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On the sea's edge lay a long grey cloud, a long, low, soft cloud, flat, like a band of soft grey velvet. The morning was inexpressibly calm and peaceful yet it was busy with sound and with movement. Rooks, those sanctimonious humbugs, circled overhead, cawing thieves' warnings, that had the twang of sermons, to other rooks, out of sight in neighbouring seed-fields.
Meanwhile Merton was addressing the older detective respectfully indeed, but not without a certain boyish impatience. "Well, Mr. Gilder, have you got much farther with the mystery?" "There is no mystery," replied Gilder, as he looked under dreamy eyelids at the rooks. "Well, there is for me, at any rate," said Merton, smiling.
You hear the wind whistling in the stable, the great door creak, the dog pull at his chain and howl, and, despite the noise of the forest trees which are groaning and bending close by, you can make out the lugubrious cawings of a flock of rooks struggling against the storm. The rain beats against the little panes; and, stretching your legs toward the fire, you think of those without.
George slowly mounted his own hill. The chequered April day was declining, and the dipping sun was flooding the western plain with quiet light. Rooks were circling round the hill, filling the air with long-drawn sound. A cuckoo was calling on a tree near at hand, and the evening was charged with spring scents scents of leaf and grass, of earth and rain.
Jolly rooks' nests in the schoolhouse elms, only Paddy won't let us go after them." "Who is Paddy?" inquires the father. "Oh, the doctor, you know Dr Patrick. You'll see him down in `The Big, and his dame, and " "And what's written up over the door there?" inquires Captain Cusack, pointing up to the coat-of-arms above the great doorway. "Oh, some Latin bosh! I don't know.
Jays were constantly inquiring how the nestlings were getting on, an inquisitive Magpie peeped into the nest, trying to get a glimpse of the pretty ones, and received a sharp peck from the angry father as a reproof for the intrusion; as to the motherly Rooks, who were supposed to care for nothing save their own family concerns, they kindly advised the young parents how to rear the brood, saying, 'Care, care, was all that was necessary; nay, it is even recorded, as an undoubted fact, that an old Owl, who had lived for ages in a hole in the tree, actually opened her eyes quite wide when the news was first told to her, although it was broad daylight!
"Yes," said Juliet's new mistress, "my name is Bosher" here the bonnet nodded, "and now you are my servant, and while you are in my service you will do precisely everything that I tell you. I have a brother who has a gun; sometimes he shoots rooks, sometimes he shoots other things. He lives next door.
The next morning everybody began to call the chiff-chaff names, and to say it was a little cheat; for a sharp sleety rain had been falling for hours and freezing as it fell, so that all the rooks' claws were stuck fast to the tall, top branches of the limes.
A whiff of perfume from the laurustinus in the drive came back, the scent of hay, and with it the sound of the mowing-machine going over the lawn. He saw the pony in loose flat leather shoes. The bees were humming in the lime trees. The rooks were cawing.
Thus, either the memory of aged individual rooks or an authenticated tradition in their society has preserved the idea that the old grove is forbidden and inauspicious to them. A soil of General Arnold, named William Fitch Arnold, and born in 1794, now possesses the estate of Little Messenden Abbey, Bucks County, and is a magistrate for that county. He was formerly Captain of the 19th Lancers.