, both with that fascinating touch of the nasal Parisienne voice. Sally was enchanted with ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... accustomed to hear him prate, Mr. Quisque seemed to listen to him without surprise, pleasure, or pain. It was what he expected. It was the man. A machine that had no more meaning than a Dutch clock; repeating cuckoo, as it strikes. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... can do that," the boy protested, then turned suddenly a deep red. "Oh, lor, I didn't mean that! Hi, Dinah!" He turned to cover his embarrassment and sent a deafening yell at the sun-bathed facade of the hotel. "Are you never coming, you cuckoo? ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... not try to discover beauties in nature? One can be so happy in a wood! What a charming thing to hear a leaf sing! I know few things more delightful than to watch the triumph of the month of May when the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the lark open the spring in our forests! And then, later, come those beautiful crystal days of autumn—days that are neither warm, nor yet are they really cold! And then the trees—how eloquent they ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... them back, when the man, looking up, caught sight of a bundle of oaten pipes among the miscellaneous wares. He plucked one to him, and in a moment the air was full of tender liquid notes—a thrush's roundelay. Then a blackbird called and his mate answered; a cuckoo cried the spring-song; a linnet mourned with lifting cadence; a nightingale poured ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... years a great many birds tried to sit on the tree, and wished to build their nests in it, but whenever they came the bulbul sent them away, saying, "This fruit is not good. Don't come here." One day a cuckoo came and said, "Why do you send us away? Why should we not come and sit here too? All the trees here are not yours." "Never mind," said the bulbul, "I am going to sit here, and when this fruit is ripe, I shall eat it." Now the cuckoo knew that this tree was the cotton-tree, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... and commenced to search the upper regions. But the same absolute quiet reigned above as below. Only the loud ticking of a cuckoo-clock at the head of the stairs ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... possible that the tree can yield so much. A similar but much smaller homopterous insect, of the family 'Cercopidae', is known in England as the frog-hopper ('Aphrophora spumaria'), when full grown and furnished with wings, but while still in the pupa state it is called "Cuckoo-spit", from the mass of froth in which it envelops itself. The circulation of sap in plants in our climate, especially of the graminaceae, is not quick enough to yield much moisture. The African species is five or six times the size of the English. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... leave Lafayette in Hanover County, take his cavalry, dash to Charlottesville, break up the assembly then meeting there, and capture Jefferson. By hard riding on the nights of June 3 and 4 Tarleton nearly made it to Charlottesville undetected. But he stopped at Cuckoo Tavern in Louisa County, where he was spotted by militia Captain John Jouett, Jr. Guessing Tarleton's mission, Jack Jouett rode madly through the night over the back roads he knew well, and beat Tarleton's men to town. At Jouett's warning ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... but a few minutes to eight, and Bertram Borstal, with steady nerves, waited for the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the prison tower. Once again a knock sounded upon the cell door, and with the utmost sang-froid he drew the key from his pocket and unlocked it. The honorary secretary of Germany entered, preceded by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... of English grammar, that all singular nouns ending with a vowel preceded by an other vowel, shall form the plural by simply assuming an s: as, Plea, pleas; idea, ideas; hernia, hernias; bee, bees; lie, lies; foe, foes; shoe, shoes; cue, cues; eye, eyes; folio, folios; bamboo, bamboos; cuckoo, cuckoos; embryo, embryos; bureau, bureaus; purlieu, purlieus; sou, sous; view, views; straw, straws; play, plays; key, keys; medley, medleys; viceroy, viceroys; guy, guys. To this rule, the plurals of words ending in quy, as alloquies, colloquies, obloquies, soliloquies, are commonly made ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Lang, tells, in savage fashion, the story of the introduction of Christianity, we learn how the maiden Marjatta, "as pure as the dew is, as holy as stars are that live without stain," was feeding her flocks and listening to the singing of the golden cuckoo, when a berry fell into her bosom, and she conceived and bore a son, whereupon the people despised and rejected her. Moreover, no one would baptize the infant: "The god of the wilderness refused, and Wainamoinen would have had the young child ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... satisfactory. One might parallel it with the case of hatching birds' eggs. Most birds sit upon their eggs themselves, and supply the necessary warmth from their own bodies. But any alternative plan that attains the same end does just as well. The felonious cuckoo drops her foundlings unawares in another bird's nest: the ostrich trusts her unhatched offspring to the heat of the burning desert sand: and the Australian brush-turkeys, with vicarious maternal instinct, collect great mounds of decaying and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... characterizes the seeming ubiquity of the voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... What then is the Light?—Why, simply something you cannot confine in a church or bottle in a creed: and this is a proposition that needs no proving at all, because it is self-evident. There was a fellow in English Wiltshire once, they say, who planted a hedge about his field to keep in the cuckoo from her annual migration. The spirit of Cuckoo-hedging came in, in the first ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Nunckle, the Hedge-Sparrow fed the Cuckoo so long, that it's had it head bit off by it young, so out went the Candle, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... "'Cuckoo! cuckoo! sweet voice of Spring, Without you sad the year had been, The vocal heavens your welcome ring, The hedge-rows ope and take you in, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... pleasant-looking face of Liubka, all spotted from freckles, like a cuckoo's egg, lengthened ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... plumage of the golden-tailed humming or fly-bird (Trochilus chrysurus, Cuv.) which haunts the warm primeval forests, but it is still more frequently found in the pure atmosphere of the ceja-girded Montanas. The silky cuckoo (Trogon heliothrix, Tsch.) retires into the thickest masses of foliage, from which its soft rose-colored plumage peeps out like a flower. The cry of the voracious chuquimbis[86] accompanies the traveller from his first steps in ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... New-comer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice. O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Tennyson The Blackbird Alfred Edward Housman The Blackbird William Ernest Henley The Blackbird William Barnes Robert of Lincoln William Cullen Bryant The O'Lincon Family Wilson Flagg The Bobolink Thomas Hill My Catbird William Henry Venable The Herald Crane Hamlin Garland The Crow William Canton To the Cuckoo John Logan The Cuckoo Frederick Locker-Lampson To the Cuckoo William Wordsworth The Eagle Alfred Tennyson The Hawkbit Charles G. D. Roberts The Heron Edward Hovell-Thurlow The Jackdaw William Cowper The Green Linnet William Wordsworth To the Man-of-War-Bird Walt Whitman ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Sunday week, for the first time, I heard the note of the cuckoo. "Cuck-oo—cuck-oo" it says, repeating the word twice, not in a brilliant metallic tone, but low and flute-like, without the excessive sweetness of the flute,—without an excess of saccharine juice in the sound. There ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... eternity, and if you are right in that—But I will not reopen that old discussion. Give me back my child for a year, a month, a day even, as she was before murderous disease laid hands on her, and I will make you a free gift of your cuckoo-cloud-land of eternity, and of the remainder of my own life ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... into the sky, and there was the hawk, almost up among the white clouds, soaring round and round, and watching all that was proceeding. Almost before he could look down again a shadow went by, and a cuckoo flew along very ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... any longer do, or affect to do, old gentleman, to earn your honourable wages? Is there not (as the lawyers would style it) a failure of consideration? If you go on any longer collecting "the rent," may you not be liable to an indictment for obtaining money under false pretences? Poor old soul! his cuckoo cry of Repeal grows feebler and feebler; yet he must keep it up, or starve. Tempus abire senex! satis clamasti! That Ireland is still subject to great evils, recent occurrences painfully attest. Mr Pitt, in 1799, (23d January,) pointed out what may still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Afternoon Digging Two Houses The Mill-water A Dream Sedge-Warblers Under the Woods What will they do? To-night A Cat The Unknown Song She dotes For These March the Third The New House March The Cuckoo Over the Hills Home The Hollow Wood Wind and Mist The Unknown Bird The Lofty Sky After Rain Digging But these things also April The Barn The Barn and the Down The Child on the Cliffs Good-night The Wasp Trap July ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... mocked at me as he flew by in full song, and sought to taunt me with his happier lot. Oh, how I envied him! No lessons, no task, no school; nothing but holiday, frolic, green fields, and fine weather. Had I been then more versed in poetry, I might have addressed him in the words of Logan to the cuckoo: ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is!" exclaimed Malcolm—"as mean as the cuckoo, that lays its eggs in other birds' nests. And I'm glad it dies when it has killed the palm tree; it just serves it right. But don't figs ever grow in this ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... the sea. Usually the message is washed ashore on some part of the Long Island. Natural superstition supplements, in a small degree, the lack of mails: when the islanders, for example, hear the notes of the cuckoo, they are convinced that the Macleod is dead. Happily the cuckoo is rarely heard breaking the silence of the seas ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the noses of the horses showed beyond the stalls; but, when the vessel rolled heavily to a beam swell, their heads swung in and out like the cuckoos of cuckoo clocks. One moment, as the ship lay well over into a trough, Mac could see nothing but a long line of posts; the next, as she lifted to a sea, out shot those eighty heads. They trod backwards and forwards in ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... out I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our fellowship—old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its pipit—a beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women. Later in the day, as the old man talked continually of the fairies and the women they have taken, it seemed that there was a possible link between the wild ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... nervous and emphatic character of the large-billed water thrush, or the many pretty attitudes of the great Carolina wren; but to give the same dramatic character to the demure little song sparrow, or to the slow moving cuckoo, or to the pedestrian cowbird, or to the quiet Kentucky warbler, as Audubon has done, is to convey a ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... of North Queensland jungles which have marked individualistic characters is that known as the koel cuckoo, which the blacks of some localities have named "calloo-calloo"—a mimetic term imitative of the most frequent notes of the bird. The male is lustrous black, the female mottled brown, and during most parts of the year both are extremely ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... earth a rivulet break And purl along the untrodden wilderness; There the shy cuckoo comes his thirst to slake, There the shrill jay alights his plumes to dress; And there the stealthy fox, when morn is gray, Laps the clear stream and ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... their native fashions, and put out their foliage as they used to do in their own homes. The young alders and the hawthorn hedges are greening, but it will be a fortnight before we can realise the beauty of that snow-white bloom, with its bitter-sweet fragrance. The cuckoo-flower came this year before instead of after the bird, they tell us, showing that even Nature, in these days of anarchy and misrule, is capable of taking liberties with her own laws. There is a fragrance of freshly turned earth in the air, and the rooks are streaming out from the elms by ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... play on the lute, viol, and other instruments, every day." Whether it was that she had no ear for music, she herself never became harmonious as the instrument she touched. All these ladies may be considered as rather too alert in thought, and too spirited in action; but a tame cuckoo bird who is always repeating the same note must be very fatiguing. The lady of Samuel Clarke, the great compiler of books in 1680, whose name was anagrammatised to "suck all cream," alluding to his indefatigable labours in sucking all the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... far as I know: 'One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.'" I wish I could convey by words the lilt of her clear, fearless, boyish voice, the sparkle of mischief and daring in her eyes, and deep beneath, like treasures in the sea, that look of steadfastness, of praying, that made you wonder if she was really ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... I said, 'While Philomela's song Proclaims the passion of the grove, It ill beseems a cuckoo's tongue Her charming language to reprove'— Alas, how much a lover's ear Hates all the sober truth to hear, The sober truth ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Mannering," was attacked with some viciousness in the periodical of which he was practically the founder, and already the critic was anxious to repeat what Scott, talking of Pope's censors, calls "the cuckoo cry of written out'!" The notice of "Waverley" in the "Edinburgh Review" by Mr. Jeffrey was not so slight and so unworthy of the topic. The novel was declared, and not unjustly, to be "very hastily, and in many places very unskilfully, written." The Scotch was decried as "unintelligible" dialect ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day were tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of cool green shadows, and musky little valleys of gloom with a brook purling over mossy stones. I long for the solemn greenery of great elms, aisles and aisles of cathedral-like gloom and leaf-filtered sunlight. I'd love to hear an English cuckoo again, and feel the soft mild sea-air that blows up through Louis's dear little Devonshire garden. But ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... their sleep thus silent be, from streams and flow'rs away, While wanders thro' the sunny air the cuckoo's mellow lay; Those forms, whose eyes reflected heaven in their mild depth of blue, Whose hair was like the wave that shines o'er ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounding through the house, and seeming to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star, Dickens, and no other could, by any chance, have conjured up the forms of either Caleb Plummer, or Gruff-and-Tackleton. The cuckoo on the Dutch clock, now like a spectral voice, now hiccoughing on the assembled company, as if he had got drunk for joy; the little haymaker over the dial mowing down imaginary grass, jerking right and left with ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond a cuckoo was calling. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... be cuckoo time directly my dear; and the lambs will be bleating on the fells, and the yellow primroses blowing under all the hedges. I want to see the swallows take the storm on their wings badly ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... now, a lovely May morning, such as generally called forth the maidens, small and great, to the meadows to rub their fresh cheeks with the silvery dew, and to bring home kingcups, cuckoo flowers, blue bottles, and cowslips for the Maypoles that were to be decked. But all was silent now, not a house was open, the rising sun made the eastern windows of the churches a blaze of light, and from the west door of St. Paul's the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ever if the Catholics exercise political power. Give the Catholics everything else; but keep political power from them. These wise men did not see that, when everything else had been given, political power had been given. They continued to repeat their cuckoo song, when it was no longer a question whether Catholics should have political power or not, when a Catholic association bearded the Parliament, when a Catholic agitator exercised infinitely more authority than ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on one side, the sea lay like a silver mist; on the other the mountains, so ethereal that they looked as though at any moment they might melt away into the blue of the sky. But Mick had no heart for these things. Even when he heard the cuckoo across the fields, for the first time that year, it was with no answering thrill, but only with a dull sense that he had grown too old now to care—seeing Aunt Mary had brought back all the trouble he had tried so hard ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... chaunt So sweetly to reposing bands Of travellers in some shady haunt Among Arabian Sands; No sweeter voice was ever heard In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird Breaking the silence of the seas Among ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... higher, and the cuckoo began to raise its voice, Ulrich's name was shouted loudly several times in rapid succession through the forest. The arrow he had been shaping flew into a corner, and with a hasty "When it grows dusk, Marxle!" Ulrich dashed into the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... house the greensward slopes to a wheat-field that is like a wall of gold. Here I lie and laze away the time, or dip into a favorite book, Stevenson's Letters or Belloc's Path to Rome. Bees drone in the wild thyme; a cuckoo keeps calling, a lark spills jeweled melody. Then there is a seeming silence, but it is the silence of ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... down." "And I, as bird, will pull out my feathers." The bird went and alighted on a fountain, which said: "Bird, why are you plucking out your feathers so?" The bird answered as the others had done, and the fountain said: "And I, as fountain, will dry up." A cuckoo went to drink at the fountain, and asked: "Fountain, why have you dried up?" And the fountain told him all that had happened. "And I, as cuckoo, will put my tail in the fire." A monk of St. Nicholas passed by, and said: "Cuckoo, why is your tail in the fire?" When the monk heard the answer ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... curse? May'st thou quit scores then, and be hanged on Nestor, Who hangs on thee! thou lead'st him by the nose; Thou play'st him like a puppet; speak'st within him; And when thou hast contrived some dark design, To lose a thousand Greeks, make dogs-meat of us, Thou lay'st thy cuckoo's egg within his nest, And mak'st him hatch it; teachest his remembrance To lie, and say, the like of it was practised Two hundred years ago; thou bring'st the brain, And he brings only beard to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... instinctive. In the eighth chapter of "The Origin of Species" Darwin says ("Origin of Species" (6th edition), page 205.), "I will not attempt any definition of instinct... Every one understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate and to lay her eggs in other birds' nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, myself, and getting others to do the same, we found it was the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... and asked for news of my friends, in which he satisfied me. We stayed there that night, set sail next morning, and found ourselves sailing, now, nearly as low as the clouds. Here we were surprised to find Cloud-cuckoo-land; we were prevented from landing by the direction of the wind, but learned that the King's name was Crookbeak, son of Fitz-Ousel. I bethought me of Aristophanes, the learned and veracious poet whose statements had met with unmerited incredulity. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... voice, as he alighted on a rock. "Corcorico!" chanted the Cock. The Monkey was scratching himself and admiring his grinning phiz in the water, which served him for a looking-glass. Then the Buzzard was beside himself [with rage]. And the Cuckoo was wailing. The Ass rolled over and over, crying: "Heehaw! how ugly Man is!" The Elephant stamped about with his heavy feet, his trumpet raised towards the heavens. The Bear assumed dignified airs, while the Peacock ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... shone into the room. The Swiss cuckoo clock struck ten—eleven—twelve. The merchant could not sleep. He was haunted by the fiery eyes that he had seen ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... undoubtedly derives from cuculus, cogul, cocu, a cuckoo, has taken a queer twist, nor can I explain how its present meaning arose from a shebird which lays her egg in a strange nest. Wittol, on the other hand, from Witan, to know, is rightly applied to one whom La Fontaine calls "cocu et content," ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... The cuckoo comes to join thy train, With his melodious lay, Until his song, a rapture! runs O'er all thy ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... donned a holiday costume. Through the open windows, between the massive bunches of lilacs, hawthorn, and laburnum blossoms, Julien de Buxieres caught glimpses of rolling meadows and softly tinted vistas. The gentle twittering of the birds and the mysterious call of the cuckoo, mingled with the perfume of flowers, stole into his study, and produced a sense of enjoyment as novel to him as it was delightful. Having until the present time lived a sedentary life in cities, he had had no opportunity of experiencing this impression of nature in her awakening and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... him on to the sea. The woodlands are captured by blossoms, the hamlets grow fair, Broad meadows are beautiful, earth again bursts into life, And all stir the heart of the wanderer eager to journey, So he meditates going afar on the pathway of tides. The cuckoo, moreover, gives warning with sorrowful note, Summer's harbinger sings, and forebodes to the heart bitter sorrow. Now my spirit uneasily turns in the heart's narrow chamber, Now wanders forth over the tide, o'er the home of the whale, To the ends of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and brightness in her as in those others; her little mouth is as sweet as the cuckoo on the branch. You would not find a mind like hers in any woman since the pearl died that was ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... the beginning it would be all well," said the mother stork. "Turn thy thoughts now to thine own family. It is almost time for our long journey; I begin now to tingle under the wings. The cuckoo and the nightingale are already gone, and I hear the quails saying that we shall soon have a fair wind. Our young ones are quite able to go, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... string of pearls, her lips like the red gourds, her neck like a pigeon's, her waist like a leopard's, her hands and feet like a soft lotus, her face like the moon, with the gait of a goose, and the voice of a cuckoo!" ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... which obtained its name on account of the similarity of its note to that of the Cuckoo-clock, was one of the earliest sufferers of the housing problem, which it successfully solved by depositing its eggs in the nests ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... remember your oaks and your beeches. I remember the cuckoo's reply To the ring dove that moaned where the reaches Of the Windrush are blue ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... with a heavenly concert. In the evening every bird hastens home, and then they are at their best. The cuckoo, the clock of the woods, has enough to do in striking the hours, and the thrush whistles ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... peculiarities of the instructors rather than to the period when the instruction was given. The marks left on the memory by the instructions of a foster-mother are soon sponged clean away. Consider the history of the cuckoo, which is reared exclusively by foster-mothers. It is probable that nearly every young cuckoo, during a series of many hundred generations, has been brought up in a family whose language is a chirp and a twitter. But the cuckoo cannot or will not adopt that language, or any other of the ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... through Brienz, dead to the seductions of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the pretty town of Interlaken. It was just about sunset, and we had made the trip from Lucerne ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... did; her full figure and plump arms were set off by a brown dress, which he stared down on when he did not look into her pale face. She felt each movement of his eyes. She had come from the other room, and from thoughts of death; she heard a little cuckoo clock upstairs announce that it was seven o'clock, and the little thing reminded her of all that was now past. One thing with another made her turn from him with tears in her eyes as she said, "I cannot possibly think of such things how." ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... day, that this political old hen had hatched out her various sort of eggs. We expected that her motley brood would afford us some fun. Here we expected to see a young hawk, and there a goslin, and next a strutting turkey, and then a dodo, a loon, an ostrich, a wren, a magpie, a cuckoo, and a wag-tail. But the old continental hen has now set so long, that we conclude that her eggs are addled, and incubation frustrated. During all this time, the Gallick cock is on his roost at Elba, with his head ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... warriors. The storm in the trees, the sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo calling among them,—indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are wonders of the other world about the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... coats. The bottle quickly passes, the simple tale goes round, the ballad purchased at the fair is sung; the mower whets his scythe, and the grass and the wild-flowers fall before it; the waggon, heavily laden, removes the odoriferous hay; and the neat-mown fields display a brighter green. The cuckoo, with his never-varying note is heard; but let us, when the day is over, placed in some secluded nook, listen to the sweeter nightingale, who, as poets feign, was once a hapless female. Industry now toils through the lengthened day, and the name of ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... unfortunately is transitory. When the wooden woman has churned her hour in her empty churn; when the stiff backed man has hammered or sawed till his arms are broken, or till his employers are tired; when the gilt lamb has ba-ad, the obstinate pig squeaked, and the provoking cuckoo cried cuckoo, till no one in the house can endure the noise; what remains to be done?—Wo betide the unlucky little philosopher, who should think of inquiring why the woman churned, or how the bird cried cuckoo; for it is ten to one that in ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... skittles give. Now, lo! on Egypt's coast that hostile fleet, By nations dreaded and by NELSON beat; And here shall soon another triumph come, A deed of glory in a deed of gloom; Distressing glory! grievous boon of fate! The proudest conquest at the dearest rate. On shelf of deal beside the cuckoo-clock, Of cottage reading rests the chosen stock; Learning we lack, not books, but have a kind For all our wants, a meat for every mind. The tale for wonder and the joke for whim, The half-sung sermon and the half-groan'd hymn. No need of classing; each within its place, The feeling ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... and asks them whether they have seen his love,—the peacock, 'the bird of the dark-blue throat and eyes of jet,'—the cuckoo, 'whom lovers deem Love's messenger,'—the swans, 'who are sailing northward, and whose elegant gait betrays that they have seen her,'—the chakravaka, 'a bird who, during the night, is himself separated ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... opening of the shade, in changing and varied colors. The delicate young leaves filled the air with refreshing odor. Merrily rippled the clear brooks and rivulets between the green, velvety rushes, and over the many-colored pebbles beneath. All nature spoke of abundance and plenty. The cuckoo sang, and the lark carolled, for it was now beautiful spring. The careful willows had, however, covered their blossoms with woolly gloves; and this carefulness is rather tedious. Days and weeks went by, and the heat increased. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... 322. There is a wonderful conformity between the vegetation of some plants, and the arrival of certain birds of passage. Linneus observes that the wood anemone blows in Sweden on the arrival of the swallow; and the marsh mary-gold, Caltha, when the cuckoo sings. Near the same coincidence was observed in England by Stillingfleet. The word Coccux in Greek signifies both a young fig and a cuckoo, which is supposed to have arisen from the coincidence of their appearance ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... stockings, Chick, and turn your coat inside out. Here, I'll hold the baby; yer Mammy's nursing the other one. Shove that beer can under the stove, and hide that there cuckoo clock." ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... just burst forth from the growth of spring; when the summer is yet but three days old, and all the various shades of green which nature can put forth are still in their unsoiled purity of freshness. The apple blossoms were on the trees, and the hedges were sweet with May. The cuckoo at five o'clock was still sounding his soft summer call with unabated energy, and even the common grasses of the hedgerows were sweet with the fragrance of their new growth. The foliage of the oaks was complete, so that every bough and twig was clothed; but the leaves ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... one which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is a ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... inland places in the neighborhood. Rheinschnacke (of which the equivalent is perhaps "water-snake") is the standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who repays it in kind by the epithet "karst" (mattock), or "kukuk" (cuckoo), according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or the forest. If any Romeo among the "mattocks" were to marry a Juliet among the "water-snakes," there would be no lack of Tybalts and Mercutios to carry the conflict from words ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... any emphatic idee laid down by Peets instantly sets Boggs to strikin' same as one of them cuckoo clocks. ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Bullfinch Cock Canary Crow Cuckoo Eagle Falcon Goose Hawk Humming-bird Lark Mocking-bird Nightingale Owl ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... instance, at least, Darwin had pictured in his imagination the steps by which a "strange and odious instinct" may have been developed from comparatively innocent beginnings. He was referring to the ejection by the young cuckoo of its companions from the nest. "I can see no special difficulty in its having gradually acquired, during successive generations, the blind desire, the strength and structure necessary for the work of ejection." "The first step towards the acquisition of the proper instinct ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... sweetheart," said he; "then the corn which is within it will be turned to flour; but if thou art still only a young cuckoo, then it ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... green of the beech trees will flash between two blues, the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the bluebells. Later the violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers; when evenings are lengthening out and the bat is abroad again; and all the flowers are out and all the birds sing. At such a time not only Nature smiles but our quiet villages and grave ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... an extinguisher that can put out the sun. She had ceased to find pleasure in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl. She was irritated by the fact that the cuckoo had only one song to sing. She tried not to hoe in time to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her. Her row of beans stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked along it the end seemed farther away. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... but is taught to fear them by the parents, is to be found in the striking contrast between the habits of parasitical and genuine young in the nest, and after they have left it, while still unable to find their own food. I have had no opportunities of observing the habits of the young cuckoo in England with regard to this point, and do not know whether other observers have paid any attention to the matter or not, but I am very familiar with the manners of the parasitical starling or cow-bird ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... found in the Balkan and Rhodope forests, the wild pheasant in the Tunja valley, the bustard (Otis tarda) in the Eastern Rumelian plain. Among the migratory birds are the crane, which hibernates in the Maritza valley, woodcock, snipe and quail; the great spotted cuckoo (Coccystes glandarius) is an occasional visitant. The red starling (Pastor roseus) sometimes appears in large flights. The stork, which is never molested, adds a picturesque feature to the Bulgarian village. Of fresh-water fish, the sturgeon (Acipenser sturio and A. huso), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... is next month," Nelly said with stiff lips. "The twenty-third of July, to be accurate. I have wondered about you. I hope Mr. Rooke is well and Cuckoo and Bunny." ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... smugglers retrieving kegs of rum and brandy and that the horsemen were excise officials. But the folk-lore origin of "Moonraker" is said by the Rev. J.E. Field to belong to a very early period, probably before the day of the Saxon and to be contemporaneous with the "Cuckoo Penners" of Somerset, who captured a young cuckoo and built a high hedge round it; there they fed it until its wings had grown, when it quietly flew away, much to the astonished chagrin of the yokels. This is a widespread legend and belongs to ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... the Literary Gazette, in a letter to Mr. Loudon, says, "about fifteen years ago I obtained a cuckoo from the nest of (I think) a hedge sparrow, at Old Brompton, where I then resided. It was rather curious, as being within ten yards of my house, Cromwell Cottage, and in a narrow and much frequented lane, leading from near Gloucester Lodge to Kensington. This bird I reared and kept alive ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... seem surprised,' he said, 'when I tell them that within a few minutes' walk of Baker Street Station, and the incessant din of Marylebone Road, such birds as the cuckoo, flycatcher, robin and wren have reared ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... of yards away ten or eight women waited their turns. Conversation between the men and the women had been forbidden in the fiercest terms by Monsieur le Directeur: nevertheless conversation spasmodically occurred, thanks to the indulgent nature of the Wooden Hand. The Wooden Hand must have been cuckoo—he looked it. If he wasn't I am totally at a loss ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... zummer hums O' bees; and don' know when the cuckoo comes; But night and day I hear the bombs We threw at Valencieen . ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... the tuneful, melodious canary from that of the chirping, inharmonious sparrow. Nor could he fail to mark the constant difference between the form of the head of a song thrush and that of the jackdaw; or to discern how the cuckoo's head is hollow where the organ of the love of offspring is located, whilst the same part presents a striking protuberance in the partridge. In the dolphin, the porpoise, the seal, and many other animals, the male could ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... companion, "for it if were not that these forfeitures, and that last fine that the old driveller Turntippet is gaping for, and which, I dare say, is laid on by this time, have fairly driven me out of house and home, I were a coxcomb and a cuckoo to boot to trust your fair promises of getting me a commission in the Irish brigade. What have I to do with the Irish brigade? I am a plain Scotchman, as my father was before me; and my grand-aunt, Lady ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance: the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed: a linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on some wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes an object of imagination ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... narrator, "because one day when I was passing by the palace garden, I met and had a chat with a cuckoo, who, as you know, is a conjuror, and can foretell what will happen. As we were discoursing with each other on the affairs of the ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... one dared to peep, and cupboard and pantry were unmolested. Now and then she carried her forays to hedge and orchard, and I remember one sad summer twilight that saw her bring in a slender brown bird which my grandmother said was the cuckoo we had delighted to hear in the still mornings among the alders by the river. She was scolded and had no milk that night, and we never knew her ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... the genial sunbeams. The beautiful wind-anemones are gone, too tender and lovely for so rude an earth; but the wild hyacinths droop their blue bells under the wood, and the cowslips rise in the grass. The nightingale sings without ceasing; the soft 'coo-coo' of the dove sounds hard by; the merry cuckoo calls as he flies from elm to elm; the wood-pigeons rise and smite their wings together over the firs. In the mere below the coots are at play; they chase each other along the surface of the water and indulge in wild evolutions. Everything is happy. As the plough-boys ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... looked extraordinarily mystified, and I explained that the Bank's country branches are the only ones where gold is still to be had. * * * * * She and an empty milk-can and I were all that got out at the little station in the hills. However, a cuckoo introduced himself boldly by name. He seemed so near he might have been in the booking-office. But ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... glad yourself to be a cuckoo until a falcon came," said the old man. "Perhaps 'tis falcon who is at the turpentine works? but this is folly. You can't earn a piece of ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless. A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the resting school-ma'ams ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of which he had plenty, this pleasant, honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Goneril herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick, such as comparing the king to the hedgesparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains; and saying that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear's daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); and that Lear ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... all is equally satisfactory. One might parallel it with the case of hatching birds' eggs. Most birds sit upon their eggs themselves, and supply the necessary warmth from their own bodies. But any alternative plan that attains the same end does just as well. The felonious cuckoo drops her foundlings unawares in another bird's nest: the ostrich trusts her unhatched offspring to the heat of the burning desert sand: and the Australian brush-turkeys, with vicarious maternal instinct, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... huge affair, and contained an extraordinary medley of articles—European furniture, sewing machines, barrel organs, brass cannon and cannon-balls, cuckoo clocks, bayonets, cutlasses, rifles, cases and casks of liquor, from Hollands gin to champagne, and fiery Fiji rum to the best old French brandy. His harem consisted of the daughters of his most notable ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... eternal cuckoo-cry, "I'm sure it's all a mistake—a hideous mistake; and we'll be good friends again some day. Please forgive me, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... the other, namely, a cool, conscious, workmanlike control of every element in the selection and combination of imagery. Wordsworth's naive explanation of the task performed by the imagination in his "Cuckoo" and "Leech-Gatherer" [Footnote: Preface to poems of 1815-1845.] occupies a middle ground. We are at least certain of his entire honesty—and incidentally of his total lack ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... hillsides, nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled to Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last, in desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better citizen. Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers to come, he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon the ground, and yet as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say. 'Your clock has hooted me.' 'It often hoots at a stranger,' she ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... as leader, and stands up, generally with his back against a wall or post, while a second player, who is the cuckoo, bends down, as for leapfrog, with his head against the leader. The other players stand around in a circle, each placing a finger on the back of the cuckoo. The leader then "counts off" the fingers of the ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... Little Boy Blue's room stood a little blue clock. And every morning at five o'clock the door of the clock flew open, and a cuckoo came out. The cuckoo said, "Cuck-oo," five times, and then went into the little blue clock again, and the little door closed after him. Then Little Boy Blue knew it was time to ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... all the members of an extensive household are represented as gathered together in one room, spreading enamel-paint over everything they can lay their hands upon. The old man is on a step-ladder, daubing the walls and ceiling with "cuckoo's-egg green," while the parlor-maid and the cook are on their knees, painting the floor with "sealing-wax red." The old lady is doing the picture frames in "terra cotta." The eldest daughter and her young man are making sly love in a corner over a pot of "high art yellow," with which, so soon ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... banished far To this plague-stricken spot, where desolation Broods on from year to heavy year, nor lute Nor love's guitar is heard. By marshy bank Girt with tall yellow reeds and dwarf bamboos I dwell. Night long and day no stir, no sound, Only the lurking cuckoo's blood-stained note, The gibbon's mournful wail. Hill songs I have, And village pipes with their discordant twang. But now I listen to thy lute methinks The gods were parents to thy music. Sit And sing ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... been matter of complaint with hundreds, yea, it is an old cuckoo song of grim saints, that the Reformation came to its close long before it came to its completion. But the cause of this imperfection has been fully laid open by no party,—'scilicet', that in divines of both parties of the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... exquisitely of the use and beauty and worth of birds. Shelley, in his "Skylark", describes in glowing verse "the unbodied joy" that "singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest". Wordsworth hears the blithe new comer, the Cuckoo, and rejoices ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... apparently infinite variety, certain animals have a singularly close resemblance to certain others, though they be quite distinct in kind. It is a problem which perplexes us still, when we are astonished and even deluded by the likeness between a wasp and a hover-fly, a merlin and a cuckoo. In certain extreme cases we call it 'mimicry', and invoke hypotheses to account for this 'mimetic' resemblance; and those of us who reject these hypotheses must fain take refuge in others, as far-reaching in their way. This at least we know, that ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... high-road traversing a rich plain, shaded by apple and chestnut trees, and of something winding and glittering through the branches," leaving Nanny, who could not stand the sight of two magpies, or of a cuckoo, of a morning before she had broken her fast, sorely troubled to account ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... with the dreamy indescribable moments when crossing the wet grass of secluded misty meadows, passing the drowsy cattle and the large cool early morning shadows thrown by the trees, we have suddenly come upon cuckoo flowers or marigolds, every petal of which seems burdened with a mystery ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... summer is half over. The cuckoo is what I'm listening for all through November. I heard ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... through the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody warbled by the tenor sotto voce and the little company ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... leafy wet woodlands, Cuckoo and nightingale brown, Sing to the sound of the rain on green ground— The rain on green leaves dripping down! Fresh with the rain of the May-time, Rich with the promise of June, Deep in her heart, where the little leaves part, Love, like a ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... father will sometimes mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"—he must also be paid for his ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... followed a little tremolo, with four or five emphatic notes for a finish. "Now, if you listen, you'll hear the next wren answer him!" said Father Payne. In a moment the same little song came like an echo from a bush a few yards away. "The wren sings in stricter time than any bird but the cuckoo," said Father Payne—"four quavers to a bar. That's very important! Those two ridiculous creatures will go on doing that half the morning. They are so excited that they build sham nests, you know, about now—quite useless piles of twigs and moss, not intended for eggs, just to ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... talked, and lost in the charm of each thrilling minute, they walked through the shadows and darkening leaves. The soft garden echoed with the sound of a girl's voice crying, "Cuckoo, cuckoo," and the white dresses flew over the sward, and the young men ran after them and caught them. They were playing hide and seek. Excited beyond endurance, Triss barked loudly, and forms were seen ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... vanished. The birds twittered more and more loudly and busily in the thicket. An owl hooted not far off, and Laska, starting, stepped cautiously a few steps forward, and putting her head on one side, began to listen intently. Beyond the stream was heard the cuckoo. Twice she uttered her usual cuckoo call, and then gave a hoarse, hurried ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of loveliness steals over the desolate wastes, sunsets wrap them in atmospheric glory, or dreamy noons brood over them with deep calm. Between Zennor and St. Ives is the parish of Towednack, where they tried to build a hedge around the cuckoo. It is just a symbol of our craving to keep the springtime ever with us; the hedge was not high enough, and the cuckoo flew out at the top. The name of the hamlet was formerly Towynnok, which evidently embodies a dedication to St. Winnoc—probably the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... in the August of '99, or it may have been in the early days of September; but I remember that we heard the cuckoo in Patcham Wood, and that Jim said that perhaps it was the last of him. I was still at school, but Jim had left, he being nigh sixteen and I thirteen. It was my Saturday half-holiday, and we spent it, as we often did, out upon the Downs. Our favourite ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Hill one morn he lay, Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:— Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!—for the May Breathed summer: summer floating like a dream From the far fields of childhood, with a gleam Of alien freshness on her forehead fair, And Heaven ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... beginning it would be all well," said the mother stork. "Turn thy thoughts now to thine own family. It is almost time for our long journey; I begin now to tingle under the wings. The cuckoo and the nightingale are already gone, and I hear the quails saying that we shall soon have a fair wind. Our young ones are quite able to ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... end of the wall between the small shops selling scrap iron and fried potatoes was a watchmaker. He wore a frock coat and was always very neat. His cuckoo clocks could be heard in chorus against the background noise of the street and the blacksmith's ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... shepherd lad, whom he had chosen as a companion, he acquired knowledge of the plumage and the cries and the habits of birds, and whither he was to seek their nests: it had become his ambition to possess all the wild birds' eggs, one that was easily satisfied till he came to the egg of the cuckoo, which he sought in vain, hearing of it often, now here, now there, till at last he and the shepherd lad ventured into a dangerous country in search of it and remained there till news of their absence reached Magdala and Dan set out in great alarm with an ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... had plenty, this pleasant honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Goneril herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick: such as comparing the king to the hedge-sparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains; and saying, that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear's daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); and that Lear was no longer Lear, but the shadow of Lear: for which free ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... eighteen it happened, either by chance or by the will of fate, that she heard the cry of the cuckoo. This sound made her strangely uneasy; her golden head drooped, and covering her eyes with her hands, she fell into thought so deep as not to hear her mother enter. The queen looked at her anxiously, and after comforting her went to tell the king ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... story. It will be read with delight by every child into whose hands it is placed.... The author deserves all the praise that has been, is, and will be bestowed on 'The Cuckoo Clock.' Children's stories are plentiful, but one like this is not to be met with every day."—Pall ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... a lovely May morning, such as generally called forth the maidens, small and great, to the meadows to rub their fresh cheeks with the silvery dew, and to bring home kingcups, cuckoo flowers, blue bottles, and cowslips for the Maypoles that were to be decked. But all was silent now, not a house was open, the rising sun made the eastern windows of the churches a blaze of light, and from the west door of St. Paul's the city beneath seemed sleeping, only a wreath or two of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... obtained its name on account of the similarity of its note to that of the Cuckoo-clock, was one of the earliest sufferers of the housing problem, which it successfully solved by depositing its eggs in the nests of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... returned empty, and the driver seemed to know nothing whatever about anything, so the only thing for everybody to do was to put off lunch and wait for the arrival of the next tram, which occurred at 1.37. In consequence, all the doors in Tilling flew open like those of cuckoo clocks at ten minutes before that hour, and this pleasant promenade was full of those who so keenly admired ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... however, fagging flourishes in full vigour; and so long as there are cuckoos so long will there be fags. Many birds are imposed upon, one of the commonest victims being the hedge-sparrow. For days a sparrow has been watched while it fed a hungry complaining intruder. It used to fly on the cuckoo's back and then, standing on its head and leaning downwards, give it a caterpillar. The tit-bit having been greedily snatched and devoured, the cuckoo would peck fiercely at its tiny attendant—bidding it, as it were, fetch more food and not be long about it. Wordsworth ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... nurslings that linger there, 65 Over that islet paved with flowers and moss, While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow, Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine, Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own? The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt, 70 And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn; And on a wintry bough the widowed bird, Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves, Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow. I, left like her, and leaving one like her, 75 Alike abandoned and abandoning (Oh! unlike her in this!) the gentlest youth, Whose ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... descent was barred by sheer precipices; on the fourth a steep slope promised a practicable path, at least as far as my eye could reach. I placed the weaker and smaller of my birds in portable cages, and then commenced my experiment by taking out a strong-winged cuckoo and throwing him downwards over the precipice. He fell at first almost like a stone; but before he was quite lost to sight in the mist, I had the pleasure of seeing that he had spread his wings, and was able to sustain himself. As the mist was gradually dissolving, I now ventured to begin my descent, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... and beauty and worth of birds. Shelley, in his "Skylark", describes in glowing verse "the unbodied joy" that "singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest". Wordsworth hears the blithe new comer, the Cuckoo, and rejoices ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... an' bang went somethin' at the bottom o' the thing, an' it stops suddint. Out jumps a French chauffy, parlyvooin' to hisself, an' out jumps the man what owns it an' takes off his goggles. 'This is Devonshire, my man?' sez 'e to me. 'It is,' I sez to 'im. An' then the cuckoo started callin' away over the trees. 'What's that?' sez 'e lookin' startled like. 'That's the cuckoo,' sez I. An' he takes off 'is 'at an' rubs 'is 'ead, which was a' fast goin' bald. 'Dear, dear me!' sez 'e—'I 'aven't 'eard the cuckoo since I was a boy!' An' he rubs 'is 'ead again, an' laughs ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... find pleasure in the day. Pain is an extinguisher that can put out the sun. She had ceased to find pleasure in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl. She was irritated by the fact that the cuckoo had only one song to sing. She tried not to hoe in time to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her. Her row of beans stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked along it the end seemed farther away. Every time she raised her ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... which no doubt excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers. The two birds belong to totally distinct families, there being no American species which answers to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color, manners, and habits of a thrush,—our hermit thrush,—but it is not a thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... moon shone into the room. The Swiss cuckoo clock struck ten—eleven—twelve. The merchant could not sleep. He was haunted by the fiery eyes that he had ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... walked through the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody warbled by the tenor sotto voce and the little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... in her arms. As she was the first voluntary contributor of live stock, she was warmly welcomed, and a great fuss made over the tiny black infant which gradually emerged from the folds of an old shawl "like a cuckoo out of its cocoon," as Mary Quinn remarked. This, of course, was very nice and encouraging, but most unfortunately, when night came, the mother did not appear to claim her progeny, nor did she ever turn up again. ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... country, they met many other beautiful spots of scenery among the upland, considerable portions of which, particularly in long sloping valleys, that faced the morning sun, were covered with hazel and brushwood, where the unceasing and simple notes of the cuckoo were incessantly plied, mingled with the more mellow and varied notes of the thrush and blackbird. Sometimes the bright summer waterfall seemed, in the rays of the sun, like a column of light, and the springs that issued from ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... was Phrygia. Among the Thracians, Abdera; among the Greeks, Boeotia; in England it is Gotham. Of the Gothamites ironically called The Wise Men of Gotham, many ridiculous stories are traditionally told, particularly, that often having heard the cuckoo but never seen her, they hedged in a bush from whence her note seemed to proceed, so that being confined within so small a compass, they might at length satisfy their curiosity; and at a place called Court Hill, in this parish, is a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... of hue, With orange-tawny bill; The throstle with his note so true: The wren with little quill; The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray' - ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the warmest and stillest of May days, and in the clearing where we stopped for luncheon the familiar boom broke with a magnified loudness on the noonday hush. In the intervals between the crashes there was not a sound but the gnats' hum in the moist sunshine and the dryad-call of the cuckoo from greener depths. At the end of the lane a few cavalrymen rode by in shabby blue, their horses' flanks glinting like ripe chestnuts. They stopped to chat and accept some cigarettes, and when they had trotted off again the gnat, the cuckoo and the cannon ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... and disquietude. Thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the note or syllable gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence also the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the voice of a cuckoo." ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... a very tedious, affected performance, called "The Yarrow Unvisited." ... After this we come to some ineffable compositions, which the poet has entitled, "Moods of my own Mind." ... We have then a rapturous mystical ode to the Cuckoo; in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity ... after this there is an address to a butterfly.... We come next to a long story of a "Blind Highland Boy," who lived near an arm of the sea, and had taken a most unnatural ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... out and there fell the deep shining peace of a spring afternoon. Somewhere in the distance a cuckoo was calling softly, monotonously, seductively. A thrush was warbling in the terraced garden, and from her window Maud could see old Chops the setter curled up in a warm corner asleep. The children were all out on the downs, and the house ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... Apple seed and apple thorn, Wire, brier, limber lock, Three geese in a flock; Along came Tod, With his long rod, And scared them all to Migly-wod. One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.— Make your way ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... which had hitherto detained the company was now at an end. The cuckoo clock in the hall struck midnight; every one pressed to depart, for seldom was such a late hour trespassed on by these quiet burghers. As they sallied forth they found the heavens once more serene. The storm which had lately obscured them had rolled aways and lay ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... often declared, and her friends cordially agreed with her. Mrs. Fitzgerald herself was a mild, quiet, nervous, delicate lady, as much astonished at her lively, tempestuous daughter as a meek little hedge-sparrow would be, that had hatched a young cuckoo. Frankly, she did not understand Honor, whose strong, uncontrolled character differed so entirely from her own gentle, clinging, dependent disposition; and whose storms of grief or anger, wild fits of waywardness ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... and accustomed to hear him prate, Mr. Quisque seemed to listen to him without surprise, pleasure, or pain. It was what he expected. It was the man. A machine that had no more meaning than a Dutch clock; repeating cuckoo, as it strikes. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... silver mist; on the other the mountains, so ethereal that they looked as though at any moment they might melt away into the blue of the sky. But Mick had no heart for these things. Even when he heard the cuckoo across the fields, for the first time that year, it was with no answering thrill, but only with a dull sense that he had grown too old now to care—seeing Aunt Mary had brought back all the trouble he had ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... stillness of death reigns in this wilderness, interrupted only by the thunderings of the avalanche and by the noise which occasions the motion of the glaciers. No bird moves its wings or raises its twittering in this sorrowful region; only the melodious sighs of the cuckoo are borne thither by ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... the famous horologium-clepsydra-cuckoo clock, the dog Becerillo and the elephant Abu Lubabah sent by Harun to Charlemagne is not mentioned by Eastern authorities and consequently no reference to it will be found in my late friend Professor Palmer's little volume "Haroun Alraschid," London, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... preparation, which may broadly be described as instinctive. In the eighth chapter of "The Origin of Species" Darwin says ("Origin of Species" (6th edition), page 205.), "I will not attempt any definition of instinct... Every one understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate and to lay her eggs in other birds' nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a wide level field, over which the annual races are run. I noticed that here as elsewhere the short grass was starred with daisies. They are not considered in place in a well-kept lawn. But remembering the cuckoo song in "Love's Labour's Lost," "When daisies pied ... do paint the meadows with delight," it was hard to look at ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... "that's the cuckoo song to Nell; she does harm, but never does good! Well, may my blackest curse wither the man that left Nell to hear that, as the kindest word that's spoke either to her or of her! I don't blame you. Meehaul—I blame nobody but him for it all. Now a word ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... or Sylviadae erect their feathers when frightened or enraged? (469/1. See "Expression of the Emotions," page 99.) I want to show that this expression is common to all or most of the families of birds. I know of this only in the fowl, swan, tropic-bird, owl, ruff and reeve, and cuckoo. I fancy that I remember having seen nestling birds erect their feathers greatly when looking into nests, as is said to be the case with young cuckoos. I should much like to know whether nestlings do really thus erect their feathers. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... there came from a distance in advance the note of a cuckoo, three times repeated. ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... stand still,' he said, but for one moment Wendy saw the romantic figure come to rest on the cuckoo clock. 'O the lovely!' she cried, though Tink's face was still ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... Rosmersholm, there is not one which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief and murderess," as another admirer ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... calm and beautiful. The day had been fine and warm; but at the coming on of night, the air grew cool, and in the mellowing distance smoke was rising gently from the cottage chimneys. There were a thousand pleasant scents diffused around, from young leaves and fresh buds; the cuckoo had been singing all day long, and was but just now hushed; the smell of earth newly-upturned, first breath of hope to the first labourer after his garden withered, was fragrant in the evening breeze. It was ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... spring, the children would delight in gathering the sweet-scented meadow flowers—the water ranunculus, with its golden cups, the modest daisy, the pink cuckoo-flower, and the yellow cowslips; while overhead the bees kept up a constant humming; they have found their way from the straw hives in the garden and are diving into the delicious blossoms of the apple and cherry trees, robbing many a one ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... few minutes to eight, and Bertram Borstal, with steady nerves, waited for the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the prison tower. Once again a knock sounded upon the cell door, and with the utmost sang-froid he drew the key from his pocket and unlocked it. The honorary secretary of Germany entered, preceded by three cripples and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... dripping with wet, and the woods were dim with the smoke of rain, and the paths were red with the fallen bloom of the red chestnuts and white with the flourish of May and brown with the catkins of the oak, and the cuckoo, calling in Mosses Wood, was answered from Redlands and the Warren, and the pines where we sat (snug and dry) looked so solemn and dark that, with a little fancy, it was easy to change the living greenwood ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... and we used to sit for hours among the flags which grew beside it, hidden by the tall reeds and the yellow flowers, making little green boats out of the broad leaves of the flags, while the sound of "Cuckoo, cuckoo" came from ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... with four or five emphatic notes for a finish. "Now, if you listen, you'll hear the next wren answer him!" said Father Payne. In a moment the same little song came like an echo from a bush a few yards away. "The wren sings in stricter time than any bird but the cuckoo," said Father Payne—"four quavers to a bar. That's very important! Those two ridiculous creatures will go on doing that half the morning. They are so excited that they build sham nests, you know, about now—quite useless piles of twigs and moss, not intended for ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... do?" repeated Phil. "Why, everything, my gentle cuckoo. Dost thou not yet know that Indians generally, and the Mayubuna in particular, have a very wholesome dread and horror of thunderstorms, believing, as they do, that the evil spirits come abroad and hold high revel upon such occasions? If ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... female's untaught cunning may be seen In beasts, far more in women selfish-wise; The cuckoo's eggs are left to hatch and rear By foster-parents, and ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... In presenting these Cuckoo Recipes for the Chafing Dish to his friends Mr. Jefferson wishes it distinctly understood that all doctors' bills arising from a free indulgence in any of the dishes suggested herein must be paid by the indulgee, and he wishes to state, further, that while this ...
— Skiddoo! • Hugh McHugh
... come forward and pretend those parts. The lights—the orchestra lights—came up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell—which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries—of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sudden scream of a startled jay. Doves went happily from tree to tree and I never put my gun up. I had heard a very familiar sound, and wanted to be assured that my ears were not deceived. No, I was right; I could hear the cuckoo, calling through the depth of the forest, as though it were my favourite Essex copse at home. It was pleasant, indeed, to hear the homely notes so far from any other object, even remotely, connected ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king; Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... sight in the early summer than the cuckoo-spit on the grasses and herbage by the wayside. It is conspicuous and yet it is said to be left severely alone by almost all creatures. In some way it must be a disguise. It is a sort of soap made by the activity of small frog-hoppers while they are still in the wingless larval stage, before they ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... on water Agriculture of Lancaster Annuals, English names of Ash, to propagate Balsams Bee, remedy for sting of Botanical names Butter, rancid Calendar, Horticultural Calendar, Agricultural Carts, Cumberland Cattle, to feed Clover crops College, agricultural Cropping, table of Cuckoo, note of Diseases of plants Drainage reports Evergreens, to transplant, by Mr. Glendinning Farming in Norfolk, high Farming, Mr. Mechi's, by Mr. Wilkins Farming, rule of thumb, by Mr. Wilkins Fruit trees, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... Nearly all the presents had arrived by this time. The school children had come up to the Rectory in a body to present Hilda with a very large and gaudily decorated photographic album; the Rectory servants had given the bride-elect a cuckoo-clock; Miss Mills had blushed as she presented her with a birth-day book bound in white vellum; "Carter Patterson's" people were tired of coming up the avenue with box after box; and Aunt Marjorie was tired of counting on her fingers the names ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... portentously, began to let himself down apparently at the peril of his life, and the girls at the same moment coming out of the house, welcomed Emily, letting her know that their father had given them a large, lovely cuckoo clock to hangup in Parliament. "And you shall come and see it," they said. Emily knew this was a most unusual privilege. "Johnnie is not gone up there to look for nests," said Gladys, "but to reconnoitre the country. If we let you know what for, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns," and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and she had been together; winter fireside sketches; a glowing landscape of a hot summer afternoon passed with him in the bosom of Nunnely Wood; divine vignettes of mild spring or mellow autumn moments, when she had sat at his side in Hollow's Copse, listening to the call of the May cuckoo, or sharing the September treasure of nuts and ripe blackberries—a wild dessert which it was her morning's pleasure to collect in a little basket, and cover with green leaves and fresh blossoms, and her afternoon's delight to administer to Moore, berry by berry, and nut by nut, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... corpulent lunatic, who goes about the city chanting, like a cuckoo, 'Put yourself in his place—put yourself in ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... [vulva] resembles the opening lotus bud, and her love-seed is perfumed like the lily that has newly burst. She walks with swanlike [more exactly, flamingolike] gait, and her voice is low and musical as the note of the Kokila bird [the Indian cuckoo]; she delights in white raiment, in fine jewels, and in rich dresses. She eats little, sleeps lightly, and being as respectful and religious as she is clever and courteous, she is ever anxious to worship the gods and to enjoy the conversation ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on a pond, leaving an arrowy track of light upon the green behind them, while Monte Salvadore with its tiny chapel and a patch of the further landscape are still kept in darkness by the shadow of the Generoso itself. The birds wake into song as the sun's light comes; cuckoo answers cuckoo from ridge to ridge; dogs bark; and even the sounds of human life rise up to us: children's voices and the murmurs of the market-place ascending faintly from the many villages hidden among the chestnut-trees beneath ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of flow'ring thorn The song of friendly cuckoo warn The tardy-moving swain; Hast bid the purple swallow hail; And seen him now through ether sail, Now sweeping downward o'er the vale. And ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... keel only the noses of the horses showed beyond the stalls; but, when the vessel rolled heavily to a beam swell, their heads swung in and out like the cuckoos of cuckoo clocks. One moment, as the ship lay well over into a trough, Mac could see nothing but a long line of posts; the next, as she lifted to a sea, out shot those eighty heads. They trod backwards and forwards in regular step, and were cursed ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... and then it seems to have been done reluctantly. It was hardly necessary in the case of the Pastoral Symphony as it is comparatively easy of comprehension. The title gives the clew; the occasional bird notes of quail, cuckoo and lark, the scene at the brook, could hardly be mistaken; while the dance-music in Part III, as well as the storm with its forebodings of terror, convey their meaning plainly to the average intelligence. This poem of nature ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... sleep, for the lonely figure in the garden haunted her, and she wearied herself with conjectures about Hoffman and his mystery. Hour after hour rung from the cuckoo-clock in the hall, but still she lay awake, watching the curious shadows in the room, and exciting herself with recalling the tales of German goblins with which the courier had amused them ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... the seeming ubiquity of the voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... is clear of bird and cloud, The grass shines windless, grey and still, In dusky ruin the owl dreams on, The cuckoo echoes on the hill; Yet soft along Alulvan's walks The ghost ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... foretelling the crimson to come; about his feet a silver army of uncurling fronds brightened the earth and softened the sharp edges of the boulders scattered down the coomb. Here the lover waited to the music of a cuckoo, and his eyes ever turned towards a stile at the edge of the pine woods, two hundred ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... voice to its shrillest pitch, that I might hear its echoes rebounding in the bottom of the green and still glen, where silence, so to speak, was deepened by the continuous murmur of the cascade above; and when the cuckoo uttered her first note from among the hawthorns on its side, with what trembling anxiety did I, an urchin of some eight or nine years, look under my right foot for the white hair, whose charm was such, that by keeping it about me the first female name I should ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... through scattered timber and the litter of fresh carpentry-work, the man who was busy there and who certainly had outstayed his time took up his kit and disappeared around the corner of the house. Neither noted him. The cuckoo-clock was chirping out its five small notes from the cheerful interior, and the Curator was remarking ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... childhood roamed those dark, solemn woods, or sat at night on the lowly cottage stile, gazing on the wild, grotesque shadows cast by the moonbeams from the huge, forest trees; or how she listened to the solemn hootings of the lonesome owl, the monotonous cuckoo, and sudden whippoorwill; or laughed at the glowworm's light in the dark swamps, and asked her aunty if they were not a group of stars come down to play bo-peep in ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... birds, with their feathers barred across like those of a hawk or cuckoo, with lines of a darker green, started up from some grass and flew off, their long, pointed tails and rounded heads and beaks showing plainly ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... unreliable intervals on Monday morning, as I proceed toward Birmingham. Notwithstanding the superabundant moisture the morning ride is a most enjoyable occasion, requiring but a dash of sunshine to make everything perfect. The mystic voice of the cuckoo is heard from many an emerald copse around; songsters that inhabit only the green hedges and woods of "Merrie England" are carolling their morning vespers in all directions; skylarks are soaring, soaring skyward, warbling their unceasing ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of this great epic, which, according to Andrew Lang, tells, in savage fashion, the story of the introduction of Christianity, we learn how the maiden Marjatta, "as pure as the dew is, as holy as stars are that live without stain," was feeding her flocks and listening to the singing of the golden cuckoo, when a berry fell into her bosom, and she conceived and bore a son, whereupon the people despised and rejected her. Moreover, no one would baptize the infant: "The god of the wilderness refused, and Wainamoinen would have had the young child slain. Then the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... It could not be old Baldy. One looked up at old Baldy from the Lodge and she had heard that from old Baldy one looked down upon the Lodge and the river and the opening valley. She had been told that from old Baldy the Martin chalet resembled a cuckoo ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... fields rival gardens even in the richness of colour. We have all seen meadows white with Narcissus, glowing with Buttercups, Cowslips, early purple Orchis, or Cuckoo Flowers; cornfields blazing with Poppies; woods carpeted with Bluebells, Anemones, Primroses, and Forget-me-nots; commons with the yellow Lady's Bedstraw, Harebells, and the sweet Thyme; marshy places with the yellow stars of the Bog Asphodel, the Sun-dew ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... burrows in Argentina. Rattlesnakes, so common around dog-towns, enter the burrows to secure the young marmots. Another animal frequently seen was the chaparral-cock or road-runner, really the earth cuckoo (Geococcyx Mexicanus), called paisano or pheasant, or Correcamino, by the Mexicans. It is a curious creature, with a very long tail, and runs at a tremendous rate, seldom taking to flight. Report says that it will build round a sleeping rattlesnake an impervious ring of cactus spines. Its ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... a good lad and a loyal," said the housewife, feasting her eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... of my experience that nested in an old orchard, adjoining a potato patch, frequently went there caterpillar-hunting, and played havoc with one wherever found. The shy, deep wood habits of the cuckoo prevent it from coming close houses and into gardens, but robins will take these big caterpillars from tomato vines. However, they go about it rather gingerly, and the work of reducing one to non-resistance does not ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... claim to be a Christian Church at all," said the general; "it is like the cuckoo, which, hatched in the nest of the hedge-warbler, by degrees forces out the other fledglings, and usurps their place. So did paganism treat Christianity; although, fostered by God, the latter was enabled to exist, persecuted ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... Karize is resumed in good season in the morning. "What was that? a cuckoo?" At first I can scarcely believe my own senses, the idea of cuckoos calling in the jungles of Afghanistan being about the last thing I should have expected to hear, never having read of travellers hearing them anywhere in Central Asia, nor yet having heard them myself before. But there ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... heightened the general effect of arrogant self-esteem. He was an illustration of the ancient mystery—how is it that a man with such a face, and such insolence written all over him, can become a leader of other men and persuade them to hatch the eggs of treachery that he lays like a cuckoo ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... were sauntering along they heard a cuckoo in the distance, and Effi began to count to see how many times it called. She was leaning on Niemeyer's arm. Suddenly she said: "The cuckoo is calling yonder, but I don't want to consult him about the length of my life. Tell me, friend, what ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... slept, but their little son did not sleep; where the flowered cotton bed-curtains moved I saw the child peep out. I thought at first that he looked at the Bornholm clock, for it was finely painted with red and green, and there was a cuckoo on the top; it had heavy leaden weights, and the pendulum with its shining brass plate went to and fro with a 'tick! tick!' But it was not that he looked at; no, it was his mother's spinning-wheel, which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... minutes after 4 o'clock. In the house of the Hon. John M. Rose, on the bank of Stony Creek, was a clock in every room of the mansion from the cellar to the attic. Mr. Rose is a fine machinist, and the mechanism of clocks has a fascination for him that is simply irresistible. He has bronze, marble, cuckoo, corner or "grandfather" clocks—all in his house. One of them was stopped exactly at 4 o'clock; still another at 4.10; another at 4.15, and one was not stopped till 9 P.M. The "grandfather" clock did not stop at all, and is ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... should their sleep thus silent be, from streams and flow'rs away, While wanders thro' the sunny air the cuckoo's mellow lay; Those forms, whose eyes reflected heaven in their mild depth of blue, Whose hair was like the wave that shines o'er sands ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... is ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day 've been tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fond of allegory. This is especially visible not only in the "Romaunt of the Rose," but in the "Court of Love," "Flower and Leaf," the "House of Fame," and the "Cuckoo and Nightingale." In the "Assembly of Fowls" we have a fable. Chaucer was attached to the service of John of Gaunt, which may have led to his attacking the clergy, but in his youth he was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... going north a little. Presently we saw before us a bank of elm- trees, which told us of a house amidst them, though I looked in vain for the grey walls that I expected to see there. As we went, the folk on the bank talked indeed, mingling their kind voices with the cuckoo's song, the sweet strong whistle of the blackbirds, and the ceaseless note of the corn-crake as he crept through the long grass of the mowing-field; whence came waves of fragrance from the flowering clover ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... there was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action. The cuckoo lays its egg in the strange bird's nest, and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... all these things, yet so as with a difference:—for example, some animals better than others, some men rather than other men; the nightingale before the cuckoo, the swift and graceful palfrey before the slow and asinine mule. Your humor goes to confound all qualities. What sports do you use ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... a first edition; and then you can go sit in the orchard, white with blossoms, and see the butterflies that suggested the poem. And if your eye is good you can discover down by the lakeside the daffodils, and listen the while to the cuckoo call. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... The woodlands are captured by blossoms, the hamlets grow fair, Broad meadows are beautiful, earth again bursts into life, And all stir the heart of the wanderer eager to journey, So he meditates going afar on the pathway of tides. The cuckoo, moreover, gives warning with sorrowful note, Summer's harbinger sings, and forebodes to the heart bitter sorrow. Now my spirit uneasily turns in the heart's narrow chamber, Now wanders forth over the tide, o'er the home of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and "sweet messenger of spring," the "cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... falcon, the bustard, the pheasant, the heath-cock, the red-legged partridge, the small gray partridge, the pin tailed grouse, the sand-grouse, the francolin, the wild swan, the flamingo, the stork, the bittern, the oyster-catcher, the raven, the hooded crow, and the cuckoo. Besides these, the lakes boast all the usual kinds of water-fowl, as herons, ducks, snipe, teal, etc.; the gardens and groves abound with blackbirds, thrushes, and nightingales; curlews and peewits are seen occasionally; while pigeons, starlings, crows, magpies, larks, sparrows, and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... plantain-tree; her eyes are large, like the principal leaf of the lotus; her eye-brows stretch towards her ears; her lips are red, like the young leaves of the mango-tree; her face is like the full moon; her voice is like the sound of the cuckoo; her arms reach to her knees; her throat is like the pigeon's; her flanks are thin, like those of the lion; her hair hangs in curls only down to her waist; her teeth are like the seeds of the pomegranate; and her gait is that of the drunken elephant ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... hymns, and several poems, but another person wore the honors of his work. John Logan, who was his literary executor, appropriated the youthful poet's Mss. verses, and the hymn above indicated—as well as the beautiful poem, "To the Cuckoo,"[27] still a classic in English literature,—bore the name of Logan for more than a hundred years. In Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology is told at length the story of the inquiry and discussion which finally exposed the long fraud ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... our forest stream, and bare the woodland tree, And whose sunny wreath of leaves the cuckoo carolled free; The pilgrim passeth by our cot—no hand shall greet him there— The household is divided now, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... a-coming in, Loud sing cuckoo, Groweth seed and bloometh mead, And springeth the wood now. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... overtaxed, told against her. As Portia she appeared to great advantage; but when Lorenzo says, 'This is the voice, or I am much deceived, of Portia,' and Portia replies, 'He knows me, as the blind man knows the cuckoo, by the bad voice,' the audience laughed outright, and Woffington, conscious of her deficiency, with great good-humour joined with them in their merriment." The incident is mentioned in the Table Talk (1825) of Richard Ryan, to which book Daly refers. Mrs. Siddons made her first appearance ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... loud the woods Invite you forth in all your gayest trim. Lend me your song, ye nightingales! oh, pour The mazy running soul of melody Into my varied verse! while I deduce From the first note the hollow cuckoo sings, The symphony of spring, and touch a theme Unknown to fame, the passion of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... nests at Dockett Eddy. His acres of willow-grown all-but-island were made a sanctuary for birds, and therefore from Dockett only, of all his homes, cats were kept away. Nests were counted and cherished; it was a great year when a cuckoo's egg was discovered among the linnet's clutch, and its development was watched in breathless interest. Owls were welcome visitors; and the swans had no better nesting-place on the Thames than the lower end of Dockett. They and their annual progeny of cygnets were the appointed ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... deter him from going to sea. He was known to have more than once stayed alone on board a water-logged vessel while he sent his comrade on shore for help; and in his little room at home, with its white-painted windows, and geraniums, and Dutch cuckoo-clock, there stood above the roll of charts and telescope on the wall a bracket with more than one silver goblet upon it, which, like the telescope, were presents in acknowledgment of his services in piloting vessels into port under ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... are?" said the policeman; and then, briskly, "You're as welcome as the cuckoo, you are so. Come in and make yourself comfortable till the men awaken, and they are the lads that'll be glad to see you. I couldn't make head or tail of what they said when they came in last night, and no one else either, for they did nothing but fight each other and ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... the Buddhist work Wojo Yosbu, with the following comment:—"Who knows whether the animal in the field, or the bird in the mountain-wood, has not been either his father or his mother in some former state of existence?"—The hototogisu is a kind of cuckoo. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Blackbird Bluebird Bobolink Bullfinch Cock Canary Crow Cuckoo Eagle Falcon Goose Hawk Humming-bird Lark Mocking-bird Nightingale Owl Robin ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... side, and there softly leaning over it, fresh green meadows lie reposing in the settled meaning of the summer day. For this is a safer time of year than the flourish of the spring-tide, when the impulse of young warmth awaking was suddenly smitten by the bleak east wind, and cowslip and cuckoo-flower and speedwell got their bright lips browned with cold. Then, moreover, must the meads have felt the worry of scarcely knowing yet what would be demanded of them; whether to carry an exacting load of hay, or only to feed a few ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... never weary of looking at the inscriptions on the great cliffs at the River of the Dog—the strange beauty of that name! It was like the place-names of native Ulster—Athbo, the Ford of Cows, Sraidcuacha, the Cuckoo's Lane—one name sounded to the other like tuning-forks. And the sweet strange harmony of it filled his heart, so that he could understand the irresistible charm of Lebanon—the high clear note like ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the parasitical habit of the cuckoo and hits on an explanation of it. He speculates why the partridges and deer in ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... there were words going along with it—incoherent and impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... avowed greaser," Pen told himself. "With all the demerits Darrin will get, he'll have no heart for greasing the rest of this year. It's rough on Farley, but I'm not quite as sorry for Dalzell, who, in his way, is almost as bad as Darrin. He's Darrin's cuckoo and shadow, anyway. Oh, I wish I could ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... gales Scents hawthorn blown down happy dales; The phantom cuckoo calls forlorn From limits of the haunted morn;— Sing, elfin heart! thy notes to me Are bells ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... the landscape with flowers, While the thrush and the cuckoo sing soft from the bowers, Through the wood-shaded windings with Bella I 'll rove, And feast unrestrained on the smiles of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... literature and art, perfecting their dainty cities; while their tougher neighbors are dominating the globe, imposing their language and customs on the conquered peoples or the earth. One feels this on the Riviera. It reminds you of the cuckoo who, once installed in a robin's nest, that seems to him convenient and warmly located in the sunshine, ends by kicking out all ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... could no longer complete even a short day's work, and suffered from the cold in winter, he decided to go to the workhouse for a time, but he was out again before the cuckoo was singing, and we found him light jobs "by the piece," so that he could work for as long or as short a time as suited him. He was most grateful for any assistance, and told me that "A little help is worth a deal of sympathy." Eventually ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... at once that there was no atom of drama in it. At one moment I was standing with Marie Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from under the cloth that covered him peacefully beneath a tree at my side. There had, of course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... up, And I was blind in a tawny-gold day, Till she took her eyes away. So she came down from above And emptied my heart of love. So I held my heart aloft To the cuckoo that hung like a dove, ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... Literary Gazette, in a letter to Mr. Loudon, says, "about fifteen years ago I obtained a cuckoo from the nest of (I think) a hedge sparrow, at Old Brompton, where I then resided. It was rather curious, as being within ten yards of my house, Cromwell Cottage, and in a narrow and much frequented lane, leading from near Gloucester Lodge to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... landscape-painter. Now, in this month of May, the shrubs that clung to the furrowed face of the white rock were freshly green, and the low plaint of the nightingale, and the jocund cry of the more distant cuckoo, broke the sameness of the great chorus of grasshoppers in ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... in which wind and wave and leaves and the song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the same heart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will not undo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note.' 'I love ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... together with a large proportion of the wood-warblers (Mniotiltidae), the finches, the wrens, and some other groups. In the eastern hemisphere, also, we have the babbling-thrushes (Timaliidae), the cuckoo-shrikes (Campephagidae), the honey-suckers (Meliphagidae), and several other smaller groups which are certainly not coloured above the average standard of ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and soda, to consider my hideous plight, when a genial fool upon the opposite side of the table asked me if I had 'witnessed the comedy at Victoria.' Icily I inquired: 'What comedy?' He explained offensively that 'some cuckoo had tried the old wheeze of stuffing pepper in his trunk to put off the Customs,' and that the intended deterrent had untimely emerged. My brothers, conceive my exhilaration. 'The old wheeze.' I could have broken ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... and went a bit into the dark; and then the very next thing I know'd was something blowing in my face, and woke up and found a white heifer snuffing at me. 'Twas broad daylight, and me lying under a hedge in among the cuckoo-pints. I was wet through, and muddy (for 'twas a loamy ditch), and a bit dazed still, and sore ashamed; but when I thought of the bargain I'd made for master, and of the money I'd got in my waistcoat, I took heart, and reached ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... it druggists obtain salt of lemons. Twenty pounds of leaves yield between two and three ounces of oxalic acid by crystallization. Names locally given the plant in the Old World are wood sour or sower, cuckoo's meat, sour trefoil, and shamrock - for this is St. Patrick's own flower, the true shamrock of the ancient Irish, some claim. Alleluia, another folk-name, refers to the joyousness of the Easter season, when the plant comes into ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... sang until he woke the cuckoo: and the cuckoo filled the leafy air so full of his two limpid notes that the dreams of Rodriguez heard them and went away, back over their border to dreamland. Rodriguez awoke Morano, who lit his fire: and soon they had struck their camp ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... like teaching a monkey to climb trees;" "To catch fish and throw away the net," which recalls our saying, "Using the cat's paw to pull the chestnuts out of the fire;" "To climb a tree to catch a fish" is to talk much to no purpose; "A superficial scholar is a sheep dressed in a tiger's skin;" "A cuckoo in a magpie's nest," equivalent to saying, "he is enjoying another's labor without compensation;" "If the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the pit;" "A fair wind raises no storm;" "Vast chasms can be filled, but the heart of man is never satisfied;" "The body may be ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Glendaruadh! My love each man of its inheritance. Sweet the voice of the cuckoo, on bending bough, On the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... of light upon the wall slowly moved as the sun rose higher, till the ivory cross was left in shadow, but still the slumberer slept on, heedless, too, of the twittering of the swallows under the eaves, and the call of the cuckoo not far distant. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding this, observe the anxious doubling of every object by a visible echo or shadow throughout this picture. The grandest feature of it is the steep distant cliff; and therefore the dualism ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... Quiet descended on the lawns. The men smoked or buried themselves in a sleepy study of the Sunday papers. The old house lay steeped in sunshine. Occasional bursts of talk arose and died away; a loud cuckoo in a neighbouring plantation seemed determined to silence all its bird rivals; while once or twice the hum of an aeroplane overhead awoke even in the drowsiest listener ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... next day Buster Bumblebee arrived at Farmer Green's place just as the cuckoo clock in the kitchen was striking nine. And he knew at once that Jimmy Rabbit must have told him the truth about the raising bee, for the farmyard was crowded with wagons and carryalls and buggies and gigs. There ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... though thou, O scroll," he said, apostrophizing the letter, which lay on the table before his master, "dost speak with the tongue of the stranger? Hath not the cuckoo a harsh note, and yet she tells us of green buds and springing flowers? What if thy language be that of the stoled priest, is it not the same which binds hearts and hands together at the altar? And what though thou delayest to render up thy treasures, are not all pleasures most sweet, when ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... down opposite her and glanced at a cuckoo clock on the wall. "I am sorry, but I have only a few minutes. If you—" She laughed a little, not very pleasantly, and opening a small black fan covered with spangles, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... though in a dream; Behind me stood empty the house of God; Priest and people were lured by the magic 'twould seem, Of the tones that still through the air did stream. No sound they made; they were quiet as death; To hearken the song-birds held their breath, The lark dropped earthward, the cuckoo was still, As the voice re-echoed from ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... of the room opposite the wide hearth was the long narrow deal table, where the farmer and his men all dined together at twelve o'clock, for they were old-fashioned people at Hatchard's Farm; and behind the door hung the cuckoo clock, before which the children never failed to stand in open-mouthed expectation if it were near striking the hour. On all this the sun darted his rays through the low casement, and failed to find, for all his keen glances, one ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly expressed aversion nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect. "Jack, darling!" was her one eternal cuckoo cry: "I'm sure it's all a mistake—a hideous mistake; and we'll be good friends again some day. Please ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the Eighteenth Century made many of those jolly little wall clocks called Wag-on-the-Wall. These clocks may be still picked up in out-of-the-way towns. In construction they are very much like the old cuckoo clock which has come to us from Switzerland, and the tile clock which comes from Holland. These clocks with long, exposed weights and pendulum, have not the dignity of the French wall clocks, which were as complete in themselves as fine bas reliefs, and ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... in religious. We may begin by transcribing one or two of the songs, which, though not as numerous then as in some later periods, show that the great tradition of English secular lyric poetry reaches back from our own time to that of the Anglo-Saxons without a break. The best known of all is the 'Cuckoo Song,' of the thirteenth century, intended to be sung ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
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