"Twittering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking over the scene. Not a soldier stirred in his plaid; the army was drugged by the heavy fir-winds from the forest behind. The light of the morning flowed up wider and whiter from the Cowal hills, the birds woke to a rain of twittering prayer among the bushes ere ever a man stirred more than from side to side to change his dream. It was the most melancholy hour I ever experienced, and I have seen fields in the wan morning before many a throng and bloody day. I felt "fey," as we say at home—a premonition that here was ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... affectations, has little prettinesses which charm like the chirping of a bird;—as where he paints (in the very first scene of the "Pastor Fido") the little sparrow flitting from fir to beech, and from beech to myrtle, and twittering, "How I love! how I love!" And the bird-mate ("il suo dolce desio") twitters in reply, "How I love, how I love, too!" "Ardo ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the open French windows and looked out on the garden, still golden with evening light. Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow Gladstone bag on top ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... in the east gable chamber; outside it was only twilight—a lovely yellowish-green twilight with a clear-blue cloudless sky. A big round moon, slowly deepening from her pallid luster into burnished silver, hung over the Haunted Wood; the air was full of sweet summer sounds—sleepy birds twittering, freakish breezes, faraway voices and laughter. But in Anne's room the blind was drawn and the lamp lighted, for an important toilet was ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... skate on the frozen river, or at evening's cozy fireside before the blazing logs, all rejoice in simple pleasures, and prayer closes the day. Dear country home, where every sound is ministry; the morning cock and cackling hen, the birds' hopeful morning song, the twittering swallow, noon's rest and healthy appetite, the lowing cattle, the birds' thankful evening note, the village bell—old curfew's echo, the pattering on the pane, the wind in the treetops, the watchdog's distant bark for lullaby, and quiet restful sleep; his ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... the starlings and sparrows sang of Christmas pies; the jackdaws woke up in the Cathedral tower; and although it was the middle of the night the throstles and robins sang; and air was quite full of little twittering tunes. ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... cold that my heart was sore. I had now an idea of my own why the reeds so bitterly shivered. I could have given any of them a lesson. The Cigarette remarked facetiously that he thought I was "taking exercise" as I drew near, until he made out for certain that I was only twittering with cold. I had a rub down with a towel, and donned a dry suit from the india-rubber bag. But I was not my own man again for the rest of the voyage. I had a queasy sense that I wore my last dry clothes upon my body. The struggle had tired ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evening in the early spring, after the sun had dipped below the line of the high hedge-row, though it was still shining in level rays through it. No sound had disturbed the deep silence for a long time, except the twittering of birds among the branches; for up here even the sea could not be heard when it was calm. I suppose my face was sad, as most human faces are apt to be when the spirit is busy in its citadel, and has left ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... birds of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures, the storks and cranes, or the clamorous sea-birds and the screaming hawks. These suited better the rugged, warlike character of the times and the simple, powerful souls of the singers themselves. Homer must have heard the twittering of the swallows, the cry of the plover, the voice of the turtle, and the warble of the nightingale; but they were not adequate symbols to express what he felt or to adorn his theme. Aeschylus saw in the eagle "the dog of Jove," and his verse cuts like ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... in the day Major Monkey began to notice that a good many of his neighbors looked at him very coldly. The birds, especially, glared at him as if they were actually angry. And wherever he went they set up a loud twittering. Some of them even flew at his head and tried to peck ...
— The Tale of Major Monkey • Arthur Scott Bailey
... musical description of things which the composer is not willing to confess, and least of all the stage manager, for when the curtain opens there is not presented even the picture called for by the German libretto. Nevertheless, morn is dawning, birds are twittering, and the young lover, kneeling before his mistress on a divan, is bemoaning the fact that day is come and that he cannot publish his happiness to the world. The tete-a-tete is interrupted by a rude boor of a nobleman, who come to consult his cousin (the princess) about a messenger ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the birds when they say their prayers speak the common language, but when they chat together in private they use a twittering ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... climbers, instinctively finds the pendulous tips of slender elm boughs the best place for his nest, yet often in apple-blossom time he becomes so enamored of them that the white snow of their falling petals leaves him building on the twigs from which they scatter. In July the incessant, cry-baby twittering of the young orioles is thus as common a sound of the orchard and pasture as it is of the elm-shaded street. Other apple tree nest-hangers are the vireos, yellow throated, red-eyed and white-eyed, all of whom love to build on the low-swinging ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... orderly churches, but few interrupting sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous "thirteenthly" and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... 1681, the souls of the martyrs, as the 'Old Believers' affirm, appeared in the air as pigeons. In Volhynia dead children are supposed to come back in the spring to their native village under the semblance of swallows and other small birds, and to seek by soft twittering or song to console their sorrowing parents." Ralston, Songs of ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... from a letter to Lady Beaumont, about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even my par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings, all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best, languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... fellow, and visits any part of the room, trying each fresh thing with his bill to see if it is good to eat, and then perching on it to see if it good to sit upon. He mistakes his own reflection in the looking- glass for another canary, and sits on the pin-cushion twittering and making love to himself for half an hour at a time. To watch him is one of my greatest amusements, especially just now when I am in bed so much. Sometimes he hides and keeps so still that I have not the least idea where he is. but the moment I call, 'Ben, Ben,' and hold out my ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... for study was small. His teachers shook their heads. Their considerable experience of the world had never yet offered them a being so constituted. He listened more eagerly to the lowing of a herd of cows and to the twittering of the sparrows than to the best founded principles of grammatical science. Some of them thought him dull, others malicious. He passed from class to class with difficulty and solely by virtue of a marvellous faculty ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... And in a few minutes she opened her soft, dark eyes, and smiled at her vacant hands. Then she glanced at the windows; the curtains were beginning to stir, the gulf breeze had sprung up, the birds were twittering, and the house awakening. ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... the Toquaht shore. At length they reached the beach, and hiding their canoe beneath a giant spruce, they followed where a little trail beckoned them on and up the mountain side. For hours they climbed, wending their way through lonely, silent woods, the twittering wren the only life they saw or heard. At times they lost the trail, as it was overgrown with fern and berry bush. But once the leading klootsmah stopped and signed to her companions to keep still. Halting, they waited while she pointed to ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... directly on his trail. These pursuers had suddenly become silent. Nevertheless, from time to time, rustling sounds struck the ear of Tyope, and proved that the pursuit was carried on unrelentingly. He noticed a suspicious twittering and cracking, not behind him, but at one ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... business perplexities to his fireside. His little wife knew as little of business matters as the sparrows twittering on the branches of the trees out ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... Birds were twittering in the vines of the pergola not far away; honeysuckles were pouring forth their fragrant morning oblations; and the salt sea-breeze wafted her its invigorating breath as the early tide, with slow, increasing motion, brimmed the channels that wound through the marshes on the borders of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... noticed some new species at every turn. There were strange plants too, growing in the fields and garden, and vines trained upon espaliers, and corn-cribs filled with yellow corn, and dove-cotes, and martin-boxes, with swallows twittering around them. All formed a curious but ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... lost my grip: Life got me by the scruff of the neck, and held My proud nose to the grindstone. My turn, now— I'll be upsides with life, and teach it manners, Before death gets the stranglehold: I'll have The last laugh, though it choke me. And what's death, To set us twittering? I'll be no frightened squirrel: Scarting and scolding never yet scared death: When he's a mind to crack me like a nut, I'd be no husk: still ripe and milky, I'd have him Swallow the kernel, and spit ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... and it floods a thousand acres of the blue sky with it several times a day. Out of that palpitating speck of living joy there wells forth a sea of twittering ecstasy upon the morning and evening air. It does not ascend by gyrations, like the eagle and birds of prey. It mounts up ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... breakfast in her own room. It was ten o'clock, and a glorious September morning, and the sparrows were twittering on the terrace outside as though they considered it highly improper for any one to have breakfast between four walls when Nature had provided such a ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... water seemed to possess a new beauty in the early morning sunlight, and the white Casino, of which the minarets were reflected in its blue depths, might have been a dream palace. Nothing broke the intense stillness but the loud, sweet twittering of the birds in the trees which ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of the infant the better. Magnus was holding Rowena's hand, and the elder was standing on the other side of the bed holding a book. Grandma Thorndyke stood at the bed's foot looking severely at a Hostetter's Almanac I had hanging on the head-board. The widow was twittering around from place to place. When I came in, Magnus motioned me to stand beside him, and as I took my place handed me a gold ring. Rowena looked up at me piteously, as if to ask forgiveness. Sometime during the ceremony we had ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... times, the stillness of the scene was now unbroken, save by the twittering of some belated swallow, the chirp of the cricket, or the evening hymn of the forest songsters, ere they sank to grateful rest. All was peace without, but troubled and anxious was the heart of the solitary occupant of that apartment, who, ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... green, the flowers are all in bloom, Spring is here. The faint gray streaks of the dawn are in the sky and soon the whole East is suffused with a roseate flush. There is a hush of expectancy in the air, the breeze is soft, the birds are twittering drowsily in the tree-tops, and then in a flood of golden splendor "the morning sun comes peeping over the hills." Instantly all nature is alive, the birds pour forth their sweet melodies, the drowsy hum of the bees floats lazily on the air; there is a pleasant rustling among ...
— Silver Links • Various
... Beautiful to look at, but fatal, they tell me, is this reflected tint. The shade of the alders and the velvet pile of the mosses induce a fit of idleness; it is only the flycatchers, in great numbers, that are busy in the heat and glare, twittering as they hawk for insects, in notes that suggest robin redbreast on a winter day. By and by the clouds obscure the sun and we tackle our pools, with the result, for myself, of sea trout of 7 1/2 lb. and ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... the sun was shining, and the birds were twittering to each other of early spring, Harry Kendal asked the pale, sweet girl who knelt beside his ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... my son, lest my soul should be tied to the beauties of the visible world, but now when I see the twittering bills of the feathered songsters, I remember that one sense has departed, and that the others must follow; and I prepare myself for death, trusting that those who have rejoiced in the Divine Mind—however imperfectly—here, may rejoice yet more hereafter, when ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... plans, and after a brief conversation left the cottage. He heard Mrs. Carrington's birds twittering in the cold January sunshine, and a passing glimpse through the open doorway of the drawing-room revealed to him the exquisite neatness and purity of the apartment, which even at this season was adorned with a ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Campanile—ancient buildings, of a sombre brown, embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking creatures carved in marble and red stone—are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose. Their silent presence was only invaded, when I saw them, by the twittering of the many birds that were flying in and out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in the architecture, where they had made their nests. They were busy, rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into the sunny air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers within, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... upon these preliminary histrionics, women-journalists taking notes of the frocks worn by the eminent actresses and no less eminent wives of Cabinet Ministers ... a buzz of voices, a fluttering of fans, the twittering and hissing of whispered scandal, the cold venom that creeps in the veins of the society of the mummers.... There were magnificence and luxury, but beneath it all was the deadly stillness of which Charles had complained that night on St ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... strung it as easily as a skilled bard strings a new peg of his lyre and makes the twisted gut fast at both ends. Then he took it in his right hand to prove the string, and it sang sweetly under his touch like the twittering of a swallow. The suitors were dismayed, and turned colour as they heard it; at that moment, moreover, Jove thundered loudly as a sign, and the heart of Ulysses rejoiced as he heard the omen that the son of scheming Saturn had ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... galleries. The overture had begun, but people were still coming in. Late arrivals were obliging whole rows of spectators to rise; the doors of boxes were banging; loud voices were heard disputing in the passages. And there was no cessation of the sound of many conversations, a sound similar to the loud twittering of talkative sparrows at close of day. All was in confusion; the house was a medley of heads and arms which moved to and fro, their owners seating themselves or trying to make themselves comfortable or, on the other hand, excitedly endeavoring to remain standing so ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... the gathering dusk pictures which the artist's mind cherishes—the long roadway, with the maples and pines, the stump fences; behind which lay the garnered fields, where the plough had made ready the way for the Fall wheat; the robins twittering in the scattered trees; the cooing of the wood-pigeon; over all, the sky in its perfect purpling blue, and far down the horizon the evening-star slowly climbing. He noted the lizards slipping through the stones; he saw where the wheel of a wagon had crushed some wild flower-growth; he heard ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his teeth were chattering by the time he had regained the camp-fire. Of the entire party, Laure alone had no comment to make upon the accident. She stood motionless, leaning for support against a tent-pole, her face hidden in her hands. Best's song-birds were noisily twittering about Pierce; Best himself was congratulating the young man upon his ability to swim, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... was she felt, rather than saw, the glow of his deep blue eyes. She could not mistake the tenderness of his tone. She had so believed in him. He seemed so far above the callow, vapid, empty-headed youngsters the other girls were twittering about from morn till night. She felt that she believed in him now, no matter what had been said or who had said it. She felt that if he would but say it was all a mistake—that no woman had crossed his ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... this unusual hour so that the bridal couples could take the regular stage leaving Georgetown for Baltimore at five o'clock. At least it was a cool time of day for the celebration, and how beautiful it must have been with the dew lying on the box and the roses, and the birds twittering their sunrise notes. What a jolly time these four couples must have had, starting off together. Let us hope their spirits were not too much dampened by the fact that their father would not witness the ceremony, as it was at variance with his religious scruples that it was not conducted in ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... little song of the coming and the triumph of the spring. The words were all forgotten long ago. They were not much: enough to serve the turn, no more; but the notes to which they went were like barn swallows twittering under the eaves, goldfinches clinking in purple weeds beside old roads, and robins singing in common gardens at dawn. And wherever Nick's voice ran Colley's followed, the pipes laughing after them a note or two below; while the flutes kept gurgling softly to themselves as a ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... nothing unusual to her to see the pretty creatures playing about the branches, or entering the long vertical tunnels that led upward to their nests—nothing unusual for Truey to listen for hours to their sweet twittering, or watch their love-gambols around ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down from that three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the south, but when I loaded up and ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... time to snatch her pretty red slippers, and as soon as she was out of sight of the house she put them on. It made her feel less miserable. The sun was now rising and when its rays shone on her she began to sing. With her old friends, the birds, twittering all about her, ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... more than four hundred years old, but seems scarcely affected by the wearing of the centuries. The whole of the ponderous and complicated upper structure is sustained upon an open-work of round, plain pillars and cross-beams; the vast eaves are full of bird-nests; and the storm of twittering from the roofs is like a rushing of water. Immense the work is, and imposing in its aspect of settled power; but, in its way, it has great severity: there are no carvings, no gargoyles, no dragons; ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... old red-walled garden for tea, with some novel under my arm, the cathedral bell ringing for Evensong just over the wall across the Green, then slowly dropping to its close, then the faint murmur of the organ. Some bird twittering in a tree overhead, buttered toast in a neat pile placed carefully over hot water to keep it warm; honey, heavy home-made cake, perhaps the local weekly paper with the "Do you know that ..." column demanding one's critical attention. ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... FIFTH DAY of Creation that the silence was broken by the voice of birds. We are so accustomed to the various cries of animals, the buzzing of insects, and above all to the chirping and twittering and singing of birds, that we can hardly imagine what a voiceless world would ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... still caressing Tartar, who slobbered with exceeding affection. A faint twittering commenced among the trees round. Something fluttered down as light as leaves. They were little birds, which, lighting on the sward at shy distance, hopped ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... same moment, in another part of the old house, Tim found his sleep disturbed in a similar fashion; a shrill twittering beneath the eaves mingled with his dreams. He shook a toe and wrinkled up his nose. He woke. His bedroom, being on the top floor, was lighter than those below; there were no trees to cast shadows or obstruct ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... and was glad, for the birds sang sweetly, and it seemed to him as if everything sported and danced out of mere joy to be alive. Here flew two finches through the thicket, and, twittering, pursued each other; there, the young buds burst asunder, and the tender leaves peeped out and expanded themselves in the warm sun, as if they would abide in his glance for ever; here, a dewdrop trembled, sparkling and twinkling on a blade of grass, ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... bright purple tints of the dogwood, blended with the browner shades of the dwarf birch, and frequently intermixed with the gay yellow flowers of the shrubby cinquefoil. With all these charms, the scene appeared desolate from the want of the human species. The stillness was so great, that even the twittering of the whiskey-johneesh, or cinereous crow, caused us to start. Our voyage to-day was sixteen miles on a ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... now, when I've just begun really to care for him!" She opened the door and stepped out on the veranda, and he followed her. "See—it's almost morning!" The east was gray and there was a drowsy twittering of birds. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... that they would leave before daylight, without discovering me; but just as the sparrows on the roof were twittering a greeting to the dawn, as ill luck would have it, one of the men spied my coat, spread on staddles against the wall to dry. He uttered a sharp exclamation, and called to his comrades. I heard them come in my direction, and guessed by their silence that they were looking ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thought Of life and death, and doom, life's equal fee,— These were before me: and I gazed abashed, Child of an age that lectures, not creates, Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, 300 And twittering round the work of larger men, As we had builded what we but deface. Far up the great bells wallowed in delight, Tossing their clangors o'er the heedless town, To call the worshippers who never came, Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a twittering of birds, And now they burst in song. How sweet, although it wants the words! It shall not want them long, For I will set some to the note Which ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... And so we would now—I was going to say—but that poor Jim lies under a forest oak on a sandhill, and I—well, I'm here, and if I'd listened to her advice I should have been a free man. A free man! How it sounds, doesn't it? with the sun shining, and the blue sky over your head, and the birds twittering, and the grass beneath your feet! I wonder if I shall go ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... and yellow, gold and pale green; and all of these were crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny chests and the big-eyed faces of the bug things. Weaver swung in his revolving seat past first one level and another, and the twittering voices burst around him like the stars ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... The mailed knight, the Border peel, the moonlight raid, the lady at her bower window—all these have disappeared from the actual world, and lead existence now as songs. Verses and snatches of these ballads are continually haunting and twittering about my memory, as in summer the swallows haunt and twitter about the eaves of my dwelling. I know them so well, and they meet a mortal man's experience so fully, that I am sure—with, perhaps, a little help from Shakspeare—I could conduct the whole of my business by quotation,—do ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... and smiles, for there she met our only Monsieur,—Monsieur Boulanger, our landlord. She invariably took her seat beside him, and devoted quirks and quivers exclusively to him, tapping him with her fan, calling him "Mechant! mechant!" "farceur," or "quel diable d'homme!" twittering and carolling in her old broken voice, like a senile canary dreaming of its far-off youth. M. Boulanger was of peasant origin and appearance, gray-bearded and gray-haired, and clumping always in sabots over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that stood the suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... of the feast still about—gold cups and silver, broken bread and meat, the convolvulus flowers all turning their pallid faces to the rosy daylight, making pools of brightness between the shadows. Amongst the litter little sapphire-coloured finches were feeding, twittering merrily to themselves as they hopped about, and here and there down the long tables lay asprawl a belated reveller, his empty oblivion-phial before him, his curly head upon his arms, dreaming perhaps of ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... The boys ha-ha-ing, The swallows twittering, The girls are tittering, Father is calling, The cook is bawling; I'm nigh crazy with ...
— Little Songs • Eliza Lee Follen
... local and stay-at-home of all birds, never leaving the very fringe and margin, not of sea, but of land, haunting only the last edge and precipice of the coast, nesting on those upright walls of granite or chalk, and creeping, flying, and twittering among the crumbling stones, the water-worn boulders, and the tufts of sea-pink and samphire. When the winter storms slam the roaring billows against the cliff faces and the spray flies up a hundred feet ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... whistle to announce his intention, he would drop like a plummet for a thousand feet, catch himself in mid-air, and zigzag down to the nest in the spruce top, whirling, diving, tumbling, and crying aloud the while in wild, ecstatic exclamations,—just as a woodcock comes whirling, plunging, twittering down from a height to his brown mate in the alders below. Then Ismaques would mount up again and repeat his dizzy plunge, while his larger mate stood quiet in the spruce top, and the little fishhawks tiptoed about the edge of the nest, pip-pipping their ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... this disaster to the ferry came slowly, as when one smooths out a crumpled map. In the great stillness I heard a wren twittering in the reeds along the bank, and I noted a green grasshopper, caught in the current, swimming ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... fancied he heard subdued tittering and whispering in the garden. He listened; there was no doubt of it. A pair of lovers were cooing, or, perhaps, more than one pair, for divers voices were intermingled, like the twittering of a number ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... the King and the Princess to talk things over, Earl Omolo went out and caught a Robin, changed it into a smart soldier, and sent him off recruiting. Very shortly there were thousands of Robins twittering ...
— The Great Red Frog • Mosnar Yendis (AKA Sidney Ransom)
... Bankey, twittering with glee; "two nice dogs. One big and buff and bushy, with a much finer tail than the proudest fox you ever saw; and the other small and white with some dark spots, and as quick as a squirrel. This one has a short tail that sticks ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole course of the ride. The sparrows are all at Jerusalem, among the housetops, where their ceaseless chirping and twittering forms the most cheerful sound of ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... forth unrejoicingly on blinded windows, an empty street, and the grey daylight dotted with the yellow lamps. There are mornings when the city seems to awake with a sick headache; this was one of them; and still the twittering reveille of the sparrows ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... myself, and my memory is always ringing the 'changes' I have had, complacently, as a man jingles silver in his pocket. The noise of a great terminus is no jar to me. It is music. I prick up my ears to it, and paw the platform. Dear to me as the bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... gains the ear, expresses a luxurious repose. No brilliant light mars the pervading softness of the atmosphere; no violent colour materialises the light, ethereal hues of the dresses; no sudden noises interrupt the fitful and plaintive notes of the lute, jar with the soft twittering of the birds in the aviaries, or drown the still, regular melody of the ladies' voices. All objects, animate and inanimate, are in harmony with each other. It is a scene of spiritualised indolence—a picture of dreamy beatitude in the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... at Yokohama, and a whole cage full of rice-birds. They are the dearest little things, and spend most of the day bathing and twittering, occasionally getting all together into one nest, with their twenty-five heads peeping out. They are exactly like a magnified grain of rice, with legs and a bill. I hope I shall take them home alive, as they have borne the cold very well so far. We have ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... necessary imagination. He was an evil-browed ruffian in a fur cap, with a broad broken nose and little shifty red eyes; and after I had told him what I wanted he took me through a horrible little den, stacked with piles of wooden, wire, and wicker prisons, each quivering with restless, twittering life, and then out into a back yard, in which were two or three rotten old kennels and tubs. "That there's him," he said, jerking his thumb to the farthest tub; "follered me all the way 'ome from Kinsington Gardens, he did. Kim out, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... the loveliness of the earth; it seemed to be inhaling the glories of nature, as it were, through those channels which were not obliterated. The stirring of the leaves, the scent of the woodbine, the pattering of the winged seeds of the maple upon the pages of Boccaccio, the fitful twittering of the birds—all ascended as offerings of recompense to the blind man, but they only tended to enhance the sense of his affliction. He caught but the skirts of the goddess of that creation whose glories he had chanted in his celestial epic; and yet no murmur escaped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... window and crevice of the vast barn seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm. 2. The flail was busily resounding within from morning till night. 3. Swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves. 4. Rows of pigeons were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. 5. Some sat with one eye turned up as if watching the weather. 6. Some sat with their heads under their wings or buried in their bosoms. 7. Others were swelling and cooing and bowing about their dames. 8. Sleek, unwieldy ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... went out in the morning, the kookooburras were gurgling and laughing, the magpies were warbling, the parrakeets made their twittering, and Willy Wagtail was most lively; but Dot was astonished to find that she could not understand what any of the creatures said, although they were all very friendly towards her. When the Kangaroo came to see her she made signs that she wanted some berries of understanding, but, strange as ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... bow to Pope, "I've prevailed upon my young madam here to give us a taste of her quality. I trust your twittering birds won't be provoked to rivalry. Happily their ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... sweet Bet," she said; "but my nerves will not recover the shock for years! No, no! do not shake your head and smile; if you had the crawlings up the back that I experience, and the creepings down the spine, and the shaking of knees, the twittering of the lips, and quivering of ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... know,' Henrietta murmured. She could think of nothing but a pictorial piece of music her mother had sometimes played on the lodging-house piano, with the growling of thunder-storms, the twittering of birds after rain and a suggestion of church bells, but she was determined ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... awake and arming for the fray. And when the people are once awake they can't any more be bamboozled by a political despot than the war eagle, screaming across the blue dome of the everlasting heavens, will turn tail when he hears the twittering of a pewee!" Mr. Niles closed, as he always closed a speech, with the metaphor that had given ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... easefully, and dropped into a reclining posture. The tree he had chosen to rest under was a mighty elm, whose broad branches, thick with leaves, formed a deep green canopy through which the sunbeams filtered in flecks and darts of gold. A constant twittering of birds resounded within this dome of foliage, and a thrush whistled melodious phrases from one of the highest boughs. At his feet was spread a carpet of long soft moss, interspersed with wild thyme and groups of delicate harebells, and the rippling of a tiny stream into a hollow cavity of stones ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Being friendly to people, he said, was as if you had a candle in your heart and the light shines through your eyes. Oh, Mrs. Schuneman, I do believe Germania is going to like it here." For Germania was twittering as if she did find her new ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... that thick slimy mud. It was the mud-king, or the mummy of the pyramids; I knew not which. He threw his arms around me, and I felt as if I were dying. I only felt that I was alive again when I found something warm on my breast, and there a little bird was flapping with its wings, twittering and singing. It flew from my breast high up in the dark, heavy space; but a long green string bound it still to me. I heard and I comprehended its tones and its longing: "Freedom! Sunshine! To the father!" Then I thought ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... the birds twittering in the boughs of the oak. A lizard paused on the damp stone near-by. A bee hovered over the roses, twirled a leaf impatiently, and buzzed its flight over the old wall. He was conscious of recognizing these sounds and these objects, but with the consciousness ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... an easy enough question to ask and, to them, hovering twittering upon high heels a trifle worn to one side, a simple one for her to answer. She looked at them in that humorous, kindly way of hers, looked at their silly, excited, made-up faces with noses sticking ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... was cooler now, and the air blew in fresh and sweet. Outside, the birds were twittering joyously, and Pollyanna flew to the window to talk to them. She saw then that down in the garden her aunt was already out among the rosebushes. With rapid fingers, therefore, she made herself ready ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... considered it, and on their arrival at his residence, they were introduced into a large, gloomy, uncomfortable apartment; a number of swallows' nests were attached to the ceiling of the room, and their twittering owners, which were flying about in all directions, fed their young without interruption, and added not a little to the filthiness of the unswept and unclean apartment. The conversation during the interview was as uninteresting and spiritless, as their conversations with other native rulers ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... alone under the heavens, alone with the eagles and sleepy twittering birds—she could think of what had been forced upon her that day. She bitterly regretted the tears shed before Ezra, and she must never, never again look at the student Graves. She felt that to ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... faster, drawing the sword to keep me better company, though inwardly I scoffed and jeered at this new twittering of the nerves. What threat was there for me in silent shadows in the wood? The dogs I had to fear were bred in British kennels, and there was never any lack of clamor when they ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... circumference could not be seen from its highest central point. Like the other islands it was quite destitute of trees, but the low bush was luxuriantly dense, and filled, they were told, with herds of reindeer and musk-oxen. Myriads of wild-fowl—from the lordly swan to the twittering sandpiper—swarmed among its sedgy lakelets, while grouse and ptarmigan were to be seen in large flocks on its uplands. The land was clothed in mosses and grasses of the richest green, and decked ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... With twittering exclamations of dismay over the, accident the two women hurried away to minister to the burned legs of Francisco, and Jack rose and flung away his cigarette. His mouth had again the stubborn look which Dade knew so well, ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... window. The building stood high on a large wooded bluff overlooking a deep gorge. The landscape before her interested her exceedingly, and took her in fancy to the wilderness of Mottville. The busy birds fluttered to and fro, twittering sleepily to each other, and for a short time the watcher forgot her anxiety in the majesty of ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... the sun was shining, birds were twittering; somewhere in the world lambkins frisked and peasants sang blithely at their toil (flat, perhaps, but still blithely), but to Mike at that moment the sky was black, and an icy wind blew over the ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... taking the fellow, and getting married; for all, I'll not deny, I had been thinking it would be agreeable to be axed. But all at once, I couldn't abide the chap. 'Sir,' says I, trying to look shame-faced as became the occasion, but for all that, feeling a twittering round my mouth that I were afeard might end in a laugh—'Master Dixon, I'm obleeged to you for the compliment, and thank ye all the same, but I think I'd prefer a single life.' He looked mighty taken aback; ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... birds are twittering in the overhanging ivy, an English landscape of meadow and woodland, hills and hamlets, rolls far in the sunshine of a June morning. It is the year 1846, in the reign of her gracious majesty, Queen Victoria. I close my eyes, and I am back in ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... the cottage was silent. The wind breathed more gently; the stars shone out; the air was soft after the storm; the moonlight made a bright flicker of light and shade over all the outer world. Now and then a grasshopper chirruped, or a little bird murmured a few twittering notes at being disturbed in its sleep; and then came ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... and her name was Little Red Riding Hood, and once as she was walking home in the dark, after an unusually heavy tea, she met a wolf. And he said, 'Evening, Little Red Riding Hood,' and she, though she was twittering with fear, and in no condition for running because of the immensely heavy tea, said, ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... place o'errun with nested love— So have you come, when leaves hung crisp above The silent door. Yet not again, I ween, Those shining wings, cleaving the air, have seen Nor heard the gladsome swallows twittering there— Only the empty nests, low-hung and bare, Spake of the scattered brood.—So lonely were To Lilith grown her once loved haunts. Nor fair The starlit nights, slow-dropping fragrant dew, Nor the dim groves ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... he had advanced in the morning; and Mrs. Carrack too, observed now, with a strange pleasure, what she had given no heed to before when the fine coach was rolling in triumph along the road,—birds twittering in the sunny air by the wayside, and cattle roving like figures in a beautiful picture, upon the slopes of the distant hills. Oliver, the politician, more than once had out the great cotton pocket-handkerchief, and holding it ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... seen the snowbirds twittering contentedly near him. Once I saw him fly out to sea in the midst of a score of gulls, which paid no attention to him. At another time I saw him fly over a large flock of wild ducks that were preening themselves in the grass. He kept straight on; and the ducks, so far ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... delicious. Walked on my terrace, and enjoyed the fresh air of this autumnal spring. The palms are beautiful to look upon, and the Desert city has the aspect of an Hesperides. Are these the "fortunate isles" of the ancients? A few birds twittering and chirping about, pecking the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... there are the Small Birds. It is not known to everybody, least of all, I think, to poets, that the nightingale sings best of all in a cage in broad daylight and amongst a lot of other birds, all twittering away like anything. We should like to take Mr. ROBERT BRIDGES to the Small Birds' House. We should like to take Mr. ROBERT SMILLIE there too, and introduce him to the bird just underneath the nightingale, which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... and there was no sign of the wanderers. The doctor lit a cigar and watched the shadows creep up the side of the mountains. He listened to the last twittering of the birds and then a silence, profound and deep, ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... tender with fretwork of swelling buds, and beautiful with bright, young hemlock-tips; there was a twittering and calling of birds all through the air; the first little breaths and ripples of spring music before the whole gay, summer burst of song ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... wind of his, Finn's, approach to the cave he had helped to make a home. Finn paused for a moment, head raised and ears cocked, to consider this truly remarkable manifestation. And as he listened, there issued from the den other small sounds of a totally different kind: mild, twittering little bleatings; several voices, each weak and thin, and in some subtle way most curiously appealing ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... not a forbidding room either, for at one end was a latticed window with diamond panes, and in the ivy that grew outside it you might imagine the little birds twittering in the summer time. The floor was covered with a heavy rug and a candelabra of a dozen candles gave a pleasant light. The room or cell was heated by coals glowing in ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... by a vigorous arm; and the fishes were minnows indeed. Upon either side of the lake arose tall trees, around which grape-vines had wreathed themselves, and upon which fruit, ripe, black, and delicious, hung temptingly exposed to the eye of the traveller. The birds were twittering about the boughs, and swallows were skimming the bosom of the lake. But what most astonished the Nanticoke was, the great number of little cabins scattered along its shores. They were none of them higher than his hip, and were built of mud and grass. The Nanticoke, who loved to look upon the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... times a pheasant would rise and whirl like a rocket from hillock to hollow, and about midnight a rapturous concert began. On one line of trees a colony of nightingales had established themselves near the heart of the waste. First came the low inquiry from the leader; then two or three low twittering answers; then the one long note that lays hold of the nerves and makes the whole being quiver; and then—ah, the passion, the pain, the unutterable delight of the heavenly jargoning when the whole of the little choir begin ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... twittering blithely On the collar formed of saplings, And the cuckoos all were calling, On the sledge's sides while sitting, And the squirrels leaped and frolicked On the shafts of ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... Overhead the twittering of doves, the squeaking of parrakeets, the countless sounds of bird and insect ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... of carking care, while he pushed aside the proffered consolation, Roger Acton walked abroad. There was yet but a glimmer of faint light, and the twittering of birds told more assuringly of morning than any cheerful symptom on the sky: however, it had pretty well ceased raining, that was one comfort, and, as Roger, shouldering his spade, and with the day's ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... silver of the sky with the grey, quiet trees against it and the watery gleam of sunset like pale gold, low down behind the boughs, where the robin, half seen, is flitting from place to place, choosing his rest and twittering his good-night; and you think with good hope of your life that is coming, and of all your aspirations and your dreams. And in the stillness and the coolness and the peace you can dwell with confidence upon the thought ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... near to the door. A cloud of twittering swallows were fluttering round the open windows, darting in and out, as though the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of the rural funeral of Lord Dannisburgh had the effect of rousing flights of tattlers with a twittering of the disused name of Warwick; our social Gods renewed their combat, and the verdict of the jury was again overhauled, to be attacked and maintained, the carpers replying to the champions that they held to their view of it: as heads of bull-dogs are expected to do when they have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... like grown-up people. Then they also became tired and Horieneke put her arm over Doorke's shoulder, allowed her golden curls to play in his eyes and in this way they walked out, down the road, towards the wood. Here they were all alone with the birds twittering in the trees and the crickets chirping in the grass ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... jars, spilling the brilliant scarlet of geraniums, flanked the steps, and the shadows of the mighty trees fell clear and sharp across the marble. And on a soft June afternoon, sitting in the silence and the fragrance with boats plying up and down the river, and birds twittering and flashing at the brim of the fountain, one might have dreamed one's self in some forgotten Italian garden rather than a short two hours' trip away from the busiest and most ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris |
