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More "Cuckoo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the lyric night is set to song! The cuckoo calls, the plaining whippoorwill Cries faint and far away; more distant still The hoopoe, hid his marshy haunts among, Wails with the cry of some lost soul in pain; The nightingale engilds the pulsant dark With golden-throated ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... loathsome—the word implies that they are mutually loathsome—and that they are the veriest trash and refuse. He compares them to so many polecats, opossums, and crows, and finally likens them to the rain-crow (cuckoo; Coccygus), which is regarded with disfavor on account of its disagreeable note. He grows more bitter in his denunciations as he proceeds and finally disposes of the matter by saying that all the seven clans alike are uhisa[']'t[)i] and are covered with filth. Then follows another ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to 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 six short twelve-months—had wrought in me.—Perhaps ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... 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 ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... infinitely-intermingled shadow and reflection which is the hope and the despair of the 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 the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... towers of Notre Dame. There were some colored prints of battles and shipwrecks wafered to the walls; a couple of flower-pots in the narrow space between the window-ledge and the coping outside; a dingy canary in a wire cage; a rival mechanical cuckoo in a Dutch clock in the corner; a little bed with striped hangings; a rush-bottomed prie-dieu chair in front of a plain black crucifix, over which drooped a faded branch of consecrated palm; and some few articles ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the red-tiled floor shone in the half-light. I crossed a neat little kitchen, just as a cuckoo-clock was chiming five, and found myself on the threshold of a small room opening on a garden. Rose was sitting in ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... 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 was no longer Lear, but the shadow of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... much an hour ago, and also that by some slip my poor knave slept not, as I had meant he should, but babbled of old things which have wellnigh turned his wits. He must not stay in this land, but back to England to feel the snow in his face, to hear the cuckoo and the lark, to serve you or Arden or Philip Sidney. What ancient news hath he ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... 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
... visit, and had something else to show. It was a cuckoo; every ten-thousandth year it would appear to the hour and cry "Cuckoo!" The time would not be shown any longer—only the long, long course of time—which never comes to an end—eternity. The master looked at Anker bewildered. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... 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 a bird's song. Here was the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... species of retiring-room at one end of the hut, wherein the modest members of the mess might bathe and splash at ease. The remainder of the servants went out armed and returned with (1) a zinc bath, (2) a stove, (3) a cuckoo clock, (4) a large mirror, (5) a warming-pan. "Once let us make a home for ourselves," we said, "and our energies will be free to finish the War." We devoted every cunning worker in the battery to this great end. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... with the toughest of digestions would dare to include these prickly, strong-jawed, meatless insects in a bill of fare. Now and then I have found an ani, or black cuckoo, with a few in its stomach: but an ani can swallow a stinging-haired caterpillar and enjoy it. The most consistent feeder upon Attas is the giant marine toad. Two hundred Attas in a night is not an uncommon meal, the exact number being verifiable by a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... but that I should play for both. What, are you beginning to remember now—is it coming back to you after a whole month? I am going to quicken your memory up presently, I can tell you; I have got a good deal to pay off, I'm thinking. I know what you are at; you want to play cuckoo, to turn 'Cousin Philip' out that 'Cousin George' may fill the nest. You know the old man's soft points, and you keep working him up against me. You think that you would like the old place when he's gone—ay, and I daresay that you will get it before ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... short too soon," said Gubblum. "My missis, she said to me last back end, 'Gubblum,' she said, 'dusta mind as it's allus summer when the cuckoo is in the garden?' 'That's what is is,' I said. 'Well,' she said, 'dusta not think it wad allus be summer if the cuckoo could allus be kept here?' 'Maybe so,' I says; 'but easier said nor done.' 'Shaf on you for a ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... (Bee-balm); Brake; Carnation (Bizarre Dianthus caryophyllus); Clover (Crimson Trifolium incarnatus); Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris); Cowslip (Primula veris); Crowflower (Ragged Robin, Lychnis floscuculi); Cuckoo Buds (Butter cups, Ranunculus acris); Daisies (Bellis perennis); Eryngium M. (Sea Holly); Flax; Flower de luce (Iris Germanica, blue); Fumitory (Dicentra spectabilis; Bleeding Heart); Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia); ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... (Ranunculaceae) Common Meadow Buttercup, Tall Crowfoot or Cuckoo Flower; Tall Meadow Rue; Liver-leaf, Hepatica, Liverwort or Squirrel Cup; Wood Anemone or Wind Flower; Virgin's Bower, Virginia Clematis or Old Man's Beard; Marsh Marigold, Meadow-gowan or American Cowslip; Gold-thread or Canker-root; Wild Columbine; Black ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... represented, but rather the quiet scenes of domestic grief and joy. The peculiar relation of brother and sister, particularly among the Servians, often forms an interesting feature of the popular songs. To have no brother is a misfortune, almost a disgrace, and the cuckoo, the constant image of a mourning woman in Servian poetry, was, according to the legend, a sister who ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... I pass on to a speaker of a very very opposite personality—the well-proportioned, beauteous maiden with azure starry eyes, gilded hair, and teeth like the seeds of a pomegranate (oh, si sic omnes!), who vaunted, in the musical accents of a cuckoo, her right to work out her own life, independently of masculine companionship or assistance, and declared that the saccharine element of courtship and connubiality was but the exploded mask ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... woods and 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 sparkling ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... 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
... this season one may hear at intervals numerous bird voices during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when I lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird, and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost any summer night, in any part of the country, and occasionally ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... suck their blood and so forth. A large number of suffrages in favour of maternal affection would be obtained, but most species of fish would repudiate it, while among the voices of birds would be heard the musical protest of the cuckoo. Though no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... pollards; dotted oaks of vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely large enough to be styled a lake; too winding in its shaggy banks, its ends too concealed by tree and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of this accidental experiment set me on trying my skill in the mechanical arts. Accordingly I took down and cleaned my landlady's cuckoo-clock, and in so doing, silenced that companion of the spring for ever and a day. I mounted a turning-lathe, and in attempting to use it, I very nearly cribbed off, with an inch-and-half former, one of the fingers which ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... in its trusting, foolish way, that it was going to bask out of doors for evermore. As he rode through Long-Ash Lane it was scarce recognizable as the track of his two winter journeys. No mistake could be made now, even with his eyes shut. The cuckoo's note was at its best, between April tentativeness and midsummer decrepitude, and the reptiles in the sun behaved as winningly as kittens on a hearth. Though afternoon, and about the same time as on the last ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... whence she had emerged. It was close at hand—a natural grotto, arched and apparently lofty. He resolved to explore it. Glancing at his watch he saw it was not yet one o'clock in the morning, yet the voice of the cuckoo called shrilly from the neighboring hills, and a circling group of swallows flitted around him, their lovely wings glistening like jewels in the warm light of the ever-wakeful sun. Going to the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... 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, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... with sleep; secondly, a clerk, shining with fat, his dress, hair, and countenance expressive of restrained jollity, as he dreams voluptuous dreams of the cool drinks he means to absorb through a straw when the hour of deliverance shall sound from the frightful cuckoo clock, a relic of the French occupation, which ticks at the end of the room; thirdly, a creature whose position is difficult to determine—I think he must be employed in some registry; he is here as a mere manual laborer. This third person gives me the idea of being very much interested ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... The rain-crow or cuckoo (both species) is supposed by all hunters to foretell rain, when its "Kow, kow, kow" ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... When the cuckoo comes to the bare thorn, Sell your cow and buy your corn; But when she comes to the full bit, Sell your ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... master artists are all here; and the expectations excited by the robin and the song sparrow are fully justified. The thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink azalea, to listen. With me the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager delay their coming till then. In the meadows the bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the field sparrow sings ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... after a while he embarked again in the very same nut-shell of a boat that he had left Egypt in, passed right under the bows of the English vessels, and set foot once more in France. France acknowledged him; the sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; and all the people ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... steadily on, with its pitiless dropping out of seconds, minutes, and hours. The worst part of winter was over; the March gales had dried up the forests; April was tingeing the woods with its tender green; the song of the cuckoo was already heard in the tufted bowers, and the festival of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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 in their nests? ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... aquaticum, mustard, sinapis, scurvy-grass cochlearia hortensis, horse-radish cochlearia armoracia, cuckoo-flower, cardamine, dog's-grass, dandelion, leontodon taraxacon, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... gum-trees, and the bombax very symmetrical. We saw no animals: here and there appeared the trail of a hyaena, the only larger carnivor that now haunts the mountains. The song of Mkuka Mpela, the wild pigeon, and Fungu, the cuckoo, were loud in the brake: the Abbe Proyart makes the male cuculus chant his coo, coo, coo; mounting one note above another with as much precision as a musician would sound his ut, re, mi: when he reached the third note, his mate takes ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the petals of the cuckoo-buds in the river-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as he lies a' dying, "babble o' green fields," and all the long, long thoughts of youth steal over ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... bold push forward, and their feet would tread on their inheritance. But, as is so often the case, courage oozed out at the decisive moment, and cowardice, disguised as prudence, called for 'further information,'—that cuckoo-cry of the faint-hearted. There are three steps in this narrative: the despatch of the explorers, their expedition, and the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... and "sweet messenger of spring," the "cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... the words here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... 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 ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... lazily on, Cabby dropping in a word of enlightenment here and there to the effect that this old tumble-down part of the ancient wall is the celebrated Arcade, which formed part of the wall of the King's Palace; and this queer old lane running up through the walls like a sewer is Cuckoo lane; and that is Bugle street, where in olden times the warden blew; and here are the remains of Canute's palace, with its elliptical and circular arches and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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 the earth—and comes ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... 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
... remained by her as a thing of permanent mirth. So it was hardly surprising, in face of the dominant direction of her thoughts to-night, that, when the Miss Minetts' name punctuated Theresa's discourse recurrent as a cuckoo-cry, remembrance of their merrily inglorious retirement from the region of Faircloth's Inn should present itself. Whereupon Damaris' serious mood was lightened as by ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... 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, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Wayside Inn) sings 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
... 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 ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... poets, fare the worst: For they're a sort of fools which fortune makes, And, after she has made 'em fools, forsakes. With Nature's oafs 'tis quite a diff'rent case, For Fortune favours all her idiot race. In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find, O'er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind: No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... running on in so smart and fluent a manner, the Praenestine [king] directs some witticisms squeezed from the vineyard, himself a hardy vine-dresser, never defeated, to whom the passenger had often been obliged to yield, bawling cuckoo ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... 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 ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... myself love 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... no true 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
... well cultivated, and produces much grain. The whole appearance of Lahuri Nepal, and its vegetable productions, strongly resemble those of the wilder parts of Britain; and, during my stay, I was entertained with the note of an old acquaintance, the cuckoo. The air of the higher part of the valley where we encamped is much cooler than that of Kathmandu, and was so sharp to our relaxed habits, that our winter clothing became comfortable, although Chitlong is situated nearly in twenty-seven ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... ere they repair last year's villages, and join excitedly in the chorus; while the great osprey wheels overhead, and the grey falcon sits on a bare branch, still as a sentinel, each waiting for an opportunity to take toll of the nutmeg pigeons. The channel-billed cuckoo shrieks her discordant warning of the approaching wet season; and the scrub fowl utters those far-off imitations of the exclamation of civilised hens. Sundown at Kumboola towards the end of September, when the sea laps and murmurs among the rocks, and great ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... due, 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
... all well. I have no home—I'm one of the cuckoo tribe that has no resting-place of its own, and only now and then slips into the swallow's nest. For the short time I have to live, I shall have no trouble in finding quarters wherever I go. I can now climb up into a tree again, and look down upon the world in which I have no longer any ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock; now here I was, at last, right in the creature's home; so wherever I went that distressing "HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!" was always in my ears. For a nervous man, this was a fine state of things. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the spider weaves ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a bird, and that bird is the cuckoo, that seems to think it unnecessary to build its own nest, and so it occupies any nest that it happens ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... Asked to describe the cuckoo the other day, a small boy said it was the bird which put its eggs out to be laid by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... linnet; but we shall never reclaim the guinea-fowl, or accustom the swallow to a cage. Teach the Gipsy to read, or even to write; he remains a Gipsy still. His love of wandering is as keen as is the instinct of a migratory bird for its annual passage; and exactly as the prisoned cuckoo of the first year will beat itself to death against its bars when September draws near, so the Gipsy, even when most prosperous, will never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... butterfly moon! Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream To the sound of the cuckoo's call.... The white wings of moon-butterflies Flicker down the streets of the city, Blushing into darkness the useless wicks of round lanterns ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... been so popular as, in my humble judgment, he deserves to be, but of course modern readers were better acquainted with him than with Godwin. Yet nine out of ten were always heard repeating this cuckoo cry about the latter's superiority, until the 'Iron Chest' came out, and Fashion induced them to read Godwin for themselves; which has very properly changed ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... 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 a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... each turn of the mother's discourse. While Luigi is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts; for April and June are coming! The mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still more powerful persuasion. In June, not only summer's loveliness, but Chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the trees was a beautiful cuckoo, of a chesnut brown, variegated with black, which was shot. But upon the shore were some egg-birds; a small sort of curlew; blue and white herons; and a great number of noddies; which last, at this time, laid their eggs a little farther up on the ground, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... the reference to the poet's old age "which dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we reject the evidence of a further passage, in the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," a poem of disputed genuineness, we accordingly arrive at the conclusion that there is no reason for demurring to the only direct external evidence in existence as to the date of Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause of chivalry held at Westminster ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 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 ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... were beautiful with all manner of comforts and luxuries. Low divans of rich and soft material, ottomans and rugs of Persian and Turkish wool, statues and statuettes of marble, graceful forms, filled the corners and the niches. Birds of many colors sang in golden cages, and curious cuckoo-clocks chimed the hours. Laura's mamma was a fine musician, and her harp and piano were always ready to yield sweet tones. The library shelves held books of all kinds and colors; and the cabinets of richly carved wood, before the glass doors of which Laura ...
— The Princess Idleways - A Fairy Story • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... weedy 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 ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... for our music than musicians may be willing to allow; but it is no more than justice to a despised bird to say, that from it we have derived the minor scale, whose origin has puzzled so many; the cuckoo's couplet being the minor third sung ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... lambastono. Cry (call out) krii. Cry (weep) plori. Cry out ekkrii. Cry (of animals, etc.) bleki. Crypt subterajxo. Crystal kristalo. Crystallise kristaligi. Cub (of lion) leonido. Cube kubo. Cuckoo kukolo. Cucumber kukumo. Cudgel bastonego. Cuff manumo. Cuirass kiraso. Cull kolekti. Cullender kribrilo. Culpable kulpa. Culprit kulpulo. Cultivate kulturi. Culture kulturo. Cunning ruzo. Cunning ruza. Cup taso. Cupboard sxranko. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... was by now within arm's-length of the green gate. He looked with pleasure at the six virgins fluttering in their green gowns, and peeping bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked under their green bonnets. Beyond them he saw the forbidden orchard, with cuckoo-flower and primrose, daffodil and celandine, silver windflower and sweet violets blue and white, spangling the gay grass. The twisted apple-trees were ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... brook, which had now swelled almost to a stream. A more romantic situation I had never witnessed. It was surrounded and almost overhung by huge mountains, and embowered in trees of various kinds; waters sounded, nightingales sang, and the cuckoo's full note boomed from the distant branches, but the village was miserable. The huts were built of slate-stones, of which the neighbouring hills seemed to be principally composed, and roofed with the same, but not in the neat tidy manner of English houses, for the slates were of all sizes, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... eyebrows like a bow, her nose like a parrot's, her teeth like a 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
... new habitation. A few minutes active climbing brought us among the heath, formming a thick elastic carpet under our feet, on which we were glad to seat ourselves for a moment's rest. We heard the cuckoo upon every side, and when we rose to pursue our walk we frequently startled the moor-fowl, singly or in flocks. The time allowed by the game laws for shooting them had not yet arrived, but in the mean time they had been unmercifully hunted by the hawks, for we often found the remains of such as ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Yes, so long As Spring revives the year, And hails us with the cuckoo's song, To show that she is here; So long as May of April takes, In smiles and tears, farewell, And windflowers dapple all the brakes, And primroses the dell; While children in the woodlands yet Adorn their little laps With ladysmock and violet, And daisy-chain their caps; While over ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... brain when she in early 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
... her the cuckoo," said Mary Acton. "Do you remember the young one we found last spring, sprawling all over the nest, and opening its huge, ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... memories. I cried afresh to think I 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 ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... 'Oho! That is how it stands? So she is to be cuckoo, hey?' He sat square and intent for a moment or two, working his mouth like a man who chews a straw. Then he slapped his big hand on his knee, and rose up. 'If I cannot spike this wheel of vice, trust me never. ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... all the other trees, and could be seen far out at sea, so that it served as a landmark to the sailors. It had no idea how many eyes looked eagerly for it. In its topmost branches the wood-pigeon built her nest, and the cuckoo carried out his usual vocal performances, and his well-known notes echoed amid the boughs; and in autumn, when the leaves looked like beaten copper plates, the birds of passage would come and rest upon the branches before taking their flight across the sea. But now it was winter, the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a cuckoo-clock in the next room, and I felt that my visit, fascinating as my angel was, must come to an end. I left her still standing on the veranda in her white brocade, and as I walked off she made ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... the grain is grown: I share my kopecks with the village priest, Who winnows peccadillos by the sheaf." Then Zanthon, laughing in his foxy beard: "When Amine meets me in the plane-tree walk (Where pairing little finches seek to build, We saw the cuckoo thieve their nests when boys), Shall I then tell her, in my peasant way, Your broken promise, and her troth denied?" And he was gone—gone, with the stud he bought From Schamyl's son, up by Caucasus way, Leaving me solitude ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... brief mis-understanding, during which they come near tearing the two human envoys to pieces, they listen to the exposition of the latters' plan. This is nothing less than the building of a new city, to be called Nephelococcygia, or 'Cloud-cuckoo-town,' between earth and heaven, to be garrisoned and guarded by the birds in such a way as to intercept all communication of the gods with their worshippers on earth. All steam of sacrifice will be prevented from rising to Olympus, and the Immortals will very soon be starved ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... Dumbarton Bridge its giant-shadow, clad in air and sunshine, appeared in view. We had a pleasant day's walk. We passed Smollett's monument on the road (somehow these poets touch one in reflection more than most military heroes)—talked of old times; you repeated Logan's beautiful verses to the cuckoo,* which I wanted to compare with Wordsworth's, but my courage failed me; you then told me some passages of an early attachment which was suddenly broken off; we considered together which was the most to be pitied, a disappointment in love where ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... 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 cream of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... proposed 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 Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... to taunt me with his happier lot. Oh, how I envied him! No lessons, no tasks, no hateful 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: ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... 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
... and see if we cannot gather a pretty handful of wild flowers for May to take home to mamma. Here are a few cowslips with their drooping golden bells and delicious scent; I am afraid we shall not find enough to make a cowslip ball. Here is cuckoo-flower, which, as old Gerarde says, "doth flower in April and Maie, when the cuckoo doth begin her pleasant notes without stammering." Old Gerarde, by the way, ought to have said "his pleasant notes," for it is the male bird alone that cries "cuckoo." Its flowers ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... Lakenfelders, pullet. Third prize Lakenfelders, pullet. Fifth prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. First prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. Second prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. Third prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. Fourth prize Campines, pullet. First prize Campines, breeding pen. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, cock. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, cockerel. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, hen. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, pullet. First prize Rose Comb Blues, cock. First prize Rose Comb Blues, cockerel. First prize Rose Comb Blues, hen. ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... towards the place where the cuckoo has been singing, nought remains but the moon in ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 other parts ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... the 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 most of the legislators fled over ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the sweet breath of spring played amidst its branches. The young cataracts, as they danced down the ravine, laughed to the budding flowers. Anon were heard the dreamy voices of summer with its myriad insects, the gentle pattering of rain, the wail of the cuckoo. Hark! a tiger roars,—the valley answers again. It is autumn; in the desert night, sharp like a sword gleams the moon upon the frosted grass. Now winter reigns, and through the snow-filled air swirl flocks of swans and rattling hailstones ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume, The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world's a blaze of sky The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... rears the cuckoo's spurious offspring, tending with care the ultimate destroyer of its own young, does so in perfect ignorance of the results about to follow the misplaced affection. The cravings of the interloper are satisfied to the detriment of its own offspring; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... begin bellowing again in infernal concert. So there accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all that evidence which makes one proud to share with one's fellows the divine gift of reason, instead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. No wonder the cuckoo has a merry note! ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... remembrances of the fresh beauty of spring days, on which—sheltered by the light copse-wood from winds that are still keen—we have revelled in sunshine warm enough to persuade us that summer was come "for good," as we picked violets and primroses to the tolling of the cuckoo. ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... power. The sun of England is set for 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 the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... during three seasons was perfectly black, but then annually became more and more red; and it deserves notice that this tendency to change, whenever it occurs in a bantam, "is almost certain to prove hereditary."[90] The cuckoo or blue-mottled Dorking cock, when old, is liable to acquire yellow or orange hackles in place of his proper bluish-grey hackles.[91] Now, as Gallus bankiva is coloured red and orange, and as Dorking fowls and both kinds of bantams are descended from this species, we ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... 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
... a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed. Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo's nest and glared ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, or the Zeus who made love to women in the shape of an ant or a cuckoo, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and bewildering.(3) It is this IRRATIONAL and unnatural element, as Mr. Max Muller says, "the silly, senseless, and savage element," that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it. For, observe, Greek myth does ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... philosophical Ranke, "not to pray, but to contemplate the Belvidere Apollo. They disgraced the most solemn festivals by open profanations. The clergy, in their services, sought the means of exciting laughter. One would mock the cuckoo, and another recite indecent stories about St. Peter." Luther, when he visited Italy, was extremely shocked at the infidel spirit which prevailed among the clergy, who were hostile to the circulation ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... 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 ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... just a line to say I am well and happy. I am here in my dear forest all day in the open air. It is very be—no, not beautiful exactly, just now, but very bright and living. There are one or two song birds and a cuckoo; all the fruit-trees are in flower, and the beeches make sunshine in a shady place. I begin to go all right; you need not be vexed about my health; I really was ill at first, as bad as I have been for nearly a year; but the forest begins to work, and the air, and the sun, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... beautiful, after the 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... familiar room. For the house had belonged to a brother millionaire; it had changed hands with certain shares of "Water Front,"—as some of Rushbrook's dealings had the true barbaric absence of money detail,—and was elegantly and tastefully furnished. The cuckoo had, however, already laid a few characteristic eggs in this adopted nest, and a white marble statue of a nude and ill-fed Virtue, sent over by Rushbrook's Paris agent, and unpacked that morning, stood in one corner, and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... flowed up and out and round about, dancing like the brimstone butterflies out of reach before he could seize them, calling with voices like the cuckoos, themselves all the time just out of sight. Who ever saw a cuckoo when it's talking? Who ever foretold the instant when a butterfly would shoot upwards and away? Such darting, fragile thoughts they were, like hints, suggestions. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... expectations excited by the Robin and the Song-Sparrow are fully justified. The Thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink Azalea, to listen. With me, the Cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the Goldfinch, the King-Bird, the Scarlet Tanager delay their coming till then. In the meadows the Bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the Field-Sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and the woods are unfolding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... "You silly cuckoo, d'you mean to say you don't know she's gone on you? Lot of pains she takes to hide it. You've only got to ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... trees are answering your prayer In cooing cuckoo-song, Bidding Shakuntala farewell, Their ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the 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, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... already a 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 ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 show what they can ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rather more real than himself. The picture is better, perhaps, than the bricks were, yet it is not enlivening. The only other objects in the room worth mentioning are, a particularly small book-shelf in a corner; a cuckoo-clock on the mantel-shelf, an engraved portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall opposite in a gilt frame, and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel in a frame of rosewood ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings, while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh. I could eat nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl of which appeared at every meal. In consequence the hiccough lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a perpetual catarrh. I was roused to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence be it ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dead. When the squirrels left the forests in the west and journeyed out upon the open prairies, they began to burrow in the ground. Finally, for want of use, they lost all power of climbing. Among the birds the lazy cuckoo began by stealing the nest another bird had built. But it paid a grievous price for its theft, for now when the cuckoo is confined by man and wants a nest of its own it toils aimlessly, and has lost all power to make for itself ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... 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, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... children greedily whenever they could catch them. Such a terror were they that the tribes had to protect their village with high walls, [Footnote: Can this have anything to do with the idea of walling-in the cuckoo?] and then they slept securely, for the Roh hunted by night. This old chieftain determined to watch the birds, and find out their nesting-places; so he had a series of towers built, in which the watchmen could sleep ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... enter the race of University-founding, but worked on the plan of the cuckoo, by laying its eggs in the nests of others. For two centuries, Scotchmen were almost shut out of England; and so could not make for themselves a career in Oxford and Cambridge, as in later times. They had, however, at home, good grammar ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... gates of dawn Still seems to circle, and the mossy lawn, As they glide gently 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! ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... one bold push forward, and their feet would tread on their inheritance. But, as is so often the case, courage oozed out at the decisive moment, and cowardice, disguised as prudence, called for 'further information,'—that cuckoo-cry of the faint-hearted. There are three steps in this narrative: the despatch of the explorers, their expedition, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... blithe cuckoo and daisy mild, The daffodils, like elfin fays, The mystery of sunset haze O'er barren moors, his pen beguiled— ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... 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 or not, though ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of summer, and I saw a kingfisher across the watermeadows coming along. Oh, and there's a cuckoo back in the fir plantation, singing with a May voice. It must have been asleep ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to refute, were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... "Up on Grefsen ridge, cold punch had flowed down the hill as good as free. Veyergang's son had given the girls at the factory an old boat from Maridal Lake and half a barrel of pitch; heard the cuckoo and had larks all night—came down again when it ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... you caught a peep of the parsonage-house, backed by woodlands, and a little noisy rill running in front. The birds were still in the hedgerows, only, as if from the very heart of the most distant woods, there came now and then the mellow note of the cuckoo. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... whip-poor-will was piping when I lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird, and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost any summer night, ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... 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 and ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... the 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, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Gotham, they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn, to shade the wood from the sun; and others were engaged in hedging a cuckoo, which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all employed upon some foolish way or other, which convinced the king's servants that it was ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... chaffinch and blackcap; and from these there was a gradation of sounds, down to the faint lispings of the more tender melodists singing at a distance, reaching the sense like voices mysterious and spiritualised from some far unseen world. And at intervals came the fluting cry of the cuckoo, again and again repeated, so aerial, yet with such a passionate depth in it, as if the Spirit of Nature itself had become embodied, and from some leafy hiding-place cried aloud ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... 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, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... rate my eyes were drawn to the place as I passed; and like a cuckoo-bird emerging from the clock, ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... palaces with towers of silver and frosted pinnacles, so wonderful and beautiful that as she looked at it she forgot that there was work to be done, until the cuckoo clock on the ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... shadow and reflection which is the hope and the despair of the 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 ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... dogs, horses, love their masters and keepers: many stories I could relate in this kind, but see Gillius de hist. anim. lib. 3. cap. 14. those two Epistles of Lipsius, of dogs and horses, Agellius, &c. Fifthly, for bringing up, as if a bitch bring up a kid, a hen ducklings, a hedge-sparrow a cuckoo, &c. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... been dreaming of a strange foreign city, full of pictures and carved woodwork, and of a 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 ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... mother 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, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... us all things are the same as none And nothing is that is under the sun. Seven's a dozen and never is then, Whether is what and what is when, A man is a tree and a cuckoo a cow For gold galore and silver enow To magical, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... hour ago, and also that by some slip my poor knave slept not, as I had meant he should, but babbled of old things which have wellnigh turned his wits. He must not stay in this land, but back to England to feel the snow in his face, to hear the cuckoo and the lark, to serve you or Arden or Philip Sidney. What ancient news hath ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... my heart's bird! Slight and small the lovely cry Came trickling down, but no one heard. Parrot and cuckoo, crow, magpie Jarred horrid notes and the jangling jay Ripped the fine threads of song away, For why should peeping chick aspire To challenge their loud ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... 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
... 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 ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Court-opening, formula Cramming oneself Crane, herald of winter —carry ballast Cratinus, a comic poet Cress, its properties "Cretan monologues" —rhythms Crime and poverty Criticism, too low Critylla Crows, going to Cuckoo, the Curotrophos, meaning Cuttle-fish Cyclops, the, and lyre Cycni, the two Cynna, the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... cutery corn, 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.— ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... really alien person who is head of the family. Our founder will go through the spreading record of offspring and find it mixed with that of people he most hated and despised. The antagonists he wronged and overcame will have crept into his line and recaptured all they lost; have played the cuckoo in his blood and acquisitions, and turned out ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... a slope in the midst of dense forest. This is protected on all sides by a strong stockade twelve feet high for leopards abound and when game is difficult to find do not hesitate to enter villages and carry off people. Here we halt for lunch and then on again through the forest full of cuckoo pheasants. These are not much more difficult to shoot than hand reared birds at home although they fly higher to clear the tall trees. They do not, however, appear to travel very quickly but this may be a delusion ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... fact, I think Newson looks to Lowestoft as a Summer Pasture, and is in no hurry to leave it. He lives here well for nothing, except Bread, Cheese, and Tea and Sugar. He has now taken to Cocoa, however, which he calls 'Cuckoo' to my hearing; having become enamoured of that Beverage in the Lugger, where it is the order of the day. ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... but there was but one Madame Warens in the world, whose image was never absent from 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 ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Leicestershire, where he had engaged himself as an usher to the school of which Mr. Crompton was master. Here he described to his old school-fellow, Hector, the dull sameness of his life, in the words of the poet: Vitam continct una dies: that it was as unvaried as the note of the cuckoo, and that he did not know whether it were more disagreeable for him to teach, or for the boys to learn the grammar rules. To add to his misery, he had to endure the petty despotism of Sir Wolstan Dixie, one of the patrons of ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... dusky-green 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 what ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... was little change. Canterbury came down from the "cloud-cuckoo-land" in which Selwyn twitted her with dwelling. Both sides gained a better understanding of one another, and agreed to stand together on the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... only be compared to the serenity of Mr. Prigg's benevolent countenance; and there was a calm, deeply, sweetly impressive, which could only be appreciated by a mind at peace with itself in particular, and with the world in general. Then came from a neighbouring wood the clear voice of the cuckoo. It seemed to sing purposely in honour of the good man; and I fancied I could see a ravenous hawk upon a tree, abashed at Mr. Prigg's presence and superior ability; and a fluttering timid lark seemed to shriek, "Wicked bird, live and let live;" but it was the last word the silly lark uttered, for ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... very dear to her, the least and homeliest duties pleasant; she loved her sisters with devoted friendship, and she had many little happinesses in her patient, cheerful, unselfish life. Would that I could show her as she was!—not the austere and violent poetess who, cuckoo-fashion, has usurped her place; but brave to fate and timid of man; stern to herself, forbearing to all weak and erring things; silent, yet sometimes sparkling with happy sallies. For to represent her as she was would be her noblest and ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... feeling very snug and comfortable, quietly gazing at all the well-known objects in the room—at the picture of the little girl reading, which hung opposite her bed, at the book-shelf with all the brightly-covered books she was so fond of, at her canary hopping restlessly in his cage, at the cuckoo clock, and finally at the little clog in the middle of the mantel-piece. But when she came to this her eyes opened wide, she sat up, rubbed them, and looked at it again; for all in a minute, just as we remember a dream, there came back to her the dreadful events ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... hillside. We are glad of the crested larks that rise warbling from the grass, and of the buntings and chaffinches that make their small merry music in every thicket, and of the black and white chats that shift their burden of song from stone to stone beside the path, and of the cuckoo that tells his name to us from far away, and of the splendid bee-eaters that glitter over us like a flock of winged emeralds as we climb the rocky hill toward the north. We are glad of the broom in golden flower, and of the pink and white ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... 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 ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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
... year's villages, and join excitedly in the chorus; while the great osprey wheels overhead, and the grey falcon sits on a bare branch, still as a sentinel, each waiting for an opportunity to take toll of the nutmeg pigeons. The channel-billed cuckoo shrieks her discordant warning of the approaching wet season; and the scrub fowl utters those far-off imitations of the exclamation of civilised hens. Sundown at Kumboola towards the end of September, when the sea laps and murmurs ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... last train," said Lady Belgrade, at length, as the little cuckoo clock on the mantel ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... to play its shepherd's song; the brass Cyclops standing on the dial struck the hour; the cuckoo called, and the halberdier saluted. Then the little maid changed her toilet. She had a whole wardrobe full of clothes; she might select what she chose to wear. There was no one to tell her what to put on, or to help her attire herself. When her toilet ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... to illustrate 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
... seen it at home—for England is ever home to those who are far away—seen it in the early spring days clustering thickly in the woods and copse, heralding the cuckoo, and bringing with it a promise of ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... 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 ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 three ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... plot of the most abject triviality is worked out in strict accordance with the rules of French tragedy, and in most pompous and pathetic Alexandrines. The effect of this piece was magical; the Royal Theatre ejected its cuckoo-brood of French plays, and even the Italian opera. It was now essential that every performance should be national, and in the Danish language. To supply the place of the opera, native musicians, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... eyes caught a glimpse of the old-fashioned cuckoo clock that hung on the wall in one corner of the room. He started to ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... the old landmarks again, and got back into the "feel" of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's way down country lanes—"The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost Corner" and "The Flower of the Fields"—and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Dear Fanny brought me the bag. Good soul you are to think of me! Manning has promised to make Fanny a visit this morning, happy girl! Miss James I often see, I think never without talking of you. Oh the dear long dreary Boulevards! how I do wish to be just now stepping out of a Cuckoo into them! ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Cuckoo spit: liquid in the form of bubbles produced by members of the family Cercopidae and which often conceals ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... present of 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... promoted a Cuckoo to the rank of a Nightingale. The Cuckoo, proud of its new position, seated itself proudly on an aspen, and began to exhibit its musical talents. After a time, it looks round. All the birds are flying away, some laughing at it, ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... cuckoo clock hanging in Tom Turner's cottage. When it struck one, Tom's wife laid the baby in the cradle, and took a saucepan off the fire, from which came a ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... love with Arethusa, daughter of Argus. The lady's father wanted her to marry Squire Cuckoo, who had a large estate; but Arethusa contrived to have her own way and marry Captain Rovewell, who turned out to be the son of Ned Worthy, who gave ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... their bardic clan, "is sweeter than any music of men." "The harp of the woods is playing music," said another. In Finn's Song to May, the waterfall is singing a welcome to the pool below, the loudness of music is around the hill, and in the green fields the stream is singing. The blackbird, the cuckoo, the heron and the lark are the musicians of the world. When Finn asks his men what music they thought the best, each says his say, but Oisin answers, "The music of the woods is sweetest to me, the sound of the wind and of the blackbird, and the cuckoo and the soft silence of the heron." ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... He's what we used at home to call a 'frog-hopper' after he got his wings, and a 'cuckoo-spit' before that time; but these ones are six times the ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... fault of the cuckoo, for he was a grumbling, mischief-making bird and used to spend a good deal of time talking to the daffodils. This particular spring he had taken up his abode in the oak tree, and was fond of talking of all the grand things he had ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... kitchen clock, which ticks loudly, shows the hours, minutes, and seconds, strikes, cries "cuckoo!" and perhaps shows the phases of the moon. When the clock is wound up, all the phenomena which it exhibits are potentially contained in its mechanism, and a clever clockmaker could predict all it will do after an ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... needed to destroy the legend of the cuckoo, incessantly repeated down to the days of Xavier Raspail, and to us so familiar; to elucidate its history, and to set it in its ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... for he did not know that anybody was near. But beside him stood an old woman, with a ragged mantle over her head, leaning on a staff, the top of which was carved into the shape of a cuckoo. She looked very aged and wrinkled and infirm; and yet her eyes, which were as brown as those of an ox, were so extremely large and beautiful that when they were fixed on Jason's eyes he could see nothing else but them. The old woman had a pomegranate in her hand, although the fruit was ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... birds 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 from his mate,'—but none responds. He apostrophises various insects, beasts and ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... of the word "Welsh," from the Saxon "Wealh," a stranger, and the use of it in this sense by our old writers (see Brady's Introd., p. 5.: Sir T. Smith's Commonwealth of England, chap. xiii.), sufficiently explain this designation of the Cuckoo, the temporary resident of our cold climate, and the ambassador extraordinary in the revolutions of the seasons, in the words of the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... prints of battles and shipwrecks wafered to the walls; a couple of flower-pots in the narrow space between the window-ledge and the coping outside; a dingy canary in a wire cage; a rival mechanical cuckoo in a Dutch clock in the corner; a little bed with striped hangings; a rush-bottomed prie-dieu chair in front of a plain black crucifix, over which drooped a faded branch of consecrated palm; and some few ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... grown: I share my kopecks with the village priest, Who winnows peccadillos by the sheaf." Then Zanthon, laughing in his foxy beard: "When Amine meets me in the plane-tree walk (Where pairing little finches seek to build, We saw the cuckoo thieve their nests when boys), Shall I then tell her, in my peasant way, Your broken promise, and her troth denied?" And he was gone—gone, with the stud he bought From Schamyl's son, up by Caucasus way, Leaving me solitude to reason with. Around me, then, an odor swept—the ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... nor pipe, nor organ, From touch of cunning men, Made music half so eloquent As our hearts thrilled with then. When the blythe lark lightly soaring, And the mavis on the spray, And the cuckoo in the greenwood, Sang hymns ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... the land, flowers were blooming, and the reign of sunshine had begun. The cuckoo haunted the Hall gardens, rabbits basked in the glades, and the woods were alive ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... 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 ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... you 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 ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... pair of sandpipers flicked out of a tiny cove and flew, glancing white, with pointed wings ahead of us. Again we started them, and again, till they wearied of the chase and flew back, with a wide circuit, to their first haunt. A cuckoo in a great poplar fluted solemnly and richly as we murmured past; the world was mostly hidden from us, but now and then a church tower looked gravely over the bank, and ran beside us for a time, or the lowing of cattle ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... gathered around the big table, and, grasping each other's hands, raised our glasses and drank together without speaking, for there was something—we knew not what—that lay behind Dutch Peter's little speech which made us think. Presently, when a big and gaudy German-made cuckoo clock in the room struck twelve, even reckless Charley de Buis forgot his old joke about Tom Denison's 'damned old squawking British duck,' as he called the little painted bird, and we all went outside, and sat smoking our pipes on the wide verandah, and watching the flashing torchlights ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... is good and strong from first to last. Le Fanu has never been so popular as, in my humble judgment, he deserves to be, but of course modern readers were better acquainted with him than with Godwin. Yet nine out of ten were always heard repeating this cuckoo cry about the latter's superiority, until the 'Iron Chest' came out, and Fashion induced them to read Godwin for themselves; which has very properly ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, houndstongue, cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles (once more), and thorn bushes. The cattle or the rabbits eat down at once all juicy and succulent plants, leaving only these nauseous or prickly kinds, together with such stringy and innutritious weeds as chervil, plantain, and burdock. Here ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... appetite, he had been attracted by the savoury smell of Abdullah's kitchen, and he had drawn nearer and nearer to our establishment, until at length by playing with the boys, and occasionally being invited to share in their meals, Cuckoo had ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... not bear to see even an instant's pause, and he came out of the shadow, and bade them, with harsh words, go on grinding, and cease not except for so long as the cuckoo was silent, or while he himself sang a song. Now it was early summer-time, and the cuckoo was calling all the day and most of ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... then a rapturous mystical ode to the Cuckoo; in which the author, striving after force and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... 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 hill ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... Carolina wren. Thryothorus ludovicianus. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Coccyzus americanus. Crested ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... up to 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 ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... about the simple round of her childish pursuits. Every morning she goes demurely to school to fix her thoughts on "button holes and spelling books." Perhaps it is a dame school like that in "Water Babies," with a "shining clean stone floor and curious old prints on the wall and a cuckoo clock in the corner," Here some dozen children sit on benches "gabbling Chris-cross," while a nice old woman in a red petticoat and white cap hears them from the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... said, "as 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 as happy and as carefree as she seemed ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... eagle. The didapper is reverenced because it foretells the approach of rain. Linnunrata (bird-path) is the name given to the Milky-way, due probably to a myth like those of the Swedes and Slavs, in which liberated songs take the form of snow-white dovelets. The cuckoo to this day is sacred, and is believed to have fertilized the earth with his songs. As to insects, honey-bees, called by the Finns, Mehilainen, are especially sacred, as in the mythologies of many other nations. Ukkon-koiva (Ukko's ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... of 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... Sometimes, on a lovely day in June, we were allowed to go down to our river, 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 ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... paddock was damp, yet still following after them, he added, "Yea, Sue, considering all, it is better those two were apart for a year or so, till we see better what is this strange nestling that we have reared. Ay, thou art like the mother sparrow that hath bred up a cuckoo and doteth on it, yet it mateth ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... underparts also scarlet. The others—which I assume to be the females—replace the black with ashy olive, the wings being barred with yellow, the underparts yellowish. The very familiar note of the cuckoo, somewhere up in the jungle, reminds ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... way 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 ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... had of late years been excused from it, and it gave her the opportunity she wanted of a consultation with Mr. Dutton. He was her prime adviser in everything, from her investments (such as they were) to the eccentricities of her timepieces; and as the cuckoo-clock had that night cuckooed all the hours round in succession, no one thought it wonderful that she should send a twisted note entreating him to call as early as he could in the afternoon. Of course ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who unwittingly rears the cuckoo's spurious offspring, tending with care the ultimate destroyer of its own young, does so in perfect ignorance of the results about to follow the misplaced affection. The cravings of the interloper are satisfied to the detriment of its own offspring; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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
... schoolfellows and I, to grace the festival to the best of our power (for fine white and purple liveries had been given to all of us in the morning), contrived a merry mask with store of cockle-shells, shells of snails, periwinkles, and such other. Then for want of cuckoo-pint, or priest-pintle, lousebur, clote, and paper, we made ourselves false faces with the leaves of an old Sextum that had been thrown by and lay there for anyone that would take it up, cutting out holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Now, did you ever hear the like ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Such was the reputation of Chaucer that a great many writings were attributed to him—a way to increase their reputation, not his. The more important of them are: "The Court of Love"; the "Book of Cupid," otherwise "Cuckoo and Nightingale"; "Flower and Leaf," the "Romaunt of the Rose," such as we have it; the "Complaint of a Lover's Life"; the "Testament of Love" (in prose, see below, page 522); the "Isle of Ladies," or "Chaucer's Dream"; various ballads. Most of those works (not the "Testament") ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 'smurring' rather than raining, all day long: and I think that Flower and Herb already show their gratitude. My Blackbird (I think it is the same I have tried to keep alive during the Winter) seems also to have 'wetted his Whistle,' and what they call the 'Cuckoo's mate,' with a rather harsh scissor note, announces that his Partner may be on the wing to these Latitudes. You will hear of him at Mr. W. Shakespeare's, it may be. There must be Violets, white and blue, somewhere about where he lies, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... 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 in harmony ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... THE cuckoo and the coo-dove's ceaseless calling, Calling, Of a meaningless monotony is palling All my morning's pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered wood. May-blossom and blue bird's-eye flowers falling, Falling In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling Messages of true-love down the dust of the ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... 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 Speusippus seized upon a real problem of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... pretensions, that the proposed 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 ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... 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 ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... Through the wood the cuckoo was calling—the bird which reverses the law of good children, and insists on being ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... 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 ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... probably had its limits, and in such scenes, being 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 ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... there, Had left his footsteps, and reform'd the year: The sunny hills from far were seen to glow With glittering beams, and in the meads below The burnish'd brooks appear'd with liquid gold to flow. At last they heard the foolish Cuckoo sing, Whose note proclaim'd the holiday ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of gold and green Rainbow sheen Mesh the maze of flower and fern, Cuckoo-grass and meadow-sweet, And the wheat Where the crimson ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... accusing him frequently to the Achaeans, he was rejected, and fell into contempt, people now seeing that it was a contest between a counterfeit and a true, unadulterated virtue, and, as Aesop tells us that the cuckoo once, asking the little birds why they flew away from her, was answered, because they feared she would one day prove a hawk, so Lydiades's former tyranny still cast a doubt upon the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... song of some birds: the intervals employed by these are generally the same as those on which human melody is founded, the 8th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd major. Reinach, however, observes that Beethoven, who in his Pastoral Symphony has reproduced the song of the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the quail, makes their melodies to differ from those ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... Wren family, must always strike naturalists as an absurdity; and, I suppose, we may not ask how it was the banns were not forbidden, since the Messrs. Wren, with the children, and the whole creation of birds—with the single exception of a blackguard cuckoo—have jubilantly acquiesced ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... of wild flowers for May to take home to mamma. Here are a few cowslips with their drooping golden bells and delicious scent; I am afraid we shall not find enough to make a cowslip ball. Here is cuckoo-flower, which, as old Gerarde says, "doth flower in April and Maie, when the cuckoo doth begin her pleasant notes without stammering." Old Gerarde, by the way, ought to have said "his pleasant notes," for it is the male bird alone that cries "cuckoo." Its ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... sought to taunt me with his happier lot. Oh, how I envied him! No lessons, no tasks, no hateful 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: ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... moss-grown boulder sitting, Watching the graceful swallows flitting, Hearing the cuckoo's note. Sheep on the hills around me feeding, While in their piteous accents pleading, The lambkins' bleatings float. —Oh, dear! a fly gone ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock; now here I was, at last, right in the creature's home; so wherever I went that distressing "HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!" was always in my ears. For a nervous man, this was a fine state of things. Some sounds are hatefuler than others, but no sound ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... 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 ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to such an extent that evidence of its ruling force appears in every chapter of his life. He occasionally introduced a joke into his compositions. Thus, in the 'Pastoral Symphony,' we come across a trio between a nightingale, a quail, and a cuckoo. Again, in other works, such as the No. 8 Symphony, the bassoons are brought in unexpectedly, in such a manner as to produce a humorous effect. He never missed an opportunity of playing off a joke upon any of his friends, both in season and out of season, and he always showed ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... of flowers! I do not speak of those, the exquisite grace and beauty of whose names is so forced on us that we cannot miss it, such as 'Aaron's rod,' 'angel's eyes,' 'bloody warrior,' 'blue-bell, 'crown imperial,' 'cuckoo-flower,' blossoming as this orchis does when the cuckoo is first heard, [Footnote: In a catalogue of English Plant Names I count thirty in which 'cuckoo' formed a component part.] 'eye- bright,' 'forget-me-not,' ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... it for her. And others he sang, too—"The Merry Cuckoo" and "The Bailiff's Daughter". The last she liked so well that he sang it three times over, and ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the lark has sprung, Still trilling as he flies; The linnet sings as there he sung; The unseen cuckoo cries, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes, giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he does but ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Jasper; the cuckoo is a pleasant, funny bird, and its presence and voice give a great charm to the green trees and fields; no, I can't say I wish exactly to get rid of ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... which the road to Mellstock branched off from the homeward direction. By diverging to that village, as he had intended to do, Farfrae might probably delay his return by a couple of hours. It soon appeared that his intention was to do so still, the light swerving towards Cuckoo Lane, the by-road aforesaid. Farfrae's off gig-lamp flashed in Henchard's face. At the same time Farfrae discerned ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man:—then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... in the pause of the seconds between the frank, outspoken 'Good nights.' When all the signs of ripeness are visible—the love-shades and love-notes that cannot be hidden, the unconscious caress of the eyes in a fleeting glance, the involuntary softening of voices, the cuckoo-sob in the throat—why, the night-parting kiss does not need to be seen. It has to be. Still further, oh my woman, know that I justify ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners. The most innocent echo has an impish mockery ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... in some genera and wax in others, in a third division emit, when in the larval state, a great quantity of froth, in which they lie concealed, as in the common "cuckoo-spit" of our meadows. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... coloring can exceed that which is presented in the 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 the Montanas to his entrance into the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... 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 ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... 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
... own eggs, nor provide an artificial incubator; but go quietly and drop an egg into the nest of another bird, and allow this bird to act as a nurse, hatching the egg and finding food for the young bird. The most notable example of this habit among birds is the case of the European cuckoo. This bird never builds a nest, or shows the least love or even recognition of its young. The cuckoo always selects the nest of a bird much smaller than itself, and as its eggs are much smaller than those usually laid by a bird of its size, they are no larger than those which properly ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... made her descend. She 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 the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... was to be away, as he had told 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, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... ache and seems to dry my soul up. I can't help thinking 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
... sets out with three nines, and a wood-cuckoo (hawk), and a hound of tie with them, until he goes to the territory of the Ulstermen, so that he meets with Conall Cernach (Conall the Victorious) at Benna Bairchi (a mountain on the ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... sparrow surrounds her nest with thorns as a defence against apes and serpents. The eggs of the cuckoo, as regards size, colour, and marking, invariably resemble those of the birds in whose nests she lays. Sylvia ruja, for example, lays a white egg with violet spots; Sylvia hippolais, a red one with black spots; Regulus ignicapellus, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... graceful and pretty in melody as it is arch in sentiment. With the dialogue which follows, a variation of the closing cadence of the song is sweetly blended by the orchestra. Hansel crowns Gretel Queen of the Woods with the floral wreath, and is doing mock reverence to her when a cuckoo calls from a distance. The children mimic the cry, then playfully twit the bird with allusions to its bad practice of eating the eggs of other birds and neglecting its own offspring. Then they play at cuckoo, eating ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Marius readily. He shook himself with a quick breath. "And the task will be no easy one, father mine. I do not feel myself at all a cuckoo stealing into a nest ready feathered. What I get I shall pay for, in degree, if not in kind. There will be three men's work in handling ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... it was, with a shiny clean stone floor, and curious old prints on the walls, and an old black oak sideboard full of bright pewter and brass dishes, and a cuckoo clock in the corner, which began shouting as soon as Tom appeared; not that it was frightened at Tom, but that it was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... 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 ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... of rapture fell upon us both as we went down that winding road. The call of the cuckoo resounded from side to side, clear and sonorous like a bell, it echoed and re-echoed across our path under the luminous dome of the tranquil sky and over the hedges of flowering thorn, snow-white and ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... 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
... and fifteen Cigarettes in it (Melachrino and Mixed American); a cuckoo-clock (without cuckoo); five walking-sticks; numerous suits of clothes (one lot suitable for Charitable Purposes); some books—all VERY CURIOUS indeed—comprising the works of an Eminent Cambridge Professor, and other scholastic ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... an arch in an 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
... A cuckoo was shot; this bird would seem to be as in Europe attended by the Yunx, at least a cry very similar to that of that bird was heard. Lysimachia of ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... yet once over again, That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated Should seem a "cuckoo-song," as thou dost treat it, Remember, never to the hill or plain, Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. Beloved, I, amid the darkness greeted By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt's pain Cry, "Speak ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... and the younger Blifil, and most of them bear signs of having been closely copied from living models. Parson Thwackum, with his Antinomian doctrines, his bigotry, and his pedagogic notions of justice; Square the philosopher, with his faith in human virtue (alas! poor Square), and his cuckoo-cry about "the unalterable Rule of Eight and the eternal Fitness of Things;" Partridge—the unapproachable Partridge,— with his superstition, his vanity, and his perpetual Infandum regina, but who, notwithstanding ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... sepulchres could be more awful: it had been depopulated by the plague—all was silent, and the streets were matted with thick grass. In passing through an open space, which reminded me of a market-place, I heard the cuckoo with an indescribable sensation of pleasure mingled with solemnity. The sudden presence of a raven at a bridal banquet could scarcely have been a ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... said his 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
... was sitting with a girl on his knee, and had just read to her these enchanting lines in which he speaks of hearing the cuckoo call. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... There was a cuckoo clock hanging in Tom Turner's cottage. When it struck one, Tom's wife laid the baby in the cradle, and took a saucepan off the fire, from which came a ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... say. Farewell. 110 Take heed; have open eye; for thieves do foot by night: Take heed, ere summer comes, or cuckoo-birds do sing. Away, Sir Corporal Nym!— Believe it, Page; he ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... it was a person he pursued. To him it was only the face of a little girl. He ran, it rustled to the right, it rustled to the left, it rustled in front, it rustled behind, he rustled, she rustled, and all these sounds and the running itself excited him, and he cried: "Where are you? Say cuckoo!" Nobody answered. When he heard his own voice, he felt just a little uneasy, but he continued running; then a thought came to him, only a single one, and he murmured as he kept on running: "What am ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... boys, as was also one of those noble-looking insects, the privet hawk moth, which was also captured, with gold-tails, tigers, etc, etc; and at last, regularly tired out, the lads walked quietly along by the side of Mr Inglis, listening to the mellow evening notes of the cuckoo, the distant lowing of the cows, and the occasional "tink, tink" of a sheep bell; while skimming along the surface of the fields, the never-tired swallows kept sweeping away the flies front out of their path. With the setting sun, however, the last swallow ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... that Palamon, in The Knight's Tale, breaks out of prison, and at early morn encounters in the forest Arcita, who has gone forth to pluck a garland in honour of May; it is on the third night of May that the poet hears the debate of "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale"; and again in the present passage ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... from the weedy 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 lightly ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... scraps of songs, 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 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, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him up about nine, and he staggered to his feet to get out, with his revolver stuck in his coat pocket. He was away over three hours and the girl and I sat there without saying a word, just looking at each other and waiting for a clock on the mantelpiece to chime the quarters. It was a cuckoo clock, and it had just chimed twelve when we heard a quick step coming upstairs to the flat. The girl fixed her big dark eyes inquiringly on me, and then we heard a hoarse whisper through the keyhole telling ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... fight against dirt and hunger, and repair the effects of friction on clothes. Thousands of labourers were in the fields, but the fields were so broad and numerous that this scattered multitude was totally lost therein. The cuckoo was much more perceptible than man, dominating whole square miles with his resounding call. And on the airy moors heath-larks played in the ineffaceable mule- tracks that had served centuries before even the Romans thought of Watling Street. In short, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... gently 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' ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... important facts which "Natural Selection" helps us to understand and co-ordinate. And not only are all these diverse facts strung together, as it were, by the theory in question; not only does it explain the development of the complex instincts of the beaver, the cuckoo, the bee, and the ant, as also the dazzling brilliancy of the humming-bird, the glowing tail and neck of the peacock, and the melody of the nightingale; the perfume of the rose and the violet, the brilliancy of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... exactly, Jasper; the cuckoo is a pleasant, funny bird, and its presence and voice give a great charm to the green trees and fields; no, I can't say I wish exactly to ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... that natural feeling of preference for one's own kin and country which the much larger minds of the present period flout, and scout as barbarous. Happily our periodical blight is expiring, like cuckoo-spit, in its own bubbles; and the time is returning when the bottle-blister will not be accepted as the good ripe peach. Scudamore was of the times that have been (and perhaps may be coming again, in the teeth ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... with all the most wonderful toys the ingenuity and mechanical skill of Europe had produced. As he grew older the toys became more complicated, being in the form of gramophones, graphophones, telephones, phonographs, electric lights, electric cars, cuckoo clocks, Swiss watches and indeed all the great inventions of modern times. The boy was t'ao ch'i, and the eunuchs say that if he were thwarted in any of his undertakings, or denied anything he very much desired, he would dash a Swiss watch, or anything ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... one loses esteem. Therefore in accomplishing the acts of such persons, one should, without doing them completely, always keep something unfinished. A king should do what is for his good, imitating a cuckoo, a boar, the mountains of Meru, an empty chamber, an actor, and a devoted friend.[421] The king should frequently, with heedful application, repair to the houses of his foes, and even if calamities befall them, ask them about their good. They that are idle never win affluence; nor ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... at the table, and fidgets with his whistle; he blows three vague notes; then imitates a cuckoo.] ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cuckoos have been heard in different parts of the country during the past week. It is felt in some quarters that it may be just one cuckoo ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... 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 show what they ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... personified as a gigantic eagle. The didapper is reverenced because it foretells the approach of rain. Linnunrata (bird-path) is the name given to the Milky-way, due probably to a myth like those of the Swedes and Slavs, in which liberated songs take the form of snow-white dovelets. The cuckoo to this day is sacred, and is believed to have fertilized the earth with his songs. As to insects, honey-bees, called by the Finns, Mehilainen, are especially sacred, as in the mythologies of many other nations. Ukkon-koiva (Ukko's dog) is the Finnish name for ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to refute, were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 clock. ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... 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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 piled up in fleecy masses on the ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... as the feathers of the raven; the cuckoo makes a loud welcome; the speckled salmon is leaping; as strong is the leaping ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... "Troopers must forage where the grain is grown: I share my kopecks with the village priest, Who winnows peccadillos by the sheaf." Then Zanthon, laughing in his foxy beard: "When Amine meets me in the plane-tree walk (Where pairing little finches seek to build, We saw the cuckoo thieve their nests when boys), Shall I then tell her, in my peasant way, Your broken promise, and her troth denied?" And he was gone—gone, with the stud he bought From Schamyl's son, up by Caucasus way, Leaving me solitude ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... king, lion, genius, horse, princess, buffalo, hero, mosquito, negro, volcano, junto, tyro, cuckoo, ally, attorney, fairy, lady, monkey, calf, elf, thief, wife, wolf, chief, dwarf, waif, child, goose, mouse, ox, woman, beau, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... full of birds. They chattered and bickered about the creepered house, shrill and sweet, like a hundred brooks running together down steep rocky places after snow. And, not like brooks, and strangely unlike birds, like, in fact, nothing in the world except a cuckoo clock, a cuckoo shouted foolishly in the lowest boughs of the great ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the Biscacha 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 ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... air, "That depends on the girl. If it were Kitty Walton or Gay or Roberta, they'd be simply bored to death up here. They're so used to constant entertainment. But if it were somebody like Betty, it would be different. Lone-Rock isn't any lonesomer than the Cuckoo's Nest was, and she loved that place. And this would be a good quiet spot where she could go on with her writing, so she wouldn't have to give up ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet, in the latter town. As we traversed the cool woods of Acton, with stout staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye, the thrushes, the phoebe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through the open country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all nature lay passive, to be viewed and travelled. Every rail, every farm-house, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... and mother 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 stood directly under the clock; this was the dearest piece of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... 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 ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... 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 were people everywhere—so many that Buster thought all the world must ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... 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 ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... 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 ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... of ten, out of pure pity, young Friedrich was rescued from the cuckoo's nest by an uncle who had a big family of his own and love without limit. There was a goodly brood left, so little Friedrich, slim, slender, yellow, pensive and ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... votary: I have vowed to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three yeasr. But, most esteemed greatness, will you hear the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo? It should have followed in the end of ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... beginning of June, and the cuckoo at this time of the summer scarcely ceased his cry for more than two or three hours during the night. The bird's note, so familiar to her ears from infancy, was now absolute torture to the poor girl. On the Friday following the Wednesday of Melbury's departure, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... tropics. But one species, the ruby-throated, is widely diffused, and is a summer visitor all over North America, even within the Arctic Circle, where, for a brief space of time, it revels in the ardent heat of the short-lived summer of the North. Like the cuckoo, she follows the summer wherever ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... first to hide. She disappeared, and presently from the depths of the greenery, which she alone knew, and where Serge could not possibly find her, she called, 'Cuckoo, cuckoo.' But this game of hide and seek did not put a stop to the onslaught upon the fruit trees. Breakfasting went on in all the nooks and corners where the two big children sought each other. Albine, while gliding ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... boy had; he knew the magic of sound, which spoke to his heart in a way that it speaks to but few; the sounds of the earth gave up their sweets to him; the musical fluting of owls, the liquid notes of the cuckoo, the thin pipe of dancing flies, the mournful creaking of the cider-press, the horn of the oxherd wound far off on the hill, the tinkling of sheep-bells—of all these he knew the notes; and not only these, but the rhythmical swing of the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as a thing of permanent mirth. So it was hardly surprising, in face of the dominant direction of her thoughts to-night, that, when the Miss Minetts' name punctuated Theresa's discourse recurrent as a cuckoo-cry, remembrance of their merrily inglorious retirement from the region of Faircloth's Inn should present itself. Whereupon Damaris' serious mood was lightened as by sudden sunshine, and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... 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 might have ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... the one, gas in the other; but if there were anything more poetic in horse or balloon, Wordsworth did not discover it. There is something also in a cuckoo ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... of Engineers continued quickly, "Maintenant il faut mettre le—" he paused for the word—"le—table-cloth." The children grasped his meaning from the comprehensive gesture. Rapidly he outlined chairs, a delightful baby's cradle, a clock with cuckoo complete, a fire-place, until at length a complete pictorial inventory had been made of the contents of the living-room of just such a cottage as had obviously been buried beneath the rubbish heap ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... for the sea. Her dainty fingers put the fur cap on pussy-willow, paint in pink the petals of arbutus, and sweep in soft strains her Orphean lyre. "The voice of the turtle is heard in our land." The snow-bird that tarried through [25] the storm, now chirps to the breeze; the cuckoo sounds her invisible lute, calling the feathered tribe back to their summer homes. Old robin, though stricken to the heart with winter's snow, prophesies of fair earth and sunny skies. The brooklet sings melting murmurs ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... faculties and forms of sensibility, our tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet. The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world, the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those whose size and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... for something: it painted well, sang divinely, furnished Iliads. But invisible butchery, under a pall of smoke a furlong thick, who is any the better for that? Poet with his note-book may repeat, "Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri;" but the sentiment is hollow and savours of cuckoo. You can't tueri anything but a horrid row. He didn't say, "Suave etiam ingentem caliginem tueri ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... 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. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... praise a baby, exclaims: "Oh, isn't he awfully cute!" To say that he is very nice would be too weak a way to express her admiration. When a handsome girl appears on the street an enthusiastic masculine admirer, to express his appreciation of her beauty, tells you: "She is a peach, a bird, a cuckoo," any of which accentuates his estimation of the young lady and is much more emphatic than saying: "She is a beautiful girl," "a handsome maiden," ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... loud as if they had complained, Some with their notes another manner feigned." CHAUCER: Pie Cuckoo and the Nightingale, modernised by ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 to blows, though neither side ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... hear. She had gone forward with a boy on either side of her, and Susan walking backwards in front, all telling the story of a cuckoo,—or gowk, as Sara called it in Purday's language,—which they had found in a water-wagtail's nest in a heap of stones; how it sat up, constantly gaping with its huge mouth, while the poor little foster-parents toiled to their utmost ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the other inside a withy-bed. She pulled the 'cat's-tails,' as she learned to call the horse-tails, to see the stem part at the joints; and when the mowing-grass began to grow long, picked the cuckoo-flowers and nibbled the stalk and leaflets to essay the cress-like taste. In the garden, which was full of old-fashioned shrubs and herbs, she watched the bees busy at the sweet-scented 'honey-plant,' and sometimes ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... 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 are said to be always ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... beoples in the island, they say she is a wechsel-balg—what you call a fairy-elf changeling. My faith, they do not never have seen ein wechsel-balg; for I saw one myself at Cologne, and it was twice as big as yonder girl, and did break the poor people, with eating them up, like de great big cuckoo in the sparrow's nest; but this Venella eat no more than other girls—it was no ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners. The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... are answering your prayer In cooing cuckoo-song, Bidding Shakuntala farewell, Their sister for ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... 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 on earth ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... yawned with the whole Midsummer holiday in his jaws. "Up on Grefsen ridge, cold punch had flowed down the hill as good as free. Veyergang's son had given the girls at the factory an old boat from Maridal Lake and half a barrel of pitch; heard the cuckoo and had larks all night—came down again when it was nearly ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... the time; the golden hands of his watch were indiscernible in the gloom. But presently, as he passed by, he pressed his face close to the cold glass of a little shop-window, and pierced that out by an old Swiss cuckoo-clock. He would if he hurried just be home ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... 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
... true 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 and oppressed as it was, and still to exert ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... perverse! Since when, I beg, Have forest birds been tethered by the leg? They're everywhere! What more can you desire? The cuckoo shouts as though he'd never tire, The nuthatch, knowing that of noise you're fond, Keeps chucking stones along a frozen pond, And busy gold-crest, somewhere out of sight, Works at his saw with all his tiny might. I do not count the ring-doves or the rooks, ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... 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
... Joan by reason of its comfort and its peace. From here, sitting on a granite bowlder clothed in soft green mosses and having a shape into which human limbs might fit easily, the girl could see much that was fair. The meadows were all sprinkled with the silver-mauve of cuckoo-flowers—Shakespeare's "lady's smock"; the hills sloped upward under oaken saplings as yet too young for the stripping; the valley stretched winding landward beneath Sancreed. Above and far away stretched the Cornish moors dotted with man's mining enterprises, chiefly deserted. ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... depression, and to his quick and intimate response to the wild life round him, we owe those clear impressions that connect certain scenes and phases of our life with his more familiar utterances. To hear the cuckoo and the nightingale to-day in the woods round Shottery and Wilmcote is to recall some of the poet's most inspired moods. But it is not the familiar birds alone that caught the poet's eye and stimulated his imagination. ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Killing-worth" (Tales of a Wayside Inn) sings 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
... pleasure; But he ever has longing who is lured by the sea. The forests are in flower and fair are the hamlets; The woods are in bloom, the world is astir: 50 Everything urges one eager to travel, Sends the seeker of seas afar To try his fortune on the terrible foam. The cuckoo warns in its woeful call; The summer-ward sings, sorrow foretelling, 55 Heavy to the heart. Hard is it to know For the man of pleasure, what many with patience Endure who dare the dangers of exile! In my bursting ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... 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 hoe the sword ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... insects occasion perplexity, for they awaken from their winter torpor active and hungry, and have a ready appetite for almost any cruciferous plant. Hence we see the leaves of Radishes pierced by them, and all such weeds as Charlock, Cuckoo Flower, Hedge Garlic, and Water Cress serve them for food until the Turnip crops are on the move, when they will travel miles, even against the wind, to wreck the farmer's hopes. The Cabbage Flea (Haltica oleracea) in some districts is equally troublesome, if ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... last jingle 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, made his appearance. But at this time, either because ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... 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.— ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... And envy's dart, assault a H——r's name. Senior, self-called, can I forget the day, When titt'ring under-graduates mock'd thy sway, And drove thee foaming from the Hall away? Gods, with what raps the conscious tables rung, From every form how shrill the cuckoo sung![36] Oh! sounds unblest—Oh! notes of deadliest fear— Harsh to the tutor's or the lover's ear, The hint, perchance, thy warmest hopes may quell, And cuckoo mingle with the thoughts of Bel."[37] At that loved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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 shy, though noisy enough in accustomed and quiet haunts. The ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... much even for his comprehension. Besides the parrots and scarlet and yellow macaws, and other strange-looking birds which we have elsewhere mentioned, there were long-tailed light-coloured cuckoos flying about from tree to tree, not calling like the cuckoo of Europe at all, but giving forth a sound like the creaking of a rusty hinge; there were hawks and buzzards of many different kinds, and red-breasted orioles in the bushes, and black vultures flying overhead, and Muscovy ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Apple-seed and briar-thorn, Wire, briar, limber-lock, Three geese in one flock; One flew east and one flew west And one flew over the cuckoo's nest." ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... wings painted in pearl-blue, steel, and burnished silver. At other times some lovely kingfisher, with elongated tail, settled almost within reach. Then it would be a green barbet, with bristle-armed beak and bright blue and scarlet feathers to make it gay. Or again, one of the cuckoo trogons, sitting on some twig, like a ball of feathers of bronze, ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... as she turned to go her hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, "Cuckoo," in a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that "Cuckoo!" a cold perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared and then I realized that it ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... the sleepy old town of Calcombe Pomeroy were decking themselves in the first wan green of their early spring foliage. The ragged robins were hanging out, pinky red, from the hedgerows; the cuckoo was calling from the copse beside the mill stream; and the merry wee hedge-warblers were singing lustily from the topmost sprays of hawthorn, with their full throats bursting tremulously in the broad sunshine. And Ernest Le Breton, too, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... home, occupied with 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 ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the spider weaves his web in the darkened corner. The essay, as a ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say 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 or not, though the main fault was his, and she had a right ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bird I seldom hear till June, and that is the cuckoo. Sometimes the last days of May bring him, but oftener it is June before I hear his note. The cuckoo is the true recluse among our birds. I doubt if there is any joy in his soul. "Rain-crow," he is called in some parts of the country. His call is supposed to bode rain. Why do other ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... "'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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... spring visitor to the woods of England,—the cuckoo,—is undoubtedly destitute of family affection, as are others of its relatives; but this is not the case with the whole tribe. As the spring advances, from the sylvan glades of Pennsylvania a curious note, constantly repeated, is ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Americans interested in birds and books, I know a good deal about English birds as they appear in books. I know the lark of Shakespeare and Shelley and the Ettrick Shepherd; I know the nightingale of Milton and Keats; I know Wordsworth's cuckoo; I know mavis and merle singing in the merry green wood of the old ballads; I know Jenny Wren and Cock Robin of the nursery books. Therefore I had always much desired to hear the birds in real life; and the opportunity ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... imitate the cuckoo by causing his own friends or subjects to be maintained by others; he should imitate the boar by tearing up his foes by their very roots; he should imitate the mountains of Meru by presenting such a front that nobody may transgress him he should imitate an empty chamber by ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... 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 ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 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 be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... (Formicariidae), the tyrant-shrikes (Tyrannidae), the American creepers (Dendrocolaptidae), 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
... 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 ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... 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
... you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo's calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... serrated foliage, with clusters of grey-green flower buds already 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 yards distant ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... from 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
... the sun. The flowers were sprinkled all over the grass, and the bees kicked up their yellow legs as they tilted into them. The garlic stuck up stout spikes into the air, and the young radishes were green and lusty. The brown bird in the tree sang, "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" and Peter trudged contentedly along, kicking up little clouds of dust at every footstep, whistling merrily and staring up into the bright sky, where the white clouds hung like little sheep, feeding on the ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... not 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 ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... noticed the room into which they passed; a room whose scheme of colour was that watery green which we associate with the scenery of early spring, the call of the cuckoo, and the river echoes where the weir foams and the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... sometimes blooms in Britain in February, but the swallow does not appear till about the 20th of April, nor the anemone bloom ordinarily till that date. The nightingale comes about the same time, and the cuckoo follows close. Our cuckoo does not come till near June; but the water-thrush, which Audubon thought nearly equal to the nightingale as a songster (though it certainly is not), I have known to come by the 21st. I have seen the sweet English ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... 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 have lost ...
— Last Poems • A. E. Housman
... 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 ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of mohair—the poor sneaking citizens of London, who would see a man of valour eat his very hilts for hunger, ere they would draw a farthing from their long purses to relieve them. O, if a band of the honest fellows I have seen were once to come near that cuckoo's ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... of the cuckoo, Soft little globes of bosom-shaped sound, Came and went at the window; And, out in the great green world, Those maidens each morn the flowers Opened their white little bodices wide to the sun: And the man sighed—sighed—in his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... you," said the robin. "You know there is a bird called the cowbird or cuckoo, and that bird is too lazy to build a nest for itself. So what do ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... "the cuckoo." But only one Indian knew how the cuckoo came to be, and why it is too lazy to build ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... them were from the Canterbury Tales, but his version of one of these—'The Manciple's Tale'—has never been printed. Of the three poems which were published, the first—'The Prioress' Tale'—was included in the edition of 1820. The 'Troilus and Cressida' and 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale' were included in the "Poems of Early and Late Years" (1842); but they had been published the year before, in a small volume entitled 'The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernised' (London, 1841), a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... have suggested various names, and among some of the best-known ones may be mentioned the goose-foot, goose-grass, goose-tongue. Shakespeare speaks of cuckoo-buds, and there is cuckoo's-head, cuckoo-flower, and cuckoo-fruit, besides the stork's-bill and crane's-bill. Bees are not without their contingent of names; a popular name of the Delphinium grandiflorum being the bee-larkspur, "from the resemblance of the petals, which ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... displeasure from them. When the messengers arrived at Gotham, they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn, to shade the wood from the sun; and others were engaged in hedging a cuckoo, which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all employed upon some foolish way or other, which convinced the king's servants that it was a ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... it,' answered the city swallow, 'because, one day, when I was passing through the palace garden, I met a cuckoo, who, as I need not tell you, always pretends to be able to see into the future. We began to talk about certain things which were happening in the palace, and of the events of past years. "Ah," said ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... Schoenhausen summer, as the cry of war is also dying. It is really going to be summer again, and on a very long walk, from which I am returning home dead tired, I took much pleasure in the small green leaves of the hazel and white beech, and heard the cuckoo, who told me that we shall live together for eleven years more; let us hope longer still. My hunt was extraordinary; charming wild pine-woods on the ride out, sky-high, as in the Erzgebirge; then, on the other side, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the Indian cuckoo. It is sometimes called Para-bhrita ('nourished by another'). because the female is known to leave her eggs in the nest of the crow to be hatched. The bird is as great a favourite with Indian poets ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... in your papa's stubble-fields, Bevis, all flying together very happy. I think the skylarks 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 ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... had little need of her services;[12] 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 fruitful in all ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all that evidence which makes one proud to share with one's fellows the divine gift of reason, instead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. No wonder the cuckoo has a merry note! ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... separate the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,— such as belongs to weather predictions in general,—would be prophesying "more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three night-hawks ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... in, Loud sing cuckoo, Groweth seed and bloometh mead, And springeth the wood now. Sing ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... 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 ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... ran through every one. The children turned towards the darkening room. The gloomy cupboard was a blotch of shadow. The table frowned. The bookshelves listened. The white face of the cuckoo clock peered down upon them dimly from the opposite wall, and the chairs, it seemed, moved up a little closer. But through the windows the stars were beginning to peep, and they saw the crests of the friendly cedars waving against ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... might have made but little difference, but each succeeding year of war has brought indelible changes. Gone forever, I fear, are the evenings when after dinner at the Cuckoo, we would stand on the balcony and watch the gradual fairy-like illumination of the panorama that stretched out before us. The little restaurant has closed its doors, but the vision from the terrace is perhaps ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... convert Mary, and often exhorted her to penitence; she bore this pretty well for some time, being overawed by old reminiscences of sisterly superiority: but at last her vanity rebelled. "Repent! and Repent!" cried she. "Why you be like a cuckoo, all in one song. One would think I had been and robbed a church. 'Tis all very well for you to repent, as led a fastish life at starting: but I never done nothing as ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... duet of little cuckoo clocks, both in unison, both in time, both with that fascinating touch of the nasal Parisienne voice. Sally was ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
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