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Over me poised the kingfisher, looking down first at me, then ahead at the unknown beast, till the crashing ceased in a faint rustle far away, when he swept back to his fishing-stub, clacking and chuckling immoderately. I pushed cautiously ahead and came presently to a beautiful pool below a rock, where the hillside shelved gently towards the alders.
A lurid fog and mizzling rain, which had been incessant for the previous twenty-four hours; sloppy pavements, and kennels down which the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves into the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, now rising, now lowering, to avoid collision; hackney-coaches in active sloth, their miserable cattle plodding along with their backs arched and heads and tails drooping like barndoor fowls crouching under the cataract of a gutter; clacking of pattens and pestering of sweepers; not a smile upon the countenance of one individual of the multitude which passed him; all appeared anxiety, bustle, and selfishness.
Again he rang, producing a sound that echoed sharply through the house and was taken up and repeated by all the echoes of the cathedral, so that no one could avoid waking up at the remonstrating racket. Accordingly, in a few moments, he heard, not without some pleasure in his wrath, the wooden shoes of the servant-woman clacking along the paved path which led to the outer door.
One fine day in harvest it was indeed Lady-day in harvest, that everybody knows to be one of the greatest holidays in the year Tom Fitzpatrick was taking a ramble through the ground, and went along the sunny side of a hedge; when all of a sudden he heard a clacking sort of noise a little before him in the hedge.
A steam yacht flying the White Ensign, with a pennant that trailed almost down to her decks, showing the length of service she had seen, passed us and dropped her anchor a mile to the south. The silence was only broken by the clacking of the fans in the saloon. One gazed listlessly west wards at the quivering haze that veiled Kuweit.
Although he sensed the covert malice behind the smiles men gave him, he would not yield one inch from his mocking disparagement of the whole affair. He laid down a law or two to his boys, and bade them hold their tongues and go their way and give no heed to the clacking. "The show ain't over till the curtain's down for good," he said, borrowing a phrase from Belle.
I was following the trail of a herd of caribou one day, when far ahead a strange clacking sound came ringing across the snow in the crisp winter air. I ran ahead to a point of woods that cut off my view from a five-mile barren, only to catch breath in astonishment and drop to cover behind a scrub spruce.
The slatterns gossiped from house to house, the heels of their shoes clacking as they went, and cried that this was what came of being too thrifty. And sure enough, in due time, the giant widower came to the farmer as he was in the field looking over his crops, and proposed for Molly there and then.
"That's well," said Parson Henderson, approvingly. "Now then, the first thing to do is to make the mother go back into the coop. Here, Mrs. Biddy, take a bit of this nice corn." He flung out a kernel or two to the hen, whose feathers that had started up in a ruffle and fluff, at sight of Joel, now drooped, and her excited clacking stopped.
"I can see you sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure." "We didn't speak of you," Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost.
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