Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
A hundred and thirty men, mostly Chinese, with a sprinkling of Javanese and Malays, are huddled on the little deck, with goats and buffaloes, and forty coops of fowls and ducks; the fowls and ducks cackling and quacking, and the Chinese clattering at the top of their voices such a Babel!
She had already told Thyrza half a dozen times that day that such a greed for sweet things as she displayed would ruin her digestion and her teeth; and it ruffled a dictatorial temper to be taken no more notice of than if she were a duck quacking in the farmyard. "Aye, they're burnin'," said Thyrza, with a shrug. Then she looked round her with a toss of her decidedly graceful head.
Bobby had never seen so many stars. The heavens were full of them, and the still water had its share. Not a breath of wind was stirring. Through the silence could be heard more plainly the roar of the surf far away. The quacking of ducks came from near and far. Nothing of the marsh was visible. Bobby took his place on the shell-box in the bow, his rifle between his knees.
It forms the paradise of a great many ducks of various breeds, which are accustomed to be fed by visitors, and come flying from afar, touching the water with their wings, and quacking loudly when bread or cake is thrown to them. I bought a bun of a little hunchbacked man, who kept a refreshment-stall near the Serpentine, and bestowed it pied-meal on these ducks, as we loitered along the bank.
"She can rest," he declared, " the blessed baby! Not a governess or a teacher is to show as much as a hat-feather." She nodded. "We don't want 'em quacking around." Someone tapped at the door then, and entered Rosa, bearing a card-tray upon which were two square bits of pasteboard. "To see Madam," she said, presenting the tray.
Already my sunken tracks were obliterated under a glaze of water, but I felt I was safe, for I had gained harder ground. It was a relief to slide to the bottom of one of the labyrinth of causeways that drain the marsh, and plunge on sheltered from the wind. Presently I heard ducks quacking ahead. I raised my head cautiously to the level of the wire-grass.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots which afforded precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or pacing carefully, like a cat, among the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising on the wing from some solitary pool.
From the lighthouse to the ragged rocks the lake was covered with the ice and snow of an early winter. Beyond, the little waves curled up and washed over the frozen masses, adhering here and there, making an icy fringe along the edge. Flocks of wild ducks fluttered close to the lake surface, filling the morning air with discordant quacking.
They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there's a homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees! under your window in the morning when you want to sleep. "And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of voice?
From the barn-yard back of the farmhouse a chorus of sounds was rising. Pigs were grunting and squealing, cows were mooing, a donkey was braying, ducks were quacking, hens were clucking, roosters were crowing. "Saunders is right," Mostyn declared, enthusiastically. "I don't blame the fellow for spending so much time on his plantation. This is the only genuine life.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking