"Trilling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The words sounded like a rally call. With that the girl fled down the hall, trilling the merriest ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... men of Arthur kept up with them for many miles, and there was a running fight and much wounding and slaying all through the fresh green countryside, where the hedges were laden with May-blossoms, and in the sky the larks were trilling. ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... despair, he pitched the little leather-covered book aside, walked to the side-table, took his handsome flute from its case, set up a piece of music on a stand, and began to run through a few preliminary flourishes that were peculiarly bird-like in their trilling, when there was a tap at the door and Jerry Brigley thrust in ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... were broken up on the surface—and from that alone it could be seen that the river was flowing rapidly. It was still. Drowsy curlews cried plaintively on the further bank, and in one of the bushes on the nearest side a nightingale was trilling loudly, taking no notice of the crowd of officers. The officers stood round the bush, touched it, but the ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... tenderly and sharply and imperiously. "Here! Here! Here!" At this ringing command, every bird, as far as the river carried his voice, came to investigate and remained to admire. Over and over he rang every change he could invent. He made a gallant effort at warbling and trilling, and then, with the gladdest heart he ever had known, he burst into ringing song: "Good Cheer! Good Cheer! ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... is called the tresillo, from its shape, it being an old form of the figure three, reversed, thus, . It is the only true guttural in the language, being pronounced forcibly from the throat, with a trilling ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... Just what were the words that hummed across the wire into the pink little ear of the bride-to-be, Billy never knew; but a Marie that was anything but wistful-eyed and dejected left the telephone a little later, and was heard very soon in the room above trilling merry snatches of a little song. Contentedly, then, Billy ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... once, as they joined clasps for right-hands-round, how it had lent its gay, bright measure to her life? And here she was singing it alone, in the forest, at midnight, to a wild beast! As she sent her voice trilling up and down its quick oscillations between joy and pain, the creature who grasped her uncurled his paw and scratched the bark from the bough; she must vary the spell; and her voice spun leaping along the projecting points of tune ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... classed in the fourth division are a very important accompaniment to the anthem of dawn, their notes, though short, serving agreeably to fill up the pauses made by the other musicians. Thus, the hair-bird (Fringilla Socialis) has a sharp and trilling note, without any modulation, and not at all melodious, when heard alone; but in the morning it is the chief harmonizer of the whole chorus, and serves, more than any other voice, to give unity and symphony to the multitude ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... up my knotted bludgeon, I set off along the stream incontinent, following a path I had trodden many a time when but a lad; a path that led on through mazy thickets, shady dells and green coppices dappled with sunlight and glad with the trilling melody of birds; but ever as I went, before my eyes was a man who twisted in my grasp and died, over and over again, and in my ears the sounds of his agony. And ever as I went trees reached out arms as if to stay me and bushes stretched forth little, thorny fingers ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... He sat there for a long time. I don't believe he thought of anything very clearly. His mind was a turgid chaos of misery; and about him the birds shrilled and quavered and carolled till the air was vibrant with their trilling. One might have thought they choired in honour of the Eagle's triumph, ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... on the other. There was a carpet of green grass in both directions, dotted with clumps of sagebrush. It had rained a few days before—the last rain of many, it chanced—and there were damp spots in the road in places and the grass and the sage were fresh in color. Meadow-larks were trilling, and the whole scene was one of peace—provided the beholder could blot out the memory of the tenantless clay stretched out ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... barristers might be wanted to become Solicitors-General. The pet Orpheus of the hour, the young tragic actor who was thought to have a real Hamlet within him, the old painter who was growing rich on his reputation, and the young painter who was still strong with hope, even the little trilling poet, though he trilled never so faintly, and the somewhat wooden novelist, all had tongues of their own, and certain modes of expression, which might assist or injure the Palliser Coalition,—as the Duke's ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... sweetness most appealing in the trilling of their notes: It is innocence that's pouring from their little baby throats; And I gaze at them enraptured, for my joy's a real thing Every evening when the kiddies and their ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... of a soubrette trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... make thee a wife; and by thy burdensome stone, oh groom, I make thee a husband. Live and be happy, both; for the wise and good Oro hath placed us in Mardi to be glad. Doth not all nature rejoice in her green groves and her flowers? and woo and wed not the fowls of the air, trilling their bliss in their bowers? Live then, and be happy, oh bride and groom; for Oro is offended with the unhappy, since he meant ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the Sabbath sunlight. The bells of the Cathedral and the Ursulines' chapel were ringing for high mass, and a mocking-bird, perching on a chimney-top above Madame John's rooms, was carolling, whistling, mewing, chirping, screaming, and trilling with the ecstasy of a whole May in his throat. "Oh! sleepy Kristian Koppig," was the young man's first thought, "—such ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... was high when they started on their walk, and her face looked flushed and warm. But through the park-like district to the wood she raced with Don, and made him leap over her sunshade and roll over and over on the bright green grass. The larks were trilling overhead, everything was ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... not yet in leaf—only some tiny green shoots. "We shall not have any lilac this year till the middle of May. Was there ever such a season?" Larks were everywhere, ascending in short flights, trilling as they ascended; and Evelyn listened to their singing, thinking it most curious—quaint cadenzas in which a note was wanting, like in the bagpipes, a sort of aerial bagpipes. But on a bare bough a thrush sang, breaking out presently into a little tune of five notes. "Quite ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... did not even hear the question. Trilling a gay song, he had rushed off where the stir and lively spectacle of ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... line. Jacquelin, Mariette, and Josette received orders to appear in full dress. The garden was raked. The old maid regretted that she couldn't come to an understanding with the nightingales nesting in the trees, in order to obtain their finest trilling. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... at dawn Is trilling forth a joyful note, Or hopping o'er the frozen lawn, In yellow ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... Anne in weaving in wreaths the gorgeous tinted wild flowers, sweet scented violets, and glossy green of the running pine. The children heeded not time, nor the distance they were placing between themselves and the camp, but wandered on. The wild birds were trilling the most delicious music, which burst on the ear enchantingly, and was the only sound that broke the solemn stillness that reigned around, save the soft gurgling of the water, as it glided over its pebbly bed. The forest was dense, ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... their horses cropping the dewy grass near by. Lewis's riding crop and gloves lay on his knee. He cast his hat upon the grass. Little birds hopped about on the ground and flitted here and there in the trees, twittering. A mocker, trilling in sudden ecstacy of life, spread a larger melody through ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... through her drowsy brain, she heard the plaintive, trembling voice of Morty Sands's mandolin, coming nearer and nearer, and his lower whistle taking the tune while the E string crooned an obligato; he passed the house, went down the street to the Mortons' and came back and went home again, still trilling his heart out like a bird. As the chirping faded into the night sounds, the girl ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... to be, Where trilling birds their song taught me, And cascades with their ceaseless roar, And all along the spreading shore The murmurs ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... it. He made a beginning himself by leading out the lady who had played the guitar in the arbor. Thereupon he began to dance with extraordinary artistic skill, and describe all sorts of letters on the grass with the points of his toes, really trilling with his feet, and now and then jumping pretty high in the air. But he soon had enough of it, for he was rather corpulent. His jumps grew fewer and clumsier, until at last he withdrew from the circle, puffing violently, and mopping ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... here, glad summer is here! O hark! 'tis to you I am singing: The sun is all gold in a heaven of blue, The birds in the forest are trilling for you, The flies 'mid the grasses are winging; The little brook babbles—its secret is sweet. The loveliest flowers would circle your feet,— And you to your work ever clinging!... Come forth! Nature loves you. Come forth! Do not ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... ... but even as he reflected, the spring regained its sway. All around was golden green, all—trees, bushes, grass—shone and stirred gently in wide waves under the soft breath of the warm wind; from all sides flooded the endless trilling music of the larks; the peewits were calling as they hovered over the low-lying meadows, or noiselessly ran over the tussocks of grass; the rooks strutted among the half-grown short spring-corn, standing ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... in it! except that "dippers everywhere delight in deep linns and brawling rapids, where their interesting motions never fail to attract the angler and bird-student;" and this of their voices: "In early spring, the male birds may be seen perched on some moss-covered stone, trilling their fine clear notes;" and again: "I have stood within a few yards of one at the close of a blustering winter's day, and enjoyed its charming music unobserved. The performer was sitting on a stake jutting from ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the iron-horns, ripping, racking, Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking. Way down the road, trilling like a toad, Here comes the dice-horn, here comes the vice-horn, Here comes the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the sun had just cleared the valley's rim and the ground was damp with dew. Somewhere near by an unfamiliar bird was sweetly trilling. Alaire listened dreamily until the bird-carol changed to the air of a familiar cowboy song, then she sat up, ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... again and again She'd tell, after trilling that air, Of her youth, and the battles on Leipzig plain And of all that was suffered ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... enough, to have doubted its complete suitability to the tastes and demands of the reading public in the present century; for they invariably replied to Ernest's inquiries that they would be happy to undertake its production for the trilling sum of one hundred guineas, payable in advance; but that they did not see their way to accepting the risk and responsibility of floating so speculative a volume on their own account. In the end, the unhappy manuscript, after many refusals, was converted into ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Sounds yet in my ear,— Birdlike at the window sitting, Tapping, trilling there, Singing, in would bear Joy the warmth ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... turned to follow the nurse, a big car whirled through the gate, and there sounded the trilling laughter of girls, the deeper jovial bass of ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... horizon where the great blue of the sky stooped to earth. There was the laughter of soldiers, and from an adjoining meadow came the neighing of a restive horse. The sunlight deepened, and from a hundred branches birds were trilling welcome to the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the woods of the White Mountains the wild flowers were springing joyously and the birds were pouring out the fulness of life and joy and love from trilling throats. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... and showing along its green ridges those first, faint signs of yellow that foretell a coming ripeness, the grass-mantled prairie lay beneath the warm noon sun. The little girl, cantering over it toward the sod shanty on the farther river bluffs, frightened the trilling meadow-larks, as she passed, from their perch on the dripping sunflowers, and scattered the drops on the wild wheat-blades with the hoofs of ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... "lullilooing" the trilling cry, which is made by raising the voice to its highest pitch and breaking it by a rapid succession of touches on the palate with the tongue-tip, others "Ziraleet" and Zagaleet, and one traveller tells us that it began at ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... There were students from different universities. Some of the newly arrived were taking refreshments. Others, preparing for departure, buckled on their knapsacks, wrote their names in the album, and received Brocken bouquets from the housemaids. There was pinching of cheeks, singing, springing, trilling; questions asked, answers given, fragments of conversation such as—fine weather—footpath—prosit—luck be with you!—Adieu! Some of those leaving were also partly drunk, and these derived a twofold pleasure from the beautiful scenery, for a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... relates for the twentieth time at least within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... and bright and still over Las Plumas and the sky bent low and blue and cloudless above the town. Bright feathered birds were darting through the orchards and trilling their nesting songs, the peach tree buds were showing their pink noses, and the promise of spring was everywhere. In the big, wide hall of Pierre Delarue's house Marguerite stood beside the door of her room, talking with Emerson Mead, while he clumsily buttoned her gloves. She was ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... around me—a dozen different birds pitching in with a will. There have been occasional rains, and the growths all show its vivifying influences. As I finish this, seated on a log close by the pond-edge, much chirping and trilling in the distance, and a feather'd recluse in the woods near by is singing deliciously—not many notes, but full of music of almost human sympathy—continuing for a long, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... their lodge, with three drums and one fife trilling a wheezing, rattling manglement of "Croppies Lie Down," whose only justification lay in the fact that it was maintaining a tradition of the time; and Jimmy Hartigan, besieged in the livery yard with half a dozen of his coreligionists, ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Leave now these grounds, sir, or our dogs will help you quick." Then the man with dragging footsteps hopeless, wishing himself dead, Crept away from sight of plenty, starved in place of being fed, Wandered farther from the mansion, till he reached a purling brook, Babbling, trilling broken music by a green and shady nook, Here sweet Flossie found him fainting; in her hands were food and drink; Pale like death lay he before her, yet the child-heart did not shrink; Then the rags from off his forehead, she with dainty hands ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... only just appearing from behind the clouds, the air was fresh and dewy. A herd of cattle was being driven along the road from the village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one after another, like bubbles rising ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... lark in a cage, and heard him trilling out his music as he sprang upwards to the roof of his prison, but we felt sickened with the sight and sound, as contrasting, in our thought, the free minstrel of the morning, bounding as it were into the blue caverns of the heavens, with the bird to whom the world was circumscribed. May ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... naturally as a bird. She has some phenomenal high notes, which are clear as bells. She makes that usually tedious grand aria, which every singer makes a mess of, quite lovely and musical, hovering as she does in the regions above the upper line like a butterfly and trilling like a canary-bird. A Chinese juggler does not play with his glass balls more dexterously than she plays with all the effects and tricks of the voice. What luck for her to have blossomed like that into a full-fledged prima-donna with so little effort. I have got to know her quite ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Rose, that "gentle flower in which a thorn is oft concealed," sang her duet with the Nightingale (Sissy trilling weakly on the piano, while Frank fluted her fingers affectedly as she had seen it done that memorable night) it was done in the hollow, throaty tones of the elder Miss Blind-Staggers, who had created the role; while the Lily sang through her nose, which she ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... variety in all the other departments even the more insupportable. Gay, tinselled, spangled draperies suit best to the opera; and hence many things which have been censured as unnatural, such as exhibiting heroes warbling and trilling in the excess of despondency, are perfectly justifiable. This fairy world is not peopled by real men, but by a singular kind of singing creatures. Neither is it any disadvantage that the opera is brought before us in a language which we do not generally understand; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... thick on the grass by the ditch, and on the moss and the ivy in the hedgerow bank. The larks soared once more into the sky; a robin sang wistfully in the ash; a brown wren, with many a flick of her tiny wings and many a merry curtsy, hopped in and out among the trees, trilling loudly a gleeful carol. The tits flew hither and thither, twittering to each other as they flew. The hedge-sparrows' metallic notes sounded clear amid all the varied music, as the birds, moving among the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... the customary guests for concert practice; the music, instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling into ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of wrangling voices blent With liquid laughter, and with rippling calls Of piping lips and trilling echoes ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... like a grasshopper, then suddenly falls to a series of low guttural notes, and ascends, like the rolling of a drum, to another series of high notes, rapidly trilled. Almost without a pause, he recommences with his querulous insect-chirp, and proceeds through the same trilling and demi-semiquavering as before. He is not particular about the part of the song which he makes his closing note, but will leave off right in the middle of a strain, when he appears to be in the height of ecstasy, to pick up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... rose with the robins, when there were any in the neighborhood. There were plenty on the lawn around the Sagamore Club that dewy June morning, chirping, chirking, trilling, repeating their endless arias from tree and gate-post. And through the outcry of the robins, the dry cackle of the purple grackles, and the cat-bird's whine floated earthward the melody of the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the waving trees seemed bending in worship, the birds trilling hymns of joy, and the flowers wafting offerings of incense! There are times when earth seems heaven and all nature worshipers. Ishmael was divinely happy; even the lost image of Claudia reappeared now surrounded with a halo ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... blood. Heavens! what melodious strains! how beat our hearts Big with tumultuous joy! the loaded gales Breathe harmony; and as the tempest drives From wood to wood, through every dark recess The forest thunders, and the mountains shake. The chorus swells; less various, and less sweet The trilling notes, when in those very groves, 70 The feathered choristers salute the spring, And every bush in concert joins; or when The master's hand, in modulated air, Bids the loud organ breathe, and all the powers Of music in one instrument ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... and with springy legs demonstrated the various steps of the mazurka. But when he had a mind to completely startle his audience, he would suddenly and without cogent reason leap high in the air, cut pigeon-wings with bewildering rapidity, trilling with his feet, so to say, whereupon he would return to this earth with a muffled thud which, however, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... you have got all mixed up," said the old man. "She does not gargle. That is called warbling, or trilling, or trolling, or something. And no girl has a tenor voice. She must ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... remembers Almack's balls - Willis's sometime named - In those two smooth-floored upper halls For faded ones so famed? Where as we trod to trilling sound The fancied phantoms stood around, Or joined us in the maze, Of the powdered Dears from Georgian years, Whose dust lay in sightless sealed-up biers, The fairest ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... this morning for the first time this year, and would be very glad if others would inform me if they have heard the bird this spring. I heard a cat-bird trilling its notes about a week ago, and bluebirds, martins, and other birds have made their appearance. Pewits are building their nests. Brother Le Verne gets YOUNG PEOPLE, and we have all the numbers published. We all like it very much. ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... heard that her father's vessel would be at the dock in a trifle over an hour and her heart was light and happy. Somehow all her misgivings seemed to flee away, now that he was coming. She flew from one room to another like a wild bird, trilling snatches of song, and ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... agony for every ill to which humanity is heir. I remember in the early morning once he came into my room and silently beckoned me to his study. There in the vines at the window, scarce three feet from his desk, sat one of our Southern Orioles—a feathered songster, trilling forth the gladness of his heart in song. Brann watched the bird and drank in the music of his song. I saw his face light up with exquisite tenderness, and I knew that he accepted this matin song of the bird as a message from his Maker. I trust I may be pardoned for relating ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... proportions of the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows without effort,—which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,—a voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of soft, heavy chest-tone,—can come only with a physical nature at once strong, wide, and fine,—from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens, as he does her golden grapes, filling it with the new ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... blossoms, and speaking to the blind man of the long ago, when it was his to see the budding beauties now shut out from his sight. The hum of the honey-bee was heard, and the air was rife with the sweet sounds of later spring. On the branch of a tree without, a robin was trilling a song. It had sung there all the morning, and now it had come back again, singing a second time to Richard, who thought of the soft nest up in the old maple, and likened that robin and its mate to himself and Edith, ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... thought he might be in the way," she smiled, and changed the subject, calling attention to the meadow lark who was trilling out his little ecstasy in the tall ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... I pondered, her voice, clear, though somewhat sharp, broke out in a lightsome French song, trilling through the door still ajar: I glanced in, doubting my senses. There at the table she sat in a smart dress of "jaconas rose," trimming a tiny blond cap: not a living thing save herself was in the room, except indeed ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... warm earth their song went trilling, Trilling, "Wake! Arise!" The kingcups quickly Assembled, strong. The bluets stept From the moss in throng. Like fairies too Came the cress ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... birdcages in the windows, and a constant trilling and chirping going on within them. Near the stove sat a raven, whose rough plumage, and the white feathers about his beak and wings, proved his great age. He had drawn his head in between his shoulders, and seemed self-absorbed, but in reality his bright eye was observing ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... was flooding all this May loveliness of field and farm and distant wood; song sparrows were blithely pouring out happiness by the throatful; peepers were piping and toads trilling, and we thought it no hardship to wait in such a place till the dusk should gather, and the wary woodcock announce his presence. But hark! while yet 'tis light, only a few rods distant, I hear that welcome 'seap ... seap,' and lo! a chipper and a chirr, and past us he flies,—a direct, slanting ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... had called as usual one morning and found the house empty, he brought his pretty snow-birdlings in their tidy striped bibs up to the grove at the back door, where we often heard his sharp trilling little song, and saw him working like some bigger papas to keep the dear ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Bell was my school-friend.' Then she brought them straight to the bed, and stooping down gave me the only kiss with which she has honored me—her show kiss, I call it—saying, 'My darling' (how soft she said it, too, with a little trilling cadence upon the sweet old word!)—'My darling, you are not to speak, or even look, save this once: now I must cover up my dearie's eyes;' and she laid her cool hand over my eyes and held it there while they stayed. 'These are some kind New York ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... result has been the consequence. A plague of vermin has followed the withdrawal of these little insect-killers. It is so natural to look for them amid such luxuriant vegetation that they become conspicuous by their absence. Now and again, however, the ears are gratefully saluted by the trilling and sustained notes of some hidden songster, whose music is entirely in tune with the surrounding loveliness, but truly delightful song-birds have ever been rare in the low latitudes, where there is more of ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... every action of her alert young body was so beautifully graceful that you forgot her modern costume and could imagine her a nymph in classic draperies. Her arms kept motion with her tripping feet, and both were in time with the tune that she was trilling. It seemed a spontaneous expression of gaiety as natural as the flight of a dragon-fly or the sporting of a kitten. Her dark hair flew out behind her, her eyes shone and sparkled, and her cheeks flushed with unwonted color. For the moment ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... was now very near, though hidden from sight by the bushes, and he was trilling forth old airs of home that made the pulses in the lad's ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... into a spontaneous rhapsody of song as she went, trilling and warbling in sweet, untaught cadences, unconsciously like a bird singing to its mate in the springtime. She had a wonderful voice. The young man was sorry when she was out of hearing, but glad, too, for the water was beginning to pucker his ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... being so near the city, was not dense, but the girls thought they had never seen foliage so vividly green nor grass so soft and luxuriant. The beckoning shadows of the trees, the fragrance of the dew-drenched flowers, the trilling music of a thousand carefree, joyous little songsters, all combined in one irresistible appeal to ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... soft trilling whistle of the common Hoptoad in May? The call of the Cat's-eye is of the same style but very loud and harsh, and heard early in April. If on some warm night in springtime, you hear a song which sounds like a cross between a Toad's whistle and a Chicken's squawk, get a searchlight and go quietly ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... singing of the prized Kronprinz—at least, to any but a bird-fancier's ears—was the singing that usually was to be heard above the trilling of the canaries, and that came from the room at the back of the shop where Roschen was engaged in her housewifely duties. It was such music as the angels made, Andreas declared, yet thinking most of all of one angel voice, the memory of which while still on earth ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons. They spoke to him in the sound of tides and of cataracts in the moaning of wind and the whispers of leafage, in the crying of birds, and the trilling of insects, in all the voices of nature. For him all visible motion—whether of waves or grasses or shifting mist or drifting cloud—was ghostly; and the never moving rocks—nay, the very stones by the wayside—were informed ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... and in the sun The wet soil gives a fragrance to the air; The days of many colours are begun, And early promises of meadows fair With starry petals, and of trees now bare Soon to be lyric with the trilling choir, And lovely with new leaves, spread everywhere A subtle flame that sets the heart on fire With thoughts of other springs and ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... dozing, shimmering lake-rest, the happy stream sets forth again, warbling and trilling like an ouzel, ever delightfully confiding, no matter how dark the way; leaping, gliding, hither, thither, clear or foaming: manifesting the beauty of its wildness in every sound ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... open and entered the room. At the same moment he heard the trilling of the telephone bell. The instrument stood upon his desk between the two front windows. Without pausing to switch on one of the lights in the combination gas- and electrolier in the centre of the room, he groped his way through blinding darkness to the desk ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... again as very injurious to morality. For first, they conceive it to be great presumption in men to summon God as a witness in their trilling and ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... was fluttering at his window blind; a honeysuckle vine tapped lightly on the pane. Birds were trilling, warbling, whistling. From the street came the rumbling of wagons, merry cries of greeting, and the barking of dogs. What was it made him feel so young and strong and light-hearted? The breeze brought him the smell of June roses, fresh and ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... chipped and mouldered and mossed; and the grey stones stand closely in hosts of ranks, only one or two inches apart, ranks of thousands upon thousands, always in the shadow of the great trees. Overhead innumerable birds sweeten the air with their trilling; and far below, down the steps behind us, I still hear the melancholy chant of the priests, faintly, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... The birds are trilling, tra-la, tra-la, Their glad songs are filling, tra-la, tra-la, The wood and dale, the meadow and vale, The Springtime is ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... building to Page's ears vibrated to a strange and ominous humming. She heard it in the distant clicking of telegraph keys, in the echo of hurried whispered conversations held in dark corners, in the noise of rapid footsteps, in the trilling of telephone bells. These sounds came from all around her; they issued from the offices of the building below her, above her and on either side. She was surrounded with them, and they mingled together to form one prolonged and muffled roar, that from moment to ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Opera Bouffe. It was difficult, in fact, to decide whether the inner nature of Ward was more truly expressing itself when he was firing off some train of scholastic paradoxes on the Eucharist or when he was trilling the airs of Figaro and plunging through the hilarious roulades of the Largo al Factotum. Even Dr. Pusey could riot be quite sure, though he was Ward's spiritual director. On one occasion his young penitent came to him, and confessed that a ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... of the old fir, bearing its heavy mantle of ivy from base to topmost twig, and not twenty yards from the window, a thrush sits and sings. You must watch him carefully ere you assure yourself that those sweet, trilling notes of peerless music come from that tiny throat. A rare lesson in voice production he will teach you. Deep breathing, headnotes clear as a bell and effortless, as only three or four singers in Europe can produce them, without the slightest sense of strain or throatiness—such are ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... had repaired to the shade of a pomegranate grove near the cliff, the better to escape the heat; while so engaged up the path from the monastery came the good brother. Just abreast of Abul Malek's point of vantage Joseph paused to listen. A songbird was trilling wondrously and the monk's face, raised toward the pomegranate trees, became transfigured. He changed as if by magic; his lips parted in a tender smile, his figure grew tense with listening; not until the last note had died away did he move. Then ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... great dread of passing for an idiot if she did not shew her appreciation of, and her resentment for, his conduct. She felt uneasy in the midst of good company, precisely because she wished to appear thoroughly at home. If I prattled away with some of my trilling nonsense, she would stare at me, and in her anxiety not to be thought stupid, she would laugh out of season. Her oddity, her awkwardness, and her self-conceit gave me the desire to know her better, and I began to dance attendance ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and faced her with the first bolt she flung. They were quite alone, for the trilling notes of a two-step had swiftly emptied the veranda. He still wore a smile on his lips, but its singularly heart-warming quality had gone from it. His red-brown face had grown a shade less red-brown, and his grey, whimsical, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... trilling and shrieking. There's tea or something going on downstairs. You had better come away before they have a fresh burst; they are ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... himself beset with "varmints" innumerable. The wolves will entertain him with a concerto at night, and skulk around him by day, just beyond rifle shot; his horse will step into badger-holes; from every marsh and mud puddle will arise the bellowing, croaking, and trilling of legions of frogs, infinitely various in color, shape and dimensions. A profusion of snakes will glide away from under his horse's feet, or quietly visit him in his tent at night; while the pertinacious humming of unnumbered ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... hushed accompaniment, she sang, at my suggestion, that same wild gipsy air which had so stirred me once before in the wood. But to-day, confined within these surrounding walls, her voice seemed to me even more glorious, so softly pure and plaintively sweet, anon soaring in trilling ecstasy—until the swelling glory sank, languished to a sigh and was gone; and I for one lost in awed wonder and delight. For to-day she sang with all that tender, unaffected sweetness, all that passionate intensity that was part of ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... trilling Songs of love to lovers' ears, Which, to hearts with sorrow thrilling, Seem but sighs and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... it was! Here was truth stranger than fiction, indeed! She laughed—a gentle, trilling laugh, low and sweet. But ah, she could not tell him! She could not say to him, "I am the daughter you lost so long ago. I have seen in your safe the fellow of the shoe I wore when I was found by my kind ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... them well. But music calls me; I hear it trilling, and sobbing, and whispering everywhere; and sometimes it is so loud and so beautiful that I wonder why every one else doesn't stop to listen. They never do. So I sing back my answer. It is silent singing. You would only wonder why I was so ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... unless the singer is blessed with a natural trill, which is a rare gift. We begin with quarter notes, then add eighths and sixteenths. This exercise, if practiced daily, will produce the desired result. It is taken on each tone of the voice—trilling in major seconds. ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... stand for something of pain. On his walk that morning he had noted many things with new eyes—the flowers gladdening the face of nature; the trees rearing their proud heads and standing each in his own place—each doing his own work; the birds trilling their songs of praise and stirring in the soul those holy aspirations whose feet scarce touch the earth and whose face is set toward heaven—all these doing the Father's work and answering with the quick ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... lightly along, humming a farewell to the last altheas, as they nodded their shrivelled heads, in view of their departure; but their words of adieu were made brief, by a voice as of one in distress; and coming near, it proved to be the musical Vingo, trilling the wild melodies ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale |
