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There are nooks and corners whence shy creatures can steal out from the shadow and be happy. There is a loving streak of sunshine somewhere among the tree trunks. With one exception, it is not the first place to find them. The cuckoos which come to the copse do not call till some time after others have been heard in the neighbourhood.
They have watched her for three seasons going lightly and merrily through all the gaieties of Cloudland; they have listened to the scandal of the cuckoos among the pine-trees and rhododendrons, but they have not caught her tripping. Oh, no, they will never catch her tripping.
Unquestionably it would be much more difficult to keep a kingfisher alive and healthy during a long sea-voyage than a common seed-eating bird; but the same may be said of woodpeckers, cuckoos, warblers, and, in fact, of any species that subsists in a state of nature on a particular kind of animal food.
There are no poplars. The Kuvshinnikov General was lying. I have seen no nightingales. There are magpies and cuckoos. I received a telegram of eighty words from Suvorin to-day. Excuse this letter's being like a hotch-potch. It's incoherent, but I can't help it. Sitting in an hotel room one can't write better. Excuse its being long, It's not my fault.
Like cuckoos, some men are only really at home in the homes of others; others are always ill at ease when taken out of the surroundings which they have composed to their ideas and requirements; and John Norton was never really John Norton except when, wrapped in his long dressing-gown and sitting in his high canonical chair, he listened to Harding's paradoxes or Thompson's sententious utterances.
The darkness deepened owing to a thick current of clouds which overspread the sky. There was not a breath of wind. The silence of night was only interrupted by the cries of the "morepork" in the minor key, like the mournful cuckoos of Europe. Towards eleven o'clock, after a wretched, heavy, unre-freshing sleep, the Major woke.
The woman of the house brought in our coffee, but I doubt if we should have got any breakfast, only the cuckoos wanted theirs and fortunately flew off to get it. When the glorious musical bell rang out far on the other side of the wood, dimmed by distance, Viola came reluctantly to the table. "How delicious this is! this being in the country just at first.
The exceptions to this rule among European birds appear to be very few. Among our own birds, the cuckoos and the blue jays build open nests, without presenting any noticeable difference in the coloring of the two sexes. The same is true of the pewees, the kingbird, and the sparrows, while the common bluebird, the oriole, and the orchard starling afford examples the other way.
Hunt knows that Pope was called by his contemporaries the nightingale, but we never heard Milton and Dryden called cuckoos; or, if the comparison is to be taken the other way, we apprehend that, though Chaucer may be to Mr. Hunt's ears a church organ, Pope cannot, to any ear, sound like the church bell.
Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring, Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in; And since, while here, she only makes a noise, So pleasing unto none as girls and boys, The Formalist we may compare her to, For he doth suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.
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