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Then came my mother's clear, high-bred voice, just outside the door, descanting on the beauty of the Count's parterres and orangery. A swift warning glance flew from me to my hostess. I scampered off my perch, and she stood up in respectful readiness for the entrance of Princess Heinrich. "Don't tell mother," I whispered urgently. "Not a word!" "Whatever they do to you?"
Her eyes wide apart, her short upper lip and firm, little round chin were almost childlike when in repose, and her heavy hair rose and fell in charming curves as the breeze stirred it. "Joan, what do you want to do, really?" Nancy dropped from her perch beside Joan and came close, leaning against the swinging feet as if to stay their restlessness. "Oh!
Mast and sail out of the way, we stretched ourselves in the boat with more comfort, enjoying the cooling current of air. Tetuahunahuna, the sheet in his hand, squatted again on his narrow perch. "You returned to that ship when the boat picked you up?" I asked. "Aue!" he replied. "The captain was crazed with anger. He cursed me, and said that the girl has swum ashore."
So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime, ticket me with a love affair, and start me on that sensational and not always respectable journey that ended so surprisingly less than three weeks later in the firm's private office. It had been the most remarkable period of my life.
But where giant maple and ash, leaning, locked branches across the channel in one of old Mother Nature's bridges for the squirrels, he knew no fear, and dipped so low beneath them that his image trailed a wavering shadow on the silver path he followed. He rounded curve after curve, and frequently stopping on a conspicuous perch, flung a ringing challenge in the face of the morning.
We had walked on in silence for the last half hour; but I could sometimes hear my companion muttering as he went; and when, in passing through a thicket of hawthorn and honeysuckle, we started from its perch a linnet that had been filling the air with its melody, I could hear him exclaim, in a subdued tone of voice, "Bonny, bonny birdie! why hasten frae me? I wadna skaith a feather o' yer wing."
But that night they had supped poorly, for one of them had gone out to perch a turkey, since powder could not be wasted, and had not come back. "I reckon we're the first as ever concluded to winter in Kaintuckee," he said between his puffs. "Howard and Salling went in in June, I've heerd. And Finley? What about Finley, Dan'l?"
These chickens occupy two good-sized rooms, whose walls are entirely covered with compartments, some two feet square, in each of which resides a cock, with his little perch and drinking-vessel. They are kept on allowance of water and of food, lest they should get beyond fighting-weight. Their voices are uplifted all day long, and on all moonlight nights.
The prying of the outside world was impossible. Comfort, fortification; and gentlemanliness made the place, as the General said, an ideal English home. The compass of the estate was half an acre, and perhaps a perch or two, just the size for the hugging love General Ople was happiest in giving.
It took him a long while to tame, but in time he taught it to perch on his wrist, and to feed from his hand. He once let it go, and thought he would have lost it, but the bird knew it had a good friend, for it came back to the tree at night.
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