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Updated: May 21, 2025
Their notes fell on Ramona's sleeping ear, like the familiar sound of the linnets in the veranda-thatch at home, and waked her instantly. Sitting up bewildered, and looking about her, she exclaimed, "Oh, is it morning already, and so dark? The birds can see more sky than we! Sing, Alessandro," and she began the hymn:
Passing to other subjects, he said that so far he had caught nothing but linnets on the common you couldn't expect to catch other kinds in June. Later on, in August and September, there would be a variety. But he had small hopes of catching goldfinches, they were too scarce now. Greenfinches, yellow-hammers, common buntings, reed sparrows all such birds were worth only tuppence apiece.
We used at one time, during autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together, and to sell them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still in their beds. On one occasion at the market I had only one starling left, which I had offered to purchasers in vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing.
You see, he kept all nations o' wild birds an' wild animals down at his house; he'd linnets an' nanpies i' cages, and an ark full o' pricky-back urchins. But he'd niver catched a squirrel; they were ower wick for him, an' he wanted a squirrel more nor owt else i' t' world.
Your scholar, my boy Cicero, is mightily improved, and if he lives, you'll have a servant of him; he is pretty forward already, and whatever spare time he has, never off a book: He's a witty lad, well-featur'd, takes a thing without much study, tho' yet he be sickly: I killed three of his linnets the other day, and told him the weasels had eaten them; yet he found other things to play with, and has a pretty knack at painting: He has a perfect aversion to Greek, but seems better inclined to Latin; tho' the master he has now humours him in the other; nor can he be kept to one thing, but is still craving more, and will not take pains with any.
She was certainly a strong, almost a violent, friend to all she liked, chief among whom was a certain frail old gentlewoman, very blind and very witty, who dwelt on the top of a tall land on a strait close, with a nest of linnets in a cage, and thronged all day with visitors.
As it melts, too, the chalk splits and crumbles; and thus in an ordinary gateway the same process may be seen that disintegrates the most majestic cliff. The stubbles those that still remain are full of linnets, upon which the mouching fowler preys in the late autumn.
The poet "does but speak because he must; he sings but as the linnets sing." Never has the sentiment been expressed with deeper pathos than by Shelley's well-known lines: "Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not."
We laid down the slender knives and bowed before the king, but when the black and green robes had ceased to rustle, it was not the loud rough voice of King Leaghaire that spoke to us, but a strange voice in which there was a rapture as of one speaking from behind a battlement of Druid flame: "I preached the commandments of the Maker of the world," it said; "within the king's house and from the centre of the earth to the windows of Heaven there was a great silence, so that the eagle floated with unmoving wings in the white air, and the fish with unmoving fins in the dim water, while the linnets and the wrens and the sparrows stilled there ever-trembling tongues in the heavy boughs, and the clouds were like white marble, and the rivers became their motionless mirrors, and the shrimps in the far-off sea-pools were still enduring eternity in patience, although it was hard."
Oh, yes, he caught them just the same, and sent them up to London, but that was all they were worth to him. For young male linnets he got eightpence, sometimes tenpence; for hen birds fourpence, or less. I dare say that eightpence was what he hoped to get, seeing that young male linnets are not unfrequently sold by London dealers for sixpence and even fourpence.
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