United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As she entered they raised their muzzles and sniffed suspiciously, ears a-cock, and as the girl approached closer to them they moved warily away, snorting, and passed around her to the opposite side of the corral. As they moved by her she scrutinized them and her heart dropped, for Brazos was not among them. He must have been turned out into the pasture.
The only two who seemed not to know what was obvious to all the rest of the world were, of course, the two most concerned Old Mat and his daughter. They were blind deliberately so, Silver sometimes thought. The young man became at length so disturbed that he ventured to suggest to the trainer that all was not well. The old man listened, his head a-cock, and his blue eyes sheathed.
Everywhere the scarlet and grey of uniforms, the glister of gold lace the familiar decorous lines of devout top-hats broken by glittering helmets, bear-skins, white nodding plumes, busbies, red caps a-cock, glengarries, all the colour of the British army, mixed with the feathered jauntiness of the Colonies and the khaki sombreros of the C.I.V.'s!
"Have ye your barkers?" he asked harshly. Jerry tapped a heavily bulging pocket, and winked. Mr. Green thrust his three-cornered hat a-cock over one eye, and with his hands behind the tails of his coat, stood pondering. "Ay, pox on't!" he grumbled. "It must be done to-night. I dursn't delay longer. We'll give the gentlemen time to settle comfortably; then up we go to make things merry for 'em."
But while I screwed my courage to the sticking place and sought to hold it there, the pause became a keen-edged agony. A glance aside a glance that cost a mightier effort than it takes to break a nightmare showed me the ensign standing ear a-cock, as one who listens. What he heard I know not, for all the earth seemed hushed to silence waiting on his word.
Perhaps a horse would stray into the thick screen about his home, and would look as solemnly on Fionn as Fionn did on it. Or, coming suddenly on him, the horse might stare, all a-cock with eyes and ears and nose, one long-drawn facial extension, ere he turned and bounded away with manes all over him and hoofs all under him and tails all round him.
His hat, perched a-cock over his left eye, had made acquaintance with the tavern sawdust. Next to his drunkenness, perhaps, the most remarkable thing about him was his stick of ebony, very curiously carved in rings from knob to ferrule, where it ended in an iron spike; an ugly weapon, of which his tormentors stood in dread, and small blame to them.
But now Ephraim Yeates, standing ear a-cock and motionless, like some grim old statue done in leather, cut him short with a sudden, "Hist, will ye!" and a twinkling instant later we had other work to do. "Onto the hosses with this here Injun-meat, ez quick ez the loving Lord'll let ye!" was the sharp command.
"Rod," she pleaded, "I want you to come along with me. I can't do you any harm now." The hunchback had stopped playing. The old women were crowding round Spenser and her, were peering at them, with eyes eager and ears a-cock for romance for nowhere on this earth do the stars shine so sweetly as down between the precipices of shame to the black floor of the slum's abyss.
They burst into the room singing a chorus, O pescatore da maremma, and led by Mr. Badcock, who wore a wreath of seaweed a-cock over one eye and waved a dripping basket of sea-urchins. Two pretty girls held on to him, one by each arm, and thrust him staggering through the doorway. "O pesca to o o " Mr.
Word Of The Day