United States or Bouvet Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He must put his confidence in Nature; he must listen to her. She would tell him. And he lay all the afternoon listening to the reeds and the ducks talking together in the lake.
'Silence, sir! roared the banker, while the stranger threw himself into a chair, and burst into a storm of laughter. 'Upon my word, friend Mammon, here's another of Hans Andersen's ugly ducks! 'I really do not mean to be rude, said Lancelot, recollecting himself, 'but I am nearly desperate.
In half-an-hour more, during which I had the greatest difficulty to manage the boat's crew they returned with a dozen geese, and two ducks, tied by the legs, but without the two men, who had given them the slip, so that there were now three men gone, and I knew Mr Falcon would be very angry, for they were three of the smartest men in the ship.
Martin, though usually blest with a good appetite, really forgot to finish his own beef to-night it was so pleasant to him to look on in the intervals of carving, and see how the others enjoyed their supper; for were they not men who, on all the days of the year except Christmas Day and Sundays, ate their cold dinner, in a makeshift manner, under the hedgerows, and drank their beer out of wooden bottles with relish certainly, but with their mouths toward the zenith, after a fashion more endurable to ducks than to human bipeds.
As they approached the point, they were not disappointed in their expectations of finding it crowded with sea-birds, many of large size, which Tom averred were the geese he had seen; while there were various species of ducks, which appeared to be living in harmony with the other inhabitants.
With the ducks come teal and widgeon and moorhen, till the swampy meadow resounds with their strange cries. When ponds and lakes are frozen hard is the best time for sport in these irrigated fields. All day long the ducks will stand or waddle to and fro on the ice in the centre of the lake or mere, far out of reach and ready to rise at the slightest alarm.
"I'll have to send a truant officer after you." "I've been very busy," said the man, "and I reckon, after all, you can't civilize a wolf. I'm afraid I've been wasting your time." Possibly, the miserable tone of the voice told the girl more than the words. "You are having a season with the blue devils," she announced. "You've been cooped up too much. This wind ought to bring the ducks, and "
When the damp air blew chilly over the cold, glittering expanse, and came to the faces of those who looked seaward like another tide; when a steel-like glint marked the low hollows and the sinuous line of slough; when the great shell-incrusted trunks of fallen trees arose again, and went forth on their dreary, purposeless wanderings, drifting hither and thither, but getting no farther toward any goal at the falling tide or the day's decline than the cursed Hebrew in the legend; when the glossy ducks swung silently, making neither ripple nor furrow on the shimmering surface; when the fog came in with the tide and shut out the blue above, even as the green below had been obliterated; when boatmen lost in that fog, paddling about in a hopeless way, started at what seemed the brushing of mermen's fingers on the boat's keel, or shrank from the tufts of grass spreading around like the floating hair of a corpse, and knew by these signs that they were lost upon Dedlow Marsh and must make a night of it, and a gloomy one at that then you might know something of Dedlow Marsh at high water.
The temperature of the water is the same throughout the year, neither too warm nor too cold for bathing; and not a single day passes without the inhabitants indulging in the favourite and healthy exercise of swimming, which is practised by every body, from morning till evening; and the traveller along the shores of this beautiful river will constantly see hundreds of children, of all ages and colour, swimming and diving like so many ducks.
"We'll be sitting ducks for every asteroid!" "That's the chance we have to take, Astro," said Tom. "If we complained, you know what he'd do." "I sure do," growled Astro. "He'd call us yellow again, because we'd refused to make the trip!" "That's the way it adds up," said Tom. "So I guess we'd better get started. Stand by to blast!" "All clear fore and aft," reported Roger.
Word Of The Day