"Lapwing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after rain, the "heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven, Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the bird whose feathers she—delirious creature—plucks from the pillow of her deathbed ("This—I should know it among a thousand—it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it felt rain coming"); the only two white spots of snow left on all ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... through a gap in a hedge will often bring down four or five. Later on the poacher takes them at roost. They roost on the ground in a circle, heads outwards, much in the same position as the eggs of a lapwing. The spot is marked; and at night, having crept up near enough, the poacher fires at the spot itself rather than at the birds, with a gun loaded with a moderate charge of powder, but a large quantity of shot, that it may spread wide. On moderately light nights he can succeed at this game. It is ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... perceive the little larks, The lapwing, and the snipe, And tune their song like Nature's clerks, O'er ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... received the usual insulting communication on a sheet of Charles's own dainty note. Last time he wrote it was on Craig-Ellachie paper: this time, like the wanton lapwing, he had ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... 40 No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But, choked with sedges, works its weedy way; Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow sounding bittern guards its nest; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies, 45 And tires their echoes with unvaried cries; Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all, And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall; And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand, Far, far away thy children leave the ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... and among the long marsh grass we found the ruddy sheldrake (Casarca casarca), and the crested lapwing (Vanellus vanellus). They were like old friends, for we had met them first in far Yuen-nan and on the Burma frontier during the winter of 1916-17 whence they had gone to escape the northern cold; now they were on their summer breeding grounds. The sheldrakes glowed ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... his thoughts; with whom flowers and verdure sprung up beneath his feet, and without whom all was cold and barren in nature and in his own breast. The cuckoo, "that wandering voice," that comes and goes with the spring, mocks our ears with one note from youth to age; and the lapwing, screaming round the traveller's path, repeats for ever the same sad story of ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... venom fill'd, Taken ere the beast was kill'd; Adder's skin and raven's feather, With shell of beetle blent together; Dragonwort and barbatus, Hemlock black and poisonous; Horn of hart, and storax red, Lapwing's blood, at midnight shed. In the heated pan they burn, And to pungent vapours turn. By this strong suffumigation, By this potent invocation, Spirits! I compel you here! All who list may ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... comes of freedom, and the freedom that comes of joy, unbent the old man's stiffened joints. He renewed his youth at every mile. He ran like a lapwing. When his feet first struck the sandy soil of the plains, he broke into old song of the "bloom-in' gy-ar-ding" and the "jolly swain," and in the marvelous mental and spiritual exhilaration born of the supreme moment he ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Chancellor of England, whom the queen believed in because he was short-sighted like herself, or even more so, had committed to writing a memorandum commencing thus: "Two birds were subject to Solomon—a lapwing, the hudbud, who could speak all languages; and an eagle, the simourganka, who covered with the shadow of his wings a caravan of twenty thousand men. Thus, under another form, Providence," etc. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sand-banks, without any attempt of concealment; they watch them closely, and frighten away the marabou and crows from their eggs by feigned attacks at their heads. When man approaches their nests, they change their tactics, and, like the lapwing and ostrich, let one wing drop and make one leg limp, as if lame. The upper mandible being so much shorter than the lower, the young are more helpless than the stork in the fable with the flat dishes, and must have every thing conveyed into the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... knees, and implore his instant flight into England; but her ears caught no sounds in the direction of Tushielaw, save the thunder and the rain, and, at intervals, the scream of the drenched owl or frightened hawk, or the wheep of the restless lapwing, driven from the morass by the overwhelming torrent. Then came the cry again, of "Mother, mother!" from her sleepless children, responded to by her own, "Hush, hush, my darlings! your father cometh!" when her pained ear sought again the direction of Peebles, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Lady Mother, comedy by Glapthorne (identical with The Noble Trial, entered in Stationers' Registers in 1660) Lanch (unnecessarily altered to lance in the text) Lancheinge of the May, MS. play by W.M. Gent. Lapwing Larroones Lather ( ladder) (In Women beware Women Middleton plays on the word:— "Fab. When she was invited to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... giant, with his trumpet soun'; The thief the chough; and eke the chatt'ring pie; The scorning jay; the eel's foe the heroun; The false lapwing, full of treachery; The starling, that the counsel can betray; The tame ruddock,* and the coward kite; *robin-redbreast The cock, that horologe* is of ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... O shame, unhappy bridegroom, All thy life thou hast desired, 250 Vowed to choose from hundred maidens, And among a thousand maidens, Bring the noblest of the hundred, From a thousand unattractive; From the swamp you bring a lapwing, From the hedge you bring a magpie, From the field you bring a scarecrow, From the fallow ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... burst from the covert, made her way miraculously through the gathering horses and men, pushed through the gate, leaving her lover some way behind, flew like a lapwing through the shrubbery, and across the lawn, was hanging on her brother's neck before the news of the arrival ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... I would not, though 'tis my familiar sin, With Maids to seeme the Lapwing, and to iest Tongue, far from heart: play with all Virgins so: I hold you as a thing en-skied, and sainted, By your renouncement, an imortall spirit And to be talk'd with in sincerity, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... village turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and were amazed at its size; it was, he said, the strangest sight he had ever looked on. How big was it? I asked him; was it as big as an ostrich? An ostrich, he said, was nothing to it; I might as well ask him how it compared with a lapwing. He could give me no measurements: it happened when he was a child; he had forgotten the exact size, but he had seen it with his own eyes and he could see it now in his mind—the biggest bird in the world. Very well, I said, if he could see it plainly ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... foster-parents have in all probability no suspicion of the trick that has been played on them. Birds do not take deliberate notice of the size or colour of their own eggs. Kearton somewhere relates how he once induced a blackbird to sit on the eggs of a thrush, and a lapwing on those of a redshank. So, too, farmyard hens will hatch the eggs of ducks or game birds and wild birds can even be persuaded to sit on eggs made of painted wood. Why then, since they are so careless of appearances, ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... Benedick, and when I name him, let it be your part to praise him more than ever man did merit. My talk to you must be how Benedick is in love with Beatrice. Now begin; for look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs close by the ground, to hear our conference." They then began; Hero saying, as if in answer to something which Ursula had said, "No truly, Ursula. She is too disdainful; her spirits are as coy ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... counterfeit. Glad to disclaim herself, proud of an art That makes the face a pandar to the heart. Those be the painted moons, whose lights profane Beauty's true heaven, at full still in their wane; Those be the lapwing faces that still cry, "Here 'tis!" when that they vow is nothing nigh: Base fools! when every moorish fool can teach That which men think the height of human reach. But custom, that the apoplexy is Of bed-rid nature and lives ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... 30 I would not—though 'tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest, Tongue far from heart—play with all virgins so: I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted; By your renouncement, an immortal spirit; 35 And to be talk'd with in sincerity, ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... sweet things, (some sugar, if you please, papa) I determined to take one run round the park before I sat down to my morning's work: so taking a crust of bread and a glass of cold water, which I love better than (some tea, if you please, mamma) any thing in the world, out I flew like a lapwing; stopped at the dairy; and (some cream, if you please, papa) down to the meadows and gathered my nosegay; and then bounded home, with a heart full of gayety, and a rare appetite for—some roll and butter, if ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... trotting before us, with her nose to the ground, when suddenly she made a run through the short heather after a lapwing, which was, or pretended to be, unable to fly. I think it was trying to decoy the dog away from its nest. As we watched the chase, Tom ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... the night is; I do not see one star at all; And it is dark and heavy my thoughts are that are scattered and straying. There is no sound about but of the birds going over my head— The lapwing striking the air with long-drawn, weak blows And the plover, that comes like a bullet, cutting the night with its whistle; And I hear the wild geese higher again with their rough screech. But I do not hear any other sound, it is that increases my grief— Not one other cry ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... no sound except the munching and snorting of the horses and the snoring of the sleepers; somewhere far away a lapwing wailed, and from time to time there sounded the shrill cries of the three snipe who had flown up to see whether their uninvited visitors had gone away; the rivulet babbled, lisping softly, but all these sounds did not break the stillness, did not stir the stagnation, but, on the contrary, ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... is murdered by his mother and aunt. Progne afterwards serves him up at a feast, which she prepares for her husband; on which, being obliged to fly from the fury of the enraged king, she is changed into a swallow, Philomela into a nightingale, and Tereus himself into a lapwing. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... cormorants and snake-birds, without any bodies, projecting above water, and disappearing as the steamer approached. Skimmers and thick- billed tern were plentiful here right in the heart of the continent. In addition to the spurred lapwing, characteristic and most interesting resident of most of South America, we found tiny red- legged plover which also breed and are at home in the tropics. The contrasts in habits between closely allied species are ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... disposed of half the field; they crossed the second in the same order, Wild Geranium racing neck to neck with Pas de Charge; the King was all athirst to join the duello, but his owner kept him gently back, saving his pace and lifting him over the jumps as easily as a lapwing. The second fence proved a cropper to several, some awkward falls took place over it, and tailing commenced; after the third field, which was heavy plow, all knocked off but eight, and the real struggle began in sharp earnest: a good dozen, who had shown a splendid stride ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... sable hue predominated, however, in their faces and legs. The very birds seemed to shun these wastes, and no wonder, since they had an easy method of escaping from them;—at least I only heard the monotonous and plaintive cries of the lapwing and curlew, which my companions denominated the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... subjects of unremitting persecution. The eagles, larger hawks, and ravens, have disappeared from the more cultivated districts. The haunts of the mallard, the snipe, the redshank, and the bittern, have been drained equally with the summer dwellings of the lapwing and the curlew. But these species still linger in some portion of the British isles; whereas the large capercailzies, or wood grouse, formerly natives of the pine forests of Ireland and Scotland, have been destroyed within the last fifty years. The egret and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... George we received the first advices of the demise of Mir Jaffier and of Sujah Dowlah's defeat. It was there firmly imagined that no definite measures would be taken, either in respect to a peace or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our arrival,—as the 'Lapwing' arrived in the month of January with your general letter, and the appointment of a committee with express powers to that purpose, for the successful exertion of which the happiest occasion now offered. However, a contrary resolution prevailed in the Council. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
