United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bertha would have given a good deal to avoid this visit, but seeing no way to escape she stepped from the carriage under the keen scrutiny of her hostess and walked up the rickety steps with something of the same squeamish care she would have shown on entering a cow-barn. "Here, Benny!" called Mrs. McArdle. "Run you to Dad and tell him me brother Mart has come, and to hurry home. Off wid ye now!"
Of the two nests whose owners I had to study, one was on a low beam in the cow-barn, where a person might look in; the other under the eaves of a farm-building close by. The special policeman of the group and its environs was a robin, who lived in a two-story nest under the eaves of the hay-barn. This bird, after the manner of his family, constituted himself regulator and dictator.
They must needs watch the sheep as they walked their endless way on the treadmill night and morning; they thrust their hands into hundreds of nests and placed the spoils in Sam's big baskets; they watched the calves at their patent feeders, which deceived the calves, but not the girls; they climbed into the grain bins and tobogganed on the corn; they haunted the cow-barn at milking time and wondered much; but the chiefest of their delights was the beautiful white pig which Anderson gave them.
She flushed, but continued calmly: "I had nigh sold myself to some young officer some gay and heedless boy a dozen times that winter for a bit of bread and so I might lie warm.... The army starved at Valley Forge.... God knows where and how I lived and famished through all that bitter blackness.... An artillery horse had trodden on my hip where I lay huddled in a cow-barn under the straw close to the horses, for the sake of warmth.
I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L": that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the wood-shed and cow-barn.
There was no answer but a quick throb of her lids, and he went on: "She ain't said anything this morning?" "No. I haven't seen her yet." "Don't you take any notice when you do." With this injunction he left her and went out to the cow-barn. He saw Jotham Powell walking up the hill through the morning mist, and the familiar sight added to his growing conviction of security.
"A nation of wasters," muttered the German, "sleeping at their posts. They are fiddling while England falls!" Mr. Shutliffe, of Stiffkey, had led his cow in from the marsh, and was about to close the cow-barn door, when three soldiers appeared suddenly around the wall of the village church. They ran directly toward him. It was nine o'clock, but the twilight still held.
"I'd had pains before in my stomach," he acknowledged good-naturedly, "but that morning with Pa was the first time in my life that I ever had any pain in my plans! So we mortgaged the house and the cow-barn and the maple-sugar trees," he continued, more and more cheerfully, "and Daniel finished his schooling in the Lord's own time and went to college."
She gave him a look that made him slip round behind Blue Bob, and she went in and got a table-knife, and she came out and went to the pear-tree and cut a sucker. She said, "I'll learn that limb to sleep in a cow-barn when he's got a decent bed in the house!" and then she started to come towards Jim Leonard. As I said, it was in the spring that Jim Leonard's hair-breadth escape happened.
Cuffy knew that he must be very, very careful not to meet them. To his great relief, when he had gone down into Pleasant Valley Cuffy saw all three ploughing in a field. They did not see him at all. And so he felt very brave as he went on toward the farm buildings. Farmer Green's pig-pen was in a little, low building next the cow-barn. Cuffy had no trouble in finding it.
Word Of The Day