United States or Mali ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Holmes has less intellectual imagination than intelligent fancy. For example: 'If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.
As it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era in the history of their race.
The king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in majesty amidst a roll of thunder.
He, to hear my mother's name made a byword and reproach, myself alluded to as the indigent daughter of an outcast, he, who seemed already lifted as high above me on the eagle wings of fortune, as the eyry of the king-bird is above the nest of the swallow, it was more than I could bear. I said I knew by his countenance that he had heard all.
The flight of the Crow and the Raven is slow and apparently difficult, and they are easily overtaken and annoyed by the King-Bird and other small birds. They are not formed, like the Falcon, to catch their prey upon the wing, and, though their wings are large and powerful, they are incapable of performing those graceful and difficult evolutions which we observe in the flight of birds of prey.
If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.
The king-bird, too lazy to give chase to his proper quarry, the wavering butterfly, sways to and fro upon a tall weed; and there, at the bend of the brook, sits an old kingfisher on a dead branch, gorged with his morning meal, and regardless of his reflected image in the still pool beneath.
Had the crow been an old and cunning bird, he would have sought the extreme heights of air, where the king-bird is disinclined to follow; but lacking this crow-wisdom, he kept on at the level of the tallest tree-tops, and was forced to take his punishment. He was, in reality, more sore and terrified than actually injured.
It is by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable of dealing his great antagonist. The king-bird seldom more than dogs the hawk, keeping above and between his wings, and making a great ado; but my correspondent says he once "saw a king-bird riding on a hawk's back.
After the first king-bird was obtained, I went with my men into the forest, and we were not only rewarded with another in equally perfect plumage, but I was enabled to see a little of the habits of both it and the larger species.
Word Of The Day