United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"How was it he put his hand in? What for?" "He wanted to get a cuckoo's egg out of the hole for me." "The day has hardly begun and already you are in trouble. . . ." Terenty shook his head and spat deliberately. "Well, what am I to do with you now? I must come . . . I must, may the wolf gobble you up, you naughty children! Come, little orphan!"

The effect of the cuckoo's course is to cause an immense destruction of insects, and it is really one of the most valuable as well as the most welcome of all our birds. The thin pipe of the gnat heard at night is often alluded to, half in jest, by our older novelists. It is now, I think, dying out a good deal, and local where it stays.

She held out her arms in the cuckoo's direction, as if she expected his neck to be about the size of a Shetland pony's, or a large Newfoundland dog's; and, to her astonishment, so it was! A nice, comfortable, feathery neck it felt so soft that she could not help laying her head down upon it, and nestling in the downy cushion. "That's right," said the cuckoo.

'He must have had some ups and downs in life to make him such a churl. Do you know anything of his history? 'It's a cuckoo's, sir I know all about it: except where he was born, and who were his parents, and how he got his money at first. And Hareton has been cast out like an unfledged dunnock! The unfortunate lad is the only one in all this parish that does not guess how he has been cheated.

"He has always been good and kind, and it's horrid of me to think he's going to trick me." She ran down the little stair, she seized the handle of the door. It turned easily; the door opened opened, and closed again noiselessly behind her, and what do you think she saw? "Shut your eyes for a minute, Griselda," said the cuckoo's voice beside her; "the light will dazzle you at first.

A few words were indistinctly spoken in a man's voice. Then the street door shut, and almost simultaneously the door of Cuckoo's sitting-room opened very quietly and Valentine entered. Valentine closed the door behind him and stood by it, looking at Cuckoo gravely.

A Switzer occupied the farm, who owned, in addition to the more immediate members of his family, a cuckoo clock whose weights hung on long cords which by Saturday night reached almost to the floor. When I have sat at his table, I have neglected cheese and the lesser foods, when the hour came near, in order not to miss the cuckoo's popping out.

"Caw, caw!" screamed a rook just over her head, as if in answer to her thought. Griselda looked up at him. "Your voice isn't half so pretty as the cuckoo's, Mr. Rook," she said. "All the same, I dare say I should make friends with you, if I understood what you meant. How funny it would be to know all the languages of the birds and the beasts, like the prince in the fairy tale!

The rest of the gardens they swept bare enough, removing every morning Nature's rain of leaves; piling them in heaps, whence from slow fires rose the sweet, acrid smoke that, like the cuckoo's note for spring, the scent of lime trees for the summer, is the true emblem of the fall. The gardeners' tidy souls could not abide the gold and green and russet pattern on the grass.

Only in Cuckoo's grief he began to read a curious legend. In her tears there was a passion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the depths of a nature. Julian began to suspect that through all her sins and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened.