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The vagaries of the idlest fancy will often chance, as it were, upon the most useful discoveries of truth, and serve as a guide to after and to slower disciples of wisdom; even as the peckings of birds in an unknown country indicate to the adventurous seamen the best and the safest fruits."
On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, "Well, how do you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?" "I'm turned away." "What?" "Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few peckings of corn. And there's my wages the last I shall ever hae!"
He faced her squarely this time, and turned his head from side to side with queer little jerks and indiscriminate peckings at her wings and head, and smirkings that really should have been irresistible. She yawned and shuffled away indifferently. Freckles reached up, pulled the quill from his hat, and looking from it to the birds, nodded in settled conviction.
The vagaries of the idlest fancy will often chance, as it were, upon the most useful discoveries of truth, and serve as a guide to after and to slower disciples of wisdom; even as the peckings of birds in an unknown country indicate to the adventurous seamen the best and the safest fruits."
Although Marthe did not eat with Christine, if a meal was in progress she generally came into the sitting-room with her mouth more or less full of food. Their repasts were trifles, passovers, unceremonious and irregular peckings, begun and finished in a few moments. And if Marthe was always untidy in her person, Christine, up till three in the afternoon, was also untidy.
But who could smile more unaffectedly than Cally Heth at the bitter little peckings with which the dying order ever seeks to avenge itself on its brilliant supplanters? She passed on down the long room, stunning admirer in her train. High hope beckoned imminently to-night.
It was thus that matters went on until towards the end of the thirteenth day, when certain mysterious sounds were heard to proceed from the nest, faint peckings, which would cease and then begin again.
There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the artist, who obtains here.
Arrived at his objective, the old gardener, with most admired deliberation, loaded down long-handled birch-broom, rake and hoe; and applied himself to mysterious peckings and sweeping of the gravel around the wooden carriages of the little cannon and black pyramid of ball.
He evidently quailed under his jokes, and sat blinking like an owl in daylight, when pestered by the flouts and peckings of mischievous birds. At length his place was found vacant at meal-time; no one knew when he went off, or whither he had gone, but he was seen no more, and the vast surplus that remained when the repast was over, showed what a mighty gormandizer had departed.
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