Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
Chekhov himself planted the trees and looked after them. His father worked from morning till night weeding the paths in the garden and making new ones. Everything attracted the new landowner: planting the bulbs and watching the flight of rooks and starlings, sowing the clover, and the goose hatching out her goslings. By four o'clock in the morning Chekhov was up and about.
There was once an old goose who had seven young goslings, and loved them as only a mother can love her children. One day she was going into the wood to seek for provender, and before setting off she called all seven to her and said, "Dear children, I am obliged to go into the wood, so be on your guard against the wolf; for if he gets in here he will eat you up, feathers, skin, and all.
When so illustrious a mind as Grotius was inclined to believe in a race of arctic men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders; the ingenuous mariner of Amsterdam may be forgiven for his earnestness in combating the popular theory concerning goslings.
But for this tarantula-dance the great hawk-nose would still be sitting as professor at his lecturing desk, and tickling the young goslings with philosophy and wisdom as they perkt up their yellow beaks to catch the crumbs he dropt into them.
They are plucked, poor things, for their feathers as often as five times a year, and for their quills once. Even the young goslings of six weeks' old are deprived of their tail feathers, in order, as it is said, to accustom them to this cruel operation. When ready for the London market, the geese are marched slowly up from Lincolnshire to London, in flocks of from two to nine thousand.
Yes, there were Akka, Iksi, Kolmi, Nelja, Viisi, Knusi, all the six goslings, the goosey-gander, Dunfin and Thumbietot; but Kaksi from Nuolja, the first left-hand goose, was missing and no one knew anything about her fate. When the wild geese discovered that no one but Kaksi had been separated from the flock, they took the matter lightly. Kaksi was old and wise.
Richard stared too at the pleasant, furze-dotted commons, spinning away to right and left as the horses trotted sharply onward commons whereon meditative donkeys endured rather than enjoyed existence, after the manner of their kind; and prodigiously large families of yellow-gray goslings streeled after the flocks of white geese, across spaces of fresh sprung grass around shallow ponds, in which the blue and dapple of the sky was reflected.
Whereupon, wonderful to tell! the lad who had never before set eyes on any woman, thought no more of the palaces, the oxen, the horses, the asses, the money, or aught else that he had seen, but exclaimed: "Prithee, father, let me have one of those goslings." "Alas, my son," replied the father, "speak not of them; they are naughty things."
"Doctor," sais I, "it tante every darnin' needle would reach her through them petticoats, is it?" "Oh!" said he, "Mr Slick oh!" and he rose as usual, stooped forward, pressed his hands on his ribs, and ran round the room, if not at the imminent risk of his life, certainly to the great danger of the spinning wheel and the goslings.
The monster was put to rout, the champion dragged out of the pond, breathlessly explaining that he only wanted to look at the goslings when the stupid geese cackled and the gander wanted to fly at his eyes. "And I didn't see where I was going, for I had to keep him off, so I got into the mud.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking