United States or Tonga ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The stone-chat as he flits from bramble to bramble in his black cap, white collar, and red bib is a bird of charming behaviour as well as of charming colour. There is nothing in him at discord with these rainbow days. For stormy as they are, the days are rainbow days to an astonishing extent. Seldom have I seen such a violence of rainbows. The colours almost startle one, like a courting ape's.
These gloomy boughs Had charms for him: and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene, how lovely 'tis Thou seest, and he would gaze till it became Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain The beauty, still more beauteous!
The two collies lay couched beside him; a stone-chat perched on one or other of the great blocks which lay scattered over the heath gave out his clinking note; while every now and then the loud peevish cluck of the grouse came from the distant sides of the Scout. Titus was now making his final assault on the Temple.
A stone-chat with ruddy breast spurted out of the gorse, and flirted upwards. The path broadened; the gorse grew scantier. His feet crushed sweetness out of the thyme. Here and there a young ash thrust up feathery. Of a sudden he found himself again at the top of one of those almost sheer descents to which he was becoming used. At its foot grew a hanger of beeches, already bronzing to autumn.
Not a house to be seen, save on the far slopes of distant hills not a sound, but the chink of the stone-chat, or the fall of lonely water. Soon the road, after its long ascent, began to dip; a few trees appeared in a hollow, then a gate and some grey walls. Laura jumped from the cart.
Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a couple of fingers into her mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had only known it, was much admired of all the young men in the parish, and whistled clear and loud, so that the stone-chat fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter deeper among the gorse. A most revolutionary young person this.
From the cliff above starlings flew out to seek their feeding-haunts where the big game fed; and there was a familiar visitor near them in the black and drab stone-chat, whose scolding chirp they had so often heard in England among the gorse and bramble.
Word Of The Day