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Some ivy berries and black privet berries remain, a few haws may be found; for the rest, it is gone; the squirrels have had the nuts, the acorns were taken by the jays, rooks, and pheasants. Bushels of acorns, too, were collected by hand as food for the fallow deer in the park.
I don't believe I THOUGHT at all during those earliest days, or gave things names in any known language. They rather passed before me dreamily in long procession, like a vague panorama. When people spoke to me, it was like the sound of a foreign tongue. I attached no more importance to anything they said than to the cawing of the rooks in the trees by the rectory.
The cathedral chimes had at once a sadder and a more remote sound to me, as I hurried on avoiding observation, than they had ever had before; so, the swell of the old organ was borne to my ears like funeral music; and the rooks, as they hovered about the gray tower and swung in the bare high trees of the priory garden, seemed to call to me that the place was changed, and that Estella was gone out of it for ever.
"Birds in the high Hall-garden When twilight was falling, Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, They were crying and calling," was a favourite of the poet. "What birds were these?" he is said to have asked a lady suddenly, when reading to a silent company. "Nightingales," suggested a listener, who did not probably remember any other fowl that is vocal in the dusk. "No, they were rooks," answered the poet.
His head leaning back on the cushions, his arms folded across his breast, Lavretsky gazed at the furrowed plains which opened fanwise before him, at the cytisus shrubs, at the crows and rooks which looked sideways at the passing carriage with dull suspicion, at the long ridges planted with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash.
There is some natur there, but here it's all cussed rooks and chimbly swallers, and heavy men and fat women, and lazy helps, and Sunday every day in the week. So I fills my cigar-case and outs into the passage. "But here was a fix! One of the doors opened into the great staircase, and which was it?
A ragged string of wild geese passed overhead, high on the grey sky, and a few rooks whirled over the trees, inspected, and flapped off homewards with a disgusted expression; but I met no sensible being to ask the news of. About half-way across I came on a rabbit sitting on a stump, cleaning his silly face with his paws.
"I I sir only meant that there was a good crop in the ground I saw 'em sow it and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner and you wouldn't miss it, sir and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to 'em oh, oh, oh!"
At this time there is a general bustle among the feathered tribes; an incessant fluttering about, and a cheerful chirping, indicative, like the germination of the vegetable world, of the reviving life and fecundity of the year. It is then that the rooks forget their usual stateliness, and their shy and lofty habits.
'The people at home call it a rook's parliament when a whole cloud of rooks settle on some bare, wide common, and sit there as if they were consulting, not feeding, only stalking about, with drooping wings, and solemn, black cloaks. 'You have found a flattering simile, said Laura, 'as you know that rooks never open their mouths without cause.
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