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Broken, dangling shutters gave it a blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and crates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash.

The eighteen eggs for the setting were in a little basket by themselves. Peggy hung over them breathlessly, and saw in fancy eighteen balls of yellow down, teetering on toothpick legs. Then her imagination leaped ahead, and the cream-colored eggs had become eighteen lusty, pin-feathered fowls, worth forty cents a pound in city markets. Peggy's heart gave a jubilant flutter.

Now a Scotchman's tongue runs high fullams. There is a cheat in his idiom, for the sense ebbs from the bold expression, like the citizen's gallon, which the drawer interprets but half a pint. A diurnal is a puny chronicle, scarce pin-feathered with the wings of time. It is a history in sippets: the English Iliads in a nutshell: the apocryphal Parliament's book of Maccabees in single sheets.

Without appearing to notice the presence of the Aid, Shorty walked up to the lead-mule, gave him a tremendous kick in the ribs, and sung out in a tone loud enough to be heard across the roaring branch: "You pernickety pile o' poll-evil; you hee-hawin' graduate o' West Point; you pin-feathered, taller-faced, pop-eyed, lantern-jawed, loud-mouthed Second Lieutenant, you, won't you git up?"